Chapter Text
Caitlyn was soft. She was sensitive, kind, and just so unbelievably gentle. She wore her heart on her sleeve; she had the worst poker face in the world, a soul too pure for such a cruel place.
“My little angel,” her father would say whenever he saw her perform even the smallest act of kindness. His heart would swell with pride. Even her mother, always stoic and stern, would whisper to her, “My precious child.” Late at night, when she thought Caitlyn was asleep, she would kneel beside her bed and caress her hair, promising to protect her forever. Caitlyn would listen in secret, waiting for that moment ever since she pulled on her blue dinosaur pajamas, the ones Cassandra called “absurd," but could never stop herself from smiling at each morning, when she saw her daughter stumble sleepily to the table in those same pajamas, drowsy and disheveled, she found herself too overcome with affection to scold her about etiquette.
At five years old, Caitlyn would cry her eyes out whenever she saw a stray dog. Her chubby cheeks flushed pink, her lips trembling in a perpetual pout, her eyes brimming with tears. Her father would scoop her up and ask what was wrong, and between hiccups, she would explain that the puppies probably missed their mother. Tobias was a grown man — a respected doctor, a devoted husband, a loving father — but he would be lying if he said he didn’t fight back tears every time his daughter said things like that.
At eight, Caitlyn had an emotional breakdown upon learning that plants were living beings, and that humans were destroying the planet. Cassandra was left at a loss for words. What could she possibly say to that?
At twelve, Caitlyn stood before the academy principal, bristling with anger, tears streaking her cheeks, her hands trembling as she argued how unfair it was to expel a little Zaunite girl for punching a much bigger boy who had bullied her.
At fifteen, Caitlyn didn’t cry every time she was upset anymore. But that didn’t mean she felt any less passionately about the causes she defended. She was learning to reconcile her father’s unwavering kindness with her mother’s resolute will to protect others with reason and strength.
Caitlyn was kind. She was unbelievably soft. But she wasn’t weak. At five, she guilt-tripped her father into rescuing every stray puppy and bringing them to the shelter she had convinced her mother to open. At eight, she pushed Cassandra to introduce environmental policies to the council, even if she didn’t fully understand them herself. At twelve, she stood up for every Zaunite victim of bullying she came across at the academy.
At twenty-four, Caitlyn became the youngest medical graduate in the history of Piltover, following in her father’s footsteps.
At twenty-six, Caitlyn lost everything. She lost herself..
It was the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday when the news swept through the sister cities of Piltover and Zaun. Unrest simmered in every household. The tension was so thick you could almost feel it pressing against your skin. There was no official curfew, yet the streets emptied by dusk. The echoes of chirping birds and laughing children had faded into nothing more than a memory. Silence became deafening; fear, all-encompassing.
Noxus was coming. The everlasting conflict was reaching its end. After half a decade of troops marching in and out, the threat was more real than ever. The Noxians always lived up to their reputation, and the sister cities would be no exception. Soldiers would come to loot their homes, enslave the people, press weapons into the hands of their children and send them off to conquer and destroy, or at the very least, use them as bait.
The situation was dire. Prospects of peace were nil. Dreams of victory felt grotesque. The looming outcomes were dreadful.
There was only one desperate option left: to march into the lion’s den with everything they had, to walk straight toward a death sentence. Healthy men and women volunteered alike, determined to confront the advancing troops from Noxus—to force them back, to buy time for the cities’ allies to arrive, to tear the problem out by its roots or die trying.
“I must go, Mother! It is my duty!” Caitlyn’s voice trembled with exasperation.
“Since when is it your duty to die, Caitlyn?!” her mother yelled. She rarely lost her composure, but now she was on the verge of madness.
“I am a doctor, Mother. I swore to protect. Our people are fighting, how can I sit idly by and watch them get massacred? The Piltovian Medical Corps are scarce; Noxus made sure of it. Most of the volunteers fighting this war are from Zaun. Despite the mended relations of the past few years, they haven’t had the chance to train enough professional medical personnel. They will need doctors!”
“You’re not even in the Medical Corps, Caitlyn! For crying out loud, you only graduated a couple months ago—what will you do there?”
“I will save the ones I can, Mother. That’s the point. I’ll patch them up, treat their wounds, care for them. And if there’s nothing more I can do, when I have reached the limit of my abilities and spent every last resource and ounce of knowledge, then, and only then, I will kneel beside them and hold their hands. I will not let them die believing their country abandoned them!”
Cassandra had no argument left. Truth be told, as a council member, the only Piltovian councilor the people of both Zaun and Piltover respected, she had stood before Zaunites and Piltovians alike and urged them to defend their homes. Not with lies or manipulation, but with the unvarnished truth. It was all or nothing. Yet that didn’t make it any less heartbreaking.
