for love and its apologies
Chapter 01: i love you, i'm sorry -> mythraminoth
Chapter 02: i'm sorry, i'm in love with you -> minoade
Chapter 03: love means never having to say you're sorry -> addamythra
It's Minoth at his most defeated, his most sore of hope. And Minoth is not a hopeful man.
What is there left to say to someone - not just anyone - who outright refuses any positive attention she didn't deign to conjure herself?
Oh, Mythra's so, so stubborn, when she wants to be, which is all of the time, all of the space she takes up, supermassively fine and firm. An obelisk, a monolith, a pedestal of not just otherworldly beauty but complete personalogical fascination.
Mythra doesn't budge. Of course; the world should revolve around her, her halo, her aureole.
I'm sorry for what it means, Mythra, truly, but there is nothing left but the truth, here. If it's you that's rigid, then it's me that's bent, but we are twixt together, now, superpronated all the way through.
Minoth's pride is of no use to him, when it comes to Mythra. She's the Aegis; all around must submit. No argument necessary. It's obvious to anyone with a shred of ceremony in their heart. (Minoth was born with a stageload of ceremony, thrung full out to the ends of the wings.)
She looks away, frowns, fidgets. She's discontented perhaps more than she is plainly fearful. How could he heal this? How could a mere Blade, Flesh Eater, human, or any petty recombination of such?
Mythra, the ever-gaping wound, the rift to the past and the future all at once. Mythra, the myth of discovery every moment, every second, every instant.
Too great an enormity for mortal minds. He's always said this, and he always will. Minoth espouses the fantatical in his every mundanest quip.
He should be afraid, shouldn't he? Oh, he should be so apologetic. He should spurn himself to hell for daring to foist his human weakness upon an Aegis angel.
But he can't turn away. He can't abandon the thread, the present's deep-carved story.
I love you. I need you. You're always on my mind. I'm always on your side.
Yet there is Mythra, time and again, turning her back on the gaucho lancer who plys his own flair far too easily, greasily, for her to respect.
Proving himself for an unwilling audience...it's a grisly thing. Minoth hates to do it. He will, however, if the audience is eminently deserving, as Mythra is.
Just a chance, any chance, to stand at her beck, to be her alternate partner Blade, to be the darkness to her eternal light.
Darkness? He doesn't care much for darkness. Justice evades him, eludes him, as the capricious erring of wrong and right; morality bent like an idle heuristic about whatever spires the Praetorium might wish to paint.
What grim relief, the new frontier of independence. What unhelpfully nuanced spectra of social strata and fireside figures.
It is, unfortunately, so clear, to Minoth, with Mythra. You do things for your acquaintances. You give things to your friends. You make things for your family.
The Aegis, might though she would to deny it, is all of these things and more. Reciprocation, to Minoth, is something more than a whimsical hope, knowing as he does that Mythra, too, seeks comfort and constancy.
Her fierce, flighted eyes, boring into his the accusations and the supplications in one. Her slightest instability, when it's he who goes away.
Let's see how it's done, she says, first goading, then observing, then appreciative. I'll tap you out, she says, first obliging, then accommodating, then insistent.
She doesn't want him to fall. It could be for any reason.
Just the faintest of favors, and Minoth will oblige - ever at your service, my lady, my light.
How indignant Addam sounds, when he makes the proclamation. How properly scorned, more than ever he has been, and Addam Origo does know (privately) from the hind end of indignity.
Haven't you noticed, then? I do beg your pardon, but it is the fact. It is the only fact, in fact, that matters.
Minoth isn't the only one with any, or even too much, pride, around here. Addam finds that it cuts at him indeed to be brushed off as unserious, perhaps even trivial or petty.
This type of smear, he's never faced before. This type of rebuke, of being pushed back at and spiritually spat upon, right in his face. Oh, his bright and earnest face.
Perhaps it goes to show that he'd never cared so much about anything his father had to ask of him, after all, or anything that he himself had to ask. Not this much, certainly.
His father's love, though great and weighty and shielded more than it was ever wielded, pales and shrinks in comparison to the promise, the idea, the precept of Minoth.
Oh, yes, Minoth, his very existence such a beautiful idea made even more high and shining by the magnificent character and inimitable swagger (not to say aura; Minoth doesn't bleed as he glows) of the man, the beast, the Blade that here stands.
Not just a Blade. A companion at his side through everything, through every joke and every sin. A partner beyond obligation, there to support when the job goes awry and the staging has fallen about. Addam wouldn't normally say that he needs something - someone - like that, given as he is to a communal sense of family and ongoing bonds, but when he thinks of his current destiny, and all the souls bound up in it...
