getting robbed at the gunpoint
Chapter 01: into the agitator (Jin/Minoth)
Chapter 02: the darkness of that circle (Mythra/Lora)
Chapter 03: they put the rose behind a fence (Addam/Hugo)
Chapter 04: whatever you do please write eligibly (Haze/Brighid)
Chapter 05: here you are in your aged vegetative state (Aegaeon & Azurda)
Questions. Jin is always asking questions. And Minoth never answers them so much as prods at them, maybe provides a whimsical retort that sounds good enough for the meaningless conversation at hand but doesn't actually hold any water, any weight, any meaning.
Jin's meaning is frozen, of that same absent water, and he drifts lostly through time. Wish it was just me and Lora. Wish it could be over already. Wish it had never begun. Wish I knew what the hell I was doing here.
Wish I could go to hell. Wish I could come back.
Wish that I would stop speaking in such colloquialism. My formality is a crucial mask, and then it is not only that.
Could be the forest, could be the desert, could be consorting with Aspars and Camills alike and indifferent. What is it?
What is it?
It's Minoth angrily picking off beehives and lichenlodes, squat from the ground, filled with a growling sort of pent-up energy that he doesn't know what to do with but has seen and scene innumerable times before. He's got no Driver to take it off his hands, got no Blade to sort it out with. Neither of them feel that much like interfacing with the other, and Jin can't even do that yet.
The whole sky is dark. They're frustrated with each other. They hate to be alive.
Jin gets down on his knees and palms a slick of quartz from the ground. It's silver, like his armor, and it smells of shaved petrichor, like something half of liquid and half of earth had been bound together and then atomized. Like the entire composition had been formed in brittle anticipation of meeting him here, in the night.
He is fascinated by it. He doesn't want it, he rebukes and forcefully rejects it. That is his fascination.
For the moment, he is utterly taken by it. And then Minoth gets down beside him and starts chipping roughly at the surrounding dirt, first with the blades of his knives, then with the bevels of the shafts that sheathe them, then with his fingers, still in the gloves.
Why are you doing that, Jin wants to ask, but doesn't, and it's not because he knows. In that new moment, his fascination is taken by Minoth, and not in any sort of sexual or romantic manner. The cut of light against the sky shows him something moving, almost like an ant in a hill, and he is fascinated beyond scientific understanding, beyond mineral makeup, beyond cool arbitration and unwilling phenomena.
A more conventional person, someone human, might have silently addressed the side of the other's face and then attempted to turn him and kiss him. Jin instead sticks out a single finger and draws it towards him, underneath Minoth's chin; he wants to watch how the insect will wriggle, how the beast will move.
Minoth's left eye flickers, casting into relief the plane of the scar.
"Why'd you do that?"
He's not angry. Why isn't he angry? Why doesn't he explode? Why doesn't he have access to a million more idling animations that could and would and should characterize him to a fuller, but not ever fullest, extent?
If Jin looks at him from the proper angle, maybe his neck will snap over in a new direction and the tip of his nose will twitch and he will swallow and his chest will rise slightly to the left, instead of falling slightly to the right.
Maybe he will fall. Maybe he will die. If Jin looks at him a certain way. If something else new and unexplained will happen.
"I was curious."
It sounds scientific, but it isn't. It sounds like it must be love, if it isn't scientific, but it isn't.
It doesn't have to be anything at all. Jin revels in it. He is disgusted by this curiosity.
Minoth produces the root of the cache. Jin wants to compress himself by diamond mist's steam into a misshapen hunk that will cut myriad more scratches into Minoth's face before getting shoved into the abyss.
Like an onion bulb. It is sweet. It is storage. Its fruit wants to be eaten. But why?
But why?
He wants to return to a Core, that he might be reawakened. That he might breathe sterile, unloved air.
He is characterized by negative space. He is at home in absolute zero - not house and not love, but an insipid style of home. Familiarity, except he is living under its skin, and not the other way around.
