Chapter Text
Caitlyn was an eager learner. She always learned the important lessons the hard way.
The current lesson was not to trust a trencher.
Jayce was down. His back was crumpled up against the wall, until it wasn't, and his face hit the floor cheek-first. He was unconscious, and Caitlyn could do little to save him right now, with a box of stuff Jayce had asked her to lug along pinning her legs to the floor.
He had tried kicking down the door—it seemed to be barraged shut, since the key didn't work—at which point, there was an explosion. An explosion of a bright, magical, scary lightning blue.
The air crackled in front of her, through the locked apartment, and through the wall as well, sending brick and rock and cement flying in every which direction. A small fragment had hit her right in the temple, and her face was covered in blood.
The air was still crackling by the time she came to, and she was face to face with a kid. An Undercity girl, maybe her age at most, looking at her wide-eyed through a big hole in the wall where the door used to be. She had pink hair and lemur eyes. Electrical smoke dissipated in a cloud by the other kid's feet. She was wearing a patched-together outfit of browns and whites that was ill-befitting of anybody in Caitlyn's station. She carried a backpack over her shoulder, but she looked like she might wield it as a weapon, throw it at her to distract her long enough to make a quick getaway.
She smelled of danger and sewers and crackling mortar, though maybe most of that was just the air around her.
She looked how she smelled, too.
"Oh shit," Caitlyn heard her say. That sort of profanity from her own mouth would be washed away with soap if her mother ever heard it from her.
But Caitlyn couldn't think of any better a way to describe whatever had happened—whatever had been caused by this Undercity girl.
Her rucksack dug slightly into her shoulders. It looked full.
She was a thief.
Caitlyn's eyes were wide. Her breathing was quick. She could feel herself losing blood as it poured down her face. She had never bled this much.
The Undercity girl held out her hand.
Caitlyn backed herself as far into the wall as she could with the box of stuff on top of her. The floor beneath her groaned, the cracks in the floor starting to show and powder up and shudder under the movement of her weight.
By all accounts, this girl should be running away. Any moment now, she would be either crushed by a falling building, or shot by Enforcers who would recognise her unseemly Undercity attitude and rucksack full of stolen belongings and have her promptly gunned down.
Caitlyn's breathing came frantic.
She spotted shadows moving behind the girl through the door hole. This pink-haired girl wasn't alone. Why would she be? Was this a kidnapping job gone poorly? Her mother had warned her about talking to strangers before, after all.
No. It couldn't be. She was a thief, who didn't work alone, but usually kidnappers were weird old men. Not frightened—this girl was frightened, she could make out—young girls.
Caitlyn heaved the box off her lap, mentally cursing the inevitable bruising it would leave across her stomach.
She tried to stand. The floor groaned again beneath her. The room crumbled around her.
When she staggered, when she stumbled, her arms flailed out.
One of them was caught by an outstretched, bandaged hand, dragging her away from a falling chunk of ceiling.
She looked up at the tr—the girl. Scared. Unblinking. Close. She never once took her eyes off her, lest the girl throw her over her shoulder and slam her back on the floor like those old wrestling moves she had seen.
When no move to slam her to the floor came, Caitlyn nodded. Trusted. Ran behind the girl as she darted outside onto what was left of the balcony.
She looked back at Jayce. He was limp, unconscious, unmoving, laying on the ground, helpless.
"No time!" The girl shouted. Answering her question before she could ask it. Saving valuable moments.
The floor crumbled beneath her feet, causing her to stumble again.
The same bandaged hand held her weight steady, guided her to the balcony, which was somehow still mostly intact.
The blue crackling behind her told her that would not be true for long.
The girl was making a running start towards another building, where the three other people she had seen earlier stood—two boys, and one girl much smaller than them. The pink-haired girl ran forward three steps before she jumped, making it to the other roof with about a foot to spare.
Caitlyn always learned the important lessons the hard way.
The current lesson was to not look down when jumping from roof to roof.
She could've looked any other direction. Behind her, at the sparks searing through the cracking limestone. In front of her, at the building she would need to land on to survive. To the side, at all the other buildings which weren't being burgled right now.
But no, she looked down, at where failure would bring her.
She swallowed the terror from suddenly confronting her height, since she assumed she would either be dead before she ever felt it, or vomit it all right back up if she survived. She too a running start, just like the girl had before her.
She didn't get much purchase on the last step, as the ground crumpled beneath her feet.
But she jumped.
She felt weightless.
Just for a moment. Long enough for the world surrounding her to blur into the background, as she felt nothing but upward, forward trajectory.
And then her body weight kicked back in.
Her feet landed on clay, caressing the gutter pipe on the next building.
Then the rest of her weight plummeted right through it.
Her ribs slammed into the roof as she kept falling, her arms flapping about as only inertia kept her stuck to the roof. She was winded, unable to breathe, unable to see, unable to do anything but flap aimlessly.
Until one of her arms stopped moving, and she felt a bandaged arm pressed tightly—firmly—against it.
"I've got you," the girl said, gripping her arm like she was going to rip it off.
And then her other hand came down, and before Caitlyn knew it, she was being heaved onto the roof, just in time for yelling underneath them to fade back into Caitlyn's winded senses.
Enforcers.
"Show yourselves!" One authoritative voice yelled from below through the barrel of a gun, just as the three taller Undercity girls each landed a hand on one of her shoulders to pull her back from being able to see.
"Shh!"
"Get back!"
"Away from the edge!"
Caitlyn did what she was told, but the way all of their voices sounded—young—made her question their authority over her, Caitlyn Kiramman, heir to house Kiramman, future Sheriff of Piltover, for all of a second.
Then the pieces came together.
This wasn't authority.
They were all kids.
Terrified kids.
Kids who had messed up, majorly.
And now Jayce—
Now her only childhood friend was lying unconscious in a collapsing building.
Because of them.
Maybe it wasn't their fault.
But either way, it was because of them.
She looked back and she couldn't see Jayce for the rubble. Caitlyn just sat on the crest of the roof, watching. Her stomach gave out from under her, and she wept as the ruins of the building collapsed inevitably onto the street below.
She was scared. Jayce's penthouse had exploded. She had almost died. She had to jump over a creviced street that would've spelled certain death if she fell. And she almost did fall.
She wanted her mum and dad.
She felt a hand on her shoulder. Heard muffled chatter behind it.
