And So It Goes

Title comes from Billy Joel's song of the same name. I went through multiple completely separate revisions to decide how to set the lyrics, because I have a tendency to overcomplicate things by way of word salad, but overall they just speak for themselves quite well. Let me know if there's any other connections you can find; I left out some potential concepts after deciding to just package this as you see it now.

Drivers die, and Blades pass on. Into the ether, into their next lives, into something unnameable and unknowable that promises to spin eternity's separation between what they now are and what they once were. It's not life, and it's not death. That's how it goes. Everybody knows it.

Too, one almost always passes away at the other's side. If a Blade somehow suffers an incapacitation of their Core, it will be in selfless self-defense of their Driver, and when a Driver either dies or is killed, the Blade is there as constant protector.

Wherever they go, they go together. No, really. Think about that. From resonation to the fading of the bond, the Blade is with the Driver always. Any situation that separates them is either one of calmest peace or calamitousest strife.

But we take our pride, our investments, in irregularities and exceptions, do we not? We embrace what is there at base, and we tell our dearest stories about those who ascended, who descended, who were enlighted and who were corrupted. So maybe it's not always that way.

Blades do not have hearts, do not even truly have heartbeats - any pulses skipped are the result of something only imitating that organic, as we trace back upon evolution - but the line of their life is drawn from their Core. It is an idealization of a heart that bears emotion, an organ whose cavities are rooms of reasoning, spirituality, friendship, romance...places into which we retreat when we yearn to feel most fully all of what the world has to offer.

So Blades' hearts have these rooms, and it is into these rooms that they let their Drivers, before they are even fully conscious to decide if they want to or not. Companions though they may be, it is they who are being interfaced with the mortal world, and it is the human who approaches with varying measures of trepidation.

Then, once the Driver is inside, they do not leave. They will not leave. They cannot leave. Not until they die, and the Blade's corporeality is removed like a relinquishing shell, are they ushered out. We pray, then, for polite company. We hope with all our might that the visit will be pleasant. A Blade is formed around a Driver; a Driver need not base themself around a Blade.

Move now to the vignettes: we see Lora, who grew up around and within Jin. It was once said that he was her scaffolding; perhaps this is why Blades are not often awakened by children. They would become too reliant, and one may say that none's the harm, for the Blade will always be with them. But what if the Blade is not?

Jin taught Lora to make use of her excess stamina towards more efficient conduction of a battle. Lora, never quite as inexhaustible as he, nearly always ended up nearly incapacitating herself with the wanton maneuver. She learned to live with it, however, because Haze was there. So. One may say that none's the harm. One may.

Haze was not there when Lora died. While Lora was begging, perhaps somewhat selfishly, not to be sent out of Jin's most precious, most inner, room, Haze was clutching desperately onto Mikhail's hand and cursing herself for a failure undue. Jin then took Lora in - in, in, in - and never let her out of that room, and no new furnishings were ever laid for Malos to make any graceful sort of entrance.

Lora, the principal occupant of Jin's mental hostelry, dabbled in reasoning and friendship, but primarily she rang through spirituality. She never once looked into the romance room; Jin had no idea what to do with that vague positional compartment in the first place, but moreover he knew that it was no place for a girl he had raised from the age of ten.

I bring this up not to wrangle with Jin's interpersonal sensibilities and point them away from grooming in service of the direction of the fast-approaching Malos, nor even to mandate that each facet be accounted for, but to address Haze. I don't often address Haze, you see. And that is the very point.

Haze, who only wanted a place of her own, who loved but really who hated that she shared a face with Lora, because it made her nothing but that merest shell, made to be cast aside.

Haze, who was more similar to Jin than she ever could have thought, in devotion and in single-mindedness, in duty and in goal, in all but appearance.

Haze, the fresh-faced fair-spirited reflection of all of Lora's warmest kindnesses, who corraled her Driver into the romance room as best as she could, with all the smidgening snatches of focus that she could get, and then didn't even notice when her treasured guest slipped out the back door and left her alone forever.

It's cliché, even cloddish, to keep speaking of rooms and the basic, boring portent of "romance", so let us turn it back to where we began. Lora made decisions that, according to all laws of natural equivocation, of love and covetousness, were made up of all pretense, were entirely unfounded. Jin and Haze, though lacking hearts, still gave her theirs to break.

All their prerogatives. Not in life. Not in death. And so it goes.

The reference to Jin as Lora's "scaffolding" comes from Jin Against Eternity by Clavain.

- most of the time Haze was more or less silent about her treatment - she didn't get to heal from Lora's loss like a normal Blade