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A blast rocks the room, and Caitlyn is thrown off her feet.
She is not unused to being upended. She’s spent her whole life at the mercy of gravity, falling and falling and getting back up and falling again. She spent her most formative years getting knocked around, throwing strikes and receiving them until her head starts spinning and the world begins to look much more unsteady than it had before. None of that ever stopped her from jumping up again, from continuing her training, from protecting those she loves the most in this world. Nothing has ever been able to keep her down for long, not even the greatest horrors of this mortal realm.
Today, though, she is slow to get up.
Her fingers scramble for purchase in the rubble, pebbles and debris blasted too small for her digits to recognize as wall. She tears her head up, vertebrae screaming under the scorched skin of her neck, and with each movement upwards she finds a new way to feel pain. She can feel the weight of her rifle at her back, a weight she could never really feel before after years of carrying it, and it feels like her own Sisyphean stone, destined one day to crush her.
Perhaps today is the day, she thinks as her brain struggles to unfog itself, her thoughts drowning in the ringing of her ears.
She still hears gunshots, though. So many gunshots. They echo all around her, swallowed up and spit back out louder by the granite walls of the catacombs they fight in, home to the oldest of Piltover’s dead. She thinks she can feel them around her, the ghosts of the long forgotten waiting with held breath to see if she will be the next to join them.
She grits her teeth and forces herself to her knees, ignoring the blinding pain that shoots through her thigh.
She will not join them. Not today.
Not if she has anything to say about it.
She struggles. The fight to get to her feet takes eons, though in actuality it was probably on a few seconds. Everything slows down to bullet time in a fight, and she and the other women of the OCS know all too well from one too many tight battles fought in even tighter spaces. She grunts, eyes snapping up as she removes her closest weapon, the glock from her thigh holster. She winces as she sees blood just below it, painting the black material of her modest pants even blacker. Everything in her body screams at her to just reach around for her rifle, but she still has limited mobility. Better a smaller weapon than none at all.
She hears the faint shuffle of footsteps behind her and turns, firing without warning or hesitation. The bullet sings home, albeit not as gracefully as it would when leaving her rifle, exiting out the back of some poor Shimmered’s head. She swears the spray is more fluorescent pink than bloodred, but that may have just been Shimmer buildup in the system from overuse.
(Or her imagination. Or both.)
“Caitlyn!”
Caitlyn’s head snaps to the side, to where Ahri is sprawled on the ground, kicking her laced boots against the dust- and debris-covered floor in desperation as a Shimmered holds the crown of her head between its straining fingers, tilting her back to expose the long line of her screaming throat.
He lifts a knife and she fires again, aiming first for his arm to send the knife and his bone flying, then again between his eyes. She blows him a new socket and he falls limp over Ahri, spilling blood into her face.
She sputters, but only enough to clear her nose and mouth of the viscera. She kicks his body off her, moving the massive man with ease, and turns to grab her gun immediately.
Caitlyn’s eyes take in the scene in an instant. Where once there was a catacomb wall beside them, sturdy and dirt-caked from the millennia, now there is only a giant hole, through which the Shimmered seem never-ending. These people—if they can even be called people anymore, so lost to the demon drug that they are emotionally, mentally, and physically unrecognizable—look on at the girl of the OCS with bloodthirsty malice as Caitlyn’s sisters fight and fight and fight against their onslaught.
She sees Ahri run back into the fray, shooting down Shimmered after Shimmered, leaving them in her grimacing wake. Senna levels her heavyweight gun at the nearest adversary and blows a hole in his gut big enough for Caitlyn to fit her hand through. Sarah growls from the shoulders of a particularly slow Shimmered, levels both of her guns at his temples, and gives him matching bullet holes. She sees—
Well, she doesn’t see—
A flurry of bullets flies by her on her left, and she just barely ducks out of the way before they make their home in her ribs. She fires in the general direction they came from and prays to her Lord that they hit something fleshy and alive.
She grits her teeth as she finds herself back-to-back with Akali, her fingers full of kunai sharp enough to cut paper just by being in its general vicinity. She fires at the Shimmered in front of her, and Akali does the same, each girl watching the other’s back like the OCS has done for centuries.
