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Vi’s dreams are quiet things, now.
The moment she rushed into Jinx’s cell, felt her sister’s bird-thin bones press against her chest. The gentle tap of Vander’s leathery, canine forehead against her own. Isha’s little giggles ringing along a darkened tunnel lit up only by glowing moss.
She dreams of gentleness, of companionship. Jinx sitting next to Vi on the steps of Viktor’s church and leaning their shoulders together. Vander letting Isha clamber over his shoulders while Jinx cackled in amusement at the picture they made.
Vi wakes up teary-eyed and allows Caitlyn to hold her, making shushing noises into her newly-red hair, and Vi lets her girlfriend make whatever assumptions she wants to, lather Vi’s skin with whatever platitudes she wishes.
Caitlyn is still so new to loss.
Vi knows Caitlyn’s nightmares are horrible things, where Caitlyn relives her mother’s death, Jinx’s tea party, the moment she lost her eye – she wakes up screaming and doesn’t settle until Vi’s gathered her up and applied firm pressure to her body while whispering a steady stream of reassurance.
Caitlyn probably thinks Vi dreams of similar things. Isha disintegrating in front of them while Jinx thrashed and wailed. Vander’s mutilated body clawing against Jinx and pulling her down into the depths of an explosion that neither emerged from.
Vi doesn’t know how to explain that she’d rather dream of the worst parts of her life rather than have to remember them anew each morning when she realizes the best moments of her life are all gone.
Every time, it feels like something has reached into her rib cage and squeezed at her heart until it burst, leaving nothing behind but a yawning absence.
Vi’s little sister is dead. The last of her family is gone. She could not save them.
Vi's father was not even laid to rest in the slums of Zaun but rather mutilated, tortured and warped. The Hound of the Underground, the father who took in street children, the man who taught Vi how to throw a punch – she's watched him die twice, now. She’s screamed over his corpse twice.
She wakes up from dreams of Mylo and Clagger’s bodies and the mourning she feels for them is new all over again, thinking of Vander left alone and half-alive not knowing that any one of his four children survived him. A noble man and a good father, made into a beast and a killer.
Worse still are the dreams of Powder on her own, the few memories she has of Jinx.
Vi never dreams of violence with her sister, only softness. Over and over, she relives the feel of Jinx’s hollow cheeks under Vi’s calloused palms in the jail cell, the silkiness of her knotted hair in between Vi’s fingers. The nimbleness she used to chase Isha around the commune, laughing shrilly, tumbling into Vander’s broad shoulders and careening head-over-feet into Vi’s arms.
In prison, Vi used dreams of Powder’s tears and bleeding nose to keep her moving through monotonous days and years spent in the same four concrete walls. It motivated her, tormented her, kept her strong and kept her afraid.
Now, Vi’s little sister is dead. She dreams of her sister’s life and wakes up mourning.
She spends hours lying awake, staring at the ceiling in Caitlin’s enormous bed with her girlfriend curled into her side. She thinks of all the things she could have done better - at the top of the list will always be the very last moments, letting Jinx fall down the tower chute, stopping to mourn a father already long dead when that weakness cost her a sister. Vi fantasizes about getting to do it over - she imagines jumping off the ledge, climbing up to Jinx and wrapping her up in her arms and refusing to let go ever again. Every blow she laid on Jinx comes back to haunt her, each punch, each kick, each insult, each grab of her sister’s ridiculous braids.
Caitlyn came of age with the academy and the enforcers and her parents, nurturing her as she grew - Vi had prison and her last agonizing sight of Powder’s back turned to a gleaming silver knife held in the hand of the man who killed their entire family. The violence of that regret kept Vi company for seven long, lonely years in prison, until it had become ingrained in her, seared into her bones, fused with her skin – and Vi was freed, and Vi found Powder, and Vi lost her again.
How could she possibly even go about explaining the depth of that loss to Caitlyn, whose mother was given a funeral and a memorial and a statue and a coffin, four things that not one of Vi’s three parents ever received? Caitlyn, who thinks of Vi’s sister and thinks Jinx, thinks killer, thinks my mother’s killer.
Vi’s little sister is dead. She does not know how to go on without her. She has never before had to try.
The weeks following the final confrontation with Ambessa and Viktor pass in a haze.
Vi lives in Caitlyn's house and avoid Tobias. She goes on long jogs in the morning when her dreams keep her from resting beside Caitlyn in the bed they share. She visits Ekko during the day when he lets her, and lets her muscles be the most helpful part of her, reassembling lodgings in the Undercity, working on repairing Ekko's tree-village. When Ekko is away, or doesn't want to be found, Vi wanders.
Often, she finds herself in the depths of Zaun. The last places she saw Jinx alive. She finds the tunnels Jinx took her down with Isha and punches bloody smears into the walls for hours.
