So, pre-Christmas madness, especially when you help your parents host almost 30 people for Christmas Eve, along emergency present shopping taking up many entire days, and some indecision about exactly how to phrase and handle certain parts here are to blame for why this update took so long. But, this stuff was important, parts of the story I HAD to get right. There's also gonna be some SERIOUS violence at the end of the chapter, so, watch out for that. Happy Holidays, to one and all! I do not own Arcane or League of Legends. This is a fan-created work. Please feel free to review, comment, or criticize (they give me ENERGY!). Most of all, enjoy!

The Fractured Reunion - Chapter 10 - Negotiation and Monstrosity

As she approached the square of hastily gathered tables with her people, it took perhaps the most self-control Caitlyn had ever displayed to keep her face… not even neutral, really. She was due a bit of stink-eye at the woman who had killed her mother, she felt. Surely that wouldn't be held against her, even if they had previously found a strange sort of understanding.

Because Jinx was there. Sat right across from her on the other end of the rectangle the tables formed, pressed together at their edges. Vi quite deliberately had taken a seat between Caitlyn with her entourage, and her fellow Zaunites. Heimmerdinger had plopped himself next to her. All the big players of the Undercity were there; Jinx, Sevika, Ekko, the few hopeful new chembarons who's hopes had been dashed by Vi and the other three. Then, some Caitlyn vaguely knew, as they were coming to vague prominence; notable miner and labor organizers, merchants who had made themselves fixtures of the Undercity, the occasional leader of a vigilante posse who hadn't been afraid to rise against Chembaron brutality, even in the days of Silco.

Caitlyn wasn't sure if she'd brought just the right people with her loose collection of sympathetic Enforcers, minor nobles, and Shoola. But it would have to-

"So, according to my second-in-command, you're halfway up shit river, and have some seriously good stuff to offer us, CupCait." Jinx drawled as threw her feet up on the table, grinning toxically at Sevika over the implication that a mute child was better-suited as her second. A implication she reinforced by giving the girl a quick high-five. Vi pinched the bridge of her nose. "Offer away."

Caitlyn drew a burning breath through her nose, and began passing the small packets forward. She had felt more than a little ridiculous, having copies drawn up as her small group coalesced and fled into the Undercity, but she wanted to demonstrate seriousness on what she was going to say, and Vi hadn't told her it would be a BAD idea. Just that it certainly was AN idea.

"The documents making their way around go into far greater depth as to the legal particulars, but the short of it is I have two offers to make you all. First and foremost, the matter of independence." She could see as the whole table tensed and leaned in. Even Jinx pulled one leg down.

"Technically speaking, the last act of the previous Council of Piltover was to grant the Nation of Zaun it's independence and full sovereignty. No true countermanding order has been issued even before I assumed power in the wake of the Council's destruction; that you are back underboot is simply the general assumption that has been acted on. But no such official legal declaration exists, and the decision to grant independence can thus be upheld and implemented by a victorious Zaun-sympathetic government in Piltover. Which, if I win, there will be." Caitlyn shut her eyes and let out the breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding in. She could see looks of hope, disbelief, consideration. Vi's was the face she sought, and it held that same love and pride, if also a preemptive apology for the grilling they both knew Caitlyn would be subjected to.

"My second offer," Caitlyn began, wanting to get both out in the air, in the minds of the people she so hoped to reach, before the arguing and accusing and digging in could start. "Is a fundamental restructuring of the Council and an expansion of Zaunite representation. An additional six seats would be created, five filled exclusively by self-selected representatives from Zaun, with the sixth intermediary seat chosen by the two blocs of Councilors. So much of why things have grown so terrible between us is no one in power was often willing or able to understand even your most basic concerns and conditions. I would have that end." Caitlyn turned the pages before her, if only to have something to do, to try and lead into the last key offer.