He could love. It is certainly possible. It is not that he won't. It is not that he does not care.
But why? What is it?
A diligent student. He wants to live this silent, stilted question again, and not to find out the answer.
Mythra doesn't get tired. She doesn't suffer imperfections, only mistakes which translate to failures. She's not of alabaster cream (certainly not of clotted cream and precious kittens), but she still lacks something intrinsic that is human.
As all Blades do. As all Blades are. There's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing to be right about it.
But not all Blades find themselves desperately training their hyper-solenoid eyes on someone else's Driver, spinning in circles and cycles and loops to excavate all their most private patterns and frays.
Lora looks tired. Mythra finds that she is exceptionally stellar at sensing when people are tired. But it's not just a weariness in her step, a craggle in her voice, it's the circles hung under her eyes.
They're gray, purple, cool tones instead of Lora's characteristic ever-unfolding warmth. There's a reason she has an elemental affinity with Fire that crackles and surges through her whips. There's a reason she's a better leader than Addam ever will be.
Really. It's true. Mythra said it, so it has to be. That's not the kind of thing about which she can be wrong.
And what else Mythra is saying tends more around why the circles, in their depth, don't seem as out of place as they should. Shouldn't they be abhorrent? Shouldn't they be ameliorated away with creams (creams!) and treatments and touch-ups and tender loving care?
But Mythra doesn't hate them. She finds that what those telltale signs give is something achingly beautiful, intangibly womanly, a mark that Lora is actually twenty-seven instead of just twenty-two, if that.
As for these feelings? Mythra...doesn't know how to categorize them, and she doesn't want to bother. It's the information she's after, and what there is in that round, bare face that is missing from a single year of piddling experiences.
"Having a rough night, Lora?"
She tries not to be snippy - and she succeeds, even! The sarcasm, she crosses her fingers, has been tidily trained out of her voice and undercurrent inflection, leaving only the actual concern and intrigue. Changing her tone so consciously isn't new. No, not at all. It's just...
Lora, for her part, turns and gives that same worn smile, and the apples of her cheeks fight heartily with the sad circles. "Not particularly, Mythra. Why?"
She sounds slow, down-tempo. She sounds like she looks, and Mythra is still charged by it. Not fascinated, not enamored, not patronized, simply...driven.
Oh, and that's what's new. Lora has been Jin's Driver all her mattering life, and she's perpetually childlike because of it.
She's not immature across the face of everything, she's not bratty or wanton in the overwhelming majority of cases - in fact, her advice when they're talking to a selection of townsfolk looking to give them a quest is nearly always the most genuinely sagacious. She deserves the respect she gains, and not just because she stutters back from any sort of legitimate praise.
Despite everything, she is a gentle, kind woman, and yet she's just still only a girl, because she's been so cared for.
Maybe it'd be nice to have that kind of reputation for herself, Mythra thinks bitterly in a split-second pause.
But whatever. Now she understands. With the cue from her Core that she's been somehow triggered into wanting something, even if she isn't sure what, all the pieces fall into place. Lora would not be Lora without those circles. They've probably been there the whole time, but Mythra's never gotten close enough up to see them.
She doesn't need to study them more. She's seen all she needs. Now she just has to make actual conversation.
So she shrugs. "I dunno. Just seemed like you were tired."
Lora rolls her eyes good-naturedly and stretches her arms behind her head. "Well there's a secret for you, then. I'm ALWAYS tired."
"Always?" Mythra chuckles a bit, just to be polite, and once again schools away her discomfort. Suddenly she doesn't like having seen that coming. It feels like less than Lora deserves, to have been read like a book when she's still so abstracted in her experiences.
Suddenly she wants to make up for it. Wants to offer her shoulder to lean on, wants to connect over more than just random snappy quips. No matter how mangled Lora's rate of maturation has gotten, it still wouldn't be right of her to extend that sort of comforting hand, to field and reciprocate someone so much younger's scattershot feelings, but Mythra finds that she would like her to anyway.
