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The tunnels still smelled like iron and moss.
Lina paused at the edge of the old canal gate, fingers tightening around the strap of her satchel. The humidity coiled around her neck like a ghost, thick and familiar, and for a moment—just a moment—she was five again, clutching the hand of a stranger who would become her father, blinking through stormlight and smoke.
It hadn’t been just rain that night. It had been collapse. The kind that drowns memories before you can even name them.
Now, twenty years later, she stood again at the mouth of it all.
Her boots clicked softly on the damp metal stairs as she descended into the old veins of the city, a low hum of conversation behind her. Her team—half former classmates from her bioengineering program, half volunteers from community boards in Zaun and Piltover—followed her lead. Some carried old schematics. Others had power tools. One girl, a scrappy mechanic named Jules, had brought her grandmother’s lantern out of superstition. It was the only thing that lit the entryway now.
“Looks worse than the maps,” murmured Imari, a fellow student, shining a light on the collapsed ceiling tiles and rust-choked vents.
Lina said nothing at first. Just walked forward. Her gloved hand brushed against the wall: rough concrete, flaking lead, and long-abandoned graffiti half-swallowed by grime. There was no plaque here. No marker. Just watermarks on the walls and the sound of slow dripping. But she remembered. Her father’s body had been found in one of these connecting shafts. A piece of the upper city’s drainage system had come loose and fallen. The tunnels flooded. He’d lifted her up onto the walkway before the water took him.
She still had Viktor’s voice etched in her bones from the day after the storm, when she fixed that old calibrator: “That’s... intuitive. Very intuitive.”
Jayce’s voice had cracked when he’d spoken: “She’s just a kid. We can’t leave her alone.”
She hadn’t understood the words at the time. But she remembered the way they sounded, like a promise. A promise to stay.
And later, years later, when she handed Viktor the boutonniere for his wedding, she’d said: “So you don’t forget where we came from.”
A single white poppy, bred from Zaun’s hard soil, coaxed into bloom.
Now, in this place of memory and mourning, where light barely touched the ground, Lina found another. At the edge of a collapsed corridor—half-hidden beneath mineral crust and broken glass—a stalk had pushed up through a crack. Brittle. Pale. But unmistakably alive.
A white poppy.
Lina sank to her knees, heart tightening in her chest. She reached out, brushing the dust from the flower’s leaves with reverence, as if waking a piece of the past. Tears welled in her eyes, but she didn’t wipe them away this time. She let them fall, let them feed the moment.
She could almost hear her father’s laugh. Low, a little rough, the way it had sounded in old dreams.
Carefully, she loosened the soil around the flower with a small hand spade from her belt. Cradled the roots like something sacred. Then, with practiced hands and trembling breath, she moved it—just a few feet away, to where sunlight would soon reach when the upper paneling was restored. She replanted it with care, packed the earth gently, and pressed her palm over the soil to steady it.
The others gave her space, silent, respectful. They didn’t need to ask. They knew.
As she rose, hands dirt-streaked and heart unsteady, she whispered, “You’re home now.”
The poppy didn’t answer, but the air around it shifted warmer, just barely. And for the first time since returning, Lina let herself smile.
“We’ll have to reinforce the main supports first,” she said, voice steadier than she felt. “The goal is to open the central passage for sunlight exposure, at least enough for the moss to hold. The rest… we’ll build around the damage.”
There was no ceremony to it. Just work. Grit and dust and wire. They pried open sealed bulkheads, hauled out rusted pipes, vacuumed mold, and charted out the fractures in the stone. But under all that rot, under the runoff and decay, Lina found something unexpected.
Life.
Tiny, persistent things. Sporebloom. Pale ivy. Fungus clinging to the cold. In that moment, Lina wasn’t a child of war or rescue or legacy. She was just a gardener.
One returning home.
_____
Lina didn’t make a big announcement. No ribbon-cutting ceremony. No glossy campaign or grand speeches like the ones her fathers were known for. Just one simple post tucked between listings for plumbing services and a flyer about a missing cat, it appeared on an old, mostly-forgotten community board near the edge of Zaun:
Help Wanted.
Looking to turn a tunnel into something beautiful.
No money yet. Just ideas and heart.
It was quiet at first. The post fluttered in the stale breeze of passing traffic, ignored like so many others. But by the second day, someone had scrawled a phone number at the bottom with grease-stained fingers. And then it began.
