#Jayce is a sappy love struck fool

[bringthekaos]

Jayce never liked going to the undercity, specially the lower levels. It's wet, cold, dark, the air stings and the streets are dirty

But since his "reconciliation" with Viktor, going there feels like a escapade from the poster boy duties, a place where he can truly be himself again. And Viktor's lab feels exactly as how their own lab felt, back in their golden days, organized chaos, coffe, and sense of familiarity.

He is home

Ughhhhh I love this one so much.

Jayce hasn’t felt at home in Piltover for a long time; if you were to ask him when it stopped feeling like home, he can’t really pinpoint a time… he just knows the last time he felt truly at home, felt content and safe and happy, he was in the lab, working with Viktor.

And he’s tried, in the many years since Viktor’s banishment, to get it back—to recreate a home for himself. He talks to a therapist that encourages creature comforts, surrounding himself with things that bring him joy. But this is more of a hindrance than a help, because Jayce doesn’t really find comfort in things. But he tries it anyway—collecting stones and gemstones like he used to when he was a boy. But walking on the beach alone to seek them out just reminds him of the people that used to take those walks with him—his mother, Viktor.

He tries his mother’s old recipes, the ones that used to make him run down the stairs as a kid when he smelled them cooking. He tries listening to his father’s vinyl records, the ones that are so burned into Jayce’s mind that the walls of his boyhood home practically echo with it… but all any of this does is make him ache with nostalgia—yearn for the days when he was a carefree boy with nothing but homework and schoolyard crushes to trouble him. No one idolized him, no one expected the impossible of him. He didn’t have to earn love. It was freely given.

And he was just about to give up—accept that he was never going to feel at home anywhere ever again. Accept that home is an idealized concept, and… not meant for people like him, who once took it for granted.

That is, until those first few nights spent at Emberflit after his reconciliation with Viktor. Viktor built air filtration vents into every room, so the house has a crisp, almost sanitized smell to it, but… Jayce finds that he likes it. Loves it, even—it smells like steam and hot metal… like Viktor himself. He loves the weak light and how it makes the space feel small and intimate. He likes that never-ending hum and tick of Viktor’s gadgetry, the gurgle of chemicals boiling in their beakers. It becomes like a symphony to Jayce’s ears, and he finds that without it, he feels uneasy—the silence of his lab in Piltover made all the more foreign.

He knows this is ass-backwards, that he should not feel so at-ease down in the depths of a city that despises him, breathing moderately-filtered toxic air and writing on a busted old blackboard with repurposed chalk. But he does feel at-ease, he feels safe and comfortable in a way he hasn’t felt in years. And he’s actually kind of embarrassed that it took him this long to figure it out. Home was never a building, it was never a collection of polished stones shining in a windowsill. It was never warm meals or music-filled halls.

It was this. Working into the wee hours of the morning, and sharing a mug of cold coffee. Dozing in uncomfortable chairs to the sound of another’s voice. Passing notes back and forth and leaving ridiculous and sometimes wildly inappropriate doodles on the page before handing it back.

He feels stupid, only just now understanding the meaning behind the saying “home is where your heart is.” It’s been said so many times, but it always rang hollow, it never really clicked. But he gets it now. He may return to Piltover, he may spend whole months up there at a time, splitting his obligations between his lab, his apartment, the Academy, the Council chamber. But his heart resides at Emberflit Alley.