I've got a pain in my neck
Because I keep looking up
I'm searching what's coming next
But it won't come from above
And there's a hole in my chest
And I'll make it my own
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Caitlyn's tentative voice comes through my comm just as we're getting our shoes on. "Ekko? She's asking for you. She's really upset."
Goddamn it.
I look at my Firelights. "Um—"
"It's fine," says Tei, rolling his eyes. "Home'll still be there tomorrow."
I hug them all, give my comm to Quartz, and run back upstairs.
Caitlyn stands several feet back from the bed, arms crossed uncomfortably, while Vi is half-sitting with a feral glower that eases as soon as she sees me. I go over and sit next to her.
"Are you okay?" she asks, just as I'm about to ask the same thing.
"Yes...?" I say. "Why?"
"She thinks you're the one who's sick," Caitlyn says. "Apparently you have a fever."
I laugh. "No, Vi, that's you."
"You wish," Vi says indistinctly, aiming an uncoordinated hand at my forehead. "Does it hurt? Do you want juice?"
There was a time I actually did have a pretty bad fever when I was about ten. Since Benzo and Vander both had to work and Vi was the one who never got sick, she came over to watch me. I wasn't as out of it as she is now, but I was a bit confused, so she spent a lot of time re-explaining my position to me every time I woke from a nap and got all worked up. I don't remember many specifics, but I remember being comforted by her voice and her hugs. And I remember repeatedly demanding juice.
I take her hand and hold it against my head. "See?" I say. "You're the one who's sick. I'm okay."
"Little man." She relaxes and looks like she'll lie back down, but Caitlyn darts over to put an arm behind her back, keeping her upright. Vi turns to squint at her.
"She needs a drink," Caitlyn tells me. I trade places with her, and she picks up the glass from the table and pretends to let Vi take it, her shaky hands tightly cupped in Caitlyn's as she gulps all of the water. She scowls at the glass, offended that it's empty.
"Do you want more?" Caitlyn asks.
"No." Vi scowls at me now, so I move my arm from behind her and she flops down, sighs, and rolls onto her side. I shift my weight, meaning to get up. She swings her hand at me again. "Don't. Keeping an eye on you."
"All right."
She's quiet for a second, then snickers. "Councilor."
I should've thought about her more closely when I agreed to the role. I'm never gonna hear the end of it.
Caitlyn leans past me to unbend one of Vi's wrists, her posture cautious and her hair wrecked from how she pulled the pins out. "Do you want to go back to sleep? Ekko can stay here."
Vi grumbles something unintelligible and shuts her eyes. We watch her for a few minutes before Caitlyn turns to me with a faint smile and says, "How do you like it? Being a councilor?"
Our conference today lasted seven hours, argument-ridden but effective: we covered everything we planned to cover and more. She was a marvel. Since none of the Undercity recruits have last names, and since there's already a Councilor Kiramman, she's chosen to use her first name— it aligns her with us in a way that no one can criticize without sounding paranoid. She went on four separate tirades about the state of the fissures and even got Lumley, her mother's recruit, backed into a couple corners and agreeing with her. We were holding the meeting in his sitting room, since the Council room was vaporized, which just added insult to injury.
"I hate it," I say. "But I'm honored to do it."
Caitlyn frowns. "Why do you hate it?"
You can do so much more for the Firelights as a councilor than as our president.
But I promised not to leave.
"My people are across the river, surviving day by day," I say. "I'm up here, using something called face wash. What if it changes me?"
"Face wash?"
"Living like a Topsider. What if I get too comfortable and start to value it more than I value the Undercity? What if I realize, up here, I can just turn around and forget whenever I want to? What if I want to?"
Caitlyn pulls her feet onto the bed and twitches her hand as if she's gonna touch me, but she doesn't. "Ekko, you're going back tomorrow. The Undercity is still your home. You invented that term for your appointment to the Council."
"I know. But what if the time I spend here is enough?"
She shakes her head. "It won't be. No amount of time would be enough. Not for you."
I study her duvet, the kind of thing that would draw crowds and start fights outside Benzo's shop. Knives and knuckles. Gold spilling like blood on the stone.
