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He’s still in her bed, though she can hardly believe it. Gangly limbs against golden silk sheets. The last memories of Piltover she’s allowed herself despite her departure only a few short months ago.
Everything happened faster than Mel could account for; one moment a perilous journey across the sea, a body amongst the paddles wading through black waters, the next, him. Gasping for air, water spilling from his throat, eyes bleary with the dark night and water logged.
He doesn’t remember much, that’s what he tells her. She believes him, not because she should, but simply because she wants to, has to. He’s Jayce, her Jayce with eyes the color of topaz stones and flecks of red. She asks him of Viktor, he withholds. She can’t blame him. She’s had time to adjust to a new normal, Jayce has just woken up.
Mel bathes him, he asks her to. Soap lathered in his hair, suds bubbling over the holographic warping around his wrist. She sees his discomfort, kisses the crown of his head and runs her fingers over the parts of him that she hasn’t washed.
Mel leaves him in his own bedroom, freshly washed and wet tendrils of hair stuck to his face. There’s a half of a corridor between his room and hers, but she assumes he needs the space. Dying and rebirthing in Piltover is an issue on its own, Noxian waters, another.
His first night in Noxus leads him to her door despite her efforts. Immediately sinking to his knees once she allows him passage inside. His hands grip her thighs tightly, almost to the point of pain as his forehead presses into the fabric covering the lowermost part of her belly. Tears pinprick the corners of her eyes as she watches him hold on to her.
“Jayce,” she whispers, a slight tremble to her voice. His nails slightly dig into her skin. “Come to bed, please. Let me hold you.”
He tumbles into her, an amalgamation of his feelings barreling against the both of them as they come to rest atop her sheets. Jayce refuses to show her his face and Mel understands. It’s all she can do while he sorts through what’s real and what is not. She wishes she could make it easier for him. Mel, of all people, has acknowledged that it never will be. They’d all have to learn to live with it.
Tears stain the silk of her nightgown as she runs her fingers through his hair. She likes the length it is now, liked it when she found him in the council room and wanted nothing more than for him to fall into her. Like how he might’ve done before.
It’s silly; seven years of dancing around their mutual attraction and she barely had time to have him the way she wanted before their worlds were torn apart. They’re not who they were when this all began. And she still loves him. She hopes he feels the same.
Jayce finds her in the study, a room nearly bare save for the large table in the middle where a multitude of maps, letters, and other miscellaneous documents sit. There are no seats, just angular structures and long, red banners that display the Medarda crest. Silver etching into crimson fabric. It’s a normal she never wanted to return to and yet, isn’t at liberty to reject.
He’s quieter than he was in Piltover. The only reason she notices he’s entered is because her sigils ripple with his presence. He lingers at the entrance, dressed in traditional Noxian colors. It’d be…cute under different circumstances. She hasn’t even asked if he wanted to return to Piltover. She hasn’t even asked if they were still…
“You should be angry with me,” he grumbles, the gruffness of his voice almost frightens her. He stalks closer, the limp in his leg slows him down. Sometimes it makes him upset, she can feel it.
“Would it be easier for you if I were?” she answers, straightening her posture and steadying her sight on him as he gradually approaches her.
That’s the worst of this affliction she has for him. It emboldens her in the wrong ways, skews her senses, and disrupts the logic to her emotion. She cannot hide from what she feels for Jayce. One look from her mother told her exactly how subtle she was being.
“I don’t know,” he grunts, pausing on the opposite side of the table. “I think it’d be easier for me to understand.”
“What is there to understand?”
“You love me,” he spits, venom on his tongue as if it hurts him to admit. She sets her jaw and gaze straight, attempting to peer into him. He’s still so guarded, but pushing would only make him worse.
“I do,” Mel confesses.
“You shouldn’t. I saw,” Jayce sighs, bracing himself against the table. “I saw everything. Every timeline, every universe. We—I ruined everything you could have become. You would have become.”
“Jayce.”
“All because I had to bring this curse upon Piltover. My ambition, my pride. I wish I could have died. I’ll carry this weight, this burden of deaths that I caused. I killed them. Your mother, Viktor, Cassandra—”
Her feet move faster than her mind. She places her hands on his cheeks, his eyes brimming with tears. His skin feels raw and his lips are chapped, like he’s shed tears to the point of dehydration. Jayce feels so deeply, it’s no wonder he’s siphoned all this blame into his own cup.
Her thumbs run under his eyes, pulling him from his rambling. When he looks at her, Mel’s chest swells. It’s still him, in between glimpses of himself and fear. He’s still wondering if this, she, they are really here.
“You came back to me,” Mel whispers to him “Circumstances neither you nor I understand will sully what this is. What you are to me.”
