Vi - To Failure (Arcane Fan Fiction) (Patreon)

 2000 words written for, and thanks to, you guys!

 Delayed this for a couple of days and really got it to where I want it to be. Hope you enjoy, and please let me know what you think! These are tough to write and I appreciate feedback a lot.

 This story is set after the events of Netflix's Arcane and contains minor spoilers. 

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 It was with a deep, slow groan that Vi bent down, stressing a body that had grown inflexible from the pump of several hours of hard training. With an awkward, stiff movement she picked up her jump rope and unfurled it. Her fingers and knuckles were swollen and bloodied - still, the torn up punching bag slumped beneath the enormous cracks in the wall had come out the worse off. Once her hands had clamped around the hard wooden handles they felt slightly less bad. The firm grip helped suppress the throbbing, and made sure they wouldn't slip from her sweat slicked palms. There was a subtle trembling throughout her body that was a sign of so many of her muscles being worked to failure. She ignored them and kept moving.

  Muscle memory overcame exhaustion as she started to skip, swinging the rope around herself until it quickly became a blur, with a constant hiss in her ears as it cut through the air. With her light, quick jumps her heart rate picked up again after the momentary reprieve. The rhythm settled, the rope repeatedly scraping the floor a speedy metronome to her training.

  The young woman had a body forged by prison and isolation. A joint need to be tough enough to survive and work off her angst meant that physical training had taken up countless hours of her incarceration. Inmates wouldn't mess with you if you were strong enough to throw them across the room or lay them out with one devastating punch. Well, the smart ones wouldn't. And the dumb ones... Vi appreciated them all the more. As a result of her habitual fighting in prison, a large chunk of her time had been spent in solitary confinement - complete isolation for dangerous or troublesome criminals. No more than four concrete walls, a thick metal door and darkness. There, as time stretched out into some unending madness, training was her saviour again. She couldn't count days or weeks, but she could count pushups or situps. Those numbers became a point she latched onto to keep her mind straight. Passing out from exhaustion would often be the only way she could get a good night of sleep. To this day, it would often take her a few moments as she woke up in the morning to realise that she wasn't still trapped back there. Perhaps that feeling would never leave her, but in a strange way Vi was thankful for it. Maybe it was a coping mechanism - some combination of denial and acceptance - but the experience had made her stronger. Prison had hardened her body into the powerful sculpture it was today. Legs lined with wiry muscle, twitching each time she landed with a sudden flex to absorb her weight. She sported a lean eight pack of abdominal muscles punching out from a tight waist and sinewy chest muscles flickering beneath her bound breasts. Vi had wrapped them tightly in bandages for this workout, and those as well as her loose shorts were already stained with sweat.

  Where she really stood out was in her upper body. The shapes there had been carved for the raw functionality of fighting, for enduring and inflicting as much punishment as possible. She had square, striated shoulders, broad enough to give her upper body an impressive 'V' shape as her back narrowed toward her waist. Her thick lats and dense biceps fed into forearms with flowing, defined musculature. Her triceps and back were an intricate network of cuts, complicated further by the clockwork patterns of her prison tattoos. The muscles made up a cavernous canvas spread across her rippling shoulder blades and shining with dried sweat. Vi's intimidating form was bathed in a red light from the setting Sun that bled through the small basement windows. She was every bit as strong and dangerous as she looked.

  Vi clamped her eyes shut in defiance of her blurring vision. Were it not for the hours upon hours of punishing toil that had come before, this would be a relaxing cool down. Instead her heart pounded, her head spun and her mouth was dry. She hissed in air through her teeth and grunted; "Faster."

  Following her own command, she picked up to a pace that would work better for a quick burnout than an endurance test. Vi wasn't counting her time, but when she opened her eyes again the Sun had set. Only the dim, humming basement lights highlighted the shimmering sweat that was pouring from her every curve and bump. She kept her body moving, her mind sinking into an almost meditative state as she worked, but that didn't numb her screaming legs or the inferno in her chest. Sweat sprayed from her hair as she threw her head back for a deep gulp of air. "More!!" came her animalistic roar. Instead of jumping with both feet she started to run on the spot, swinging the rope faster, still somehow perfectly timed so as to not make a mistake. With each step she drew her knee high and hammered it back down to keep pace. Her feet splashed against the now wet floor in rapid rhythm. Now to hold onto it. Keep up this wild, dangerous pace.

  The relative comfort of her current life in Piltover was a far cry from the dingy alleys of the Lanes where she grew up. It made her, if anything, more insistent on keeping herself battle-ready. In recent weeks the pink-haired powerhouse had only gotten increasingly obsessed with living up to brutal expectations during her training. Setting herself goals that any sane person would know was impossible gave her an excuse to punish herself for failure. Just the same as during her prison time, this had become her escape, her method to compartmentalise the fears and anger that could otherwise destroy her. Because in her life she had failed, she had lost so much - and in those situations, she was powerless. Nothing could change that. But here, as she reached breaking point on her bench presses and pull-ups, dragon flags and boxing drills, there was recourse for her failure. She gave herself more reps, or added an extra hour onto her session (by her rough guess, at least). She willingly trapped herself in this cycle with a grim sense of duty, even satisfaction.

