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There is a silence so soft it’s only memory;
Like the way your voice always sounds when you sing to me.
- Freya Ridings, I Can’t Hear It Now
As it turned out, concussions could take away one’s hearing, especially when they happened concurrently. It certainly didn’t help that the weapon had injured her left ear in the process of distracting Ambessa enough to remove the arm wrap.
Caitlyn had thought that the eye was unrecoverable, but apparently, her father’s bionic endeavors in an attempt to distract from his new status as a widower should be able to fix that front. The promise of a replacement eye – customized, optimized, more focused – wasn’t just aesthetical, but practical as well.
But the hearing was a whole other story.
It wasn’t something she took note of at all initially – these subtle shifts in her auditory landscape. The ringing and the occasional muffled noises were familiar companions to someone who’d spent years alongside firearms and explosives.
She had chalked it up to exhaustion. The kind that seeped into her bones after every mission, every ambush, every near-death escape. The ringing and humming weren’t anything new. Everything was muffled around her like she was underwater, but wasn’t that just the adrenaline finally wearing off?
Except it didn’t fade.
Conversations continued to blur at the edges. Words turned to vague shapes she struggled to make sense of. She found herself leaning closer when people spoke around her, straining to catch meaning and piecing sentences together from context and habit.
She was at the shooting range when she truly noticed it.
The sound of birds and wind – once her cue to ready the shot – blurred into the hum of her own heartbeat. And when she fired her rifle, the recoil didn’t just jolt her shoulder. It sent a wave of pressure through her skull, making her wince.
The gunfire that used to be her sharpest ally, now a traitor.
Vi’s words – typically brusque and immediate – started losing its crisp contours. Not all at once, but in incremental moments that gathered like dust.
She had thought it would pass.
It did not pass.
“Noise-induced hearing trauma combined with repeated concussive impacts,” the doctor had described clinically when she asked two months after the war during one of their check-ins.
But clinical language could never capture the intimate violence of losing something as fundamental as sound.
The world felt distant and hollow. Like it wasn’t meant for her any longer. Caitlyn stared at the doctor, her mouth moving in careful, practiced precision, but the meaning felt blurred, dulled by the now-constant hum in her ears. As if someone had glued cotton in them.
“Will it…recover?” she stammered, her voice quieter than intended, though she couldn’t tell whether that was her or the soundless void building within her ears.
The doctor’s face softened, and she hated it. That pity. That calculated pause before delivering bad news. She had been on a similar receiving end months ago when they had officially pronounced Cassandra Kiramman dead.
“No.”
No. The word lodged itself in her chest like shrapnel.
This time, she could look at her doctor with both eyes – albeit one sustained with technology – but she was losing something else. She thanked the doctor stiffly, as if politeness could make for the pieces of herself slipping away.
She had to let loose a humorless chuckle at the irony of it all as she walked out of the hospital, wondering if there was anything else she could lose to the war.
It was like watching the world through frosted glass. Everything was muted, distant, and beyond the easiest comprehension.
The thought of telling Vi felt impossible. Caitlyn had been careful, adjusting her position to hide the way she strained to hear, nodding along even when she wasn’t entirely sure of what was said. She could already picture the look in the younger woman’s eyes – the same guilt that burned when Caitlyn was discharged with an eye patch.
Vi had tried to hide it then, brushing it off with dirty jokes and wet kisses, but Caitlyn had seen through it. She didn’t ever want to put Vi through that again.
She’d become an expert a concealment. A slight lean, a turn of the head – survival tactics that spoke more about adaptation than weakness.
Or, at least, she thought she had.
“You can’t hear me, can you?” Vi asked one night once they had settled in bed, her hand resting on Caitlyn’s hip. Even that had reached her as if she was speaking above water.
The sheriff – yes, she had demoted herself from general to sheriff after realizing the damage she had unleashed – froze. Her body, always her most honest translator, betrayed her in a moment of silence, which was also ironic.