Addam needs Minoth. His heart knows this, and has decided, and made itself up. This of all things, Addam knows.
(Addam Origo is a man who, when only his own self is to be concerned, trusts his own heart.)
But Minoth doesn't seem to understand this, so implicitly. Minoth, who grasps every meaning. Minoth who is not and has never been oblivious like Addam, the bastard prince, always has.
Addam's perception usually needs helping. Minoth's really so seldom does - but here?
How can there be this great a difference, a distance, a gulf between them?
That's where the indignation comes in. How could the world so blithely lead these two men so broadly bound together, but then render them ununited, disjointed at the hip?
The problem, perhaps, lies in the fact that Addam is not often or even usually able to conceptualize and reconcile Minoth's fears of, alternately, the Driver of the past, the Driver of the future, and the Driver of the present. It's impossible to tell how all three fold and factor in.
Decisions really do become that difficult, even when you've got no place left to go.
And that, indeed, is why Addam feels himself feint arrogant, because it is bitingly arrogant of Minoth to simply ignore the man who stands ready, knowing the entirety of Minoth's untraditional creation and moorings, to take him.
An obnoxiously bold game, the cowboy will play, twirling his guns and kicking heels into his unbuoyed infinite spirits. He'll take his notes, sip his whiskey, hold himself back.
As if he's not welcome. As if he's not the axis, the bearing, the very core and the head stationed equal to Addam, that he might look across the camp in the morning and sigh.
How is it that I can be your prince, neither Addam Origo nor any other saint in history, and you not be my very own love?
One thing Mythra is not: clueless, ignorant, delusional. Now, Mythra never likes to admit she's wrong, of course, but then...
Addam's absolution - and one into one become two into two - is that he's not asking her to. All her apologies, he's given and taken within himself already. That sublimation, that peerless level of trust...
Well, it's an idyll. It's more than a bit fantastical. Indeed, a fleeting mirage in this all-over crazy world. But once both realize that it's exactly what he can give, fathoming out the bottomless depths to see a tradition of love refashioned, then they're a world away.
A reality tied to their own physical plane by string theory and quarks, particles that flip up and down to make every little thing true all at once. All that we are, and yet beyond that all that we can be...
Mythra goes slack-jawed, when she begins to see this. A light ringed round the edge of the world, a flurry of hadrons imparting the strongest of subatomic interactions to be imprinted upon their two-in-one souls.
This is what they meant, when they told her that. You begin to join at each inflection point, bright spots burning at the tips of your fingers where another encounter could lie.
Addam might not always understand her, but he doesn't have to to accept her. It's a bizarre phasospectrum in between, all the time.
The orbit of your being. The subshells of your capability. The field, flared up from nothing but innatest juxtaposed magnet, of your life.
It's the type of bond that hurts as much as it helps, with its ebbs and its flows. So powerful, the collider could be.
Mythra has swiftly found herself not to be one very naturally nominated for joy, right from the moment of her awakening. And yet Addam is so joyful. He is so, oddly, optimistic. He is so adamant about the things he calls precious, though those are the things he doesn't force upon others; it's his fears that he puts forward first, knowing that these are more important, in an objective sense, before the cruel and carnivorous world.
Maybe it's Mythra's own stubborn refusal - her canny contrarianism - to let herself come into easy concord with Addam, directly, that has her wrapping back around. Not important, to have a good time while we're here? Screw you, then, because I'm having it! I'm taking my claims with me, when I go!
(The same unfickle girl who'd wanted to abandon all hope and just leg it to the center of the universe, once upon a time.)
It gets a smile out of Addam unguarded, unbegrudged. Some eye contact, some sobering nods. Some unfettered blossom.
That connection, what she once might have bucked and shied away from, has Mythra scrambling, scrabbling, for purchase on empathy and ever-afters.
Burnt your latest creation? That's alright, I understand. I won't even say I didn't expect it! But there's a call of calm in Addam's eyes that assures Mythra, no ridicule here. All my patience. All my love.
It's the same if she accidentally-on-purpose offends a Tornan citizen, or leaves Addam himself to struggle on the back foot while she hurls herself at a cliffside Marrin too far away for his longsword to reach.
He's just happy, she supposes, that she seems to want anything at all. It doesn't have to be him; it doesn't have to be his company, his wellbeing. It just has to be a burning will to live and learn - through it and at all.
And where did Mythra get that from? Her Driver, one in body and soul, of course.