Forget Me Not

They haven't seen any dead bodies. They haven't looked upon anything but the salvation that's come to the survivors of Torna who followed the hero out of hell and into heaven's equivalent of purgatory in Leftheria.

They've been blessed, with their damned eyes colored gold and blue. For the most part, anyway. And with the guilt of that comes some confessional.

"So you're gonna be a farmer again?"

It's not a question, but Minoth asks one anyway.

"I'll be whatever they need me to be, here, I suppose," returns Addam weakly.

The sentiment isn't delivered in any sort of watery manner, though. Right now, his eyes are dry. Minoth knows the regular speed of Addam's blinks, too, just as well as Mythra had, and for whatever reason those aren't, haven't been, coming.

"If I'm not your Driver..." Addam starts, clearly leading up to a grand conclusion.

...ah. This is where a gulp would belong. It's the proper rhythm, by all accounts. But, then...

"If you're not my Driver," Minoth repeats, suddenly put on guard, biting the words and then chewing them up into a paste and stopping only just very short of spitting them out and very, very far away from him wholesale.

Addam is standing up straight, chest and eyes front just as he always has erected himself. He is fighting every impulse he's ever had to mince words and shrink into corners and make plain his discomfort, that he might not have to be faced with any consequences for faults of his wording and his meaning.

These impulses belong to Minoth's presence alone. Perhaps Flora, before, but principally to Minoth. Even in his fear, his second-guessing, Addam had stood as straight, baring his fears to Lora. Addam had stood as sturdy, explaining his qualms to Mythra. Addam had stood as statuesque, reasoning his dislikes to Hugo.

The only one whose anger Addam has ever truly been afraid of is Minoth, just for the fact of it. Just for the disappointment. And here, where Addam knows he is going to deliver the greatest disappointment of all, he doesn't act like it. He seems to be weighted entirely not at all.

"Then someday you'll have to say goodbye. We will, I mean. But I won't be there to do it, so it's all the same."

All the same. So cheerful. So natural. So jovial and uplifted. Architect damn it, Addam, why? "You don't think goodbyes happen before the parting?"

Now Addam smiles, with an affected softness at the slack corners of his mouth. It's condescending and patronizing, only it isn't. Addam is disappointed in himself.

"You would think that I would think that, wouldn't you? But it's not always that way. It's never guaranteed."

In the very pits of his eyes, Minoth can see the fear. He can see the smoke of Torna's collapse driving hazy tears into the prince's eyes, can feel the revelations happening in this entirely unremarkable moment to be just as damning as those of Amalthus's precious hells.

"Not guaranteed, huh?" His own head is cocked, turning up out of a half-belligerent half-charismatic slump. Minoth finds himself incapable of marking matching counterpoint to Addam's own rigid posture. Someone, somebody, has to take the rubato, and that someone will be him.

You can't mean it, Addam. What you're saying doesn't feel true enough to have necessitated something gone fully wrong in the set of our spines. You hate saying goodbye. Everyone does. You're human, so of course you do. You're human, so of course you have the choice, and that's why. You hate--

"And to me, love means never having to say maybe."

"Huh." And what Minoth doesn't say is the swallowed part: but it doesn't mean a damn thing about having to say if.

Of course Addam would take that initiative now, to decide that he won't let Minoth have the uncertainty, the ambiguity, the single glimmering-slick slip-shod chance to know what goes on after death, what that transition is like, from the partnered to the lonesome, for one such as him given access to experiences never designed for one such as him.

Addam is a human. Addam is afraid of Blades. And since Addam could not, not truly, under the eyes of the Architect, only he isn't looking, be Minoth's Driver, then Addam must have them separated. Must make Minoth absolutely estranged from the ideals of "I'll protect you, always," for my strength is your strength and our bond walks only on both of our legs, arm in arm.

So he'll act like he's giving Minoth a gift, setting him free and ending their song in tune and in time, rather than too little and too late.

Minoth should be so angry that he can't see straight, can't aim his energy by anything more than vague, rough swathes of degrees. But he's not. Even if he never said it out loud, not even within the bounds of his own brain, he has sworn to protect Addam. And so if Addam will feel safer, more at easy peace, away from Minoth, then Minoth will away.

He will disappear like he wasn't even there. He will walk away and he won't ever come back.

Except that Addam didn't say he couldn't come back. So there's nothing stopping him from doing that.

He should have covered his ears. He should have disregarded the damn thing, and put it on Addam to wake up every day and tell Minoth, his Minoth, to skedaddle, to get on a transport Titan and get out of his sight. He shouldn't have listened to those horrible, horrible lies.

Because of course Addam not loving him is a lie. Right?

Some adult child of a militia member, higher-ranked than those who had gone to die in Spessia, directs him to the hill beyond the village where Addam is buried - curiously far away from the Spirit Crucible, he is. Maybe they moved him. Not that anybody here'd have any reason to put him somewhere he didn't want to be, before or after he kicked it.

But, whether or not they did move him, Minoth's not going to move him again. He'll not be messing with any such dead bodies. That choice wasn't his to make. It was Addam's.

There are all sorts of flowers strewn over the grave. Nothing ornamental, nothing elaborate for the headstone. Just Addam.

Minoth had never thought of himself as the kind of person to feel like talking to a grave. Not his kind of digging. Not his kind of...

"I always thought you'd ask for me back, eventually. Thought you'd have something to tell me. Thought you'd want to tell me things, even if they weren't important." Even if they didn't matter, which I clearly didn't.

He kicks the flowers, and they crumple into moist, lurid dust.

"Thought you'd miss me. Bastard. Who was I fooling?"

He replaces them with Spirit Clematis plucked from nearby the Crucible anyway.

"Not my fault, though. Right? Not my fault for loving you."

Was I fooling myself? Am I doing it now, even?

"I loved you, Addam. Still do. Always will."

He'd like to think the corpse is listening, with those big Leftherian ears.

Minoth is, after all. Even though, by Addam's logic, he shouldn't be.