i've seen fire and i've seen rain
Healing cuts on humans, even humans like Lady Lora who like their cuts deep and bloody, is quicker than second nature for Haze, now. It's been some five years of warming to the wind that stirs in the heels of her hands until the breath of her wind is as steady and true as if she had a heart of her own beating on, and on, and on.
As deep as the dermis, to the end of what is singed at the base of the gourd-shaped hasp that is a hair follicle's purchase on the body, sweat and sebacea. The same as setting a bone, restoring to apparent function all that which covers over the fat insulating skull from skin. Haze can rejuvenate, invigorate, even almost so far as cauterize. Haze can do anything, with the ether of life.
But for Master Minoth, this much is different. His cuts neither bleed nor pulse; his blood-ether ether-blood is watery and dissolute, undecided and vacillant in its lack of either viscosity or fluidity.
Yes, Haze can heal him, nominally, provide him with energy to keep fighting when he licks the cheilitic corners of his mouth and hangs back, head heavy on neck. She can prevent cartilage from swinging too far out of its normal way, ruefully observe the onset of a broken finger or nose. She can do anything, quite literally, that can be hand-waved away.
But Haze, need it even be said, is not the Paragon. She is not perfect. She is more a magical girl than she is a doctor, more a shrine maiden than a priestess. She can shackle, but she cannot seal. She cannot work unadulterated miracles.
So what is there to be done about the Blade who is a human? Or...well, he's not all Blade anymore, but he is still certainly more Blade than human. Right?
It doesn't do to dwell on it, thinks Haze more dourly than ever, but if she doesn't dwell on it, why, then she'll never figure it out! It isn't as if she's ever going to ask Quaestor Amalthus to give a clarifying hint, to listen to her questions and tell her.
Master Minoth is evasive, wily. He doesn't dodge everything, though. Somewhat ironically, Minoth is immune to Doom, so the sweet juices of Blants are little more than a giggle, by way of a dark chuckle, to him. Sometimes it feels like he treats everything just like that, thinking he'll dance his way out of it, come what trouble may.
"Let's try it my way!" he cries, crossing his guns over his chest in a position that Haze has come to take as automatic trigger for a personal headache. "Let's not," she replies, restraining him just enough to knock the proverbial wind out of him. No thank you very much.
First with Sentinel Carpathia, the unbreakable. Then with Herculean Gibson, the poison-breathed bull. Both times, knocked on his chapless ass while Addam frittered in the rear guard with Mythra.
And now here, with Mesmer Tlaloc. He's going to try it again, she can just about sense. Not for the first time, Haze wonders to herself just when it was that she decided she really did know better. It's just a...walking tree troll with a one-two punch? Or something like that? Other than the subterranean camouflage (and a poor attempt at that, she rather thinks), it's by far the least terrifying of the golden quartet. Some perspective is apt, yes?
That open-mindedness flies right away when she hears the telltale rumbling of an imminent Seed Bomb and sees no urgency lit in Minoth's booted step to accompany it.
And okay, so maybe Minoth is careless, short of self-sacrificial. He and Addam both, never paying quite enough attention. There's Keen Eye for embroidery of fancy emblems, and then there's plain old situational awareness. Sometimes Haze swears that the men have neither. She should be all but used to it by now.
The problem is that Minoth is not the only problem. They've also the other Drivers, and even the other Blades, to contend with - they, as in she, as in just and only Haze. Now, if there were two of her, that might work. But there are not. The closest thing they've got to another Haze is Lora, and Lora's more gung-ho than both cowboy and prince combined (see: self-sacrificial).
(Yes, these used to be worries Haze reserved for Lora. Why has that changed, now?)
Someone's wearing the Modern Medal, she thinks, but who? And whoever it is, is that person also wearing the Golden Headband, or are they being irresponsible and wearing the Iron Headband instead? Why are they all such fashion plates? Nobody had better be wearing the Steam Belt!
Is it to make her life easier, or to make sure that they all live, at all? Jin worries, yes, but he worries about ideologies, cosmic fairness, the gripes of the people that have thanklessly built and defended nations. He worries if Lora will be seen.
Health, well-being of the spiritual type, naturally falls to Haze. And, come to point, it really unrests her when it is not her beloved Driver of a lifetime who flouts her majestic high-holy authority!
What even goes on, at the present moment? Haze can barely raise herself out of reverie well enough to catch a glimpse of the searing sun melting slick to their brows and sand to their hands. A gentle zephyr would indeed be nice, but there are no ill effects to ward off. There's only--
"Stay BACK!" she shrieks, slamming her crosier across Minoth's chest to prevent him from barreling forward yet again. The rod is barely holding; she has to stumble forward out of the footwells she'd made, quaking in her own tracks, and block him bodily. The crosier is dropped, tripped over. One hand goes to his shoulder, made bulkier by the jacket; the other lands squarely on his Core.
