Chapter Text
The trail jostles her as it screeches to an abrupt stop, ruining the shot Caitlyn is trying to take of a glistening river.
She turns, slipping back into her seat with a sigh as she turns on the display screen, flicking through the photos she’s taken that day. In some, an array of broken buildings with out-of-time architure, another is a short time lapse of a busy marketplace littered with people barely present enough to be made out, one captures the rays of that morning’s dawning sun piercing through the cover of a tree.
She nearly turns off the camera when a sudden movement forces her to glimpse upwards: a woman. In one of the smooth train seats across from her, chatting animatedly with another commuter, sits a woman. She has glaringly bright hair and a grin to match as she sweeps her arm and gestures to the rest of the car.
The woman laughs suddenly, the sound too loud for the cramped space as she bends and slaps her knee. The lady she is talking to grins politely, as though the joke wasn’t intended to be so funny. Surely, the lady joins in eventually.
When the laughter fades and the conversation fizzles out like a diminished flame, the woman turns and stares out of the window. Behind her, the setting sun blares.
In profile, Caitlyn catches the sharp shadow of her jaw, her eyes tracing over the features of the woman’s face that were now illuminated and cast in orange– the curve of her lips, a mouth slightly ajar, hair somehow brighter than before thanks to the brilliant dusk. The woman is a tie-dye of reds, oranges, and pinks, all commingling together to create a great beam of radiance in the golden hour.
She looks like she’s on fire.
Hephaestus, eat your heart out.
Without having to think about it, Caitlyn raises the camera and her finger clicks the shutter.
The woman turns, attention caught by the noise. She raises two fingers in something of a wave, a smile uneven on her lips.
“You should take a picture, sweetheart,” she calls, voice sultry. “It’ll last longer.”
Caitlyn pauses and lowers the camera from her eyeline. Her brows pull together, confusion causing her jaw to open. Did this woman not quite grasp the concept of a camera?
“Sure,” Caitlyn replies after deciding not to push the topic with a complete stranger. She raises the camera once again to take another shot.
This time, the woman leans back in her seat, legs spread wide. The bystander that had been sitting next to her shuffles away. Meanwhile, the woman has a look on her face that tells the world that she thinks, no, knows that she’s a gift to the earth.
After another snap of her shutter, Caitlyn feels satisfied with her work for the day and decides that it’s time to head home. She gets off at the next stop and takes a slow meander home, camera still in hand.
It had started out as a hobby when she was thirteen or fourteen. Caitlyn had been something of an introvert growing up, finding more comfort in disappearing into books and movies instead of friend groups. Her parents had bought her a camera for Christmas as the ultimate plot to get her out of the house and finally figure out what grass was. It backfired, however, when they found Caitlyn on one too many occasions skipping out on her classes in favour of loitering around public spaces in town for the perfect photo opportunity.
After that, and once she had convinced them to buy her her very first upgrade (an 85 mm lens she still lugged around in her camera bag), Caitlyn started her own business the second she turned eighteen. She even set up her own website, though she does have to admit that the vast majority of her advertisement and marketing work is done by the likes of Jayce and his friend Viktor, who spend way too much time on the Internet.
On the days when she was busy, for weddings and parties and other such celebrations, she was really busy.
During the off seasons though, in the small months of the year - at least until summer time - she finds herself with more time than she knows what to do with. So - she spends the majority of it trying to find things to do. Crochet, painting, sewing her own dresses (she never got past this one, her latest fascination), whatever she could get her hands on, she tried.
Some days, much like today, she ventures out into the streets like she did when she was younger. Her camera hangs around her neck like a medal; she holds it up for the sights to be beheld.
She hates seeing beautiful things when she isn’t looking at them through a lens.
Her parents insisted that she live in the beautiful centre of Piltover, where there are as many skyscrapers as people, if she really insisted on living in an apartment rather than a house. Piltover is a rich, glistening city that makes mantras of progress in both technology and disappointing interactions with socialites. It’s a place where people go to make dreams come true, and equally have them sucked out like underwear that gets stuck in the dryer.
“Caitlyn,” Mel calls from the bathroom. “The shower’s broken again.”
About two years ago now, Caitlyn made the bravely ambitious idea of rejecting her parents’ most auspicious preposition of securing the penthouse suite in one of the city’s tallest buildings. Instead, she opted to go on the house hunt with her best and childhood friend, Jayce, and they ended up settling into a cheap, rickety two-bedroom flat with shitty pipework and a desperate need of some TLC.
She would much rather have to wonder why the water in the kitchen is slightly discoloured than have to find herself in the middle of a band of pretentious aristocrats that don’t have any fucks to give unless you were threatening them with a lawsuit.