Nighttime was always the worst. The quiet used to be comforting, a reprieve from Ambessa’s constant nagging and Maddie’s fervent presence, but now it was just suffocating. The quiet was heavier, weighed down by the consequences of her own actions. She would lie awake, straining to hear the tick of the grandfather clock or the occasional footsteps outside.
And now she lay awake, pondering how to shape this in a way that wouldn’t send Vi down the guilty spiral again.
Vi’s fingers traced the line of her waist. Her touch was a familiar geography that Caitlyn had mapped out a thousand times since the moment she cornered her against the wall in the undercity. She felt Vi’s hand travel from her waist, up to her shoulder.
And then…a pull so gentle that Caitlyn wanted to sob into the pillow.
She allowed Vi to manhandle her until they were facing each other. Closed her eyes immediately, unwilling to look at the expression on Vi’s face.
“Cupcake, look at me.”
No, she wasn’t ready.
“Cait.” Vi shook her gently. It went on for a few more moments before there was a sigh. Vi moved quickly to envelope the taller woman in her beefy arms.
The silence stretched between them, heavy and charged. Vi’s gentle and insistent touch felt like a lifeline as Caitlyn buried her face in the pillow. Coward’s defense of sorts. Refusal to let this be yet another thing between them.
With one arm wrapped around her waist, Vi’s other hand mindlessly traced familiar paths across her skin, from her neck to her shoulder to her back. Rinse. Repeat. A language only understood between the two of them.
“Caitlyn, please look at me.”
Her breath hitched at the desperation in Vi’s voice, the rawness that cut through the fog of her thoughts.
Slowly, reluctantly, Caitlyn opened her eyes. Her bionic eye – a marvel of her father’s grief-driven doctoring – caught the moonlight. Vi’s face swam into focus, concern etched to every line. Only Caitlyn would gain vision of her girlfriend and lose her voice.
This was what the common people would call karma. She deserved it. She had to survive losing some things, after all.
“Not completely,” she finally admitted.
“How long?” Vi spoke – they were close enough for Caitlyn to hear her as clearly as possible.
“Two months. Maybe more.”
Vi’s hand moved faster now. A storm of emotion, frustration, worry, and adoration. Each gesture a testament to everything Caitlyn wouldn’t be able to hear eventually. Her arm tightened around Caitlyn’s figure, as if she wanted to fold Caitlyn into herself completely.
“Okay,” the bruiser said after a beat.
Caitlyn paused before frowning. “Okay?”
“Yeah, okay. We’ll figure it out. Whatever you need. Whatever it takes. I’ve got you.”
Vi’s simple acceptance hit harder than Ambessa’s kick to the head. She had prepared herself for anger, grief, the crushing weight of guilt that seemed to follow them like a shadow.
But not this. Not the quiet strength that always defined Vi, kept her going in Stillwater for seven years.
The tears came then, unstoppable as they rolled down Caitlyn’s cheek – her other eye could no longer cry, evidently. Vi pulled her closer, wrapping her in an embrace so steady and unwavering that Caitlyn felt the tension draining from her body.
“You don’t get to protect me from everything, Cupcake.”
“I just – I didn’t want to see that look on your face again,” the navy-haired woman sobbed.
“You mean the look where I love you so much it hurts to see you going through this alone?”
Caitlyn drew back ever so slightly, only so she could see Vi’s face instead of being buried in her neck. And the look was nothing but tender. Patient. As if she had all the time in the world for Caitlyn.
“I’m not broken,” she insisted, a defiant edge cutting through her vulnerability. “Just…recalibrating.”
Vi chuckled and reached up to brush stray strands of hair away from her cheek. “I’m not that stupid, Cupcake.” She leaned in to press a kiss against her forehead. Her cheek. Then her lips. They lingered for a moment before releasing each other. “We’ll figure it out. Together,” she promised.
In the days that followed, Caitlyn vehemently refused to learn. She refused to let the humming and ringing hinder her work in repairing the society she broke.
She woke up every morning with Vi planting kisses on her face. She went to the headquarters and held meetings. She rebranded the organization, renaming themselves wardens instead of enforcers. She relinquished her seat on the council to Sevika.
