their safety is my charge
In the beginning, it comes slow. Before that fateful year, everything is slow - including Jin himself, indeed. He does not walk as he later will run, both away from his past and towards it at the same time. But that's for later. It's not for now.
For now is Lora, and Haze, and their family. For now is what they all learned, but principally him, in every individual moment along the way.
Lora's transition is gradual but everpresent, as she shifts from being the scared child who walks in Jin's shadow to not just existing but fully living as the confident woman who bounds ahead of him, curious and ineffable at every turn with her hands locked so gaily behind her back and her heels never quite touching the ground.
She learns etiquette, not of courts but of camps and thus not of postures but of people, and by and by when she asks for things it's less pointing and wondering and more asking and understanding. She learns to lift his sword. She learns to snap her braids.
She's growing up. She's not growing old. She may, might...might never grow old. And perhaps none of them would really mind. Don't they just love her this way?
He's proud of her. So proud of her. He couldn't be more happy to see her so happy every day.
But if Lora is an adult, if Lora can take care of herself (and Haze too, the way they become so preoccupied with each other even while swiftly, if not wholly efficiently, moving through the affairs of the morning), if Lora is Lora and Jin is Jin...who is he?
What is his role, anymore? He is still taller than her, but he doesn't loom so much as he did. Strong though he may be, he's never very sure he could actually carry the dead weight of all her injuries, and then thereafter her most injurious sins.
Does she even need him? And why does he care, quite so much or even at all, about being needed?
He's a Blade. She's a human, and his Driver. He owes her no such debt, for awakening him, for she shouldn't have had to.
Right? If all were just in this world, he would not have to wake every day with only her on his mind.
He would be his own. And he isn't angry at her, for he could never be angry at her, he could never feel anything but joy at her joy and sorrow at her sorrow, he could never pine for anything but a simple life with her, only it wouldn't be with her, it would be watching over her, for that is the purpose of a...
A what? A Blade? Not hardly. Haze watches over, protects as best as she can, to be sure, but she is not confined to that. Even when Lora's favoritism rears its ugly, quasi-wolfish head, Haze isn't actually thinly boxed into being the neat-nurse whose only actual use case is standing around behind those who fight.
Many Blades of mercenaries do less than protection. And in being less, it is more. They are more. They are equals.
Aren't Jin and Lora equals? Isn't that why they go together? Isn't why they won't ever, mustn't ever (and which is the intensified, there, no one truly knows) be parted, even if they do, now, learn sometimes to be apart?
But it couldn't be. Because something always creeps in at the edges of Jin's vision, even beyond the angled, steely crevasses of the mask. Certainly, it's something like love, and the pleasant bleed of her own curiosity, and the slightly unpleasant urge to be less kind, when she leans too far in that direction.
It's a peculiar steadiness. He feels it as he sits with the soles of his boots (shoes? clogs? fancy ribboned things so elegant and yet so utilitarian) flat to the earth of the Titan's back, while Lora's dainty little boots nearly dangle where they reach to solid things such as that dirt. Haze's are the same.
They're so light. They're so small. With beeswax and rhubarb paste and a strange sort of gum from Feris intestines that Jin hadn't even once blinked at being so eagerly asked to gather, they paint their nails the silliest shades of coral pink and, again, blood red, and match it to their hair - oh, yes, they beg Jin, oh please, will you let us do yours, look, we'll even do ours with the plain version, so we'll match your hair, don't you see?
And of course he agrees. Of course he doesn't begrudge them. In this of all things, isn't it his place to be overindulgent? He owes everything to them, after all. Everything that can possibly be owed in the liquid, infinitely absolved debts of a family and its love.
It's something like a father, and something like an older brother, and something like a cousin who's so much older and cooler and wiser and, oh, so self-assured, than you that you don't even bother to consider them as anything other than your friend - particularly, of course, if you're their favorite.
But Jin doesn't have a favorite. Swear on it, pinky promise? No, he doesn't. He couldn't. He shouldn't. He won't. After spending so long with Lora, he's well ready to appreciate all of Haze's quirks, all her endless energy, all of her screwed-up eyebrows and pursed-up lips always accompanied by the musical tinkling of the bangles that hang from her tiara.
She's deceptively strong - they always underestimate her, despite the halo and the priestess garb. That is to say, every adversarial encounter with a strange party finds eyes locking on Jin first, mask and thus Core Crystal or not. Sometimes he wishes they would look to Haze. But, then again, those cruel eyes he could never suffer to look anywhere but upon him, if they must find their little group at all.
Oh, Haze. Wonderful Haze, precious Haze, precocious Haze, not-so-prescient Haze, Lady Lora's little lady friend. Yes, she's a silly girl, and she's Lora's silly girl first of all (why, who do you think she got it from?), but behind everything those two do, in matching faces and matching clothes and matching giggles and matching upturned nose, there is always Jin.
Jin, standing still as a statue. Jin, running with as much of his body kept as still (no wasted motion, never a wasted motion) as possible, Jin with the forearms that ripple quietly but not gently, never gently. Jin, who writes, always writes, but is again so utilitarian about it, never a flower except those that the girls plant merrily in his hair.
There is an unhappy ending for Jin. Of course there is. Of course he will be, eventually, made to double down upon all his stoicness and reservation, based on those selfsame stolid words scrawled uncharacteristically fervently in that horrible, horrible book.
But he's not thinking about that, now. He only just starts to think about it after they've found Mikhail, and Lora has said so surely, we'll be your new family, and Jin has thought, I haven't the slightest what to make of this child, but I'm sure I'll understand him soon enough.
I'm sure I'll understand myself, and who I'm meant to be to him - to them, to them all - soon enough.