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Vi doesn’t have her sister’s talent with machinery. She really has no idea how her gauntlets work, or how to fix them, but seeing as Ekko says their inventor isn’t on this plane anymore, somebody has to figure it out.
It will be Ekko. He’ll do it, eventually, and she knows this, but she isn’t asking him for help now. He’s dealing with the same thing she is, and she wants to fix this even when she knows she can’t.
Well, it’s not the exact same thing. She looks back over her shoulder, at Caitlyn in her bed. She’ll wake up soon. Vi won’t have good news for her when she does, bandages still plastered across her face, but until then Vi is alone, and waiting, and unable to do anything actually helpful because she isn’t about to leave Caitlyn alone, so here she is, trying to fix the broken gauntlet herself.
Using something doesn’t teach you how it works. Loving someone doesn’t teach you as much about them as you would like, but eventually, deep down, you learn enough. She knew. She thought she knew her sister was still in there deep down. Eventually, she thought she was wrong. She forced herself to give up.
She was wrong – the second time. She puts the stupid screwdriver down and presses the palm of her hand against her eyes, forcing the emotions down. Later. Maybe never.
She’ll break before never, but when they’re still treating the wounded, it can’t be now.
“Vi?” Caitlyn’s voice is groggy and quiet, but Vi hears it as loud as the explosion that took what was left of her family. She turns around in her seat to watch Caitlyn blink open her exposed eye for the first time.
Oh.
“Right here, Cupcake,” Vi tells her, standing from her seat to cross the small room. Caitlyn’s head starts to twitch. “Don’t do that,” Vi tells her and surprisingly, Caitlyn obliges, not moving her head and waiting for Vi to come to her and enter her vision, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking her hand.
“Your face-” Caitlyn pauses for a moment just to take a breath from the strain of speaking, “-tells me that it’s not good news,” she finishes, but there’s a playful curl to her voice. There’s no mourning on her face, just quiet acceptance.
“The good news is you make it look good,” Vi tells her, squeezing her hand gently. Caitlyn manages a laugh that sounds a bit painful but so soft, not from weakness, but fondness. The smile fades into that same quiet acceptance.
“What is it?” Caitlyn asks. For a brief moment, Vi remembers their first meeting in that jail cell, where she didn’t see even a cop like those that had beat them down, but a prim topsider who probably hadn’t even seen enough combat to participate in those beatings. She underestimated her. Now, Caitlyn easily accepts any price to herself, because it all added up to victory, whether that meant civilians surviving unharmed or other soldiers just plain surviving.
“They had to remove your eye. Once it heals up, they can see about getting you a prosthetic,” Vi explains. No point in sugarcoating it. It would be insulting to Caitlyn. She can handle it. Caitlyn closes her one functional eye again.
“Mm,” is all she hums for a moment. Vi traces her thumb over the back of her hand. “Well, as long as I pull off the eyepatch as well as you say,” she decides, opening her eye again so Vi can see the sparkle in it. Vi laughs quietly, shaking her head.
“They’d have to do a lot worse to you to change that,” Vi says. It wouldn’t matter. She reaches out, brushing a hand over Caitlyn’s free cheek. “And I’m not going anywhere,” she adds in a whisper. She watches Caitlyn’s expression shift, her brows lifting for just a moment of softness before it’s replaced with a wince of pain.
“I know what we can build.” Caitlyn’s fingers tighten around Vi’s. “Together,” she whispers.
They’ll rebuild Piltover and Zaun, but that’s not the word Caitlyn used. Caitlyn gingerly lifts her free hand and reaches towards her own face.
“Hey, easy, easy,” Vi quickly interrupts, capturing her hand quickly. “Be careful. Don’t want to poke yourself in the socket,” Vi says, a joking tilt to her voice even as she carefully, carefully guides Caitlyn’s hand to her face, Vi’s fingers covering her own so she can direct them over the parts of her face that it’s safe to touch. Caitlyn’s one seeing eye feels like it’s staring up at her with wavering awe as Vi carefully guides her to feel over her cheek, her brow, and sweeps over her temple, carefully helping her map out what she can, probably still numb for their attempted restoration. After a moment, that look vanishes when Caitlyn flutters her eye closed.
“Not so bad considering how I started that fight,” Caitlyn decides, humming to herself, and Vi guides her hand back to the bed, squeezing it as she lays it over the sheets.
“I have to hand it to you, Cupcake, you really have the worst taste in girls,” Vi tells her. The laugh she pulls out of Caitlyn is louder than it should be, laced with a wince, but it sounds like she needed it as she flutters her eye open.
“It was Ambessa that did it,” Caitlyn corrects. Oh, Vi knows. She got the whole story from Mel or she wouldn’t even know to rag her about Maddie. Vi flashes her a smirk.
“My point stands,” she tells her. Caitlyn’s gaze falls down, towards their hands. After a moment, her fingers tighten almost imperceptibly around Vi’s.
“No, it really doesn’t,” Caitlyn whispers. Vi’s heart constricts in her throat.
When all the fires have been stamped out in the streets, she’ll go to Ekko and ask him to fix the gauntlet. Then she’ll use them to lift up the rubble and rebuild the pillars that held their broken city together, but better, this time, because for the first time Zaun and Piltover are going to build it hand-in-hand.
They’re going to do it hand-in-hand.