Chapter Text
Caitlyn’s eye throbbed and itched beneath the patch. The wound was still raw and wet under the bandage, which she knew was due to be changed, but she couldn’t bring herself to peel off the white cotton and see the ruined mess beneath.
So instead she was here, seated with her back straight on the lightly padded bench, her long fingers splayed over the piano’s keyboard. She took a deep breath, glanced at the sheet music she’d long since memorized, and began to play.
The tune was frustratingly simple. Just a gentle melody with her right hand. But that was the point, wasn’t it. Starting simple, building up her coordination as she adjusted to her two-dimensional world. That’s what the doctors had said, that playing piano was good for her fine motor skills, a good way to re-learn where her hands were in space.
And it went okay at first. She had a natural grace to her movements, one that made fighting and playing come naturally to her. But ever since she’d woken up after the battle, her world had been just slightly off. Flat. And soon enough she was making the same damn mistakes, again and again. After the fifth or sixth time misjudging the distance of a key and pressing the wrong note, a frustrated “ugh!” erupted from her throat. Even as she threw up her arms in frustration, her single eye couldn’t judge the distance from the lid of the keyboard, and her knuckles cracked painfully across the front of the piano.
Tears of impotent anger welled in her good eye as she massaged her hand to ease the sharp ache, staring balefully at the keys. She briefly considered having the instrument taken away and burned, but it was fleeting, a product of her frustration and nothing more.
A light footstep in the doorway had Cait flinching away, not wanting to be seen. She knew she looked a mess. Her face was gaunt and hollow, a product of the hours of missed sleep as she lay awake each night, filled with terror of the visions her mind would conjure. Her hair was messy, falling in oily sheets about her face. She hated that the most, but she couldn’t get her eye wet, the doctors had been very clear. So her head remained dry, hair unwashed.
Vi padded softly over. It had taken several days to get her to remember to take her shoes off in the house, but now her bare feet whispered across the wood floors. She moved surprisingly quietly, like a ghost wandering halls she still wasn't sure belonged to her.
Cait knew Vi was struggling to make this place her home. She wished she could offer more comfort, but they were both barely floating in their grief, struggling to take in the world they were now living in, a world that was so dramatically changed. Fractured and reformed around the cracks, starkly missing pieces leaving gaping holes everywhere they went, hairline fissures marring every thought, every sentence, with a deep, quiet sadness no one could quite shake.
“Hey.” Vi’s voice was soft, almost hesitant. Cait didn’t reply, just leaned into Vi’s touch as the fighter slid her hands onto her shoulders from behind. She closed her eye, putting her weight onto Vi’s chest and stomach.
“It’s time to change your bandages,” Vi said gently, brushing her thumb over Cait’s left cheek. This was how she was, gentle but firm, never allowing Cait to let herself waste away. Vi was always there, reminding her to dress her wounds, bringing her food, coaxing her to sleep. A constant force, always driving her to keep going, to keep healing.
It wasn’t always this bad. Cait had good days and bad days, just like Vi did. But today had started in the dead of night, Cait bolting up in a flash of fear and pain as she startled awake, jolting her stomach wound painfully. Add to that the grey, cold morning, the growing pile of official looking letters accumulating in the study, and the way she kept bumping into door frames and losing her balance, and she had the perfect recipe for the blackness that settled heavily on her shoulders.
Cait sighed, not wanting to open her
eyes
eye. She just soaked in Vi’s warmth, savoring her hand on her face, letting herself drift, weightless, in the fighter’s embrace.
“Cait?”
Cait turned her head to press her face into Vi’s arm.
“What’s wrong?” Vi moved around her to sit on the edge of the bench, letting Cait rest her head on her tattooed shoulder.
“I don’t…” Cait swallowed, trying to pull her complex and jumbled thoughts into a form she could express. “It looks… bad. Underneath. Looking at it is… bad.” It felt woefully inadequate to express the way the sight of the wound made her stomach churn, how looking at it brought back that terrible tearing sensation as blade ripped through flesh, pulled her back to the fear and agony and guilt that had carried her through that fight. How sometimes when she looked at it, she thought that she deserved it. Deserved the way it made her feel.
But that’s what was so wonderful about Vi. Because she didn’t need to understand all that. She just… looked into Cait’s eye, gaze soft and warm, touch gentle on her face, and did the only thing she could do, the best thing she could do, for no other reason than it was Vi, and that was who she was.
“Then let me do it for you.”
And Cait melted just a little bit.
“Okay,” she murmured, pushing through the lump in her throat. Vi nodded and brushed a tear from her cheek, rising from the bench and pulling Cait up with her. She grasped Cait’s forearms with steady strength, supporting her as she winced. The wound on her side twinged sharply as she instinctually tensed her abs, the dull ache sharpening for a moment to a razor point. Vi held her up until it passed, then kept holding her hand, letting her lean on her as they made their way to the bathroom. She didn’t need the support but she took it anyway, craving that closeness.
Vi seated Cait on a stool with her back to the mirror, quickly gathering the items sent with Cait from the hospital. Clean white bandages, sterile looking eyepatches, a jar of cloudy ointment that tingled when it was applied. She watched as Vi washed her hands and sat opposite her, leaning forward.
