we depend (I depend) on you • jayvik

Jayce - Year Twenty-Eight

I think you love me back. I really do.

It took me a while to realize it, but it's there. It's always been there.

You don't show your love in the same way that you love Steb – with his steady reliance, evening kisses, and his gentle morning routines – or Lyra, whose name falls from your lips like the warmest ray of sunshine. No, your love for me is something quieter. It's in the way you linger when I speak, and in the way your eyes soften when you think I'm not watching, as if you're checking to make sure I'm always close by.

Your love is quiet and delicate, like the sound of snow melting or the hush that comes before a wave strikes the seawall. If you're not paying attention, it can come and go without you even realizing it was there at all – gone without being appreciated, or greedily taken.

I keep looking for it in the natural beauty of life, and sure enough, it is there.

I will never miss it again.

The warm months arrive quicker this year, and the mornings are brighter through the glass. There are more rainbows the more I look for them, and the warmth of leaving the windows open means that the birds sing their songs from morning until dawn.

Your love is woven between the notes they sing. They command their chorus for me to hear. I was simply too naive to recognize it before.

Even Steb, steady and ever reliable, gets promoted to Head Enforcer of Piltover. It's a huge change for our little family, and that's how I know he loves me too. With the extra money, we're able to finally get you that bed you need – the adjustable one that splits the mattress in half and allows you to move without causing too much unnecessary pain. It only takes a few months and the money we set aside from his promotion bonus to purchase it, and the bed is installed into the bedroom the following day before either of us can blink.

The bed allows you to feel more present again. It allows you to feel a little more like yourself. It puts an energy back into you, and a small smile onto your lips that I haven't seen in years. I'm thankful for it.

But the greatest act of love, the one that proves to me more than any words or gestures ever could, is your final creation. It is the last thing you ever build, and you pour every ounce of your brilliance and devotion into building a miniature version of me for your daughter. You do it not for yourself, but for her, and in doing so, you give a piece of your love to both of us – something that will endure even after you are gone.

All around the lab, the old design schematics sat rolled neatly into tubes for years, and the dusty notebooks sat on shelves, filled to the edges with diagrams and fault corrections.

You've had everything you needed to create something better this entire time.

After I retrieved them for you, you spent days hunched over those pages, studying old error logs, reworking designs into a more condensed cube, and smoothing out the kinks that made me exactly what I am. You could have built someone smarter, more efficient, and less emotional in these past decades – someone who would never hesitate, never glitch when your hand brushed too close. Someone who could have been everything I never was...

But you didn't. You kept me.

You kept the first irreversibly broken thing you made, the one who never stopped wanting you no matter how many times you turned away. You chose me, Viktor. You chose all of my imperfections, all my outdated wiring, all the mess you soldered into my frame when you made me uniquely yours. And now, with all that knowledge still alive inside your hands, you are building something new – not to replace me, but to give a piece of what we have to someone else. You are using what was once meant to leave me behind to create a companion for your daughter, someone who will know how to think and feel and dream and love , because somehow, against every odd, you taught me how to do just that.