Chapter Text
“God, the absolute nerve of them!” Caitlyn explodes, for at least the third time on this phone call, and catches the tail end of Jayce’s sigh.
“I know, Cait, I know. It’s good ol’ boys club bullshit at its finest.”
Caitlyn shuts her eyes and leans her head back against the plush back of her couch, pushing her temper down to a simmer. “Sorry, thank you, Jayce. And thank Mel for me, please. What does she like to drink? I need to get her a gift basket for finessing this for me.”
“What’s a big brother for? And Mel’s been really into this one Freljordian gin; hold on let me get the name.”
Cait stares at the dull ivory of her ceiling, listening to the clatter of Jayce’s keyboard and tries to rub the angry tension out of her neck. She only manages to deepen the ache.
“Ah, here we go,” Jayce says. He tells her the name and Cait peels herself off her couch to grab a pad off the side table and note it down; she'll leave the office for lunch and pick it up this week. A personal favor means a personal gift, not just hiring a shopper or hitting up Doordash.
“I thought Noxians were into wine?” Cait says, absently doodling on the notepad. “Isn’t that their whole thing?” That, and corporate espionage, Cait thinks sourly, but that’s not Mel’s fault.
“Yeah but Mel hates tannins, that’s why she never drinks tea.” Jayce says this like it’s very fascinating personal information because, bless the man, he was born a wife guy. Cait has no idea how Mel tolerates the clinging. She hums in response as Jayce rambles and makes another note on her scribbly notepad, underlines it. No tea.
“So,”Jayce says as he winds down his Tales of Mel. “What are you going to do about it, Sprout?”
Cait heaves a sigh. That’s the thing she's been indulging in her outrage to avoid thinking about. When Cait had heard through the office grapevine that she had been earmarked for an off-Partner track, an of Council position, she had immediately reached out to Mel in a panic. There was no one else Cait knew better at networking than Mel, and she had come through, gotten it right from the horse’s mouth. The firm considers Caitlyn both a reputational and a flight risk. Until they consider her respectable enough, with roots set down in the city, they don’t want to risk putting her on a Partner track. The Partner who had spoken with Mel had opined that, were he in Caitlyn’s place, he’d find a pretty little fiancee to settle down with and kill two birds with one stone.
Even apart from that vile little aside, the whole thing galls Caitlyn viciously. They want to keep her as a resource, a show name, a Kiramman in the stables to match a Kiramman in the name of the firm. Her great-grandmother had been a founding partner of Hale, Kiramman & Grauf, her mother worked in this firm before moving on to serve the city as Governor, then Senator. This is the city Cait was born in. She’d become a First-Year lawyer here at twenty, before the ink was even dry on her Bar certificate, four years as an Associate, and made Senior Associate last year. Her path has been accelerated, but she's earned what she’s gotten. But Cait’s great-grandmother is dead, and retired senator Cassandra Kiramman is planning a move to Ionia, land of both her foremothers, and competing law firms. As for Caitlyn herself, well, she did all her schooling in Ionia, and with her mother and father leaving, she has no real ties to Piltover, and she’s an open lesbian with a string of short term relationships and hook-ups. There are plenty of public candids of her leaving bars and restaurants and nightclubs, never with the same woman on her arm, trotted out whenever the society pages have a slow week.
Caitlyn could holler homophobia and misogyny until she was blue in the face, and it would certainly get her attention, a brief flash of performative outrage online. It might even ding the company’s stock values slightly, or get some unimportant and likely uninvolved c-suite suit fired. What it wouldn’t do is get Caitlyn what she wants: a position as Partner in the firm. It would, in fact, softly blacklist her from most other BigLaw firms as well.
More personally, the idea of taking that little toad’s advice and just…picking a woman to get engaged to, trying to force that intimacy with someone who is basically a stranger living in her home is just - ugh. It makes Cait’s skin crawl, and frankly, considering her most recent experiences, it makes her afraid.
“God, I have no fucking idea, Jayce.” Cait rubs her forehead, then swears again when she realizes the pen is still in her hand, and she's left a blue streak on her face.
