So. THIS is IT. THIS is ultimately the scene that made me put everything else in Fractured Reunion before and after together, so that the hate and madness and angst of Chapter 1 could lead HERE. Kinda. It's complicated. This was supposed to be an alternate scenario, remember... Anyway.
I do not own Arcane or League of Legends. This is purely fan work. Please, feel free to comment, criticize, and above all, enjoy!
The Fractured Reunion - Chapter 5 - The Bridge and The Friend
Caitlyn swirled the glass in her hand, her mind... she wasn't sure what it was doing, any longer. After the monster, the explosion, VI... Nothing official had been declared by either side, but all seemed to understand. Time was needed.
Caitlyn drew a shuddering breath as she drank down the last of the amber liquid in the glass. That time was about to run out. Progress Day was nigh, and the reports... The Herald's healing and CHANGE kept spreading, but Viktor seemed just as content to keep to himself as ever. Jinx had kept her growing following under a downright remarkable control.
What really worried, mystified Caitlyn, was something else. Rumors of another new player. No one, not even Zaun, could seem to agree on a name, a title. The New Hound of the Underground. The Angel of Colors. The Crystal Hand. Jan'ahrem Reborn.
They were the one thing neither Piltover nor Zaun believed the Undercity could ever truly produce. A true peacemaker. The idea both elated, and terrified. The disproval of the worst assumptions, and the sum of the worst fears. All of Zaun, peacefully united. To what end?
Caitlyn pulled the bottom drawer open and drew the bottle out again.
"They'll test us," Ambessa Medarda declared, gazing with Caitlyn from the top of the barricade on Progress Bridge. "Maybe one. Maybe many. Maybe ALL of them. They'll test us, and we cannot waver. Cannot falter. Wrath must be met with wrath, Commander."
Words Caitlyn had, even before, been believing less and less. And now, after all the she had been told and seen and realized... What Vi had seemed to try to tell her in her cramped room in the slums about the cycle of anger and hurt; what Caitlyn had slowly, awfully realized she'd let herself become; that terrible, paradoxical, grief-founded unity she'd forged with Jinx, however briefly... Whose wrath?
Ambessa scoffed as the bridge shook subtly, as a great crowd visibly began to gather on the Zaun side. For centuries, Progress Day had meant the potential for the two cities to come together, to share and enrich and build upon each other. That was the glittering ideal, at least. And while reality had truly always disappointed, the possibility had never been denied outright.
Caitlyn was dimly aware of the rattle and clink of rounds being loaded at the bottom of the barricade, and around her. No. No, no, no, NO.
"-"
Ambessa's hand clamped around her shoulder and knocked the breath from her, stole the counterorder from her as the riot gas rounds sailed onto the dividing line. As the crowd drew close. As they walked INTO it, and moved on. What?
And of course, now that a good fifth of the bridge was consumed by riot gas, Caitlyn couldn't see how or what was happening. She wrenched her arm from Ambessa's grip and raised her spyglass; her rifle remained resolutely against the railing, out of her own immediate reach. The leader of the mob emerged from the edge of the gas, her... her multi-hued red longcoat fluttering in the wind, a pair of familiar welding goggles hanging around her neck...
...It couldn't be...
A gas mask, roughly designed according the specifications from the Kiramman vault, hid her face. Many around her wore the same, but some marched out with faces bare, their lungs so used to or ruined by the far more toxic fumes of the depths and mines that Enforcer riot gas was a welcome change of pace. Caitlyn's breath shuddered in her chest as the Angel of Colors raised an arm, a crude steel battle gauntlet strapped to it, and the crowd stopped dead.
"Don't tell me you've lost your nerve, girl." Ambessa's voice hissed into her ear. And where once Caitlyn would've heard it as a challenge to overcome, now she could percieve the threat buried within.
The Angel reached with her other hand, likewise armed, armored and... undid the straps of the gauntlet on her main hand, letting it fall to the bridge with a mighty, meaningful clang of metal. Now Caitlyn could see the title of Crystal Hand was both well-earned, and did no justice to the reality of her. An impossible, MAGICAL mixture of gold and flowing, glowing gemstone, of wrought blue steel prosthetic and black-scorched flesh reached and undid the other gauntlet. And once the ringing from its fall subsided, the sound built up again.
