A family can be a cowboy, a prince, and an Aegis.

This is the best universe your honor. After all, I have to make up for it somehow after making Mythra live through the far-arced brutality of yet another Torna longfic.

Minoth is nice. Like, really, really nice. And he's great friends with Addam, and they never explain why, and Mythra finds herself feeling heartened, instead of getting jealous.

She burns the first dinner they eat after he arrives, because they had already planned to let her have a go that night, and Jin always sticks to the schedule. How embarrassing, the way the smoke goes black as it passes over her face, and she's tarnished already, but he just smiles and waggles his fork and says "Eh, I've had worse." Mythra bets he can't cook at all. The thought doesn't make her smug, only grateful.

In the desert, Minoth is an excellent hand at interfacing with the wildlife, bugs in particular. Haze, of course, hates bugs almost as much as she hates (the thought of) ghosts, because being a nature ninny can only do you so far. Addam and Hugo are no better, and Lora is cheerfully indifferent, and Brighid would probably laugh at such a hobby, so Mythra settles down on her haunches beside him and leans her cheek on her palm and squints in at the pillory patterns in the sand. "Fascinating, aren't they?" he says as if it's to no one in particular, but she knows it's for her, and that's exactly what she thinks. Fascinating.

He gets along with Brighid very well, she notices. Chivalrous, is the word. And with Aegaeon he's broad and considering, even if he's feigning that, and with Jin he's grave and insightful, and with Haze, he just lets her be silly, and braid his hair, or whatever. If she ever got childish, he'd likely skirt himself brusquely away, but as yet she's only childlike, and maybe that's something to cherish.

Mythra is probably more towards the former, though. When she says something a little overly brash across the campfire, and Hugo quips genially back at her before Brighid brings down the hatchet, he bumps her knee with his own, then makes an expert turnabout of the Fire Blade's tantrum. Not so bad, is it? You'll be okay.

When they take the picture, he grouses right along with her, and she doesn't even have to snap at Addam for his over-cheeriness because they're a unified front against goofballs. That is, Mythra thinks so until Minoth's bony chin makes landing on the crown of her head, and he smacks the back of his hand, gauntlets and all, into the prince's chest, and Addam claps his other hand that's not already clamped over Minoth's shoulder onto hers, and the unified front is now a barriers-breached ring. So they're both goofy. ...that's okay.

Sometimes she sits by him with her sketchbook, and he obligingly offers a point of his quill at a smudge here, a stroke there. On occasion he'll drop the tip down himself and whisk in an extra twinkle in a face's eye, an extra upturn quirk in a wry smile. Her drawings...they're not very good, because somehow for all the way she watches the world with mathematical precision she can't get it down exactly right, and when she mentions this to him he laughs. "No shame in that at all! I wouldn't exactly want to look at an anatomy textbook, if that's what you're making. The spirit lies in your own telling."

He reads campfire stories to Milton and Mikhail (and Haze). Writes them too, of course, but it's the reading that Mythra watches intently, when she's sure no one can see her doing it. Because when he reads, yes, he is treating them as children, but he's respecting them too. They have agency, they have wants and needs, they have opinions on the ending or the descriptions or the big bad that he considers with gravity.

Since he's a Flesh Eater, and not just a Blade, maybe he understands a little more about growing up, or not getting to. She, as a Blade, should get that respect too, because if they're fully-formed people in little bodies that will someday grow big, she's just the same, but without the physical change. So she's got it even more so. He stumbles, yes, but he does give it to her. "Go on, Aegis, give us a light show!" is as sincerely offered a rousing cry as "Careful Mythra, overdo it and we're all goners." Because she's trying, and he knows that.

They make the rounds of Auresco, and as often as Minoth snipes a conversational insult at her (they're all well-meaning, of that much she is sure) he chooses in equal measure to ruck up Addam's shoulders and say "Come on now, Prince, she's doing just fine! I give her credit." He gasses her up, because she knows it's not entirely unreasonable for Addam not to be able to do it himself (probably because it reflects on him, too, and he has never been and will never be self-aggrandizing).

Of course, he stands behind Addam as much as if not more than he stands behind her. If he didn't, it'd become an unequal hierarchy, because it's a different behind that he has to do. He knows how to set the characters. Mythra is satisfied, very satisfied, with the way he parses things out. She'd do it that way too, if she could put the right rounded edge on it. Like that old scar, he's very good at that. She just hopes he won't ever become too good.

When Pyra meets him- no, when Mythra meets him again, because she is Pyra and Pyra is her as much as they are separate, even sisters, she wants to hug him, he's so old and small, and she never got the chance before he faded away to Uraya, or Spessia, or wherever. But as she stands there watching the crook of his smile, lips stretched too wide across a face that was once much prouder, even if he's still just as handsome, she's afraid to, because he's not as strong anymore.

He is not the rock he once was. Minoth could falter. He already has - he's Cole, and if his name before meant that he should be bullish, now he just seems cowed. And Pyra doesn't want to see that happen to another good man. The first one was more than enough.

This one goes out to those quartzguts stories that I will yell about until the end of time. Fabulous.

The "Mythra has a hobby of drawing/painting" headcanon is one that makes the rounds fairly often, but in particular I want to shout out this story by LotusRootsAndBambooShoots for the quite frankly heart-wrenching way in which they approached it.