"I guess I should try it sometime. It'd be better than always being awake, like Addam."
Lora's laugh is like a round shout; it sounds so much like her that it scares Mythra. Of course people's laughs sound like them. Of course all the sounds people make, when they're not trying to sound like something else, sound like them.
Mythra gulps. She knows too much. Yes, she knows she knows too much.
Her hand scurries back into her lap, away from Lora's side, and she fields hurriedly, "Say, can you do an Armu call?"
Everything is different, Addam realizes.
He does it as he's bending out the Deer Wood underside of the Koto of Self-Interest - he'd always meant to get around to fashioning up one of these, but the instructions had gotten buried in the vault, and then there'd always been more important work on the farm to do, and what use was an instrument that helped you gather spoils from fighting monsters if the only monsters that came a-crawling out on the moor were slimy old Dormine Brogs?
He's never liked hunting for the sport of it, anyway; if he kills the thing, then he's bound to eat it, and make use of what he can't as best as he can. Hugo had always been more likely to go in for something like that, but even he had always determined that he'd keep such outings to only a few times a year. There were enough of the senators who liked it, after all, and let them on with it, if they must.
Hugo. Oh, what a dear, dear friend. Addam's memory still hasn't adjusted past a picture of a sixteen-year-old boy crowned emperor before his time - and that was any time, when you considered that he'd much more starkly rather it stake endpoint at forever, never drawing nearer. Of course, there're all the same jokes about how he's not quite aged a day, height-wise, and according to the harmless cut of his chin, but...
The Hugo in front of him now is working on a Wing Booster, and trying his damndest not to poke his eye out with a length of Hi-Vis Wire. His blue eyes are bright, deep cobalt like Aegaeon's beloved sea. He's twenty now, or not even. Addam is twenty-four now, or not even.
Shouldn't they be older? Shouldn't they be wiser? Who's to say this is right?
Addam places the thin plank of wood down lest he bend it past its breaking point. It'd be a long way back to Gormott for replacements, should they need this later, which Haze has indicated that they quite likely will, if she's able to find enough accoutrements for more intricate talismans.
Talismans. Who ever thought he and Hugo would be such daunting adventurers, interested in running faster and striking harder instead of ruling juster and playing fairer?
The wood does not bend back to flat, untouched though it now is. Everything is different.
The birds chirp. The children laugh. The trees rustle. He is overcome with a longing he has not felt in...
Not ever. He has never been old enough to have such nostalgia for the past, for when he was much younger he was a Leftherian layabout, and when he was older than that he was a palace rat that nobody quite wanted to kill but nobody quite wanted to see either.
Now is the turning point. Now is the beginning of his life, when he can really make it matter, but somehow it feels dreadfully, dastardly, like the end.
"Did you miss me, dear Hugo?" Addam floats absentmindedly over the picnic-like table sat gaily outdoors in Hyber.
He wants to retch at the careless tenor of the flirting. He shouldn't know how to do this.
And I don't, he thinks to himself. I don't know what I'm doing. I wish I did. I wish I did.
Hugo looks up, and the wire springs forwards, and Addam catches it in the chainmail right above his heart. He laughs, so he doesn't cry.
"Of course I did, Addam." And Hugo doesn't lie. Not even this Hugo.
Aegaeon would never let him, after all.
Addam bites hard on that thoughtless thought he's drawn up as a comfort. Aegaeon is not Hugo. Aegaeon is the royal, is the court. Aegaeon is the sea into which Addam and Hugo are drowning for he has always been there and he always will be there and if they two frivolous boys were to mutate into other creatures no one would know the difference, because their retainer would still be there.
"Do you swear it?" Addam hears himself ask weakly, voice straining as if he truly has been stabbed.
Hugo would never do that. He doesn't carry a sharp enough sword.
Hugo's not a hunter. He doesn't hold himself in a high enough regard.