The Zaunites came first.
A pair of older gardeners—one sharp-tongued, one quiet with a bad knee—showed up with chipped tools and soil-stained gloves, muttering about how it was “a damn fool’s project” even as they started hauling rubble with practiced ease. A teenage boy with mismatched gloves and bioluminescent moss in jars asked if he could try planting them near the drainage walls.
“They like the dark,” he said with a shrug. “They glow better when it’s quiet.”
An older woman, stooped and wiry, appeared one morning with compost tucked in canvas sacks and a twinkle in her eye. “You can’t grow anything if you don’t feed the ground first,” she told Lina. “Everything starts with hungry dirt.”
The Zaunites didn’t ease into banter—they dove in, trading jabs like old cards, rough voices and rolling laughter bouncing off the tunnel walls.
The sharp-tongued gardener, a wiry man named Malo, threw down a cracked bucket with a grunt. “Knew this place when it stank of runoff and rot. Now we’re planting flowers like it’s Piltover’s fancy tea party.”
The quieter one, Sef, rolled his eyes and leaned on his shovel. “Your tea parties smell like fermented socks.”
“Yeah, and your socks smell like fermented tea.” Malo shot back, and they both chuckled like it wasn’t the first time they’d said that exact line.
The teen with the moss, who introduced himself only as Rin, was carefully tacking a sample to the damp corner wall, brow furrowed in concentration. “Y’all ever think maybe the tunnel doesn’t care if it’s ugly or not? Maybe it just wants to be useful again.”
“Well,” Malo said, wiping his forehead with the back of a grimy glove, “that’s the philosophy of someone who’s never argued with an invasive root system.”
“Better roots than rust,” muttered Sef, tugging at a buried pipe with a groan.
Then, one of the newcomers—a middle-aged woman with heavy boots and a rust-red scarf, hauling in tools wrapped in canvas—squinted at Lina where she was crouched near the wall sketching out the next vine trellis.
“You’re Talis’s girl, aren’t you?” the woman asked.
Lina looked up, a little startled. She gave a small smile. “I go by Lina. But yeah. I’m their daughter.”
A quiet murmur rippled through the group. Malo raised an eyebrow.
“Didn’t expect to see one of his kin crawling around our tunnels,” he said—not cruelly, just directly. “Most of the bright ones don’t come back after they get their boots clean.”
Lina stood, brushing off her palms. “Most don’t have a baba like mine.”
She paused, glancing around at the cracked ceiling, the moss starting to pulse faintly on the walls. “He’s the reason I started loving Zaun in the first place. The way he talked about it. The way he fought for it, even when it broke him a little.”
There was silence after that. A deep one. The kind that hummed with recognition.
“But,” she added with a wry smile, “I also wouldn’t have the reckless ambition to try this in the first place if it weren’t for my dad, Jayce. He and my little sister once tried to build a hover-bridge using only old batteries and a toast rack.”
Rin snorted. “Did it work?”
“It absolutely did not.”
Sef leaned against his shovel and looked at her with the kind of quiet pride that Zaun rarely wore openly. “Good combo, then. Bit of heart, bit of chaos.”
“You’re making roots,” the older compost woman said, eyeing the moss blooming at Lina’s heels. “That matters.”
Malo nodded gruffly. “You keep showing up like this, kid… you’ll be one of us before you know it.”
“I hope so,” Lina said softly, glancing at the space they'd cleared. “That’s all I want to be.”
And as they bent back to work digging, wiring, and anchoring soil into hollowed-out ducts, the laughter came easier, the chatter warmer.
Piltover trickled in like light through old skylights—tentative, refracted, but real.
And it began, as things often did in Piltover, with calculations.
A trio of engineering students, still smudged with workshop soot and soaked in caffeine, arrived lugging metal rulers and clipboards cluttered with diagrams. They immediately began arguing in front of a collapsed wall.
“If we reinforce the dome here with triangular load-bearing ribs—”
“Triangular? You’re thinking in two dimensions again.”
“I’m not —”
“Then why are you drawing like a coward?”
They paused long enough to wave awkwardly at Lina before launching into chalk-scribbled formulae across the wall. She smiled and handed them a salvaged thermos of tea someone had left near the compost corner. They forgot to thank her, too busy debating the ideal curvature for light dispersion. But the warmth in their eyes said it all.