Clubs. Bats. Pipes. Knives. Pistols, rifles, grenades, boards with nails, broken bottles. Every weapon imaginable, and likely some that Caitlyn HADN'T imagined, the crowd had brought.
Every weapon they now relieved themselves of, dropping them as the New Hound had. The crowd disarming themselves, the sound of so much violence being literally cast aside - it ECHOED and DEAFENED. Even Ambessa looked surprised. Though also like she held the gesture in no small amount of contempt.
Jan'ahrem Reborn reached a strange, impossible, beautiful hand and began to remove her gas mask, sliding back her hood in the process. Shocking pink hair in a familiar, if longer and reversed cut spilled out. Her face was divided by ten great scars in a criss-crossing pattern from a monster's defiant, pained claws. Her eyes, once a soft yet stormy grey now BURNED a gleaming, shining Hexgem Blue, as if the power within the crystals had somehow BECOME her irises.
Vi smiled at Caitlyn through the spyglass as if she could see her standing right there before her. A smile that held such promise, such FAITH. So much that Caitlyn didn't deserve, least of all from her. Vi's new, inhuman hands slowly but surely raised above her head. Just as with the mass disarming, the sound of the thousands lifting their hands in unison, a mass demonstration of their lack of threat, echoed into the two cities. She could see Vi draw in a deep breath.
"Dear friend across the river
My hands are cold and bare
Dear friend across the river
I'll take what you can spare."
Oh.
Caitlyn didn't know why it surprised her so. But Vi's singing voice was beautiful.
"I ask of you a penny
My fortune, it will be
I ask you without envy."
The whole crowd had taken up the song, and as Vi stepped forward, they began to march with her.
"We build no mighty towers
Our homes are made of stone
So come across the river
And find the world below
Dear friend across the river
My hands are cold and bare"
It went on and on, as the crowd drew closer and closer. Caitlyn choked back on her building tears, lifted a hand to signal, opened her mouth to countermand the standing orders as Ambessa's hand left her shoulder. Then the point of a blade pressed against her throat as the captain of Ambessa's personal guard stepped into her place.
"Caitlyn, my dear, I'm disappointed. I honestly, truly thought you were different from the rest of them."
The rest of her team was wrestling against the arms and blades of Ambessa's personal guard. Ambessa herself strode forward and snapped up Caitlyn's rifle, taking aim.
"But you're just another such sort in this city of soft-spined idealists."
"NO!"
But the booming report of the Hextech rifle stole her scream. Vi fell to her knees upon the marblestone, clutching at the gaping, bleeding gut shot, the crowd surging forward around her, to protect her with their own... And with the Noxian contingent below egging her Enforcers to action... Caitlyn's heart bled as the rest of the rifles readied. Threats be damned.
"NO! HOLD FI-AGH!"
The point pressed into her throat hard enough that she could feel the blood begin to flow. Some below had heard her. Some below listened. Some turned to look, and Caitlyn could see the potential breakdown of the increasingly tenuous alliance between the Enforcers and the Noxian shock troops. Some went even further, as what they'd been about to do crashed down upon them, their weapons falling from shaking hands.
Some. But not all. Tears began to fall from Caitlyn's eyes as the first volley, however fewer guns fired than were meant to, burst forth from the barricade, the shots streaking towards the crowd.
An explosion of power blinded her for a second. When her vision returned, Vi had risen to one leg out of the arms of the mob, her hands held out before her. Arcane power FLOWED like wind from the shimmering, whirling, twisting forms of her hands and arms; it BURNED a literal flame in her eyes that further gleamed with satisfaction and HOPE. The Arcane power formed a barrier that blocked the whole of the barricade's field of fire on the crowd.
Every bullet fired smashed uselessly against it. Vi stood tall on shuddering legs, her wound running freely with both hands occupied. Her eyes slid meaningfully up to Caitlyn, that same undeserved hope, that provenly misplaced faith in HER, shining as brightly as the Arcane fire.
