Chapter Text
It’s not supposed to be Vi’s day off.
She doesn’t actually have days off, usually. She doesn’t even have weekends. She’s worked every day since she was a teenager, barring that one time she fell off the bridge and couldn’t walk for four days.
But today she has nothing to do. She’d tried to pick up a warehouse shift, only to be told that there’s nothing available.
So she’s home. It’s not ideal, because rent this month is already going to be tight, but she’ll ask around and see if there’s any other work she can pick up before the end of the month to make up for it.
Vi sprawls out on the couch and turns the battered television on. As always, she glares at the black spot in the corner of the screen, courtesy of a baseball throw gone awry.
Why was a baseball being thrown indoors? Vi doesn’t know and she never got a straight answer out of the boys. She’s still mad about it.
But she tries to ignore the black spot and flips to the sports channel. Leaving the basketball game on for background noise, Vi pulls out her phone and settles in to text Caitlyn and doomscroll.
She unlocks her phone to find that Caitlyn has texted her already. She’s sent a picture of a saran-wrapped sandwich with the palest bread Vi has ever seen. The caption is ‘today’s trial. Emotional trial, I mean. Not legal.’
Vi grins and quickly sends back, ‘cait, do not eat that. order a pizza or something. please. do it for me.’
She gets an immediate response. It’s a picture of the same sandwich, now half-eaten.
Vi sends her a picture of a random man screaming in despair on a beach. She’s grinning at the typing bubbles that appear when she hears footsteps outside the front door.
Vi jolts, sitting up and whirling around. Ekko is in his dorm in Piltover, Mylo and Claggor are at work, and Powder is… not around.
So why the fuck is the door opening in the middle of the day?
Vi tenses, getting ready for a fight, and then Mylo and Claggor come in.
Vi stares at them, her heart sinking.
They both trudge inside, defeat on their faces. Claggor shuts the door behind him and then just falls back against it. Mylo goes straight into the kitchen and starts rummaging through Vi’s stash of liquor.
“No,” Vi groans.
“Yeah,” Mylo mutters.
Vi could cry. “How many people?”
“All of us,” Claggor says. He looks tired. “Well, our whole shift at least. Said they’re consolidating or something. Closing down our part of the factory, moving operations elsewhere.”
“Fuck,” Mylo mutters under his breath. He kicks one of the kitchen cabinets. “Fuck!”
“Stop kicking that,” Vi says automatically, as if half those scuff marks aren’t from her. “So it’s closed for good, then? It’s not a temporary layoff?”
Claggor just shakes his head. Mylo uncaps a bottle of vodka and drinks straight from the bottle.
Vi sits up, bracing her elbows on her knees and putting her head in her hands for a second. “Did they pay you for today?”
“Only for the morning,” Claggor says. “Three hours each. They called us all in after that and broke the news.”
Vi takes a deep breath and lets it out. “Okay. Okay. We’ve got two weeks until the rent’s due. That’s lots of time.”
“Lots of time,” Mylo mutters darkly. “Lots of time to sit around, maybe. There weren’t any other jobs even before this, and now there’s a few hundred of us all looking for work at the same time.”
Vi scrubs at her face. “You guys have to go now. Like, right now. Start knocking on doors, I don’t care. Someone’s gotta have something.”
“I was thinking we could try that diner a few blocks down,” Claggor says. “The one with the broken sign out front.”
Vi lifts her head to stare at him. “Didn’t someone die there last week? I heard one of their dishwashers got shot.”
“Well, yeah,” Claggor says, “which is awful, but… they probably have a job opening for a dishwasher then.”
Vi thinks about it. “Okay, yeah. Good idea. Go, Clagg, right now.”
Claggor nods and heads back out. When the door shuts behind him, Mylo turns back to Vi.
“Are we short?” he asks bluntly. “For this month?”
“Yeah,” Vi admits. “But there’s still time. And if you and Clagg can’t find work… I’ll figure something out.”
Mylo gives her a flat look. “Uh huh.”
“Hey, we haven’t lost this place yet,” she reminds him. “I don’t plan to lose it now.”
Mylo just shakes his head. “Our luck’s gotta run out at some point.”
It’s not luck. It’s not luck that’s kept a roof over their heads all these years. It’s been Vi working herself to the bone and getting beaten within an inch of her life in the pits that’s kept them here.