"Finally," She cut in over what she could see was a building skepticism, a need to call out and criticize bubbling up to the surface of the Zaunites across from her. "Any persons detained under the orders and operations of my former government will, of course, be released with full amnesty and have their records purged. All such were… victims… of my own personal sorrow and weakness. That they were treated so at my worst behest is an unconscionable miscarriage of justice, a shame that will follow me for the rest of my life. And I will have it undone as best I can."

Caitlyn leaned back, and couldn't help but to wipe at her cheeks, at the tears she couldn't help but cry for what she'd done. What she'd become; her lowest, most twisted self who'd reigned for nearly a full year, inflicting herself, her pain and her anger on both cities. How many new Vi's had she created in that time? How many had she simply, callously hurt and sealed away with no due process on the wrongful basis of need and… and convenience for security's sake, but truly taken just out of apathetic-

"You must be so completely FUCKED, Kiramman." Seika's voice cut across her self-loathing thoughts. Her voice was dripping with sadistic, vindictive amusement. "I do hope you can see what we're all appreciating; you get maybe the tiniest taste of your own medicine, and you come crawling down to us, offering the world. And for what? Out of the goodness of the heart you now claim you have?" That brought out a mixture of chuckles and vague yells of assent from her side of the table, and a glare from Vi. "How in the Void can you even start to promise any of this, seeing as the Grand Commander has fled her own city? Who's going to deign to give us any of what you've offered?"

Caitlyn waved her hands at many of her group.

"Several particular nobles and officials are on a short list for the new Council that will enact whichever option you choose. And I know they will implement these policies, because they have all been my greatest critics for the last year, on a humanitarian basis. A few of the greatest I'll need to have released from Stillwater." Even Sevika didn't seem like she had an argument against that.

"What's the catch? The price?" Ekko cut in. "You come here offering all this, when your own people are turning on you, trying to kill you. What do you want in exchange? As if we don't all already know…" He folded her arms, put his feet up, and gave her a look that dared her to try and overcome his expectations.

"Nothing. I'm not asking for anything in exchange; merely telling you what you will have in the event I am victorious." Even Vi startled at that. That hadn't been the plan, at least not what she suggested. Vi, Void, most of Caitlyn's people, all assumed they were here to recruit allies, or at least ensure they had no true enemies. "From a purely pragmatic standpoint, some of the hopeful officials of the new government are here with me, and I honestly believe they'll be safer here in Zaun than I could make them in Piltover. Some are still trapped Topside, but that's my problem. Further pragmatism might suggest that you've a self-interest in my victory, that gaining what I've offered will be easier, more assured, if you help me fight and win."

Caitlyn could see the faces of the Zaunites… not sour, exactly. This, THIS was what they had expected. Fight and die in my civil war, and you'll get the respect and humanity you've always been denied. This was Caitlyn meeting their exact, low opinion of herself.

"Bollocks to that further pragmatism." Caitlyn declared. "Piltover has asked for enough from you; taken enough from you. I'll not ask nor wheedle out another scrap of metal, another hunk of rock, another drop of blood from you. All you need to do is decide what option you desire if I win… and be prepared to defend yourselves if I lose."

The look Jinx was giving Caitlyn was what drove her from the table, to leave them to debate amongst themselves. She'd said all she needed to; everyone had the packets; she could offer no further information, no deeper insight than she had already. And Jinx was looking at her with a perplexed but hopeful disbelief she didn't deserve, nor did she want. From Jinx least of all. For all that they had found a strange unity in their grief over Vi's apparent death, Jinx had still killed her mother, and Caitlyn wasn't sure… wasn't sure.

"You coulda warned me, Cupcake." Vi whispered over her shoulder as they lay together. Ekko had, perhaps because of his better judgement, perhaps in spite of it, offered the Firelight Sanctuary as a neutral meeting and waiting ground for her people and the main heads of Zaunite forces. They'd taken one of the side-rooms, Vi slinging her coat over Caitlyn's head in an effort to keep the rest of the mass of refugees from recognizing her, and followed that with a moving forcefield once the coat had failed. The woman who was WHY they were there in the first place. People she'd cost. Cost spouses, friends, partners, siblings, parents. She'd cost this city, these people, so much already; and if she didn't win, they'd never get it back. She couldn't ask any more of them.