“And what do you want her to do about it?” Jayce responds, emerging from one of the bedrooms down the hallway and padding through to the kitchen, where Caitlyn stands, smearing a bagel with way too much soft cheese. She sprinkles a generous handful of poppy seeds over the top of it.
She takes a zealous bite, chewing a little, mouth still full as she responds, “Did you try hitting it?”
“Why do I have to hit a shower to make it work?”
Jayce turns to Caitlyn, pulling a face. “Sounds to me like she’s been calling the shower names again.”
Caitlyn hums, nodding and swallowing her bite of bagel. “Definitely.”
As it turns out, the rate at which their shower turns on - whether it’s hot or cold is a different question altogether - is directly proportional to whether or not you had called it a piece of shit in the last twenty-four hours.
You didn’t even have to say it within the house, you just had to say it aloud somewhere in the country (they hadn’t tested if the reach was continental, but it was a work in progress) and it would know that you disrespected it. The shower, as Caitlyn quite matter-of-factly coined it, was like some sort of Omniscient God that was bent on fucking you over, purely out of spite.
“Tell the shower that you’re sorry,” Caitlyn says, and takes another bite.
Jayce grins. “Yeah, Mel, wine it and dine it.”
Caitlyn looks over to him, the same smile stretching over her face. “Treat the shower like you’d treat a woman.”
“I’m not going to take the shower on an outing,” Mel declares, and as if it was listening, the apartment shudders and creaks sadly. The pipes in the wall rumble.
“That’s not an apology,” Caitlyn points out. “You’re only making it worse.”
“I’m not going to apologise to a fucking shower,” Mel says with maybe a little too much forte. She emerges from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, with her shower cap still pulled over her hair. “That’s blatantly ridiculous and I’m not going to stoop to your level.”
Jayce looks at Caitlyn, and Caitlyn looks at Jayce. He says, “Well, that’s a you problem but you can’t complain that you stink all day just because you refused to be nice to the shower.”
“‘Be nice’ to the shower.” Mel scoffs, walking through to the kitchen to stand with them. She leans over the counter, keeping her towel up with one hand so that she could pluck the other half of the bagel from Caitlyn’s plate. She takes a bite, before making a face, begrudgingly swallowing it before continuing. “You say that as if I’m going to talk to some inanimate object like I’m in need of a psychiatric ward.”
“Apologise,” Caitlyn insists.
“For the bagel?” Mel cocks an eyebrow, turning her gaze down before her expression sours, looking at it again. Maybe she was wondering if it was healthy for someone to consume so much soft cheese within a small amount of time. Caitlyn sometimes wonders the same exact thing.
Caitlyn considers her question for a few seconds. “Both.”
“I’m sorry for the bagel.” Mel sighs. “But there is nothing that you could feasibly do that would ever make me apologise to that piece of shit of a shower.”
If it wasn’t obvious, Mel was, is, and likely always will be the reason as to why the shower has hissy fits at them.
“Apologise.” It's Jayce, this time.
Mel inhales deeply, pinching the bridge of her nose with the hand that isn’t holding the stolen breakfast. She adjusts her stance, jutting her hip out to the side as she takes not one, but two deep breaths. “I’m going to do this one time. And if this doesn’t do a thing, the both of you owe me a drink. Two drinks. Each.”
“Okay. Do it, then,” Jayce says confidently. Caitlyn takes another bite of her half of the bagel.
Mel sighs, just one more breath for good luck, before she finally says. “Okay, shower, I apologise for calling you a piece of shit, and everything else. I didn’t mean it.”
In the walls, the pipes gurgle. Then they fall silent.
“See?” Mel says. “As I told you, asking for the shower’s pardon wasn’t going to do a thing so the both of you owe me-”
She’s cut off, quite abruptly, by the noise of running water from the bathroom.
Jayce grins, Caitlyn licks a bit of soft cheese from her upper lip before saying, “Told you so. I know you only moved in two months ago but surely you should have learnt that much by now.”
“What? I was supposed to have known that I need to apologise to a shower with more of a fickle attitude than a hormonal teenager when it disrespects me? How can it not expect me to retaliate when it treats me just as abhorrently?” All of a sudden, she seems to realise how much she was getting into this whole ‘sentient shower’ thing and takes a moment. Her expression deflates, the anger draining from her face to be replaced by pursed lips. “You know what? It’s fine. I’ll go - I’m going to go and take my shower in peace.”
By the time Mel finally emerges from the bathroom for the second time, Caitlyn is already pulling her shoes on to head out of the front door.
