Work Text:
Jayce didn’t know how to rest. He could pause, could delay, could even crash when the high wore off but he didn’t know how to be still.
His hands had to be moving. Turning screws. Fusing wires. Tapping code like it was rhythm in his bones. That was the only time his mind stopped racing: when the world narrowed to the fine-point of creation.
It wasn’t the spotlight he missed, after a year on the tech circuit. It wasn’t even the prestige, or the crowds chanting his name at startup expos in Berlin, Tokyo, and Zurich. It was the quiet. The lab light at three in the morning. The hiss of the soldering pen. The scent of burnt plastic and fresh metal. That was home.
So when he came back to Piltover, bruised in spirit and hollowed out by too many hotel rooms, he didn’t announce it. He just got off the plane, took the long train to Hightown, and walked up the garden path to his mother’s house with nothing but a duffel bag and a quiet ache behind his ribs.
Ximena was waiting.
She’d always known when he was coming. Never needed calls or letters or flight confirmations, just opened the door like she’d been listening for his heartbeat through the soil.
“Mi amor?” she said softly, silhouetted in the porch light. Then, louder: “Jayce Talis, you better not be thinking of stepping into this house without a hello first.”
He hadn’t realized how badly he needed to be held until her arms were around him.
That night, Jayce sat in the kitchen with his mother while she baked something sweet he couldn’t name. He’d told her about Zurich. About the startup that had begged him to stay. About the award they’d given him that still didn’t feel real.
But when he handed her the bracelet, the rest of the world dropped away.
“It’s ugly,” she said, squinting down at the chunky silver band.
Jayce laughed. “Mama.”
“It is,” she insisted. “Too industrial. And why does it buzz?”
“It monitors your heart rate and your temperature. If anything spikes or drops too fast, I get a ping.”
She raised a brow. “And what am I supposed to do with that information? Call you while you’re halfway across the world?”
“You don’t do anything,” Jayce said quietly. “I do. I show up.”
She looked at him a long moment before sliding it onto her wrist. “Thank you. But I’m still not wearing it to mass.”
The next day, he dropped by the precinct.
He’d barely stepped through the glass doors before Caitlyn slammed into him in full tackle-hug, knocking the breath out of his lungs.
“You prick,” she said fondly into his shoulder. “You absolute bastard. You just vanish and expect no one to track you down?”
“I left you a message,” he managed.
“A message?” Caitlyn pulled back to glare at him. “You left a gif, Jayce. Of a guy waving goodbye with fireworks. I thought you were kidnapped.”
He chuckled, lifting his hands. “Okay, okay. I deserved that.”
“You deserve worse. But I’ll settle for letting you buy me lunch.”
Jayce did. And dinner. And coffee after. It wasn’t until she went to use the restroom that he pulled out the keychain-sized device from his pocket, sleek and compact, no larger than a flash drive.
He’d built it over months. Motion-triggered panic alert, disguised as a police badge charm. Linked directly to her squad’s internal frequency. Auto-activates on a hard impact or if her vitals flatline.
When he handed it to her later that night, Caitlyn stared at it, then at him.
“I already carry a gun.”
“This can’t be turned on you,” he said. “And it’s quiet. Just in case.”
She didn’t argue. Just clipped it to her belt and muttered something about “paranoid engineer instincts.”
He took it as a thank-you.
The lab hadn’t changed.
His badge still buzzed green when he scanned in. His name was still half-rubbed off the placard beside Viktor’s, as if someone had tried to scrape it off and changed their mind halfway through. The lights clicked on the same. The hum of the 3D printers was still the same lullaby.
Viktor didn’t even look up from his screen when Jayce stepped in.
“You’re late,” he said.
Jayce grinned, dropped his bag, and sat beside him like no time had passed at all.
They worked in tandem for hours, picking up an old biotech interface they’d shelved last year. Jayce only let the illusion of normalcy last until Viktor coughed…quiet, like always, but rougher this time. Wet.
Jayce’s chest went tight.
Later, when Viktor had gone home, Jayce stayed. He pulled out the half-finished project he’d carried with him across three countries. A portable respiratory enhancer, smaller than the clunky oxygen packs Viktor had refused to use. Sleek. Easy to clip onto a coat or belt. Whisper-quiet.
He didn’t want Viktor to know how long he’d been working on it. How often he’d re-coded the processor until it could monitor airflow in real time. How many times he’d panicked in hotel rooms at the sound of a phantom cough and gone back to perfect it.
When he finished, he left it on Viktor’s desk.
No note.
Just a silent offering.
The last thing he built was the smallest.
It didn’t have sensors. No biometric tracking. No threat-response protocol. It wouldn’t save a life.
It was just…a charm.
A sleek cuff, not unlike the one he’d made for his mother, but finer. Black titanium. Engraved on the inside, not with words, but with a pattern he remembered sketching on the back of a napkin during some late-night summit in London. Mel had teased him about it. Said it looked like a cipher.
It was. Her initials. Hidden in a geometric script only they understood.
She’d never wear something overt. He knew that. She was too polished, too private. But she’d wear this, if he ever had the nerve to give it to her.
He didn’t expect to see her again so soon.
It was near dawn, and he was back in the lab, hands deep in some new prototype he hadn’t named yet. Just solder and metal and blinking lights, something to keep the ache at bay.
The door opened. Softly. Deliberately.
“You always did make the worst patient,” said a familiar voice.
Jayce froze.
Then turned.
Mel stood in the doorway like a memory made real, dressed in a cream coat and too many layers for summer. Her eyes were sharp, but her voice—God, her voice—
He hadn’t forgotten it. But he hadn’t realized how much he missed it until it wrapped around him again like a wire pulled taut in his chest.
“Did Viktor call you?” he asked.
Mel shrugged. “No. I saw the lights.”
He swallowed. “I didn’t know if you’d still be around.”
“I am. I still walk by here before going home for some reason.”
Silence.
He looked down at his workbench, then slowly reached for the cuff.
“I made you something,” he said. Voice low. Careful.
Mel stepped closer. “What does it do?”
“Nothing.” A pause. “Everything.”
He held it out. She took it.
Her fingers brushed his. Warm. Steady.
When she turned the cuff over and saw the engraving, she didn’t speak. Just held it tighter.
Then, so softly he almost missed it:
“You never did stop caring, did you?”
Jayce’s throat tightened. “No.”
She didn’t put it on. Not then. But she slipped it into her pocket, like something worth keeping close.
That was enough.
That night, Jayce doesn’t toss and turn.
He doesn’t need to.
He built something.
He came home.
And for now, that’s enough.