But she doesn’t say that. She just says, “I’ll figure it out.”
Mylo goes back to the sink, rinsing out the now-empty bottle of vodka. “The mines will take us.”
“No,” Vi says immediately. “Over my dead body. Literally. If we lose this place, I’ll find another. Or we’ll sleep on the streets until we get it together. No fucking mines.”
Mylo doesn’t look at her.
“Well, get going,” Vi says, a little more harshly. She’s pissed that he even brought the mines up. “You’ve got to get ahead of everyone else, like Clagg said. They’re fixing up that apartment block that started to sag up on Fifth - go check there. I asked if they were hiring last week and they said no, but things might’ve changed.”
Mylo heads out and takes his dark cloud of gloom with him. Vi flops back onto the couch and tries not to scream, her frustration boiling and boiling inside of her.
She goes to see Caitlyn that night. They hadn’t planned on meeting up tonight, but Vi’s having a bad day and needs to see her. She'd texted all the details to Caitlyn earlier in the day, and Caitlyn had offered to pick up dinner and meet her at the apartment, which sounds like a dream.
Vi crosses the bridge just before it closes, literally. She has to run the last few steps when the Enforcers start shouting at her to clear the bridge before the gates close.
Vi trudges down the dark Piltover street alongside the river until she reaches the apartment building. She lets herself in, because this building isn’t in an area nice enough for a doorman, and takes the elevator up to her floor because she doesn’t have the energy for the stairs. As the elevator rises, she tips her head back against the gold-plated wall and closes her eyes.
When she comes into the apartment, Caitlyn is at the kitchen table taking takeout containers out of a paper bag. She looks up when Vi comes in. “Oh, Vi.”
“Don’t,” Vi manages to say. “It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
Caitlyn sighs, but she doesn’t press. She just sets the takeout containers down and holds out her arms.
Vi walks right into her and lets Caitlyn wrap her in a hug. Vi slumps against her, tucking her face into the collar of Caitlyn’s sweatshirt. Well, it’s Vi’s sweatshirt, but Caitlyn’s wearing it.
After a few minutes of this, Vi feels recalibrated. She steps back, takes a deep breath, and starts helping with the takeout.
They eat dinner together quietly. Caitlyn tells Vi about her day, which sounds like it involved a whole lot of paperwork and not nearly as much violence and conflict as her ‘Sheriff of Piltover’ title might imply. Vi does her best to listen, but the mental calculation of how much money she needs to make rent keeps forcing its way back into her mind.
Caitlyn seems to pick up on it. When they’re cleaning up the takeout, she says, “I could ask around. There are so many open jobs in Piltover, and they’d pay better than anything in Zaun.”
Vi finishes rinsing out a container and leans over to give Caitlyn a quick kiss on the cheek before tossing the container in the recycling bin. “You’re sweet. But you know they’d never hire one of us.”
“If I vouched for one or both of your brothers, they might,” Caitlyn says stubbornly.
Vi shakes her head. “At best they’d hire them just to appease you and then fire them the next day. They hate us, Cait. And Mylo and Clagg wouldn’t take work in Piltover anyway.”
Caitlyn crosses her arms and leans against the counter. “They won’t take work in Piltover but they’ll let you work yourself to death to keep a roof over their heads?”
Vi can only shrug. She doesn’t want to have this argument again. Caitlyn sometimes gripes about Vi’s siblings and how much Vi does for them, and she’s not technically wrong. But Caitlyn also doesn’t get what it’s like in Zaun.
Vi’s siblings would do more than gripe about Caitlyn, if they knew about her. They’d be actively insulting her. There’s nothing a Zaunite hates more than a Piltover cop, and Caitlyn is the Queen of Cops.
Caitlyn doesn’t like it when Vi calls her that. She always says, “that implies that I was handed this title by being born into a specific bloodline. I worked hard for this.”
Which is fair. But she is the highest paid cop in Piltover and the one in charge of everyone else, so it’s not necessarily an inaccurate nickname.
But either way, Vi’s siblings don’t know about Caitlyn, and Vi has no plans to change that.
Caitlyn sighs. “How much do you need to make the rent?”
“No,” Vi says, and grabs the dish cloth to go wipe down the table.
“Vi, I can give you cash,” Caitlyn says desperately. “There’d be no record of it.”
“Cait, I love you,” Vi says, “but no.”