“Where are you going to?” Mel asks as she wades through into the central living area, in jeans and a white tube top pasted across her middle. Caitlyn wonders if the piercing through her navel hurt, and makes a mental note to ask her, knowing full well that she’ll probably forget by the time it's fit to bring it up in conversation.
“Jericho’s,” Caitlyn says, pulling the laces of her Docs taut before tying them into a double knot with a noise of effort. She hates putting them on, but it was way worth it when they set her up for her stomping around like one badass bitch, ready to gaslight, gatekeep and girlboss her way through the day. “Are you coming?”
“Sure,” Mel agrees, and moves to join her at the front door, taking a few moments too long to figure out which shoes were hers as Caitlyn retrieves her camera bag from her room.
When they’re out of the front door, meandering along the pathways that line the river, their idle chatter begins in earnest, as it always tends to.
They’d met through a mutual friend - Jayce, of course - and the following month, Mel had moved in. They had given her some excuse or other but if she was to be completely frank, Caitlyn wasn’t actually sure why they hadn’t just found a place of their own. It would have been different if it was Caitlyn joining them but she just can’t make sense of much of it.
“Why’d Jayce skip out on the food?” Caitlyn asks, craving the other half of her bagel, but still looking forward to absolutely demolishing a full plate of fries because damn, Jericho always gets them just right. The right amount of crunch every single time.
“He’s being a harlot about his muscles again,” Mel says tiredly, as though she’s tired of having to talk about it altogether. “All this balderdash about not being able to eat greasy food because it’s gonna turn his abs to mush.”
“I’ll turn his abs to mush myself if he keeps skipping out on us,” Caitlyn says, and slides her hands into her pockets as she watches the cityscape roll by .
“That’s what I said as well.” Mel scoffs. “I told him - I said, ‘The key to staying in shape is, on the one hand, eating healthy, but you also have to allow your body to build up in fats and whatnot in order to get larger.’ He just can’t seem to grasp it.”
“His whole body building persona really reminds you that he’s a cishet man.” Caitlyn sighs.
“It’s alright,” Mel reassures her, patting her shoulder as her posture slumps. “I’m going to reform him. It may take a while but I swear to you that I will knock the sense into him, whether he is willing or not. Eventually, anyway.”
“You have your work cut out for you,” Caitlyn says, and she looks at Mel just in time to catch the end of her eye roll.
“Oh, do I ever.”
They walk for a few paces in silence before Caitlyn starts again. “You don’t mind us all living together, right?”
“Why would I?” Mel asks, eyebrows furrowing on her face. There are freckles drawn onto her cheeks using some sort of gold glitter or body paint - they shift and twinkle in the light, almost moving on her face as her countenance changes. “I do hate to break it to you, but you’re wearing the baggiest ripped jeans that I’ve ever seen, Docs, and your keys are currently attached to a carabiner clip. You are the walking epitome of a lesbian stereotype.”
Caitlyn laughs, her smile showing awkwardly for a few too many seconds. “Is that so?”
“Seriously, its like as if you’re the walking adversitement for the local LGBT youth centre, and you’re their guru-mommy gay that teaches them the ways of the clit,” Mel says.
Caitlyn’s expression shifts and she laughs again.
“How can you keep a straight face while saying something like that?” Caitlyn asks and she’s smiling. She lowers it, keeping her lips pulled over her teeth.
“I’m not saying anything but the truth,” Mel says. “And you have to know, more often than not, the truth must be told without the grey area. The truth is black and white, if it’s the absolute truth, there shouldn’t be space for any other colours.”
“You sure that you shouldn’t be the gay guru-mummy, Mel?” Caitlyn raises her eyebrows. “You sound like you know your stuff about the gays.”
She tuts. “What else would I have to be wisdomic about? Taxes? Bills?”
“Well, it would certainly help out if you were.”
Mel waves a dismissive hand, shaking her head to brush off the comment with a click of her tongue. “Caitlyn, dear, you have to know that I only give wisdom to the people that I like most, and for some reason, they all do tend to be lesbians.”
Caitlyn hums. “Are you - you know - queer yourself?”
“I’m carrying a tote bag with the cover of Jane Austen’s eponymous ‘Pride and Prejudice’ on it,” she says, looking at Caitlyn as though she’s a lost cause. “What do you think?”
“Got it.” Caitlyn gives a small laugh, suddenly finding herself more and more ridiculous for even asking in the first place.
“Seriously, though,” Mel says. “We’re all friends, are we not? You’re a good person. Hence, you were best friends with him for - what - your whole life? I can only have you to thank for him turning out so well.”
