Chapter Text
Chapter 1: The Walk Home
The precinct smelled like ink and cold coffee and the particular staleness of a building that had been breathing the same air since morning. Caitlyn signed the bottom of the incident summary — a theft on Artisan Row, two witnesses, one suspect already identified — and added it to the stack at the corner of her desk. Three more reports. Maybe forty minutes of work. She'd be home before the streetlamps came on.
She reached for the next file.
"Officer Kiramman."
Sheriff Grayson stood at the edge of the desk. Hands clasped behind her back, shoulders square, chin level. The posture of someone delivering information rather than requesting it.
Caitlyn looked up. Registered the face.
Grayson's expression was carefully neutral. Not warm, not cold — managed. The kind of composure that required active maintenance, which meant it was covering something that would compromise it if left unattended.
Caitlyn's eyes narrowed.
"A word in my office, if you would."
Not a question. Caitlyn set the pen down and pushed back from the desk. "Of course, Sheriff."
She followed Grayson through the bullpen. Two officers glanced up as they passed — Harwick and Denning, mid-shift, nothing unusual about the Sheriff pulling someone aside for a briefing. Caitlyn cataloged their expressions automatically. Neutral. Uninformed. Whatever this was, it hadn't reached the floor yet.
"Close it behind you, please. Have a seat."
Caitlyn closed the door. The latch clicked with a sound that felt louder than it should have. She sat in the chair across from Grayson's desk — the same chair she'd occupied during her first case briefing, her first commendation review, her first formal reprimand for exceeding operational parameters during a pursuit in the warehouse district. The leather had memorized the shape of difficult conversations.
Grayson settled behind her desk but didn't reach for any file or document. Her hands rested flat on the surface, fingers spread. A grounding posture. Deliberate.
"I'm going to be straightforward with you, Caitlyn."
First name. Not rank. Caitlyn's spine straightened a degree without her permission.
"There's been a double homicide at the Academy." Grayson's voice was even, measured, each word placed with the care of someone laying stones across water. "Jayce Talis and Viktor. Both confirmed dead."
The room contracted.
Caitlyn heard the words. Processed them in the order they arrived. Double homicide. Academy. Jayce. Viktor. Dead. Each one landed cleanly, slotted into the framework of professional comprehension that four years of Enforcer work had built. She understood homicides. She'd worked them. Interviewed the families, cataloged the evidence, written the reports.
Her blood went cold.
Jinx said she had a meeting with Viktor today.
This morning. The kitchen. Jinx standing at the counter with a mug in her left hand, the ring catching the light as she brought it to her mouth. Talking about a power cell calibration issue — something about the build she'd been working on for months. I need to see Viktor about the output curve. Should be quick. And Caitlyn had said something — tell him I said hello or don't get into another argument or some other throwaway line that she couldn't remember now because it hadn't mattered then. Then Jinx had kissed her, tasting like coffee, and Caitlyn had left for the precinct.
"Jinx had a meeting with Viktor today," Caitlyn said. The words came out steady. Professional. The marksmanship breathing kicked in without conscious command — in through the nose, four counts, out through the mouth, four counts. "Is she — is she alright, was she there when—"
She stopped.
Grayson's face had changed. Not dramatically — Grayson didn't do dramatic. But something had settled over it. A heaviness that pulled at the corners of her mouth and deepened the lines around her eyes. The expression of someone who had delivered bad news a hundred times and had never found a way to make it land softly.
The air left the room.
"The incident was witnessed by Professor Heimerdinger himself." Grayson held Caitlyn's gaze. Didn't flinch from it. Gave her the respect of directness. "Jinx shot and killed both men."
Caitlyn's jaw set. Something behind her ribs compressed — not breaking, not yet, just compressing — and her hands found the armrests of the chair and gripped.
"She wouldn't do that."
The words formed automatically. Reflex. Defense. Because Jinx had spent nearly two years now building racing engines with them, arguing about torque, laughing at Jayce's terrible jokes and Viktor’s dry humor. They were her friends. She'd called them that — reluctantly, privately, in the dark of their bedroom with her head on Caitlyn's chest and the admission carrying the weight of something hard-won and precious.