Caitlyn shakes her head and turns away. She starts going through the fridge as Vi cleans up the rest of the kitchen in silence, pouring out expired drinks and throwing out old food. There are days when neither of them are here, so things often go bad in the fridge and cupboards.
When they first got together, it was Vi’s pride that kept her from accepting Caitlyn’s money. She didn’t want a sugar mommy, she wanted a girlfriend. She didn’t want any sort of imbalance in their relationship, any sort of push and pull or leverage.
Then times got really tough for Vi, about six months into the relationship, and Vi’s resolve started to waver a little. Caitlyn has so much money. It would be so easy to accept just a little bit, just a few hundred bucks to get through the month.
But then Caitlyn got promoted, and then she got promoted again, and again, and again, and now she’s the goddamn Sheriff.
And, because she’s the Sheriff, all her bank accounts are heavily monitored. Every transaction is examined. Any money taken out has to be accounted for.
It’s to prevent corruption. Caitlyn herself is all for it - she allows the auditors unfettered access to all of that. She doesn’t want anyone to be able to claim that she’s making decisions because of bribery or personal interest. There’s been too much corruption in the Enforcers over the years, and Caitlyn’s determined to change that.
But that also means that if she starts paying Vi’s bills, she’s going to have to either lie about where that money went or admit that she’s giving money to an ex-con, ex-drug runner, occasional pitfighter, and current Zaunite. Which at best will taint Caitlyn in the public’s eyes, and at worst will get her investigated and potentially fired.
So Vi won’t accept anything. Not a penny. This apartment is enough, it’s plenty. It’s an escape that Vi’s never had before in her life. It’s comfort, it’s safety.
It’s a small apartment that overlooks the river, only a few minutes away from the bridge. It’s on the Piltover side, because Caitlyn obviously can’t live in Zaun, but it takes Vi less than thirty minutes to cross the bridge and walk home from here. It’s a one bedroom apartment with a cozy living room and a small but practical kitchen. Vi loves it.
It’s Caitlyn’s apartment on paper. Easily justifiable, as far as financial records go. She’s young, she’s only ever lived with her parents - of course she might want a small place of her own.
But Caitlyn likes living at her estate over in Upper Piltover with her parents. She only got this apartment so she and Vi would have somewhere to meet, because Upper Piltover is too far for Vi to go on an average day.
It’s been working great. They both stay here a few nights a week and at their respective homes the rest. No one in Vi’s family ever questions where she goes at night, and Caitlyn’s parents know but don’t care because Caitlyn is thirty years old.
So for a few nights a week, Vi gets to live this beautiful pretend life. She sleeps in a soft, warm bed in a temperature-controlled apartment next to her beautiful girlfriend. They order food and eat it snuggled up on the couch, watching whatever reality show happens to be on. They have as much sex as they want and don’t have to be quiet about it. They whisper to each other about their lives and their deepest secrets before they fall asleep.
Then the morning comes, Caitlyn leaves for work, and Vi goes back to Zaun to face her shitty, fucked-up life that she can’t seem to fix, no matter how hard she tries.
Claggor gets the job at the diner. Mylo finds a temporary gig as a barback, but it’s only coverage for their regular guy who broke his arm. Barbacking isn’t the best job anyway because of the lack of tips, but it’s something.
It helps, especially because they can both start right away. But it’s not going to be enough.
Vi spends hours each night sitting at the kitchen table, sorting through her stash of cash to see if she can somehow make more bills appear.
She doesn’t want to go fight. She doesn’t want to do that anymore. But she might not have a choice.
Her general mood isn’t improved when Mylo starts badgering her about the bedrooms again.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he complains as the three of them eat dinner at their rickety table. “We’ve got three bedrooms. You’re in one, Clagg and I are in the other, and then one is empty. I’m paying rent, I deserve my own room.”
“Then move out and get your own place if you want your own room so bad,” Vi says, and shoves another forkful of noodles into her mouth.
“Would if I could,” Mylo snaps. “Powder’s not paying rent. She’s not even here! So why the fuck are we holding her room for her?”
“You know why,” Vi says dully. Beside her, Claggor is ignoring the conversation entirely and just eating his food.
“She’s not coming back,” Mylo says. “Clagg and I pay rent. We should get our own rooms.”
“No,” Vi says. “Final answer.”