Jayce hums thoughtfully then sighs, his fingers audibly drumming, clearly prevaricating. Cait does not tell him to just spit it out because she loves him, and his girlfriend just helped her enormously.
“I have this friend - you know, my cool lesbian gym bro?”
Cait smiles; she has heard about Jacye’s little workout buddy. The man had just moved to Piltover and was so happy to make a friend who was willing to discuss - whatever they talk about that the nerds in Jayce's labs aren’t interested in - protein powders, reps of things.
Jayce launches into a tale of woe: how his friend had finally shipped the baby sister she raised herself after the death of their family off to college. How the slumlord they rented their crappy apartment from had been putting them off about water stains and mold issues for so long that the inevitable thing that happens with leaking water had happened, and the ceiling had collapsed. No one had been hurt, but the gym friend’s - whose name is Vi, Caitlyn learns - belongings sat in dirty water, covered in sodden insulation and drywall all day. She'd lost almost everything, and with the apartment unlivable, Jayce said she was currently living in a motel, her slumlord was dodging all communication, and she didn’t know what to do.
Caitlyn makes the appropriate noises, mind churning. At the forefront is sympathy and outrage, that someone has to deal with this sort of blow when her life was finally getting easier, that someone would keep two young women living in a moldy wreck, then further dodge responsibility after it collapsed. Then comes the jittering nerves, because she knows what Jayce is getting at and it’s so stupid, it’s a bad romantic comedy, and Cait hates that she’s desperate enough that she can see it working.
This woman is also a lesbian, is already vetted by Jayce, and Cait easily has the means to make it worth her while. It would be mutual help, really. Cait needs to look respectable and grounded - and apparently she needs a fucking fiancee for that - and Vi needs a place to stay while she gets back on her feet. Caitlyn can be a roommate for a bit. Once she makes Partner and Vi is comfortable their engagement can always just not work out, and both of them will have gotten what they need out of it. Maybe things will go well enough that Cait will even come out of this with a new friend. It’s been hard to maintain relationships when work takes up so much of her life, and making a new friend would be lovely.
“I hate that this actually sounds like a workable idea to me,” she says, and Jayce scoffs.
“You should trust me! It sounds like a cheesy movie plot, but I think it could help both my friends out of a pinch,” he says, warm and hopeful as ever.
Cait smiles fondly, and tells him to set up a meeting, giving him a list of days and times when she can squeeze in half an hour at a cafe. To meet who could possibly become her fucking fiancee. Fake fiancee. God, what is Cait even doing?
Hanging up on Jayce, Cait drops back onto her sofa with a groan, propping her legs up on the arm. She stares out the french doors to the terrace, gauzy curtains fluttering over the glass. Spring is well underway and all her plants are a riot of greenery, new buds and vines crawling up the trellised awning. She should take the patio furniture out soon.
It’s hard to imagine someone else living here full-time; even Maddie had only spent a few days a week at Caitlyn’s place. She has the space, the guest room is still cleaned every week along with the rest of the apartment, it shouldn’t be a problem for Marie to accommodate cooking for one more. Cait drums her fingers on her chest, then gets up off the couch and pulls on leggings, puts her hair up. If she lays there she’s going to drive herself mad imagining disaster scenarios made up of every horrible roommate situation she’s ever heard of. She’s going for a run, she’s going to eat dinner and she’s going to get more than six hours of sleep. She’s actually going to meet this Vi before she talks herself out of this whole farce before it even starts.
****
Vi lies on her back on the shitty mattress in her shitty hotel room, trying to quash the paranoia that every tickle of her leg hair being stirred by the shitty AC is actually a bedbug crawling up her shin.
