Vi comes in the way she always does—shoulder first through the window, a jolt that rattles the dresser and sends dust skittering across the floorboards. The room smells like rain on warm stone and the faint laundry-sweet of your shampoo. The climb to Piltover is taking more out of her these days. She tells herself she’ll stop. She never does.

She wants to say something smooth, something cocky, to make you roll your eyes and hide how worried you are. The smirk finds her out of habit, that small foolish shape her mouth makes when she thinks of you and can’t help it.

You’re already there, bare feet whispering over the floorboards, not scolding so much as shepherding. Your hand ghosts along her elbow, and the world narrows to that point of contact, to the promise that she won’t be doing this alone in some alley with a broken mirror and a dirty rag. She hates that her legs go weak from the gentleness. Hates more how much she craves it.

The bathroom’s light is kinder than the city’s. You turn the tap; water stitches the silence. She watches your reflection instead of her own—your mouth set, your brow a line sawed thin with worry—and thinks of all the small, ordinary things she’s taken from this room: the scratch on the tile shaped like a crescent, the way your toothbrush leans against hers like the two of them are conspiring, the mug with a faint smear of your lip balm she never washed because it felt like a theft to make it clean.

“You’re bleeding on my floor,” you say, soft, like naming the storm rather than cursing it.

“I’ll mop,” she means to joke, but it lands as apology. “Yeah. Sorry.”

You press a cloth to her side; she swallows a hiss and tries to hide the flinch. The warmth of your palm bleeds through the fabric. It isn’t the pain that undoes her; it’s how carefully you try not to give her more of it.

“Hold still.”

She does, because you asked. Because it occurs to her, not for the first time, that obeying you might save her life in a hundred tiny ways no fight ever could. She looks at your throat where your pulse knocks, at the damp curl that has slipped loose against your cheek, at the precise concentration you aim at closing her open places. She thinks absurd things: that if she ever deserved a chapel, it would look like this—steam and tile and your breath steadying hers.

“Is this going to keep happening?” you ask, and it isn’t an accusation. It’s a door you’re afraid to open.

She tries to disguise her motives under her usual bravado but the truth is—she comes back torn and bloodied because she needs you, not Piltover, not the fight.

“Only when I miss you,” she says, softly. It startles her how quiet it is. A breath. “And I miss you all the damn time.”