Other days, Caitlyn keeps her in Piltover, presumably for her own good - although Vi doesn't think it makes much of a difference. They have breakfast together and Vi makes Caitlyn laugh when she can and moan when she can't - in another life, they might be in a honeymoon period, but not in this one.
At night, Caitlyn sits them in front of the fireplace and massages her fingers into Vi's forever-tense muscles, and they begin to plan what their new life will look like. Vi tries not to project just how empty she feels but Caitlyn has a way of knowing regardless.
They sit in the bath together - Caitlyn no longer tolerates the shower - and press their foreheads together, breathing in the same air, hurting in such similar ways.
Living in the aftermath is not easy, but Caitlyn makes it less hard.
Three weeks after the battle for the hex gates, Vi wakes up too early as she often does. Cait is nestled against her spine, her legs slotted in between Vi’s, and her fingers clenched tightly in the material of Vi’s singlet.
It takes only a moment for Vi to register what feels different. The hairs on her arms are standing upright and her breath catches in her throat.
There’s a face in the corner of Cait’s room.
It’s pale, shadowed, a half-crescent that Vi would know anytime, anyplace, amongst any number of other faces – she'd know this face even if blinded.
Vi’s mouth opens and she’s not cognizant enough to know what name she’d call out for, Powder or Jinx, but her sister raises a half-metal hand up and says shhh.
Vi’s wide awake, now, and frozen in place – terrified that moving might dispel whatever hallucination she’s conjured up in her grief. Against her better instincts, she blinks, hard, but the face and the sister who it belongs to remain present in the room, unmoving.
Vi shudders and squeezes her eyes back shut, this time to hide the tears immediately springing to the surface. A sob gets stuck somewhere in her chest, slipping out from between her ribs and so large that Vi thinks she could choke on it. The last time she felt like this was looking down at the monstrosity she used to call Dad, shortly before that weakness led to her sister’s death.
Vi’s body shakes as she tries to keep the writhing emptiness inside, bringing up a hand to her lips and curling it into a fist, biting down on her knuckles.
A gentle touch falls on her cheek, and Vi’s cannot help wondering whether she’s dreaming and Caitlyn is waking her up, or if this is real and her sister is really back from the dead - or perhaps never dead at all.
“Hi,” whispers Jinx, her half-metal fingers cold against the skin of Vi’s cheek. “I’m sorry, Vi.”
Vi opens her eyes in a rush, and jolts forward to fling her arms around Jinx’s skinny shoulders. Caitlyn makes a sleepy noise of discontent and Vi feels Jinx freeze, but she doesn’t care, only squeezes tighter.
“Oh, Powder,” she gasps out, “ Jinx, oh, god. You’re here, you’re okay – oh my god.”
“Hi,” Jinx repeats, strangely shy. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to interrupt, I just wanted to check on you.”
“You aren’t - interrupting, what?” Vi stutters, wounded and confused. “God, Jinx. I thought you were dead, everyone thinks you’re dead, I...” There are tears coming to her eyes and she chokes on them, faltering in place. “Let me see you, come on.” She pulls back from the hug, grabs Jinx’s hand and tugs her gently towards the bedroom door, out into the living room where the blinds have been left open to let moonlight shine into the room.
Jinx blinks up at Vi, wide-eyed as ever, glowing pink in the dark, and Vi means to say something comforting or loving or furious but all that comes out are more tears, and she drags Jinx into another hug. Her shoulders and shaking.
“I’m okay, Vi,” Jinx manages to say around Vi’s shoulders, “really, I’m okay.”
“You left me,” Vi answers, entirely unintentionally. It isn't what she ever thought she'd say, if given the opportunity - it is also exactly what she has felt.
Jinx grows still in Vi’s arms and Vi curses to herself, filled with immediate blistering regret, but Jinx finally lifts her arms to hug Vi in return, and exhales quietly. Vi hears it and tries to keep herself together.
“I thought I could do it on my own,” Jinx says eventually. They’ve found their way to the sofa. Jinx is sitting with her back to Vi’s chest, and Vi’s got her arms wrapped firmly around her body – she tries not to think of it as a cage. Touch is all about safety for Vi, she likes to keep people close, to affirm that she’s able to do that now – from everything she’s seen, touch is something that Jinx only rarely initiates, and never with any real sense of gravity.
After seven years in a cell, Vi’s entire sense of gravity comes from touch.
Caitlyn is forever lacing their fingers together, brushing Vi’s hair behind her ears, trying to keep Vi grounded in a way that doesn’t involve a punching bag.
“I just thought it was better for everyone,” Jinx continues. “Me, you. I didn't understand why everything just kept hurting, even when you came back. I just wanted it to stop hurting. To break the cycle. I needed to get out.”