Jinx wouldn't—
But the sentence crumbled before it reached her mouth. Because memory moved faster than denial, and what surfaced wasn't the workshop or the racing prototypes or the sound of three voices arguing about gear ratios.
It was a bridge. About Eight years ago. The railing cold under her hands, the water black below, and Jinx sitting beside her with her knees drawn up and her face empty of everything except the flatness that came after something irreversible.
I killed someone.
Caitlyn had been sixteen. Almost seventeen. Sitting on that railing because she'd spent days looking for a woman who kept disappearing and kept coming back thinner and quieter and further away. She'd found her there. And Jinx had told her — flat, factual, offering it like a document to be filed — that she had killed someone.
Caitlyn had asked if they deserved it.
She'd taken Jinx's hand. Hadn't left.
She closed her eyes. One breath. Two. The compression behind her ribs tightened, and she held it there — contained it — because this was Grayson's office and she was an officer and the next question mattered more than the ones piling up behind it.
She opened her eyes.
"Where is she now?"
Grayson studied her. The assessment lasted long enough to carry weight — not suspicion, something closer to calibration. Measuring what Caitlyn could hold. What she needed to hear versus what she was owed.
"She was last seen leaving Piltover."
Grayson let that statement stand alone. Didn't qualify them with direction or speed or vehicle description. Didn't offer a timeline. Just the bare fact, stripped to its bones: leaving Piltover.
Caitlyn's grip tightened on the armrests. "In what? On foot? Which direction? How long ago?"
"Caitlyn."
The name again. Gentle this time, or as close to gentle as Grayson's voice could manage. It stopped the questions the way a hand on a shoulder stops forward motion — not with force, but with the authority of someone who has decided that this is where the conversation turns.
"You're going to be questioned over the next several days," Grayson continued. The professional register returned, precise and unhurried. "You are not a suspect. But we need to understand everything we can about Jinx — her background, her capabilities, your relationship with her, whether there's any indication of further danger you might be able to identify." A pause. "You understand why."
Caitlyn understood why.
The first people questioned were always those closest to the perpetrator. Standard procedure. She'd sat on the other side of those interviews — had watched partners, spouses, parents struggle to reconcile the person they loved with the person described in the incident report. Had noted their tells. Their denials. The precise moment when professional detachment gave way to the ugly, personal weight of what had happened.
She was Jinx's partner. The person who shared her bed, her house, her mornings. Six years of choosing her. Top of the list.
"I understand," Caitlyn said. Her voice held. The breathing held. Everything held because it had to, because the alternative was coming apart in her Sheriff's office, and the part of her that had been forged by four years of the badge would not permit it.
Grayson let the silence settle. Let it do the work that additional words would only dilute.
"Go home, Caitlyn. For the day. It's a lot to process."
Caitlyn stood. The motion was stiff — her body had locked into the chair without her noticing, every muscle drawn tight, and releasing them felt like prying open something that had fused shut. She straightened her uniform jacket by reflex. Smoothed the front. Small gestures of normalcy performed by hands that didn't feel like hers.
"Thank you, Sheriff. For telling me directly. And for the warning about what's coming."
Grayson nodded. The heaviness hadn't left her face. Wouldn't, probably, for a while. Two men dead in her jurisdiction, killed by someone whose partner was one of her officers. The administrative cascade alone would be brutal.
Caitlyn turned and walked out of the office. The door closed behind her with the same sound it had made when she entered — that precise, contained click — but the room on the other side of it was different now, and so was the woman walking away from it.
She stopped at her desk. The unfinished reports sat where she'd left them. The pen. The coffee mug, half-full and cold. She gathered her things with efficient movements — coat from the hook, bag from the drawer, the small framed photo of her and Jinx that sat beside her desk lamp. Her hand just moved. Turned it face-down without her deciding to do it.
She paused at the action and reached for it but hesitated. She left it face-down. Picked up the bag. Walked out.
The evening air hit her like a wall. Cool, edging toward cold, carrying the metallic sweetness of the river and the distant industrial hum of the Undercity's filtration stacks. Piltover's streetlamps were flickering on in sequence down the main boulevard — warm amber, the newer models that Jinx had consulted on, designed to run on the grid she'd spent so many years building.