A medical assistant—early twenties, kind-eyed, and carrying a crate of plant samples suspended in gel—showed up from the clinic one afternoon, fanning her sweaty brow.
“These are leftovers from our greenhouse experiments,” she explained, crouching next to Lina. “Mostly herbs and spliced hybrids. They’ll wilt without sun, though.”
Lina studied the green-pink tendrils curling behind the transparent gel. “They’re beautiful.”
The woman smiled. “Maybe they’ll surprise you.”
Even a pair of chem-baron legacies wandered down eventually—quiet, nervous, unsure of their welcome. One had a visible facial burn, the other a tremor in her left hand. They introduced themselves only by their first names: Theo and Mira.
“We don’t want to be associated with the people we came from,” Mira said, her voice a whisper. “We just want to help.”
They weren’t handy. Theo dropped three bolts before tightening a single pipe. Mira nailed her glove to the scaffolding by accident. But they tried . They listened. They stayed late.
And the murmurs started.
“She’s got the Talis spark, doesn’t she?”
“She’s better than her dads. She’s softer. That’s power, too.”
“She’s innovating off her dads’ inventions like it’s child’s play. Imagine what she could do with a lab of her own.”
The words came with more reverence than jealousy, more awe than expectation. One student even pulled her aside, eyes bright behind round glasses, and said, “You’re the future of Pilt-Zaun tech. I mean it. What you’re building is not just elegant, it’s kind. That’s rare. You deserve upscaling. Syndicate support. Real funding.”
Lina flushed, kneeling by the roots of a white poppy bed, gently parting the soil with gloved fingers.
“I wouldn’t be doing any of this if it weren’t for my dads,” she said, smiling softly. “My baba taught me how to build something that lasts. My dad taught me how to break the rules if they get in the way of helping people. They never made me choose one world over the other. They just… believed in me.”
“And now we do too,” the student said.
And maybe it was the way the tunnel shimmered that afternoon: light filtering through the patched dome onto damp moss and sketched plans. Or maybe it was the way Zaun and Piltover's voices had started to blend in the distance, laughter echoing between railings and beams.
No one asked about funding. No one cared who Lina’s fathers were. They just showed up. And kept showing up.
Together, they worked in layers.
They cleared out broken tiles and rusted rebar. Hauled away mold-ridden beams and vacuum-sealed the worst runoff. The dome overhead, cracked from decades of neglect, was patched with reinforced glass and lined with reflective mesh to catch the light from the wired sunlamps. They salvaged pipes from broken distillation towers and built a waterfall wall, where filtered runoff would cascade in a gentle stream. The sound softened the space. Made it breathe again.
Lina sat in the middle of it all, sketchbook balanced on her knee. No digital plans. Just hand-drawn lines, annotated with loops and flourishes: vines twining over old railings, soft moss underfoot, a center garden bed ringed in white poppies like the one she had replanted.
In a corner of the wall, someone carved the name with slow, deliberate care.
The Bridge Garden.
A space not just to grow things, but to mend them.
Lina ran her fingers over the etched letters one evening, dirt still under her nails, the scent of moss and mineral water all around her. The tunnel no longer felt like the end of something. It felt like a beginning. And for the first time in her life, she didn’t just carry Zaun with her.
She helped it bloom.
_____
Lina hadn’t told Jayce or Viktor exactly where she’d been disappearing to these past few months. They knew the basics—“fieldwork,” she’d say with a shrug, or “data collection for the thesis”—and that was enough to earn a proud grin from Jayce and a fond nod from Viktor, who’d always been more focused on the process than the product.
They never pried. They trusted her. Though that didn’t stop them from gossiping.
“She’s definitely working with those symbiotic root systems again,” Viktor mused one evening, stirring tea with one hand while leaning heavily on his cane with the other. The light caught the silver strands woven through his dark, mid-back-length hair, now usually kept half-tied with a leather cord. “Her boots were covered in black soil last night. Northern tunnel dirt.”
Jayce looked up and leaned against the counter, arms crossed, grinning. His own hair, once a tousled chestnut, now showed elegant streaks of gray at the temples and in his short, neatly trimmed beard.