So then. It's all settled.
And Hugo looks Addam in the eye, and nods solemnly, and promptly busies himself with a Fancy Seam like he's never seen one before.
Preposterous. Where did you learn all this from, then, old friend?
Brighid is an expensive woman. We know this. We understand this. We love this, treasure this, even. We marry it to our hearts.
She dabbles in perfumery. She wears her hair in enormous, impossible, cinnamon-roll-evocative-esque buns on either side of her head, and her hair above the bristine cyan heart is on fire. It is on fire.
She is purple, ermine-royal. She is exquisite. She is silks and satins and velvets and velours and not gold nor silver nor brass or bronze. Nothing tinny, nothing chintzy. Not possibly. Never so.
Yet she is still metallic. She is still forged in fire, et cetera. She is still sickeningly curious about a girl formed in spins of impossibly organic late-spring early-summer wind, who should float away and become negligible, but doesn't.
This girl, who is a healer yet needs to be kept safe (that's intrinsic, perhaps, to us, but to her? hmmm...), who floats and settles erratically yet in perfect time, who is both dizzy and dizzying...
It's not that much of a mystery. It cannot be. No person is so much more charming than the rest, so much more willful or saccharine.
But for Brighid, Brighid who loves a novelty like a thing divined...
Brighid is fixated. She pushes Haze away, pulls her closer, arrays her in perfumes and frills and parades her around in her mind like a perfect peppy show dog who can be lifted and lofted in a spacious cosmopolitan purse, and then undresses her from all those most undue luxuries and shoves her roughly to the ground - to the dirt, from whence she came and in which she belongs.
In essence, of course. Never in action. Brighid is always exactly equanimous in action - exactly, and never any less either as no more.
But she does think these things. She is amused by them. At the very least, amused by them.
She is also amused, and more than that wholly occupied, by the thought, the wish, the sick dream that Haze should and almost certainly does idolize her in an exactly suited parallel manner. That Haze's girlish wonder at Brighid's "perfect skin" (of course, of course, don't try to fool me, I know what I am owed and how I am observed) is charged by an animal want and not just a polite, feminine curiosity.
And that if they were to fight, somehow metaphorically if not metaphysically, if these opposing urges were to clash, of course she would win. Among the female Blades, with Lora discounted straight off, Mythra is Mythra, not worth speaking about, and Brighid is the only possible superlative. In fact, look at Mythra's nonexistent composure - she can't contain the respectlessness of what she is for even a second! And Haze can, but surely then she must be impotent about it.
How, however, could she enact such a tangle? Haze is simple - poor, but not cheap, not that that makes it sound any better, because you can never truly dress up simplicitude - and she loves the prospect of braiding hair. So if she were to proposition Brighid for the evening's mindless activity, and thereafter find the conditions too hot, too steep...
Well then. Brighid would win, and then she would console the poor thing by helping her grind colorful, comforting makeup out of handfuls of insects, torched in an instant as if in retribution for their impertinence, that they should possess such insignificance.
For Brighid, such a willing pet would be like a fashion accessory in and of herself, but one that could be dressed up and adorned in and of itself. She is like a trophy, a badge, a particularly fetching ribbon. No one has ever held a candle to the Jewel (do you see?) and no one ever will. Hugo is well enough attended to by Aegaeon's wet simper, and none can calm the flame. So she goes as she will.
"Lady Brighid," pipes up Haze from her appointed place at the ballgown's side (she can assist with the process of perfumery, but only assist, and never interfere), "I'm so glad to be able to spend time with you. I'm surprised you haven't had more ladies want to do this with you."
Surprised, are you? Aha. Mhm.
"But, I suppose it takes a very specific kind of lady to know how you like to do things."
Brighid blanches, and the fragile Speckled Monarch, held in a chrysalis of Angel's Sage, is gone in an instant. Crisp, but not supple.
Has the horrid little pretty little infuriating little creature become situationally self-aware?