“Where in God’s name is Vi?” Caitlyn hisses as she reloads, quick as a flash.
Akali throws a knife, the metal sailing through the air, its glint just visible out of the corner of Caitlyn’s eye. She hopes it, too, meets its mark. “She’s still in the chamber. Seraphine is covering her exit.”
Caitlyn wastes no time raising her gun once again, taking down two Shimmered with one shot, the bullet flying through one skull then another in tandem. This gun grows more and more foreign in her hands with each shot, so it isn’t long until she’s reaching for her rifle. She uses the cover Akali provides her as an opportunity to strap the glock back down and haul the rifle off her shoulder, taking precious seconds to unfold it and fill the chamber with bullets.
As soon as everything is in place, she raises the scope to her eye, the light press of it comforting against her face. She sees each Shimmered, then, like she had not before, landing bullet after bullet in skull after skull, chest after chest, femoral after femoral. She feels Akali peel off her back, running off back into the siege, but she needs no cover now. She’s a killing machine, feeling God at her hand each time she carefully maneuvers the rifle, each twitch of her finger against the trigger blessed.
It took her a long time for her to reconcile murder with her God. When she was a child, she could barely shoot cans with her mother’s borrowed rifle, so terrified at the prospect that that little cylinder of aluminum could be replaced by someone’s pleading eyes and to some it would pose no difference. She hesitated on the trigger for years, so much so that her mother had to help her pull it often times just so she could get her practice in at the edge of the Kiramman estate.
“There is no room for hesitation when you are defending yourself,” Cassandra had said to her so many times, voice firm but understanding. “When you hold a gun, it holds you as well. Do not let it collect dust in your hands.”
In her adulthood, she took that guidance almost too literally. Some days she swears she’ll wear the metal right off her trigger. Some days, it feels like every one of her targets is a tin can; nothing soft, nothing alive.
It’s easier that way. It hollows her out, removes the collateral damage from the strangest job in the entire world.
It convinces her that nothing hurts. Not even her.
She feels a huge hand grab her leg—her bad leg at that—and suddenly the scope is wrenched from her face as she falls to the ground. She lets out a shrill noise, not quite a screech (since she has been in worse spots and never screamed before) but still something desperate, something startled. Her head spins again as she punches frantically, waiting for her fists to meet something unstable, but her blows are only met by solid muscle, pustulated with pink veins. She reaches for her thigh holster, the rifle having skittered away from her seconds ago, but a hand slaps her hand away, trapping it above her head. Her terrified eyes catch the barest glimpse of brown in this Shimmered’s, a faint glow of humanity underneath a disc of unnatural pink, but there is nothing humane in his gaze now.
He drives his fingers into the wound on her leg, and this time she really cries out, the echo of it pitched and horrified in the acoustics of their razed chamber. She can feel his hot breath, metallic with blood and the chemical scent of Shimmer, puff over her face as he reaches for a long, thick serrated knife at his side. It makes a sharp, punctuated noise as it exits its sheath, and she hears someone cry out her name again.
She watches him raise it up, bracing for pain, or death, or God.
What she feels instead is warmth.
She feels the blast of hot air before she sees the wall open up in its familiar writhing, amber way. A body erupts from the wall, not through a blast hole but from nothing like a ghost, and slams into Caitlyn’s assailant, muscular arms wrapping around his torso to take him down as efficiently and as quickly as possible. Caitlyn immediately reaches for her gun, barely giving herself enough time to catch her breath before she shoots upright, leg screaming as she bends it to take proper aim.
What she finds instead of a hurtling, angry Shimmered barreling back towards her, is the familiar plane of broad shoulders, white tank top slick with sweat. She watches short pink hair, unrestrained by a habit, flutter in the warm wind that kicked up in the cavern upon her arrival, the roll of her neck as she stands with her foot planet on the chest of the Shimmered, Divinium knuckles glowing blue as they clutch around an even larger Divinium sword.
The Halo glows like holy fire through the back of her shirt, settled between defined deltoids, like the eye of God looking right into Caitlyn’s soul.