Vi thankfully seemed to see that on her face, could tell where her mind was going.

"I know, back in the vents, I asked you not to change. And I asked that cause I could see you were. We all were. All of us starting to become our-our worst selves. But we've stopped, Cait. We've stopped, and we've reversed. We're still changing, but we're all becoming something better than we were. We're becoming our best selves. And I'm so fucking proud of all of us for that."

It went unsaid that Jinx was included in that 'us.' And the worst, best part was Caitlyn couldn't deny it. Seeing Jinx pal around with the people she'd failed to kill for years in the Firelights, how she organized and handled her own following of Jinxers, how gentle and loving and encouraging she was with the girl (Isha)… It was all a humanity, a capability for kindness, that Caitlyn had long since thought impossible for the mad young woman.

But Jinx had likely thought the same of her; the Piltie Bluebelly who'd stolen her sister. Until they'd both broken down at Vi's apparent death. Until Caitlyn had shot the rifle out of one her own Enforcer's hands because he'd aimed at Vi. Until she'd marched what she could gather of her people into Zaun in the hopes of keeping her former greatest opponents from Topside safe among them, and offered Zaun the world with no thought of returns or demands of aid. It made Caitlyn… uncomfortable.

For as much as Caitlyn knew she ought to confront the why of that uncomfortability, Caitlyn didn't. She instead let herself press closer into Vi, let those impossible crystalline arms wrap tighter around her as she drifted off…

BOOM!

The explosion sent them both scrambling awkwardly out of their bed, reaching for clothes and, in Caitlyn's case, her rifle. They emerged to chaos. Enforcers and Noxious fighting Enforcers and Firelights and Jinxers and chemgoons. For as many were arrayed against the Noxious and… what WERE those Enforcers who had turned on Caitlyn? Rebels? Insurrectionists? And how had they found the Sanctuary in the first-

Then Hextech-enhanced phosphorous exploded against one of the upper housing units, and Caitlyn's blood ran like ice. She'd seen children fleeing in there to hide from her once she had been recognized, and-and that was Maddie's-

CA-CLACK!

They both flinched at the sound of a rifle being cocked just behind them, and Vi had enough presence to turn, her face shifting from angry to disgusted.

"You rotten, little, tricky bitch…" Vi growled. Caitlyn turned her head just enough to see Maddeline Nolen holding a rifle up against the brawler's head. Her other hand held a pistol, aimed squarely between Caitlyn's eyes. Part of Caitlyn roared and festered; part of her wanted Maddie dead as much as she had wanted Jinx dead down in the vents. But that was what made her pause, because where had that murderous drive really gotten her? What had it truly done? So she looked at Maddie harder, and saw the uncertainty, the regret, on her face. Saw the horror in the young ginger woman's eyes as those same children who'd hidden from them earlier burst through the doors and windows, tumbling, screaming, and burning through the air.

"…I'm sorry." The apology crawled from the depths of the young officer's soul, and as suddenly as she'd come upon them, her pistol was holstered, her rifle shifted, and a shot fired. It blew through the head of the man down in the common area carrying her weapon, that he could only have because she'd given it to him. Maddie stepped past them, taking shots. She hit fewer than Caitlyn would've, but Maddie wasn't a sharpshooter. She hadn't been lying about that, at least.

Vi leapt from the balcony, and Caitlyn followed. It was still utter madness; an endless whirlwind of violence and terror and blood and death. Even the Enforcers on both sides had trouble telling each other apart, to say nothing of the various Zaunite factions. Caitlyn, at least, had a better idea of who and where her people were, started rallying and ID-ing and reforming, until-

"AAAAUGHHHHH!"

