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Jayce isn’t surprised to learn Mel is leaving for Noxus. Someone has to manage House Medarda’s affairs now that Ambessa’s dead, and she is the clan’s sole surviving member. Still, the weight of her mother’s passing hangs on her shoulders, as does her new status as a mage. Anyone would struggle to carry such a burden. He’ll die before he lets her do it alone.
“I’m coming with you.”
“I can’t allow that,” Mel responds. Her expression is neutral, that of a trained diplomat, but Jayce isn’t blind to the pain in her eyes. It wasn’t there before. “Noxus is nothing like Piltover. You know that. Other houses will be gunning for me, as will the Black Rose. It’s too dangerous.”
“I don’t care.”
“Jayce–”
“I don’t!”
Her facade crumbles, replaced by the Mel he’s come to know—the woman who feels everything, and feels it deeply.
“It’s not just that,” she admits. “My…abilities are still alien to me. There’s so much I don’t understand.” She stares at her golden-dipped hands, and Jayce is struck by the look on her face. Exhausted. Afraid. Just like him. “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I am.”
What she is, to him, is everything.
“I can’t ask you to help me figure this out,” Mel continues. “Not when you have your own ghosts to confront.”
She’s not wrong about that. He glances at the glittering rune fused into his flesh, Arcane corruption blooming across his skin. He still has nightmares of the horrors he’s experienced. Even now, the mere mention of magic is enough to send him spiraling. That same magic stirs within Mel as they speak. It’s not enough to scare him away. He wouldn’t mind being touched by the Arcane again, if it came from her fingertips. He’d claw his way from the depths of that ravine a thousand times over for her.
“You once told me that we can’t change what fate has in store for us, but we don’t have to face it alone.” His gaze locks with hers. “That applies to you, too. To us.”
Mel is quiet for a few moments. “Why?” she finally asks. Her voice is a choked whisper, tears glistening in her brilliant eyes. “Why would you come all this way for me?”
Doesn’t she understand? She is his North Star, his guiding light. Wherever she goes, he’ll follow, even to the farthest reaches of Runeterra. Put plainly…
“I love you.” He spent seven years dancing around such a confession, afraid of what saying it aloud would mean. He’ll never take time like that for granted again.
He takes Mel’s hands. One thumb traces the new sigils along her skin, the ones that start at her fingertips and trickle up the length of her arms in long stretches of gold.
“We’ll make sense of it all together,” he promises. “If you’re with me, I’m with you.”
Mel’s tears spill freely now. There was once a time she wouldn’t be caught dead crying—Jayce supposes time and suffering have changed them both. He opens his arms and she stumbles into them, shoulders trembling with soft sobs.
“I love you, too,” she whispers. “Thank you, Jayce.”
He holds her tighter as she cries quietly into his chest. He’s made his vow. He intends to fulfill it.
Mel’s own guards don’t see her as a true Medarda. She’s told him she senses their distrust, and she must sense it now as she spars with them. He sits in the courtyard of the Medarda compound, watching her take on a group of them with nothing but her magic.
She dismisses her men at sunset. Her shoulders heave as her breaths deepen, golden tendrils curling from her sigils. Her magic flares up like this when she’s frustrated, and it fries Jayce’s own nerves in response. For better or worse, the Arcane connects them, threads them together in a garment of destiny.
“You’re holding back,” Jayce says as he approaches her.
“No,” she spits, “just weak.”
“You are a force of nature.” He thought that of her before her power awakened, but now he’s doubly sure. “Show them who you are.”
Her eyes meet his. She nods.
The next day, she fights like the wolf she’s been forced to become: teeth bared, without mercy.
As Mel said, Jayce has his own ghosts.
His mind is fractured in ways he’ll never fully understand. Traces of the Arcane still buzz in his brain, pulse beneath his skin like an itch he can never scratch. His ears are sensitive after so long trapped in silence, so much so that even the smallest of noises make him irritable. One smell, one sound, one gust of wind is enough to plunge him back into that damned ravine.
He finds himself curled up on the bathroom floor some nights, sweating and trembling, tortured by his memories. Mel senses it, feels his pain like it’s her own. It invades her senses, overwhelms her, washes over her like a tidal wave. She holds him tightly as she kneels beside him, like he’s all she has left—and he is.
“It’s alright,” she whispers, on the verge of breaking herself. “I’m here.”
Her voice is clear as a bell. It grounds Jayce, lifts him from his trance. She’s warm, so warm, and he leans into her touch. He’s never been ashamed to be weak around her. There are some things no amount of tribulation can never change.
He curls into Mel’s chest, shoulders heaving with quiet sobs, and she hugs him tighter, resting her chin atop his head. War rages all around them in Noxus, but this right here is the only thing worth fighting for. She will protect this, protect him, until her heart no longer beats.
They will never be whole again.
They both realize that soon enough. But with each sunrise comes another chance to be better, together. And, eventually, perhaps they’ll find that better is good enough.