"I suspect Master Minoth's assumption was correct, Azurda."
Ever-curious about the workings of the Womb, though in a manner much less urgent, even desperate, than the likes of Jin, Aegaeon has returned there, and while Tarath exercises his slowly-but-surely healing legs, they reflects on lost points of their journey with the dragon's own offspring fixture.
"Not Master?" The rumble is kind, perhaps well-meaning, but certainly not edgeless. It's more than just a joke, as would be the usual. "You don't deliver to me that same measure of respect?"
Had he not mentioned the other Blade, perhaps the omission would have gone unnoticed; if not unnoticed, then simply unspoken of. Azurda is as even-keeled as the next, when it comes to such conversational matters as much as destruction in the capital. But this question...
Ah, yes. The curiosity is open like a wound.
Aegaeon pauses, lids his open eyes. Perhaps it is time to leave the talk of womenfolk aside...at least for now. This is, indeed, a matter much more pressing, in the grand scheme of things.
The grand scheme. The system of it all. The fact that Azurda was born here and Jin will return here, to die and to be reborn as new forms of life. Aegaeon himself, so much more clinically-natured than the slow-rising aridity of the Ardainian Titan, cannot imagine it. Of course, there's naught to say that he will return there - it's more that no one knows which Titan he did originally hail from, a Driver of which denomination he was first truly awakened by.
"That is an astute observation. Much as I cherish the rituals of respect that the Empire has always established between Driver and Blade, particularly those imperial, would you not feel perhaps more offended if I did address you in such a way?"
Azurda raises a stony brow. "I did not expect this from you, Aegaeon." Now the edge has been curbed. Yes. The wise one is not without pause, without surprise welled deep within him. "There is truth in what you are saying, but for Hugo's steadfast aide...hidden depths, indeed."
They can't help a triumphant nod at the sound of the final pat phrase in unison. Almost too facile to be satisfactory.
But Aegaeon responds, as he must. "There is no reason for me to drive that shaft of inequity between the two of us. Just as you have admitted in this very conversation, we are the two who are taken most often for granted, passed by. It would not do if we were to lose each other in over-elaborate prostrations of title."
"That may be." Azurda's chin arcs carefully behind Aegaeon's head, and the tubes whistle from the almost-contact. "But are you sure you're not just trying to assert yourself as not lying at the bottom of the totem pole?"
They battle staunchly in hypotheticals, in grants and groans dropped opposite each other, and Aegaeon feels the emptiness of this room so like a tomb. The irony of rhyme is not lost on him, though sometimes it may be.
"You would not stand and form the basin with me?" He does not tack on the old Titan's name to complete the natural cadence and rhythm; the incompleteness rings deadly hollow. He finds himself missing the quick steps of Lora and Haze - the innocents - upon this floor.
"I have already done so. I have been a live, agile transport for Addam and many other children for quite some years now. I will be the same for quite some years yet. I do not need to be equal to one such as you."
One such as you. As you. He would never say this if he were speaking to Jin, or to Brighid. Not Minoth, certainly, but from what Aegaeon understands that point is rather unfairly moot.
Azurda is calling Aegaeon common, is asserting him down to the bottom as dust and as droplets. And Aegaeon, much as he would wish to fight it, finds himself lacking the crucial offense he would need to push back at this framing.
"I serve the Empire to the utmost." He has stated it before, and he will again: Emperor Hugo is everything to him. His entire focus and world.
"That you do."
"None can match my combined agility and strength, save Brighid, who is my equal." It is intuitive to place the Jewel and the Crest, the sword and the shield, together in all things. They complete each other. Someone has to be the will to her whim, the shore to her tide. But then Aegaeon...
"That is true."
"I do not stand out because I do not need to stand out. You expect more of me than you should."
More than you should. For you are a Titan, and you do not deserve expectations.
"That I do. But why shouldn't you, Aegaeon? Do you want to be just like the rest?"