i just did a reread of “i had him bless these hands” and it’s still AMAZING!!!! i loooove the amount of detail you put into each scene — vi’s tongue poking out to taste the antiseptic cait had applied rlly jumped out at me this time. the way you’ve characterized jayce and his friendship with caitlyn is wonderful!! it feels so true to canon in that he is her older brother figure who can be a bit obtuse but remains open-minded, at least when it comes to cait and her safety. his protectiveness and ability to understand her is so sweet. i also love how you’ve explored caitlyn’s empathy and her analytical skills in the way she catalogues vi’s reactions. truly one of my fave fics ever.
i hope you’re doing well <3
(p.s. this isn’t meant to pressure you into writing more so i’m sorry if it comes off that way!!! it will remain one of my faves regardless of completion status!!! thank you for sharing your talents with us!!!)
omg this is such a lovely message thank you!! i'm glad it brings you joy.
i will finish it eventually, i swear. the next chapter is like 80% written, there's just a couple bits that are fighting me.
actually you know what, as thanks for your patience and this incredibly sweet message, sneak peeks be upon ye:
“In here,” she orders, pushing Vi ahead of her.
Vi allows herself to be manhandled, as pliant under Caitlyn’s hands as always, and looks around with interest at the on-call room Caitlyn’s urged her into. “You actually have these? I thought it was made up for TV.”
“We have them,” Caitlyn says, shutting the door behind them. “Vi—”
“You ever…” Vi interrupts, quirking her eyebrow suggestively.
“Have sex in here? No. That is made up for television. The door doesn’t lock, for a start.” Caitlyn is familiar with Vi’s habit of flirting when she’s trying to distract her, and she’s well practised at ignoring the flutter it sets off in her chest. Steb’s interruption had drawn her attention back to Vi’s wardrobe, to the fact that if Vi isn’t here for her, there might be a more pressing problem than their interpersonal mess. “What are you doing here? Where did you get that lab coat?”
“Locker room. You guys need better security on those things,” Vi says, but Caitlyn can read her too well to fall for the forced nonchalance.
“Vi. What’s going on?” Caitlyn asks, aiming for stern but landing somewhere closer to gentle. Now she’s looking for it, she can see how wan Vi looks, the exhaustion hooked under her eyes and around her mouth. Under the hastily-applied concealer, she looks almost haggard – it’s not the worst Caitlyn’s seen her, but it’s close.
Vi doesn’t answer, lets the silence stretch for long enough that Caitlyn thinks she’s going to have to dig it out. But then Vi sighs, a slow, deflating breath, and sinks onto one of the beds. “It’s Powder,” she says, scrubbing her hands across her face with her elbows braced on her knees. The motion smudges the make-up on her cheeks, just enough to reveal almost sallow skin under a fading bruise. “Something happened, they wouldn’t give me details, but they said she’d been transferred here.”
Caitlyn frowns, confused. “I’m sorry to hear that, but I don’t understand how that led to you stealing a lab coat.”
“She’s in the Balbok wing. They won’t let me see her.”
Caitlyn’s eyes widen in understanding. Balbok is a locked ward, intended for patients at imminent risk of hurting themselves or others. “I see.”
“She’s been in there for three days, and they said I can’t see her for another four.” Vi says in a rush, notes of desperation creeping into her tone. “I just need to see her for a minute, to let her know it’s not like before.”
“Before?” Caitlyn asks, tilting her head.
Vi falters, just for a moment, then dodges the question. “I—She doesn’t do well without me. I just need to talk to her.”
Caitlyn worries at her lip with her teeth as she thinks. Involuntary holds were supposed to be a tool of last resort, triggered only in the most severe cases. If Powder had been unstable enough to warrant it, limiting outside influences may not be the worst idea.
On the other hand, seven days is an unusually long time, even for a hold triggered by an act of violence. It’s especially unusual to impose a contact ban on top of it, and Caitlyn suspects that if she were to dig into it, she’d find that Powder being from Zaun had been the deciding factor.
But those considerations pale into insignificance next to the way Vi’s looking at her, wide-eyed and exhausted and pleading. In the face of her obvious desperation, Caitlyn catches her mouth speaking with little input from her brain. “I can take you to see her.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” Caitlyn answers, against what’s left of her better judgement. She really shouldn’t – she has almost no training in psychiatry and absolutely no authority to override an involuntary hold – but seven days is an excessive length of time, and Vi is here instead of in a ditch, and Caitlyn’s learning that the lines she won’t cross are much further away when Vi is looking at her like that. “Take that off.”
Vi stands so quickly she almost falls over, wrestling herself out of her stolen lab coat as she goes. “Should I…?” she asks, holding it by the collar and looking around.
