Chapter Text
"Watch where the fuck you're going, genius!"
The shout cut clean through the noise of the construction site.
A few heads turned.
Nobody looked particularly concerned.
Mostly because the voice belonged to Vi.
And Vi yelled at people the same way other people said good morning.
The unfortunate target of today's wrath—a nineteen-year-old apprentice named Jackson—didn't even flinch.
"You almost walked into a pallet of drywall," Vi continued, pointing accusingly across the site.
"I was like five feet away from it."
"You were walking toward it. Stupidly."
"That's not a thing."
"It is now."
Jackson rolled his eyes and kept walking.
Vi muttered something deeply offensive under her breath and turned back toward the stack of lumber she'd been inspecting. The morning had already been long.
Her leg hurt.
Not unusual.
The difference was that lately the pain had started taking over everything she did.
Vi planted her cane against the side of the stack and bent to grab one of the heavier boards.
Immediately, a familiar voice barked from somewhere behind her.
"Boss."
Vi closed her eyes.
No. Absolutely not.
"Boss."
She already knew where this was going.
Slowly, she straightened.
"What."
Claggor appeared beside her, his brows furrowed.
"I've got it."
"No, you don't."
"I do."
He reached for the board, disregarding her words.
Vi pulled it away. She felt the phone buzz in her pocket and ignored it for the sake of winning this pointless battle.
For a second they stood there in a bizarre tug-of-war over a piece of lumber.
"Vi."
"Claggor."
"You know Vander will kill me if he sees this."
"You’re a grown man, daddy’s not gonna spank you," Vi said, pulling on the piece of wood once more.
"I'm serious."
"So am I."
The look he gave her was infuriatingly patient. Like she was a child refusing to wear a coat. Like she didn't own the damn company.
"They’re paying me to work," she said.
"You're paying yourself to work."
"Exactly."
"That's not helping your argument."
Before she could come up with a sufficiently creative insult, pain shot through her leg, making her squeeze her eyes shut. Her grip loosened.
Only for a second, but Claggor noticed.
Everyone noticed these days.
That might have been the worst part, the way people looked at her now. Careful and concerned, like she might fucking break.
The board disappeared from her hands.
"I've got it," Claggor repeated more gently this time.
Vi fucking hated gentle.
"Yeah, whatever."
Claggor nodded, carrying the board away.
Vi stood there glaring at his back.
Her phone rang.
She didn't even need to look. There was only one person who called her this persistently.
"What."
"Good morning, sunshine."
"What do you want?"
"Just checking in on my favorite sister."
Vi groaned, limping toward the construction site exit.
"I swear to God, if this is another one of your weird medical interventions—"
"It's not an intervention."
"Last week you hid anti-inflammatory medication in my coffee," Vi said, walking towards her car. She desperately needed caffeine.
"Whatever works, right, sis?" Jinx giggled, remembering her genius scheme.
"Get to the point."
Jinx hummed innocently.
Vi immediately became suspicious.
"What did you do?"
"What makes you think I did something?"
"Powder, what did you do?"
"Technically, Vander did it."
Vi stopped walking.
"Did what?"
"He found you a great PT, your appointment starts in forty-five minutes."
Vi stopped in her tracks, gripping her car door with anger.
"Fuck no."
"Yep."
Vi closed her eyes, taking a deep breath.
"I'm not going."
"Cool."
The agreement was immediate enough to make Vi frown.
"...cool?"
"Yeah."
"That's it?"
"Sure."
Something was wrong. Jinx was never this easy.
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing."
"Jinx."
A pause.
Then, very casually:
“Vander already paid for seven sessions.”
“Jinx, what the fuck?!” Vi hit the steering wheel with frustration. “You can’t fucking do that, I’m almost thirty fucking years old!”
"Exactly. What a shame it’ll be if you, as a grown woman, waste our nearly elderly father’s hard-earned money," Jinx said, sighing dramatically.
Vi hung up the phone, simply staring at her phone for a moment.
She threw it onto the passenger seat with more force than was strictly necessary.
It landed against the cane.
The sight of the two objects lying side by side irritated her immediately.
The phone because Jinx had spent the better part of three months making it her personal mission to interfere in every aspect of Vi's life.
The cane because it existed.
Which, admittedly, wasn't the cane's fault.
Still.
Vi glared at it anyway.
The thing looked harmless enough. Cheap, almost. A black aluminum frame with a rubber grip that had already begun to wear smooth where her hand rested. There was nothing dramatic about it. Nothing tragic. Nobody looking at it would think it capable of ruining someone's day.
And yet there it was.
Occupying the passenger seat like it belonged there.