She knew doctors were desperately needed. She knew that at this point it didn’t matter whether it was a seasoned field surgeon or a first-year intern who had never treated wounds outside a perfectly sterilized operating room—they needed everything, and everyone, they could get.
But… Why did it have to be her daughter? Her only child. Her everything. It couldn’t be Caitlyn. And yet it couldn’t be anyone else either. No one else was as fierce and compassionate. No one else’s heart balanced steel and softness so perfectly.
And it wasn’t just that. Her daughter was a good doctor — an excellent one. She had graduated from the academy at sixteen with full honors, then gone straight to college, specializing in cardiothoracic surgery. She was young and lacked experience, but that only made her achievements more remarkable: the youngest graduate in the university’s history, for God’s sake. Cassandra couldn’t have been prouder.
But right now she felt like she was drowning. She couldn’t be objective. She couldn’t be cool or collected. She wouldn’t be rational or composed. She would be a mother. And if her stern and severe approach wouldn’t work, she would go find her husband and pray that his caring, gentle nature might reach their daughter instead.
But nothing worked. Their daughter was stubborn and unyielding, she always had been. At last, Tobias understood where she was coming from. But she was still his daughter, his baby, his everything. He couldn’t stop life from showing Caitlyn its uglier face, but he could at least stand beside her to face it. And that was exactly what he would do.
Caitlyn protested. Tobias was needed here, he was the hospital’s chief. He had to stay and lead, because the people who remained behind would still need him.
But her father was immovable. Clearly, she hadn’t inherited all her obstinacy from just her mother.
Caitlyn had been twenty-five for only a week when she and her father rode out in the convoys, dressed in military uniform.
The battle was brutal. They had set out believing they would be dead within a week, but four months later they were still fighting. They managed to hold the Noxians back, keeping them from setting foot anywhere near Piltover’s borders. Yet as the war raged on land, the Noxians tried to bombard the city from the sea.
Piltover wasn’t a nation seasoned in the art of war. But it was the City of Progress for a reason. With their technology and inventions, they fought back, reducing the damage as much as they could. Even so, the destruction to both Zaun’s and Piltover’s infrastructure was considerable, though, remarkably, civilian casualties in the cities were kept to a minimum.
It was thanks to a small group that stayed behind. Desperate as the cities were, they weren’t foolish. Leaving Piltover and Zaun defenseless would have been a death sentence in itself. Four of the finest scientists, and, much to their dismay, the three best fighters in Zaun, had been the first to volunteer for the front. But their individual strength was the equivalent of a small army, and their talents were needed at home. If, by some miracle, the cities survived this war, they would need something left to build upon. Not only blood and ashes. They had to fight from within.
By the sixth month, Caitlyn had lost count of how many people had died in front of her. She had lost count of how many limbs she’d seen flying through the air, how many she herself had amputated to “save” a life — though it no longer felt like saving anyone. The smell of blood was constant. She couldn’t remember the last sunny day. Gunpowder had left them living in a perpetual shade of grey.
Her boots had holes; she had traded her perfectly fine pair to a soldier barely nineteen. Caitlyn felt sick. She missed her mother’s voice more than anything. She would have given anything to be scolded about her dirty uniform and grubby hair. The only thing keeping her sane was her father’s smile — the smile that appeared even on the darkest days. He had recently convinced her to start a journal, to stop bottling up all the pain and horror.
August 3rd, 21:00
“I can’t sleep. The scout team sent to gather intelligence about enemy positions and fortifications hasn’t returned in three days on a mission that was supposed to last one. The oldest person in that team is my age. I can’t afford to worry about them. It’s not my job. I should pour my soul into the injured, the ones I can actually help, as little as it may be.”
August 10th, 14:00
“The scout team is back. They brought the intel. Captain Grayson calls it a successful mission. I feel my blood boil. Five of the nine soldiers came back. One is on the brink of death and there’s nothing I can do about it. There’s never anything I can do. My mother was right. I’m of no use here. I miss her. I miss her dearly.”
August 24th, 09:00
“Father has gotten himself a guitar. Oh dear. The soldiers love it; we’ll never hear the end of it. An Ionian soldier gave it to him. Their troops are starting to arrive. Help is coming. I’m so tired, but Father keeps me grounded. He’s always hopeful and optimistic, even through the worst. Perhaps this won’t be in vain. I just want this senseless horror to end. I know he’s desperate for it too. He misses Mother terribly.”
September 11th
“My watch broke. I don’t know what time it is, and I don’t care. It’s dark. It’s always dark. I’ve been scrubbing blood from under my fingernails for an hour but it won’t disappear. We’ve been running out of supplies for weeks. If I have to watch the light drain from another soldier’s eyes, I’ll go mad. I think I already have. Seven months. How many deaths will be enough?”