“Just leave it here. With luck, whoever owns it will think they just forgot it,” Caitlyn says, but her eyes are caught on Vi’s arm. They’re unwrapped, presumably as part of her makeshift disguise, but removing the coat reveals a raised, dark line spearing jaggedly through the line of her tattoos, curving around her arm and ending very near the middle of the healed circle of scars from the first time Caitlyn had treated her. “Are those sutures?”
Vi jerks her arm out of view. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.” Caitlyn can’t help but worry about it, but isn’t sure enough about where they stand to push. Vi is here, in front of her, and Caitlyn doesn’t want to risk scaring her off again. Instead, she nods, then gestures Vi back out into the hallway.
getting peer pressured by @scooby-doo-creepymechclown (<3). i also tag @penvision @wraithofwords @xkatebishop no pressure friends
1) i had him bless these hands just to run you out (caitvi)
The first time it happens, Caitlyn is just barely home from a twelve-hour shift that turned into a twenty-hour shift, tired enough that her eyes feel like they’re shivering, and assumes the knock on her door is an uber driver with a burger and way too many fries.
2) love always wakes the dragon (caitvi)
It doesn’t rain in the Undercity.
3) who needs comfortable love (avatrice)
When their plan goes to shit, it goes to shit quickly and without warning.
4) cradle me with grace (avatrice)
This is how Ava dies.
5) lets rest for a while 'til our souls catch us up (avatrice)
Beatrice wonders, in the aftermath, if Ava heard her when she said “I love you.”
6) my darling, let the band play on (‘cos it’s clear we stole the show) (supercorp)
“Remind me why I wanted to be an actor, again?” Kara asked with a groan, rolling onto her back as the crew scurried around her, resetting the scene.
7) on leading the gift-horse to water (and other mangled metaphors) (supercorp)
“I think I might be homophobic.”
8) meet me here, in the liminal spaces (agentcorp)
It starts like this, with Alex alone in her apartment, drinking straight from the bottle because there’s no one left to watch her disapprovingly.
9) but we shall fall gracelessly, and love as fools do (supercorp)
Kara loves the rain.
10) supergirl's daycare for petulant billionaires (supercorp)
The first time, leaving Morgan Edge on a freight ship off the coast is impulsive, a reaction to his thinly veiled threat to Lena and the sneer he paints across his face when he sees Supergirl.
so this chapter is fighting me but it is still coming i swear. have a sneak peek while you wait:
...
“I wish I’d tried harder to talk you out of joining the enforcers,” Jayce says, derailing Caitlyn’s train of thought.
She blinks at him, confused by the non-sequitur. “You didn’t try at all. What does that have to do with this?”
Jayce pauses halfway through dragging his hand down his face to look at her incredulously. “Literally everything,” he says, dropping his hand to his lap. “It threw your moral compass so badly out of whack that you overcorrected, and now you’re so terrified of falling back into the black that there’s no room for grey.”
“That’s—I’m—” Caitlyn starts, but he’s right. With one pointed thrust, he’s struck the precise heart of her turmoil. “She’s a patient,” Caitlyn says again, but even to her own ears it sounds weak.
“To start with, maybe, and only if we don’t count the fact that you slept with her before that,” Jayce says, leaning forward to meet her eyes. “But you’ve been friends with her for a while, Caitlyn. The fact that you both had to cover it with ethically grey medical care doesn’t negate that.”
“It wasn’t a cover—” Caitlyn starts, but Jayce snorts, shaking his head.
“You said she showed up one night because she’d stubbed her toe.”
“She’d cracked her toenail in half!”
“Painful, but not something I’d take to a doctor unless it went black and fell off. Particularly,” he continues with a sardonic smile, “if I were a naturally suspicious Zaunite with an allergy to authority figures.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that Vi’s gotten more medical care in the past six months than in the rest of her life combined, and it’s not because she’s suddenly more injury-prone.” Caitlyn opens her mouth to respond, but Jayce continues, “You’ve got yourself all twisted up in the ethics of this, so let’s make it easier. If she weren’t a patient—” the emphasis he puts on the word highlights how ridiculous he finds that objection, “—would you want to be with her?”
Caitlyn shifts uncomfortably, squeezing the crumpled paper between her hands, because the answer is unequivocally ‘yes’, but admitting that feels like she’s making it worse. She’s aware how distractingly, unbearably attracted to Vi she is, and has been since the start, but it’s developed beyond that as Caitlyn’s come to know her better. In almost any other circumstance, Caitlyn would’ve kissed her months ago and dealt with the consequences. “You’re making it sound too easy.”
“Or,” Jayce says gently, “maybe you’re making it too hard. What’s the worst thing you think is going to happen if you let yourself explore this?”