A year ago, if somebody had told her she'd spend her mornings driving around with a cane riding shotgun, she would've laughed in their face.
Not because she thought she was invincible, Vi had never been stupid enough to think that. Construction sites were full of men who'd thought they were invincible right up until gravity, machinery, or bad luck proved otherwise.
The reason she would've laughed was because she'd always assumed that if she got hurt, she would’ve just recovered. That was how injuries worked.
Turns out, that’s not always the case.
Her gaze drifted toward the windshield.
Workers crossed the site outside. Someone was unloading materials near the far fence. A forklift backed up with an obnoxious beeping sound that carried all the way across the yard.
The familiar rhythm of the place settled around her.
She'd spent years building this company. Years earning the right to bark orders at people and have them actually listen.
Once upon a time, she'd been the first person lifting lumber off a truck and the last person leaving a site at night.
Now people watched her whenever she stood up too quickly.
They noticed when she limped.
They noticed when she leaned against things.
They noticed when she winced.
And worst of all, they tried to help.
Vi tightened her grip on the steering wheel.
The irony was that the pain itself wasn't even the worst part anymore. What she couldn't stand was everything that came attached to it. The limitations.The way people looked at her.
The way she looked at herself.
Against her will, another memory surfaced.
Headlights appearing where they shouldn't have been. The shriek of tires. The impossible sensation of the bike sliding out from beneath her.
She remembered the smell most clearly – gasoline, hot metal and blood.
After that, things became disconnected.
Moments floating separately from one another.
A stranger kneeling beside her, shouting for an ambulance. The taste of copper. The realization that she couldn't move her leg.
Not because it hurt but because something was fundamentally wrong. The sort of wrong that bypassed pain entirely.
Vi blinked hard.
The memory dissolved.
She exhaled slowly.
A year later, she still hated thinking about it. It made her angry.
At the driver, at herself, at the months she'd spent insisting she didn't need rehabilitation.
Mostly, though, she was angry because everybody else had been right.
Vander, Powder, Ekko – very single one of them had spent the last year telling her she was making things worse.
And the truly infuriating part was that they had been correct.
Vi sighed as she’s reached the physical therapy clinic. After Vi hung up the call, Jinx has sent her two messages – the clinic address, followed by a blue heart.
The cane helped.
Which meant she couldn't even hate it properly.
With a sigh, she grabbed it and climbed out of the truck.
The familiar pain settled into her leg almost immediately. A dull, persistent ache accompanied by the unpleasant sensation that the entire joint no longer moved quite the way it was supposed to. Some mornings were better than others. Today was somewhere in the middle.
She crossed the parking lot slowly, trying not to think about the fact that a woman nearly three times her age was overtaking her on the sidewalk.
The automatic doors slid open.
The waiting room beyond looked neutral. Comfortable chairs arranged in neat rows. Houseplants occupying every available surface. Framed landscape photographs decorating the walls. Somebody had even placed a basket of complimentary tea bags near the reception desk.
The receptionist greeted her with a bright smile.
"Good morning."
“Hi.”
After checking in, Vi settled into one of the chairs near the window and inhaled deeply. Her heart was racing for no particular reason.
The waiting room was quiet except for the occasional turning of a magazine page or the distant sound of voices somewhere deeper in the building. Across from her, an older man wearing a knee brace skimmed through a newspaper. A woman in running clothes sat nearby scrolling through her phone. Neither appeared particularly distressed by their circumstances.
Traitors.
Vi crossed one ankle over the opposite knee, immediately regretted it, and shifted again.
The chair wasn't comfortable. Then again, neither was standing.
That seemed to be the theme lately.
A door opened at the far end of the room.
She looked up automatically.
The woman who stepped through wasn't what she expected.
Actually, that wasn't entirely true.
Vi hadn't expected anyone specific. She'd simply assumed, without thinking about it very hard, that her physical therapist would be older. Maybe a former athlete. One of those aggressively healthy people who tell you it’s all about your mindset.
Instead, the woman standing in the doorway looked to be somewhere around her age. Dark navy hair neatly pulled back. Black leggins and a cropped grey sweater, that slid of her shoulder slightly. No white coat.
And an eyepatch.
Vi noticed the eyepatch immediately.
Not because it was unusual, but because it wasn't.
Or rather, because the woman wore it with the kind of ease that only came from years of familiarity. There was no self-consciousness in it. No awareness. The same unconscious relationship Vi herself had gradually developed with the cane.
For a brief moment, something uncomfortable flickered through her chest. Recognition, perhaps.
Then the woman looked down at her clipboard.
"Violet?" she said her name with a pronounced accent that would for sure make Vi smile in different circumstances.
