Work Text:
“The maid wants to know,” Cait calls from the hallway, “if you would like to have your jacket dry cleaned or steamed.”
There’s a pause, and Cait is about to yell out the question again when Vi’s voice calls back, slightly muffled through the bathroom’s heavy mahogany doors. “I really don’t know what any of that means.”
Cait realizes that she has never been, and probably never again will be, this welcoming of a conversation about laundry in her life. “Well,” she says, leaning against the door, “a dry clean is more thorough. Guaranteed to get the bloodstains out. On the other hand, steaming it would–”
“Whatever gets it done quicker,” Vi interrupts. “Look, can you–can you come in here for a minute?”
Initially slightly annoyed by her flippant answer, Cait now pauses. “Are you sure? Should I bring anything, or cover my eyes, or–”
“Look, just do it. Please.”
Impressed and slightly concerned by Vi’s uncharacteristic display of courtesy, she reaches for the doorknob. She lets her hand hover above it for a few seconds, and then slams down on it and pushes the door open in a single swing.
Vi stands next to the tub at the other end of the spacious bathroom, dappled in sunlight coming in from the high window. A towel covers her torso and thighs, though it has been tucked in haphazardly right above her chest. Her bandages lie unraveled on the dresser next to the sink and, for the first time, Cait sees what her knuckles have been hinting at. Her forearms are a kaleidoscopic array of purples and reds, jagged lines of cuts that never properly closed up creating cracks along her skin here and there. Currently, they’re frantically motioning for Cait to close the door behind her. And as Cait does so, she notices two more things: that there isn’t a trace of water on her body or hair, and that she’s desperately avoiding eye contact with Cait.
“What I’m about to ask,” Vi says slowly, “stays between the two of us. Forever.”
“Vi, what–”
“How,” she cuts in, smacking her hand against the smooth porcelain surface near the faucet, “do you turn this tap on?”
Cait blinks. She looks up at Vi, and though her gaze is intense, she’s still red in the face. Then she looks at the tap, a little cylindrical contraption stuck to the bathroom wall about a meter above the faucet.
She leans over and puts her hand on it. “You’ve got to pull on it until it clicks into place like this,” she says, demonstrating. “Then you turn the actual water on like this.” She twists the knob to the right, and a stream of water immediately gushes out. “You can control the water pressure if you move it around a little. And if you turn it to the left, it’ll come out of the shower head instead.” She nods towards a shower head mounted on the other end of the wall, evidently detachable through a hose. “And for the temperature…” There’s a cog on the surface of the knob, and she spins it with the tip of her finger. “Left for hot water. I think this should be good.”
In Vi’s defense, she realizes, it’s a pretty stupid tap.
Vi watches as the surface of the water steadily rises. “I didn’t realize you could pull it out like that. I kept trying to turn it over to that side.” She makes little motions with her hands, still not looking up from the water. “And it took me a while to realize it was even connected to the faucet in the first place.”
“It’s a bit hard to get the hang of, honestly. They should replace it.”
“And…thanks for not laughing. Haven’t exactly had a private hot tub for the past seven years or anything.”
“I figured.”
“And this never leaves this room.”
“Duly noted.”
Cait clears her throat. She doesn’t want to leave on this kind of note–she doesn’t really want to leave at all, though, ashamed of the thought, she shoves it back into her subconscious–and she scans the room for things to conveniently change the topic to. She’s about to ask if Vi’s decided what soap she’s going to use when she notices a leftover piece of metal lodged into the curve of skin where Vi’s neck dips into her right shoulder.
It can’t be more than two centimeters in both width and length, but she immediately finds herself standing beside Vi, her face almost touching her shoulder as she peers at the splinter, her fingers gently probing the skin around it. Vi jerks away just a little, probably instinctively, but it’s enough for Cait to realize that the only thing separating their bodies is a shoddily-wrapped towel. Embarrassed, she drops her hands to her sides, but she makes a point of cocking an eyebrow at Vi, silently demanding an explanation.
“Oh,” Vi says. “That. I was planning on dealing with it at some point.”
“Vi. That point should be now.”
“Relax, it doesn’t even hurt–”
“It could get infected,” Cait chides. “Or go in deeper.”
And ten minutes later she’s kneeling by the tub, and inside it, Vi is covered from her shoulders to her feet in a layer of lavender-scented foam. She’d told her to get in while the water was still hot, and in the meantime she’d gone out and fetched a box of impromptu medical supplies.
“You know,” Vi says, her eyes following Cait’s hands as she moves a pair of tweezers towards her. “I’ve had to deal with a lot worse than a single tiny-ass splinter.”