Moisture gathers at the corners of her own eyes and she lets it spill. Every time she touches him, she tries to press a little love into his skin. For every word she wished she had said, every decision she wished she could undo, he came back to her. A little fractured, but still hers.
“My golden boy,” Mel sighs, a weary smile creeping onto her features. “Do you love me?”
“Yes,” he sobs, collapsing into her arms. She embraces him, tightly, as if he’ll fade away if she doesn’t. She rubs soothing circles into his back and cradles the back of his head with her other hand. “I’m so sorry, Mel.”
He pulls away from her embrace, standing up to press a kiss to her mouth, the skin beneath her eyes, and her cheeks, laden with tears. She guides him back to her mouth, every press of their lips igniting formerly dull embers within her belly. He loves her, she loves him. It should be enough.
xXx
Caitlyn sends word from Piltover. They’re re-building, slowly but surely. Mel can’t fathom why she looks forward to her correspondence. Piltovan affairs render her useless in Noxus. The people speak in grunts and the sound of steel clacking against steel inspires more cheer than a smile.
Perhaps it is because Caitlyn knows Mel is alone. Everything that was ever truly hers died in Piltover. Her ambitions, her mother, Jayce. Even her dreams taunt her, torturous attempts at conjuring up some sort of an understanding or explanation. Every morning she does manage to wake from sleep, its to a cold, empty bed. A reminder of her solitude in a place she hasn’t known since she was a child.
Mel can’t decide, really. Whether war is over or has just begun. She has to know who she is, what her mother left behind. Some days are so discordant she spends them in halves. Her mother’s wolf, her brother’s fox. Sometimes a third option, a parent shrouded in shadows that it seems she’ll never be able to shine light on.
She spends her days with little to look forward to, but the truth. Marking maps, cross-referencing travel logs, and waiting to see. A part of her longs for eyes colored in a rich amber with flecks of red, or hands with raised callouses that gravitate to the swoop of her waist.
Mel misses Jayce, misses him so much that there are days she can hardly bear it. She won’t leave her bed, clutching the last pieces of him. The shirt he left, the last note he wrote her, the sharp edges of his house crest on the shoulders of his jacket.
They talked of childhood, mostly his. To her, Jayce’s always seemed more fascinating, more freeing. Stories of warm houses on cold nights, warmer meals in soft bellies. Mel urged him to speak of it when they huddled in bed, his or hers, under cotton blankets and each other’s touch.
He told her of his father, regaled him as the strongest and brightest man he’d ever known. How his innovations inspired him to press forward in the darkest of nights. The pursuit of greatness in his stead, as if it were genetic. Mel wondered if his children would share the same ambition. Wondered more if his children and her children would be one and the same.
She dreamed of futures beside him. A place of their own, children who would never have to fear what laid beyond their walls. Who would never know the rigid and cold edges of Noxus. They’d be all hers, all theirs.
The memories are worse for wear in the night. Nothing but waves crashing against spiked rock from her bedroom window and his voice, persisting, pressing into her mind. The water is harsh in its caress of the shore. They meet and meet again; both elements, water and earth, forever changed by the other. But always returning.
Mel will never know his touch again.
She hasn’t painted since she left Piltover. The canvas and her no longer speak the same language. The palette knives tremble in her hand, the reds, yellow, and blues blur into an unsavory sienna. She’s losing these parts of herself, losing the shape of his face, slope of his nose.
Her brother and mother walk alongside each other in the swimming memories of their faces in her mind. She’ll never get over it, especially not now when she has to stuff her feet into boots that are entirely too big for her. Like a toddler, playing around in her mother’s armory. When Mel was still perfect, when Mel was all Ambessa’s.
She curses the absence left by her mother, curses the woman. All this mess, her mess that Mel is left to clean up, alone. The other side of a love so deep stews the desire of hatred within her body, but it always fizzles. A flare of smoke left by matches lit on top of muddied puddles.
The grief is piercing, it stabs every part of her skin. The wounds burning so deeply they char her insides. But, she cannot let it get so far. Lest it lingers and rots her from the inside out.
Though they resist her diplomacy, Noxus still needs her. They benefit from her willingness to communicate, even in the short time she’s headed House Medarda. The benefit of the golden magic in her bloodstream does well to warn her of potential betrayal. It dulls overtime, the need to look over her shoulder. The Noxians have grown tired and they have been waiting for a semblance of respite for years.
There are things she can fix, things to occupy herself with, as her mother would put it. And it won’t fill the hole, but it’ll pass the time. The time for the bump of her belly to harden and grow, and the Noxians to shy away from endless wartime. It’ll offer her a chance to make the world she wanted for all three of them.
The world where her mother’s mistakes do not predicate the course of her life and her brother’s death does not loom over her in naught. A world where she loves the parts of Jayce she can still feel on Runeterra.