"What the fuck do we do?" One of the boys asked, his voice crumbling with worry. "She's gonna—"
"Vander will know," the pink-haired girl said, trying to paper over the cracks in her voice. She recognised her voice now—had heard it just enough over the past few minutes. "Vander will know what to do."
"Come on, Piltie," a third voice said, the same timber to his voice.
Caitlyn didn't know why she did it. Maybe it was because she was full of anxious energy, needed to run it off, run away from everything before she collapsed into tears within the blast radius of her life's implosion.
But she followed them.
Even as she jumped from roof to roof—as it turned out, floors that weren't collapsing were easier to spring from than ones that were—she never found herself stopping, not to scream, not to look up at the sky, not to breathe.
She just ran. Ran, further and further south, out of upper Piltover. Towards the River Pilt.
All while she heard shouts beneath them, of civilians suddenly looking up for the first time in their lives, of a steadily dwindling gaggle of Enforcers trying to track their moves.
Eventually, as they ran, leapt, changed directions, and the sound of the Enforcers' voices faded into obscurity, Caitlyn's breath caught for the first time, fatigue and exhaustion and terror finally crawling into her bones.
The others noticed her stopping.
The sky was a bright, electric blue.
The same blue that destroyed their penthouse and killed her friend.
"Jayce," she coughed out, staggering as she stopped still.
It was as though saying his name spoke him back into existence. Jayce, still in the rubble as the building collapsed. Jayce, knocked violently against the wall, before dropping head-first onto the floor.
Jayce, who she might never see again.
The dam burst.
Big, ugly, uncontrollable sobs left her now. She tried to wipe her eyes clean of tears, only to rub the long-forgotten pour of blood from her temple over her cheek. It had half-dried in the rush of wind blowing past her face, but half-dry wasn't fully dry.
Everybody was facing her now. She couldn't face this attention. Not from these people.
The ones who caused it.
"Take me back," Caitlyn said between sobs and coughs from overexertion. "Take me to the Enforcers. I need to see him."
A pause. The others clearly didn't expect her to say anything.
"Pretty boy?" The pink-haired girl asked. The moniker was clearly derisive.
Somehow, her tone wasn't.
Caitlyn nodded. Her throat was clogged, and her face was still stricken with tears and blood.
"Can't save 'em all, cupcake," the pink-haired girl hummed, like it didn't matter, like her best friend didn't just die in a collapsed building while she just watched.
"First time losing someone?" One of the boys, large and burly, asked her. He was speaking as though he was already gone. Like Caitlyn already would never see him again. It dislodged something in her stomach, as well as her throat.
"You killed him," she seethed through her clenched jaw.
"I saved you," the girl muttered back venomously. "From an exploding building. You're welcome, by the way. And now, the Enforcers are gonna think you're one of us."
"Do you even know who I am?" Her voice was still angry. Vicious. Venomous. Maybe it always would be.
"Uh, I know you owe me for saving your gold-plated ass."
The girl's snarky tone set her off further. "I am Caitlyn Kiramman, heir to house Kiramman, future Sheriff of Piltover. You will treat me with respect."
"Gee, is that your full name?" The pink girl scoffed, voice bitter like acetone, like the name she heard didn't carry any weight up here. "Vi."
"What?"
"Vi. That's my full name."
"You really don't know who I am, do you?" Caitlyn asked, incredulity only briefly beating out her seething anger. "My mother will already be looking for me. All of your days are numbered, if you think you'll get away with the callous murder of one of the Kirammans' patrons."
"We didn't kill him, alright?" The girl—Vi—exclaimed. A moment's pause as both Caitlyn and the girl seemed to gather their thoughts. "You wanna know what we were there to do? Feed our family. We were gonna sell whatever shit we found in your fuckass penthouse—" Vi emphasised the word sarcastically, "—and, I dunno, sell it to buy food? Clothes? Maybe this is news to you, but not everyone has a goddamn luxury topside apartment that explodes if an unwanted visitor shows up!"
With that, the lump in Caitlyn's throat came right back. She stumbled back a step, her footing suddenly weaker on the top of the roof. She almost fell to the side.
Vi didn't reach out her hand to help steady her, to save her. Not this time. Caitlyn was left to steady herself on two shaky feet.
Once she managed to stabilise herself, instead of standing, Caitlyn took the opportunity to sit down on the roof, curl her legs up into a ball, and breathe.
In, out. In, out. In. Out.
"Look," Vi muttered, and for the first time Caitlyn noticed that Vi was also breathing. In. Out. "We're all freaking the fuck out here. We don't know why your goddamn apartment exploded. And hey, maybe your friend is fine. Maybe he made it out. Maybe the explosion didn't touch him. But we can't stay here to find out. Our families won't feed themselves." The girl held her hand out one final time for Caitlyn to take. "Come on, we know someone who'll know what to do. Please."
Caitlyn heard the desperation in her words. But her gaze was on the youngest member of their troupe.
Another girl, with electric blue hair, who looked barely older than ten.
She had the same lemur eyes as Vi, but where Vi had the hardiness and dirt stains to counteract her starry-eyed expression, the young girl had nothing but beady optimism and childlike fear in her bones.
Because she was a child.
She was too young to be involved with any of this.
"You're pretty," the young girl said in the way that only a child could. Maybe she sensed Caitlyn's eyes on her, or perhaps she only now managed to get a good look of her face. Her eyes briefly met the other three kids, and her face hardened into a scowl. "For a Piltie."
It broke Caitlyn's resolve, broke her gaze, broke her down.
Her life was falling apart. Had been blown to smithereens.
All because of a group of children.
A group of children that she was now a part of.
Because she had made the decision to run away. She had grabbed Vi's hand. She could've tried dragging Jayce to safety. Or, at least, maybe not safety, but somewhere other than the part of the building that was condemned to fall.
And sure, up close the Enforcers would likely recognise her, but from afar? To the people who watched everything happen, it may as well have been an elaborate breakout, staged and orchestrated by her.
She had no choice now, but to stick tight to her guns, to keep running down the same path, and to hope, beyond hope, that maybe everything would stop hurting so badly.
Right?
Because the other choice was to confront everything.
And what would mother and father think, if she told them? Told them she had tried to run away with the group of Undercity thieves who had, for all they knew, killed their patron, her best friend?
She had to get up. Tears or no tears. Breath in her lungs or no. She had to keep going.