Look who it is! The boy savior.
"No one's immune to corruption," I say. "No one's too good to go bad. It all comes down to the price, and you don't know your price until you've already paid."
"Understanding that at all is a shield many people don't have," says Caitlyn. "Your people on the Council are another shield, your people at home a third. And that's assuming you need a shield— but look at you, Ekko. Look at you. If anything, you care too much."
"What?" I demand. "How can you care 'too much'?"
"When you don't have any care leftover for yourself."
Shit.
"If it's any consolation, I hate being a councilor too," she says. "I've always wanted to see the world. To follow in my mother's footsteps feels almost like a betrayal. To myself, I mean. But you're right— at the same time, it's an honor."
I almost laugh. "You're not following in your mother's footsteps," I say. "You're a councilor, sure, but— well, look at you, Caitlyn."
She examines her outfit, which, to be fair, is worryingly Cassandra-like.
"You helped overthrow her government," I say.
Caitlyn laughs for real. "That's true."
"I feel like there'll still be room to live," I say. "Not as much as I'd like, but there'll still be time for you to go see the world."
"Certainly," she says. "And there will be time for you to learn to take things sometimes, instead of just giving them."
My ribs squeeze inward. I turn to the window, with its luxurious curtains and untainted evening sunlight brimming around their edges.
"I don't know if I've ever actually said this," I say, "but I really appreciate you. You're the only reason we could have a coup in the first place. We'd have been screwed multiple times over in the early days if you hadn't been there."
"Oh," says Caitlyn, like it's news. "Well, it was my pleasure."
"I know I was hostile to you when we met, and some of my people have been too, and there probably isn't anything we can offer in repayment that you didn't already have here and abandon for our sake. So, just— thank you. If you ever think of something we can give you, tell me."
She shakes her head in my peripherals. "You and Vi and the Firelights have already repaid me," she says. I turn back to face her, surprised. "You taught me the truth about this city. You gave me a home and a community that didn't care about my name. That's worth more than you know."
"Huh." I've never considered the specific trappings of her previous existence. No one in the fissures gets lied to about the city; we see the truth of its function in our daily lives, whether we want to or not. Without surnames, our family legacies can't be discerned at introduction— not that most of us have any legacy to discern in the first place. We rarely judge each other on anything besides who we are, since we just don't have much else.
"Despite our rough start, I'm grateful that you and I can cooperate peaceably now," she says. "It means a lot."
"I'm glad we're friends too, Caitlyn."
She beams, stifles it, and looks over at Vi, who's still sleeping calmly. "Do you think she's uncomfortable? It's a terrible fever. And taking the Shimmer seemed to hurt her, so I would expect overdosing on it would feel like something. But she hasn't complained."
"She's not gonna," I say. "When we were kids, Vander used to examine her for injuries every night, because she wouldn't tell anyone, even if she didn't know how to take care of it. One time she had a wood splinter through her back that was like six inches long, and she'd just put some gauze on it— Vander was raging and she just shrugged and said, 'It'll come out at some point.'"
Caitlyn covers her mouth and shakes with silent laughter.
"Shimmer does hurt when you take it," I say. "I had a Firelight overdose once— she did basically the same thing: took the wrong variant for what she needed— and she didn't get a fever, just these purple sores at the injection site. She said those itched and her veins burned. Not as bad as when she first took it, though."
That doesn't seem to reassure Caitlyn. "And she just has to endure it? I don't know if I can endure it." She smooths Vi's hair. "Do you think the doctor would find out if we gave her the pain relievers? Perhaps just one?"
"She's tough, Caitlyn. I promise."
"Yes, but I would rather that she didn't have to be."
I can't argue there. Not being tough just was never gonna be an option for Vi.
Caitlyn and I shoot the breeze until the sun sets. I borrow her comm to talk to Quartz when I estimate that the group will have made it to the fort, and they assure me that everything's good. Heimerdinger pops in to ask me to give Vi his well-wishes. Caitlyn does some writing in a notebook. Vi, for her part, rolls around a bit and mentions the fish at Jericho's, but looks content enough until I open the door to go get ready for bed. She calms down after checking my temperature with her own flaming hand again.