The Shimmered raises his head up towards Vi, her Warrior Nun, and spits.
“Hail Silco,” he grunts.
Caitlyn can’t see Vi’s face from this angle, especially not while the fray escalates around them, but she watches her right fingers flex. A nervous habit, Caitlyn has come to notice over the many months since Vi took up the burden, that precedes hellfire.
“Yeah,” Vi says, pulling the man up by the lapel of his shirt, not even bothered by the massive weight of his trunk. “I don’t think so.”
She sheathes the sword, curls those fingers into a tight fist, and punches his lights out.
She doesn’t stop at one. She punches and punches and punches until the man—no, the Shimmered, he is not a man any longer, Caitlyn knows that—is nearly unrecognizable, face splintered and leaking blood from every orifice. Another Shimmered rushes her from behind but Caitlyn nails him with two bullets, one to the side of the neck and one to the head. A sloppy job, but she’ll take it.
Vi’s head snaps up, and for the first time Caitlyn can see the glint of the Halo’s aura in her irises, gold ringing gray as her face turns wild. When she sees it’s only Caitlyn, though, her expression softens. Over Vi’s shoulder, Senna takes down two more Shimmered in succession, and now that she has gotten her bearings back under her, she can see that only a few Shimmered remain among the littered bodies of their compatriots.
Those few dwindle down to none as Vi lets off a pulse of golden energy, sending most of the remaining Shimmered flying into walls and the ends of waiting knives. Those who did not immediately meet their end at that point were knocked prone enough for the other nuns to finish them off.
Vi walks over to her, kicking bodies and swiping necks with her sword to make sure all of the Shimmered around them were dead as she makes her way over to Caitlyn, the wild expression on her face bleeding into relief. That relief, to Caitlyn’s dismay, turns to a smirk when she looks down at Caitlyn, still prone on the floor with her leg shaking from pain.
She folds her arms as the other members of the OCS regroup, sweeping the area for any stragglers, and leans down to meet Caitlyn’s steely face.
“Need a hand there, Cupcake?” she muses, and the way she says it—that horrid, condescending way she always does when Caitlyn is around—makes Caitlyn’s blood boil.
“I do not,” she spits, struggling to get to her feet. “I’m perfectly capable of getting up on my own, thank you very much.”
As soon as she puts pressure on her wounded leg, though, she stumbles.
Strong arms catch her, and Caitlyn feels her cheeks flame, though she doesn’t quite know why. She’s always like this when Vi is around—sputtering, stumbling, frustrated. Even now, as warm hands encircle her upper arms and thick wraps of muscle strain to keep her upright, she finds herself full of a fire that she cannot explain, one that isn’t so easily identified or doused.
When she looks up at Vi again and sees that shit-eating grin stretching wide across her face, she could venture a guess as to what that fire might be.
“What was that?” Vi asks, and she is overtaken by the desperate need to smack that grin right off her face.
Before she gets the chance to retort, she hears someone beside her yell, “Caitlyn! Vi!”
Caitlyn looks over to see Seraphine, the youngest member of the Piltover branch of the OCS, running over to meet them. Her eyes are wide and frantic, not yet hardened by her position quite yet. Caitlyn almost envies her.
“You’re hurt,” she says, immediately removing bandages from her back. She gets to work wrapping Caitlyn’s leg up to staunch the bleeding as Vi holds her up. “This will hold, but you’ll need medical attention.”
“What’s your order, Caitlyn?” Sarah asks, sidling up with them as all of the OCS members regroup in the center of the cavern.
Caitlyn winces as the cloth is pulled taught over her wound. Her eyes flicker up to Vi, who is still holding onto her like she might pass out if she lets go (which, to be fair, she might.) Vi’s expression is inscrutable, but her eyes flicker over Caitlyn’s face with precision, letting her know that despite her thickheadedness, she’s probably listening just as intently as the other girls.
“Is the mission complete?” she asks Vi. “Is the shipment destroyed?”