Meanwhile, Vi flittered between spending her days in the undercity with Ekko to rebuild and hovering around Caitlyn. The table at her side of the table began to stack with books on hearing deficiencies and sign language that Caitlyn refused to acknowledge.
Tobias was mindfully kept ignorant of the subject.
“She’ll come around,” she barely overheard Ekko telling Vi one afternoon when she was on her way to meet them at a café near headquarters. “Healing isn’t linear.”
Vi’s laugh was more vibration than sound. “Since when did you become so wise?”
Vi watched. Waited. Her stack of books grew silently, a mountain of unspoken support prepared to embrace her whenever she was ready. She didn’t think she would ever be.
One afternoon, while Caitlyn was reviewing reorganization treaties, Mel appeared at her office. Unannounced, but never unexpected. The woman had practically watched her grown up after all, practically her older sister in a way.
The person Caitlyn had confided in, other than Vi.
“Sheriff,” Mel greeted smoothly, taking a seat without invitation. “You’ve been avoiding me.”
It hurt that Mel’s dulcet tone was so…underwhelming now. It used to be warm. Used to fill her with reassurance. Now, it was only edgy and strained.
The comfort she'd once found in those precise tones was gone, replaced by a growing sense of isolation. Where her bionic eye could capture every minute detail, her hearing betrayed her, turning Mel's once-comforting voice into a distant, incomprehensible rhythm.
Caitlyn hated this, twirling the pen in her hand anxiously.
“I’ve been busy,” she replied, her tone brittle.
“Busy pretending everything is fine?”
Caitlyn stilled. She kept her eyes on the paperwork spread before her. “What do you want?”
“I want to talk.”
Caitlyn set the pen down, her movements precise as though the act might lend her the control she desperately needed. She looked up, her bionic eye catching the faint glow of the mid-morning sun streaming through the window behind her.
It was strange, seeing Mel now. Once, Caitlyn would have eagerly welcomed her presence.
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Caitlyn,” Mel pronounced, leaning forward and resting her clasped hands on her knees. “I’ve known you since you were a child. You’re one of the strongest and most determined people I’ve ever met. But this?” She gestured faintly in the sheriff’s direction. “This is not strength. Stop punishing yourself.”
“I’m not –”
“You are,” Mel interjected. “You’re treating this condition like a personal failure. Retribution for bad decisions – which, by the way, we’ve all made.”
“You don’t understand.” Caitlyn picked up the pen and started twirling it again, faster this time. “Every meeting, every negotiation, every strategy session – if I miss even one word, one inflection, everything falls apart.” She licked her lips and closed her eyes. “And I can’t – last night, I watched Vi laughed at a joke my father made. Watched, because I couldn’t hear her clearly. I can barely listen to her laugh before I’ve even heard enough.”
For a long moment, Mel only stared at her, as if she was trying to parse her next words very carefully. Caitlyn wouldn’t blame her – she had been on a tightrope and she couldn’t remember how many subordinates she’d yelled at since yesterday.
“Vi came to the council chambers.” Caitlyn’s eyes snapped open, looking at Mel with surprise. Mel smirked humorlessly and nodded in confirmation. “She’s worried about you. She doesn’t want to push you and she doesn’t know how to…navigate you. And she came to me for advice.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“Told her I’d knock some sense into you.”
Mel stood up and rounded the desk, leaning back against the edge of the furniture and taking Caitlyn’s hand in hers, gently removing the ever-present pen. Her fingers touched the calluses on Caitlyn’s skin, built from years of shooting and combat training.
“We’ve all lost things in the war,” Mel murmured gently, but loud enough for the navy-haired woman to pick up. “You’ve lost more than anyone can imagine. Vi has too. She’s lost people – all of them. You cannot be another notch in her post.”
“She won’t lose me.”
“If you keep this up, Caitlyn, she might. Not in the way you think, but in a way that matters as much.”
Caitlyn’s jaw tightened, but she didn’t pull away.
The words stung, not because they were cruel, but because they carried the weight of truth she hadn’t wanted to face. She knew the toll her stubbornness was taking, not just on herself but Vi, on everyone around her.