“You're talking about him as if he was your son.”
“He’s like my dog on the best of days,” Mel says, and Caitlyn can’t help but think of that whipped-dog type expression that he seemed to have whenever she asked how Mel had been. Pre-move in, of course.
“We should team up against him,” Caitlyn says.
“Oh, definitely,” Mel agrees.
Caitlyn didn’t really know what teaming up against him entails, so she assumes that Mel doesn’t know either. But going in blind to fuck with Jayce is always reliably fun.
Soon after, they deviate from the scenic paths by the river so that they can walk up the stairs to the raised platform of the trainline and take seats on one of the benches. The blue paint is peeling from the long years of use.
This station is much older than the rest of them in the city. It was only one away from the first stop in Zaun, and it showed. Mostly because it smells like piss, and that might be a needle near the bin. At least they tried throwing it away.
The Piltover council really is shitty at keeping every part of their city in prime condition. Usually, their renovations only touch the areas of the city that tourists came to see - the parts that are going to make them money. Unfortunately, a shitty little train station at the confluence of Zaun isn’t very high on the list of priorities. It was likely that it wouldn’t ever be.
“How long until the next train arrives?” Mel asks, sitting up straighter to adjust the position of her shirt. Shirt or boob cover?
“Usually, this one runs every five to ten minutes, so we won’t be waiting long,” Caitlyn says, even taking the chance to look at the screen that hung in the air a few metres away. It was on, but has a web of cracks across the glass, barely legible.
After that, Caitlyn pulls her phone out and begins thumbing her way through her Twitter, looking at all of the shitty hot takes of her favourite show and restraining herself from cancelling them with her mass of a following.
At some point, Mel leans in, phone landscape, to snap a picture of the two of them. Caitlyn shifts in her seat, turning her knees inwards toward Mel’s and giving the camera a sweet, close-lipped smile before Mel pulls back. She looks at the picture, before showing it to Caitlyn.
“I think this is cute. Do you mind if I post it?” Mel asks.
“Yeah, sure. Tag me and put some cute song over the top to piss Jayce off?” she suggests.
“Oh, that was going to happen whether you wanted it to or not,” Mel reels, opening another app to adjust the lighting of the photo. Caitlyn averts her eyes and looks at the tracks, waiting for the ding of the intercom, followed by the announcement of the arrival of the next train.
It doesn’t come for a while, so they just sit, sort of looking through social media, occasionally showing one another images that they find funny.
By the time the train pulls into the station, they’re beginning to exchange ugly pictures of themselves, Jayce being included because why not. They stand.
When they step into the train, the cabin is mostly empty.
A woman sits far off to the side; she’s clad in a taut blazer and a pencil skirt, a purse tucked beneath her heels.
Across from her, a small group of teenagers witter to each other as they snicker at their phones. They soon begin to loudly discuss something about next week's homework and how none of them had even thought about starting, let alone finishing it.
Standing in the aisle is a man, tapping his foot to a beat that was playing in his head phones so loudly that Caitlyn can hear it.
Next to him, a woman is seated - or, less seated and more sprawled. She’s laid out across almost the entirety of one bench, staring at the ceiling of the train car with her hands tucked behind her head. Maybe she’s having a rough day.
Caitlyn recognises her.
Caitlyn and Mel both take seats across from the woman, looking at her and then back at each other before exchanging smiles that could have been laughs, had she not been laying right across from them.
“So - as I was saying,” Mel starts again. “When he was bowling, his finger got stuck in the bowling ball and this man released the ball - full speed launched this ball - only it got unstuck at the last second.”
“Oh, God,” Caitlyn said, horrified.
“We were escorted out because he broke the ceiling tiles but gosh was it an experience and a half. I’d definitely go again if it meant seeing that man almost start crying as the teenage employee tells him that he’s going to have to leave because he’s not only destroying property of the bowling alley, but also making a complete fool of himself.” Mel snorts as she laughs
“Oh - have you ever seen him ice skating?” Caitlyn interjects.
“No, but by the look on your face, I’m presuming that I should.”
“That is an experience: you have to do it. I’ll tell you what, I say we make up a fake holiday and take him there next week to ‘celebrate’.” Caitlyn makes quotation marks with her fingers. “He has Wednesday off.”
“That’s right, he does, doesn’t he? This is going to be perfect,” Mel says, with a huff of finality before she pulls out her phone again. “What are you going to get?”
“From Jericho’s? My usual,” Caitlyn says. In the corner of her eye, she sees the sprawled woman’s head turn, attention hooked like a fish to bait. “I always say that I'm going to try something different but I never do.”