“She could be dating someone, you know,” he said, brow raised. “Twenty-six, brilliant, beautiful, mysterious disappearing acts—classic signs.”
Viktor raised an eyebrow, amused. “That’s what you said when you disappeared for three weeks after the science fair in year two.”
“I was dating someone.” Jayce nudged him, smug. “So maybe she’s more like me than you think.”
Viktor sipped his tea, deliberately slow, pinky out like he was mocking Jayce’s flair for dramatics. “Please. Our daughter has taste.”
Jayce staggered back like he’d been shot, hand to his chest. “Betrayed. In my own kitchen.”
“Mm.” Viktor smirked and closed the distance between them with a soft kiss, their movements slower now, more deliberate, more familiar. A thousand tiny rituals built over the years. He leaned into Jayce’s warmth, one hand curling gently at his husband’s side. “You’ll recover.”
Jayce’s fingers brushed through Viktor’s long hair, untamed in places and streaked with silver like molten metal. “I always do. Especially when there’s tea and flattery.”
They stood like that for a moment, two older men, no longer the brash inventors who’d once set the world ablaze with hextech. Softer now. Wiser. Slower, yes—but no less sharp. The lines around their eyes were laugh lines. Their hands bore calluses from decades of tools and blueprints. And their love, quiet and enduring, was stitched into every corner of the home they’d built.
“I heard from Nik today,” Jayce murmured, still close. “Frankie’s presenting her paper at the symposium next month. He’s helping with the coding backend.”
Viktor’s smile warmed. “He always did have a gift for problem-solving. Heimerdinger must be spoiling them both.”
“I hope so. And Jules is shadowing at the architecture school again this weekend. He keeps reworking his portfolio.”
“He’ll get in,” Viktor said without hesitation. “He’s relentless. Like you.”
Jayce chuckled. “And Jasna?”
“She’s welding prototypes in the garage and bribing the neighbor’s dog to guard them.” Viktor’s tone was fond, laced with exasperated awe. “I believe we’re under strict orders not to touch anything .”
Jayce let out a low whistle. “Distinguished Innovators competition, here she comes.”
In the quiet kitchen, warm with stove heat and evening light, Viktor began to hum an old Zaunite lullaby under his breath.
Jayce tilted his head and smiled. “You think we should ask Lina where she’s really been going?”
Viktor chuckled, eyes soft. “No. She’ll tell us when she’s ready.”
“She always does.”
They leaned against each other like pillars holding up the same roof, content in the quiet. Their children were grown, their days a little slower, but the house was still full of echoes. Of footsteps, of laughter, of brilliant ideas shouted through the halls, and comfort offered in silence. Still full of home.
The truth was, Lina was working. Tirelessly. Passionately. But what she hadn’t said—not out of shame, but something quieter, something more sacred—was why. Sometimes she stayed after the others left, long after the last sunlamp dimmed and only the bioluminescent moss lit the walkways with soft, dreamlike shimmer. She’d sit in the center of the greenhouse and let the silence fill in the spaces her words couldn’t.
There, under the arching glass dome she helped rebuild, surrounded by a world that bloomed out of grief and hope and compost and cooperation, Lina grieved. Not loudly. Not in pieces. But wholly.
She grieved the dad she barely remembered; the one who died shielding her when the flood tore through Zaun, whose hands she only recalled as callused warmth and whose voice had always felt like thunder softened at the edges. She’d followed echoes of him here. Built a garden in the ruins of the day he died.
And she healed, too.
Because when she looked at the glowing moss, the climbing vines, the delicate white poppies swaying in the still air, she didn’t just see loss. She saw the hands that caught her. The lab was full of tools and sleepless nights and gentle voices that never turned her away. The man with oil-stained fingers who knelt to fix the leg of her first workbench. The man who braided her hair into a fishtail before her science fair and wept louder than the audience when she won.
She thought about names. Her first name, given by a father who never saw her grow up. A name that came from an old story, one about light in the dark. And the name she wore now— Talis —a name chosen with tears and a kitchen full of burned pancakes and so many footsteps. A name that meant legacy, not biology. A name given by two men who had no obligation to stay but did.
Jayce had given her wild courage, the kind that broke rules and asked for forgiveness later. Viktor had given her precision, patience, and a reverence for what came before. Together, they’d given her a home. A foundation. A place to land, and a place to launch from.