Then she gets up, grabs her boots, and goes to see if she can find more work that doesn’t involve getting knocked out in the pit.
She picks up an extra shift at the warehouse the next day. It’s technically an illegal shift, considering she already worked a full shift here this morning and labour laws forbid back-to-back shifts at the same place, but nobody cares.
It’s exhausting work. It’s backbreaking, sometimes literally. Vi and her coworkers haul box after box after box from one belt to another. They sort the boxes. They stack the boxes. They ask why they can’t get a few goddamn forklifts to help them move the boxes. They’re told to either shut the fuck up or find a new job. They stack more boxes. They transfer boxes to trucks. The trucks drive away and new trucks arrive. They unload boxes from trucks. They do it all again.
During hour fourteen of Vi’s work day, she hands off another box to the guy standing in the truck and steps back, wiping sweat off her forehead with the sleeve of her shirt.
“Hey, Vi,” her coworker Hayden says. He groans as he lifts a particularly heavy box into the truck. “Are you free on Thursday?”
“My answer depends on why you’re asking,” Vi says, stepping into the shadow of the truck to take a swig from the flask she has tucked into her pocket. It’s filled with water, not alcohol, because they’re not allowed to even have water bottles on the warehouse floor. As much as Vi loves alcohol, she loves not dying of dehydration more.
“Got some work, if you’re interested,” Hayden says.
“Oh, I’m interested.” Vi takes another desperate pull from the flask and then caps it, tucking it back into her pocket before the supervisor can notice.
Hayden takes her aside. “It’s a protection detail,” he murmurs. “We’ve got too few people right now, we need at least three more. Four would be ideal.”
Vi raises an eyebrow. “For who?”
“It’s for a truck, not a person.”
“Then whose truck is it,” Vi says flatly. Only the chembarons can afford protection detail.
“Sevika’s.”
Vi rolls her eyes. “So, Silco.”
“Technically. But it’s Sevika’s thing.”
“I don’t do work for Silco or Sevika,” Vi says. “You know that.”
“I know, but the money’s good. Real good. Thought it might be enough for you to make an exception.”
“I don’t make exceptions for Sevika or Silco.”
“But it’s easy work,” Hayden says desperately. “Please, Vi. It’ll be three hours, max, and then you’ll make three months worth of money.”
“Why are they offering so much to protect a truck?” Her answer is going to be ‘no’ regardless, but now she’s curious. “They usually don’t put together crews this big for Shimmer shipments.”
“It’s not Shimmer. It’s the Shimmer cure.”
Vi’s heart pounds once, twice. It feels like an electric jolt is travelling from her skull to her feet. “Oh,” she says, putting everything she has into keeping her voice even. “I guess that makes sense. They must be moving a lot of it to be using a full truck.”
“Yeah, exactly,” Hayden says. “And it’s a big truck, so we need a lot of people.”
“Why can’t Sevika’s guys just do it? She has enough people.”
“Some sort of event or something going on at Silco’s club. Most of their people will be there instead. I told her I could put together a big crew and now I can’t find enough people. Look, if you do it, I’ll even give you some of my share.”
Vi claps him on the shoulder. “Sorry, man. I can’t do this one. I appreciate the offer, though. Come find me next time, as long as it’s not for Silco.”
Hayden sighs, but lets her go. Vi goes back to hauling boxes, but her mind is whirring.
This is her chance. This is her only chance. This is her one and only chance and it’s just been handed to her on a silver fucking platter.
Two days later, Vi gets ready.
Mylo and Claggor are out somewhere. Clagg is probably with his girlfriend and Mylo is probably with his friends. Doesn’t matter - what matters is that Vi has the apartment to herself.
She gets dressed in a pair of black sweatpants. They’re not her favourite for something like this, because they’re a little too bulky and loose for the kind of running she’s going to be doing, but she needs the bulk to hide the shape of her hips. She needs to look masculine to the point of being mistaken for a man, and if she can’t achieve that, she’ll hopefully look at least androgynous.
She pulls on a sports bra that she usually never wears because of how constricting it is. But it flattens her breasts like nothing else, and although her ribs are going to hurt by the time she gets home, it’s just for a few hours and hopefully she won’t crack anything.
