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It’s late. The clock on Caitlyn’s office wall is telling her that she should have finished up here hours ago. Jayce and Viktor are coming for dinner tonight; they might have already arrived. Vi can entertain them for a while, but Caitlyn should really get downstairs soon. The reports on her desk have been piling up for weeks, though, and if she doesn’t get some of them sent out tonight, they won’t get signed off in time for the next council meeting, which means they’ll have to delay the next Piltover-Zaun treaty signing for another month, and then—
She hears the click of her office door opening and whips her head around to face the doorway. She hates that the door is on her blind side, now, but she can’t bring herself to rearrange the furniture in here. This was her mother’s office, once, and in a way Caitlyn still feels like a kid playing with her mother’s stuff.
“Hey,” Jayce says gently, stepping into the room. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. Should have knocked.”
She makes a face, trying to calm her pounding heart. She’s been so much jumpier these past few months, since the war with Noxus. The massive blind spot and the nightmares that sometimes follow her into the waking world haven’t helped.
“I’m fine,” she says, brushing off Jayce’s apology. “Sorry, I must have missed the doorbell when you guys arrived.”
Jayce grins. “Too deep in your paperwork, Councilor Kiramman?”
She groans and pushes aside the stack of papers she was focused on. “If you would join the council again, Mr. Talis, maybe you could take some of this paperwork off of my hands.”
He laughs and shakes his head, holding his hands up in surrender. “No, we saw how that went last time. I’d rather spend my time in the academy labs, thanks. Besides, I haven’t been very popular with the council or with the citizens since I came out in support of, you know, not having Viktor thrown into Stillwater or executed.”
Caitlyn sighs, not wanting to be reminded of the sticky political situation she’s working to untangle. Despite everything, Viktor is still something of a symbol in Zaun, and with tentative peace being brokered between the two now-independent nations, having Viktor arrested or killed as a martyr would be a disaster for Piltover, which is the only thing that has kept Viktor safe these past months. Jayce and Viktor have mostly been laying low, holed up in a wing of the academy with a lab and living quarters. Jayce has sworn to Caitlyn that they’re not working on anything that could trigger another apocalypse, and she prays to their long years of friendship that he’s right.
Mel visits them often, too, disappearing into their academy wing for days at a time. As the heir to the Noxian throne, though, she can rarely stay for long. She is constantly traveling, trying to secure peace between Noxus and its many, many enemies. Caitlyn doesn’t envy her that paperwork.
She watches as Jayce crosses her small office and sits down in one of the armchairs by the bookcase, groaning softly as he carefully stretches out his left leg and rests it on a low ottoman.
“How is it?” she asks, nodding at his leg. The metal brace glints in the low light of the office.
He shrugs. “Could be worse. The doctors at the academy clinic gave me some stretches to do.”
She raises an eyebrow. “And have you been doing them? Or have you gotten so busy you ‘forget’ to?”
He snorts. “You’re one to talk. We’ve been ready for dinner for hours and you’re still up here doing paperwork.”
She chucks a pencil at him and he ducks, laughing as it lands on the floor beside him and rolls off under the bookcase.
“Yes, I’ve been doing them. It gives me an excuse to remind Viktor to do his physical therapy, too.”
Caitlyn rolls her eyes (eye, she reminds herself) and smiles at him. “Of course that’s what gets you to remember. The two of you would fall apart without each other.”
Jayce gets a vaguely distant look for a second, seeing something Caitlyn can’t imagine. “You don’t know how true that is,” he says eventually.
Jayce has told her some of what happened that day, when Noxus attacked with Viktor-who-wasn’t-Viktor. Most of it sounds too surreal to be true, travel through time and space. But whatever happened, the two of them returned… changed. Viktor had shed his inhuman form, but he and Jayce still seem—otherworldly, at times. Sometimes, Jayce is the same man that Caitlyn grew up with, her well-meaning big brother with big dreams and an even bigger heart. And sometimes, he is something… else. Somewhere else.
But she knows that she has changed, too. Ambessa changed her. War changed her. Vi changed her—for the better, she thinks, but still. She is not the same little girl that Jayce watched grow up.