“I love the veggie burgers,” Mel nods, sitting back in the rubbery seat. “Yeah, those are great.”
“I’ve never had one, to be honest. They look like they’re too big to bite into.”
“Oh, yes,” Mel says. “That’s part of the appeal. There’s a trick to it, though. You gotta unhinge your jaw and just go for it. I’ll show you when we’re there, anyway. It’s not pretty, for the record.”
“Who is when burgers are involved?”
Mel sighed dreamily.
The woman laying on the seats has at this point been looking at Caitlyn for far too long, and when she finally digresses to make eye contact, the woman smiles at her. For the first time, Caitlyn truly notices her.
Her hair is a bright flare of pink, bordering red, short in places and messily cut, as though she did it herself in the mirror mid-breakdown. Her eyes are a soft blue, hardly visible from across the car, ajar as though they’d been closed in a soft sleep. When she smiles, one corner of her mouth quirks higher than the other, highlighting the scar closest to it.
She winks at Caitlyn - actually fucking winks - and turns to look back at the ceiling, shaking her head to herself.
Caitlyn may as well have stuck a fork in a toaster with the amount of brain activity she has left. She looks at Mel, who had been swiping through her phone the whole time, nonethewiser to the very gay, very homosexual activity that just took place.
Instead of pulling out her own phone, smoothly, as though to pretend she was blissfully unaware of just about everything that had just happened, when Caitlyn goes to take her phone out of her jeans, it slips like a stick of butter from her hands. It skitters so far in front of her that she feels the innate need to press herself so far between the seats that she simply ceases to exist. She wishes that could be her fate.
Instead of her timely demise happening upon her, she instead decides that her only option is to be as casual as possible and act as though it never happened in the first place. As she leans forward out of her seat to grab it, the train chooses that exact moment to lurch to a stop, sending Caitlyn flying.
So that’s how she ends up on her hands and knees in front of the most perfect beings that she’s ever seen - the same one that had - moments ago - winked at her. Probably the furthest thing from her proudest moment, and if she remembers about it later, she’ll likely cry about it, but that’s neither here nor there.
The woman sits up in surprise, one leg already falling from the bench.
“Oh shit - you good?” she asks, a swipe of concern across her face.
“Positively dandy,” Caitlyn says, and immediately hates herself for. She takes her phone from the floor, as if it had cheated on her with her mum, before standing up to her full height.
The woman just stares up at her, her concern morphing into the hybrid grin of amusement and something that Caitlyn couldn’t quite catch. “‘You sure about that?”
“Yes,” she says cleanly, and promptly turns to Mel, who’s standing behind her and looking positively mortified, before grabbing her by the wrist and hauling her out onto the street.
After around five blocks of Mel making fun of her for collapsing on the floor of a train, Caitlyn finally found her usual seat in her usual booth at Jericho's and practically fell into it with a soft sigh of relief.
“Can you just drop it?” Caitlyn asks. It was something that she would both have to live and probably die with based on the way that Mel’s keeping this laugh-track running.
Caitlyn has no reason to doubt that Jayce already knows about the whole fiasco, courtesy of the household group chat containing not only them, but also the landlord, who insisted on being added to it, if only to send minion memes about ignoring requests for the shower to be fixed.
“I’ll think about it,” Mel says, plucking a menu from one of the fish-shaped holders. Her eyes rake across it as though this is the first meal she’s had in years, as though she’s never even seen the menu before. “Oh - should I get something new?”
Caitlyn looks to call over a waiter, leaning out of the booth to wave her arm until she is spotted by the gaze of a woman with long hair pulled back into a slick ponytail . “You're not fooling anyone, Mel, I know that you’re only going to - good afternoon! Could we get one veggie burger and a big plate of fries, please? Tell the cook it’s for Caitlyn.”
For a moment, the girl’s eyes narrow for a split second but she scribbles a note onto her pad of paper anyway. She steps away from the table with a shrug. As she walks away, she disappears into a door, but eventually reappears next to the patchy red and blue striped wall behind the counter.
In terms of decor, Jericho’s definitely isn’t the most visually appealing place to be spending most evenings.
The walls look as though they’ve withstood about a hundred glass bottles thrown at them (maybe they have), with a multitude of stains Caitlyn wouldn’t even like to think about the origins of spread across and into its very fibres.
It had taken a while to figure out exactly what made Caitlyn dizzy when she sat in the diner for too long. For a while she thought it was the rich smell that emanated from the kitchen, all fried meats and caramelised onions. She thought that it was all too much - that the sheer aroma of all of the wonderful things went straight to her head, like some sort of food-thought overdose.