Next is a thick black sweater that Ekko left here in the boys’ room. It’s supposed to be oversized, so it’s loose even on Vi’s muscled shoulders. Over that, she puts on the black jacket that she stole for this exact purpose. The sweater bunches up underneath the jacket, making her shoulders look broader than they really are.
She’s sweating already. Great. This is going to be a terrible night.
Her hair is next. She’s not going to dye it, because its visibility is exactly what she’s going to need in the second part of her plan. Instead, she ties it back into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. Then she takes a deep breath, savouring the last moments of not feeling smothered, and pulls the black balaclava over her head.
She has an old, smudged mirror in the corner of her bedroom. She turns to it to see her reflection and laughs out loud. She looks hilariously like a cartoon criminal. But hey, it’s a classic look for a reason.
The balaclava covers her head and her face entirely, leaving only her eyes exposed. That’s a problem too, because Vi’s eyes are kind of identifiable to anyone who knows her, but she’s accounted for that.
She picks up the black ski goggles she found a while back (it’s ridiculous that she found these in Zaun - no one here can afford to ski) and secures them on her face, tightening the strap behind her head. The lens of the goggles is completely black as well. Every identifiable part of her is now hidden away.
Vi tucks some cash and her key into a secure pocket and then goes out to the living room. Sitting on the arm of the couch, she unlocks her phone and flips to one of her favourite pictures of Caitlyn.
In the picture, Caitlyn (Sheriff of Piltover, heir to the Kiramman legacy and fortune, future city councillor, one of the most notable people in all of Piltover and even Zaun, feared by many and loved by some), is wearing a white sweatsuit and sitting on the couch in their apartment. There’s a huge red wine stain spreading all over the front of her sweatshirt, and she’s pretending to wail dramatically while holding her now-half-empty wine glass in the air.
Vi had been nearly in tears of laughter when she took the picture. She smiles at it fondly for a few minutes now, because there’s a good chance that she could die tonight and she won’t get to see Caitlyn again. She can’t even call her to say goodbye, because Caitlyn is really fucking astute and will definitely pick up on the tone of Vi’s voice.
Then she closes the picture and flips to her contacts instead. She calls Ekko.
“Hey!” he says when he picks up. “Sorry, I’m just about to walk into class. Can I call you back?”
“No,” Vi says.
There’s a pause. “Okay,” Ekko says, the cheer gone from his voice. “One sec, I’m just going to get out of this hallway.”
There’s some rustling, and then the clamour of a hallway in the University of Piltover fades and then disappears entirely.
“What’s wrong,” Ekko says flatly. She can tell that he’s bracing for the news that Powder’s dead.
Vi takes a deep breath. “I need you to go get Powder.”
A pause. “Vi, come on.”
“Ekko, I’ve never asked you for anything,” Vi says, letting the desperation seep into her voice. “Not once, not ever.”
She doesn’t add that she’s also given him everything she’s ever had to give. She doesn’t have to. He knows.
“But there’s no point,” Ekko says. “Vi, we’ve tried this. We’ve tried everything. Remember what happened the last time you went to get her?”
Yeah, Vi remembers. She’d gone down to what Silco calls his club. Vi calls it his lair.
She’d walked right through the front doors, made her way through the whole place, found Powder, and tried to convince Powder to come home.
It had gone exactly as it always goes. Powder had laughed at her, taunted her. Escalated to insults and shouting when Vi still wouldn’t leave.
Eventually Silco’s goons had dragged Vi out. They’d kicked her and punched her and just generally beat her to within an inch of her life by the time Powder came outside, her bluster gone. She’d tried to play it off, like she always does - she made a joke about a bunch of men being unable to get rid of her pathetic sister without beating her up, and finally the goons left. Vi had been lying on the concrete, crying and bleeding, and Powder had hissed, “get the fuck up. This is embarrassing, get up. Hurry, go now.”
So Vi had crawled away and gone home.
In the here and now, Vi says, “this is different.”
“Why,” Ekko says flatly. “Why is it different.”
“I need you to trust me,” Vi pleads. “Please, Ekko. Just this once. She’ll listen to you, she always does. I just need her here tonight. Please.”
“Not unless you tell me why! What are you doing?”
“If you leave right now, you’ll make it before the bridge closes.”
“Vi - ”
“I’ll see you tonight.” Then she ends the call and sets her phone down on the beat-up old coffee table with the water stains all over it.
She can’t take her phone with her. Can’t risk dropping it, can’t risk losing it. Can’t risk her location getting tracked if she has it on her.