Caitlyn makes a noise somewhere between a scoff and a snort. “I get fired. I lose my medical licence. My mother disowns me and burns me an effigy on the manor lawn.”
I hurt her, is the one that catches and dies in her throat, the worst of the lot that may have already happened.
“Okay, well the first two are unlikely, and I’m sure Tobias would talk Cassandra down from the third one.”
“You think I wouldn’t lose my job if Salo found out I’d started sleeping with someone I’ve been treating outside the hospital?”
“I think you’d probably get away with occasionally patching up your girlfriend more easily than trying to explain that you’ve been treating a bouncer-slash-pit fighter that you drunkenly slept with one time.” Caitlyn shoots him a look, and Jayce raises his hands. “Or friend, even, if girlfriend is a bridge too far.”
i had him bless these hands just to run you out - chapter 4
hey look, it's the find-out section of the fuck-around chapter and everything is fine!
It takes a minute for Caitlyn to gather herself sufficiently to re-enter her bedroom. The confrontation with Deckard and conversation with Maddie had both served to sober her up quickly, but now she feels wrung out, hungover from emotion more than alcohol.
Vi would have heard at least part of the latter encounter, and is either going to get quiet and withdrawn about it, or tease Caitlyn relentlessly. Caitlyn doesn’t think she has the emotional fortitude left to deal with either of those options and repair whatever fresh damage Vi has done to herself.
Presuming, of course, that Vi is still in her bedroom – Caitlyn’s half expecting to find she’s fled back out the window.
Happily, when Caitlyn talks herself into entering, Vi is still waiting for her.
Less happily, she’s back to being curled defensively away from Caitlyn, her posture so closed off as to be almost hostile. It’s such a radical departure from her usual demeanour that Caitlyn pauses warily just inside the door.
“They’re gone. Jayce too,” she says carefully but Vi doesn’t relax at this news as Caitlyn was expecting. “What’s wrong?”
“You were a fucking enforcer?” Vi spits, expression somewhere between outraged and betrayed.
sneak peek of caitvi friends-with-medical-benefits!au under the cut. everything is going totally fine and normal with them
“Did they do this?” Caitlyn asks, probing carefully at the cut with her thumb. She doesn’t need to specify which ‘they’ she means. Enforcers generally don’t carry blades, and she hasn’t seen this kind of injury inflicted by them before, but she wouldn’t put it past Marcus to turn a blind eye to unauthorised additions to their kits.
Vi shakes her head, though, and says, “No, I umm… it’s why I was coming here, when I ran into them.” Her tone is odd enough that Caitlyn glances up to her face, and finds her looking almost sheepish.
“Oh, what did you do?” Caitlyn asks, exasperated, because she’s seen that expression on Vi’s face before. It usually precedes a tale of her doing something either ridiculously dangerous or slightly insane.
Vi just mumbles something, not meeting Caitlyn’s eye.
Normally, Caitlyn wouldn’t push, but the little half-smile Vi’s trying to hide suggests that she wants Caitlyn to ask. She nudges Vi with her leg and, in the flattest, most Dr Kiramman voice she can muster, says, “Vi.”
“Ekko got a new knife,” Vi admits. “I might have been showing off a little.” Caitlyn just looks at her, covering her exasperated amusement under Dr Kiramman disapproval. “It was sharper than I was expecting.”
Caitlyn laughs softly, a quick exhale through her nose. “Of course it was. You’re a menace.”
“You like me anyway,” Vi says, shooting her a little half-grin that, in combination with the sentiment, would’ve sent a tingling spark down Caitlyn’s spine if she were acknowledging the crackling, unspoken thing between them.
Which she’s not.
Instead, she gives Vi her arm back and stands. “I need my kit. Wait here, and don’t—”
“Don’t fall asleep, I know.”
“Actually, I was going to say don’t bleed on my bedsheets, but yes, that too.”
4 and 6 for “let’s rest while our souls catch us up” please!
I really enjoyed that one
hi friend, thank you for asking :) i love that fic a lot
4. What’s your favorite line of dialogue?
so there's barely any dialogue in this one, but my favourite line is probably “There’s literally nothing to do here, Bea. For miles. I checked.” because i can hear her saying it in my head, and also that part is based on a roadtrip i took one time because there are vast parts of australia where there really isn't anything to do
6: What makes this fic special or different from all your other fics?
it's the fic that got me writing again.
i'd written for SC and a couple others but i'd been struggling with it for a couple years and i was pretty convinced i'd lost the spark, but then this stupid nun show came along and straight up murdered me.
i wrote the whole fic in one go in a sort of daze immediately after finishing season 2 because i had too many feelings and needed to catharsise about it for 3k words
so yes, it's one of my favourites for a lot of reasons
It should surprise Caitlyn, but some part of her had been almost expecting it. There’s no reason to believe that she’d ever see Vi again – that she’d come back the first time was remarkable – but it hadn’t stopped the nebulous sense of inevitability every time she hears someone moving near her door, the vaguely anticipatory shiver in her stomach every time someone knocks.
