Hyber Cringe

I like to keep my memories right here, in my heart, Lora says.

Everyone groans. Lora, Lora, Lora, always with the flimsy, far-too-human sentimentality. It's not as if they'd like her to be stiff and upkept, the way Addam is despite all his contradictions of noble appearance and the way Hugo doesn't even try to hide that he is. It's not as if they'd like her, expect her, to behave any differently. Right?

It's no one's problem but her own, and it's their fault if they make it their business, but they don't, but their fates are intertwined and if they don't take her advice then she gets left alone, alienated, ostracized.

She needs to blend in. She depends on it. It's literally life and death. Any newcomer, any strange new shape, is all the portent shock and fear. Oh, god, no, you're telling me there are MORE people in the world? There are an even greater number of dangers than the ones I've as yet become accustomed to?

There are more years left in the sun then I've got stocked in my walking-kicking-running-jumping

FALLING

boots? I'll have to die, one day?

She doesn't want to be forgotten. It's in the little things, like the ways she laments over Rynea's grave and what Kali and Kelly must have thought of her, the way she makes keepsakes instead of meals to be shared, the way the idea of Jin having once been another person puts her so damnably ill at ease and insecure, but one can quite immediately tell that the idea of legacy means an awful lot to one Miss- no, Lady Lora Lacking-Of-A-Last-Name.

It means a lot. But who, really, knows just exactly what that lot means? It means a lot in life. Of all the ones that could be colored, characterized, cherished, she's certainly got one.

Because if one forgets Lora, then one forgets that she ever lived. That's natural, nigh-intrinsic. Maybe it's one and the same thing. However - however! If one doesn't forget Lora, then one might possibly start to remember a different Lora, one that could never be reconciled with the history books. And then where would we be?

So she would like to keep the fables told close. So she would like to be remembered only by those who are most important to her.

Is she selfish? No, never. Or...yes, always. As humans tend to be, as humans are wont to be. She is Lora, she loves meat and combat and the taste of life in the air, and the idea of being dead is, to her, synonymous with the idea of being ensconced in stony façades that practically never lived, in any way that matters.

Lora likes the idea of mattering. She doesn't like it in the way that Minoth likes it, hidden behind the scenes driving braver men, or the way that Addam likes it, small and contained and grand only because oh, it makes him smile so, and nowhere near in the way that Jin likes it, because Jin has no earthly or unearthly idea what it is that he likes.

Lora is hands-on. To all others, she sends the signal, hands-off. I love you, but I'll keep you just as close as I like and no closer. Because if you're closer, you can hurt me.

If you've got a sword, you can stab me. If you've got a shield, you can shut me out. If you've got an arm, you can strike me. If you've got a laser striking catastrophe from above, then I will fit you into the terms I best understand.

I'll kick you in your crystal, for what is a Blade but a being, what is an Aegis but someone powerful who doesn't really want to be, what is a person but a delusion?

I like to keep my memories right here, in my heart. Where no one else can ever have them. Where no one else can ever distort their uncallable names.