Then she gets her boots, pulls them on, laces them tightly. Yanks on her black gloves. Flips the hood of her jacket up over her head, and leaves.
It’s easy to find the truck.
Hayden had mentioned that this is Sevika’s crew moving the product, so Vi goes to one of the depots that Sevika runs. Sure enough, there’s a truck backed up to the open bay door of the building.
Vi scales the side of a nearby building and finds a shadowy fire escape to crouch on. She presses herself into the wall of the building and holds perfectly still as she surveys the scene.
They’re all moving quickly. They’re loading container after container into the truck with practiced efficiency while more crew members patrol around, keeping an eye out for anyone approaching. They’re all armed.
Vi’s not, because you can’t get a good weapon of any kind these days unless you’re attached to a chembaron.
Sevika herself appears, storming around like she always does. “Faster,” she barks, and the crew scurries faster. “We don’t have all night!”
In an ideal world, Vi would pull off some kind of fancy heist. She’d throw a spike strip in front of the truck once it’s on the road, so that it would be forced to stop. Or it could hit the spike strip without stopping and crash, and she could rob it then. Or maybe she’d somehow jump onto the back of the truck and swing inside as it drives away, robbing it easily before jumping back off.
But that’s not practical. She’s strong, she’s fast, but she’s not superhuman.
She also doesn’t know where the truck is going. She has no idea if it would be easier to rob it at its destination. Hayden hadn’t said, and Vi couldn’t press him for more information without it looking suspicious.
Vi can’t wait too long to make her move. It’s a big crew and Sevika is breathing down their necks, so they’re really hustling. She has to go now. Now or never. Literally.
She gets back down to the ground and then starts making her way to the other side of the bay door, away from Sevika and most of the crew. The sun has fully set by now, so this whole area is shrouded in darkness, and it gives Vi an advantage. She creeps soundlessly through the dark and keeps an eye on the crew as she does it. A few of them point flashlights around every once in a while, but it’s easy to tell when they’re going to do it as long as she keeps an eye on them.
Only a few minutes later, she’s made it close to the truck. She wants to hesitate, she wants to time this perfectly, she wants to wait - but she can’t. The truck’s already more than half full.
She waits just another moment, calculates her approach, and then stands up. She keeps her hood over her head - just another one of the crew, all dressed in black. The others aren’t covering their faces, but a few of them have hoods up just like she does. If she times this perfectly, no one will even look at her.
Vi walks confidently around the side of the truck and right through the bay door, following some big guy wearing nearly exactly the same outfit she is. Vi keeps her head tilted down but her shoulders loose, her arms relaxed.
The guy in front of her grabs a container and starts to turn around. Vi steps forward just as he turns, so that she’s bending down for the next container and therefore keeping her face hidden under her hood.
He doesn’t notice. Just walks past her, container in hands. None of them have noticed yet - she’s just another random henchman, another goon, another Zaunite willing to sell their soul to the devil to make rent this month.
She grabs the next container. It’s plastic, and she’d figured that these containers were just bins of some kind, but now she realizes that they’re coolers. This stuff probably needs to be kept at a certain temperature. Well, hopefully it can withstand some time out of the cooler, because Vi sure as hell isn’t carrying this whole thing back home with her.
She turns around with the cooler and carries it toward the truck. As another guy turns to come by her to grab another cooler, Vi ducks her head again and leans forward, adjusting the cooler in her arms like it’s a little too heavy.
That works too. He doesn’t notice her.
Just before she reaches the truck, she steps around the side of it and then hurries into the shadows. She doesn’t go far, because there’s not enough time. She just sets it down silently and opens the lid.
Inside the cooler is a small box, surrounded by ice and a thermometer. Probably so the recipient can check the temperature.
The small box is barely bigger than her hand. Big enough for the syringe and its precious contents and not much else.
Absurdly, the box has a beautiful black leather exterior. It’s so fucking ridiculous that Vi wants to laugh, but then she decides that if she were paying three hundred thousand dollars for this syringe, she’d expect it to come in a fancy box too.
No time to waste. Vi takes out the small box, unzips her jacket, and tucks the box securely inside.
Then she zips it back up, gets to her feet, and hears someone shout, “hey, what are you - ”
Vi runs for her fucking life.
