THE WORLD BELOW (VixCaitlyn) / a dive into season two

Wounds

Vi woke up to warm sunlight on her face, rolled up on top of the bedsheets with her shoes on the pastel-blue pillows. Her body was bruised and aching, her head still ringing from the effects of the liquor in her blood. It took her a moment to remember why the soft linen beneath her felt nothing like the cold ground of the alleys she usually slept in. Images of Caitlyn flooded her mind, the smell of her clothes as she cried into her shoulder, the gentle strokes of her hand on her face that had guided Vi into her sleep.. But as she opened her eyes she found the matress beside her empty, no sign of Caitlyn. The room around her felt like it existed in a different time, untouched by the chaos of the past weeks. It was unfamiliar yet welcoming, and reminded Vi of the one night she had spent with her Cupcake, right before the world ended. A warm feeling overcame her as she stretched herself out on the bed. Everything about Caitlyn grounded her, reassured her.
"Oh! You're awake! I hope I didn't leave you waiting for too long." Caitlyn stepped into the room just before Vi could get lost in her emotions, a covered tray in her hands.
"No, no... I just woke up, I..." Vi struggled to sit up as the room spun all around her. "What time is it?"
"It's the evening, the sun is setting. You were only out for a couple of hours I think." Caitlyn looked out the window. "I stayed with you for a while, I just left to have dinner with my parents. I told them that you're here but I said you were not feeling well so you wouldn't have to join us... Figured it might be best for everybody if you had some time to get settled first." She put the tray down on the mudstained blankets. "Brought you some food, if you're not feeling as sick anymore." she said softly, testing the temperature of her forehead with her hand, only to pull it back with haste.
"I- I can't complain." Vi stuttered. She wanted to tell Caitlyn how the warmth of her hand had made it all better somehow. She wanted to confess how all she desired was to go back to that moment, to lay her entire body in her hands and never be let go, to just melt under her fingetips and never part again. "Just a bit dizzy is all."
"Perhaps a shower?" Caitlyn suggested.
Vi gave her a panicked look.
"Don't worry, I have an en-suite. You won't have to talk to anyone." she reassured her.
"What's an onsuit?" Vi turned her head to the side in confusion, picturing some sort of Piltiover invisibility cloak.
"An en-suite. It's like a bathroom that you can only access through the bedroom, right there." Caitlyn pointed at a door on the opposite side of the window with a chuckle. "Don't worry, I'll show you how everything works.
She offered Vi a hand but she chose to push herself off the bed while clinging to a pillar of the canopy. The raging hangover had made her steps less secure than usual, but she managed to hold her own. Slowly, she followed Caitlyn through the small door. The bathroom was almost aggressively bright and polished, with golden refinements on every knob and every handle, and miriads of vials and bottles of various colours emanating the sweetest scents. Just as she took in all that perfection, she noticed how Caitlyn had frozen still beside her, staring at the giant mirror in front of them.
"What's up, Cupcake?" she whispered.
Caitlyn hesitated. "This is where..." she stuttered, her voice shaking "This is where Jinx... That night... I never even set foot in here after that night."
"Right in this room?" Vi asked in a worried tone "You ok?"
Caitlyn shook her head violently, then nodded. "It's okay. I've just been avoiding it, but somehow today i didn't even think about it when I entered. I guess it's about time." she said.
She walked over to the shower and activated a small, ornate lever, causing a strong jet of steamy water to gush down. She stepped closer, pulling her sleeve up to test the water with her wirst. "Seems just perfect to me!" she said "Do you like it this warm?"
Vi looked down to the marble-tiled floor, clenching her fists. "I don't remember, honestly." Her voice was full of bitterness. "All those years in Stillwater... I kind of forgot that warm showers are a thing."
"Oh..." Caitlyn said quietly. She felt the urge to walk over to Vi and hold her, in an attempt to offer her comfort in some way, but she knew that it couldn't be undone. Instead, she reached out with her fingers to touch her clenched first as she spoke: "I'm sorry, I should have thought about this."
"Don't worry about it cupcake, I'm still working on the realization that I am finally out here myself." Vi shrugged it off, ignoring her touch. "This is more than I could ever ask for. Onsuit." She chuckled.
"En-suite you moron." said Caitlyn with a snicker, walking away towards the door. "I'll give you some privacy now. Just knock on the door if you need anything, my father might get agitated if you yell."
"Don't go" Vi thought. But she stayed quiet as the door closed.
The lights around her were so bright Vi had to wince her eyes to see anything. She felt strangely faint, as though something was seeping the life force from her. The divine smell of the steam coming over from the shower, however, called her back to her senses and reeled her into reality. "Hot, clean water..." she marvelled. Inhaling the enticing vapor she clumsily started peeling the dirty clothes off her body, scattering them on the floor with her muddy footprints. Only her recently aquired jacket was carefully placed onto a golden credenza by the door, which she then held on to while making her way to the shower. The hot water felt like a blessing onto her skin, so much she almost didn't notice how the washed-off dirt and grease from the undercity burnt in her wounds. Her entire body was covered in a thick layer of grime, blood and dust, even her hair was soaked in the sticky mixture. Vi breathed in deeply, filling her lungs to the brim with purified topside air, until a sudden pain in her side made her flinch. She looked down to her waist to see a large bruise bulging through her skin, right where Sevika had stabbed her weeks ago. She could never forget that night.
"Fuck" she whispered. The skin on top of the bruise looked thin and almost see-through, and when she laid her hand on top of it she felt it burning up even hotter than the water that was still thundering down on her. "What the fuck is this?" she said to herself, carefully pressing into the mass only to wince in pain. She sighed and carried on scrubbing the back of her head with her fingertips until she saw a little glass window in the shower that was all fogged up from the steam. Curious, she limped over to it, only to discover it was the door of a small cabinet in the wall. Holding herself up with one hand against the wall, Vi traced a line onto the glass, then another, until she had drawn what looked like a box with an eccentric hairstyle. "Cupcake" she thought. Looking over her shoulder as if she was doing something forbidden she carefully pulled the tiny door open and picked up a soap bar. As she ran it over her neck and shoulder, a familiar smell invaded her conciousness. It was Caitlyn. Caitlyn's soap. Inside Caitlyn's shower. Why did she feel like she wanted to disappear into that feeling?
Even after all their misadventures, Caitlyn was just another Topside girl, with a perfect marble bathroom and silky bedsheets. A councilor's daughter at that. Vi was but an unwelcome intrudor in this world, a stain on the carpet that ruined the picture, a fly in the soup. She shook her head and put the soap back in the cabinet. "Why lie to myself?" she thought "She may have feeling for me but... In this world? We can't change the way things are."
She lifted her face towards the stream of water and closed her eyes as the droplets ran down her face and concealed her emotions. Although the water in Piltover tasted of nothing like Zaun's, Vi's tears were just as salty in either world, and they burnt all the same, no matter how hard she tried to hold them back.