Her voice was calm and entirely free of the exhausting cheerfulness that seemed mandatory among medical staff.
Vi pushed herself to her feet and reached automatically for the cane.
The woman's gaze flickered toward it for a short second, assessing.
Then her attention returned to Vi herself.
Interesting.
"That's me."
The woman nodded.
"My name is Caitlyn."
Vi had the distinct feeling that this appointment might not go the way she'd expected.
The examination room was smaller than Vi expected.
A desk occupied one corner, an examination table another. There were anatomical charts pinned neatly to the walls, diagrams of muscles and joints that looked vaguely threatening in the way all medical illustrations did. A plastic skeleton stood beside a cabinet, its empty eye sockets fixed permanently on the room.
Vi immediately disliked it.
Caitlyn either didn't notice or had spent enough years sharing a workspace with it to become immune.
"Take a seat," she said, setting the clipboard on the desk.
Vi lowered herself into the chair opposite her and watched as Caitlyn opened the file. There was something oddly methodical about the way she moved. Everything seemed deliberate. For a minute, Vi just watched her, distracted from her internal turmoil.
For a few moments the only sound in the room was the quiet turning of paper. Then Caitlyn looked up.
"So. Tell me what happened."
Vi leaned back.
"The official version is a motorcycle accident."
"And the unofficial version?"
"The unofficial version is that some stupid fuck nearly killed me."
Caitlyn nodded as though this was valuable medical information and made a note.
Vi narrowed her eyes.
"You're writing that down?"
"No."
"You considered it."
"Briefly," Caitlyn nodded.
The questions continued.
When did the accident happen?
What surgeries had she undergone?
Had there been complications?
What treatments had been recommended afterward?
Vi answered with varying degrees of cooperation. Some questions received actual information. Others received sarcasm. Caitlyn accepted both with remarkable patience.
Or perhaps tolerance was the better word.
Nothing seemed to throw her off balance.
“How many courses of physical therapy have you attended?” Caitlyn asked, still scribbling Vi’s answer to her previous question.
"One."
"One course?"
“One session,” Vi shrugged.
Caitlyn leaned back in her chair, raising her eyebrows in question.
"I hated it."
Vi caught herself sounding like a teenager.
"You attended one session."
"I form opinions quickly."
There was a pause.
Just long enough for Caitlyn to lower her pen and lean forward, putting her elbows on the table between them. Her stare made Vi shiver a little.
"It occurs to me," she said, "that you may not be an entirely reliable narrator."
Vi barked out a laugh.
The sound surprised both of them.
"That's probably fair."
The conversation shifted gradually from the accident itself to its aftermath. Questions about pain. Questions about work. Questions about sleep.
Those were worse. The accident was a thing that had happened but the consequences were ongoing.
They were harder to joke about, harder to dismiss.
When Caitlyn asked how long she could stand comfortably, Vi discovered she didn't actually know anymore.
At some point discomfort had become so normal that she'd stopped measuring it.
When asked how often pain woke her during the night, she instinctively wanted to answer "never" before realizing that waking up three times to reposition herself probably counted.
The realization irritated her.
By the time the questions were finished, Vi was already regretting every decision that had led her here. Then Caitlyn stood and set the clipboard aside.
"Let's have a look."
So far, the appointment had consisted mostly of questions—some irritatingly perceptive, others uncomfortably practical—and she'd managed to survive those with a combination of sarcasm and selective honesty. Physical examination was different. Questions could be dodged. Questions could be redirected. Her body, unfortunately, tended to be less cooperative.
Caitlyn asked her to walk across the room and back.
That was it.
No complicated exercise. No elaborate test. Just walking.
The simplicity of it somehow made it worse.
Vi set her cane against the wall and pushed herself upright. For a brief moment she simply stood there, resisting the urge to glance back at it. The cane had become an extension of her routine over the past few months, something she reached for automatically before leaving the house, but she still hated the feeling of being separated from it in front of other people. Hated the vulnerability of knowing that every uneven step, every unconscious compensation, every hesitation she normally disguised was about to become visible.
She crossed the room anyway.
The distance wasn't more than a few metres, but by the time she reached the opposite wall she had become painfully aware of her own body. The slight stiffness in her hip. The instinctive shift of weight toward the right side. The way her left leg never quite landed with the same confidence as the other one. These were adjustments she'd stopped consciously noticing months ago. They had gradually become part of the background noise of everyday life, folded into muscle memory and routine.
Apparently they weren't invisible.
When she turned and walked back, Caitlyn was watching with an intensity that was strangely difficult to interpret. Most people looked at the cane first. Then they looked at the limp. Then came the assumptions. Concern. Sympathy. Sometimes pity.