Nikolai had given her steadiness. As the eldest of the younger three, he’d been the quiet weight at her side, the one who would sit beside her in silence until she was ready to speak, who never demanded explanations but always offered an extra set of hands. He taught her that strength didn’t always have to be loud to be real.
Julian had given her imagination, wild and unapologetic. His sketches of impossible cities, reengineered stars, and solar-powered wings had covered the kitchen table for years. He reminded her that dreaming wasn’t a waste of time, but a blueprint for what could be, and that the future needed both vision and rebellion.
And Jasna had given her fire. Sharp, ambitious, unapologetically Zaunite, she questioned everything, challenged everyone, and loved with a kind of fierce loyalty that made Lina feel protected even when she was the eldest. Jasna dared Lina to keep evolving, never settle, and to speak even louder when her voice shook.
They had all shaped her. In laughter, in arguments, in late-night tears and sibling mischief, and stolen tools. In tiny revolutions and quiet comforts. And Lina carried them with her now, in every choice, every risk, every place she called home. And now, alone in the garden made of light and loss and laughter, Lina whispered to the silence:
“I hope I made you all proud.”
Outside, a pipe dripped steadily onto moss. Inside, the greenhouse pulsed with a living hum. Roots deepened. Leaves unfurled.
_____
The invitation came on thick, folded card stock, delivered by a breathless courier just after breakfast. Jayce read it twice, then three more times, as if it might reveal more each pass.
Come see what bloomed.
Love,
Your Lina.
No location, just an address scribbled in the corner and a time: dusk.
Viktor emerged from the bedroom, adjusting the cuffs of a clean, high-collared coat, his silvered hair pulled back in a sleek low tie. “Is she getting married and forgot to tell us?” he asked, smirking faintly as he noticed Jayce still in his undershirt.
Jayce blinked, clutching the card like it might fly away. “I—I don’t think so? It doesn’t sound like that kind of thing.”
“Then stop fussing and put on a shirt,” Viktor teased, crossing the room with the slow, deliberate gait that came from years of living with a slight limp. The cane tapped a soft rhythm across the tile. He reached for Jayce’s tie, tugged it off its hook, and expertly looped it around Jayce’s neck. “You get distracted every time she writes us anything with that tone. Like you’re still the anxious intern trying to impress Heimerdinger.”
Jayce chuckled as Viktor cinched the knot. “I don’t think she’s gonna tenure-review me, Vik.”
“No, but she is the product of both our temperaments. She’s unpredictable, sentimental, and suspiciously quiet when planning anything. You should be worried.”
Jayce tugged Viktor close by the waist. “You’re just mad she inherited my charm.”
“And yet somehow, she’s still tolerable,” Viktor deadpanned. Then he leaned in, brushed a quick kiss to Jayce’s cheek, and murmured, “Come along, Mr. Talis. We’ve got a flower to find.”
Down the hall, the house was already humming with movement. Nikolai was in the foyer, fiddling with his collar while his girlfriend Frankie, dressed in a sleek jacket over a Zaun-blue blouse, adjusted the buttons for him with practiced ease. “She didn’t tell you anything either, huh?” Frankie asked, arching a brow.
“Not a word,” Nikolai replied. “Which means it’s probably dramatic.”
“Or deeply personal,” Frankie muttered, then looked over her shoulder to the staircase. “Or both.”
Julian came down the steps two at a time, tucking a folded schematic into his coat pocket. “If this is another unveiling of her eco-biomech synthesis lab, I swear to gods, I am not pretending to understand the chlorophyll numbers this time.”
“It’s not that,” Jasna said, brushing past him in a sharp, navy blazer with a bright green ribbon pinned to the lapel. She tied her braids back as she walked. “The stationery’s too nice. She only uses that paper when she’s emotionally spiraling or making a statement.”
Julian groaned. “So… an emotionally spiraling statement.”
“Exactly,” Jasna said with a sigh.
Jayce appeared in the archway, looking every bit the proud, confused father. “You three almost ready?”
Nikolai grabbed his jacket and held the door for Frankie. “None of us has any idea what’s happening, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“We wouldn’t miss it,” Jasna said, softer now.
“No,” Viktor added from behind Jayce. “None of us would.”
To everyone’s surprise, the northern tunnels had changed. Tremendously.