The Kirammans' servants, who I'm gonna have to have a talk with them about, did everybody's laundry while we were out, which was incredibly weird but admittedly convenient. I'm having two showers with hot water in one day. I ate three complete meals. But Caitlyn's right, at least so far: I don't feel changed. I want to go home just as bad as I did when we were in the infirmary.
Caitlyn waits for me to get back before disappearing into her bathroom. While she's gone, I pull the curtains back and look out the window at Piltover, a place I'd never seen from this vantage point until this week but that I'm sure wasn't always beautiful. Not the way it is now, at least. It probably wasn't always this terrifying either.
I turn around quickly and shut the curtains when I hear Caitlyn climb onto her bed. She smiles, unwinding the tape from Vi's wrists. For some reason, she's wearing a shiny dress.
I make the mistake of tapping Vi's shoulder and saying good night. She opens her eyes, scowls at her bare hands, scowls at me, and says, "Do you want juice?"
"No, I'm fine."
"Where're you going? To learn the forks?" She bats at my hand. "No. Stay. Keeping an eye on you."
I raise my eyebrows at Caitlyn.
"You can stay," she says. "I'd rather not poke the bear."
I give Vi's shoulder a last pat, switch off the lamp, and lie down. My face is inches from my end of the pillow when I notice Caitlyn looking at me in openmouthed disbelief.
I sit back up. "This is an unimaginably bad faux pas up here, isn't it?"
She nods mutely. "Is it... is it not a faux pas down there?"
"If anyone had a bed this size in the fissures, the whole household would share it. They'd probably invite other people over to share it too. Especially in the winter, the electricity's shoddy, so we like to pile up to keep warm. Everyone's bed is kind of everyone's."
Caitlyn's visibly torn between horror and endearment. "When I first brought Vi home, I left the room and came back to find her lying here like it was nothing. I thought it was so odd. I never knew how many social norms differed between us."
"I can take that chair," I say. "Or I can go downstairs, but if Vi's gonna get upset—"
Caitlyn bursts out laughing suddenly, so loud that Vi's eyes snap open, her Shimmer marking glowing. "Sorry," Caitlyn gasps. Then it's sobs instead of laughter, or it might have been from the start. Vi murmurs something about forks in a concerned tone, twitches a hand toward Caitlyn's leg, and falls dead asleep again.
Absolutely lost, I pull Caitlyn into my arms. She hugs me hard and says, "My mum hates me."
"Shit."
"But I don't even care. I do, but I don't. She hurt Vi— and I hurt Vi— and I don't want to choose— but I have to. I think I have to. I'm going to break her heart."
I remember my earlier question. "Whose?"
"Mum's."
I exhale and hold her tighter.
"Not that I haven't broken it already."
"It'll be okay, Caitlyn."
"Mum used to share my bed when I was sick," she mutters. "Sometimes I would even be a bit happy that I was sick, since I knew I would get to have her there. Just ridiculous."
"It makes sense."
Caitlyn abruptly pulls away from me, wiping her eyes. "I apologize," she says. I get whiplash from how fast her voice turns steady. "I was just lecturing you about giving and taking."
"No, it's no problem," I say. "You're not asking much."
"Still. Let me save it for Jayce." She glances at Vi. "You can sleep up here," she tells me. "Actually, she might prefer that you're the one next to her— as I said, I... hurt her. Just before this all happened. She needs some space from me."
We trade places, leaving me in the middle and trying not to feel Vi's radiated heat. I'm awed at how much room I have, even with all three of us, but I take up as little of it as I can. Having me in her bed probably feels the same to Caitlyn as having strangers wash my clothes felt to me.
"G'night, Councilor," I say into the pillow.
Caitlyn snorts. "Good night, Councilor."
Silence.
"We won a fucking war," I say.
"Shit," Caitlyn says.
We laugh until Vi smacks me between the shoulder blades and irritably mumbles, "Sunscreen."
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Intro lyrics from "Take This Lonely Heart" by Nothing But Thieves.
delirious people are so funny i just had to do it
thanks for readin' ily