Any Major Dude Will Tell You
Any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you, my friend.
Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again.
When the demon is at your door, in the morning it won't be there no more...
Addam's too easy. Like, way, way too easy. He doesn't have a bitter bone on him. His voice is all warmth, all gracious gravel, and his arms are always spread wide in greeting. Maybe he used to be lonely. Maybe he didn't. Whatever the case, the people around him find themselves never feeling so. No, whatever you need, Addam Origo is right there.
It's quite a change for Minoth, of course. He got his height from long-inborn and well-inlaid instructions, and possibly a bit of a bonus from some ancient first Driver much, much further back before Amalthus, but being positioned to damn near scrape the ceiling with his ponytail at any given moment doesn't mean that he's kept being so gullible as he might have been in the past.
At every turn, he expects it. Jin's guarded because he knows that he is quite literally state property and can and will be bodily seized by any means necessary, if the wrong kind of corrupt noble gets wind without an upstanding one standing over the hunter's shoulder. But Minoth is...why?
Why? What could possibly go wrong? Even if Addam were a slightly different man, more tended to the sensibilities of either Lora or Hugo, instead of the curious hybrid he seems to be, surely he'd still see on the face of it that Minoth was detached, quite near to drifting away and out of self-possession, that he gave as much as he did because he didn't just want but indeed needed acceptance in return.
It's not a human thing. Of course it isn't. It's an irrational flinch he's had since birth, a flicker-snap instinct to push others away because you're only a burden, they're only just being nice, you need to earn it, you need to earn it, you need to earn it, or else God'll turn you on your head and send you all to pieces for breaking off from the conventional path.
Because you're not supposed to fall in love with your Driver. And because you're certainly not supposed to fall in love with not your Driver.
Oh, Minoth knows he's well and truly screwed the moment they leave that first battle.
"You're very capable, even on your own."
It's absolutely the barest minimum form of a compliment, half-backhanded, but Minoth knows exactly what Addam means all the same. That is, his brain knows. His Core, on the other hand, is several levels deeper and has turned heel and started running in the opposite direction.
"Ah, well maybe I should thank him. Or not."
Backhands go cross-court, don't you know? And Minoth isn't quite ready to start running around it.
"It's like that's how it's supposed to be. Eh, I don't know."
But Minoth knows. Oh, how he knows.
We've started trading weapons between the Drivers and Blades, Addam says, would you like to try? Take a crack?
So Minoth cooperates, like a polite fellow, don't you know, and can hardly keep his wrists from shaking as he hands the guns over. When Addam's gloves wrap around the well-worn grips, he knows he wants to cry.
Minoth falls off-kilter; Lora course-corrects. Addam, like the beautiful idiot he is, offers to kiss it better. Once again, Minoth calls him a clown and buries the epithet in a guffaw before he can gulp it down and start sobbing anew.
Presence of eligible girls this, getting what's coming to you that, Minoth pretends sun up and sun down that he's got it all figured out. Oh, what a terrible, terrible lie.
I'd like to meet the Architect, he'd said. Salvation, huh?
Oh, no. Not on your life. Not on your not-half-lived life, bucko. If the Architect ever thinks about me, Minoth says to himself, it's with lightning bolts at the ready - and not Addam's kind, either. I'll be caught out, one way or the other. Malos will smite me for betraying my Driver, because he's right, he's right, of course he has to be right. He is a man of the lord, after all.
If the humans of Alrest were made in their maker's image, then Amalthus certainly got his fair share of absence and accidental-on-purpose imperiousness. Trouble is, Minoth can't fare half so well as the entire mortal world at large did since that subtraction left him more or less completely alone. Minoth couldn't simply imagine Amalthus into nonexistence, the way Klaus had done to him.
But any man with half a heart - or more, or less, or whatever it is Minoth should come around to having, in the end - can see that it's not that way. Indol's latent haze gave undue disortion on the whole affair, and Addam pushes things so naturally back into focus every day without even knowing he's doing it.