What was once crumbled stone and metal bones had been smoothed and shored up, illuminated from within. As Jayce and Viktor stepped inside, followed by Nik and Frankie, and then the twins. The dark gave way to warmth. Light filtered through glass panels overhead, thick vines draped across archways, and moss glowed faintly beneath their boots. A soft waterfall trickled down one wall, surrounded by lush greenery and winding walkways. The scent of soil and something faintly sweet hung in the air.
Jayce let out a stunned breath. “What… is this?”
“She did this?” Viktor whispered, his voice almost caught in his throat. “By herself?”
“No,” came a voice behind them. “She did it with us.”
Vi stepped into view wearing a collared shirt and a smug grin, her jacket slung over one shoulder. “Welcome to The Bridge Garden, Professors. Try not to cry. Or do, honestly. It’s been a long week.”
The whole family turned, and there they were. Caitlyn, elegant in slate-blue and silver, stood just beside Mel, who wore her signature gold cuffs and a knowing smirk. Jinx had somehow wrangled herself into a dress with combat boots, her goggles still perched on her head. Ekko stood by a small DJ booth with a battery-powered speaker, already queuing music. And in the corner near a table of refreshments, Jayce’s mother laid out sweets on a floral napkin.
Jayce blinked rapidly. “This is…”
“I know,” Viktor murmured, quietly overwhelmed. His eyes scanned the dome, the plants, the poppies—especially the white ones in the center. “She brought him back here.”
“Who?” Julian asked first, the question hesitant. “What do you mean?”
Jayce exhaled, long and steady, like he was trying to release something he'd kept sealed away for years. “Lina’s biological dad.”
Jasna blinked. “What? I thought she’s always been with you two.”
“She has,” Viktor said gently, still watching the way the glass caught the evening light and poured it over the field of carefully cultivated flora. “But before that... there was someone else.”
“You never told us,” Nikolai said, brows furrowed. “She never told us.”
“She doesn’t talk about him,” Jayce replied quietly, as if raising his voice might undo the peace of this place. “Not often. He died when she was very young. A flood up in the old aqueduct sector above Zaun. The pipes snapped after days of rain, and the collapse took out half the area where he was helping people. He didn’t make it out.”
“And this is where it happened?” Jasna asked, softer now.
Viktor nodded. “He was buried beneath these broken pipes. Lina was six, and we found her taking shelter in our old lab. We couldn’t just leave her alone.”
“And you kept her,” Nikolai murmured.
“She chose to stay,” Viktor corrected gently. “And we were lucky enough to be chosen, too.”
The siblings stood quietly, taking in the garden Lina had shaped,a blend of Piltover structure and Zaunite wildness. In the very center, surrounded by curved pipes and pale, living moss, bloomed the cluster of white poppies. Soft. Resilient.
Jasna was the first to speak. “She’s honoring him. Without telling us, without explaining, she just… did this.”
Julian glanced between the flowers and his fathers. “It’s beautiful.”
“It’s Lina,” Jayce said, voice thick with emotion. “A place where she could heal.”
The crowd turned as footsteps echoed at the tunnel’s entrance. Lina entered in work boots and a simple dress, her curls pinned back with a few white blossoms tucked behind her ear. She looked exhausted. Radiant. Nervous. And she was smiling.
She crossed the distance between them and wrapped both her dads in a fierce hug, arms around shoulders, forehead to Viktor’s collarbone. “You made it.”
“Of course we did,” Jayce said, voice thick. “Lina, this is…”
“Perfect,” Viktor finished for him.
Lina pulled back slightly, eyes shining. “I didn’t want to tell you until it was ready. I didn’t even know what it was at first. But I kept thinking about my late father. And about you two. How this place could be more than what it was. A grave. A memory.”
She gestured around them. “Now it’s a garden. A bridge. A place for Zaunites and Piltovans. A place to begin.”
Jayce looked around at the people gathering, laughing, sharing food and stories under golden lights. “You did this?”
“We all did,” Lina said. “But yeah. I dreamed it. And you two… you’re the reason I knew how to make it real.”
Viktor’s voice was gentle. “You are an innovator, Lina.”
Jayce nodded. “The kind that builds the future.”
Lina reached into her satchel and pulled out two small pins engraved with a flower crest. One she handed to Viktor, the other to Jayce. “So you’ll always be part of it.”
