Cait wouldn’t leave her alone.
Every way Vi turned, she was there, but never more than a moment. Vi would turn sharply and see Cait in her stolen clothes from their first jaunt into the Undercity. The costume that Vi had taken for her was one of a dozen attempts to get rid of the mousy, timid little burden that was getting in her way as she hunted for her sister, for answers, for Silco. For someone made of meat that would bruise and split under her knuckles until she could beat ten years of her life out of them, ten years in hell.
Once she saw her dancing, free, without the grief that weighed her down like a suit of armor and choked the life and joy from her. This was another punishment- to see flashes of the girl she was before Vi’s *bullshit* wrecked her life. So full of life, so devastatingly beautiful, dancing in the dark with her skin aglow, and then she was gone and some shitbag was making over on her and got a broken jaw for his effort.
Cait was there when the world spun from the booze, and when ham sized fists cracked ribs and bruised organs to the point of bursting, when the grain alcohol scoured her throat with hot whips and hard knuckles chipped her skull and scrambled her brains. When her cheek hit the dirt she would come in brief flashes, soft fingers curled lovingly around her chin, huge eyes liquid with grief.
On those nights she made it home -or at least, crawled back to her shithole flip house- she would lie on her side and see Cait’s face filling her vision again, only to slide inevitably into nightmares and dreamscapes made torture by her absence.
She had done everything wrong and Cait was gone.
Most of the times. Sometimes she raged. That Piltie bitch promised she wouldn’t changed but she’d lied, she already had. Vi had given her everything, everything! Her name was shit down here, her family gone, her life gone. She was nothing but a rabid dog mauling other beasts until one day she’d get her throat torn out, just more trash. What had she called them? Animals?
She’d scream her name in a rage as the bottle shattered on the wall and plead for her as she gulped from the next one. Eventually even Loris stopped coming around.
“I’m not going to let you kill yourself, Violet. I’m definitely not going to help.”
“Then fuck off,” Vi snarled.
She didn’t know how long that had been. Down here in the lowest parts of the undercity, day wasn’t much different than night. She crawled back to the pits. She fought. She won, sometimes she lost. With blood knuckles and a feral grin or a busted lip and a feeling of coming apart inside her ribs, she’s take a bag of coins, give a few to the landlord and spend the rest on drink.
It was Cait’s voice she heard in the dark.
You’re not even eating.
“Go fuck yourself, cupcake,” she’d mutter, and some sump rat would stare at her like a madwoman, sometimes run his yap and get a pop in the jaw for it.
Eventually it’d happen. The booze-rot would eat its way to the outside, or something would break inside, or she’d throw hands with someone with a blade or a club and be too tired and drunk and fucked up to fight it and she’d be fucking free.
No more ghosts. The living do not haunt the dead.
She wasn’t sure how she got back here. She wasn’t even sure if she won the last bout. They were all melting together in a stew of pain, the meat within falling to shreds from boiling too long. Vi stared at herself in the cracked mirror, one little Vi surrounded by a dozen little ones, all splitting the same face, drawn and waxy and pale and marred by sooty black. She took a drink of her poison and shook the bottle, hearing the hollow slosh of the dregs, and tossed it, uncaring of it broke or not, if there were enough coins in the black bag to buy another.
Vi fell more than sat on the bed. Gravity did the rest and she fell on her side, wincing at the explosion of pain radiating from her flank. Cracked rib, most likely. She remembered now. She’d been careless, slow, tried to trap an uppercut meant to crack her sternum and kill her and took it in the rib instead. Every breath hurt. It would be easier to just not to, but she couldn’t stop.
Of course she was there. Cait lying in a silken heaven, big liquid eyes drinking Vi’s soul, full of such compassion and love. No one had looked at Vi like that since she was a child, looked past the grime and the scars and the hurt to just see her.
No one but Cait, and Cait left her.
Vi closed her eyes, ready as ever not to open them. When she felt a soft brush of fingers on her cheek she brushed them away. The visions could fuck off, she was tired.
“She’s not waking up,” Cait said, her voice tight with concern, stretching the clipped professional tone she used round her subordinates to its limit.
“She’s hurt badly,” a man said.
“Commander, we have to go. If someone spots you here they’ll tear us apart.”
“Loris, help me carry her.”
The worked carved red lines of pain through her as powerful hands lifted her from the bed.
This was odd. She’d imagined Cait everywhere but she’d always been alone. Why the hell was she hallucinating Loris? Sure, he was a fine drinking buddy and reminded her a little of Vander but he was hardly-
Oh.
Vi forced her eyes open, a struggle with how gummy and dry they were. The big man was carrying her in his arms and Maddie was comically struggling to carry an oversized bag weighed down by Vi’s atlas gauntlets.
Cait.
Cait was there. It was her. It was really her. Vi could feel her fingers probing her broke rib and see her and God she could smell her, Cait smelled like lilacs and how could anything smell so good in this fetid shithole?
“Cupcake?” she rasped.
“What is she, hungry?” Maddie muttered.
“Cait, get your hood up,” said Loris. “Vi, stay quiet. We’ll take the ventilation shafts, stay out of sight.”
Vi obliged the request by passing out.
It felt like hours in the dark. She’d wake, not knowing if she was in the dream world or the real, if these figures were carrying her to Piltover or hell. She would hear Cait’s voice, soft words to steady her and a gentle hand clasping hers when a jolt made her cry out in agony.
It was strangely easy to sleep while someone as carrying you.
When she woke, she knew she had to be in a dream. She’d dreamed this before- opening her eyes and seeing the elaborate silk canopy of Cait’s expansive bed in her palatial bedroom, big enough to build a Zaunite tenement inside. She would sit up, and Call Cait’s name and hear no answer. She’d rise and wander the halls and eventually make her way to the gardens and still no one would reply.
Vi would wander in an empty world forever, a specter with no one to torment.
No, it was different this time. She’d never dreamed of a thin tube connecting a bottle hanging over the bed to a needle taped in place on her arm. He dreams had never had the constricting feeling of bandages around her trunk, or wrapped around a dozen cuts on her arms and legs. In dreams her lips had never been dry, her throat never parched. The dream world traded in other kinds of pain.
She tried to speak but it was like her tongue was sandpaper, so she moved to sit up instead, gasping in agony as pain exploded in her side. She felt like shit, skin clammy with sour sweat, hurting all over and her head was pounding.
“Try not to move,” Cait whispered, suddenly there, a gentle hand pressing her back down. “You’ve a broken rib and internal injuries, and the withdrawal.”
“Caitlyn?” Vi managed to choke out.
Cait gently lifted her head, guided a glass to her lips. The water was ice cold and it was bliss. She closed her eyes and savored it as deeply as a fine wine. Not that she’d had much experience with that.
“Where am I?”
Cait hesitated.
Vi’s eyesight was clearing now as she blinked the gum away. Cait was pale and drawn, dark circles under her eyes from nights without sleep. There was a deep weariness in her eyes that made Vi’s heart ache. She looked for the spark that had always been there, but saw only faint embers, ready to be swept into nothing by the slightest air.
“I brought you home.”
Vi closed her eyes.
“You should have left me where you found me.”
“I shouldn’t have left you at all. I’ll never forgive myself.”
Cait curled her fingers around Vi’s, and squeezed.
“Yeah,” Vi rasped. “I know that feeling.”