Well, maybe he knows. Maybe he's onto something when Jin gets chatty about the idea of becoming a Flesh Eater by one's own accord, instead of as the result of not-so-subtle coercion, and Minoth is all too eager to decry himself more than the process itself.
You can't change the past, and you probably can't even change the future, so much. Fate starts at the individual level. Seems to me we're all pretty plainly predestined as those poor victims. But no, of course, Addam doesn't think so.
"If you think of yourself as a mongrel, that's how people will see you," he claims, bright as anything but with a peculiar glint in his eye, because the tritest points are the easiest to deliver, and Addam Origo is a born lover of certainty.
Minoth, arms crossed, stares back, watching the glint as closely as he can. He sets his jaw to keep it from hanging open. 'S not how you see me, Addam, no matter how much I try to convince you otherwise. Mind telling me why that might be?
He could feint sappy. He could open it all up right here, and tell the man, "With you helping me, it's not so bad, you know? I like myself alright, nowadays, considering how much you seem to."
That's a weak approximation, anyway. But Addam's statement is incredibly broad and generic, barring the invocation of the quasi-cursed word, and Minoth decides not to seize on it. As if it's a conscious choice, and he's not too petrified to get a proper handle on any words at all.
So he worms his whip-quick way out of it. "Always with that positivity," he retorts, and says something about how the bombastic band of goody-two-shoeses will all drive him full crazy before the month is through. Sure, that'll do it. He could stand to go a little crazy on top of being so broken inside anyway.
Because there, there, there is the easiest excuse of all. Addam's married, you see. Lora and associates hadn't known; of course Hugo and his retainers are perfectly aware; and both Minoth and Mythra probably knew but probably didn't care to remember, for one reason or another.
And it doesn't take a man of the cloth to know that it isn't right to court infidelity.
Once Marena's trotted away and the post-quest conversation has dissipated, Minoth is left watching Addam pass the jar of Energy Pickles idly from hand to hand.
"You hungry?" he offers dryly, just to help pass the time.
Addam, obviously distracted, only looks up for the briefest second. "Huh? N-no. I was just...thinking."
"About?"
His thumb rubs in the opposite direction to a prominent smudge on the handwritten label, as if he can undo the aberration so many months after the fact. "About Flora. And how I do wish she could meet you, after all these years."
Several clocks tick off-time in Minoth's head at that. "Me? Tch. Not much worth meeting here, even if I were anything more than a war buddy."
The vague self-deprecation is shockingly easy to drum up, by this point. Probably, he could have engaged some snappier wording. But, it's not really worth it. It all comes to the same outcome, after all.
Doesn't it?
Now Addam raises his head more fully, squints, perhaps realizes something. "Is that what you...?" Then he realizes something else, and his tone drops an octave or two. "Come on."
Minoth, still acting his role, follows directly, makes no unnecessary (not to say unwarranted) snide comment at whatever Addam says to the rest to indicate that they're soon to be going, going, gone.
No one questions that he's going back to see his wife, even after the speech he just gave, and that's fine enough. But no one, not even Mythra or Lora, questions the fact that Minoth's going with him either. Huh. Strange.
Addam, for his part, may be emotionally aware, but he lacks Minoth's overall depth of emotional intelligence. Hailing Azurda is the best way to avoid possible confrontations on the way back (which he should know that Minoth won't pursue anyway, so maybe it's awkward silence that he wants to avoid), so that's what they do.
Very easy. Very normal. Very dangerously cliché.
At the garrison, the prince waves all manner of greeting aside, motioning at the manor itself to indicate that he's a man on a mission. Noowl and Vez and Hedwyn and Augustus all stand aside, though they do each look upon Minoth with a greater share of wariness than the last.
"Say, uh, Prince." Addam looks over at Minoth immediately. "Do we really have time for this?"
