Caitlyn wasn't having a good day.

And that was saying something.

Since arriving in Zaun her definition of a 'good day' had quickly deteriorated into any period of twenty four hours that didn't leave her hungry, wet, or rattled to the point of questioning every life decision that had landed her on this path. She didn't believe in the multiverse, but if she did, she couldn't help but wonder if this timeline - her timeline - was the darkest one. No one on the Zaun Law Review was particularly invested in publishing comprehensive papers formalizing what her professors preached, she'd yet to have a shower that didn't devolve from scalding hot to a halestorm of bone-chilling cold, and worse yet was that her apartment was in a state beyond disrepair.

An entire section was quarantined off and emitting an odor that even hyperbole couldn't articulate. The section used to be called a 'kitchen' but it was the last place Caitlyn would trust food. Somehow the wreckage of her kitchen made the ambiance, stench, and general damp air wafting from her window something to be cherished. Three weeks earlier she'd have gawked at such a suggestion, but since her life had plummeted into this state of chaos, it was a silver lining she clung to.

The lack of kitchen resulted in her second largest obstacle: food. Without a kitchen she was bound to seedy dark alleys filled with poorly lit holes in the walls and bubbling, brown, unidentifiable pots of Zaun's less than familiar cuisine. She'd been raised on a pedigree of three-star restaurants and private chefs. Even on a budget, she still had standards; standards that Zaun was clearly not capable of meeting. New dishes were one thing, but the unstately nature of them was something else entirely. Slick, slimy sauces made noodles slide down her throat like a wet grub, but that was nothing on the over-prepared way meat appeared on platters like boiled jerky. And if that wasn't bad enough, even produce was impossible to source. Fresh vegetables were about as common as miracles. Instead, colorless, mushy slop was on offer.

So she bought a hot plate and settled for less and worse and a diet of instant noodles, canned ravioli, and soup. She spent an afternoon seeking out a childhood treat: toast and jam, but it was clear that the Shaddock marmalade she craved most was not something stocked in Zaun's scarce and heavily-depleted grocery shelves. Worse yet was that bread was never less than three days old, and Caitlyn's jaw was hardly equipped for such a workout.

After a week of searching and a week of disappointment, the inconvenience of the unfamiliar meant her pack was filled with single-portion sized noodles from the corner store. Tiny packets of msg flavored her meals and sated her hunger for the length of a study session.

It became a pitiful existence, but it was an existence she wouldn't be caught dead confessing to her parents.

So on most days, a good day came when Caitlyn did nothing but study at the library. A decent coffee cart provided her enough familiar sustenance in caffeine and carbs that she could act like it was a balanced meal when paired with freeze-dried shallots and meat nibs that adorned her ramen noodles. There were even windows that brought hazy fragments of natural light into her study area and never once had she felt something alien drip on her because that also was life in Zaun: it never rained and yet there was always something drizzling or draining or dripping from above.

When that wasn't a factor, Caitlyn counted it as a win. Which was why, when she'd managed to navigate from the library back to her flat without a suspicious neon goop landing on her shoulder, she entered the musky apartment lobby with optimism.

This should have been a sign that everything was very quickly about to crumble. Really it was her own fault. Blinded by a less than bad day, she forgot that Zaun was a place that thrived on stealing away any sense of joy or comfort or requiescence.

So when Caitlyn stepped up to her door and reached into her left pocket where she always diligently stored her keys, she should have known they wouldn't be there. Not because she's negligent or left them behind somewhere, but because luck ran against people in Zaun. And so of course they weren't there. Because the stitching of her high quality jacket had unraveled, and when her hand plunged deeper in desperate searching, her fingers appeared out the bottom edge of her jacket.

And Caitlyn could have screamed.

But she didn't, because she was raised by Cassandra Kirammin to control feelings of outrage by suppressing them deep, deep down. No foreshadowing at all about that kind of lifestyle choice.

She glared at the closed door for longer than was strictly necessary, but for once it took longer than normal to swallow down her rage and soften it to something more palatable. Like 'mildly inconvenienced'.

