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Diya’s foot slips on cobblestone.
Rain slicks the streets, pulling oil along the walkways, and already her shoes are worn smooth.
She’s traveled across oceans to be here. Past Bilgewater, through Ixtal, and across the sands of Shurima. She has made a great journey for a better start, for a place where difference becomes unity and individuality means you are an integral part of something whole.
Here, beneath the glistening rooftops of gold, Diya’s journey is not yet over. She is simply slowed.
Her child sleeps through the thundering downfall. She has always slept through that which should scare her. The sea had put her to sleep as the sun has lulled her into silence, and from Iona to Piltover, Diya has watched her baby learn to simply weather the storm.
Piltover will be a home for her child. It will raise a better soul than she would be capable of.
Diya does not know it, but her daughter will grow to be a son. He will be golden as the rooftops, sharp as Piltover’s spires, and no matter where he looks, he will never be able to find someone who understands him. He will live as he was left; alone.
For now he is loved. That is all there is. Enough love to leave him. Enough love and the rain pulling oil beneath Diya’s wear-worn shoes.
She can’t admit to anything except her own exhaustion, but the surety in each step lends a credence to her ability nonetheless. This is the right thing to do and she knows it.
Lightning strikes a rooftop mere streets over, the sky pulsing in white, and Diya pulls her child closer to her chest. Breaths later and the air shatters with sound. Still, the baby sleeps.
By the time she makes it to the orphanage, her chest is shuddering with breath and her cheeks are bright with cold, the sort of color like mulberries on the dark of her skin. Her husband used to call her his cheri back before he passed. He called her a hundred niceties, a thousand sweet-words, a million versions of love punched into simple syllables. Diya missed him still. She thought, sometimes, that if he was still here, they might have been able to pull themselves together enough to raise this new life they had made.
They might have been worth a child in a world that had never blessed them.
Without him she has nothing. Only love, enough to leave him, the rain slipping beneath her weather-worn shoes, and cheeks so bright they rival the ripeness of fruit.
Her first knock is swallowed by the storm.
Her second knock is interrupted.
“Are you aware of the hour?”
Diya steps backwards from the doorstep, her shoulders meeting the downpour and arching inwards as if she can shelter her child from a threat that hasn’t yet met him. The woman ahead of her looks at them with something like pity. That, or disgust. She’s not quite sure which would better describe the matron’s tight expression as Diya wasn’t quite sure she could imagine the woman with any other expression at all.
After a moment her judgement meets a lapse and she steps aside, pulling the red edge of her robe beside her hip to make room for their entrance. Diya forges inward, her rainsoaked clothing dripping immediately onto the marbling floor, and yet she can offer no sense of apology when faced with the interior of the building; gold arches across the walls and floors, metal itself built into the structure of the crownings and melded into the set of the tiles. Oil lamps light flickering dimness upon the walls, no doubt turned to a bare hiss as nightfall had set several hours ago, and yet the antiquity reads as nothing but wealth.
From behind her comes the door shutting, wood on rich wood, and then the footsteps of the matron come to inspect them.
“Where did you even come from? Such clothes,” her voice fades, inquisitive but not unkind, before she seems to make up her mind, “you may stay with us if you need. I fear we have not many beds, but what we do have you are welcome to.”
From within Diya’s arms comes the soft sound of her child waking, and all at once the matron seems at ease. Pleased even. Her hair, grey but streaked with brighter white slices, seems to fall around her cheeks in a way that seems flattering if not youthful. Her green eyes crinkle at the edges.
She was a mother, once.
Like Diya, but better suited to it.
This is a good place.
“I hoped you would take her. The — the man who sells inks, at your boundary markets, and the paintings of the fish with the red heads. He said you could do it,” Diya tells her, tilting her baby so that they both may appreciate the softness of her cheeks, “her name is Jaya.”
The matron smiles. “Of course. You speak of Pavel. He is so generous I’m half-shocked he didn’t offer his own home for you to stay in.”
“Oh, he did. Many times.”
Shared laughter rings out throughout the warmth of the entryway. The matron provides a soft, ‘may I?’ and Diya passes the waking body of her child into a pair of arms that sit untouched by wind or weather or worry. From here they are a fitting family. A child and a mother who loves her.
Diya wonders if she is meant to regret this part. If she is meant to feel like she is losing something.
She finds nothing but relief. Her life is not the life of a mother. This child would grow up knowing it was unloved, knowing it was unwanted, knowing she had never planned for it so much as she had planned for her husband to live.
Diya says, “Thank you. You are saving my life.”
And she thinks if she was a better person, this would be the moment she started to cry.
Instead, there is nothing but love. Only love, enough to leave, the rain slipping beneath her weather-worn shoes, cheeks so bright they rival the ripeness of fruit, and relief so thick it could drown.
The rain slips down her fingertips and sloughs to the floor, and with it goes every worry she’s carried from Iona to Ixtal to Piltover.