She reached towards the shaky, bandaged arm now outstretched her way. Grabbed it once more. Allowed herself to be hoisted up, pulled away from the ghosts and monsters in her head, and towards a new life, as a runaway.
How had it all gone so wrong?
It wasn't long before Caitlyn found herself in the midst of narrow, winding streets, in unfamiliar, worn-down clothes.
The three grown-ups—though that was a stretch, considering Vi was clearly the ringleader, and still she barely seemed around Caitlyn's age—had made a point to steal an assortment of clothes from unfortunate passersby, that Caitlyn could wear for the whole purpose of hiding her Piltie nature. The blue-haired child had seen fit to fuss over her hood, make sure she wore it correctly: far down enough to hide herself, but not enough to seem suspicious.
And now, she was in somebody else's sweat-infused rags, being escorted through a grimy, treacherous city she had never so much as seen before, let alone set foot in, all at the word of one man, Vander, who could maybe fix things.
The five of them were moving at Undercity walking speeds, which meant a medium jog for Caitlyn, until all of a sudden Vi's arm acted as a barrier. For what, exactly, she didn't know.
Until she did.
For the second time today, Caitlyn made the mistake of looking down. The only difference this time was—
"We're going that way," Vi said, pointing down into a cavernous, smog-encroached fissure in the ground. Except the smog was green, like those poison clouds in some of those cartoon picture books Caitlyn's schooltime peers would read. The expanse stretched so far downwards that the gap from the Piltover rooftops felt like an easy step in comparison, and it seemed to warp beneath her feet, causing her knees to buckle and shake in anticipation of landing on the ground far, far below—if there even was ground at the bottom. There was nothing as far as Caitlyn could see except green smoke, random protrusions, and down.
—this down was the direction she would be heading. Willingly.
Before her own protective instincts kicked in, the two boys were already leaping. She was too stunned to speak, to call out, to reach to try and grab them, as if they weren't yards out of her reach already.
And then the youngest girl jumped with them.
Caitlyn couldn't look over to watch any of them, taking a leery step backwards from the cliff-like edge.
Only her and Vi remained at the top, safe from their own certain deaths.
"Come on," Vi said, seeming utterly barmy the way she was still stock serious.
Caitlyn stayed still. Dared not move a muscle.
"Powder's been doing this since she was seven," Vi said, far too dismissively for the sight of three children leaping over a cliff to their deaths.
"What?"
"All us fissurefolk can. You gotta get used to the drop if you're gonna kick it down here with us."
Vi looked her up and down.
"And, you are."
Caitlyn teetered forward towards the edge again, her eyes still watering and legs still shaking at the distance down, but slowly some things started to appear to her, as if they were being summoned by the magic smog. A couple of protruding pipes, some tall, rickety-looking buildings that looked like they had been condemned for decades. A rusted ladder with its rungs broken off, three at a time in some places, leaving sharp iron fragments behind.
"H-how do I..." Caitlyn asked, no longer bothering to hide the sickly green frog in her throat.
"Friction's your friend," Vi said. "Lean towards stuff, not away from 'em. Better to lean too much than not enough."
And then the girl jumped, a whisk of pink hair flowing behind her along with the bagginess of her clothes.
This time, Caitlyn watched. She was terrified, but she watched. Saw how Vi leaned, adjusted her weight, slid her sides and back against things. At first she didn't understand—wouldn't that ruin her clothes? Wouldn't she be practically naked at the bottom?—before she remembered that she wasn't wearing her thin, delicate school uniform any more.
Maybe they wore these rags down here for a reason.
"These things have been jumped on by people bigger than us for years," Caitlyn heard Vi call, the sound and shape of Vi appearing from the roof of one of the dilapidated buildings below. "Mostly Claggor."
Caitlyn gulped. She could do this. She just needed to throw all of her survival instincts out of the window first. She could do that. She'd already done it just today.
She jumped down. Felt the weightlessness again, then the downward tug of gravity. Waited until she felt the thunk of the slanted, corrugated rock roof beneath her side before leaning into it, trying to force as much friction between herself and the roof so that it slowed her down.
She felt the unusual roughness of the roof, the small, grey-white specks flickering slightly past her vision.
Was this roof made of asbestos?
"You good?" Vi asked from beside her on the roof. She wasn't looking at Caitlyn, though. Her eyes were firmly on the rusted ladder hanging from around ten feet below her, before suddenly cutting off in the middle of the dirty green air. "That was a meaty jump. You're actually doing alright, for your first time down here."
"Oh, um..." Caitlyn didn't know how to respond to the backhanded compliment. So she didn't. Vi didn't push it.
Instead, the pink-haired teen just jumped down off the roof, hooked her hands over the ladder, and once she climbed the bottom she just let her legs hang and swing, holding herself up by outstretched arms, trusting her entire bodyweight on the final rung of the ladder, until she leapt off onto another corrugated roof.
Vi seemed to feel her watchful gaze, and even though Caitlyn hadn't seen much by way of parkour, she could see Vi's smirk as she moved, and the flourishes in her movements were clearly signs of her showing off.
Caitlyn tried to copy Vi's movements again, barely making it onto the next roof, this time feeling the sting in her feet hard enough to audibly yelp out in pain. All she was met with was Vi's laugh, like this, too, was a normal fact of the descent.
As they dropped further down, the buildings and juts they could grab onto were slightly more common and closer together. Naturally, the pink-haired girl skipped most of them, opting to jump a lot further and in longer increments than Caitlyn dared to even chance.
After what felt like months of sustained adrenaline rush and wiping her clammy, calloused hands on her rags to get the dust and sweat off them, Caitlyn finally found herself landing at the bottom of the fissure. Vi was just a little bit ahead of her, not even breaking a sweat.
The other three were already idly hovering around in one corner, as if they were waiting for Vi—or, more accurately, Caitlyn.
"Ugh, you guys take too long," one of the boys at the bottom—the lanky one—groaned as they landed their feet on what finally, finally, felt like the bottom.
"What did you expect me to do, huh, Mylo?" Vi asked, her vocal cords still somehow intact enough to speak, to squabble petulantly in this air, which felt—thicker in her lungs. Harder to breathe. Like it might suffocate her. "Leave her topside so she could tattle to the Enforcers? Get all our asses in deep shit?"