Things happened. Keys went missing. Doors stayed locked. It wasn't an impossible situation, and it certainly wasn't the worst thing that could have happened. She wasn't dead in a ditch somewhere, or kidnapped, or failing a midterm. She was just locked out.

None of that was what enraged her. What did was the 'who' that undoubtedly stood between her and the spare key to her apartment. She turned from her sealed door and toward the stairwell that wound through the middle of the building. A lone skylight above cast fading light down the void and to the ground level. The view was enough to send a small sigh of defeat from Caitlyn's lips. She shrugged off her bag and felt her feet comply with the same enthusiasm that rounded her shoulders and set her jaw in anticipation.

Cassandra Kirammin would have had a field day with the sight.

Caitlyn counted the steps to the first landing. Eighteen, just as it always was. For a moment she wished for more. She wished to be a character in The House of Leaves starting Exploration #3 and winding down the stairs for the next seven hours. Or maybe Exploration #4 when it lasted three days. Anything to avoid the fate she knew would send her blood boiling and challenge every ounce of her patience.

She hadn't spoken to the property manager since she'd left the tattered remains of her apartment. Hurricanes had done less damage in more time than Vi had taken to disfigure her kitchen with the help of spewing water. That no one had come to fix her place since then was perhaps something of a silver lining: Caitlyn didn't think she'd trust anyone anyway.

Each stair landing was met with two doors: a number followed by either 'L' or 'R'. She deduced with Vi's casual admission and a few weeks of studious observation that no one occupied the column of units that sat on the left side of the apartment building. Except her, that was, and Caitlyn had a sneaking suspicion that if she kicked in the doors of the four other levels she'd find evidence of water damage in all of them.

In her observations, Caitlyn deduced that Vi didn't reside in any of the ten main apartments which meant there was likely another unit at the ground level. Her boots transitioned from wood treads to cheap linoleum far too quickly for her liking, and suddenly was surrounded by the familiar, sparse furnishings of the lobby space. A three-legged bench sat stored in the corner of the small space right next to a row of mailboxes. It was only after moving in that she realized Vander had mistakenly not given her a key to unit 5R's mailbox, but she was beyond caring: all of the tiny box doors were ripped from their tiny hinges anyway.

Because anything else wouldn't have so cleverly been as symbolic of Caitlyn's new life: unhinged, broken, and missing a certain amount of privacy she'd come to know at the Kirammin Estate. Yes there'd been staff and her parents living there, but they didn't have the tendency to get into shouting matches in the stairs or blare music at two in the morning or leave broken bags of trash in the stairwell.

It was odd to see units on the ground level. In Piltover, such a sight was unheard of with fancy shops and retail stores typically occupying the street front. To live on the ground level was surely a sign of being uncivilized, and yet faded lettering on the left door showed where a '1' and a 'L' once resided. Next to that, a mismatched combination of '1R' were tacked at misaligned angles. She glanced around for another door and found none.

It made her sigh.

She'd been doing that a lot. She'd also begun expecting the worst in things. Like how Vi told Caitlyn she was the live-in property manager. At this point Caitlyn half expected that to be a lie: maybe there was no live-in property manager afterall. It would explain the impossibly grotesque state of everything in the building. With her phone halfway out of her pocket to dial… someone, she heard the echo of a door slam. She peered up into the stairwell, sensing the noise hadn't come from above. She took a curious step past the wall of mailboxes and found a small set of steps off to the side that descended into a basement area.

With all the courage of someone with very little left to lose, she took the flight down.

Thirteen uneven steps.

Thirteen.

Caitlyn sighed again.

She turned to find a small door with a faded piece of paper fighting to resist the tape adhering it in place. She squinted through the dark and made out the similarly faded writing:

Vi, Property Manager

hours: M-F, as needed

contact: knock the door

It being Saturday made Caitlyn hesitate. Was she allowed to knock on Saturday? Probably not. But surely this was considered an emergency. Granted, this was hardly as much of an emergency as, say, a riptide of water dousing an apartment, but without some sort of assistance Caitlyn would have nowhere else to go. She doubted an unplanned trip home would sit well in her efforts to impress a positive, authentic law school experience on her parents. She also couldn't imagine how she'd get there in the first place.