Beyond the walls of the lab comes the sound of thundering rainfall. It’s been pouring for almost a week straight, the storm heavy against the earth as stones pelting glass, and yet it bleeds into nothing but oblivious sound in Jayce’s periphery.
He’s yet to be distracted by something as simple as the weather.
“Why don’t you have any parents?”
Jayce swivels in his chair to face Amaranthine. His mouth has formed the sort of scowl that could never make it to billboards, the deep-set ‘C’ frown of horror that would form wrinkles if he wasn’t trained into a constant smile between the cringing.
“You can’t just ask that,” he tells her.
She counters quickly, skipping into the lab to plant her feet on the bottom wrung of his seat and whirl them both into a spin, “I just did and no one stopped me, so… guess I can!”
Jayce plants a boot on the ground, the arm closest to Amaranthine moving to catch her in her own inertia lest she fall. Her curls bounce in the sudden stillness for no more than a second before she tumbles forward, her little body folding over his arm as she crawls over the arm rest to seat herself on his knee. She’s misty with raindrops. Jayce pulls one of her bows straight in her hair before pulling them back to his workbench to continue signing the latest batch of patents.
For a moment she is still. Then Amaranthine snatches his pen to sign one perfect forgery of his signature before he slides the paperwork from her reach.
Jayce gives in. “Why are you even asking me about that? You don’t have parents either, so I’m sure you can figure it out.”
“Wrong. You’re my dad, so good try but not good enough,” she says, matter-of-fact, “and everyone in my class says they have grandparents but I’ve never met mine, so. Did they leave because you were annoying? I asked Mister Herald and he said they left because you were annoying, but half of what he says is made up or crazy so I didn’t take it to heart. And he laughed afterwards, which is never a good sign if you’re trying to convince someone of anything ever. I learned that while talking to him, which means he is good for teaching some things that aren’t just geometry! Another point to me on the ‘Amaranthine is Always Right and the Smartest Ever Ever Ever’ board. I’ll update it when we get the new stickers.”
“I still can’t believe you made that a real chart.”
“I never break a promise, obviously. Now answer my question.”
Jayce sighs.
There’s a multitude of reasons. There’s a multitude of people he could cite having raised him, improperly of course, but in the greatest sense of his experience nonetheless. None of them are people he could introduce her to.
There was Miss Absil with her strict gaze and stricter words. She had fed him, clothed him, taken away his tools when bedtime came lest she found him up at dawn forging a new escape route surrounded by miniscule automatons. She made sure to get him soft toys instead of mechanical ones. He would take apart anything that had innards to de-and-reconstruct. She was never a mother but a warden, kind where she needed to be but stretched far enough that even Jayce could see her love was conditional as it was shallow. She was a good woman.
When he left she might have seemed sad. He never looked back long enough to notice.
A Miss Giulia Giopara came next, ushering Jayce along when he was only twelve. She alone had offered him the role of apprenta while still in the midst of his showing. He had barely introduced himself, his fingers light as he snapped the battery into place, and as his one eighth recreation of the Sun Gates had flared into motion, Giulia had thrown the flag to offer him a contract for Clan Giopara. The next day she was the one to pick him up from the orphanage and escort him to his dormitory.
Jayce had his own room there. He shared the floor with four other boys, and while they made fast friends he was too busy with the unending supply of materials to worry about social nicety. It didn’t matter anyways. They were older than him by a couple years, and no one wanted to be friends with a kid. It didn’t matter doubly when Jayce alone produced results faster than all four combined. Giulia checked in on them at least weekly with assignments and commissions and requests for blueprints, and after a while Jayce was given his own lab space without the distraction of inferior workers beside him.
He told her that he liked the quiet better after a week of it. It was almost true if you considered that he could play music out loud when he was alone.
Giulia was nothing like a mother. This wasn’t a fault. He didn’t need a mother, he needed a leash. A guiding hand telling him where to go and nothing more. When he completed a task he was rewarded and when he went beyond expectations he received little else, because he had shown that his standard was more than someone else’s bare production alone. He was better than anyone else they had. Jayce was the best.
The Giopara’s cared for him like a machine cared for any of its parts, in the way that he was given the necessities for life and little else. His necessities included: oil, parts, sustenance. Giulia dragged him to doctors appointments while he was young and sent physicians in to speak to him when he was older.
They had learned that he could do nothing to hide who he was. They might as well cover him in the best that gold could buy, and maybe his boyish charm would offset his brutish superiority. They signed him up for etiquette classes. Taught him ballroom dancing. Got him tutors that refused to teach him after the first day and still he learned from the books they left behind.
Jayce was a monster. He could barely work with others, he could barely show up to an event without committing a horrific faux pas, he could barely manage to greet the doorman without making some sort of face that implied he didn’t appreciate the wishes for a good morning.
And yet he excelled in everything else the Clan asked of him.
For this reason alone, they gave him everything he needed.