Cait couldn’t stop herself from flinching as Vi reached for her eyepatch, but with slow and gentle fingers she pulled the straps from Cait’s head and carefully removed the bandage.
Cait braced for the look of disgust or revulsion, horror or pity, as Vi’s gaze fell upon the wound for the first time. But maybe she’d underestimated Vi, because she didn’t recoil. She didn’t look quickly away, she didn’t stifle disgust or veil her pity. She just looked at Cait with soft, open eyes, cupping her cheek in her hand.
Tears welled again in Cait’s good eye, and she reached up and brushed them off roughly, looking away.
“Y-you don’t have to…” Cait’s voice was thick with emotion, burning with shame at her wound as she felt stripped bare under Vi’s relentlessly tender gaze.
“Cait,” Vi murmured, and her voice was raw too, “you’re beautiful. You always will be.” Her gaze flicked between Cait’s eyes, just as it had done before, a natural, genuine, back-and-forth movement that made Cait feel whole again.
Vi dabbed ointment onto the raw wound unbelievably gently. Her fingers worked in careful, feather-light touches, and though Cait tensed at the light contact, wound stinging at the disturbance, she found there was very little discomfort. When she did it herself, in her haste to get it done with so she could stop looking at the wound, she was clumsy and ungentle, and the process was a painful, jarring one. But under Vi’s fingers, the numb sensation that blossomed as the ointment seeped in felt almost pleasant.
When Vi went to place a fresh dressing over the wound she seemed almost reluctant, touch lingering over tender flesh as she stretched a fresh patch over Cait’s eye. Her fingers ghosted over a sharp cheekbone, lightly tracing an arching brow, and Cait shuddered. She closed her eye and leaned into the touch, Vi readily cupping her cheek in light fingers, as Cait let the warmth of her palm seep into the cold darkness that lurked beneath her skin. That warmth spread from the contact to burn away the shadows, and Cait felt lighter.
Vi’s fingers moved to the hem of Cait’s shirt, lifting just enough to get a look at the bandage on her side. No higher than necessary, though Cait did feel her fingertips brush the skin of her stomach. Cait held it up for her, brimming with unspoken gratitude as she watched her work.
Satisfied with the dressing, Vi added fresh tape to keep it in place before guiding Cait’s shirt back down. She deftly began to gather the supplies together again and stow them away, and as Cait turned to watch her, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror.
She looked gaunt, eye hollow and dark, hair flat and greasy and tangled. She hadn’t even bothered to brush it this morning, couldn’t bring herself to spend the long minutes working the knots out of the azure mass.
It wasn’t that Cait was particularly focused on her appearance. She’d never been the type to preen, but she did take pride in how she presented herself. And her mother had loved her hair. Seeing it like this made Cait visibly recoil.
Vi noticed. She set down the bag of medical supplies and faced Cait, brow knitting with worry. She watched Cait’s expression, watched the way she kept glancing uneasily at the mirror, watched the way she avoided the fighter’s gaze. “Your hair?” She asked.
Cait just nodded.
“You can’t get the patch wet,” Vi recalled.
Cait nodded again.
Vi ran her hand through her hair, pushing red locks out of her face as she considered for a moment. Her eyes flicked around the room, sizing up the space, before landing on the bathtub. Then she looked at Cait again.
“I’d like to draw you a bath,” she announced, “and then I’d like to wash your hair for you.”
Cait nodded a third time, and then she began to cry. Not the small, quiet tears from before, but propper sobs that caught in her chest and made her shoulders hitch. It caught her by surprise at first, the speed at which it hit her. The exhaustion, the relief, the gratitude, the love , all storming her at once in a cascade of confused emotion that she couldn’t hope to put words to. So she just cried.
And then Vi was there. Murmuring in her ear, kneeling to take her in her arms, strong and solid and real. Cait pressed her face into Vi’s shoulder, hugging herself as the fighter’s arms wrapped around her. In that little cocoon of safety, Vi spoke softly to her. “Oh Cait,” and, “I’ve got you,” and, “You’re okay,” soft reassurances that washed over Cait in cool, cleansing waves.
It didn’t last long. Several long moments of quiet, hiccupping sobs before Cait got control of herself. Vi stayed until she’d calmed completely, eventually murmuring, “I’m gonna go start that bath, okay?”
“Okay,” Cait mumbled into her shoulder, allowing her to move away. She watched the fighter start the water and prepare the bath, eye still shining, and thought that she might be the luckiest woman alive.
But then that dark little voice crept in. It showed up often these days, wearing Jinx’s face and speaking in Ambessa’s voice, seeping like ink into the fabric of her thoughts. It whispered in cloying-sweet tones, telling her that she would never, ever deserve the woman with red hair who was drawing her bath. It hissed that Cait could live a thousand lifetimes and right a thousand wrongs, and she would never atone to what she did to Vi. To Zaun. To herself. It would haunt her for all her days.
Cait listened to the voice, and watched Vi work, and felt like she was being torn in two.