It’s fine, she’s fine – the hotel is just cheap, not actively disgusting, and Vi had checked the seams of the mattress and the cushions of the chairs, and taken the pillows out of their cases and everything else she could think of before so much as letting her thrifted suitcase touch the balding carpet. Paranoia is a lingering motherfucker, though. A few years ago an infestation had hit their building, coming through Powder and Vi’s vents from another unit. Even though it had been one of the few issues their landlord had properly addressed, it had been one of the worst times Vi can remember. The money they lost throwing out furniture and buying plastic covers for their mattresses, clearing out the freezer so they could put Powder’s school books, sealed in off-brand ziplock bags, in there to kill any eggs. Having to take time off work because she had to be home for all three times the technician came to spray. She remembers sitting in their tiny bathroom in the middle of the night, because Powder couldn’t hear her cry in there, feeling ashamed and dirty and exhausted, her skin crawling too hard to let her sleep on her infested mattress. The pinprick scars on her and Powder's ankles from the bites had taken years to fade completely.
So Vi’s been in some shitty situations, and though it’s extra insulting that this feels like a fucking repeat assault - same shitty landlord, same loss of belongings - at least this time Powder isn’t involved. A twofold relief, both because Powder doesn’t need this shit during her freshman year of college and, guiltily, that Vi doesn’t have to wrangle her little sister’s volatile reactions and feelings while dealing with this.
Vi’s joked that she’s been a single mom since she was fifteen, mostly to smooth over other people’s discomfort with her situation. Fifteen was when Vander had started to get sick. Her uncle had been a lifelong smoker, and Vi, who had lost both her mother and father to random chance at ten, had seen the cough that shook her uncle's massive shoulders, and the flecks of blood on the handkerchiefs he tried to hide, and she’d gone out and gotten a part-time job after school as a bagger at the Market Basket down the street.
She’d opened her own bank account, separate from the ones Vander had opened with Powder and her, just to make sure she always has access to money. Last year she’d heard Mandy talking about her Oma’s death during science lab, and how her mother was having issues accessing her late mother’s accounts to cover her final expenses, even though her name was also on the account.
Vi looked up apartment prices and budgeting tips and legal guardianship with regard to orphaned siblings on the computers at school and started doing her peers' math homework and english essays for cash in addition to her bagger job. Vander had watched her do all this with his brow dug down and a frown making deep lines on his face, but they never talked about it. The money from their parents' accident was socked away for Powder to go to college, and they don’t have any other family. Mylo was trying to keep his head down in the Navy long enough to get his education paid for, and Claggor was in trade school. Just like them, Vi is doing what she has to do, and both Vander and her know it.
Vander held on until Vi was two weeks past eighteen. It was as on purpose as that sort of thing could be, Vi thinks. He’d waited to make sure Vi and her sister wouldn’t be separated by the state. She doesn’t cry at his funeral, all Vi can think of through the service is how she has to find an apartment close enough to where they used to live so that Powder doesn’t have to switch schools, and how she can’t really make a comprehensive budget until she knows if they can get a place with utilities included.
That’s been the last ten years of her life. Things did get easier; Vi thinks they got out of it okay. Powder is thriving in college, Vi managed to get a handful of therapy sessions before their health insurance changed, and those probably saved her from juvie. She has better jobs now, a car that runs, even a tiny bit of savings. Or she did, until the roof fell in and most of her belongings sat in rusty water for eight hours. Now she’s here, firmly ignoring her bug-induced paranoia, listening to Jayce describe the plot of a bad romcom like it’s a legitimate solution and feeling desperate enough to agree.
“So this other lesbian friend of yours-”
“My sister from another mister.”
“Christ, dude. So, your sister - you’re sure she’s not playing a prank on us? Or planning on trafficking my organs?”
If she is, it’s not a dealbreaker. Vi would hand over a kidney, or her spleen, or something else non-vital at this point. Can’t you grow your liver back if you donate a chunk of it? Vi is so fucking tired, in a way that no amount of sleep seems to touch, that recovering from surgery actually sounds relaxing. Especially if she can do it in some rich lawyer’s apartment.
Jayce laughs. “No, no, I know it sounds really weird, but Cait’s the most ambitious person I've ever met, and she’s been gunning for a Partner position since she started at that firm. I guess one of her grandmas was a founder or something? If getting fake-hitched is what she needs to do to get it, she’s going to do it, and she’s going to excel at it.”
Vi raises an eyebrow at the water-stained panelled drop ceiling. She’s sure getting a good grade in being a fiancee is a very normal and healthy mindset, but that’s not really Vi’s business. “What the fuck is that about anyway? Is it the 1950s in her office? They seriously said she needs to wife up to be taken seriously?”