Although, much more mundanely, she noticed when she was looking at the wall full of dated Employee of the Month awards - all old timey pictures of people with toothy grins - that not one of them laid flat against the wall. They were all hanging, poised gently off of the wall. It was then that Caitlyn realised that the whole wall was at an angle. And she likely felt dizzy because of the impending doom of said wall falling in on them and imminently causing a whole lot of untimely and frankly unnecessary deaths.
She wonders, every time she walks through the doors, just how someone could fuck up that bad during the construction.
This place, with its miscellaneous stains and wonky structures and shitty, faded leather booths, feels just like home to Caitlyn.
When she moved out of her parents’ house and had begun to live on her own, this is the one thing that was constant - unchanging and immovable Jericho’s. It could last through a war, forbidding something as horrific as that ever happened.
When Caitlyn’s life felt like war, there was Jericho’s. The food is always fresh and hot and just the right amount of crisp - a home away from home. It was something that she wants, something she needs, on the days that feel like they last for months.
Well - it’s not that she always comes here when it’s bad: there’s the good times, too. Like when she and Jayce finally found a sofa that didn’t smell like some old guy had spent a lifetime smushing his farts into the cushions so that they bonded on a molecular level. They had to celebrate that. Or Cait‘s birthday two months ago, or the anniversary of her company’s two year establishment.
The doors of Jericho’s saw a lot of things: the happy, the sad, the good, the bad.
And always, without a doubt, Caitlyn could count on Jericho behind the counter, raising his hand in a wave with a great smile. The dude didn’t talk much – or at all, really- but this place wouldn’t be home without him standing there to greet her.
According to the waiter, he isn’t the original Jericho. He’s much too young - the big guy’s son. As provided from the same waiter, apparently Jericho II also has a son called Jericho (Jericho III).
“Well that was rude,” Mel says with a sigh. She slides the menu back into place before laying her elbow against the table, slouching to rest her chin against her palm.
“Well, I was not about to sit and watch you look at the menu for twenty five minutes before deciding that you just want to order what you usually do,” Caitlyn replies, and she sits a little taller in her seat. “Mind if I take a picture of you?”
Caitlyn’s already rifled through her camera bag and is holding up the lens when Mel finally says, “Yeah. Go for it.”
Mel looks bored as she sits, staring off into the distance at some table at the other side of the diner. Her golden freckles glint in the picture, like little droplets of starlight running across her cheekbones. The girl in the picture, though, is far from Mel.
The girl in the picture is nameless, a beauty to be forgotten with her closed stature and almost pouted lips. The girl in the picture could be anyone you want her to be.
Maybe she’s freshly single, in the process of moving back home to live with her parents. Maybe she’s bored because they’ve started lecturing her again because moving in with a boyfriend is never a good idea.
Maybe she’s finally outgrown her fledgling feathers and fled the city, or the country, to find somewhere that has enough room so that she can grow to the full expanse of her wings, as fragile as they are. Maybe she’s bored because she wasn’t as big as she thought, and now she feels small.
Maybe - she’s Mel: a girl that just moved in with her boyfriend and his best friend, and paints her face everyday so that the hue of paint can match the earrings that hang loosely from her many piercings. Maybe she’s just looking for a place to call home, where she can comfortably live without a sentient shower. Maybe she’s bored because she has one of those.
“Earth to Cait?” Mel says, and then she’s waving a hand in front of the viewing window of the camera, the one that Caitlyn realises she’s been intently staring into for just a little too long.
“Yes? What is it?”
“What do you even do with that camera, anyway?” she asks, and Caitlyn furrows her eyebrows.
“I - uh - I take pictures?”
She doesn’t know what Mel expected, especially when she follows up with a tut and a dramatic roll of her eyes as she says, “No shit Sherlock - I mean - what do you use the pictures for?”
“The ones that I usually take?” Mel nods. “Just for fun, for the most part. I just like taking photos of things. Although, I do have to admit that some are for my website and socials, but it’s not as though they’re taken separately from the just-for-fun pictures. If you understand what I mean.”
Mel looks at her sceptically. “So - you’re telling me you have all of this fancy equipment just for shits and giggles?”
“Well - no - and yes, I suppose,” Caitlyn pauses, trying to reach for some words that could possibly make sense. “It’s like - this started as a hobby, but eventually I started a business based on said hobby and now it’s what I do for work. I’m a freelance photographer.”
Mel nods, before sitting up fully. “You’re not gonna make me pay you for taking pictures of me or anything, right?”
Caitlyn laughs. “No? Obviously not, just who do you think I am?”