They chase her. They shoot at her. Vi keeps running.
She’s fast. Some of the guys chasing her are fast too, especially because Sevika is bellowing at the top of her lungs and probably waking up this entire part of Zaun, but she has the advantage of adrenaline and sheer desperation.
She also knows Zaun better than they do. She skids around corners, slamming her shoulder into brick and concrete and wood over and over as she takes each turn too fast. She jumps over crates and fences. She scales fire escapes and jumps from one to another. She’s fast.
She’s fast, but they have vehicles.
She hears tires squealing from multiple directions. They’re bringing out the entire cavalry to chase her.
Only the chembarons have vehicles in Zaun now, so the streets are mostly clear of other cars - therefore, the vehicles chasing Vi have an unobstructed path to her.
But Zaun is poorly designed and falling apart at the seams. For once, the crumbling infrastructure works in her favour. She adopts a new route, only ducking through narrow alleys, circling back, then going through again. She aims specifically for alleys and pathways surrounded by broken streets and random rubble. Anything that would be an obstacle to a vehicle but not to her.
It’s still not enough. She shakes them, and then shakes them again when they catch up, and then again.
They nearly catch her just as she reaches the subway station.
The subway station isn’t actually a subway station. It was supposed to be; back in the day, before Zaun really started to crumble, they were going to put in a subway line all through Zaun and into Piltover. It would go under the river! It would connect the two cities like never before!
Then just like everything else, it fell apart. The subway line never got finished. The above ground hub that had led down to the underground station has since turned into the biggest shantytown in Zaun. It even has its own market, its own stores.
It’s also a fantastically huge hub of chaos and crime. It’s the perfect place for Vi to disappear.
She dives into the crowd and runs for the stairs. Not even a bunch of chembaron vehicles coming around the corner spooks this crowd, and so she disappears into the throng and then disappears further into the dark station.
They chase her even then. She can hear them yelling at people to get out of the way, as if anyone cares.
Vi runs down, down, down until she hits the market. There’s a stall set back into the wall, most of the items safely stored out of sight with just the counter and the stall owner at the front. Vi sprints for it and dives over the counter in one smooth motion.
The force with which she hits the floor on the other side is a little less smooth, but that’s okay.
Mary, the owner of the stall, doesn’t even flinch or look at Vi. “Hey, Vi,” she says casually, leaning on her counter and staring out at the crowd. “Who’re you hiding from?”
Clearly Vi’s disguise hasn’t fooled her. “You’ll see,” Vi grunts, scrambling under the counter. She pulls her knees in and tries to smother her gasping breaths.
Sure enough, Vi hears the shouts a few moments later as Sevika’s guys come through the station. They’re shouting for people to move and asking if anyone’s seen someone come through here at the same time.
Vi holds her breath and pulls her knees in even more tightly as she hears footsteps approaching.
“You see anything?” a man shouts at Mary.
Mary is totally relaxed. Her legs are right beside Vi’s hiding place, and she’s just loosely rolling one of her ankles around like nothing’s happening. “No,” she says. “You wanna buy a candy bar? If not, fuck off.”
The man scoffs and storms off. Vi grits her teeth and waits.
Minutes pass. Then half an hour. Then a full hour.
Finally, Mary says, “they’re gone. You’re good.”
“Thanks,” Vi mumbles. She’s shaking; staying completely motionless after a huge hit of adrenaline like that does not feel good. She stays under the counter but lets herself tip back to sit on the ground more comfortably, letting her legs sprawl out as she pulls the goggles and balaclava off. She holds them up to Mary. “You wanna sell these?”
“Sure.” Mary takes them and goes over to a box under one of her shelves, tucking them inside. “You gotta go. You’re making me nervous.”
That’s fair. “Thanks again,” Vi says, hating the way her voice trembles. Her teeth are chattering, both from the adrenaline crash and the chill now setting in from the sweat trapped against her skin.
“Good luck with whatever the fuck this is,” Mary says as Vi climbs back over the counter and stumbles out into the crowd.
Vi makes a mental note to bring some kind of ‘thank you’ gift over to Mary at some point. Vi hasn’t actually seen her in a while; it’s sheer luck that Mary’s stall is open today. They’d had a friends-with-benefits situation a few years ago, before Vi met Caitlyn. It hadn’t worked out, mostly because Vi is completely incapable of doing friends-with-benefits situations. It’s not her fault that she has a tendency to start falling in love after a single hookup! But Mary had wanted a casual thing only, so they’d ended it.