“I’m sorry,” Vi responds, mumbling it against Jinx’s downy blue head. “I don’t want to hurt you. I’m sorry I ever did.”
Jinx nudges her head backwards in acknowledgement. “I know. I know, Vi.” She sighs a little, and shrugs. “I missed you too bad to stay away.”
Vi chews on her thoughts and tries to express them in a way that won’t make things worse again. Who was taking care of her, out there in the world? Was anybody filling the role that Vi was meant to have played? “Thank you for coming back. Even if it’s - just to say hello.”
“It wasn’t fair to leave you like that,” Jinx says quietly. She curls onto her side, so her cheek is pillowed atop of Vi’s collarbones. “I thought about Isha, you know? If she left me one day, and if I thought she was gone, but she wasn’t? I loved her, Vi. I miss her all the time.”
There’s a lump in Vi’s throat and she doesn’t think she’s capable of speech, so she tightens her arms around Jinx and hopes that says enough.
“It hurt me to imagine it,” Jinx whispers. “I’d be happy she wasn’t gone, but it would hurt me anyway, and I don’t want to hurt you anymore. You’re my sister.”
Vi sniffles, and tilts her face down to press a kiss against Jinx’s head. Her cheeks have become wet and slippery. “I love you,” she says, and her tone accidentally slides into something desperate and too honest - “Please don’t leave me again. Please.”
She hiccups, undignified, and gasps out: “I can change, okay? I can be better for you, I can be – what you need. I’ll be better, okay? Please, please don’t leave me again.”
There’s a hurt noise that tears out from Jinx’s throat and she twists and burrows herself into Vi’s embrace, properly this time, letting Vi cross her arms entirely across Jinx’s back and keep her close. They lie there on Caitlyn’s couch, turned into each other like parenthesis, and Vi falls apart entirely with her baby sister in her arms and back from the dead.
There are tears of relief, and tears of betrayal, and tears of grief. Grief for Jinx, grief for Vander, and grief for herself. She misses the girl she was before losing Vander and Mylo and Claggor, the girl she was before seven years of prison. She misses the girl she was before that, with two loving parents and one toddling sister.
“I’m here,” Jinx says fiercely, and then, steadier, “I’m not leaving, Vi. I’m here. I’m not leaving.” Vi weeps miserably and pulls Jinx close and cries until she can’t think of anything else.
She doesn’t remember falling asleep, but Vi wakes in the morning with the realization that somebody is running their fingers through her hair.
Vi mumbles a confused greeting, but then registers that there’s still a body snoring against her chest – "Cait?”
Caitlyn’s managed to wedge herself onto the couch, trapped between Vi’s body and the arm rest – she's removed the pillows so that Vi’s back is leaning against Caitlyn’s chest.
“Mm,” Caitlyn answers, her fingers not pausing their combing.
“Oh - Cait -” Vi goes to push herself up, but Caitlyn pushes her back down. “I can explain, she just showed up overnight-”
Caitlyn shakes her head, moving her curtain of blue-black hair as she does. “It’s okay, darling,” she whispers. “Go back to sleep, Vi. It’s alright.”
“You - your dad -”
“Don’t worry about that right now,” Caitlyn says firmly. Vi’s always folded to that specific tone of hers – so elegant and refined but entirely assertive. “Go back to sleep, my love.”
Vi’s heart is racing in her chest. Jinx’s mouth is open and she’s drooled all over Vi’s top from where her head has slid down to rest atop of Vi’s stomach. Her fingers are wound through the holes in the fabric, and Vi’s hands found their way overnight to rest on Jinx’s back.
In the morning light, Jinx looks young, and the differences in her appearance are more apparent. Her hair is still short, although it has grown out some, and she’s not wearing any of the smudged black makeup that Vi had come to expect from her. Her shirt is billowy and oversized and her arms are wrapped extensively in gauze. Her face is bruised yellow-green.
“Cait,” Vi protests quietly. She loves Jinx, and she won’t stop loving Jinx, but she loves Caitlyn too, and this is her mother’s house.
“Sleep, Violet,” Caitlyn murmurs, and leans down to kiss Vi’s forehead. “Everything’s alright now. We’ll work it out, I promise.”
Caitlyn’s arms creep across Vi’s shoulders and crisscross over her collar. She hums a little song and the vibrations carry upwards and into Vi’s bones – she knows it’s not fine, she knows she can’t pit Caitlyn and Jinx against each other again and definitely can’t pit Caitlyn against Tobias, but her sister’s asleep on her stomach and the love of her life is warm against her spine and singing her to sleep.
Helpless to resist, and feeling entirely at peace for the first time in years, Vi drifts.