Mylo just groaned in response. "Are we gonna talk about why she's even here with us? Somebody's gonna tell the Enforcers anyway."
"He's right," the big and brawny boy said. "It's not like nobody saw us. They'll ask around eventually."
"And when they do they'll have to get through Vander," Vi shot back. "He'll fix things. He always fixes things. We'll be alright."
Caitlyn was still listening, still trying to pick out information, even as her senses were still being squeezed into a tunnel from the already-overwhelming day. "And where do I fit in with your plan?" She scoffed a dry, mirthless chuckle, still full of adrenaline, even now that she should've recovered physically from the descent. "What happens to—to me, to my friend, who died in the accident that you all caused? What happens to my parents, who now have to—to live with—not only his death but also, apparently, mine?"
Caitlyn's breath was hitching on almost every other word. And yet Vi, ever so calm, collected and unreadable, just looked at her, kept her gaze on her for a moment. "You've never lost anyone before, right?"
Caitlyn shook her head no, eyes wide, breath still caught on something. Vi put her hand on Caitlyn's shoulder, took a deep breath, and exhaled it right back out, the barest flicker of emotion on her face.
"You'll get used to it," was all the pink-haired girl said, before turning away and leading them all on.
"Is—is that all you have to say?" Caitlyn almost screamed. "Someone died and—and you just—pretend that that's a normal occurrence?"
Vi just turned back to face her, a deadpanned expression on her face. "Welcome to the Lanes," Vi called back.
Caitlyn was speechless. She was dumbfounded at just how blasé everybody was being. Mylo walked by her without saying anything. Powder was looking up at her as she walked by, but was also silent. Only the other boy—Claggor?—put a big, calloused hand on her shoulder, guiding her gently in their direction.
"Come on," he said. He spoke with a gentleness she wasn't expecting, but he didn't disagree with anything Vi had said. He was just...resigned, acting like she should just silently accept the ways in which her life would never be the same.
"Let's get to Vander."
Caitlyn wasn't expecting a bar to be the home of four kids.
She wasn't expecting to spy so many familiar faces there, either.
There wasn't anybody in particular she was well-acquainted with, much less people she wished to speak to right now, not that the others would let her do that anyway.
But there were faces she had recognised, from watching her parents' private meetings from behind cracked-open doors, from gala events she half-remembered, and from random strangers introducing themselves to her as friends of her mother's.
Had they also climbed down the same crack in the ground that she had?
Before she could hover too long, or brinh too much attention to herself, she was ushered along into what looked to be a cramped cellar-turned-common-room, walls lined with ugly copper piping, sofas made of lumps and discoloured cushions and patchwork that rivalled her rags in quality, and a bunk bed built from splinters and pinewood shoved against the far-off wall.
The room was illuminated only by a single candlelight, freshly lit, sitting on a barricaded door re-contextualised to be a table, and the faces of the others looking at her, who stuck out like a sore thumb with her upright posture and forward-facing legs.
The room sat in a terse silence, silent conversations being had between everybody in the room—Vi and Claggor were looking helplessly at each other; Mylo and Vi were shooting one another annoyed, pointed glares; even Powder, curled up into Vi's side, was watching Claggor, whose tightened jaw would point in her direction every now and then—everybody except Caitlyn.
She was alone in an unfamiliar environment, buried deep underground, a mile's climb from the surface of a city she had never seen before except in pictures. She had been locked out of her old life. Everybody here was building a wall around her—or rather, they were building it around themselves in a way that excluded her.
The whole room wasn't enclosing around her, yet, but she could see the walls encroaching upon her own bubble.
Against closing walls, she could try to hold the walls back, push on them with all your might, keep them from crushing you from the outside.
But Caitlyn had been doing that all day. The ruins of her old life had already crumbled down. Walls, ceiling, roof.
And she was so tired.
So she chose the other option. The last ditch option, as she clung to the last few dying seconds while the walls found her, and didn't even flinch as they ripped her apart.
She found that she couldn't handle feigning propriety in a hostile, encroaching environment any more.
She shrunk. Made her own bubble smaller.
Caitlyn curled up into a ball. Brought her knees to her face. Wrapped her arms around herself to keep them there. Pulled the hood over her head, like it would provide a small sliver of resistance against the crushing force of everything around her. Breathed—in, out, in, out, in, out—until the thick, aggravating air around her stopped being potable. Closed her eyes, so she could at least die ignorant of whatever incoming threat was wrapping itself around her waist and squeezing the breath out of her like a tube of toothpaste.
Jayce was dead. Her parents thought she was too. She had run away to the Undercity. She had blindly trusted the hand of the first thief who pulled her from the rubble. She took the easy way out, and ran away from everything, from everyone, leaving them all to worry in her absence. And now she was in a basement, in a bar, in a hole in the ground of a city she'd never been to, buried under a mile of ground, all borne of her own descent in order to escape the new life she faced.
She wasn't just afraid.
She was a coward.
A coward who ran away.
The touch of a hand on her back—one she didn't deserve, for being such a coward—broke through the noise like an embroidery needle through cloth. Not enough to dissipate or even disrupt it, but enough to maybe add a single spoke of colour to the sheet of utter despair.
Thread stretched across the noise, a tightrope of tolerability she barely had the energy to cling to.
But it was a start.
"Hey," a familiar voice called out. Not old-familiar, like her parents, like Jayce—though she likely would never be able to stomach those voices right now if she tried. A new kind of familiar, one that stung with the rawness of recency.
In the severed divide between old and new, it was the oldest new she had.
She still didn't say anything. Speaking was worlds and worlds beyond where she was at for now. Even her presence was a far reach. But she tried anyway. Nobody could say she didn't try to be present, right here, right now, for the sparse, fleeting comfort of those currently around her. Or rather, those in her proximity.
"I'm gonna get Vander," another new-familiar voice said in hushed tones. Vander. Something else she had heard before. A name. Someone who could fix things. Fix her, perhaps. Fix her life. Fix everything.
"What's your name?" A voice that was not familiar asked. It was quiet, but in the way a thunderstorm in the distance is quiet. It rumbled, carried the potential for danger, but right now it was safe and distant.
Caitlyn's eyes were dragged open by a large pair of hands, gently dragging her own palms from her face back around her knees. The face that met her was large. He had a rougher beard than her father's, but he had gentle eyes, the ones her father sometimes looked at her with when everything was falling apart. The kind that was used to taking care of scared teens.