Maddie's scream cut across the din of battle. Caitlyn turned, and saw her crumbling to the ground, utterly peppered with crossbow bolts but still defiantly, or perhaps purposely, alive. Rictus loomed over her. Where the bare stump of his hand should've been, some sort of… integrated crossbow prosthetic sat instead. Vi, to her credit, launched herself at him. And for all of Rictus' training and skill, Vi was proving his equal until… he began to block with the full center of his now-shortened glaive. Where the magic-absorbing runes were strapped.

Vi dropped to her knees, screaming a terrible, inhuman PAIN. Arcane wind and lightning flowed from her into the runes; from her arms, her eyes, her heart. Caitlyn snatched up a high-caliber pistol from a fallen chemgoon and fired. The glaive blew apart under the ballistic force. Caitlyn tossed the pistol aside, and sighted down with her Hextech rifle. She'd been able to blast off Jinx's finger with that rifle. Jinx, who'd been in far closer proximity to the same woman she again sought to save. Who was far more helpless than she had been before, somehow.

Caitlyn didn't snap. She had snapped, before, she'd eventually realized. She knew what snapping felt like. No. Something in her roared. Some furious, blood-hungry, animal part of her that saw her world, her life, her love threatened and refused. That decided that anything that so dared must pay.

Her first shot blew Rictus's new weaponized hand off and sent him spinning. Her second tore through his left ear as his face turned back around, and he realized just who was shooting at him, and why. She saw as the fear came over him. Good.

Caitlyn.

Rictus tried to turn and run. A bullet through one ankle as his foot descended sent him sprawling. Which put him in the perfect position as he tried to rise to fire another shot at his nose, tearing and searing it clean off his face. It was a testament to Noxian conditioning and discipline that he hadn't yet succumbed to shock. How unfortunate for him.

Caitlyn.

Her next bullet tore through his left shoulder. Then she shot out his knee on the same side. Rictus was screaming something. Caitlyn couldn't hear it over the roar of fury and blood and violence in her head. Over the hate bubbling up from the darkest depths of her soul. Her next round melted through the edge of Rictus' cheek before blowing out of the back of his jaw.

Caitlyn.

She racked open the Hexgem chamber, letting the excess heat and Arcane energy scream out and dissipate. She stalked forward, slamming the lever back, readying her next shot, raising it to clip the very edge of his skull-

"CAITLYN!"

One of Vi's beautiful, impossible crystal hands snatched the barrel of her rifle down as her next shot went off. It took a second to realize Vi had been calling, shouting at her for some time. And the monster in her roared in displeasure at the interruption of its violence. How DARE…

She wasn't looking at the Vi that had returned from death and magic an even greater woman. She was looking at the Vi who still wore the Atlas Gauntlets, who'd stopped her shot for the exact same reason. Who she'd twisted into the very thing that had taken everything good in her life. It wasn't the screaming and crying of many children she could hear. It was the terrified, desperate whimpers of just one. It wasn't the mutative verdancy of the Sanctuary she saw around her; it was the ruined, blasted grey and painted rubble of the temple of Janna at the bottom of the vents.

Caitlyn's vision swam. A awful, sharp, keening whine pierced into her ears. Her rifle dropped from her shuddering hands, that then reached up to claw through her hair and pound against her head. Vi's own hands reached up to seize hers, to hold them tight before her, to try to pull her close as she tried to pull away, because she knew and feared what she would do next, because she knew and hated what she had done next last time. Vi was, clearly, speaking to her. She could see those wonderful lips move and those adorably sharp-but-round cheeks shift. But she couldn't hear Vi, over the endless, keening whine…

Caitlyn realized the whine was coming from her…

"Yeaaah, sucks to realize what you really are, doesn't it, Big Hat?"

The voice of her fantasies and nightmares pierced through. A hand landed roughly on the top of her head, ruffling as a copper middle finger tap-tap-tapped against her skull. Then it slid away, and Jinx strode forward, the sound of her pistol sliding from its holster, the hammer clacking back, somehow loud enough to shake the world. She held it up against Rictus's head, his bleeding, ruined self, and -

BANG!