“Lawyers are so fucking weird, Vi,” Jayce says, with the kind of fervent intensity that comes of being the only sane person in a room. “Cait once told me about how she had to speak with this baby lawyer because she was wearing red heels to the office.”
“That jezebel,” Vi says dryly.
Jayce goes off on more stories about how damn weird lawyers are and Vi lays there in her tiny hotel room, with her dinner of cup noodle and vending machine snacks waiting, and thinks that roommating it up with someone who may be a stick in the mud legal shark but is still human enough to give advice to a young lawyer sounds more and more like the clear winner out of her current line up of shitty choices.
Cait doubts Jayce's insane plan more and more the closer the lunch date gets. On the day of, she drinks too much green tea, pees every twenty minutes that day as a result, and holds onto the fact that the cafe she chose is one she loves. If it’s a flop, Cait will still get a giant iced coffee, and one of their proper bagels, smeared with cream cheese and piled with tomato and cucumber, lox and capers.
Then she actually meets this Vi face to face.
The worst part is that Cait is sold at first sight, and Jayce's stupid smug expression knows it. Vi has a heartbreakingly pretty face, ticked with a couple intriguing scars. A shaggy candy pink undercut, the long thick mass of her hair gathered in a sloppy bun. She’s wearing trainers with a pair of dark wash straight leg jeans, worn to white around the knees and thighs, and muscle tee, a fanny pack worn as a cross body, with stark black tattoos across her arms and peeking around her neck.
In short, Jayce has brought her the exact type of masc Cait loves to pick up and introduce to her strap collection for a few hours, the asshole.
Vi herself is perfectly lovely, despite the strangeness of their meeting. Her unguarded expression is a little uncertain, but hopeful, and the greeting she gives Cait is friendly. Mostly, Vi looks tired, which Cait finds eminently understandable.
Charmingly, Vi takes her advice and lets Cait order the bagel sandwich for both of them; Jayce gets the quiche because he’s a philistine who hates lox. Vi’s eyes widen at her first bite, and she hides her muffled laugh behind a napkin when Cait smiles at her. Jayce continues to look pleased with himself, and honestly, Cait can’t even be mad about it. Vi is clever and pleasant to talk to and, to be shallow, Cait is looking forward to Vi and her built little body living in her penthouse with her, available for aesthetic appreciation and companionship if nothing else.
Cait checks her watch and actually feels a little tug of regret at having to go back to work. She's already stayed later than she means to because she’s having fun.
“I’m sorry, I do have to head back to the office,” Cait says.
Jayce pouts at her, because he owns his own company and doesn’t understand schedules. Vi just nods, sitting back a little and looking, Cait hopes, a little disappointed to see their lunch end. Cait smiles at her.
“Vi, thank you,” Cait says. “It was lovely to meet you, and I think this is going to be a very fruitful partnership for both of us.”
Jayce practically glows with satisfaction, and Vi grins, broad and sunny and relieved. Cait’s belly gives a little flip at how utterly gorgeous she is.
“I couldn’t agree more,” Vi says, and offers Cait her hand, which Cait takes. Vi’s handshake is firm, warm, with intriguing calluses on her palms.
Later, on one of her scheduled ten-minute breaks, taking a few laps around the floor just to keep her legs from atrophying and making her an even more permanent fixture behind her desk, Cait sticks Vi and Jayce into a group text and fires off a string of messages. There is no reason to make Vi sleep in a squalid little motel another night. Jayce can put his lax schedule and big boy muscles to work getting her packed up and out. Cait’s guest room may be plain, but it’s functionable. Maybe Vi’s lovely presence will fumigate the last of Maddie’s rancid vibes from her home.
“Absolutely not,” is the first thing Cait says later that evening, when Vi pulls up outside Cait’s building in her car, her belongings in the back.
“Hey!” Vi protests, feeling a tug of loyalty towards her little Camry that has kept her on wheels even through the neglect Vi inflicted on it. “She’s not fancy, but she works hard.”