So she’s grateful that they can still have this. A quiet evening, chatting about work and about life, both of their partners downstairs, waiting for them to come down and join them for dinner. It’s almost idyllic, if you didn’t look too closely at the details. Caitlyn can almost imagine it, another reality, where neither of them ever strayed from the path that her mother had imagined for them. Where they both married House Kiramman-approved, politically-valuable matches, and had quiet dinners with their quiet spouses—Caitlyn snorts. Vi and Viktor are many things, but quiet is not one of them.
“What about you?” Jayce asks, tilting his head, watching her disappear into her own mental somewhere-else.
“What about me?” she asks.
He reaches up and touches his cheek, just under his left eye. “How’s the eye?” he asks.
She reaches up to mirror his gesture, and realizes only in that moment that she isn’t wearing her eyepatch. She only ever takes it off in private—other than her doctors, she’s fairly certain only Vi has seen her with it off. And Jayce, now. She reaches for it, where it lies discarded on her desk, but doesn’t put it back on.
If anyone can see her without her defenses up, it’s Jayce.
She lets the eyepatch fall to her lap and shrugs. “Well, it’s gone, is what it is,” she says. The damage to her eye was too severe—her doctors had to remove what was left of it. She knows it’s not a pretty sight without the eyepatch, a pink emptiness behind her drooping eyelid. She could have a glass eye, but the first time she tried to press the glass orb into her empty socket, her stomach roiled at the sensation—she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Besides, Vi has said that the eyepatch makes her look intimidating, and there’s something comforting about that. If she learned anything from Ambessa, it’s how powerful the appearance of power can be.
“Does it still hurt?” Jayce asks, his face creased with concern. This is far from the first time they’ve talked in these past months, but it might be the first time they’ve talked about this. About the permanent injuries they’re both still learning to live with. In the whirlwind of everything that’s happened, it hasn’t had much of a chance to come up.
Caitlyn shakes her head. “Not really. The wound is healed. It just feels… strange. Empty.”
She runs a thumb along her cheek below the empty socket. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever get used to this sensation.
“You’re still a mean shot, though,” he says with a half-grin, nodding at the trophies lining the shelf across from her desk. Striving for a sense of normalcy, the annual Kiramman Hunting Gala was held this past month, and even with one eye down, Caitlyn managed to keep the first-place title she’s held since she was a young teenager.
“Didn’t lose my aiming eye,” she says, tapping her right cheek. “The lack of depth perception isn’t fun, though. Some kid from Zaun almost beat me.”
Inviting Zaunites to participate in the Hunting Gala was a contentious issue, but one that Caitlyn had insisted on. She’d considered holding her shot, too, when she had seen the young Zaunite lining up their shot, considered pulling the same move that Grayson had, so many years before. Later, she told herself that she took the shot for political reasons. A Zaunite beating the head of House Kiramman at her own Gala could have upset the factions who’d been unhappy with Zaunite participation in the first place, and Caitlyn was doing everything in her power not to incite a civil war.
But the truth was that she took the shot to prove to herself that she still could, that she was still the best, one eye down or not. Maybe it was selfish, but holding that trophy to her chest had eased a fear in her like nothing else could.
Next year, she could be as gracious as Grayson. This year, she’d needed a win.
Jayce is still watching her curiously, as though he’s trying to guess what’s going on behind her gaze. She could tell him—she thinks he’d understand.
And then she hears a voice in the hallway, breaking through the quiet in the room. “Hey, babe? You didn’t shoot Jayce when he snuck up on you, did you? He was supposed to come get you for dinner and it’s been like ten minutes—”
The door to her office is thrown open, and Vi leans in the doorway, glancing at them both.
“What is this, a business meeting?” she asks. “You were supposed to pull her away from work, not join her, Jayce.”
Jayce laughs. “Sorry,” he says, using the back of the armchair to push himself to his feet. “Got distracted.”
“Typical,” Vi says, but she’s grinning. When Jayce joins her in the doorway, she bumps her shoulder affectionately against his.