Caitlyn wouldn't let that pain go on a second longer than absolutely necessary. Wouldn't let Vi's faith continue to go unrewarded.
She swept her sidearm out of its holster, whirled it upwards, and FIRED. She felt the tinnitus flare in her right ear, felt blood spatter on her cheek as she blew the captain's hand off at his wrist, then spun out of his grip. Ambessa turned, her disbelief only growing on her face before-
BANG! BANG!
Ambessa plunged to the floor as Caitlyn's first shot tore through her main shoulder, and her second blasted a kneecap out from under her. Caitlyn LONGED to simply kill her, but Piltover didn't need another diplomatic incident with Noxus. And if Mel Medarda could still be found, Caitlyn didn't want to tell her she'd killed her mother. She knew too well that pain.
Caitlyn snatched her rifle up from the floor. She spun to see her team needed little help freeing themselves, distracted as their captors had been by the sudden incapacitation of their leaders. Caitlyn refocused, racking another round into the rifle chamber and aiming, aiming as the forces at bridge level stopped and turned upon hearing the shots from the command level.
A statement needed to be made. So she made report of her shot boomed as she blew the rifle out of the hands of the Enforcer at the very front of the formation.
"The next one of you who fires, I will take something far less replaceable! STAND. DOWN!"
As soon as Caitlyn saw her order, her warning, had been heeded, she holstered her own weapons. Then, calling on the brief but instructive lesson she'd recieved from the still-smiling woman who let her Arcane barrier drop, Caitlyn LEAPT over the edge of the barricade. She didn't land with nearly the skill or nimbleness of a Undercity runner, but she did so well enough for her own purposes.
She further leapt over or ran around the smaller blocker lines, tearing her dark, imperious coat from her shoulders as she sprinted desperately forward, pressing the fabric hard against the bleeding wound in the woman she... She...
"Knew you... wouldn't let me down... That I was crazy enough... to see you again, Cait..."
Vi's eyes began to flutter closed as blood and bile continued to seep out onto Caitlyn's pants, onto the fine marble of the bridge below. Caitlyn felt that she was screaming. But she couldn't hear what was coming from her mouth. Not over the singular, echoing thought that burned through her very soul:
Not again.
Full disclosure: the barrier scene is why the explosion happened last chapter, and why Vi has magicpunk cyberarms, in the meta/macroscale sense. Cause I pictured her protecting an entire Bridge's worth of a peaceful protest with a kickass magicpunk cyberarm forcefield, and I couldn't bring myself to write the more banal version of the same scene. Where she just drops the Atlas Gauntlets as opposed to VANDER'S GAUNTLETS (WHO CAUGHT THAT?!) and they all walk through a hail of gunfire unprotected. Same thematic purpose, sure, but Vi being able to PROTECT on a MASS SCALE seemed so much more SATISFYING to me as a way to bring her literally full circle. Leading not a revolt on the bridge where her parents died and her adoptive parent saved her; but a demonstration on that same bridge, one that forces Piltover to maybe reckon with its inhumanity towards Zaun in a way it hasn't had to, where no one but her gets hurt. Taking a woman who has been prodigiously capable at banal violence and making her able to defend on a superhuman scale. I LOVED that shit.
But also, as I said, this was originally an alternate Fractured Reunion scenario. Vi cleans up, starts uniting the Undercity relatively peacefully, and the first time she and Caitlyn see each other after Caitlyn leaves her hurt and sobbing in the vents is when she's leading the largest peaceful protest either city has ever seen, DARING the woman she loves to shoot her for it. Then I, partway into writing Chapter 2 just so I could explore the conversations that would happen after Chapter 1, and I was like: "There is a thematic throughline here, of a Vi who wants Caitlyn to know she understands why, but isn't sure if she can forgive her for what Caitlyn did to OTHERS, to a Vi who leads a mass peaceful protest at Progress Bridge, CERTAIN that Caitlyn WON'T shoot her OR others... I gotta FIND IT!"
And here we are...
Vi getting magicpunk cyberarms is also me lifting an very old, very FanFiction As Fuck story idea I've had in the pan since finishing Season 1 years ago. Which I honestly might still do anyway at some point, so I won't spoil how or why.