None of that really mattered though, because Caitlyn couldn't just abandon work for the weekend. A draft of the Review layout and her lead article was due that night to Professor Heimerdinger and she had a whole day of studies to catch up on Sunday. No, it certainly wouldn't work to retreat north for the weekend.

And yet she still waffled. She raised her fist and let it stay suspended, unmoving. Her knuckles didn't rap against the door like any normal, functioning human's knuckles might. Because she was still caught in the indecision of it all. Was it worth the anxiety of dealing with Vi? Maybe she should just abandon becoming a lawyer altogether if it meant avoiding the haughty glance from her property manager or, worse yet, the accidental explosion of the apartment building. Exaggerated as it might seem, Caitlyn didn't doubt for a second that Vi was fully capable of sending her apartment further into shambles.

So instead of knocking, she stood and swallowed hard and bit her lip and leaned back on her heels. Then leaned forward on her heels. Then backward. Then forward. Then-

"How can I help you?"

A wiser, more present person might have made use of her five senses and heard the shuffling on the other side and the cautious steps that brought a figure to the other side of the door before it energetically swung open. Unfortunately for Caitlyn, she was not prepared for the confrontation of a person, much less one who wasn't Vi.

"Oh," Caitlyn jumped, startled by the short, blue-haired youngster staring up at her. "Sorry, I'm just looking for Violet."

"Who?" the girl asked, head cocked to one side.

"Violet?"

The girl's eyes scrunched. "You mean Vi."

"I… well, yes? Do you know her?"

"She's my sister. Jinx is the name," Jinx said, extending her hand and offering a confident smile and a glimmer of mischief that reminded Caitlyn of Vi. Beyond that, the two hardly looked anything alike. Where Vi was jacked, scarred, and top with a burst of red, Jinx was lanky, soft-skinned, and adorning a pair of braids that swung to her waist.

"Your name is Jinx?" Caitlyn replied before her Kiramman training could put a stop to such a crassly toned question. She didn't meet Jinx's hand, too flush with embarrassment to act remotely human.

"Got a problem?"

"No, no, I - well, yes, actually. It's why I'm here. Is Vi around?"

"She's out at the moment. But I'm fully qualified to help with anything you need…lady?"

"Caitlyn."

"Caitlyn! From… let me guess: Piltover?"

"Yes. How-?"

"Not many dames dressed like that on this side of town," Powder winked. "So, what'll it be Caitlyn of Piltover?"

"Just Caitlyn is fine. And it's actually quite embarrassing."

"Can't be as bad as old Crabby Cranston in 3R. You know she's legally blind? You'd think a blind lady wouldn't try replacing a sink. Threw it right down the atrium last week!"

This did answer the carnage of broken linoleum and sunken features of the floor that had appeared overnight a few days earlier. It also eased the reservations Caitlyn had for her own circumstances.

"Oh, well then, I suppose it's quite simple: I've locked myself out."

"Classic rookie mistake," Jinx replied, retreating into the room and collapsing onto a wheeled chair that slid across the concrete floor toward a sad looking desk. "First time away from home?"

"Yes, actually," Caitlyn offered, peeking into the space: it clearly doubled as both home and office with a full bed neatly made in one corner, a set of dresser drawers with mismatched hardware in another, and a wall of filing cabinets lining the far wall. Snug against the only remaining wall space was the desk Jinx sat hunched over.

"I see; the ole doorman isn't there to let you in," Jinx snickered into an open drawer of jangling metal. "Whatch're door, Caitlyn of Piltover?"

It was strange hearing the words an old man might say come from someone clearly a few years younger than her. It was even more strange to hear the emphatic way Jinx seemed to enunciate every syllable.

"5L."

"The ole penthouse, eh?" Jinx whistled low, the sound of metal clinking together coming from the delves of the desk's bottom drawer. Seconds passed at an agonizing pace. All feelings of success from an hour earlier swirled the drain, and Caitlyn wanted nothing more than to collapse onto the couch and indulge in her ten minutes of doom scrolling for the day.