“But you shouldn’t have to. And I don’t want you to. At least not under my watch.”
Vi is quiet after that. She doesn’t flinch at all at the sting of the disinfectant being swabbed against her skin, nor when Cait jerks the bit of metal out of her shoulder, nor when she sees the gaping red mark it leaves behind. Cait feels her hold still as she snips off a small piece of gauze from a roll and softly presses it onto the wound.
“There,” she says, taping it down. “All better. Now you won’t get tetanus.”
“Thank you.” Vi prods the gauze with her fingers before Cait shoos them away. “Really. I probably would have forgotten about it. Now I only have the rest of my body to deal with.”
Cait leans back on her haunches. “Does it hurt a lot?” Stupid question–she’d seen Vi bleed out from a stab wound, felt her weight as she clung to her shoulders and dragged her legs along.
“Oh man , does it. I could try to act all cool about it, but you just watched me struggle to turn a tap on. So every muscle in my body is on fire.” She stretches a hand to her neck, cracks some kind of bone there. “It’s like, sometimes I don’t even register how much it hurts until way after I’ve had the shit beaten out of me.”
“I would amend that statement,” Cait says, barely thinking about the words as they leave her mouth, “to be ‘after they’ve had the shit beaten out of them by you .’”
“Knew there was a reason I liked you, Cupcake.”
Cait finds herself smiling in spite of the stupid nickname. She knows she’s overstaying her welcome, that it’s strange to hang around the bath of someone she’s known for two days at most (has she really only known her for that long?), but she’s still not entirely willing as she pushes herself off the floor and rises to her feet. Still, Vi hasn’t told her to leave yet, nor does she look like she’s about to. And she doesn’t think she’s exaggerating her pain, either. She can’t see most of her body under the water, but she can see the occasional wince cross her face, or how she’ll roll back a shoulder as if trying to shrug some invisible thing off of it.
And she thinks she could do something to help.
She hesitates. “If your back is sore, and if you don’t mind me sticking around, I can try giving you–well, it’s like a massage.” She sees Vi raise an eyebrow. “Not a full-body one, I don’t know how to do that. Just your back. Nothing too extravagant, but it might help a little. My mother used to get them a lot, and she said they worked.” She tries to sound nonchalant, but her words come tumbling out, awkward and rushed, and she hopes Vi doesn’t notice. “Again, just an offer. If you’re comfortable.”
Within the few seconds that she had taken to say all of that, she had imagined about five different scenarios that ended in her being laughed out of the room. But Vi doesn’t miss a beat in saying, “I think I would be comfortable with flashing the entire Council if you could get my back to feel less like it just got run over by three steamrollers.”
“That won’t be necessary.” She suppresses a sigh of relief. “It’s just that you’re going to have to sit up a little, and–”
Cait yelps as, with no warning except for a splash, Vi heaves her upper body out of the veil of the bath water. Instinctively, she jerks her head to the ground.
“In prison, they’d turn the showers on about three times a week. No schedule. No telling when it would happen. Someone would just yell, ‘shower’s on,’ and that was your cue to haul ass to the shower room.” Cait is still examining a particularly intricate floral design on one of the floor tiles, but out of the corner of her eye she sees the outline of Vi’s side profile, the rising and falling of her chest. “Now, the first thing about the showers was that there were about thirty showerheads. No stalls, no partitions, just the showerheads lined up next to each other. The second thing about the showers was that, every single time, the water would be cold–except for the first three minutes after the guards had turned them on. So, every week, there’d be me and about a hundred other women, all ass naked, pushing and shoving to be first to get under the water. And if I got lucky enough, I would get about fifteen seconds of hot water in exchange for becoming intimately aware of the 70 year old inmate who managed to get in next to me.” She turns to face Cait, or at least the strands of hair falling down her still-downturned face. “The bottom line here being: I can sit back down if it’s going to be an issue for you, but to be honest, I don’t really care if you see my tits.”
Tentatively, Cait raises her head.
“See?” Vi grins. “Nothing special.”
Cait would disagree with that, but something else feels wrong. Naked, a cut above her lip still bright red, drops of water clinging to her bruised skin, Vi looks vulnerable. She doubts many people have described her that way, and if the past 24 hours are anything to go by, she can’t blame them. After this bath, she’ll put her bandeau on, wrap her bandages back around her arms, and leave the sunkissed, chandeliered bathroom. Then she’ll take whatever punches are thrown her way by Councilors who, regardless of the meeting’s outcome, will reward themselves for the day’s work with a bottle of imported champagne worth more than any amount Vi has ever touched in her life. And there Cait is, standing over her in her tailor-made clothes, with–comparatively–barely a scratch on her body. She remembers how once, after she’d gotten told off by a particularly harsh officer during her enforcer training, she’d treated herself out to dinner at one of Piltover’s most renowned gourmet restaurants that night, not even looking at the check as she’d billed it to her parents’ account.
