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Some nights, the bed feels too damn big.
Or she feels too small.
Vi rolls out of the bed as quiet as she can, keeping her feet light and head low, sneaking out of the bedroom. She would say she feels like a teenager again, sneaking through the streets of Piltover with some coveted prize she plans on selling down in the Lanes, except, well. Not like she actually felt like a teenager when she was one.
She stopped being a kid when she walked through the fire and bloodshed on that bridge, her sister’s hand in her own.
The Kiramman Manor itself feels too damn big, too, but that’s because it is. Too much empty space, too many unused rooms. Her steps echo, even with her bare feet, as she toes through the halls. Cait’s father still lives there -- Vi would be damned if she let another family get divided -- but it's so easy to not see him for days at a time.
She finds herself sitting in one of the vast number of arm chairs the manor has, under the vacant gaze of Cassandra Kiramman, the oversized portrait staring blankly down at her in the moonlight from the massive window. The longer she stares at it, the deader the woman looks -- there’s no hint of the woman who kicked down a door and aimed a shotgun at her with zero hesitation, nothing of the woman who got her foot in the door only to sit there as Vi was dismissed. There’s no sign of the badass woman or the spineless councilor, nothing to suggest this painting is of an actual human being and not the perfect parody Pilties like to put on.
Frankly, Vi prefers not having any photos of her loved ones over this. Better to be a faulty memory than a memorial that looks deader than your corpse.
Cait’s father occasionally suggests it's time for her and Cait to get their portraits done. She knows she’s going to have Ekko do the portrait, because he’s the only one she trusts to not pull any bullshit like this. She just… doesn’t know how to ask, yet.
Her throat hurts often these days, like all the words she can’t say are caught in the foggy Gray poison Zaunites grow up learning to fear, trapped and trying to claw through the smog. Getting lost trying to find a way out.
Vi brings her legs up into the chair, wrapping her arms around them. It's cold, not that she’s ever let that bother her.
“Vi?”
The voice belongs to the naive girl that broke her out of prison and insisted on following her down to the Undercity.
Cait steps forward, still half standing in the shadows. With a blanket around her shoulders and her face half hidden by her hair, she looks like the woman who tore both their city apart in her grief.
“Violet, are you alright?”
And now, standing in front of her, tucking her hair behind her ear, scars on display, she looks like both of them and neither of them. Like herself.
Vi’s fiancée.
Vi leans against the side of the arm chair, arm outstretched.
Cait squeezes next to her, every inch from their shoulders to hits touching, and suddenly it's easy to breathe again.
Vi lets Cait move her sideways, lifting her legs into Cait’s lap. Cait rests her head on Vi’s shoulder, burying her face there. Even though Vi feels fragile, like she’s waiting for something to jump out from the shadows and drag Cait away from her, Cait sighs like she’s relieved as Vi wraps her arms around her. Like as long as Vi is there to hold her, she’s safe.
They both know better, obviously, and Vi has long since learned that Cait can hold her own, but she can’t lie, it's a nice feeling.
Cait shuffles the blanket to cover both of them.
She’s used to this by now -- used to the nights where Vi can’t stand the too big bed and the too big house, nights where she feels too fucking small and too fucking little and everything is just-
Too much.
“Go to sleep, Violet,” Cait says. “We’ll face it in the morning.”
Vi rests her chin on Cait’s head and closes her eyes. She just lets herself feel this: the weight of Caitlyn against her, the squeeze of Caitlyn’s arms around her waist, the knowledge that Cait, despite (or maybe because of) everything, is there to hold her.