It'd been nearly two months since the semester had started, and already she was bogged down by readings, papers, courseload, and her own self-curated anxiety-inducing pressure to succeed. She'd long ago perfected a reduced sleeping schedule of four hours a night, and she was leaning heavily into that to stay ahead of her classmates. It was a truly different experience attending ZU: the opinions and concepts shared were everything U of P had taught against. It was strange to be surrounded by such strong-willed and minded people. ZU wasn't known for attracting 'foreign student's as she was often labeled, so most of her classes were made up of locals who had spent their lives in oppression.

Separate from the labyrinth of her coursework was the maze of Zaun. After her first week she'd gotten lost over a dozen times, witnessed three muggings, and was certain she'd catch tetanus by an errant scrape on a loose piece of steel sticking out of a facade on her walk to class.

All of this had set Caitlyn down a self-imposed rabbit hole of introversion and hermit-like tendencies. She'd barred Mel from visiting until after midterms and kindly rejected every offer to grab lunch or a hangout with her classmates. Not that they were exactly breaking down her door with invitations. Caitlyn kept her nose down and squarely in the library of books she needed to digest by semester's end.

For as focused as she was though, she familiarized herself with certain things. Like the ZU crest and logo which was stamped on Jinx's tattered sweatshirt.

"Are you a student at Zaun, too?" Caitlyn asked, sizing up the petite girl and realizing she didn't look nearly as young as she'd labeled her at first glance.

"Yea, second year mechanical engineer."

Caitlyn's eyebrows lifted in surprise. If Jinx noticed, she didn't comment.

"And what about Vi?"

"Vi works so I can go to school."

Caitlyn's eyebrows dropped to a frown.

"But what about your parents?"

"Dead."

The ease with which Jinx shared the information suggested it had happened long ago, but that didn't make the news any easier to swallow. Caitlyn had grown up surrounded by the love of her parents. She couldn't imagine losing them now let alone as a child.

Caitlyn glanced around the apartment's shabby interior, noting the secondhand furniture, doorless cabinets with mismatched flatware on display, and the peeling paint that plastered the walls. It made her apartment look like a five-star hotel, and that was saying something. She thought rebelling against her parents and self-funding her move south was a frugal move, but the truth was that she was tapping into a trust fund to do that.

"Found them!" The cry of success was met by the sight of Jinx lifting a ring of thirty rusting keys in success. "Now let's get you back in your flat."

Caitlyn watched Jinx's unbreakable spirit turn into a frown, then a mumble, then a grumble, then a string of curses as, key by key, each one failed to gain access to Caitlyn's 'penthouse' flat. It took fifteen minutes to fail, and the duo trudged back to the office with the ring of useless keys jingling merrily along the way. The mockery of it did little to help either Jinx or Caitlyn's mood.

"Maybe there's another set?" Caitlyn offered when Jinx lamely dropped the ring back into the bottom drawer.

"Well, if there is, I don't know about it."

"Can we ask Vi? Wh-where is she?"

"Beats me. She's usually home by now."

"Where is she?"

"She runs errands on weekends."

"Errands? Like what?"

"Like whatever Silco needs."

Caitlyn didn't know who Silco was, but Jinx said it so matter-of-factly that Caitlyn stowed it away for later research. "Why?" she asked instead.

"Because this gig doesn't pay the bills?"

Caitlyn paused, reflecting on this detail, glancing at the faded paper taped to the door. It hadn't occurred to her that this job might be a part-time gig. For as often as she'd seen Vi around the building fixing up this or repairing that, she'd assumed it was a full-time position. The building certainly needed that kind of attention, but, come to think of it, all of Zaun needed a little bit of love and elbow grease.

"Is there someone we can call? What about her employer?"

"Silco? Not a chance. I'll just call her."

"Call… her? How?"

"Uh, with this thing? Called a phone?" Jinx replied, slipping a small black device from her pocket and waving it nonchalantly in the air. "It's been around for a while; I figured you topsiders would've been walking around with the prototypes."

"I know what a cell phone is," Caitlyn huffed defensively, but her cheeks flushed anyway. Was it crude that she figured Vi just didn't have one? A handful of her classmates didn't have one which made coordinating and planning difficult, and when she'd refused to give out her number it wasn't a far stretch of the imagination to presume Vi fell into the same category.