Then Vi had met Caitlyn not long after that, and they’ve been together ever since. And they’ll stay together until Caitlyn inevitably has to drop Vi so she can live an actual life with an actual partner, not a half-life with a secret girlfriend.
Vi makes her way through the subway station. It’s sprawling; the original design included several different platforms, because this was supposed to be a hub for a couple different subway lines. Now it’s just a giant tent city, filled with acrid smoke from garbage can fires and the smell of too many people with no access to showers.
Vi doesn’t go back to the surface yet. Instead she goes from tent to tent, looking for any women around her size.
She trades her sweatpants first; the young woman that she finds eyes them hungrily. They’re a nice pair of sweatpants, really - way nicer than the grey leggings the woman gives her in return, which is why the woman makes the trade.
Vi gets changed behind the woman’s tent, not really caring if anyone sees her, and then keeps going. She trades her black jacket and sweater for a dark purple hoodie, careful to keep the leather box tucked against her chest until she can secure it inside her new hoodie and zip it up.
Then it’s just her boots left. She’s really sad to trade these - they’re her favourite pair, she’s owned them for years. But she’s gotta do what she’s gotta do.
The shoes she gets in return are a pair of ratty canvas slip-on shoes. They don’t fit perfectly, but she can walk in them, and that’s all she can ask for right now.
She gives her beautiful gloves to some random teenager and doesn’t ask for anything in return. The kid is curled up against one of the grimy tile walls, shivering.
All that’s left is her hair. Vi had tucked a tiny packet of hair gel into her sports bra before she left, and now she pulls it out and squeezes the entire thing into her sweaty hands. She runs her hands through her hair, spiking it up as best she can. She’s going to look ridiculous, but that’s kind of the point. Vi? Vi with the super spiky hair? No, Vi couldn’t have been that thief, that thief was wearing a balaclava and goggles and a hood. Look at Vi’s hair, that’s not the hair of someone who was wearing a balaclava and goggles and a hood!
When that’s done, Vi takes a deep breath, quells her shaking as best she can, and heads back to the surface.
Vi knows a lot of people in Zaun, and she recognizes a few of the women hanging out by the entrance to the station. They’re sex workers, and a few of them work at Vi’s old friend Babette’s brothel.
“Hey, Vanessa,” Vi calls as she walks up to one of them. “How much for you to walk home with me?”
Vanessa glances at her. “Is that a euphemism?”
“No. Literally just the walk.”
Vanessa looks thoughtful. “I’d do it for twenty.”
“Deal,” Vi says immediately, taking a bill out of the wallet she’d transferred into her new hoodie.
She and Vanessa make their way through the rest of the crowd and back out into the street. Sure enough, there are five different vehicles all parked on the street. Sevika’s goons are milling around, arguing with each other and glaring around at the crowd.
Vi ignores them. She chats to Vanessa as they walk, smiling and laughing at Vanessa’s jokes. There’s no reason to look at Vi - Vi’s just a normal Zaunite, walking by with a friend. Vi’s got nothing hidden in her big purple hoodie. Vi’s not the thief all dressed in black that they’re looking for.
It works. No one shouts after her. No one looks twice at her.
Vi’s heart starts to pound again the closer she and Vanessa get to Vi’s apartment building. This is the next hurdle. The scariest part, really. She can only hope that Ekko came through and has Powder in the apartment right now, otherwise this all will have been for nothing.
Vanessa, who is a consummate professional, doesn’t ask any questions about Vi’s weird request. She just walks Vi to her building and then says goodnight before heading off.
Vi takes a deep breath and starts up the rickety stairs. Her apartment is on the fourth floor, which isn’t all that high up in terms of walk-ups but is definitely too high when her body is struggling to find any reserves of energy left.
There’s also no interior entrance to this apartment. The only way to access the front door is by climbing up this rickety set of stairs. The stairs were probably originally built to be a fire escape, but the building got subdivided into smaller and smaller apartments as the years went on and now Vi’s shitty apartment is only accessible from the outside.
She finally makes it up to the equally rickety landing and takes out her key. Her hands tremble as she opens the door, sweat pouring down her back again. She might actually pass out, now that she thinks about it.
She opens the door and steps inside.