After that came Pavel and Zoya. Viktor’s parents. They had loved him in a way that was threatening, a sort of all encompassing care that came from nothing and perpetuated beyond even his betrayal of their son. He had met them maybe five times in his life, ducked tall beneath their low roofing, and they had both hugged him with a generosity that seemed almost foreign. They asked after his grades. His home life. They sent sweets for Harrowing and sweaters for Snowdown, and in each letter addressed to Viktor came an accompanying ‘tell Jayce to write to us and that he is welcome to visit whenever you come home!’
He had never visited.
Viktor was the buffer between what he was allowed and what he wasn’t. The care they had for Jayce should have died with their son and yet they had sent him letter after letter asking after his wellbeing in the wake of their child’s absence.
He responded at first. Stilting explanations of his own hope and his own schedule keeping him from seeing them.
Jayce didn’t explain all that had happened. After he met the Machine Herald, he had stopped replying at all.
Beyond that wish to keep something that was not his, there was no one. Four people kept in careful boxes of what a parent should have been and what he was given. A caretaker. An employer. A dream.
Amaranthine kicks her feet so that the tips of her shoes meet his calf.
Jayce begins anew. “Apparently, my father was from Targon. He met my mother in Iona while they were both travelling to watch a meteor shower. He studied the sky–“
“Astronomy.”
Jayce smiles. “Yeah. But they’re weird about it. Religious.”
“You can’t say religion is weird. That’s mean.”
“I just did. And no one stopped me.”
Amaranthine’s expression sours, and the next time she swings her foot it’s with enough force to bruise.
She says, “Finish your story.”
And Jayce begins again. “They fell in love and he died and she brought me here. That’s it.”
“That’s it? No way. There needs to be more. Where did you grow up?”
“Absil’s Home for Gifted Youngsters.”
“Ew,” Amaranthine frowns like the idea itself is offensive, “terrible name.”
“Horrible, yeah.”
“And then what? You started working for Clan Ferros?”
He scrunches his nose, pulling the paperwork closer to him yet again. “Of course not. Giopara. Did a stint with the Medarda’s too, but Jago couldn’t afford me.”
The pen slides against his newest contract like a knife through soft meat.
The signature looks suddenly too overt, too ostentatious, the ‘J’ reaching into the lettering above it and flourishing outwards like an ink spill. Jayce thinks to be ashamed of it. He thinks he doesn’t know how to be.
There has only ever been him in singularity, in solitary profoundness, in perfect isolation as he reaches out as far as he can manage.
Viktor had once told him it was something mutual. They called it ‘bridging the gap’. While within the confines of blank, stretching oblivion, the blackened void of identity, there was nothing you could do but hold your hand out and pray someone grabbed it. Bridging the gap between solitary existence and shared understanding.
(Every time you create, you are furthering this bridge. You are putting yourself into something and asking someone to see you in it. To create is to touch the world itself, through time and intention.)
Jayce thinks there’s credence in this idea.
He had found it in Viktor first. His first understanding of family, of whatever sly thing they called love. They had bridged that gap at the same time in the same way, pouring themselves into their work, into each other, into each word that came and fell between them. Jayce would always love Viktor for that in the same way that he would love Viktor for everything that came after and in between.
The others came gradually. Sand through the hourglass. Sun rising through the trees. He had found his hands to hold slowly, but he had found them nonetheless.
“So Vicky is right,” Amaranthine says, interrupting his thoughts as she tilts her chin into her hand, “you were too annoying.”
“Sure. I guess I was. So you better be grateful I love you too much to care about all that stuff.”
Here she gasps, sitting up straight to regard him with the full brunt of her offense. “You take that back! I am not annoying, Mister Jayce Hammer.”
Jayce can’t help but laugh. “I didn’t say that, Miss Amaranthine Hammer.”
“You implied it. In your words! Apologize this instant or I’m going to live with Viktor in his blood covered staph infection launch site forever.”
“You wouldn’t,” Jayce says, knowing full well she would, if only to spite him.
“I would,” Amaranthine bites, like he isn’t going to acquiesce.
Jayce can admit that he’s always been stubborn. He’s no stranger to digging his heels in, to dismissing anything that doesn’t align with his own viewpoint, to pushing aside anyone he deems too slow.
But he’s gotten better. He likes to think he’s doing better.
Amaranthine is proof enough.
Jayce will never blame his mother for what she chose. Her decisions had led him here, through disconnect and distrust, to a life he can be proud of. A daughter that had been given to him not by blood but by chance. A patchwork family cobbled together in care.
Jayce has never needed anything but that.
He’s always wanted people who will choose him and people who decide to stay. Those who will bridge the gap, reaching out to him through all the murk, in the same way Jayce reaches out to them. Here, with Amaranthine, he knows there is nothing but love enough to stick around.
“Alright,” Jayce says, pressing his cheek to Amaranthine’s forehead as he pulls her into his embrace, “you win, teeny, I’m just kidding. You’re perfect. Wouldn’t change you for the world.”
After that, there’s nothing but the same feeling of love enough to stay and rain slipping like comfort across the scenery.