Jinx cocked an eyebrow of doubt before shrugging and tapping, scrolling, and finally, calling Vi. She tapped the speaker phone, and a dial reverberated through the small office/apartment before it picked up on the second ring.

Caitlyn wasn't sure what she expected from Vi. Perhaps annoyed or angry or impatient, but certainly not worried or terrified or nervous which was exactly how Vi answered the phone.

"Powder? Is-is everything, hang on… is everything ok? Are you ok? Are you hurt? Are you-"

"Relax, the noob locked herself out."

"The noob? Who?"

"Caitlyn of Piltover from 5L."

"... what?"

Concern quickly morphed to confusion, disbelief, and, if Caitlyn had heard correctly, the slightest hint of disgust.

"She locked herself out."

"Are you serious?" came Vi's voice of disbelief. Caitlyn felt another wave of warmth against her cheeks and the sudden desire to melt into the fracturing concrete beneath her feet.

"Yep, and that drawer of keys did no good," Jinx continued, spinning in her chair which sent an ear-splitting squeak through the space.

"The Kirammin girl locked herself out," Vi repeated, and it did nothing for Caitlyn's composure. "Do they not teach basic responsibility topside? She can't be trusted with her own key? What, is her servant on lunch break?" Vi rattled off with lightning speed. "What kind of idio-"

"Hello, Violet."

Whatever insult Vi was about to throw down ended in static-filled silence.

"C-cupcake, hey, hi, how's it going?" It was the sound of shame and discomfort coughed out into a pathetic attempt at recovery.

"Any chance you could point your sister to the spare key?"

"Uh, yea, well, funny thing about that… you see, there isn't one."

"Excuse me?"

Caitlyn's hand sprawled across her face in exhaustion. It took another five minutes of desperate pleas on the phone for Caitlyn to accept that there just was no spare key. It took another seven minutes to unsuccessfully persuade Vi that this was an emergency and whatever task she had surely didn't outweigh Caitlyn's obligations to get the Review draft out to Professor Heimerdinger by midnight. It took another two minutes for Jinx to convince Vi she could solve the problem and another three minutes to find a small leather pouch of tools in one of the desk drawers.

And now they were posted outside of Caitlyn's flat nearly one hour since she'd arrived home the first time. Caitlyn leaned against the opposite wall while Jinx crouched down in front of her door, tools in hand and tongue stuck out in concentration. Her fingers were expertly picking the lock, hands working simultaneously with the two tiny tools.

"How'd you learn this little trick?" Caitlyn asked by way of awkward conversation. In all truth, she wasn't exactly comfortable that Vi's apparent little sister knew how to break apartment locks

"An old friend taught me."

"Old?"

"Not like 'old' just, you know 'old'. Past tense. He's dead, too."

The frankness somehow made the news harder to absorb. That brought the 'dead' tally to three which seemed far too many for such a young kid. Caitlyn had experienced death only once, and that was while she was away at boarding school. Her grandmother had passed, but it was hardly unexpected. Parents and friends weren't expected.

Silence engulfed the hall again, and Caitlyn searched for a tangent; anything that would change the topic away from the list of dead that kept Jinx company.

Or Podder. Parlor? Parker?

"I thought you said your name is Jinx," Caitlyn said suddenly, her memory struggling to recall what Vi had said minutes earlier on the phone.

"It is."

"But that's not what Vi called you. What was it? Podder? Prowler? P-p… pow-?"

"Powder."

"Is that a nickname?"

"No, it's my name."

Caitlyn blinked, finding Jinx/Powder's unhelpfulness unfathomably grating.

"So Jinx is a middle name? I didn't think Zaunites traditionally had them."

"It's not."

"Then is Jinx a nickname?"

"Sure," Jinx/Powder replied, tongue darting in and out of her mouth in concentration.

"Why do they call you Jinx?"

A click and snap sent Caitlyn's eyes to the lock excitedly. Unfortunately Jinx/Powder's expression didn't mirror her enthusiasm. A grimace scrunched her nose as she extracted both tools from the lock, only instead of the pristine picks they'd started with, one had clearly split in two, the broken end stuck firmly in the lock.