It’s never Vi, until it is, and when it is, the timing is atrocious.
Caitlyn is having a bad day.
It’s on the downswing – after a vaguely acrimonious brunch with her mother and a shift at the hospital that had been cut short by her attending sending her home, Caitlyn had retreated to the shooting range to indulge in the least-destructive of her coping mechanisms. It had worked, mostly, but Caitlyn’s mood and the general trajectory of her day still has her half-expecting to return home to find her apartment building on fire.
So when she hears the door to the roof access stairs open as she passes it, then feels someone approaching as she’s unlocking her front door, Caitlyn is startled but not surprised.
“Hey,” a familiar voice says from somewhere behind her, just as she’s fiddled the lock into cooperating.
Instead of turning, Caitlyn just tilts her head forward to press against the doorframe, because Vi would choose today, of all days, to come back. Caitlyn’s exhausted, sore from too many hours at the rifle range trying to shoot her frustration away, and desperate to just collapse into bed. She’s far too emotionally wrung out to deal with the warm, complicated thing that curls through her stomach in Vi’s presence.
“Vi,” Caitlyn says into the wood, trying to muster the willpower to look at her. “Is this going to be a regular thing?”
“I’d really like to say no, but…”
Something in her tone urges Caitlyn to turn, and when she does, her exhaustion is wiped cleanly away by a flash of alarm.
Vi is lingering in the middle of the hallway, and she looks absolutely terrible. One side of her face is a kaleidoscope of bruises, her left eye so black and swollen it won’t open all the way, and there’s an odd, lopsided set to her shoulders that hints at damage Caitlyn can’t see. “I can go, if you want,” she says, but Caitlyn has already taken an automatic step towards her.
sneak peek at chapter 2 of caitvi strangers-with-(medical)benefits au under the cut.
“It’s nothing,” Caitlyn says, ushering Vi into her apartment. “What happened?”
“Got punched a lot,” Vi says, as Caitlyn shucks her jacket in the direction of the coat rack and approaches her.
“By what?” Caitlyn asks, resting a hand on Vi’s jaw to tilt her head into the light. Up close the bruises look even worse, and there’s a gash bisecting her eyebrow that’s almost lost among the discolouration.
“Really big guy,” Vi says, wincing as Caitlyn’s thumb brushes over her split lip. “He was faster than I expected. Should’a gone to the pit doc but he charges outta the purse.”
“Pit doc?” Caitlyn asks, meeting Vi’s unbruised eye just in time to see it widen.
“Never mind. Forget I said that,” Vi says quickly, twitching her head away from Caitlyn’s hand and continuing before Caitlyn can argue, “I think I fucked my shoulder.”
Closer, Caitlyn can see she’s right. Vi’s left shoulder is swollen beyond even the normal bulge of her well-developed musculature, and her arm is hanging oddly from the joint. It’s clear in the way she’s holding herself that it’s painful, and Caitlyn suspects she’s going to have to make it worse before it gets better.
“May I?” Caitlyn asks, waiting for Vi’s answering nod before easing Vi’s jacket off her shoulders, letting it drop to the floor at their feet. “I don’t think it’s properly dislocated,” Caitlyn says, moving Vi’s arm carefully with one hand and probing her shoulder with the other. “It feels more like a posterior subluxation.”
“A what?” Vi asks through gritted teeth, her expression contorted with pain.
“The top of your arm bone popped backwards out of the shoulder socket, but not all the way.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Probably. It will hurt, though.”
“It already hurts, just do—fuck!” Vi cuts herself off with a curse as Caitlyn uses her grip on her arm to jerk it forward, pressing her other hand against Vi’s shoulder to guide the joint back into place with an audible pop.
“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Caitlyn says, catching Vi around the waist as she sags against her with a relieved groan. “It works better when you’re not tense.”
Vi mumbles something into Caitlyn’s shoulder – Caitlyn tilts her head until she can make out the muffled swearing interspersed with thanks. She flushes slightly as her brain helpfully notes the parallel to the night they met – Vi, post-orgasm, heavy and boneless across Caitlyn’s chest, panting nonsensical half-words against the underside of her jaw as she catches her breath – and with Vi pressed against her, it takes longer than it should to brush the memory away.
“You’re welcome,” Caitlyn says, urging Vi backwards until she can guide her down onto the couch. “Wait here, I’ll get you some ice.”
