#jaycexvi

The bedroom smelled like smoke and sex. The only source of light came from the nighttime Piltover skyline, which pulsed just outside the window as though in time with some unseen heartbeat. Two figures sat against the tall headboard, their forms little more than silhouettes against the darkness of the night. Vi sat with the covers tight drawn up over her bare chest, arms wrapped around the tops of her knees as she leaned forward slightly. There was a cigarette between her lips, and the tip glowed a bright red that was sharp against the darkness as she inhaled deeply. She held the smoke in her lungs for several seconds before she exhaled it as a long silver coil that shimmered in the dull glow of the lights. To her right, Jayce leaned back against arms that were folded behind his head, watching Vi as she plucked the cigarette from between her lips and held it loosely in her fingers. His eyes traced the curves of her shoulders – broad and muscled – down to the points of her shoulder blades. There, his gaze settled on the word tattooed across the top of her back: EXECUTIONER. Leaning forward slightly, he slipped his left hand out from behind his head and ran it up her back, garnering a slight shiver from her as he followed the line of her spine. “What’s this about?” he asked quietly, tracing the letters in question with his fingertip. Vi glanced back at him, taking another long drag from her cigarette. “Y'really want t'know?” she asked, and her words came out cloaked in smoke. “Only if you’re okay with telling me.” He was relieved to see the beginnings of her signature smirk tugging at the corners of her lips before she turned her head away. “Y'know my gauntlets?” Jayce nodded absentmindedly, aware that she could not see him, but knowing that she would continue regardless of whether or not she had. “Well, I named ‘em both: the left one’s ‘Judge,’ the right one’s, ‘Jury,’ and I’m-” “-the executioner,” finished Jayce, and a smile of his own curled the ends of his mouth at the simple, unmistakably-Vi humor of it all. She looked back at him, and her grin was wicked to say the least. “Bingo.”

Jayce stumbled backwards with a muffled grunt, tripping over his own feet and only just managing to catch himself on the ropes of the boxing ring before he fell over. His heart was thudding heavily in his chest, and he used the brief but welcome reprieve from the flurry of fists he had endured to try to catch his breath. The inside of his head was ringing like a boxing bell, and spots of light danced before his eyes like fireworks. The right side of his face throbbed dully with pain, and his head was swimming from lack of oxygen. Gingerly, he felt along his right cheek with a gloved hand, rolling his jaw to make sure that everything was still in one piece; he seemed to have bitten the inside of his cheek, and though he could taste the metallic grit of his own blood, that seemed to be the extent of the damage. Spitting out what he could to one side, he wiped his mouth with the back of his glove before readjusting his mouthguard and looking back up at the figure standing over him. Vi was dressed in red boxing shorts and a black sports bra, hopping nimbly from one foot to the other and looking no more tired than she would had she been taking a leisurely stroll in the park. Her skin was shiny with sweat, and she blew a stray strand of her pink hair out of her face; had Jayce not been on the receiving end of her merciless fists for the past hour, he would have found the sight of her unsurprisingly muscular body unfairly attractive. “Don't tell me you're done already, Pretty Boy,” she laughed, cutting through his wandering thoughts like a freight train. “We only just got warmed up!” “Just catching my breath,” he countered as smoothly as he could with a mouthguard between his teeth. “There's no catching your breath in a real fight,” she shot back wickedly. “And I promised Cupcake that I would toughen you up, so get up before I string you up by your own gloves.” Jayce groaned into his mouthguard. Though it was true that Caitlyn had asked for Vi’s help in helping whip Jayce into shape after he had suffered a particularly nasty beating at the hands of some thugs who had caught him off-guard – after all, he had an image to maintain as the Defender of Tomorrow – he thought that he was far from as helpless as Vi made him out to be: he had been a dedicated swimmer and water-polo player during his time in college, and even now, he always exercised whenever he had the time. In the back of his mind, he supposed that he should be grateful for her help, given that Vi was the best hand-to-hand fighter he had ever seen. But after his first week in the “Vi School of Hard Knocks,” as she put it, he was beginning to have a sneaking suspicion that she was doing this mostly for her own amusement, and to have a reason to hit him in the face as hard as she could. “Are you sure you're not just using that as an excuse to use me as your personal punching bag?” he asked, squinting up at her through the only eye of his that was not yet swollen shut. “Whatever gave you that idea, Sweet Cheeks?” asked Vi as she flashed another devious grin, her own face still unmarked by Jayce’s fists. “Now put ‘em back up - I'm not done with you by a long shot.” Jayce sighed; he could already feel his right cheek throbbing in anticipation of even more pain.

Jayce had never wondered why she always seemed to wear gloves, opting to do so even during the times few and far between where she went without her signature gauntlets; he had always thought gloves so fundamentally Vi that it for the longest time – to his embarrassment – it never occurred to him that she may have had something she wanted to hide. He may very well have remained blissfully unaware of such a thought for as long as knew her, had Caitlyn not rang him up late one night to ask his help in bringing her partner home after an evening out. Vi was very, very drunk, and Caitlyn looked very, very sorry for what she was about to ask of him. It took the two of them several minutes of gentle coaxing before they finally managed to get her out of the bar and into his Hexcar. Not to mention the other half an hour it took him to half-carry, half-drag her all the way back up to her apartment. Her door was thankfully unlocked - a fact that did not exactly ease his wariness, as her apartment was hardly in a friendly part of town - and he nearly tripped over her dragging feet as he followed her inside. To his frustration, she groaned loudly in complaint when he tried to turn on a light, so he was forced to stumble his way through her unsurprisingly messy apartment in the dark. It was only when she was securely in bed that he finally breathed a sigh of relief, and he almost missed the fact that she had taken off her gloves altogether. And as he caught sight of her bare hands for the first time, he felt his heart skip a beat: the skin of her fingers and palms was scarred, discolored in some places from what he knew from experience could only be chemical burns. It perhaps should not have surprised him, but this unexpected revelation made him feel strangely uncomfortable - as though he were suddenly privy to a moment of weakness that no one but her had any right to. The full impact of her Zaunite upbringing had never struck him until that very moment, and as he looked at her sleeping figure - curled up into an almost fetal position - he realized just how little he knew about her.