He should have said it back in Auresco, by rights, but he'd been busy. Busy thinking about how very odd it is that the two of them are so reciprocal. Amalthus had never been that way. Even with Malos, Amalthus was very apparently not that way.
No, Amalthus never gave anything of himself at all.
"We'll have to make it if not," Addam returns shortly. "It's very important."
So Minoth stands back and watches. A jar of pickles and a kiss goodbye, after whatever length of time he must have been away, really can't mean a whole lot, but to each their own. To the prince, all the sentimentality he deserves. Minoth'd certainly allow it.
When they swing open the double doors, the parlor is empty, and Addam practically jogs down the staircase into the main hallway. "Flora?" he calls out once, but keeps walking, stride after stride.
She doesn't appear from any of the adjoining rooms, so they proceed down a second, larger flight, and it's on this floor that one of the various doors opens and a petite, pregnant woman - practically a girl, she's no older than her husband - emerges from behind it.
"Back so soon, Addam?" Her voice is mid-range and impeccably clear, her smile so prim and bright as she slips her hands into Addam's and he leans down to kiss her cheeks. Then her eyes, Tornan blue, land on Minoth.
Well. She doesn't exactly look pleased.
"Is this him?" Addam nods, only half timid, but Flora's frown lasts only one moment more. "Oh, Addam, I thought you promised me I'd have fair warning before you brought him over!"
She turns to address Minoth directly now. "He's told me how much you like Ruska Dumpling Soup," she explains. "I wish I'd known, I would have made some for you."
Another thing Amalthus had never done: paid attention to what Minoth ate, period, and certainly not the meals that were his favorites.
"You've...told her?" he questions awkwardly, trying once again not to tremble in his confusion at the eager way Flora takes his hands and squeezes the exact same way she'd done with Addam.
Addam makes an appraising face, places his hands on his hips. "I hope you don't mind - Flora's an excellent cook, I thought it was the least we could do."
The least. This from the man who always gave commensurate effort as only a base precaution, before piling on whatever more he had in earnest, if he saw his way clear to do so.
"We," Minoth repeats. Need I remind you, my prince? Just a war buddy? But the way Flora's looking so adoringly up at him, roving eyes over every intriguing spot on his cheeks and hair and armor, doesn't seem to align with that description.
Amalthus had looked the same way at everyone. That is, with disgust. He hadn't wanted to.
"After all," laughs Addam, tipping his head back to watch a nondescript point on the ceiling, "what ever will we do if you happen to find out that you're not a fan of her cooking only after you've settled in here after the war?"
It's funny. So very funny. Of course it is, if the Origos are both so gaily laughing. But Minoth doesn't get it. For once, he says so, straight out: "I don't get it."
So Addam and Flora share a glance, perhaps rounding with force upon the final realization. "Is there something I'm missing, Minoth? Why shouldn't we be happy? I should think it's a universal ideal to want the people you love to meet the other people you love."
Oh.
Ah, right.
Love. So simple.
Right in front of me, the entire time.
Minoth looks at Addam. And he looks, and looks, and looks, and he feels himself falling into a devastatingly deep pit, one that he logically knows has a bottom to it but one that he's never fully or even halfway climbed his way out of yet.
"I don't...have the words," he mumbles at last. And that is something he will never be able to recover from. That is the ultimate admission.
Something liquid - yes, call it liquid gold - shines in Addam's eyes. Maybe it's that same curious glint come back again. Maybe it's not.
"That's alright, Minoth." And then he takes the Flesh Eater's hands from Flora like it's normal, like that is the sensible thing to do in a situation like this. "You don't owe us a thing."
I've been absolutely obsessed with Chuff on Tumblr recently, and this post in particular makes me feel so...seen LMAO but since I don't have a Tumblr account I've just been sitting here in my little hole of shame not being able to tell them that I'm crazy about their art. So anyway. It all figures in. Sorry to be back again with the pathetic gay men but I think you know by now that I'm kinda boring like that. Thanks so much for reading...!!!