Caitlyn started walking.
The precinct to New Piltover was an hour on foot. She knew the route the way she knew the weight of her service weapon — through repetition, through the body, through the accumulated memory of a thousand identical journeys that had blurred into a single groove worn into the city's surface. Left on Meridian. Through the Commerce Arch. Along the river path where the bridge connected the two halves of everything.
She didn't take the trolley. The walk was the point. The walk was the hour between the woman who had sat in that chair and heard those words and the woman who would have to open the front door of a house that—
She cut the thought off. Not yet.
Her boots struck the cobblestones in a steady rhythm. Around her, Piltover performed its evening routine: shop owners pulling in displays, couples walking along the riverfront, a group of Academy students arguing loudly about something mathematical outside a café. The world continuing. Ordinary. Unaware that two of the brightest minds it had produced were dead in a lab and the woman who killed them had—
She was last seen leaving Piltover.
Leaving. The word stuck like a fishbone. Not arrested. Not apprehended. Not in custody awaiting questioning. Leaving. Which meant Jinx had walked out of whatever had happened, gotten into — what, the racing carriage? The one the three of them built together in the garage attached to the lab? — and driven away. And no one had stopped her, or could stop her, or—
Grayson had shut down the questions for a reason. Caitlyn understood that too. Understood that the Sheriff was protecting her from details that would make the next several days harder. Understood that some of those details would surface during the questioning anyway, delivered in the clinical language of incident reports and witness statements, and that hearing them from Grayson's mouth in a closed office would not have made them easier to carry.
She crossed the Commerce Arch. The foot traffic thinned. The buildings shifted from Piltover's commercial density to the transitional architecture of New Piltover — newer construction, cleaner lines, the district that had popped up in the space as the old city expanded outward with the help of people thinking about the future. With the help of someone.
Someone. Jinx. Who had designed the power grid that lit these streets. Who had argued with the Council over installation schedules and connector node specifications. Who had stood in the Lanes with her hands elbow-deep in a junction box she'd spent years perfecting, bringing power to people who'd never had reliable light.
Who had, this morning, kissed Caitlyn in the kitchen and said I love you before Caitlyn left for work.
The compression behind Caitlyn's ribs shifted. Not outward — not cracking, not releasing. Deeper. Into the place where the things she couldn't process yet went to wait. She'd feel them later. In the house. In the quiet. When the professional architecture she was using to walk in a straight line and breathe in four-count intervals finally met something it couldn't hold.
The river path curved south. The houses grew more spaced. Trees replaced lampposts, and the cobblestones gave way to the paved roads of the residential quarter where people like Caitlyn — people who wanted space from both cities without abandoning either — had put down foundations.
She could see the house from the end of the street. The dark blue door — almost black in the failing light. The window of the upstairs workspace, dark. The front garden that neither of them maintained well enough, the hedge that needed trimming, the boot scraper by the step that Jinx had installed after Caitlyn tracked mud through the entryway for the fourth time.
Caitlyn stopped walking.
She stood on the pavement thirty meters from her own front door and couldn't move. Because the house was dark. All of it. No lamp in the kitchen where Jinx would be making something or dismantling something or sitting cross-legged on the counter reading a technical manual. No light in the upstairs workspace. No sound of tools or muttered profanity or Jinx humming tunelessly while she worked — the sound that Caitlyn hadn't realized she listened for until right now, standing in the empty street, not hearing it.
The house was dark because Jinx wasn't in it.
Jinx wasn't in it because she had killed two people and just left.
Caitlyn's hands hung at her sides. Her left thumb pressed against the base of her ring finger, rubbing the spot where skin met metal — the band she wore, the match to Jinx's, the same waveform, the same frequency, warm from her body heat. She didn't remember putting it on this morning. She put it on every morning. The way she put on the badge. The way she laced her boots.
The streetlamp nearest the house flickered on. One of the new ones. Running on the grid Jinx built.
Caitlyn started walking again. Thirty meters to the front door of the home she'd have to enter alone.