hope this helps
Yearning is categorical, to Mythra. An everpresence of curiosity and forbidden knowledge just betwixt the outermost ring of the flower, fleshy and waxed: you don't know, but you know that you don't know - and you shouldn't know that.
Contentment, and not contention, is a usual Blade's lot. They take on the frustrations of their Driver, and no more.
A Blade is meant to be sandboxed.
But Minoth is an overthinker. Mythra's a furnacekettle of stolen thoughts. Jin flints, too, and the occasional spark of a long, slow smoulder emits, but that's not the same kind of curiosity, Mythra thinks. That's not...
Well. That's not her. Which is the problem.
The Paragon is steely and dry, never-melting, ever-staunch. Lora likes him that way - likes that she's the only one who has access to his teased smiles and true gentility.
Just one look at Minoth tells Mythra that he could never live that way, not ever. Not in a hundred, thousand, million years. No, he wants to love everyone and he wants everyone to love him. Which is a big, huge assumption, but she synches it together from two very important things:
"I've never seen Malos up close, you know. It's nice, being able to see you."
Cagey enough, ulterior enough, but the other piece:
He has his hand on his Core when he does it. And that, Mythra knows from the way it pulses in the ether, all intemperate irritant, is something Minoth never does.
He never touches that thing, if he can avoid it. She knows because she more or less does the same.
She knows, she knows, she knows.
And she wants to know more.
But what's she gonna do? She can't just ask the guy to lay out flat and let her grope him.
(What? She knows that's what it'd be if the roles were reversed.)
Mythra figures eventually when this is all over, Minoth will end up in the same place as her: either with Addam, or not. No matter Lora's favoritism, Haze is still coming with them, right? Right.
She doesn't indulge the wicked little voice that counts off possibilities of how they could end up separated, whether because Minoth has his own agency or because Minoth has his own benefits. She's going where he's going, whether she likes it or not.
(Buried, this time, is the voice that proclaims, he'll hate it, you stupid sack of bricks. Because Mythra figures Minoth is sappier than that.)
He uses his time well, this one. Always beckoning after people for what he can help them with, always squirreling something down, always right in the middle of it while staying so neatly uninvolved.
Maybe that's why he's got connections to both Aegises. He does what they can't, somehow.
No matter how much Mythra wants Minoth's friendship, she's not going to throw herself into the Feris den of trying to make herself useful when she has enough trouble staying out of trouble when her presence is requested.
Watching the clouds move (above, not below, though she's tried those, too) makes her eyes swim, a little bit, because she can actually detect each infinitesimal strain of moisture movement, and it doesn't feel like something she's prepared to parse.
At the same time, Mythra doesn't shield her eyes, either, because that's just an algorithm for pain once she actually has to get up. If she just keeps staring, she'll be able to see through the sun eventually.
And then the sun goes dark.
"Jesus, Addam, can't you let me do one thing myself?!"
"Who's Jesus?" a tenor voice drawls. "Sounds like an interesting type."
"I...I don't know," Mythra replies shakily, scrabbling herself up and wishing she could rewind to unsay those words. Now that Minoth's decided it's fortuitous, for whatever reason, to block her view, she'll be blind the next time she blinks.
"What do you want, anyway?"
Brighid would snip, "You'll get a lot farther in this life if you stop assuming everyone's out to get you. It's demoralizing and disrespectful, you know."
And then she'd berate Mythra for something insignificant she did, like an evil stepmother or stepsister or spinster aunt, whatever it is Hugo and Addam's friendship makes her.
So anyway, Mythra's prepared for more of the same from Minoth, who seems to fancy himself quite put-together, indeed, and entitled to be unassumped-upon.
He doesn't answer at all, though. If that miniscule movement is him chewing on his lip, then maybe he wants to unsay himself, too.
"Never mind. It's fine. I was probably...hurting my eyes, anyway."
"You probably were," Minoth agrees. "Hope I'm not intruding too much."
Too much? What's too much, for her? For them?
"You know I'm an open mess regardless," Mythra replies, now listless.
Minoth cracks his jaw. So maybe he is a little crazy, even though it feels like none of this should really surprise her.
"There aren't exactly a titanload of places for us to go."
Isn't it more true that there literally are? And who's us, anyway?
Mythra decides to echo that one aloud.
"You and me," Minoth answers, to her chagrin.
He lurches down onto the grass next to her with a just-shy-of-embarrassing sigh.
"The Prince's Blades."
"Hasn't he ever told you?" Mythra digs her heels in. "I won't be anyone's anything."
Even if that means disappointing them all, wholesale. She's got to be just only her own. It's the only way. Right?
Minoth nods. "'s a good way to be."
She doesn't have to deal with this. His shoulders are broad and his armor is complete and his pants are flared because he actually has them and they are not the same.