All of her senses flooded back not long after. She became aware of things around her again. The now-open door up the basement stairs, the copper plumbing wrapped around the walls of the room like it was there as decoration, the four familiar faces behind the visage of this new man that took up most of her field of vision.
Maybe she could even speak, now.
She tried.
"C-Cait—K-Kira-mman" she managed around two butchered words before the shaking in her voice, throughout her whole body, rendered her voice useless.
The man looked like he had seen a ghost. Given her current state, maybe she was a ghost. She already felt like she was floating on air. Fatigue—a funny, floaty ghost word for exhaustion—was just starting to kick in, for some reason. Something had happened today, but nothing she could think about.
The other five faces murmured in the loudest whispers, or the quietest shouting, about things Caitlyn was in too much of a trance to figure out. Maybe she was just shaking too much to pay attention, the sounds all garbled and jumbled together by her own body vibrating.
She had learned about that in school a few days ago—things that vibrated made sounds. Bees made buzzing sounds because their wings flapped very quickly.
Maybe she could fly like a bee. Maybe she already was flying.
Or maybe she could speak again.
"I can't go back," Caitlyn mumbled, and the thick air in the room froze still.
"Why not?" The man asked, face just as impassive as ever.
"My—my parents will be looking for me," Caitlyn answered, voice still mumbling. "They will think I ran away."
"You being here will cause problems," the man said. "Problems bigger than you, me, anything else down here."
"My parents will be disappointed in me," Caitlyn argued.
"They will be glad to have you back alive," he said, as if the shame, the disappointment in her they would feel about her for running away, for leaving her friend to die, was nothing to worry about.
"I left him," she mumbled once more. "I left him to die. He was—he had—such a bright future. And he was there in the explosion."
"Woah, woah, hold on," the man said, thunder rising in his voice. He turned away for a second to look at the other four behind him, and they instantly looked half an inch tall in comparison. Still, he kept his tone level. "An explosion? What are you lot not telling me?"
"My—my mother's penthouse," Caitlyn mumbled, stumbling over her words. "It...exploded. They—Vi—she saved me. I had to jump onto the next roof. Jayce—my mother's patron, he was—he was...still in there. When—when it collapsed. I don't know if—if he got out. But I ran. I ran away. With Vi, with everyone. They said they'd take me to Vander. That he'd know what to do."
The man's gaze didn't leave her. He didn't discourage her from talking. He just listened to her words, piecing together the story in his mind. His face was fiercely impassive, neutral, thundercloud-grey. "Well, I have good news and bad news," he said slowly. "The good news is that they did take you to Vander. Here I am." He gestured vaguely towards himself at that.
"The bad news is that you can't be seen around here," Vander continued. "You're gonna need to go back. The sooner, the better. And I can't risk your disappearance being traced back to me, or my kids, or the Lanes, or else a whole load of shit will blow up in my face. Did anyone see you? Any Enforcers? Anyone topside who could trace you back here?"
Caitlyn paused. She was unprepared for the question. She hadn't seen anyone, and she didn't know how to answer.
She didn't need to.
"Just some meatheaded enforcers," Vi said. "And not since we were topside. We lost them pretty quick."
Vander rested his palm on his face again. He was recalculating. "That's a yes, then," he muttered after a moment. "I'll—I'll sort it. You lot all lay low until I figure out what to do. And none of the stuff you pinched ever gets sold, alright? The Enforcers will be looking everywhere for any shred of evidence tracing back to us down here."
The others had clear disappointment on their faces, but Vander didn't pay them any more attention as he turned to leave the room.
"Oh, and Caitlyn," he says just before he opens the door. "You lay low, too. You've got a good get-up for now, you almost fit right in with those clothes, but your name never leaves this room. Alright? Nor does anything that makes you recognisable. If word gets out that you're here, I can't guarantee the safety of this lot."
The door closed behind Vander's gravely serious face before she could respond. Immediately she let out a sigh, as if she had been holding it in for weeks.
"We need to come up with a new name," Vi said almost immediately after the door closed.
"Felicia?" Powder suggested.
"No, that's mom's name!" Vi countered.
"Why's that an issue?" Claggor asked.
Vi didn't have a good answer for that.
"Mouser?" Mylo pitched.
"No! We've already got a Mouser!" Powder defended, immediately pulling out a small metallic container from her belt, shaking it for everyone to see.
That isn't what caught Caitlyn's eye, though.
What caught her eye was a collection of small, uneven spheres in a side pocket.
They were a bright, magical, scary lightning blue. The colour of the electricity she had seem crackling in the workshop, right before it fell.
"What are those?" Caitlyn asked, pointing to the bag on Powder's side.
"What are what?" The girl asked.
"Those—blue rocks," Caitlyn answered.
"Oh, these?" Powder greedily dug her hand into her bag, and pulled out as many of those blue rocks as would fit in her palm, which was only three of them. "Found 'em in the apartment. They were in a big blue trunk, and they looked cool so I took 'em." At Caitlyn's demented, shocked look, the girl kept speaking. "What? You asked!"
"They're—they're not safe," Caitlyn stammered out. "Jayce, he—he will have had those locked up for a reason. I don't know what they are, but if even Jayce kept them in that big trunk... they're dangerous."
"Nah," Powder said, far too relaxed for the situation. "They've been sitting in my pocket all day. If they were dangerous, trust me, you'd know."
"They're the same colour as the smoke in the explosion!" Caitlyn exclaimed, exhausted that she had to explain it in such simple terms.
"So? So is my hair!"
"But that's not—"
"Did my hair cause the big kaboom too?"
"You do like making explosions, Pow," Vi chimed in unhelpfully, and it was enough to make Caitlyn angry once again. She was already on edge all night. And now nobody was listening to her?
"Ugh!" Caitlyn let out an aggravated grunt. "Jayce told me something about—about some kind of crystal. I don't remember enough of it, it's been a stressful enough day already, but he said he could use them to—to harness magic. That his research on these crystals—whatever they are—could completely change the world as we know it."
Everybody was looking at her with a bored, gormless expression, except Powder, whose gaze was flickering animatedly between the small bunch of blue crystals in her hand and Caitlyn's explanation.
"But he said these crystals—" Caitlyn pointed to the blue rocks in the young girl's hands, "—which I have reason to believe it's those—are incredibly dangerous, and must be handled with extreme caution."