"That's why," she replied apologetically.

Yes, Jinx was a fitting name, and Caitlyn was absolutely going to miss her deadline.

She sat outside her door, glaring at its unmoving frame and static hinges and cheeky lock. Jinx offered a slew of apologies that fell on deaf, annoyed, bitter ears. She quickly parted, making some excuse about being late for a study group which Caitlyn hardly believed was true, but she also had no interest in sharing a cramped hall space with a yammering reminder that she was mere hours away from turning into a pumpkin. She waffled and waffled, debating whether running back to campus and hand-scrawling a draft to Professor Heimerdinger was a viable option. Hand-scrawling because of course her laptop had run out of battery and was it really so hard to have a single, normal, pleasant day in Zaun?

She contemplated the risk to her life. It was a forty minute commute one way, and after thirty minutes of indecision, she cursed Vi for not returning home as the final daylight crept beyond the horizon.

If there was one certainty, it was that Caitlyn wouldn't be caught dead walking in Zaun alone at night. Well, that wasn't true. She would be caught dead. Or at least, she'd be found dead. That was without question a definite fact. Now, whether death was better or worse than missing this deadline was still up for debate, and one even Cassandra Kiramman would appreciate her daughter agonizing over. Any sane, well-adjusted person on the other hand would gawk at such a preposterous comparison.

Fortunately, her mental coin flipped to heads and she decided life was more important than submitting this draft. She wasn't particularly happy with the decision though.

It was nearly two hours before Vi returned, and Caitlyn was the spitting image of frantic. She paced, tapped her legs impatiently, and sighed at volumes that would have woken the dead. After some pressing and just barely controlled anger, she hurried Vi up the steps and sat her outside her door with a new set of tools.

It took another thirty minutes before she wrangled the broken piece from the lock.

"The more you keep pacing, the longer this'll take."

"Couldn't we just knock it down?"

"What's the rush, Cupcake? Hot date?"

"Hardly."

"Interesting response…" Vi replied, some foreign tool clenched between her teeth.

"I have a deadline, and this entire evening has been a complete disaster."

"Sounds like that's a 'you' problem."

"What is taking so long?"

It sounded whinier than a dog whimpering at the back door in a storm. It was also a sound Caitlyn had never made any other time in her short-lived life, and boy if that didn't make her cheeks red it was definitely the way Vi, in her signature overalls was. Because even though she wanted to burn the whole building down if only to get into her apartment, Caitlyn Kiramman was still a living, breathing human with eyes and an irrational attraction brewing deep inside.

"You know, some people have bigger problems than a little deadline."

"It's not just… ugh, nevermind. Can you please just focus?"

"I was trying but your shuffling and huffing got a bit distracting."

Minutes passed, and Caitlyn's pacing got worse. She began clomping up and down the stairs in an effort to avert her gaze from Vi's methodical lock-picking.

"What's your deadline?" Vi called when Caitlen had meandered to the fourth floor for the nine hundredth time.

"The Review," Caitlyn called up, her nails getting a much needed break from the gnawing they'd been subject to. Just another vice, Cassandra had said.

"You mean that little newspaper thing?"

"It's not a little news-" Caitlyn huffed again in frustration. "Yes, that's the one."

"I thought you said it was published once a semester."

Caitlyn didn't remember saying that, but she wasn't interested in splitting hairs when she was moments from just kicking the door in.

"It is," she confirmed instead, making the trip back up the stairs to the fifth floor.

"But didn't term just start?"

"Technically it started two months ago-"

"Wow, time flies."

"But yes; this is just a draft of sorts."

"What's that?"

Caitlyn gaped, her eyes narrowing in scrutiny of Vi's focused study of the lock.

"You don't know what a draft is?"

"I know the army has a draft."

"That isn't… this is a different draft."

"Oh, cool."

Another minute passed, and Caitlyn was balancing on the top step, about to make her nine hundred and first trip down when Vi interrupted her again.

"So what's it about?"

"Didn't you just say I was distracting?"

"I said you huffing and puffing was distracting. This is a conversation; very different mood, Cupcake."

"What is with 'Cupcake'?"

