Lucky Bastards

Jin was an observant man. Jin was a patient man, too. He took the fullness of every moment and judged it just right, just so.

That is to say, he noticed quite plainly how Mythra's bad form, and Addam's to boot, didn't always sabotage them in their coordinated attacks, how hits landed that never should have, how it positively begged the question of how on Alrest they would have survived this far had they not been so mysteriously...lucky?

He and Lora had never had it that easy. When her technique had still been painfully far beyond the pale of gentlest "lacking", they couldn't get a single slice in if she so much as flicked her head in the other direction to check for Jin's signal.

That was at first, of course. As time wore on, there came a critical, none-too-subtle intersection in whatever mental graph of abilities versus serendipities the Architect, if he was even watching, might so boredly have kept.

One moment, Jin's focus was at the utmost, and he felt every scathingest miss bone-deep in his Core. The next, the nodachi felt loose, limber, almost clumsy in his grasp, and Lora's too when he tossed it to her. Their luck turned, almost without his noticing, and combat was born anew as such a wonderfully fluid, afterthought thing.

Mythra, meanwhile, relied less and less on chance and more and more on skill (and, as a bonus, shaky confidence from Addam that she could go just a little heavier on the Siren blasts, which boosted her area of effect just a little) to down monsters, and Addam stood back and watched on support. Their luck was running out, it seemed.

Maybe Jin should have noticed. Maybe Jin should have predicted how things were already starting to judder, to slip back out of control when they most dearly needed not to. But he was too busy taking stock of where his own blessings had come.

The fear had always been there. He'd thought that it always would be there. Yet, by meeting Addam, they'd skipped out of just about every trial they had always planned, except not, to face up to, except not, because Lora hadn't done anything wrong...but hadn't she?

She very much had trifled with the very concept of Jin's life, bringing a Blade into the world with exactly no measured intentions about the whole affair, by touching the pretty blue crystal that dark and stormy night.

If she didn't know enough to know why she did it, she probably shouldn't have done it. If she did know enough to know why she did it, then she should have known enough to realize what a dreadful, wonderful, awesome, terrifying responsibility it would be.

And Lora was...okay at facing up to responsibility - certainly better than Addam was, because if he'd actually awakened Minoth, gotten bonded to him of his own volition, then he'd be a full-blown hypocrite being so unearthly afraid of Mythra, really, but he wasn't, so you see - but she really, really, really wasn't qualified.

By the end of her life, seventeen years passed by in which to adjust to the idea that she might not get to bound all the way along to the end by her own bootsteps and that her boon companions wouldn't be there to do it if she wasn't, she still wasn't. And no human ever really will be, but we can hope that someday some will learn to grow into it at least a little better than others.

Lora was only lucky. We can't hold it against her. No one can blame for anything she did...except Jin. And even he felt guilty doing so - after all, he truly couldn't imagine having lived another life without her. Not that he would have had to. This Jin simply...wouldn't have been.

This Jin wouldn't have been able to mow down so many scores of Indoline soldiers without the presence of mind to temper his technique. This Jin wouldn't have gotten away from every bloodthirsty authority so scot-free, every single memory he'd ever shared with Lora pounding bloody murder in his ears.

This Jin wouldn't have made it very nearly to the top of the World Tree before her damnably, fallibly human heart finally gave itself out. This Jin, splendid Jin, powerful Jin, luckiest Jin, never missed.

Was he so glad to have made it that far? He should have been. For such a Blade, it'd be a crime, a sacrilege, a blasphemous lie not to be.

Why couldn't the others have been so lucky? Why couldn't they have been doomed to remember, to observe all of...this?