“You’re right,” she finally says. “It isn’t going to be an issue.”
“Great. So, is your miracle healing–”
“But if you’re going to be like this,” she continues, unbuttoning her blouse, “I want us to be even.”
Cait doesn’t need to see Vi’s expression as she lifts her blouse over her head. “Oh my god,” she guffaws. “This is like the beginning of a bad story feature from an… interesting magazine you can buy in the undercity.”
“Shut up,” Cait says, but she’s laughing too, and she focuses on that feeling as she unhooks the clasp at her back and lets her bra fall down her arms. It joins the crumpled-up heap of her blouse on the floor, and she stares at them both for a few seconds, registering the sudden feeling of steam on her now-bare skin. She lifts her head up slowly, and then her arms, until her back is straight and her hands are above her head, elbows bent and fingers spread out as if asking–daring–Vi to search her. “See? Now it’s less weird. Somehow.”
And despite her unbroken resolve to look Vi straight in the eye, she’s holding her breath. Because although she’s thought about Vi’s comment at the brothel more times than she cares to admit, and even though now would be a perfect time for Vi to follow up on it, she finds herself desperately hoping she won’t–not now. If it happens now, she thinks, something will be lost.
It never comes. Instead, Vi’s voice is surprisingly soft when she says, “Yeah. It does feel less weird. Somehow.”
There’s a wooden footstool by the window, and Cait sets it down at the end of the tub, behind Vi’s head. Sitting here, she has an unadulterated view of Vi’s back–the sprawling map of her tattoo, a shock of red hair beginning at the nape of her neck, muscles that bulge and shift as she shrugs her shoulders into place. The muscles are what she’s there for, ostensibly.
“You sure this isn’t taking time away from your important enforcer duties or whatever?”
“I just spent about thirty minutes trying to convince my parents that people are dying. Let’s just say I wouldn’t worry too much about that right now.”
“Ah. I won’t start feeling too special, then.”
Gently, she places her hands on the damp, warm skin of Vi’s shoulders. She feels Vi inhale, and she can see a prickle of goosebumps on her arms. But it subsides, and Cait takes that as her cue to move down to her back. With the flats of her palms, she begins to push in long, gliding strokes, reaching out to Vi’s shoulders and then going back down again. “This good? Not making it worse?”
“Yeah,” she says, and her voice is breathy in a way that makes Cait think it’s genuine. “Yeah, it’s good.”
So she continues, slowly becoming familiar with the expanse of Vi’s back. Cuts, bruises, a fading red line above her midsection where her bandeau had been cutting into her ribs. The sturdy column of her spine. She tries to memorize the arrangement of cogs that spill across her shoulder blades and over onto one arm. Once she thinks she’s mapped her out, she moves on to the specifics, pressing down on different areas at a time, systematically trying to find a swollen patch of skin.
“I think you’ve got some kind of knot here,” she says, feeling a tight bundle of muscles below her left shoulder. “No wonder you’re in bad shape.” She rolls the pads of her thumbs around the area, and then the tips of her fingers, working in small swift circular motions.
“How come–ah–how come you’re so good at this?”
“I don’t know if that was meant to be rhetorical, but there actually is a reason for this.”
“Go on.”
“When I was a kid,” Cait says, still kneading, “my mother moved around a lot more for her job. She’d get a lot of back pain from it, so she hired a live-in physical therapist. But really, everyone just called her a masseuse.” She smiles. “Her name was Hilda. She’d always bring me donuts from those cheap food stands that are around every corner here, even though she knew my parents never let me have them. I think at that point, she spent more time around me than my actual mother did. She had bad knees, though, and they would get worse in bouts. I think I had this idea in my head of becoming her apprentice and swooping in to help whenever the pain got bad for her. I practically begged her to teach me what she was doing. And she actually played along, bless her soul.”
Vi snorts. “Damn right.” But she pauses. She sounds much more careful when she says, “You keep talking about her in the past tense, though.”
For the first time, Cait stops moving her hands. She’s quiet for a moment before she begins pressing down again. “She was caught trying to steal some jewelry from my mother’s drawer. She said it was for the doctor. I tried to argue with them. They fired her anyway.” She feels a familiar bitterness rise in her own voice. “I guess I got more into guns after that.”
“I think you did the best you could.”
