our own initiative

---

"Minoth!"

Hugo's voice comes out as a strange hiss with all the dry cracks showing - the tone of a snake from the outside in. Indeed, it feels colludial to even be acknowledging the person he just heard Addam and Flora discussing in the other room. Well, so maybe discussing is a strong word. But that's the point of it: they speak of him, and he doth appear.

"Well for Titans' sakes, why on Alrest are you so caught up with sitting at his bedside and speaking in hushed tones?!"

There's a disconcerting shrillness to Addam's voice, like his collar's been caught and pulled from behind, bristling nonchalantly under the gulping prominence of his larynx. Like that hook, that finger, is plugging the dyke that currently keeps the enormity of such an unconscionable trauma at bay, but it's rotating in place and flirting with the thought of fresh air even still.

For Addam to be wound up with post-traumatic stress is one thing. For him to be misplaced and throwing it around at everyone and everything in front of him is quite another.

Then there's Flora's reply. She, too, sounds pinched. Her usual cadence flows naturally from one sentence to the next, collecting a single thought into perfect crystallized logic. She doesn't mutter. She doesn't stutter. She doesn't worry.

"I don't know. I'm not sure. Maybe it's my god-given right to administer a cool washcloth."

When he had awoken, too, she had sounded thus. She had blinked at him, disbelieving, tongue falling from roof of mouth with a neat click but remaining inoperative until Hugo had tried, "What fair maiden hath summoned me?"

"You're- well--"

Where had her gracious, graceful hushed tones been in that moment? Where had her tremendous relief been locked away?

Where is dear Hugo now?

"We don't know." We'll never know. "Maybe I have some kind of latent power."

And Hugo had laughed until he coughed, recessing into a fitful world with eyes rolled back and cheek turned to the side for unproductive sputum.

So, by one turn, calm. Not eerily. But wrongly. By omission, almost. By opposition to the grave schism occuring somewhere deep within Addam.

Not using each other's names. Not supporting, nor tearing down. Being perhaps so wholly repulsed by the prior incarnations of these people, the princess and the pauper, that they have forgotten who they are entirely. By choice. By force.

He is the axe, but she is the wedge. Both are armed against themselves.

"What if it were Minoth?"

But that's all that can be heard out of her, since the resigned agitation of Vronka has entered the room and directed Flora in no uncertain terms that she should return to nursing her own wounds, these formed and folded at the opening of life rather than at the curtains of the close.

And Addam goes back to staring out the window, mopishly lifting aside the linen curtain with one limp finger of his own. Ah, they're bombing Spessia now. I've heard it done once, a long time ago. Maybe that's how Titans sink. Who would have thought it?

Hugo is at once terrified and relieved. His exclamation now is unlike any broad or incisive posturing of their precious travels together. Suddenly they are brothers indeed, of the type that crack open a cold flask and commiserate together.

Because Minoth, apparently, is as rattled as him; as grimly foregone, born-again and breathed full of all the autonomous theatrics. Just as strange to lose but even stranger to win back again.

Maybe it's so. Or maybe a tawdry rank-and-file emperor is really not equally curious to an aberration under the Architect.

"You never saw me," Minoth replies. "And I'm sure I never saw you. Feels like I could be tried in three separate countries and one more that doesn't exist for harboring a fugitive, just by standing here."

"Don't be ridiculous!" The edge of scolding bullies forward in earnest. "Don't you hear what they're saying?"

Hugo is, privately, not so sure he heard it either. He had expected to awaken, indeed, under the muzzy, matter-of-fact dampness of scabs being gently washed, tended; to emerge into the middle of something, but nothing that didn't reciprocally expect him as well.

Minoth knows the scenario is wrong, of course. Cavalier as he may pretend, his surreptition, his superstition, his sense of prohibition are all improperly poised, if he's going to choose to come into the house at all and not sit quietly in the kitchen.

So he keeps just wronging along with it.

"My, someone's pretty wide awake for waking up from what almost was a cloud nap. And speaking like a commoner - the Emperor has some new clothes, I see!"

Hugo falls back against the pillows - only this machination of distance shows that he had even been sitting up - with a sigh. His words, unlike Addam's and Flora's, do not fail him. "Freedom has done me much good, in its burgeoning innocence. I feel thrust naked into the complexity of real, honest human feelings, such as were so often hidden, among the royals."

"So His Majesty is a gossip, and he's only just now discovering this? Pray tell, where do you think Brighid and Aegaeon got it from?"

Dangerous, to talk like that. It used to be, anyway.

"Caution. I've had my fill of caution."

"No you haven't," says Minoth simply. "You've only just begun."