gravity pinwheel

"Misha," Minoth said, because he was the only one brave enough and strange enough to do it. Sure, their entire group were anti-effacing kitschy oddballs, but they tended toward pillow fights and pestering more than they did any arcane arc of a family history, any trunk of a storied tree.

How lucky they were. How untethered they were. How blessedly able to invent their own logics and interrelations.

Lora called him Mik, her obvious little brother whose original plight never quite left her mind. Mik, the mischievous and the awkward, called Lora his big sister. It was hugs and aids and ruthless, relentless understanding from all of them (except that it was, of course, very very gentle indeed).

Even Malos, who should have had all the bluster of a legion of scowling gargoyles, was worn down to heartfelt nubs by the knuckle-short emotions the former-and-forever orphans carried.

It was the four of them, the storied few ultimately and completely reliant upon Jin, and then it was the others, outside, but they all did the thrust of the thing together. They couldn't help but; it was the way and the light and the truth, for five hundred years.

Actually, moreover, everyone was gathered around Mikhail. It was his story, protagonist's privilege and all.

Mikhail. Mik. Jin, Malos, Lora. Short syllables bracketed by consonants. Haze was for Mik as Mik was for Jin was for Mik, was for Lora was for Malos was for Jin was for Mik again.

Also, Mythra and Addam. Then, too, Minoth. These, of the green-hearted contingent, who were Tornan by passport but who had never known the campfires and the inns that the young'uns had. Hadn't been there, in that fated beginning. Should have had no way through other than to take just what they say.

But Minoth liked to find things. Liked to dig for them. Liked to draw his conclusions from the earth, rather than thin air.

(Patroka hated him as she would hate any an asshole with a flair for the dramatic, but she did find him level-headed enough, infuriatingly.)

So Minoth had always called Mikhail, instead, Misha.

And little Misha, bright with blond hair and a burning curiosity for the way that things ticked, didn't object.

"Misha, the flightless bird, has grown wings!" Minoth had crowed, to see the fans form and spin. It was a different dance than the pinpoint rotation of bullets about a barrel, and Minoth's ether came with smoke and dust rather than silken feathers, but it was a dual-wield dance of his element. Of course he was proud!

"Our secret, mighty Misha," stage-whispered Minoth, when he found the boy feeding his ravenous adolescent hunger with both rhogul jerky and before-times tomes, in the dead of night when even the security lamps were dim. Not a word of disapproving concern. Of course, why should anybody deter him? But Minoth, the restive king of the night, most of all.

"To Misha's plate from mine, as the young master desires it," Minoth would declare, when there were only a handful of Sumpkin Griddle Cakes left on the platter in the center of the table and those agile gray-blue eyes turned on their opponent with an almost-cocky glare of challenge.

There weren't so many of them that one would lose one's own special way if one didn't call another by a particular unique nickname.

Maybe this way Minoth had a backup, if he ever did need to be serious with Mikhail. And on missions, in times of extreme gravity, he deferred to what the innominal leaders would most wish to hear.

But he still had to have his own way, because he was just a nudge like that. His own name didn't do much for shortening or other diminution (imagine the ridiculous warship that bore as passengers Min and Mal, Jin and Lore and Haze and Ade). Why not pick on the baby?

The baby. The baby, who'd shot up to nearly Jin's height (not quite to catch Malos, but poised to reach Minoth) and had ropes of steel for arms, very nearly.

They weren't any of them ever going to see old age. Surely, they'd die out of heroic causes much sooner.

But Minoth felt old. He'd always felt old. And here was Misha, eternally young.

Just like everything else they did and felt for each other: what was to lose, by knowing it?