Caitlyn stands, pulling the straps of her eyepatch up and over her head, and smooths down the edges, making sure it sits nicely in place. She knows that Viktor wouldn’t begrudge her the unsightly mess of her eye, that these are all people who can see her with her guard down. But she isn’t ready to shed her armour, not yet.
She follows Vi and Jayce out of the office. She’ll finish up the paperwork after dinner, make a late-night run to the post office. But for now, she has dinner to eat, and friends to share it with. She watches Vi jog down the stairs, taking the steps two at a time, while Jayce takes them slow, one hand firmly on the railing. She adds get an elevator installed to her endless mental to-do list.
When they reach the living room, Viktor is perched in an armchair by the fireplace, his leg elevated on an ottoman in an almost perfect imitation of how Jayce had been sitting upstairs. At times Caitlyn almost feels like she’s seeing double—Jayce and Viktor have always been near-inseparable, two sides of the same nerdy, science-y coin, but ever since whatever happened to them on the day of Ambessa’s attack, there’s been something… more to it. They move the same way, mirror each other subconsciously. Part of it is probably the matching injuries, the leg braces that were clearly modeled off of the same designs. Caitlyn is still getting used to seeing Jayce move more slowly, more carefully, adjusting to a body that doesn’t always do what he wants. But it’s something else, too—they’ve become something else.
Caitlyn would add figure out Jayce and Viktor to her mental to-do list if she thought it was something she had any hope of figuring out.
Viktor sets down the book he’d been flipping through—it’s not one that Caitlyn recognizes, so he must have brought it with him in case he had a chance to squeeze some reading time into the social get-together—and nods at their arrival.
“She has emerged,” Viktor says with deadpan enthusiasm, waving a hand grandly as if to announce Caitlyn’s arrival.
She snorts and rolls her eye. “Yes, yes, you all rescued me from the depths of my paperwork hell.”
“So,” Vi says, perching herself on the arm of Viktor’s chair. “Are we doing Piltie or Zaun food tonight?”
It’s a question that Caitlyn couldn’t have even fathomed a few months ago—no one in Piltover would be popping down to Zaun for a quick dinner. But although the treaties are still in progress, although there are still tensions between the two nations, things have opened up. There is trade between the two; there is travel. When Vi gets a craving for tentacles slathered in greasy orange sauce, she can wander down to the Lanes on the main road, without having to parkour down a death maze of pipes and scaffolding. She still does parkour down there sometimes, but only because she enjoys flirting with death before a good meal.
“Ekko told me about a new place in Zaun we could try,” Jayce says, leaning against the fireplace mantle next to Caitlyn. “Or we could try Mel’s favourite spot up near the academy, if we’re feeling fancy, but we might need a reservation…”
“I’ve tried Ekko’s new spot. It’s shit,” Vi says, making a face. “I swear that kid doesn’t have functioning tastebuds. Why don’t we just go where we went last week?”
“The place that gave you food poisoning?” Viktor asks, raising an eyebrow dryly.
Vi shrugs. “I’ve never been to a good restaurant that didn’t give me food poisoning at least once,” she says.
“And you’re sure Ekko is the one with faulty tastebuds?”
“Shut up,” Vi says, punching Viktor in the shoulder lightly. A light punch from Vi still packs a wallop, though, and Viktor recoils, giving her a wounded look.
“There’s always the café by my mom’s place,” Jayce offers valiantly, and the other two give him the same unimpressed look—only Jayce likes the dry sandwiches and bitter coffee they serve there.
Caitlyn watches in quiet fascination as the three of them continue to debate. The conversation is so mundanely domestic that it makes Caitlyn’s chest tighten with warm affection. The paperwork on her desk feels miles away. She leans her head against Jayce’s shoulder, and he puts an arm around her automatically, giving her a little squeeze without getting distracted from the restaurant debate. She doesn’t care where they decide to eat—she’d be happy if they stayed in this room, together, forever.
She doesn’t know how they got so lucky. She feels, at times, like maybe they don’t deserve it. They’ve all made bad choices; they’ve all hurt people. But life isn’t really about getting what you deserve—it’s about moving forward, every day, the best that you can. And sometimes, even if it’s just for a moment, the best that you can do is beautiful.