claws in your back

Heat, tender and aching, blooms in the space between Vi’s jaw and cheekbones. Without lifting her fingers to hover above the spot, she knows the warmth of the bruise would radiate to her fingertips. 

Tonight was a fucking rough one. Just the latest in a string of misfortune and not even worth tending to the slew of new cuts, aches and bruises. Impossible, too, given the dizziness that follows her like some sort of liquid is sloshing around in her skull. The impression of a fist to her cheek is what hurts the most, anyway.

One shot of whiskey dulls the sense of it. A second eases the sting, and a third…well, a third does fuck-all, so she plummets down to the sixth and the pain finally lessens up a bit. 

Physical pain, at least.

The mental shit? No fucking dice. Nothing can pull the pain out of her heart or the pressure off of her ribs or ease up guilt that wracks her mind. But she can blur her world. Distort it, tilt it on it’s axis until she can’t tell if she’s on the floor or if the whole room has just shifted forty-five degrees. With every drink, she breaks her world a little more. Gravity becomes heavier, words hit her ears much slower, and faces separate and morph together. 

At least there’s something familiar about ruining her world. She’d like to consider herself somewhat of an expert on it. 

Couldn’t save Powder, couldn’t stop Jinx. Couldn’t help Cait, couldn’t stop Piltover from bringing the hammer of martial fucking law down to Zaun. 

These days when she takes a hit, she can’t even get back up.

Vander would be disappointed.

Bracing her hands on the rusted sink of her apartment, she looks into the mirror and decides, no.

He’d be disgusted.

Vi is not a daughter or a sister or a partner or a leader. She is nobody. 

And when that bell rings out in the pit and all she can feel the rage hammering in her chest and the staggering emptiness in her gut, she wonders if she’s even human, too. Even when her victory is announced, she can’t seem to pull back from walloping her opponent for at least another thirty seconds. A snarling, thrashing animal born from her chest and unwilling to be caged so soon.

Power, fleeting, barely-there power, can be taken back in quick hits and right hooks. A type of control that lasts only for the quick minutes she’s in the ring. At least the crowd is entertained, at least a few coins come her way. At least her suffering is good for a show.

Blood that pools out of the cuts on her face and the bruises that mottle her skin are the only proof she has that she is alive. There is still something, no matter how twisted and awful, beating inside of her. Pain becomes her only tether to life, to humanity. 

With the pain she’s caused everyone else, she can’t say she deserves that much. So she drinks until the pain goes away, and the cycle repeats. 

Punch. Give pain, get pain. Victory. Decide that pain isn’t enough, get more pain. Vomit. Pain is too human to feel. Drink. Lose. Pass out. Repeat. 

Life is better this way, deep in the Fissures with nameless bodies around her. Crowds coming and going, never cursing themselves by getting attached to her. Roaring in the stands, demanding more. 

And she can give them more. More of the awful, savage beast inside of her that corrupts, destroys, kills. They eat it up, they applaud the nothingness and the total waste of her.

Loris leaves, eventually. Fine by her. One less person to worry about, one less person whose life is significantly worse off for having collided into hers. She can’t remember what she said to him that finally got him to piss off. Can’t even recall the feeling of opening her jaw and spewing nasty words at him. Or picking herself up off the metal stairs and limping back to her shit stain of an apartment. All she remembers is that Loris leaving hurt less than the butt of a rifle shoved into her stomach.

Everything does.

Blue eyes burned with resentment as they looked down on her. Having finally realized that Vi could never, would never be the person she needs. Vi wasted her time by trying, and Caitlyn wasted hers with an impossible ask.

Doomed from the start.

They both knew better. Knew what she was incapable of doing. But they still gave it a fucking shot.

She screams. Into the punching bag, into the toilet bowl. The mirror echos it back at her, the ceiling offers a desolate drip in response. Black dye to covers up the person she failed to be. It’s not meant to go on her face—she doesn’t need a shiny box with fancy warnings to tell her that. It burns the first time she does it and every time after, too. She binds, wrapping the bandages tight around her ribs and her chest. Helps her fight better, hurts to breathe. More pain in the fodder.

Vi is just another fighter in the pit, punching her way to the top. Until the booze and the bruises and the blood all catch up with her and there isn’t a familiar face in the crowd. Her injuries get more severe, take longer to heal.  Her injuries are getting more extensive, taking longer to heal. 

Storyline is nothing new. Newcomer comes in, topples a few longstanding favorites. Crowd goes wild, calls it an underdog story. Within a few months, the newcomer becomes the toppled, discarded thing. People wise up enough to stop betting on a losing dog, and it gets harder to afford enough alcohol to numb it all.

Muscles aching, face throbbing, she doesn’t make it to her bed. Bandages and sweat stick to her skin like stains to the rotting floor below her.

Her end is near. It feels a whole lot like nothing, like pit of darkness just beyond her fingertips. Maybe not tonight, but soon. Her life, in all of it’s pathetic undoing, will end. Knowing this doesn’t scare her or shock the anger and sorrow from her system. She doesn’t run towards it either, she lets it come to her because she’s quit chasing what she wants.

Consciousness slips from her open palms.

***

Jinx finds her. Vi isn’t all that shocked. She couldn’t get away with living in the Undercity—the place they used to run around and call home, without Jinx knowing about it. 

Saving that kids life must’ve meant something, with the way Jinx lets her life undisturbed for so long. Or maybe her slow destruction was just what Jinx wanted all along. Revenge for the slap, the tea party, the Grey, the fight.