Viktor looked at the symbol, then at her. “You gave me a name once,” he said softly. “Now you’ve given it meaning.”
Lina squeezed his hand. “You gave me a life. This is just me growing it.”
A small chorus of footsteps approached, and then arms were around her—Nikolai, Julian, and Jasna sweeping her into a hug at once.
“You’re unbelievable,” Nikolai said, half-laughing, half-sniffling. “You didn’t tell me anything! I thought this was a wedding!”
Frankie, standing just behind him with her braids coiled in a crown and a Zaunite jacket patched with academic logos, grinned. “I told him if there was cake, it didn’t matter either way.”
Lina laughed into her brother’s shoulder. “Sorry. I wanted it to be a surprise.”
“Well,” Julian said, pulling back slightly, his voice cracking just a bit, “it worked. You surprised us. And inspired us. You always do.”
“Julian almost started sketching the support beams,” Jasna added, nudging him with a teasing smirk. “I had to remind him this wasn’t a structural review.”
“Speak for yourself,” Julian muttered. “Some of these welds are genius.”
Jasna turned to Lina more seriously then, her expression soft. “You made something beautiful, Lina. Something Zaun needs. Something we all needed. I’m going to reference this project in my application. Hope you don’t mind.”
Lina raised an eyebrow, amused. “You’re shameless.”
“Runs in the family,” Jasna said, then pulled her into a tighter hug. “But seriously. I’m proud of you. We all are.”
Frankie stepped forward then, holding a bundle of tiny, dried pink blossoms wrapped in recycled lace. “These are from my mum’s roof garden. She said they’re for good luck, for things that grow in hard places.”
Lina took them with careful hands, touched beyond words. “Thank her for me?”
Frankie smiled. “She already loves you like one of her own. So do I.”
The family stood together beneath the golden lights, in the garden born from grief and love, from memory and dream. Around them, Zaunites and Piltovans mingled, sharing food and laughter, and walking paths that hadn’t existed before Lina carved them out of broken stone.
The pipes no longer dripped or echoed.
Now, they sang.
Jinx launched the first burst of glitter from a cannon and shouted, “PARTY TIME!”
Vi groaned, snatching it away by the second blast. “Jinx. You promised.”
Caitlyn laughed under her breath, pressing a quick, secret kiss to Vi’s cheek.
Mel raised her champagne. “To what blooms in quiet. And who we become when we choose to grow.”
Cheers echoed across the dome. The music started as a soft, glowing swell. Jayce wrapped an arm around Viktor’s waist, the pin still warm in his hand. “Ready to dance?”
Viktor arched a brow. “My knees are forty-seven years old and angry.”
Jayce smirked. “Then I’ll carry the rhythm for both of us.”
Viktor rolled his eyes but took Jayce’s hand anyway, slipping his cane into a holder near the edge of the space. “Only if you promise not to step on my foot like last time.”
They stepped into the light.
Jayce leaned in, cocky. “That was passion, not clumsiness.”
“Ah, yes. Passion. A violent and unpredictable force. Much like your footwork.”
They laughed, and then they were moving, slow and careful, wrapped in the kind of closeness earned over decades. Viktor’s hair, long and silver, swayed softly against his back as Jayce spun him with careful grace. Jayce’s beard glittered with a few stubborn gray streaks that caught the gold lighting just so, and Viktor’s temples had gone entirely silver, like a crown.
“You know,” Jayce murmured, “you’re still the smartest, prettiest guy in the room.”
Viktor smiled, flushed and a little breathless. “You always say that when we’re one of the oldest people here.”
“Doesn’t make it less true.”
Across the dance floor, Lina watched. She stood with her arms wrapped loosely around herself, barely blinking, her heart aching in the best, softest way. It wasn’t just that they looked happy. It was that she knew they were happy. They’d built something together. Not just her, not just their careers. But each other. They hadn’t just raised her, they’d raised each other.
The tears slipped down her cheeks before she noticed them, warm and quiet.
The night wore on with dancing and laughter and faint trails of glitter left behind by Jinx. The music faded eventually, and the guests lingered in smaller groups, sipping tea, eating cookies, and swapping stories about the past.
Lina grinned. “Close your eyes.”
Jayce and Viktor exchanged a look, the kind full of old mischief, and obeyed without protest.
