to the last of our lives
ever since i first read this fic in early 2021, i was absolutely enchanted with the author's ideals of closeness and sincerity between people. especially, of course, i loved mr & mr minoade. there was tenderness in a sort of a raw, ultimate form presented with an honest, genuine restraint. it was and has remained a kind of free and loving atmosphere that i attempt to emulate and portray in my own work. i so love to be reminded of it and to immerse myself in it, whenever it appears. so here is my piece, the only way i know how.
"But you think about it, surely."
Addam's smile was faint as he nodded to the idea of doing anything but thinking fondly of the picture kept displayed on his dresser for as many centuries as he continued to be alive. That was what it was there for, certainly? There were humbler effigies. Too, there were those more ostentatious.
And Angelia was not that way.
"Many men can be married once, I'm sure, Minoth. Few men have been married at all to a woman like Angelia. Fewer still could ever hope to remember it so long."
All this, from the man who didn't want to be married at all. And it wasn't the marriage that had done it; it was the bond. They, who consorted with Blades (even were them, if Minoth could remember himself back to that ancient time when he'd still be reconsidering and unconsidering and drawing himself into the fold), would always know it in this way.
The things he had done for her. Moreover, the things she had done for him. Such a great distance, tied by the strength of pinky fingers. Ring fingers, even, for those were stronger across precipices in the hands of adults and those who wished to be.
There was no returning. There was no wish of it. Only what lingered in the past, a gentle aftertaste.
"And to imagine, as dreams are wild, just reaching her with a thought..."
Minoth trailed off to keep the lightness in his tone, and let the gravity of Addam's in.
Addam yet mused. "Mythra only has so much Core to give."
Minoth nudged him with his knee. "I'm sure she'd give it, if it were for you."
She was, indeed, a capital model for Patroka, who owned her own characteristic disagreeableness in every passing moment, because if nobody else was going to be contrarian, then she certainly was. Mythra still didn't like to be seen as sappy (rather: efficient, all-knowing, effectively critical, yet still able to hit the heart where it panged and hurt), but she had evolved as anyone would have had to, to belong among Lora's soul-first bunch.
Mythra would give whatever was asked of her, because she almost valued being chill and rolling with the cockeyed plan of the moment over digging her heels in, by this point. Everyone was going to have snide remarks to make. Hers were her own simply because she had to remember that she was inimitable. You know, kind of her thing.
And to speak of inimitable, Addam sighed without breathing. "Ah, but it's over now. She's gone."
"Never gone so long as you remember her, my prince." The sort of adage that Minoth particularly liked.
"And she always liked you, too."
It was that thoughtful note in Addam's tone, that catching onto a thread of something crucial, that almost had Minoth feeling something like hope. And hope for what? Hope to raise and exhume the dead? Hope that there was a force to cross beyond the grave, as such, and unite them all in that selfsame ongoing memory?
"Bahhh, you're just saying that," replied Minoth, because it was easy and because it was the kind of thing to say, when you were being polite.
(As yet, you know, they were still just being polite.)
"Can't a man just say things that are true?"
Rising from his mess hall bench, Minoth took the couple of steps required to sit himself down once more, now behind Addam, and dig his chin into the once-upon-a-prince's shoulder.
Always liked you, she did. And what did she even know? Not pity, surely, from the fate of Amalthus, because Angelia didn't pity. Everything Addam had ever done that was pitiable would have given her far too much distraction.
She'd left him to his affairs. He'd left her to hers. Or at least, that was the tale so far as this company issuing from the beautiful idea of Torna knew it.
The Monoceros, so vast and so empty if not for the plethora of people and systems determinedly filling up its many, many aughts of cubic footage. In another life, it was full of comrades' bodies and the unawakened crystals themselves charging toward liberation. In this, one had room to mourn just as much as one had room to celebrate.
You think about it. Having her here.
To see the world through Addam's eyes was to be constantly in awe of those fantastical people around him, all somewhat less categorically human than he was (for what was he? imagine measuring up to the ultrafine waffle-knit weave of Mikhail's bond with Jin, Lora's kinship with Malos, no matter the color of the cross in his chest) but all so great in depth of feeling. Rather, it was only a "but" in that he compared and contrasted these things. The space where he felt himself pushed out was where they, all of them, pushed in.
So he did try his damnedest to be the simple, human leader that they did, occasionally, need. He liked being useless - grunt work, you know. But it smacked a bit of the grift. He had to pull his weight.
Didn't he?
Or was the work, perhaps, already long over?
Minoth could have grown, in these centuries, to be a very sour and unpleasant sort of man. It was Mythra, most like, who had saved him.
Taken by another turn, it was Angelia, for she had given him a place to stand when standing with Addam wasn't quite safe, yet. She didn't - hadn't - save everyone, because she couldn't. She was Addam's true human half. She was more powerful than a packet of yeast, but only in certain ways.
She knew how to direct people. She knew how to command attention. She knew how to be shrewd when it was canny, in the moment. Sometimes, she even knew to let loose (but this was rare, because years of affectations had affected her own capacity for total silliness).
Ghosts watch over us, she would say. She knew Addam and his contraband crew were out there, somewhere, outliving her by, if nothing else, sheer dint of one-upping the number of times they ought to have died, versus her zero.
Ought to have died. It's an odd sort of phrase. If everyone should be alive, then everyone has a time when they should die, because life and death are two sides of a coin as thick as the stem of a human nervous system. And Blades, of course, were reset when the flower no longer could draw its share water.
Who could say? Not the Architect, because Minoth invoked that imaginary man as a satirical in-joke at all hours of the day, seeing as the account of his existence belonged to the lofty (and unfortunately not long-deceased) Brother Amalthus.
Caused all of this, he had, hadn't he? Stirred the pot, in his own deep-buried heart, just searching for something. Anything. The answers. The truth.
Addam sighed again, with Minoth's thoughts buzzing close to his own. There were ten of them, each matched by so many measures as to sketch a symmetry as proud as Aion, but there could have been eleven.
Ought there to have been?
"If things had been different, we wouldn't get to wonder."
Not an accusation. Never an accusation. Just something said that was true.
(also, to note - i have no specific recollection that flora is based on angelia, but i didn't remember looking at the quest picture of shanelle or palva when designing her either, so we don't know!)