Until Jinx lets herself in, swearing some bullshit about Vander. 

Could be another trap, but unless Jinx is planning to kill her, Vi is useless. She doesn’t have any insight on how far the Council will go to bring her to justice. She thought she did—she thought she knew the very limits that Caitlyn would be willing to go, but she had been wrong. And Caitlyn doesn’t want her, doesn’t hold concern for her, so there isn’t any benefit to Jinx kidnapping her and using her as leverage. What a waste of everyone’s time.

Worst hangover of her life, but she’s got nothing better to do, so she follows. She follows and she lets some of her resentment boil over, she doesn’t try to understand anymore, doesn’t make excuses. All of that ugliness in her is out in the open now, so she poises her words to match the pain in her rotted heart. Pulls Jinx’s hair, tackles her to the ground, that victory bell is about to sound when—

Her arm. Sharp pain through the bandages, right on an open cut. Instinctively she throws her arm back and then…

The kid. Smacked to the ground. Bloody face.

That was all her. The monstrous, rotten, decaying thing that she’s become. Jinx should look at Vi with disgust, retaliate, hit her harder. Take the kid leave Vi to find her way out of the tunnels herself.

She doesn’t.

A do-over, she offers instead.

He’s your father too, she says.

The numbness lain over her heart thins and pain breaks through. It almost feels new, for all of the punching and liquor it’s been buried under. 

How Jinx can look at her now and offer this tentative…truce, or whatever the hell it is, Vi can’t understand. Can’t untangle the mess that’s been made between the two of them, who’s more right or who’s more wrong. But Jinx offers this, despite it all, and looks at Vi almost like…

They’re sisters.

Until Vander finds them in the tunnel and Vi finds herself a daughter again, too. 

***

The commune is…promising. It’s nice to be in the sun without being Topside, and it’s nice to walk around freely without finding wanted posters with Jinx’s face all over them. 

She feels it. Her heart. Thumping, beating in her chest. No longer numb.

There are three people for her to protect now. Maybe it’s that sense of purpose that reduces the growling, demanding void inside of her. Isha isn’t afraid of her, which speaks more to the kids sense of self-preservation than anything, Jinx tolerates her and Vander recognizes her. Despite everything that’s become of her.

Viktor can heal him. It’ll take time. Vi is an impatient, restless person but she finds this is a wait she can withstand. He already looks much more…lucid after their first session. 

And the commune is actually pretty welcoming. There is food for them to eat, water to drink and bathe with, beds to sleep in. 

Huck makes a pointed comment about no alcohol, which Vi ought to smack him for, but she doesn’t. The way he says it brings about a pinch of shame, reminding her of the state her sister found her in. Pathetic, bruised and alone at the bottom of a bottle. Weak. She’d never want Vander or Isha to see her like that, either.

So she doesn’t mind being booze free. Not with warm light on her skin and the sounds of people working peacefully around them. She won’t say it out loud but she finds herself in awe of the community around them. It’s like…like a—

A balm. Viktor has…healed these people. In ways Vi didn’t even know was possible. They stare at her, of course they do, but there is something…gentle to it. They know about pain. Suffering. Heartbreak. They look at her with fondness. Reminiscing, maybe, of a time when they were as lost as her. She nods at them, some of them look familiar even if she can’t place a name to the face, and wanders about the place.

She catches a glimpse of herself. Some shiny jug at her feet, she kneels down to get a better look at it. The image of herself is distorted because of the shape of the damn thing, but the sight of herself unnerves her. The last she’d seen of reflection was through the broken glass of her mirror. Pale, sweaty from having just heaved up her savings in booze, tear tracks pushing black dye down her face.

In the Herald’s Commune, Vi looks…better. Less dye on her face, a natural flush from eating again, cuts and bruises mending themselves. She looks more alive, at least. No longer wasting away or letting that cracked, dried thing behind her ribs consume her inside and out.

Still different. From the person she was before she put on that stupid fucking badge. And different from the rest of the people in the commune. They’re so…at peace. Content. Safe. Happy. 

Vi wonders if peace like that is possible for someone like her, someone so far gone. She wonders if the Commune imagines it for her too, and that’s why they stare so damn much.  Thinking about it for too long makes her feel funny. Something crawling under her skin, pricking up the hairs on the back of her neck.

 She doesn’t need healing the way Huck did or the way Vander does. She doesn’t want that. It’s not her.

But when Viktor proposes Jinx use her talents to help them keep building, she figures he might be onto something.

“What if we stayed?” She asks, when it’s just her, Jinx, Isha and what remains of the place they grew up. “Helped them out?”

“We?” Jinx returns.

It isn’t a no. It feels closer to an agreement than anything else. Vi looks around them, the grass beneath their feet and the flowers just within reach. Jinx could help them build anything. More homes, fortifications, whatever. Vi thinks she can help too. She has to be good for something more than hurting.

Security needs to be tightened up. It’s only a matter of time before word of this place reaches Topside, so they’ll need to prepare themselves. She can train people. Vander can too, after a few more sessions with Viktor. Plus there’s shit she can learn to do, too. It can’t be that hard to help these people;

To carve a space out in the earth for the four of them to live together and call it home.

But of course, 

Nothing good can last.

Two gemstones loaded into a gun, triggered by small and quiet hands, cause the world to shift, collapse, fade to red.