Vi wrapped her body into one of the candid towels that had been left for her and carefully walked back into the bedroom, her heartbeat racing inside her chest. Caitlyn had changed the bedsheets and was sitting in the middle of the room where she had laid out some papers on the ground around her. "Are you done? You look a little better. Come over here, I won't hurt you." she assured, noticing her insecurity.

"Hey Cupcake? Did you say your dad's a doctor?" Vi asked hesitantly.
"He is, he is a surgeon. Why? I do have painkillers if you need any." Caitlyn reassured her.
"It's not that" Vi's voice was faint, her legs weak under the weight of her body "There's something wrong with my stomach, right where I was stabbed..."

"Let me have a look. I did have medical education at the military academy" Caitlyn said in a strict tone. She sat Vi down on a low velvet stool and kneeled beside her, grabbing the brim of her towel softly, but with confidence. "I'll have to pull this up so I can see, you can hold it with your hand to cover yourself." she firmly spoke, trying to convince herself that the girl who she cared about more than she liked to admit was just another wounded soldier.

"Medical education... all this fuss just to see my tats? You could have asked, you know?" As opposed to her stern companion, Vi just barely managed to hide her lingering insecurity behind her jokes, her voice much higher pitched than usual. She loosened her grip on the towel, tugging it tight against her chest and thighs.

Caitlyn played along, sensing her discomfort. "Shut up, you prick! I wouldn't have known you had any with all that dirt you carried around on your skin. Hard to tell how much of it actually comes off." she countered.

"Do you even know what you're doing?" Vi asked mockingly.

"My father is a doctor, he tried to push me into a medical division when I started military training. Thought it was way too dangerous for me out in the field." Caitlyn explained as she lifted the edge of the towel to get a better look at her bruise, softly pushing into it with her fingertips. Vi flinched under her touch.

"Am I hurting you?" Caitlyn asked, pulling back.

"You're making me whole" Vi thought, but then she heard herself scoff "I've had worse doctors" instead. "Don't be stupid" she reminded herself "It's like oil and water. No need to get any more feelings involved." In the meantime, Caitlyn had sat back on the floor with a worried expression, her eyebrows pulled together firmly.

"I think we might want to talk to my father," she slowly said "this looks like a bad infection." in her head, however, she knew this was an understatement. "It looks as though it might kill you. It definitely would have killed you out in the streets." a little voice in her mind continued.