Caitlyn didn't seem interested in any of those things.
She wasn't looking at the injury.
She was looking at movement.
At posture.
At balance.
At information.
By the time Vi reached her again, Caitlyn had already picked up her pen and written something down.
"What did you just write down?"
"You compensate heavily through the right side."
The answer came immediately, without hesitation.
Vi frowned.
"No, I don't."
Caitlyn looked up from the clipboard. Her expression didn't change. There was no argument in it, no challenge, not even annoyance. Just the quiet certainty of somebody stating an observable fact.
Then her gaze flicked briefly toward the cane resting against the wall before returning to Vi.
The message was obvious.
Vi sighed dramatically.
"You know, you're remarkably judgmental."
For the first time since the appointment had begun, something that looked suspiciously close to amusement crossed Caitlyn's face. Not enough to qualify as a smile. Certainly not enough to be satisfying.
"I'm evaluating you."
"Right."
"That's quite literally why you're here."
There wasn't really an argument against that.
Which, Vi was beginning to discover, was an ongoing problem with Caitlyn.
The examination continued.
Caitlyn tested her balance first, then her range of motion. She measured angles with clinical precision, asking Vi to bend, lift, rotate, and repeat movements that seemed insultingly basic. None of them looked difficult.
She found herself concentrating on motions she'd once performed automatically.
At one point Caitlyn asked her to lie back on the examination table while she tested flexibility through the injured leg.
Professional and entirely clinical.
Still, Vi found herself oddly aware of the process.
Caitlyn's fingers pressed lightly against her thigh as she stabilized the leg and guided it through another movement.
"Tell me if that hurts."
"It doesn't."
The movement continued.
A sharp stab of pain shot through her hip.
Vi's jaw tightened.
Caitlyn stopped immediately.
"That hurt."
It wasn't phrased as a question.
Vi stared at the ceiling.
"Lil bit."
"Mhm."
Caitlyn stepped back and made another note.
The note-writing had begun to feel personal.
Eventually she lowered the clipboard.
"What is your regular pain level?"
Vi didn't even think.
"Three."
The silence that followed lasted less than a second.
"Don't lie to me."
The words weren't harsh. If anything, they were surprisingly calm.
The certainty in them was what made Vi blink.
"Huh?"
"If you plan on lying to me, our cooperation won’t be possible, Violet. If you tell me your pain is a three when it's actually a six, I'll treat it like a three."
Caitlyn folded her arms loosely.
"And then you'll go home, aggravate the injury, get frustrated when things don't improve, and blame physical therapy."
"I wouldn't."
"You absolutely would."
The confidence with which she said it was offensive.
Mostly because she was probably right.
Vi crossed her arms.
Caitlyn waited patiently, which somehow made it harder to argue.
Eventually Vi exhaled.
"Seven."
"There we go."
Vi narrowed her eyes. It felt like Caitlyn was holding back a “good girl”.
"That sounded… smug."
For the first time, Caitlyn smiled openly, shrugging.
The assessment wound down after that. Caitlyn returned to the desk and reviewed her notes while Vi reclaimed her cane and lowered herself back into the chair.
The room felt quieter now. Less adversarial than it had been.
Caitlyn closed the file.
"What can you no longer do that you used to love?" Cailtlyn asked, relaxing into her chair.
"Run marathons."
"You used to run marathons?"
"No."
Caitlyn clearly held back another eye-roll.
"Then what can you no longer do?"
The answer arrived before she could stop it.
"Ride."
Caitlyn looked at her.
"Ride?"
"Motorcycles."
The word settled heavily in the room.
Vi looked away first.
"I sold it."
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Caitlyn didn't offer sympathy. Didn't tell her she was sorry.Didn't launch into some motivational speech about adapting and overcoming. She simply nodded in acknowledgment. Nothing more.
Strangely, that felt better.
After a moment, Caitlyn pulled a printed sheet from a folder and handed it over.
"We'll start with these."
Vi scanned the exercises.
They looked insultingly simple.
"This is it?"
"This is it."
"I could've done these at home."
"And yet you didn't."
Vi stared.
Caitlyn met the look calmly, completely unimpressed by her attitude.
It was infuriating.
And, if she was being honest with herself, a little impressive.
"I'll see you on Monday, Violet."
Vi opened her mouth, intending to say something noncommittal.
Instead, what came out was:
"Yeah."
The word lingered between them for a second before she turned toward the door.
Somewhere between walking into the clinic and walking out of that office, she'd lost the argument she'd been having with everyone for the past year.