uwu i'm fighting invisible demons from within
Sitting alone on the Soaring Rostrum is boring. It is absolutely, positively, negatively, mind-numbingly boring, and that's saying something, because Malos's mental cortexes are always blazing as roaring razor-sharp as his Monado's angry purple fire. They can't but be. If they stopped, he'd start panicking at the spontaneous quietude of it all, and while they're going he's...also panicking. Because there's too much, way too much. Like, way, way, way too much.
And sure, knowing everything about all the Blades and Titans living in the world is hot shit, it's cool beans, but being part of the Trinity Processor means that he's also constantly taking in new information about every goddamn creature on and or or in the network, imperfections and all. Every. Single. One. Attached humans, too.
He can handle them dying, because that means buffers flushed and archives collapsed, and he can even handle them living, because regular propagation through the states and actions by learned policies requires no special exceptions, but when they reproduce, or get their bonds fractured, or change their minds so as to shift their entire assigned paradigm...
Fuck. That's trouble. It's not an empathy thing, really, it's not like he's got an issue shutting out pithy pity from the processing, and none of this shit even affects him, really, because the garbage collector does its sweep so highly impersonally, with absolute impunity, even, the anti-announcement flag a reckoning force and all, but man, sometimes knowing things is a burden. Everything happens so much.
He's learned various mechanisms, various policies of his own - more heuristics, really - for keeping himself on track, and they range from as asinine as sitting on his hands to make sure he doesn't throw whatever he's currently holding out the metaphorical window (or into his mouth, oddly enough) to as sapient as methodically wandering back through the chain of train of thought and seizing upon the source to write it down, physically, and put it out of sighted mind.
Oh, and a note on that, before we move on, because it strikes particularly relevant: he knows exactly what the Tornan Titan's seal tastes like as he tosses it from hand to hand, again to occupy, even preoccupy, himself, and the flavor is something artificial that the humans of this time haven't learned to distill into the garish ungodly abomination that is blue raspberry (tinged with all the irresolute requisite chemical bitterness, too), but the temptation is still powerfully strong to see if he can unhinge his gullet, snakelike, to fit the whole thing into his mouth. A real gobstopper, indeed a jawbreaker, and you're getting destructive again, aren't you, Malos? Keep sitting on those hands. Don't think about how your hamstrings hurt.
Not thinking about it. Right. Back to our point: he's had to learn them. Amalthus had hardly ever offered him respite in which to sit, to dwell, alone with his own thoughts, poetic or poignant or pitiful or pitiable or otherwise. In that way, his Driver had been a model of efficiency. Still was, probably. Wouldn't take no for an answer, wouldn't waste time dissecting emotions or motivations, wouldn't even stop to ask if you were busy before starting in with the tasks of the day, the night, the next two hours without cease.
And that was good, wasn't it? Admirable. Again, a model. Humans suck, but maybe if all humans were more like Amalthus, treating their Blades like straight-up tools and using them to the fullest extent of their god-given powers, maybe they wouldn't have deluded themselves into this delirium that they call utopia.
I haven't got a name for the kind of baseless, harmful thought that is, Malos. Much as I'm in it with you until the very end, in all the missing moments where no one bothered to ask what you thought, what you think, I can't help you there. I think even I know that's wrong. You do too...don't you?
Well. Is it? Malos has seen Mythra, now. He's been able to case her, her whole...deal, as well as what he can gather of her (ugh) compatriots, and he knows as sure as he knows...uh. Whatever it is he knows. He doesn't exactly have a standard intrinsic domain of knowledge. But anyway. He knows beyond a shadow of a shadow's doubt that the bulk, if not the entirety, of her glaringly obvious issues stem straight out of what a poet, nay a philosopher, would call "foibles". What Malos would call them is stray traces of human weakness, manifest in her and in her Driver.
Number one: if you set yourself up for someone else's example, someone else's expectations, you're bound to fail. See, this is better than just lowering your own expectations, because that shows you've got no sense of discretion. Instead, find out what you're good at, better than anyone else around, and then hammer at it. Don't let anyone stop you from doing it. Don't let anyone else in on it, either, unless you've vetted them thoroughly and can be absolutely sure their work is up to par.
(Oh, the things Malos has time to come up with when he's left to his own driverless devices. Get it? Because...yeah. You get it.)
Number two: following on from number one, don't compare yourself to anyone else. Ever. Not unless you know there's no point in comparing. Identifying infinitesimally close convergences that you can't solve is a recipe for disaster - the bad kind of disaster, the one that doesn't clean up after its own messy calamity. Keep in your own airspace, and make it damn well impossible for anyone to get in your head.
(Because it's enough of a trash fire in there without other people getting the grand tour.)
Number three: following on from number two, choose your own self-image. If someone criticizes you, they're wrong. You formed your personality based on your own choices, and you sure as hell don't need their prissy-pissy input, their holier-than-thou judgements. After all, they're not perfect, are they? No humans are, and other Blades are basically humans, the way they fraternize. Aegises are different, though. They have to be.