The woman across from her just shook her head. “I don’t know, I don’t really know you at all.”
Caitlyn hums. “You’re right, though it doesn’t feel that way. I did almost see you naked this morning.”
“Not by any choice of mine!”
“You walked out of the bathroom after throwing a tantrum at the shower, took the other half of my bagel, took three bites and then put it back and went to finish your shower,” Caitlyn lists. “As far as I’m concerned, you did just about all of those things on your own accord.”
The next time Caitlyn shows her face on the train, she hates that it’s her only option.
She’s swiped with dirt and is already feeling the ache in her arm from trying to scrub the leather clean later today. Her chest heaves from running.
It’s not as if she was unfit - rather the polar opposite - she trained herself for weeks on a pull-up bar to make sure that she’d be able to scale all of the necessary fences needed to get the shot of a lifetime. And - granted - she did get it, in desperate need of a laundromat and/or shower or not.
The main problem came when something popped out of place and all of a sudden there was an alarm and police sirens on the property and she took off in a sprint. She wasn’t seen - at least she doesn’t think she was, who’s to be sure? But the one thing that she doesn’t doubt is that she would have been had she not run as quickly as she did.
As she slumps down in the seat, she rests her elbows on her knees, hunched. Her hands practically claw at the camera that is still hanging around her neck. Once she’s certain that there’s no critical damage (a little scuff here and there didn’t matter all that much), she lets it go. It occasionally thumps against her chest, swinging back and forth like a pendulum.
Caitlyn closes her eyes, throat growing more dry with every fall of her chest. She swallows, but it turns mostly into a gasp that she drinks down with a loud gulping sound.
There’s a small ding and the doors of the train close. Caitlyn looks up.
A shadow stands over her, obscuring her vision of the rest of the car. Long legs clad in jeans that look like they have definitely seen the doors of thrift shops more than one and a jutting hip of unbalanced posture.
Not today, Caitlyn thinks. Of all days, not today.
And then, she looks up.
The jeans belong to a girl that she’s seen before.
The girl.
The one with flaming hair, short and buzzed on one side and biceps like she spent the better part of her youth bench pressing men thrice her own size. She stands with one hand perched on the overhead railing, keeping her steady when the train lurches into motion. She doesn’t flinch as it does, so she’s a regular commuter. That much is obvious.
The stark ink of tattoos curls around her arms; the skin is littered with blocks of gears and swirls of clouds and beams of machinery - all black with hard lines and deeply set edges. Like she’d just walked out of a test of how much she can Fuck Caitlyn Up and passed with flying colours.
It feels hot, with her standing so close but Caitlyn did basically just run a marathon, so it’s probably that.
In her other hand, she clutches a bottle with a sealed cap, holding it out to her. She offers Caitlyn water with a gesture and a smile which is, unexpectedly, just what she needs.
Caitlyn wants nothing more than to take a picture of that crooked smile, dimple and all, and pin it on the fridge in sheer pride. What a sight.
And suddenly, she breathes a sigh of relief to see the woman - her previous embarrassment of basically praying to her apparently being negated by the demands of a shitty day. Not some pervert trying to feel her up for cash, or whatever else those fuckers ask for from random young girls in train cars. Caitlyn’s just glad that today is not the day she finds out.
“You okay there, Camera Girl?” The woman asks, and Caitlyn swears that her heart pauses - just for a beat, like taking a breath - and then starts again. Her voice is deep and soft and husk; she clears her throat afterwards to get rid of that low grovel that it has. “You look like you’re on the run from the pigs.”
Caitlyn breathes a laugh. “Funny you should say,” she pauses. “Thank you.”
And for some unknown reason, she doesn’t think twice before she twists the cap off of the bottle and downs at least half before she resurfacing.
Don’t take candy from strangers, Jayce’s voice echoes in her mind, but it wasn’t as if she was in Zaun yet, anyway. And also - water isn’t candy. And it was sealed, so it can’t be that bad.
By the time she looks up, the woman has tossed herself down into the seat two away from her. One of her legs stretches across the seats between them, and she glares at an agitated looking tourist, who is forced to stand in the aisle because of it.
“Camera Girl?” Caitlyn allows herself to ask. Without having to think about it, her knees turn towards the woman, torso in tow. If Caitlyn had been standing, the way that the stranger’s eyes are bearing into her and the set of her easy smile - the dimple - Caitlyn would have been on her knees in front of her seconds ago. “Why Camera Girl?”
“Well, you always haul that thing through here and I’m like - ninety percent sure I’ve seen you hiss at someone that came near it.”
