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There was no silence, not really.
Not when you could hear every voice in the city, every heartbeat, every siren, every whisper of danger rising up through the metal bones of Piltover. Not when the wind carried it to you like prayer. Or penance.
Jayce hovered in the stratosphere, suspended in that strange stillness that didn’t belong to earth or sky. His cape drifted in long, lazy ribbons behind him, catching on the upper thermals as if reluctant to rest. It looked poetic. Majestic. Heroic.
He hated it.
It made him look like what they wanted him to be.
He closed his eyes. Tried to think of nothing.
Instead he heard everything.
A man crying in an alleyway behind a closed bar. A skimmer overheating three streets north of the Shimmer detox clinic. A child coughing, deep and wet, not smoke, not poison, just sickness. He knew the sound of sick children by now. He could sort them by the pattern of their breath. He could count the beats between gasps.
He should go.
He should always go.
He was The Paragon, wasn’t he? Piltover’s golden son. The man who caught falling airships with his bare hands. Who cracked through burning debris to carry civilians out on his shoulders like some ancient god reimagined in techweave and lightning.
He didn’t need rest. He didn’t need sleep. He didn’t need quiet.
He needed to move. To stay in motion. To fly.
Because if he stopped—
If he ever stopped—
He wasn’t sure he’d remember how to be a person again.
He hadn’t meant for it to happen. The transformation. The mythology.
He was just a scientist. A councilor. A man trying to honor the memory of a father who died too young and a mother who sacrificed too much. He’d wanted to make something better: a bridge, a tool, a way forward.
And then the Hexcore exploded.
And then the sky cracked open.
And then Jayce flew.
He hadn’t known, at first, what it meant. The fusion of Hextech and something older, something rawer than science. He only knew that it burned inside him. That the hammer responded to his will. That his blood sang in storms and his skin could survive fire. That the city needed saving, and he could do it.
He could do it better than anyone.
And once he started, how could he stop?
How do you stop being a miracle?
The city didn’t worship him exactly, but it didn’t matter.
They needed him. They called for him. Screamed his name as buildings fell, whispered it in terror as riots began, sobbed it in gratitude after he made the world feel safe again.
Paragon.
Hammergod.
He couldn’t bear that one.
Sometimes he looked at the posters, the murals, the damn gold cards they handed out to children like a civic lesson, and felt something rise in his throat that had no name. Revulsion, maybe. Or grief.
Because none of it was him.
Not really.
Jayce Talis hadn’t gone to bed in weeks.
Jayce Talis didn’t eat unless Viktor shoved a protein bar into his hand.
Jayce Talis hadn’t touched anyone, really touched anyone, since…
Mel.
His fingers twitched at the thought of her. The memory of her hand on his chest, brown skin pigment-stained from a morning of painting, pressing gently over the place where his core burned brightest.
“You’re too warm,” she’d murmured, once. “You need to come down before you start glowing again.”
He’d laughed, rough and dry. “I can’t. There’s a gas leak near the docks. Fourteen people affected already.”
“I didn’t say you should ignore them,” she said. “I said you need to come down. Just long enough to remember you’re human.”
He hadn’t told her that he didn’t feel human anymore. Not all the time. Not when he moved faster than bullets. Not when he stopped a collapse with his hands and felt nothing break.
She saw it, though. In the way she looked at him. Steady. Calm. Not afraid, but concerned.
Like she was watching him drift further away with each flight and wondering how long it would take before he was lost to the sky entirely.
He didn’t mean to avoid her.
It just became easier not to land at all.
What would he say, anyway? That the core in his chest hadn’t gone dim in days? That he could hear the sound of the moon brushing clouds, the grinding of tectonic plates beneath Zaun? That he had started dreaming of thunder not as sound but as command?
That sometimes, when he flew high enough, he didn’t want to come back?
The higher he went, the quieter the city became. The more he could pretend it wasn’t begging for him. That it could survive without him.
That he could survive without them.
That juggling council duties, inventing and hero work was killing him?
But even up here, the voices returned. Muffled. Persistent.
Paragon. Paragon. Paragon.
They said his name like a lifeline. Like an incantation.
They didn’t know what it cost him to answer.
He heard her before he saw her.
That was how it always was with Mel. Her voice slipped through the noise. Smooth. Intimate. A call, not a cry. A thread between stars.
“Jayce, are you listening?”
He turned before he thought.
Her balcony. Her silhouette backlit by the warm gold of the penthouse. A robe falling from one bare shoulder. A glass of wine untouched on the ledge beside her.
He dove like a meteor, the air screaming past him, cape whipping around his legs.
He didn’t land gracefully.
He never did, with her.
He stumbled slightly, boots cracking the marble tile, his weight catching unevenly on the balcony rail.
She didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink.
Mel just arched one brow and said, “You’re late.”
He stared at her.
She was barefoot. Paint-streaked. Glowing.
She was real.
Jayce reached for her before he knew what he was doing.
But Mel stepped forward first, and placed her palm flat against the center of his chest.
Over the core.
Over the part of him he no longer understood.
“You’re shaking,” she murmured.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
He closed his eyes. The heat was rising again. That thrumming, dangerous tension just below the skin. The urge to lift off, to go back to the sky, where things were simpler. Where people were problems to solve, not feelings to navigate.
Mel’s hand didn’t move.
“You don’t have to be everything,” she whispered.
“I don’t know how to stop.”
“You don’t have to stop. You just have to come back. Sometimes.”
“I don’t know how to be normal anymore.”
“You never were,” she said, with a soft smile. “That’s not what I’m asking.”
“Then what?”
Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Just… come inside. Sit down. Let someone see you.”
Jayce breathed, shallow and uncertain. His hands were still trembling. He hadn’t realized until now.
Mel took one in hers and held it. Anchored it.
Not with power. Not with command.
With presence.
With care.
And for a moment, just a moment, The Paragon remembered he was Jayce before the hammer. Before the myths. Before the city opened its arms to him like a son and devoured every other part of his life.
He wasn’t a god.
He was just a man who wanted to be held.