Has someone asked you for your caitvi gift giving and receiving headcanons? If not, do you have any?
These can be associated with a holiday (real or from runeterra lore or made up, any is good), birthdays, or just gifts for no particular reason.
Please and thank you!
saved this ask so i could answer it on my birthday because getting to think about nice things happening to my girls is a gift TO ME, thank you 🫶
by virtue of having all material wants and needs satisfied from the moment cassandra started taking pre-natal gummies, caitlyn is practical on the subject of gifts. you don't have this thing that you need? okay, well, now you do. she’s perceptive and has a good memory, and imo “paying attention and planning ahead” is pretty much the entire formula for being a good gift-giver
though “being filthy rich and more than slightly unhinged” also helps, meaning even really boring gifts come with a sense that like. oh. you got kind of scary with this. caitlyn kiramman is NOT making last minute amazon orders.
but she also just thinks this is something everybody is good at and so doesn’t realize at all the effect such simple kindnesses as “having my needs considered” and “being known” can have on vi
ex. a hand cream will appear on vi’s side of the vanity with a note like “your hands have been rather dry and the cold has you favoring your knuckles again, per the product lists of every five-star salon in the city i've determined this is the most effective brand for both moisturizing and pain relief - xx C” and vi will be crying for an hour in the shower
for vi, i think her having to make do with what she had, wants and needs both irrelevant, is something she still applies but mostly to herself. my socks are perfectly fine, thank you, these holes are darn-able. which drives caitlyn crazy. i could buy you a small principality, the least i can do is buy you some socks.
with other people, though, pretty sure vi is hugely generous! real shirt-off-her-back kind of gal, it just doesn’t often take material forms and i don’t ever see her being truly comfortable spending caitlyn’s money on stupid and unnecessary bullshit. vi is way more likely to show up at your house with a six-pack an hour before the party starts and ask you to put her to work. she is building IKEA furniture at the Firelight base on the weekends because it’s been a while since they had an upgrade. etc.
so her gifts to caitlyn are like. ordering takeout and catching up on paperwork so caitlyn doesn't have to stay late alone. picking up boot polish and gun oil when caitlyn's running low. reading a book out loud so caitlyn’s eye won't get tired. and so on.
for these reasons i think they both kind of come easily to the same conclusion that for the big holidays they don’t need to do gifts and would much rather a) just do something fun together, and/or b) give things to other people instead of each other. they’re going out to their favorite hole in the wall and dropping off a giant check to the soup kitchen on the way home. they're going to the mall and fulfilling every ticket on whatever the runeterra angel tree equivalent is. etc.
all this means that they're both small everyday givers more than they're big occasion people. as noted, a post-canon caitlyn is dropping declarations of devotion via hand cream on your average tuesday. for vi, i love that idea of her becoming a big Maker Of Shit and gifting all of it to her loved ones. she’s soldering little creatures out of aluminum scraps and leaving them in places that will make caitlyn laugh. she’s planting poppies in fall so she can bring caitlyn to see them in the spring, pressing them between pages so she'll find them in twenty years and know she's been loved for as long. they're sparring and writing each other letters and peeling fruit for each other and agreeing to five more minutes and changing each other's bandages. they’re buying each other books and flowers and fresh bread and all the small fleeting nice-to-haves that make life more itself.
i do think there are exceptions to every rule and some exceptions that are funny for me to think about are 1) vi buys caitlyn stupid amounts of seraphine merch because caitlyn is embarrassed by the depths of her own superfandom and won’t buy it for herself, 2) vi buys dumb outfits for their dogs because it pisses caitlyn off, 3) vi buys caitlyn ONE pack of cigarettes to get her through the year (she gets an extra pack for the really bad cases, no questions asked) 4) caitlyn is not immune to an impulse purchase in her desire to either a) give vi a life free from either want or pain, or b) win an argument or bet; through this they have acquired possessions including a) one of those luxury espresso machines, b) an evil shetland pony (redundant, i know), and c) a djungelskog, list non-exhaustive, 5) caitlyn is incapable of seeing a sweater and not putting vi in it, 6) caitlyn is such a regular at their favorite sex shop that they give her the staff discount.