"God, you even talk like a Piltie when you're freaking out," Mylo groaned.
"This Jayce guy sounds like a big-mouthed, small-brained idealist," Claggor said. "Ten of them on every street in Piltover."
"Stop, Clag," Vi said, though with a less biting tone than she would have used with Mylo, or her. "So you think these—these little blue rocks destroyed your apartment? The ones that this guy—Jayce—was keeping there?"
Caitlyn nodded. Powder immediately put the crystals back in her pouch, and put the bag down on the table in front of everyone.
"So it's kinda that guy's fault for having these crystals?" Vi half-asked, half-deduced.
"You think it's his fault?" Caitlyn was absolutely flabbergasted at the suggestion, the audacity of the assertion. "You think he wanted to kill himself?"
"You think we wanted to destroy your penthouse?" Vi yelled back. "Because it kinda seems like this guy fucked around with something dangerous, then found out what dangerous means!"
"Because you lot went snooping around! And now he's as good as dead! Because of something you all did! Because of—"
One of Caitlyn's gesticulating hands slapped the pouch. The impact knocked the pouch over by accident, tilting it to one side.
"—these!"
Caitlyn always learned the important lessons the lard way.
The current lesson was to not swing her hands near explosive crystals.
One of the gems from inside the pouch she just hit spilled out and bounced onto the floor.
Five panicking, wide-eyed heads turned in unison towards it as it hit the ground.
Blinding white-blue sparks flew out of it like lightning as it rolled, with raw, destructive energy offshooting from it like shards of glass, seeping into the floorboards in bright flashes, like impossibly fast snakes of blue slithering through the floor.
The shockwave shot through the whole floor and sent a vibration through the whole room. The furniture of the room shook, including the bed, and the sofas everybody was sitting on. Many wooden planks cracked and a few collapsed in on themselves, leaving a sizable impact area on the ground towards the open side of the room, which stopped barely a foot from the stairway up to the exit.
As the crystal skidded to a halt, nobody said a word. Caitlyn chanced a peek at everybody else.
Mylo and Claggor were gripping the sofa like their lives depended on it.
Vi was cradling Powder's head, her body acting as a physical barrier between her and the fallout.
Nobody said anything for fourteen seconds—Caitlyn counted—after the room went still.
"Has it...stopped?" Caitlyn chanced. She glanced hesitantly towards the small blue crystal, caught resting on the nook between two broken planks of wood.
"Go—go pick it up, Mylo," Vi stuttered.
Mylo turned, suddenly antsy. "Why me?" He hissed.
"Because I asked you to!" Vi hissed back.
"Make the Piltie do it!" The derision in the way he emphasised Piltie made Caitlyn's stomach crawl.
Caitlyn's head twisted back in indignation to Mylo for a second, and she was about to protest vehemently, before Vi spoke. "Did you not see what happened the last time she touched those things?"
"I'll do it," Powder said, still muffled by Vi's arm, who still hadn't let go of her.
"No!" Vi and Mylo hissed in unison.
Claggor, meanwhile, was standing up. He walked over to the crystal slowly, as if it were a wild animal he was trying not to startle. There was some kind of tangible fear in his expression, visible now since he had taken off his goggles at some point since Caitlyn last noticed.
He touched it with his finger, and pulled back slightly when a tremor ran through the air between it and his outstretched digit.
He touched it again, felt no shock, and reached in to gently pick it up, at which point his shoulders loosened and dropped in relief.
"Easy as pie," he said, smiling sheepishly as he saw eight poised, unblinking eyes on him. He put it back into the pouch as gently as feasibly possible, letting out a deep, breathy breath. "We shouldn't have these," he added.
"What do you suggest we do then?" Mylo asked. "Tell Vander we basically have a sack full of bombs?"
"It's a satchel!" Powder countered.
"It's a pouch, actually," Caitlyn said, before shrinking into herself at the way everyone's attention shifted towards her. "A pouch full of bombs."
Everyone was flighty today. Even Caitlyn. Especially Caitlyn.
"Whatever, these things are gonna explode if we so much as look at 'em wrong," Mylo said, looking around the room. "If somebody out there got their hands on them, they could do some serious damage. Even the Piltie's Piltie—" he snapped his fingers as though he was trying to remember a name.
"Jayce," Caitlyn supplied.
"Yeah, Jayce, he had 'em in a big box and they still blew up the whole apartment."
"Stop," Vi cut in, sensing Caitlyn's discomfort and, for some reason, intervening on her behalf.
Mylo groaned. "Yeah, whatever. Piltie can't handle a little death. Anyway—"
"Mylo," Claggor cut in sternly.
"Anyway," Mylo continued, exasperated, "my point is, if anybody up there catches wind of these, number one, we're gonna be in deep shit, and number two, what if somebody down here figures out how to use 'em in a real bomb? Sets up some big lab like Mister Dead Piltie was doing in the apartment?"
Everyone turned to face Caitlyn, who was grimacing.
"As much as I hate to say it, Mylo's right," she said eventually. "I trust I'm not breaking new ground in saying that the Undercity... has corrupt people in it. And before you call me a Piltie again, I'm judging solely by the fact of everybody being so blasé about the fact that my friend has possibly died. And the fact that I'm wearing stolen, oversized clothes and nobody cared. We can't risk these coming into the wrong hands."
"So, what, we don't tell anybody?" Claggor asked, pulling his goggles off his head to wipe them free of sweat and condensation.
"Vander did say nothing we stole leaves this room, right?" Powder noted.
"No," Vi said firmly, leaning towards the skinny boy. "Vander always knows what to do. We go to him."
"And what?" Mylo asked, gesturing his hands around madly. "He keeps them in the bar? Gives 'em out for free to anybody who asks nicely? Lets anybody steal 'em whenever he's not looking? No! These are safer with us, down here, far away from the bar. Besides, people could come looking for the Piltie soon! Enforcers! Do you want the Enforcers to have bombs that can blow up buildings?"
Vi dropped her face into her hands, letting out a long, ugly grunt.
"What's so bad about the Enforcers?" Caitlyn asked, a furrowed pair of brows underpinning her expression. She was trying to understand, really.
All four of them looked right back at her with a scornful glint in their eyes, like she had pulled the pin of a grenade. They held her stare for a long, intense few seconds. Seven, to be exact. Caitlyn counted again.