Caitlyn doesn’t remember hissing at anyone, but definitely wouldn’t put it past herself doing something so troglodytic in a desperate fit of needing to preserve her camera.
“Huh, weird,” Caitlyn says. “Don’t call me that. It sounds cliche - and kind of slutty.”
“Slutty, huh?” The stranger repeats and she laughs: low and soft and made of dreams that would linger in Caitlyn’s mind long after her bedroom lights went out. “How about ‘cupcake’?”
Caitlyn stares at her for a few seconds, maybe a few too many, because the woman begins to shake her head, gesturing for a response. The offer dangles in the space in the train car. She would feel humiliated, but when she looks around, there isn’t a single person paying attention to them.
Everyone either has their head in their phone or in a book and even the tourist - the one that had looked like he was gonna shit on the woman’s pillow if he ever got the chance to - has his attention turned to a map that he’s holding upside down. On a normal day, Caitlyn would help him out, but this - as she’s realising - is not turning out to be a normal day.
“Cupcake,” Caitlyn tries it and it lays sweet on her tongue. She hums disapprovingly. “Why?”
“Because you’re so sweet,” the woman says, hair falling to one side as she leans off-centre.
Caitlyn purses her lips, giving a dry laugh. “How about just my name?”
“Now where’s the fun in that?” the stranger asks, sitting further into the seat divide, which was essentially just a long, thick yellow pole, hardly something to be used as a pillow. The woman, however, doesn’t seem to care.
Caitlyn shakes her head, suddenly aware of how little choice that she had in the matter.
“Cupcake is better than Camera Girl,” she notes aloud.
“I still stand by Camera Girl if I’m completely honest. It makes sense - you always have a camera and never once been seen with a cupcake,” the woman points out, and Caitlyn just sighs. “We could even shorten it to Cam Girl.”
“We cannot!” Caitlyn dictates, suddenly sitting bolt upright. Was this woman even aware of the world around her? That’s blatantly insulting - and if not just that, she has some gall.
“Damn, too bad. It really did have a ring to it.”
“What’s your name?” Caitlyn demands.
The woman’s smile is back again, and as her eyes lock with Caitlyn's, she leans forward in her seat. She taps one of her cheeks.
“You can call me Vi,” she says. “The face says it all.”
This entire gesture may have had the potential to make Caitlyn’s nose bleed on a good day, and the look in her eyes, something unreadable, like she’s finally setting a plan into action after long years of waiting, was unmatched. However, most of the aforementioned energy is negated by the-
“Wrong cheek,” Caitlyn says, pursing her lips mournfully to hold back a laugh that eventually slips from her lips as Vi turns and looks at her reflection in the window beside her. She curses loudly.
The dark ink on her cheek proudly proclaims “VI” - roman numerals. Six. Vi. It stands bold on the paleness of her skin, the edges of it still sharp. She must have had it done recently.
“Now that I’ve made a fool outta myself,” Vi says, and swings her legs off of the bench to slide her way towards Caitlyn, “You can call me Vi.”
Vi holds a palm, outstretched towards Caitlyn.
Her hands are clothed in white wraps - or maybe that had at one point been white, though greyed and frayed around the edges at present. She has the hands of a fighter, Caitlyn realises, as she takes it in hers and shakes it once, firmly.
“It’s nice to finally meet you, Vi.”
“Right?” she agrees, and her grin is suddenly more goofy than whatever sexy conflagration it had been moments ago. “After seeing you everyday for weeks.”
Weeks? Caitlyn thinks. Surely she hadn’t been seeing her around for weeks.
She tries to recall all of the times in the past few weeks that she had seen Vi. She had been such a recurring face that Caitlyn had hardly clocked that she was there. Vi was - when Caitlyn was too busy fucking with her camera - just your every day subway static.
With the timbre of her voice - the way it feels like a rolling wave, like a spilling heat down your spine, and the way her laugh is far too loud, Caitlyn wonders how that could ever happen. Though, she realises, maybe even the out of the ordinary becomes mundane in a place like this.
“See ya round, cupcake,” Vi says as she stands from the seat beside her.
Before she can even respond, Vi stands to point out to the tourist that one of the seats is now free. The sweaty carcass of a man in a floral button-up plants himself right next to Caitlyn and she grimaces to stand in the aisle, arms finding the railing and wobbling until she finds her balance.
As she looks around, she half-expects to see Vi, standing across the car and laughing at her, like there had been some sort of inside joke, maybe even suppressing a grin. But when she looks for her, Vi is gone. Gone in a blink, like the flicker of an extinguished flame. Not even smoke remained in her wake.