"Hm?"

"Cupcake."

"Oh, first time I laid eyes on you I knew you were all bark and no bite - sweet, like a cupcake."

"The first time? You'd barely met me for a minute."

"Yea, but you were trying so hard to look tough. It was sweet."

Silence followed because Caitlyn couldn't find the moisture in her mouth to speak and Vi seemed on the verge of getting the lock to flick open. Another ten minutes passed before Caitlyn was blessedly finally able to reenter her water-damaged apartment.

"So?" came Vi's voice from the hall.

"So?" Caitlyn parroted back, glancing at Vi leaning casually against the door frame. Caitlyn hated it. She hated it because she liked it; the crossed arms, exposing the toned muscles of her bare arms, the broad shoulders supporting her weight and the cherry to top it all? The head cocked to the side, resting against the door frame.

"What's it about?"

"Are you always this persistent?"

"Only when I'm interested."

"You're interested in a paper? Not even a paper; the draft of a paper."

"No, not really."

"Then why-"

"But I am interested in you."

And boy if that didn't touch every iota of Caitlyn's being.

"I… That is not… uhm," Caitlyn stammered, looking for a distraction for her hands and eyes and brain and mouth, because the penetrating gaze from Vi was making her uncomfortable and nervous and warm in all the ways she shouldn't.

Vi was a distraction; a handsome, funny, curious, infuriating distraction. One minute she was stubborn as a bull, the next she relentlessly teased, and the next she dropped blush-inducing remarks that made Caitlyn all sorts of speechless.

Vi was a distraction and she reveled in the discomfort it caused Caitlyn. That was it; nothing more, nothing less. The better she got at deflecting Vi's antagonistic remarks, the less likely she'd let the Zaunite get under her skin and burrow somewhere far more dangerous.

"Thank you for taking care of the lock."

Vi's head cocked even further to the side, leveling up the degree of 'distracting' to a new record. It sent Caitlyn floundering and focused on removing her shoes except she remembered her floors were soaking wet and socked feet were hardly viable, especially with the chillier nights coming and Caitlyn clung to that to ground her. Because her apartment was still a disaster, and no matter how charming and situationally helpful and chiseled and handsome Vi was, she was the reason Caitlyn had to think about things like catching cold on a chilly autumn night. She was the reason her kitchen was utterly unusable. She was the reason her diet consisted of manufactured noodles and Red Dye 40 and unidentifiable impressions of meat and tomato sauce.

So even though Vi's smirk was disarming and her hair something Caitlyn dreamed about raking her fingers through and her arms something she'd happily let pressed her down firmly into a-

No. No, stop. Caitlyn shook herself of the vision and focused on the creak of soggy wood under her feet. She reinforced her resolve with a laundry list of reasons Vi was not someone to fraternize with.

"I'll have someone stop by tomorrow to replace the lock," Vi replied.

"That would be great, thank you," Caitlyn said, backing further into the apartment and shedding her jacket and bag and dead computer. "I'll be sure to get a spare made and drop it by your place tomorrow-"

"Giving me a key to your place already? It's only been three dates," Vi replied from the door, her eyes wrinkling to contain the smile her mouth was fighting back.

Caitlyn silently cursed because she'd forgotten her entire train of thought. How on earth was she ever going to be a lawyer at this rate?

"I didn't - that isn't what I-"

"Though I suppose it'll be four when you drop it off," Vi interrupted, fingers stroking her chin in faux consideration. "Give me a heads up next time you just swing by my place though."

"A heads up? How?"

Vi squinted before breaking into a slight smile. She pulled a phone from her pocket and tapped away. Moments later a chime echoed from the depths of Caitlyn's forgotten bag.

"I thought you didn't have a phone," she said, trying to decide whether she was annoyed, flattered, enraged, or a mix of all three.

"I never said that," and the confident wink made Caitlyn's hands clench into fists.

"Yes you did."

"No, you asked for my number to call me. I don't do calls," Vi clarified before adding, "or email or social media."

The riddle sent a scowl of thought across Caitlyn's brow. She really hated how challenged her brain became around Vi. "So… I can text you?"

"Bingo, Cupcake."