“I guess.” She wants to change the topic. “I’m surprised I even remember how to do any of this. Or that it’s working so well. My mother always said I was too rough when I tried it on her.”
Vi shrugs. “Never really had anyone try to take care of me like that. Definitely not in jail, anyway.” Her voice softens. “Powder would try to patch me up sometimes when we were kids, after I’d gotten beat up pretty bad. Didn’t always work. But she definitely tried.”
There are about a thousand different things either of them could say about Powder in that moment. Neither of them do. But the air doesn’t feel tense as they leave the conversation on that note, and Cait believes that Jinx–Powder–would have done that, she definitely does. So she silently keeps working, listening to Vi’s steady breathing, watching the way the light from the window hits her back, her arms, her neck, her hair.
“Wait, you haven’t even touched your hair.”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes, I’ve seen where it’s been. Look, just lean back a little. I’ll do it for you.”
Vi sighs, but she doesn’t hesitate as she tilts her head back, her eyes rolling up to meet Cait’s. “Just don’t mess it up.”
“I don’t think there’s much more I can mess up,” she says, but her voice is warm, and she runs a quick hand through the red mop in front of her to soften the blow.
It lands. “I’ll have you know I was very popular with the girls at prison. They’d offer me their porridge rations and everything.”
From where Cait is sitting, she can crane her arm and pull the hose of the shower towards herself. “Ohh, I’ll get it,” Vi says, leaning forward when she sees the head in Cait’s hands. There’s a clinking sound as she fumbles with the tap for a few seconds, but soon enough warm water shoots out of the showerhead. She leans back into position, grinning. “Really do upgrade that though. Make it automatic or something.”
“Bring it up to the Council tonight, won’t you.” She positions the stream of water above her head and watches as it engulfs her hair, a few drops running down her upturned forehead. Vi closes her eyes.
A few minutes later, water turned off, Cait is lathering shampoo onto Vi’s head (“I’ll be honest. I haven’t seen one of those in a while,” Vi had said when she’d seen the bottle). Vi is surprisingly patient as she works her fingers into her roots, pulling stray bits of her hair out of her face, trying not to miss a single spot. Very carefully, almost imperceptibly, she scrapes her nails against the stubble of the shaved part of her head. She establishes a rhythm, moving her fingers back and forth, watching the shampoo bubble against her scalp.
She thinks she’s imagining things when she feels Vi’s head lean into her hand.
She stops for a moment. Then she starts again, pressing down just a little harder this time.
With a small “mmph,” Vi rolls her head into her hand, her cheek pressing against Cait’s palm.
So she keeps doing it. Wordlessly, she scratches at the space above her ear, and with her other hand she massages the wet, soapy strands of hair on the other side of her head. Except for the movement of her hands, the room is completely still, a ray of sunlight obstinately not moving from its spot on Vi’s back.
What happens after this?
After Cait puts her shirt back on, after she leaves to let Vi get changed, after the meeting. After they’ve both assumed their respective identities. Caitlyn Kiramman, topsider, enforcer, rich girl. Vi, undersider, convicted criminal, not deemed important enough for the city of Piltover to remember her full name. But here, it feels like they’re allowed to be something else. She doesn’t know what exactly, not yet, but she wants to find out.
Then she thinks of the bowels of the undercity, the desperation and death that Vi had barely flinched at. She thinks of the Councilors and their champagne, of the way her parents had raised their eyebrows at her when they’d seen the girl she’d chosen to smuggle into her room this time. And she feels that something slip through her fingers just as easily as the water in the tub.
And if– if –the meeting goes wrong–
“Vi,” Cait says, almost whispering.
It takes Vi a moment to lift her head away from the palm of Cait’s hand, as if she’s waking up from some kind of daze. “Hm?”
“You said what happens here never leaves this room, right?”
Vi responds slowly, almost as if she doesn’t want to. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Then, just to be safe–”
For the first time, she doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t worry about coming off the wrong way, doesn’t think of the consequences. She leans in and presses a kiss to the nape of Vi’s neck. She smells like shampoo and lavender soap, and her lips come away wet with a few warm drops of water. Cait keeps her face there, resting her chin against Vi’s shoulder, quiet.
At first, Vi doesn’t react. From where Cait is, she can’t see her face, and she doesn’t think she can feel her body move at all. But then her shoulders relax, moving Cait’s head just slightly down along with them. Very softly, she nuzzles her neck against where Cait’s face is pressed into it. She doesn’t say anything, but she slowly lifts an elbow out of the water and places a hand on her own shoulder.
Cait raises her own hand, and her fingers tangle with Vi’s.
Just to be safe.