The back of his head blew out from the force of the shot. Jinx's expression… Uncaring, cold-blooded murder? Or pragmatic but necessary mercy?

"You'll love it in the C.U.G.C. Crazy Ultraviolet Girls Club. I'll get you a jacket." Jinx's twisted rictus grin was everything she'd dreamed of seeing behind bars, or watching explode to pieces from behind a scope. But the more Caitlyn looked, the more it seemed…

"You're not helping, Jinx!" Vi's accusation managed to cut though what Caitlyn was fairly sure was the horrified white noise in her mind of self-realization.

"…Wasn't trying to." But an undercurrent in Jinx's face and tone belied her statement. She was truly sad, truly sorry, to see what Caitlyn could become. Because she knew, because she'd become just the same a long time ago, only no one had been able, been there to pull her out of becoming until it had been… Had it been? Too late?

And that idea just broke everything. Because Caitlyn could truly see at last just how little separated the two of them. All she could do was kneel there, grabbing at her lover's arms with increasing desperation as she wailed in one last futile defiance at the truth.

WHOO! I don't think I'll be stuck quite like I've been stuck on this chapter. Cause I had the two vague halves of it, that weren't necessarily meant to fit together in ONE chapter, in mind for a while in terms of planned moments. Caitlyn's offers of independence or representation specifically I had in mind almost around the time I finished Chapter 6. She's made her apology to Vi, and she feels the need to make an apology of promised actions to Zaun. It was likewise SO important that she not actually ask for anything in return, cause she's right; Zaun has deserved one of those two for a LONG time, and they shouldn't have to help her win PIltover's civil war cause so much of Piltover is so damn classist they'll actually START A CIVIL WAR over treating Zaun as it deserves to be to get what they've deserved.

The general amnesty for anyone she had imprisoned in her Grand Commander arc was a late idea, but one I knew Caitlyn had to make once I had the idea, cause she absolutely does. The realization that she'd done to so many just what had been done to Vi, and she KNOWS how TERRIBLY that hurt Vi… I'm pretty proud of myself for that one, I can't lie.

And the ending scenes, and Maddie… Maddie is my one serious critique of Season 2, because I get WHY Fortiche did what they did with her, but it's the rare case where I feel they didn't truly set it up the way THAT kind of twist NEEDED to be. Especially in light of what some of the writers have said in the wake of the end of Arcane, that Maddie was apparently always a Noxian/Noxian-loyal plant in the Enforcers. Just… EVERYTHING about her always said the exact opposite, and I realize that that can then be just, MASSIVE and EXPERT levels of duplicity on her part, but… It didn't make sense. MAYBE the actually obvious-in-hindsight break-up scene between her and Caitlyn at the memorial helping push Maddie fully into Ambessa's cause, but… Eh.

I'd also written Chapter 6 before the twist reveal, assuming Maddie just was what she seemed on the surface. Now, with Maddie still being something of a Noxian plant, but reticent and unable to truly follow through on it in this story, her line to Caitlyn there about failing to keep her on the righteous and narrow gets to take on a WHOLE different meaning. Maddie nearly had a very different role in the story overall, which would've made her scene here play out QUITE differently. But she doesn't, so this is how it goes.

Lastly, Caitlyn shooting Rictus to pieces and suffering a serious flashback/breakdown once Vi stops her shot was another vague idea that gained more and more meaning as I wrote it out. I had most of the whole scene pretty well fully formed, from Jinx's seeming taunts and executing the poor bastard to Caitlyn hallucinating her way back into the vents. But writing it out in the moment let me work in further details I hadn't planned, and realize the key point that's going to be important going forward; who and what Jinx has become and done because of what she's suffered is not anomalous. Caitlyn realizing, actually, how very, terribly similar they are, responding to intense loss and trauma with hateful, gleeful violence… THAT is how these two are going to be able to coexist without killing each other for the rest of the story and beyond. Cause NOW, they finally SEE and UNDERSTAND each other, however bluntly Jinx makes the revelation, however much it hurts Caitlyn to acknowledge.