"Piltie," Vi muttered dismissively, and everybody was mostly back to normal, but with a clear line drawn. One that cut Caitlyn off from the others.
"No, really, what is it?" Caitlyn asked, much more persistent this time. "What did they do?"
"Killed our fucking parents?" Vi seethed, a bitter ichor in her words. "You know, the massacre on the bridge?"
"Massacre?" Caitlyn asked, dumbfounded. "When was this?"
"Progress Day, seven years ago? The Bridge Riots, or whatever you guys call them up there? Do you not know history? What did they even teach you up there?"
Caitlyn's vacant stare seemed to tell the others enough. "Not that, apparently," she mumbled, and an audible gasp rang through the room.
"What do you even know about the Undercity topside?" Mylo asked. "Like, tell us everything you know."
"Um." She thought for a second. Two more. Winced sheepishly. "We're... taught... that it's a centre for crime and corruption. That all the wrong sorts hang out there—here. Other than that, the details are a little blurry."
Mylo and Vi both scoffed at her, whereas Claggor just had a resigned sigh to say for himself.
"We can teach you," Powder said, an odd yet welcome eagerness in her voice. "Like about the bridge, about Vander, and the chembarons, and our parents..."
Caitlyn was surprised to find herself nodding along faintly at the suggestion. Maybe she shouldn't have been surprised; if she was laying low in the Undercity for a while, maybe she owed it to the place to learn about the place that would be her forever home.
"Powder," Vi interrupted as the young girl was about eight or nine things they could teach her deep. "I think she gets the point."
"No, no," Caitlyn says quickly, too quickly. "It's fine, she can talk." She cleared her throat and let out a heavy sigh. Had she been this choked up all this time? "I think I need the distraction right now anyway."
"Yeah," Vi said, pursing her lips, seeming to find at least a flicker of sympathy, if just for a moment. "Not every day you lose your first friend."
Caitlyn just nodded, relenting for once to the cold comfort—emphasis on the cold—of her words.
Vi nodded back too.
"When I said the thing—about the Enforcers—I'm... sorry. I didn't know. That they did that. And I'm also sorry. For your parents. For your loss. For the whole—I know it's hard, even if you—even if—"
"Did you do it?" Vi asked, cutting Caitlyn off from her rambling.
"Do what?"
"Kill our parents."
"What? No, of course—"
"Then you don't need to be sorry, cupcake," Vi said with a clearly practiced breeziness to her tone.
Caitlyn was speechless. Utterly flummoxed at the way Vi so effortlessly dismissed her concern. Why was it so hard to show that on some level she cared? Why were they dismissing her out of hand so easily?
But another question teased at the corner of Caitlyn's mind.
"Why do you call me that?" She asked.
"Call you what, cupcake?"
"That!"
"I dunno, cupcake." There was a little more emphasis on the word this time, and a faint smirk behind it. "Maybe because I know it pisses you off? And it's easier to say than Caitlyn Keyhole, Blah Blah Some Other Bullshit. That reminds me, we still need a new name for you, by the way."
Vi's ability to change the subject was throwing her off-balance. She had thought she was good at debate, even went to Debate Club after school, and liked to consider herself a dominant force there. She was always putting forward good arguments, speaking confidently and clearly, thinking things through quickly on the fly.
But Vi's sheer charisma was disarming, the way she carried a room, the way everybody listened to her and turned their heads to her instinctively. It made Caitlyn's extensive vocabulary feel completely useless when Vi communicated ideas simply without using it.
Maybe it was true that Caitlyn just talked like a Piltie.
"Ooh, how about Matilda?" Powder chipped in.
"We'll workshop it," Vi said, stifling a laugh.
They did end up going with Matilda.
Caitlyn had spent a week living solely between the basement and the bathroom before deciding she was stir crazy. She couldn't live being holed up inside a stuffy room all day, the thickness of the air in a tiny basement being used as a common room for five sweaty teenagers—or rather, four sweaty teenagers and Powder—proving too much to bear.
The first couple of days, she needed the rest. She slept around twelve hours a night on average. The day where she upended her whole life lost her best friend, jumped across Piltie roofs, and then climbed down into a colossal crack in the earth with four total strangers, seemed to have taken an extreme toll on her mental energy.
She cried, too, the first two nights.
The first night, she cried for Jayce. The way his life was cut short by happenstance, by incalculable factors, by his own eagerness to make the world a better place, no matter the consequences.
It just so happened that he would experience those consequences before he could get there.
The second night, she cried for herself. For the life she had lost, that she could never go back to. For the people she would never see again. For the things she would never learn, the places she would never visit.
Both nights, Powder and Vi kept her company.
They both slept on different bunks of the bunk bed, so Caitlyn could face both of them at once easily. Sometimes, they would talk about meaningless drivel, or tell Caitlyn increasingly outlandish stories about growing up in this place, in what seemed to be a kind of game of what she would actually believe.
Other times, Caitlyn would let the emotions get the best of her, and the weight of all she had lost would come back.
Neither of them seemed to say much during those times.
"Why do you do that?" Caitlyn had asked at one point.
"Do what?" Vi asked in return.
"Nothing."
"Um, okay...? You asked, I was just..." Caitlyn couldn't see the flickering of Vi's brows in the darkness, but she could almost hear it.
Caitlyn groaned. "No, as in, why do you say nothing when I'm—when I'm clearly grieving? Isn't it customary to at least show some kind of sympathy?"
"Customary?" Vi asked, a dry laugh escaping her. "You're such a Piltie." The way she said it wasn't quite as derogatory as it was when Mylo said it, but still it hurt for some reason.
"That's not an answer."
"Because it doesn't help," Vi said. "Not really. Besides, once you hear it fifty times it kinda just makes it worse."
"So you're—what, saving those first forty-nine times?" Caitlyn posited with an uneasy chuckle.
Vi just laughed. "Saving 'em for people you might care about."
"I care about you," Caitlyn said, before she realised that might be a little bit weird to say to her kidnappers. "I—I care about all of you. I'm—kind of forced to, anyway, for—for however long I'm down here." She stammered to correct herself, her thoroughly flushed face gracefully hidden by the darkness in the room.
"That right, huh, cupcake?" Vi asked, and Caitlyn felt her features morph into a scowl.
"Stop calling me that," she muttered.
"Nah," Vi said, with a soft lilt of a faint smirk. "Not until we choose a name for you."