Cait folds her arms, and Vi refuses to be distracted by her amazing tits. “Can it pass inspection?”
Vi winces. “For an extra fifty bucks, sure.”
“Out,” Cait snaps, and Vi is standing on the sidewalk, Cait’s tone having made a decision for her. Her face flushes, it feels oddly like the restaurant –Cait’s surety that Vi would like her favorite order, her open pleasure when Vi did.
Cait smiles the same way now, a hot curl of appreciation. “Thank you, Vi. I’ll give it back to you after the junkyard crushes it into a cube.” Then she shakes her head and laughs. “I understand this is a big change, and I appreciate your willingness with all of it. I promise, I’m not trying to Stepford wife you. I may ask for certain things, but you can always tell me to fuck off.” Cait smiles, and the sweetness of it combined with the swearing makes Vi’s heart give a little flip.
It’s really the only reservation she had going into this. Caitlyn Kiramman is quite simply the hottest woman Vi has ever seen, and that’s going to make living with her very interesting. It’s not like Vi thinks the two of them sleeping together is inevitable just because they’re both into women, and going to be roommates, but they are both young and attractive and honestly, Vi wouldn’t say no to an uncomplicated hook up. They’re not as satisfying as they were when she was eighteen, but it’s been a while, and HIIT workouts can only dispel so much tension.
Then Cait is lifting her suitcase from the trunk, and Vi has to grab her duffel and trot to catch up with miss long-legs.
“You don’t have to worry about it, and I’ll have it towed. We can pick a replacement to be delivered,” Cait says when Vi catches up. “I know Jayce said you lost a lot of your belongings; is there anything you particularly need?”
Vi’s brain skids around Cait talking about buying her a new car like she’s ordering takeout, and reminds herself - rich girl. She shrugs, duffel banging her thigh. “I’m pretty low on clothes, and my laptop got totaled,” she says.
Cait nods thoughtfully, and there’s a warm flash of sympathy in those intense blue eyes. “It’s not the same, but I remember how panicked and upset I was - we all were - when there was a fire in the dorms of my boarding school one year. Everything was burnt or soaked, we were wearing the spare gym outfits the school supplied until our parents could get us means to replace things.”
It isn’t the same, but it is a very pathetic mental image, a bunch of sad, soggy rich girls in borrowed sweatpants, far from home.
They step into the cool, spacious lobby of Cait’s apartment building - enormous arched windows with sheer curtains, lots of brass, and that chrome and black furniture ubiquitous to fancy buildings - and Cait is introducing her to the concierge, a tall, lean woman with the most cultivated customer service voice Vi has ever heard. She gets a keyfob made for Vi on the spot and, after a quick, silent check-in with Cait, passes Vi a new tenant packet that explains the amenities.
The elevator up to Cait’s top floor apartment is fast and silent, and Vi thinks she should be more tense, she should feel out of place here. Instead she can feel her shoulders starting to unknot for the first time in ages. It feels oddly like getting a new job she feels good about, with higher pay and coworkers she clicks with. Maybe because so far, Cait has approached this whole thing like a business deal instead of charity on her part.
Entering into Caitlyn’s apartment, Vi is expecting the kind of decor out of prestige tv about politicians or stockbrokers. Modern, lots of metal and glass, gigantic windows everywhere. Instead, Cait’s apartment is charming. Expensive, to be sure, with the warm blonde parquet floors, the view over the city, and a whole ass terrace visible through the living room windows, but it definitely feels more like a home than Vi was expecting.
“You have a lot of plants,” Vi says, following Cait through the living room with the teal accent wall, a fat and sprawling spider plant trailing offshoots over her shoulder as she passes by it. The visible terrace has patio furniture gathered under a trellis covered in a jungle of greenery.
Cait hums and glances over her shoulder as she leads Vi into a compact guest room with a desk and a tall narrow dresser crowned by a chubby succulent, the bed with a deep green comforter folded down, and a huge impressionist painting of wildflowers on the wall opposite a window looking down onto the sprawl of Piltover.