She met her dads at the tunnel entrance where they’d first come in. Her boots were caked in dirt. The sleeves of her loose overshirt were rolled up, streaked with soil and pollen, and her curls had unraveled a little with the evening humidity.
“Okay,” Lina whispered, barely able to contain her excitement. “Open them.”
The path ahead bloomed into light. Overhead, glass panels revealed a star-dappled sky, and strings of recycled copper wire curled around steel arches, carrying warm golden bulbs like suspended fireflies. Greenery cascaded from baskets overhead—trailing ferns, peace lilies, bright clusters of hibiscus. Water trickled from sculpted fountains made of old pipes, their rusted forms transformed into something quiet and elegant.
Rows of herbs flanked the walls: calendula, echinacea, valerian. Berry vines crawled along the trellises, delicate and determined. And in the center of it all, nestled beneath a golden lamplight, was a garden bed of radiant white poppies.
Jayce froze. Viktor stepped forward, breath catching.
At the base of the flowerbed, a plaque read:
For the father I lost in the tunnels—
And for the two who helped me rise from them.
-Lina Viktoria Talis
Jayce covered his mouth with one hand, shoulders trembling slightly. His knees felt weak, and he swayed ever so slightly, as if the world around him had suddenly grown impossibly vast. The lump in his throat pressed painfully against the words he couldn’t say, the emotions building too fast, too fiercely to be contained. His eyes welled up, and the first tear slid down his cheek, warm and quiet, as if it had been waiting to escape.
Viktor, kneeling beside him, was equally still, but his usual poise had faltered. The edge of his jaw clenched, and he bit down on the words threatening to spill. His fingers traced the engraved letters, lingering over the ones that marked the loss of something so irreplaceable: Lina’s biological father. The father neither of them had ever met, but the one they had both, in different ways, come to honor through their daughter.
Viktor’s breath caught, just as Jayce’s had. For a moment, the two of them seemed suspended in time, their shared grief merging with their shared love for this space, this garden that had grown from the deepest parts of their hearts.
And then, in that quiet moment, the tear fell from Viktor’s eye, as gentle and certain as a drop of rain on a leaf. It was almost too soft to notice at first, but as it traced the line of his cheek, a silent tremor passed through him, the weight of the years catching up in a way words could never express.
Jayce’s shoulders shook with a sob, the release coming with such force that his body seemed to collapse in on itself for a moment. The tears spilled now, faster, more freely, as if a dam had finally broken. He leaned forward, resting his head against Viktor’s shoulder, and Viktor, ever the steady presence, shifted his weight to support him, wrapping his arm around Jayce’s back.
Viktor’s voice was rough when it broke the silence. “I didn’t think… I didn’t know how much I needed this.”
Jayce’s voice, muffled against Viktor’s shoulder, responded with a laugh that was more of a choked exhale than anything else. “I don’t think we’ve ever known how much we needed it.”
The sound of their breathing, uneven but steady, filled the space around them, mingling with the soft trickle of water from the fountains, the whisper of the wind through the leaves. The two men sat there for what felt like hours, just letting the emotions flow, not caring that the tears stained their cheeks or their clothes.
Viktor’s thumb brushed gently over Jayce’s back, offering quiet comfort, even as his own chest tightened. He didn’t need to say anything more. There was no need. Without a word, Lina crouched beside them, placing a hand on each of their backs.
“I didn’t want to build a monument,” she said quietly. “I wanted to build a beginning. Something that grows.”
Jayce turned toward her, voice thick. “You built more than that.”
“You built a home,” Viktor whispered. “A bridge. A memory… we can walk through.”
Jayce pulled her close, his face a mixture of joy and sorrow, and whispered hoarsely, “We did good, sweetheart. You’ve done good.”
Viktor nodded, pressing a kiss to her forehead, his hand lingering on the back of her head, as though trying to memorize the feeling of her presence. “You gave us something we didn’t know we needed,” he murmured, voice thick with emotion. “A place to breathe. A place to heal.”
And then he smiled, soft and a little cracked at the edges, and added, “It seems our daughter has good taste after all.”
Jayce let out a watery laugh and reached for both their hands. “Come on. Let’s stay a while.”
They sat beneath the white poppies until the lights dimmed and the stars blinked into view again—quiet, steady, and still growing.