After around a week in, though, once they had settled on her new Undercity name, Caitlyn felt like she was going crazy. Her back was uncomfortable from lying on the lumpy sofa all week, her stomach was rumbling a little, and the air felt thick and humid, like an artificial fog machine had been going off all week.
"I need to get out of this room," Caitlyn sighed, for around the fifteenth time this week. Her eyes glanced at the rug haphazardly covering the mess the crystal had made of the floorboards, that everybody had fussed over looking natural so as not to subtly alert Vander of something being awry.
"Vander said," Vi groaned, also for likely the fifteenth time, even though she, too, wanted to escape just as badly. She ran her hand over her face, her whole head slightly coated in grunge and sweat from being stuck inside on her bed all day.
"I'm sure we could walk around the block," Powder said. She was sitting next to Vi, both hands fiddling with the small tin—Mouser, she had called it—absentmindedly. It now adorned new, colourful doodles. "Pick up My and Clagg."
"Maybe we should run it past Vander?" Caitlyn asked.
"He'll say no," Vi said simply as an act of dismissal.
Caitlyn sighed once again, the disappointment lingering as if they hadn't had this conversation six times already.
"So why don't we go anyway?" Caitlyn asked, the two heads in the room tilting up towards her.
"We can't go against him," Vi said.
"Piltie's got spirit!" Powder said at the same time.
"Did he sanction your invasion of the penthouse?" Caitlyn scoffed. "I can't imagine him signing off on what you did."
"No," Vi said. "And look at where it got us."
Caitlyn bit the inside of her cheek. She wasn't good at debating Vi. Every time she thought she had a good argument, this girl would counter with the simplest of things and all Caitlyn's energy would deflate.
"Besides, you still sound Piltie," Powder added. "We gotta put some Lanes into you."
Vi snorted, the sound both ugly and refreshing. "You can put the girl into the Lanes, but you can't put the Lanes into the girl," she teased.
"I'm almost a woman," Caitlyn countered.
"You know what the word almost means, cupcake?" Vi asked, taking a step towards Caitlyn. "It means not."
"I'm older than you," Caitlyn countered.
"Are not."
"Really? How old even are you?"
"Twenty," Vi said evenly.
"Bullshit," Caitlyn scoffed.
Vi laughed. Actually laughed, for a few seconds. So did Powder. "Didn't pit you for a curser," the pink-haired girl said. "Fine, eighteen."
"It's very childish to lie about your age, Vi," Caitlyn pointed out, sitting up to face a still-standing Vi.
"Oh, yeah? How do you know I'm lying, Matilda?"
Caitlyn ignored the deflection. "I have my methods," she said, eyeing Vi's face up and down. "Fifteen."
"Huh?" Vi asked, the exact details of her brows visible while they creased.
"You seem like you're still fifteen. I turned sixteen three months ago."
"You sure about that?" Vi asked, her head inching closer to Caitlyn's.
Caitlyn didn't take the bait. She knew enough about Vi by now that she deflected whenever she was on the back foot. She decided to let sleeping dogs lie, and to try and lighten the unreadable mood.
"I think I would know when my own birthday was," she joked, "I was there, after all."
"I don't," Vi said with an undoubtedly calculated turn of the head, walking carefully around the rug covering the broken floor, before resting her bodyweight on her arm as it leaned on the wall. Well, that failed. "So you don't know mine either."
"How do you know how old you are, then?" Caitlyn asked.
"Seven years since the bridge," Vi said, knocking the wind out of Caitlyn's sails once again with pure nonchalance. "I was eight. Powder was three."
"And I was almost nine," Caitlyn said, a vacant stare haunting her expression as she thought about the day where Vi's parents were brutally murdered by Enforcers. The same ones who sometimes carried extra gummy sweets just to give out to Piltover children, also took away the parents of Undercity children.
"Bet you don't even remember the day," Vi mused. "Bet for you it was just some Tuesday."
Caitlyn swallowed. Nodded, because Vi was right. She didn't remember what she was doing on Progress Day that year. Her biggest worry at the time was probably a homework assignment she had to do, or preparations for a party her mother had hosted. Meanwhile Vi and Powder had lost their mum and dad.
No—they had their mum and dad taken from them.
"Thought so," Vi said.
"It really is awful what happened to your parents," Caitlyn said, trying to bridge the tense gap between them that formed whenever they talked about it.
"Yep," Vi said. She said it with a popping sound that reverberated through the room off the stone walls.
"And I wasn't even taught about it," Caitlyn continued. "I doubt anybody knows about it topside." She had picked up a few words from Vi and the others in the past few days.
"Good thing you're not topside any more," Powder said. Her blunt simplicity was a refreshing change of pace, Caitlyn decided.
"I suppose so," she mumbled. "I'm starting to speak like you all, now. Saying topside and everything. Speaking in incomplete sentences like I wasn't raised to do the exact opposite my whole life."
"Starting to," Vi remarked. "You still sound Piltie."
"Maybe I could pretend to be mute?" Caitlyn suggested.
That was the wrong thing to say, apparently because Vi clenched her fist in laughter, turning to face Caitlyn. "You know how to sign?" Vi asked between guffaws.
"No," Caitlyn sighed.
"Good," Vi said, finally calming down from a laughing fit. "Piltie sign is so different from Zaun sign anyway, you'd just end up giving yourself away even quicker."
Caitlyn shrunk inside herself. "Maybe I'm mute and have two broken arms?" She asked timidly, as if she would have any chance.
"Just stop, Matilda," Vi laughed. "It's not happening. Hate crime aside, it'd just never work."
"I'm sorry, is a Piltie pretending to be from the Undercity not also a hate crime?"
"Obviously," Vi said, rolling her eyes. "But we're doing it with you. And we're all a bunch of criminals anyway, right? You'll fit right in."
"You can't just say that sarcastically when you literally stole a bunch of things from my penthouse," Caitlyn groaned.
"Way too Piltie," Vi said. "Nobody here says penthouse."
"You're so infuriating," Caitlyn said.
"And you're so Piltie," Vi countered.
Caitlyn flopped back onto the sofa in defeat. "How do I sound more... Zaun, then?"
"You'll learn," Vi said.
"Can you teach me?"
Vi folded her arms as she leaned on the wall, a smirk on her face that was almost signature.
"Sure," she said.