Of course, they're both heaving breaths, hopped up on adrenaline, but Master Minoth's Core is hot, haggard, patently unable to cool itself.
"Haze, I'm flattered, but if you're looking to canoodle, methinks now is not the time."
His expression is ragged, unschooled, cheeks simultaneously hollow and puffy but altogether absent of mischief.
Haze doesn't answer him, instead distracted by an involuntary, repetitive wagging of her jaw that leaves her blinking in lieu of hyperventilation. Hah - imagine, ventilation, now.
Water. Can you drink Blades' water? You can't, just like how you can't drink out of the Cloud Sea. If you were a vampire, you wouldn't dare to drink Minoth's blood. You'd just--
Water.
Water.
Earth, Wind, Fire and Water.
Dispassionately remarks a voice Haze has never heard yet intrinsically knows, from the other end of a corridor and from the back of a twin-braided head, "Stop touching each other."
Haze is obedient to the instruction, rather than defiant, but the way Minoth's wrist curls tighter around her shoulder (reciprocally, she supposes, although she hadn't noticed it initially land) suggests that he yet harvests some comfort from her absolute insistence upon his best interests.
So she twists her neck about gingerly, gradually, until the face to match the name comes into view: upturned chin, hooded eyes, and thick, dancing eyebrows.
Haze sees now that the perceived dispassion is actually audacious indignance masked as a flavorful indifference. Put another way, the newcomer is laughing at them through the lens of a disapproving glance.
"You're retreating, or...?"
"Trying to press the advantage." Minoth gestures at his captor. "Failing."
With a click of the tongue, the mysterious Blade (has to be, because no Tornan wayfarers are dressed as ornately as this) drags the toe of a sandal in the pattern of a frowning face whose eyes are then swiftly - say, viciously? - crossed out. "Ixchel Iara is no stranger to Tlalocs."
"Minoth," he says, and then, twirling her away from him as if they'd merely been dancing, "Haze."
She doesn't have it in her to curtsey, and obviously their guest has no such concerns. There may as well be another Blade about, that's not the trouble. For all her lamentations to the anti-contrary, Haze decides she won't even mind if her principality as a healer - as the healer - is usurped.
They're being sized up, snickered at, judged. That's fine. They can have it out about their picky feelings later.
It's that Ixchel has that look in her eyes that says she is seeing and feeling everything for the first time.
When Haze knew that look, so many awakenings ago, she was quiet and reserved. When she met Jin and Lora, she was indelibly overjoyed.
She knows that the Ardainians are noble and dutiful, that Jin was stoic from the very first. She's heard that even Mythra was as stunned a blank slate as you might get, that Malos was eerily observant in the early waking moments.
If she were a betting woman as Minoth is a betting man and Jin denies that he prays, she'd lay a talisman or two on Minoth having snarked his way out of the Architect's conventional womb.
"Y-you're Ixchel," she says, stupidly (is it, really?), tasting the unwieldy digraph. Ixchel seems abruptly to turn inward, to consider something long-forgotten by men and mortals. If she were holding anything, her grip might tighten. "But...who could possibly be her Driver? Lady Lora-"
Haze clamps her lips shut on that one fast enough to swallow the words back whence they came, if ever anyone was. She pretends her rage is for Jin. Actually, she pretends her rage is for nobody. It's only her own fault, right?
In response, not hearing the private dialogue or not caring even if she could, Ixchel peers listlessly into the middle distance of a three-quarter angle, pouting. "I suppose whoever wants me can have me."
"I want to say it's whomever. But it's not."
Ixchel scoffs. "Forget you." Then fae summons a bow to aer hand via a roll of aer wrist - there, for the tight grip to get one - and skips into the fray.
"I think..." begins Minoth, waiting for Haze to follow up once she's scrambled to fetch up her crosier once more, "...she was born to vanquish this monster."
Enough time wasted on intimate affairs has rendered Mesmer Tlaloc none diminished in stores of health but nearly depleted in the realm of active hostility. Luckily for them all, Ixchel evidently knows from active hostility, and sets himself up from a convenient vantage to snipe bladed arrows at every available vacuole, while the sun bleats hot and high.
He's not, in fact, a healer, as has been made strikingly apparent, and neither is his element expressly effective in such a fight against such a foe. Just as apparent, however, is the fact that Ixchel does not care. It's somewhat of the inverse of how Minoth had been conducting his role in the battle: happy to chip away, steady on, from the rear rather than the fore.
Of course, Haze being Haze, she can sense that the ether flow present in the flight of each arrow, from tip to tail, is primed to suffocate its bearer. Ixchel's Core may be sufficiently operative, but without a Driver to reconcile it against...
"This isn't good..."
Suddenly, Ixchel's affect shifts from gleeful thrill to uncanny pallor. "In fact, it's very, very bad."
