and in the end, it's all for good
The Aion hangar was green - fluorescent, in that way, and not just because of Pneuma's fading presence. Well. Reality, in that room, was and had been, had always been, defined by the Trinity Processor, both those two thirds of it present and then the absent, ever-mysterious third child.
Green is good. Green is correct. Green is go ahead, all clear, tests passed, bingo. Not exactly something Malos has ever gotten used to, even with all the rhythmic convince he's settled himself into, against.
The Aion hangar was green, and then...not the Aion hangar is also green. Malos stares, more wide-eyed than he'd been since leaving Jin in Megrez, at the picaresque, pseudo-watercolored (which is to say, he can hardly believe his eyes, it looks so achingly real) landscape that he doesn't recognize, but then again doesn't exactly not recognize.
"Where am I?" Oh, Father damn it, where the hell am I? Just what have I gotten myself into now?
When will it end? Why hasn't it?
"I think 'where are we' would be a more apt question."
"Jin? Is that you?" And Malos doesn't run to him immediately, doesn't reach for the crush of that centuries-old new catharsis, just turns quietly, lets his incredulation ring off his face instead of his chest.
Jin, armor simple and solid and white, smiles, gently. The most gently he's done anything in quite a long time. Malos would think it a rare thing if it didn't seem so...natural, in this moment. "It's been nearly five hundred years, Malos. At this point, I don't think it could be anyone else but."
It couldn't be. Fate, predetermination, predestination. Amalthus turning the wheel. Father above - or below, really, because if this is Elysium...
"You know, I realized something."
"Oh?" Jin's still smiling. Once again, if his topic weren't so important, Malos would let himself be distracted by how intoxicating it is. But he can't. This is...this is everything. Or at least, he hopes it is. Because even if he can't change a Father-damned thing, he wants to know that he understands what already happened.
Wants to know that his truth, his word of god, is actually good for something. It really hasn't been up until now.
"When I was fighting with the kid, and all his minions." Now, he stops himself before he stumbles into saying something stupid like "I realized it wasn't my fault," or "I realized we were wrong." Because they weren't wrong, not about everything, and he's certainly not going to slough the entirety of his participation off the wings of Amalthus's fake-ass miter.
Malos stands, hip uncocked, a violet-grim blight on the perfection of Elysium, set as a devil against the guardian angel that is and always has been Jin, and he thinks to himself, I don't care about "if only". I don't care about seeing other worlds. That one Driver for me...
"Jin, I'm sorry."
Still, Jin is calm. Calmer. He has, for whatever reason, a peace here that he'd never known in all five hundred and eleven years of this (that?) his final existence. "For what?"
Still he asks. "For...for making you do what you did. For making you into...gah. I won't call you a monster, because you weren't - you're not - but..."
Now Jin looks concerned. He reaches over, ever gentle, and grasps at Malos's wrist; the Aegis suppresses a shudder, borne of what specific emotion he denies his Core or afterlife facsimile thereof the categorical satisfaction of categorizing.
"Malos, it wasn't your fault. I was the one who took you down this path. I was the one who made you double down on everything you did during Torna - the old Torna, the real Torna."
The real Torna. Because ours was a cheap copy. A place where Drivers and Blades were one in body and soul because the Blades were their own Drivers and were the Drivers of the other Blades, who were more like younger siblings than strict subordinates.
Is that really true?
"You didn't make me do shit," says Malos flatly. Because the tremor of "it wasn't my fault" still rings precarious in his mind, in his shot-up Core that he can't see but also doesn't want to see. I can't let myself be cast lilywhite. I don't want my agency stripped like that. Damn, it had hurt when the kid had said so.
"Alright." Jin, fidgeting with Malos's dangling wrist for a couple moments before dropping it unceremoniously (he seems to regret that as the heavy appendage falls), concedes, takes a deep breath, and reorganizes the cold truths in his mind. "Malos, we did...horrible things to each other."
"To each other?" Malos raises a blocky black eyebrow; the blunt reframing makes everything quite clear, somehow (of course it does, and the both of you are always, were always, quite blunt when you needed to be, so how in the living hell did you end up in a state like this?). Equalizing them in their faults makes it, well, perfectly equinanimous. "I'd think your guilt over all the people you murdered would come way before that."
Murdered. Indeed, he did. Don't even call it genocide, because Jin dispatched each and every silent-screaming victim by hand, with directed efficiency. He did exactly what he'd sworn never to do, or at least tried to stave from, when he'd been bonded to Lora.
Well, maybe. If you called it pacifism, that could connote either the conscious choice always to spare a life where possible, or it could mean that you were anti-war. And was Jin anti-war?
("Mercenaries and statesmen each have their own views and ways to effect change.")
So perhaps not, exactly, and that's fine. But it squares us back in: Jin killed people. Jin killed a very, very many people. Jin did it exactly the way Malos the very didn't; if he'd have tried to put a caveat on it, it would be that somehow doing things anti-messily, by way of ethereal hijinks, would somehow make it...more okay, anyway.
But Malos had done that, in fact. Malos had sunk entire Titans with furious, vociferous, vehement black flame. Without even knowing why.
No better than Amalthus, were they. Not either of them. Right? Wrong?
Quite a picture it paints. For all of Jin's kindness, all of the virtues praised in the ever-timeless Paragon, the time right after Lora had been a dark one, indeed. Then, joining up with Malos, they'd sat together in a dim room, playing metaphorical cards and being folded more than they ever folded themselves.
And then, it got better. Didn't it?
Eventually, they found Mik again. Then Akhos and Patroka, and a Blade for each of them besides Jin, and even Nia, with Dromarch, before she shipped out once more. That was family, of some twisted sort, and, truly, it, they, was something to care about. Jin needed that, so obviously did he need that again, and Malos had never had it, so one might as well try, right?
(You're not immutable, Malos. Because it worked. Not so far, not so very far, beyond saving.)
There was love, somewhere in the Monoceros, buried under all the unending, undying hate. There was something human in all the Blades-not-Blades. Of course there was.
This conclusion, once Malos stumbles upon it, and perhaps finds Jin there waiting just ahead, feels like it's been beaten upon before. Didn't we know that? Didn't we have any regard for the beauty in our terror, the value in our suffering?
I wouldn't have done it without you. But I couldn't have done it without you. I couldn't have made it this far without you. No one would ever, ever, ever have been able to understand me as well - and I didn't even understand myself. No one would ever have accepted me, only not just, not only, accepted me, so beautifully.
(And I didn't even accept myself. I did it for you. You did it for me. Yes, there was only ever one Driver for me.)
Oh, Malos knows that there's never been anyone so beautiful to him as Jin is, inside and out, and he's known that since the very first time he saw him. But as the bell tolls for his father's death and for his sister's rebirth, Malos doesn't want to look anymore. Malos doesn't want to think anymore. Now he rushes towards Jin, who hasn't spoken since he started contemplating all his uncountable sins, and his knees give out from under him just as he reaches his goal.
He doesn't apologize. The time for that is long past. The sky flushes purple diamond mist, cracks and crags erupt in the skybox; all that has been said is now all that ever will have been said. No...no time to weep and deliver a eulogy.
The Architect did not give Jin to Malos, and Malos to Jin, consciously, out of the goodness of his half-hearted half-heart. But now, perhaps, he has given them, by whatever intransient miracle, this one last closure, this one last second chance - one with each other, not one with the world - to clutch the shards of broken understanding.
Good, isn't it? To die knowing you've spent your life with the one you love most.