She watches Vi swallow, and she isn’t quite sure why she hesitates. Still, after a moment of staring back at Caitlyn, she says, “Done and done. Not a trace of Shimmer left down here.”
Caitlyn nods. “Good. Then let's get out of here as quickly and quietly as possible. Because of that blast, there is no way the authorities won’t be crawling around this site within the hour. Stay together, and keep your heads down.”
The other nuns nod, and as they begin to file out of the corridor, weapons still raised as they clear the path forward, Caitlyn looks back at Vi. She isn’t grinning anymore, that much Caitlyn is thankful for, but she does look bemused as she watches Caitlyn shuffle her leg underneath her, testing the waters to see what kind of pain her body is willing to handle while still remaining upright. Whether she can still get out of this while walking on her own two feet.
Her leg screams in pain and buckles slightly again, so the answer to that particular question is a definitive no.
“Come on, Caitlyn,” Vi says. “Let me get you out of here. I don’t want you to hurt yourself even more.”
“Excuse me,” Caitlyn’s nostrils flare. “I did not hurt myself. As you can imagine, someone else was trying very hard to hurt me.”
Vi winces. “Jeez, Cucpake, didn’t mean it like that.”
“Then please,” Caitlyn huffs. “Next time, think before you open your mouth, alright?”
“If I agree to keep my mouth shut, will you please let me get you out of here?”
Caitlyn, eyebrows pinched in frustration, searches her expression for any hint of a joke, any inkling that Vi may not be taking this mission seriously, as she has with missions in the past. All she finds in those gray eyes is intense focus, grave seriousness, and maybe, maybe a hint of pleased mirth at having Caitlyn in her arms.
Something about that stare makes her legs wobble, but she writes that off as blood loss.
“Fine,” she huffs, winding her arms around Vi’s neck. She can feel how soft the hairs at the nape of her neck are, though she’s not really sure what her brain plans to do with that information.
Vi breaks out into a grin once again. She scoops an arm under her legs and says, “Up you go!”
Suddenly, Caitlyn is being cradled against a solid, supple chest, her head leaning against the front dip of Vi’s shoulder. Caitlyn gasps as she’s moved, half from the pain and half from the sudden feeling of being pressed against another person so closely, their bodies perfectly aligned as Vi begins to walk with her like she weighs nothing at all.
She can feel the beat of Vi’s heart, strong and unwavering. Vi radiates a warmth that she has never felt from another woman, and part of Caitlyn wonders absentmindedly if that’s because of the Halo’s holy energy coursing through her veins or if it is in fact her natural body temperature. As Caitlyn tries to keep her breathing even and steady, she can’t help but notice that Vi’s skin smells like the standard soap from the OCS showers, but also smells like something sharp, something spicy and woody that Caitlyn can’t quite place.
Her head spins, and she tries her best to put those overanalytical thoughts aside as Vi carries her through various corridors, talking with the other members of the OCS briefly as they clear out different areas to maintain security.
Her words are strong. Sincere. Level-headed. This Vi is a far cry from the Vi Caitlyn met just six months ago, on what was likely one of the worst days of her life.
Still, Vi is an imbecile. Caitlyn knows that, has known it since the moment Vi stepped foot on their hallowed ground, carrying a weapon in her back that was never supposed to be hers. She’s rash, unpredictable, and has an angry streak deep enough and hot enough to rival Silco himself. She doesn’t look before she leaps, and it has resulted in injuries. Deaths.
Vi is a hard woman. Caitlyn can feel it even now: the rough press of her calloused hands, the strength of her build, the curve of her muscles. She was built for a world that did not show her kindness, and Vi in turn didn’t offer it any kindness either. It’s a wonder how her skin can feel this soft, this supple as Caitlyn rests her cheek against it, her spinning head lolling just inches away from the greatest gift God ever thought to bestow on them, a weight that Caitlyn herself was offered and refused.
She can’t imagine it. That weight. That power, which takes so long to harness and requires so, so much sacrifice.
If she could just get her head out of the dirt, Caitlyn thinks as her eyelids grow heavy, barely registering that Vi is jostling her form, begging her to stay awake, she could be the best Warrior Nun this world has ever seen.