"Trouble in paradise," murmurs Minoth quietly - to his credit, he's been refraining from both all-out and all-in attacks, instead casting Dorso in Ixchel's general direction. Maybe he thinks it's funny that the idiot holster has been pawned off to someone else. Maybe he's experiencing some other species of private horror. Maybe he's just being a man about it, which is to say, sort of blithely useless.
To speak of showing to avoid displaying a tell, Haze has to, oh, has to realize what the irony has all been building to: that she must take action, and accept the fray as a family home. That best intentions do indeed pave the way to some kind of stagnant living hell.
Ixchel is staring at her with those pale, pale green eyes, rimmed in scarlet and flush with lashes.
How strange, to feel a human emotion without having a human heart or any traces of such things in the biosynthetic synapses of one's brand-new mind.
How strange, to fulfill a want rather than a need and be so self-centered- no, so self-possessed about it.
How strange, to be looking toward the bridesmaid barometer of nothing significant that has ever come to pass, asking for a duet honor done in your eyes.
"Lady Haze, now is the time!"
Haze, ridiculously but not all that surprisingly, yelps to see the golden thread of ether (first blue, but only for an instant) erupt between her and her scion. Not distrustful of it, is she, but enervated enough to go bug-eyed with trepidation. Truly, this, for me? For Ixchel? Is it allowed? Is it anything like godly?
(If the Architect cared, he'd have struck down Minoth, or Amalthus, or both, years ago. He's had time. He's had cues to attention. Obviously, he doesn't care.)
It's not that Haze is pious. Rather, she's afraid that others might be. Her overarching, soul-spinning want is to be seen (reached, touched); to be wanted, to be needed. But supposing she's not actually up to snuff? Supposing her lack of practice has put her into disuse and disarray, facsimile of heart-muscle atrophy?
And that's all without even mentioning the honorific.
Minoth isn't much on being reassuring without a mask firmly affixed atop with gum of the spirit and the mind. His answer is to flick his gaze to where he knows Haze's will be waiting and flash his eyebrows, just long enough to cast himself comic.
Ixchel, as accurate as aer patron marksman with one eye shut, looses the nocked arrow with aim to pierce directly through the seam of the Blant's two-palmed claws and wash the peripheral seed of the snapping blossoms shut. If anyone had the visual acuity and presence of mind to check the monster's facial expression, they would have seen it blink blearily at the blunt rebuttal, but forget and forge ahead just as quickly.
"It's not working."
So maybe Ixchel is a firm believer in the adage that the best defense is a good offense. As a recommendation for aggressive parries, it certainly is working, but if an offense's merit and quality is determined by the speed of its potential and capacity for killing, then no, it's not working.
Without turning to regroup for strategy, Ixchel draws another arrow from his quiver.
Haze glances around nervously, from herself (her crosier-laden hands) to the affinity link (Ixchel's heart-shaped Core Crystal) to the rest of the party (somehow, all preoccupied with other things). She doesn't look at Minoth. Minoth just watches her.
The Ardainians are in front, but Brighid is too busy dodging. Minoth has one eye for her, and one eye for his trusty guns.
Oh, but where is Lady Lora? She and Jin...
Fending off Ropls and Crustips that have moseyed over to vent their deadly needles of komodo fire as freely as they please, until they realize that knocking back their targets just relinquishes their quarry to the golden monster that already takes far more than it needs, owing to gratuitous photosynthesis of its crown peeking above the sand.
(Have they not noticed? Do they not care? Ixchel is here! Of all the people to share such a thing with...Haze's hot-handed jealousy is grateful for the dryness of Minoth's bolero.)
The Ropls, which fight fire with fire until the ice curdles in their alligator veins. The Crustips, which have as their resource nothing but water.
Then, Ixchel, who seems to have heart afire. Ixchel, who just needs to press the right advantage. Ixchel, whose aim is true to an off-kilter self.
And finally, Mesmer Tlaloc, licking its toothy ligninine chops, about to turn to the dark side; about to be all but impervious to anything but the Aegis's light (and she, the forgotten streamsand's savior, is fallen, rubbing her head, receiving a positively biblical diadrematic migraine).
"Lady Ixchel," Minoth intones, taking the epithet right out of Haze's mouth for her to, pseudo-hemo-stichomythically, continue: "I believe now is the time."
this appears to be an amalgamation of two fics (no particular praise or detraction) and also my historical lack of success in retracing the original source of...
i waste so much time searching up specific things i remember and usually i'm successful but this time it is just not worth it. read a fic once with the phrase "haze can only club clumsily at the enemy with her crosier" or some such and my recollection is that it was meant to be in comparison to lora, but in comparison to jin...poor baby...and...
another one. false memory of haze prose. this one about her keeping lora in line and making the decisions when lora's adhd arises. i thought i kept it even though haze also has the adhd. but i can't find it...i guess i rewrote around it
...thank you to Merric!