  The bindings across her chest covered a nasty line of bruising where she had reached her limit during bench presses and trapped herself beneath the bar. Even her thoroughly calloused hands were nearly torn to shreds because of a vicious grip that had kept her on the pull-up bar between gruelling sets. Her tight abs were swollen and her back hurt as her utterly ravaged core failed to keep the pressure off her spine while Vi powered through her abs workouts. She was on the brink of injury but kept herself there. Her body was tough enough to work to exhaustion without breaking down. She hoped. Her stomach was doing flips, and she swallowed back the impulse to vomit with a grimace. The room span and she felt dangerously hot, the steaming sweat pouring from her a hopeless attempt at temperature regulation from her failing body. Good. Keep it up. Get stronger. Slurred utterances under her breath through gasps and grunts.

  Her body transformed over the course of this cardio set. Each overworked muscle swelled, tightened. Her thighs were hard and tight, teardrop quads and pumped hamstrings straining against her skin as she powered through steps. Veins crawled all around her forearms, clearly traceable along her biceps and even into her chest, pumped muscle and desperate blood flow pushing them into an almost gruesome definition. She looked as much of a beast as she felt.

  Scent, hearing, instinct - one or all of these told her she was being watched. Violet turned her head just enough to spot the tall, slender silhouette in the doorway. She turned back with a grimace. Caitlyn. But the woman didn't intervene, so Vi didn't acknowledge her. The pair had gotten into arguments over the severity of this stress relief, or self torture depending on which of the two you asked. Caitlyn was a fighter, Vi knew, but the circumstances of their completely opposite upbringing made for an inexorable rift in each of their outlooks on life. Caitlyn couldn't understand Vi's reason for continuing, and Vi could never take heed of Caitlyn's concerned urges to stop.

  Now her thoughts moved to extending this session, to not failing in front of her girlfriend. Caitlyn’s presence gave her more reason to push, to hold out, to endure.

  It bought her maybe an extra ten minutes.

  It was a miniscule error that caused an immediate cascade. The rope handle slipped a fraction of an inch in her hand, meaning the rope itself was a split second out of time. Her foot caught it awkwardly and then everything collapsed at once. Vi fell unceremoniously and hard, body sounding like a wet brick striking rock as she hit the floor. The girl groaned loudly, hauling herself upright and pressing her fingers to her lip - no blood. That was good. She felt the urge to wretch again but held it back. She could feel her blood rushing in her ears with every ragged heartbeat. A distorted reflection stared back at her from the puddle of sweat beneath her. "Get the fuck up." it said.

  "Violet..." Caitlyn finally spoke up. There was a morbid acceptance in her voice - concern, but a resolve in knowing that the words would bounce off the kneeling beast. "That's enough. You don't have to do this to yourself."

  "Go back upstairs, cupcake. You don't wanna see this..." she didn't even look at her.

  The frustrated grunt and sound of a closing door told her that she was once again alone, so Vi dragged herself back up. Pressing her foot firmly on the ground, she pushed up from her knees. She tried to wipe some of the sweat from her palms only to realise her shorts were just as saturated. Shaking out her cramped fingers made a shower of droplets fall from her gleaming body. She felt desperate for a drink, but pausing for water would have been too much of a break for her to abide. The next hour was even tougher and more gruesome than the dozen before it. Vi worked herself to the bone. Desperately. Dangerously. The girl cried out as she pushed. Yelled until it became a breathless rasp and she dropped the rope again. Back up. Back to work. It was a clumsy, frantic show of her burning need to wring every last drop of life out of her failing muscles. Each time she fell it took longer for her to get back up, and her next bout of skipping crumbled more quickly. Raw pain enveloped her. This is what she was capable of, and this was how she proved it to herself. This was what her mind and body could take. But her inhuman efforts eventually had to come to an end.

  Utterly drained, her legs gave way beneath her and she fell to her knees. Her body was wracked with shakes, each movement twinging and searing another overburdened muscle. Her swollen, solid thighs crushed into her diamond calves under her weight. She hunched. A lump of heaving, panting muscles, eyes wide and staring past the sweat flooded floor. There was no room left in her thoughts for anything. The fading burn and breathlessness that receded at the same time as the encroaching blackness on the edge of her vision. Suddenly the basement concrete was rising to meet her. She was falling forward with one last, conscious breath.

  Footsteps behind her. A hand at her front, halting her and keeping her from hitting the floor. Vi blinked, slowly. She was in Caitlyn's lap, staring up at the silhouette of her head cast by the buzzing lights above them. She made out a twinkle of tears in the girl's eyes and tried to reassure her with a weak smile. This was a good kind of failure, Vi thought. Then peaceful, merciful sleep took her.