Because if they're the same, then someone's keeping score. If they're the same, he can't look at her and say oh, how novel, so cool, you're different.
I won't be anyone's anything. I won't have a metric put on me.
"Do you like being Addam's Blade?"
After a brief turn skyward (the sun has clouded over, of course) Minoth looks her in the eyes, gently, still and cool.
"I do."
"Do you think it's, like...great?"
He turns back toward the horizon. "I do."
Okay. Fine sort of answer. What's she want him to say, no, the guy I joke around with all day and guard fondly all night sucks, I hate him, I wish I was back in the old country?
"It's something I like having as one piece of me. Addam's Blade. Addam's friend."
Addam's Blade. Minoth's friend?
"I need more pieces."
Minoth nods. Mythra listens to him creak. "Yes, you do."
And now what's she gonna do, take his?
"Can I...see your Core?"
The problem isn't getting him to say yes. The problem is that she doesn't know why she's doing it. Why does she do anything? What does she love?
She can't just be Minoth's friend, his weird little gendersmacked sister who follows him around because people like talking to him and he has more varied taste in food than she does.
She can't just be Addam's Blade, either. That, obviously, has created a year worth of wonderful history everyone's going to treasure forever. And she might have better taste in food than Addam.
She can be curious, though. Even when her entire framework is busted down and all she knows is that she doesn't know, she can be curious.
Don't say no just to say no, she's been told. Moreover, you can't say no just to say no. Which is something every young person with particularly particular sensibilities just loves to be told.
Those same people would probably say you can't say yes just to say yes, because being a pushover isn't right either. Don't and you can't, here, are the same things.
But it doesn't matter. She's gonna do it anyway.
From the looks of Minoth's shy, slow smile, he does that too.
"Why not?"
He might as well have rolled over. Well, but he doesn't, and Mythra doesn't feel like positioning her head or the rest of her body in the box of Minoth's chest.
"Okay, Beethoven. Roll over."
She has even less idea who that is.
Florid flashes tattoo the scene. Like seeing inside marrow, between bones.
When you break a Skwaror bone, it doesn't ooze. Just is.
A shattered Core Crystal, Mythra imagines, is more like rock candy than packaging purge. Shattering Minoth's wouldn't even be satisfying. It's just sad.
If being inside her own matrix-bound head is hellish, with all the loose ends popping and firing everywhere (and hey, maybe there really is something really wrong with her?), no end in sight and no source left behind to scour, then Minoth's Core is that without the activity.
Just sort of...dull. Cold. Old.
They'd removed his belt, because it got right in the way of where Mythra needed to sit, and Minoth had had plenty of laughs about that, because yes, Mythra had found out, it is funny when you're straddling someone's crotch after you've partially disrobed them but your intentions are entirely platonic and clinical, except you're stranded on a grassy knoll in the middle of nowhere, so how clinical can you be?
Mythra's thumb strokes from base to tip of the crystal, smoothing it over to get the smudges off if not to placebo herself into thinking she can fix up the torn-up inside.
Minoth, propped on his elbows as well as he can without doing something injurious to his neck, is smiling a lot less than he'd done at all the other inflection points in their weird, weird conversation.
"Find what you were looking for?" he offers at last.
And yeah, Mythra supposes she has, since what she's found is the exact shape and size of the hole in Minoth's head, fragmentations where the Driver hook was ripped out splining everywhere, plumb lines where something silver-gold has ducked itself in to patch, and most importantly a little green spot, twinkling, that looks an awful lot like her.
She'd sit harder, or something, just to give him something else to oof about, but that wouldn't exactly help any of their cases or causes, at all, ever, so instead she reaches her right hand out, flexing the fingers repeatedly toward the palm in a grabby motion.
Minoth gives. His hand is warm, and only slightly clammy, which doesn't give much information about the overall state of him, but it does more than just motor shut around hers, so much smaller and, Mythra has to face it, more delicate, so the important parts of him still do work.
"I don't know why I did this," she says.
"I know," he says. "But it's interesting, about me - about the world -, and I like offering what I can, to people who deserve it."
Tiny, tiny squeak. Do I deserve it?
But she gets what he means. He's just a body, until someone loves him, and until he loves someone. His chances are a lot worse if he...well, assumes. The writing helps him organize his thoughts and express himself. He can write broad, or he can drill deep. Everybody wins. He wants them to, anyway.
Mythra takes a deep breath. Knows Minoth can probably feel it, from all the ways they're linked (her left hand is still probing, strangely comfortable), but doesn't care.
"I hope the next time I do this, it's a little different. In there."
Minoth cocks a brow, along with his chin and the rest of his face and skull in between. Easy joke.
"But still the same," Mythra amends. Easy joke, easy joke, easy joke.
"I like the sound of next time," is all Minoth says. He makes no move to get up.