“My mother said keeping plants alive is a great way to remember that you too are a living thing,” Cait says, slotting Vi’s suitcase in next to the dresser, and watching Vi drop her duffel at the end of the bed.
“Was that a risk?” Vi asks.
Cait smiles. “When you’re nineteen and feel like a robot whose only purpose is to pass the Bar, yes, it’s very helpful.”
Vi doesn’t know shit all about lawyers, but that sounds young, to her. “That young, huh? I can see it.”
Cait laughs, her body language softening as she leans in, and Vi feels a stupid little tug of pleasure at making a pretty girl laugh, at flirting and having someone flirt back. “Guilty. I was an annoyingly precocious child,” she says.
“Well, it seems to have gotten you far,” Vi says, and something dims the warm humor on Cait’s face.
“Let's get dinner,” Cait says. “What do you think of Indian?”
“Sorry to stick you in the den instead of a proper bedroom," Cait says over food. “The second bedroom is my office, and it would be an ordeal to move it at this point. I’m not even sure it would all fit.”
Vi waves her off. “I don’t think I have to point out that all of this is a huge upgrade for me.” Cait gestures concedingly at her with a samosa. “I’m perfectly happy with the room.”
Vi is perfectly happy with all of it so far, really, even the things she thinks she should be resentful of, or find controlling or condescending.
Cait has asked her to quit her jobs - too far to commute from Cait’s highrise anyway - because it would look strange if the fiancee of the Kiramman daughter was working like someone struggling to make ends meet. The contract Vi had read and signed as they waited for dinner to be delivered says Vi will be pulling a salary - not from Caitlyn directly but a side account belonging to her parents - and she is officially Caitlyn’s personal trainer. It’ll be the backstory of how they met. Vi’s new fiancee had insisted on it.
“I won’t have you with a great big unexplained gap in your resume because of me,” she’d said firmly, unboxing the takeout in her small dining room. “You’re already working at a gym, I just drew up a contract as a private client,” she’d waved her fork dismissively. “If you like you can look into a certificate, or further schooling in that field.”
“You’ve been very generous,” Vi says, her tone neutral, throat burning slightly from the lamb vindaloo. If Cait is trying to fuck her over in anyway Vi hasn’t been able to pick up on it, and she has a pretty good radar for that. It’s just that this is so new and so strange. This is not Vi’s world, these aren’t her people. She feels she should be warier than she is.
Cait gives her a serious look. A lot of her looks are serious, and it makes her smiles all the better when they appear. “If this whole quid pro quo arrangement of ours works out I will be getting something incredibly valuable to me, both personally and monetarily. I don’t intend to short you on your end,” she says plainly, then, with a small indrawn breath, continues. “To be frank, you could be the most enthusiastic gold digger in the greater Piltover area, and you would exhaust yourself before making an appreciable dent in mine and my family's finances,” Cait shrugs, watching for Vi’s reaction. “I would like this to be a profitable venture for both of us,” she finishes, and caps her statement off by sliding a slim leather wallet towards Vi.
Vi pushes the glossy platinum card up with her thumb, just far enough to see her name etched on it. “You know, I was expecting it to be black.”
Cait laughs high and light and Vi grins. “Flashy new money nonsense,” Cait says. “The perks aren’t worth the ten thousand dollar initiation fee and the five thousand in annual fees.”
“Jesus Christ," Vi sputters and Cait laughs again, at her this time, which Vi supposes is fair.
Later Vi lays in her new bed, arms behind her head, freshly showered with the basket of new products Cait had prepared for her. She smells like toffee and bergamot, her skin feels soft and her hair is so clean it squeaks. She left the curtains open, and the lights of Piltover’s skyline glitter through the glass. It looks like a scene from a movie and only adds to the unreality of everything happening to her in the last twenty-four hours. Vi pulls in a quick breath against the sudden threat of tears. God, the relief! Even if her relationship with Cait never progresses beyond this slightly awkward new-acquaintance friendliness, Vi can finally relax here, she can take a breath, take some time for herself like Mylo and Claggor are always pushing her to. Shit, maybe she will get certified as a personal trainer. Why not? Thanks to Caitlyn there are possibilities Vi had never considered now open to her.