September 30th
“It’s freezing at night, scorching at midday. I’d worry about skin cancer if I didn’t think I’d die from a stray bullet first. I’ve befriended two Ionian soldiers, Ahri and Irelia. I think they’re in love, but they’ve decided to be useless and say nothing. We sleep huddled in a tent, hoping our body heat keeps us alive. They’re good friends.”
(Undated)
“I don’t care what day it is anymore. Irelia is dead. Ahri screamed at me, pleaded with me to save her. Her body was blown in half; there was nothing I could do. There never is. Not ten hours later we found Ahri’s body too. She’d shot herself. I’m tired, Mother.”
(Undated)
“It’s been eight months since we rode in that convoy. Seven months and three weeks since I saw the first soldier with a bullet in his head. Three months since we started running out of supplies. One month since Ahri and Irelia died. I can’t remember why I’m here. I think the soldiers can’t remember what they’re fighting for either. For their families, their friends, their people — yes — but the concept of life is devalued now. It doesn’t mean what it did eight months ago. But we can’t stop now. We must go on.”
(Undated)
“Mother, please forgive me. I couldn’t do it. Mother, it’s my fault. I couldn’t take the shot. He couldn’t have been older than fifteen. They gave me a rifle two weeks ago when we discovered the inhumane torture the Noxians practiced. They said we were soldiers now as much as we were doctors. That there was no other option. I have killed people. I haven’t missed a single shot I’ve taken. But I froze when it mattered most. And now Father is dead. Father is gone and it’s all my fault. Please, Mother, forgive me.”
Tobias died in November, shot through the heart. Caitlyn had the chance to save him and she didn’t take it.
Caitlyn lost her kindness, her softness, her sensitivity. She thought it would make her stronger. Instead, without gentleness she became a void — a shell of a person. She stopped writing. She stopped crying. She killed and healed and hated herself every time she did either. She had broken her Hippocratic oath the day she took that rifle, and was hypocritical enough to keep tending the wounded anyway. She was no doctor. She was no soldier. She was a machine. Broken, but ironically effective.
Every night she put the muzzle of the rifle in her mouth. Every night she didn’t take the shot. The possibility of self-erasure was within reach, but she didn’t deserve it. She had brought her father here. She had gotten him killed. She had stolen her mother’s love of a lifetime only to be utterly useless. Her comrades called her a hero. She thought she was nothing at all.
The war officially ended in January. They returned with more weapons than people, but they were going back. Caitlyn wasn’t in any of the vehicles. Grayson delayed her own departure searching for her, but there was no trace. For the last two months, Caitlyn had been impeccable, infallible — a hero, even if she was too busy drowning in guilt and pain to see it. She wasn’t a deserter. She had done her duty to the very last minute. When it was over and the camp erupted into celebration, crying and screaming, she vanished without a word. She couldn’t see it, but they loved her as much as they had loved her father.
Caitlyn arrived back in the city a month later than the rest. She was… taking care of a few things. She didn’t have it in her to face her mother, her very presence felt like an insult. Nor did she want to risk running into Grayson and hearing something absurd about medals or commendations. She wanted to stay dead to everyone.
So she went to Zaun instead.
The crunch of her boots in the snow was the only sound on the remote street where she finally stopped. Her belongings were few: a bag with a rifle, a bag of coins from home she’d never spent, her father’s broken stethoscope, the weight of every person she had watched die, a lifetime of regrets, and enough bitterness to start another war.
The streets were dimly lit, streetlamps flickering with a nauseating greenish glow. The buildings were bare brick and concrete, the alleys narrow and menacing. The decay of these streets predated the war; its darkness had always been there. Hollow and broken, they were a direct reflection of Caitlyn’s inner world.
She sold her rifle, the one engraved with the Kiramman crest. It only had one use left anyway, and after all, history had already proven Caitlyn didn’t take the shots that mattered most.
“I don’t even have the courage to be a coward,” she muttered as the hand behind the bars took the rifle and shoved a few coins back at her.
She rented a room with the money, though she could easily have found an abandoned place. It wouldn’t have made a difference.
She collapsed onto the mattress with a dull thud, her nose raw from the winter air, her scarf doing little to warm her.
It was February 14th. Caitlyn’s 26th birthday. By this age, she had lost everything — her father, her humanity. She was unworthy of her name, unworthy of her mother, who probably hated her anyway. And now she had sold the last thing she owned bearing her family’s symbol.
Caitlyn was hollow, hurt, grief-stricken, unbelievably exhausted. Her heart had been replaced by a void, her face fixed in a perpetual blankness. Only one certainty remained: a pure soul is an unsafe virtue in an impure world.