“Vi’s learning sign language,” she said suddenly. “She’s been collecting books. Studying. Preparing.” A bitter chuckle escaped her throat. “As if it’s that easy.”
Mel watched her carefully. “Nothing worth doing is ever simple.” She gestured at the stack of paperwork on the desk. “Not rebuilding two cities. Not overturning a system. Not healing.” She leaned down to pull Caitlyn’s chair towards her, wrapping her up in a sisterly hug. “But we keep trying.”
“What if – what if I become too much for her?”
“You’re never too much, Caitlyn. Especially not to Vi.”
“I’ll – I’ll try,” she finally conceded.
“That’s all we’re asking.”
Mel tightened her arms for a moment before stepping back, smoothing down the hem of her coat as if nothing about the conversation affected her, but Caitlyn knew better. Mel was a politician, and Caitlyn was raised by one.
“Get some rest. Or at least take a break. Go out. Take Vi on a tour around the city. Read a book with her. Talk to her.” She paused at the door, turning back. “Don’t make me come back for another lecture. I’ve got plenty where that came from.”
Caitlyn huffed a soft laugh, the sound rusty but genuine. “Noted, Councilor Medarda.”
When the door closed behind her, the office felt quieter. She glanced at the pile of treaties waiting for her attention, and then shifted her gaze to the corner of the room, where a table sat, decorated with memorabilia collected from family and friends over the years.
The training gun Jayce had made for her when she was just entering the shooting range was propped there. She so wished he would know how much she missed him. How much they all did.
Sign Language for Extra Dummies.
The title was insulting. Hilarious. Something that would never be published in Piltover. Ekko was always resourceful.
The cover was simple, unassuming. Something pulled together from scarce resources in the undercity by people who wanted to learn but couldn’t. Yet, it felt like it weight a ton in her hands. She ran her fingers over the cover, breathing in regulated cycles.
Then she made her way to the fireplace and took a seat in the armchair designated for Vi. She took another breath and inhaled the musky scent that her girlfriend had embedded into the fabric before flipping it open.
It wasn’t long before she was totally engrossed in the learning of it all, forgetting her surroundings and the condition that made her have to open this book in the first place. Her fingers moved and danced as she contorted them in a completely foreign language that was beginning to make sense.
She didn’t know how long she’d been studying when a tap landed on her shoulder and she looked up to find Vi looking down at her with a gentle smile.
“Hi,” she signed, not opening her mouth.
Vi’s smile widened. “Hi,” she signed back.
A sense of warmth spread through Caitlyn, not from the fireplace. Vi was not known to be a patient woman, but she always was with her.
“I’m trying,” Caitlyn spoke, not that far into her studies yet.
“I know, Cupcake. Take as long as you need,” Vi replied, making herself comfortable on the handle of the armchair and placing an arm around her shoulder. “Ekko found this from Benzo’s old shop. I found more rooting around in the bookshop in the undercity.”
“It’s…something, isn’t it?” Caitlyn said, glancing at the title.
Vi’s gaze softened. “You don’t have to do this alone, you know that, right?”
“Yes,” Caitlyn whispered.
“Don’t shut me out because it’s hard. Like I said, we’ll figure it out.” Her lips twitched into a teasing grin. “Besides, I got pretty great. I mean, you saw me – perfect execution.”
Caitlyn laughed and leaned into Vi’s figure. “You’re terrible.”
“Hey, it’s a work in progress!” Vi shot back, her grin widening as she stood, pulling Caitlyn up with her. “Come on, Tobias invited us for tea in the gazebo, which is crazy by the way. Why do you even need gazebos?” she grumbled, tightening her grip on Caitlyn’s hand.
“Probably to feel closer to nature or something. Typical Piltover, right?” Caitlyn answered with a smirk, leaning into Vi’s embrace as they walked out of the room.
They continued their banter as they walked down the hallways and passed the portraits of her ancestors. The books and the paperwork and the negotiations could wait. For now, they could walk and talk and have tea.
Everything took time. Rebuilding a city. Overturning a system. Healing. She had time.