(You see how he's onto something? Maybe? You see how he is just...oh, so close to getting the point?)
Points bulleted, we can see that these sniping evaluations dance into the respective arenas opposite Addam, Brighid, and Jin. Still monitoring the pins and needles possessing the tendons on the backs of his hands, Malos squints, curls his lips apart, waggles his jaw from side to side until he can feel the motion yanking on his aural canals.
I sound crazy. I sound like a fucking lunatic. I sound like Amalthus. I sound like me.
Who am I?
I'm Malos. I'm the Aegis. I'm Mythra's partner.
What would Mythra do?
Mythra would follow Addam's example, at least a little bit, and compare herself to Brighid, at least a little bit, and indulge in Jin's criticisms, at least a little bit. In moderation, not in absolution. Not everything has to be all or nothing.
(Not every little thing has to damn the whole world straight to hell.)
Maybe, Malos thinks...maybe I wish I'd met her more often. More than just the fucking once. Maybe there's something to it after all.
Malos thinks this, and then he jots it down in a back corner of his memory banks, and then he idly, or perhaps completely presently, with all manner of intent, destroys a rock formation on one of Torna's blazing fully-unfurled wings. Because what he'd really like to do is destroy some small, some large, some all-encompassing portion of himself, to stop the niggling itch threatening to forcibly conduct his neck through a series of convulsive tics, but he can't.
Because they've got a job to do. Yes, mass destruction is a job. It's convenient, because at the end of it all he can fold himself up and recursively pass zeroes over the place where he used to be, used to stand stomping with his bombastic boots, but it's a job all the same. He won't pretend to like it. Won't he?
No matter. The point is, he can't just quit. Certainly, he can't quit if that leaves him poised helpless to do anything but join up with the humans, because they'll drive him all the way to crazyville if he's not already there. And as much as Malos wants to think that the Aegis is above all other creatures the Architect ever created, ever deigned to create or then again never did, this can't be just him. Such a pathetic problem to have. To have to have. Hell, even Mythra probably experiences the same things. Though...
No. He searches back to their first face-to-face encounter in the sand gardens. While she'd been busy shouting about what humans and Blades can do together, which is the biggest load of crap he's ever heard, Torna is most definitely just as shitty of a place as every other bit-bucket Titan he's sunk, he'd been busy speccing out her presentation.
Mud on the bottom of her boots from swimming up from the moat outside the city, sand piling grain by grain around her ankles - yes, he saw every single one, he counted them, and he subtracted that count from the total he'd dredged up with and in exactitude from and for the rest of the area - with hardly a shudder of acknowledgement, eyeliner not fully rendered in the creases between the corners of her eyelids and the rest of the palpebral surface, carabiners twisted inside out to the boundary of questionable mobiusity, and does she just not fucking care?
It can't be that she doesn't notice. She has to notice. She has to be like him, and want to put weird things in weird boxes, and never leave a vicinity until the target has been utterly destroyed down to the last molecule, the last atom, the last up-down-sideways quark. Aegis or not, singular or not, there is no fucking way he's the only one who has to bear perceiving all of this bullcrap. That would be too cruel for even his twisted absentee father god.
(Now, he doesn't know that Mythra shares his chosen predilection to manually take things from where they're swimming erratically, intangibly, around in the steaming soup of the think tank and move them to somewhere else, anywhere else, or that instead of sitting on her hands she digs her nails into the soft place between her biceps and her triceps until the imprinting indents are left multiple millimeters deep and she's forgotten what she'd been feeling compelled, compulsed to do altogether, but in this case, not knowing is absolutely no comfort. None at all.)
Is it that bad? Is it really that fucking bad? My mind is a prison, he could say, I'm tormented by imperfect pictures of the past and unrealistic visions of the future, amid all the boiling-vibrant immediate images of the present, I'm suffering because I'm too prescient, too omniscient, for my own good, I can't live like this but I certainly can't die like this, and what even is this, who even am I, where did I come from and how did I get here--
Oh. How, indeed? There was the...the-- What do you call that, anyway? Grooming? Manipulation? But manipulation is a conscious thing, isn't it? Does Amalthus even know what it is that he's done?
(Does Malos even know what it is that he's done?)
Maybe, after it all, Malos has finally, in fact, forgotten whatever it was that set him off into this spiral. He's got nothing to do, until the goody-two-shoes heroes show up. Until he has another chance to study Mythra (and Jin too, probably, because why the hell not, what's a Paragon to an Aegis but a kindred spirit, or something like that).
Maybe a little more thinking about what Amalthus got right, and what he got wrong, would be a better distraction. An old, familiar pattern. Something inescapable. Something new, too, as a challenge, but everything within the bounds of what is reconcilable - eventually, anyway.
Or maybe he should just quit pondering, eat the orb, and be done with it.