Bright Abyss

This song makes me cry...every time. Every time.

Mythra is made of stardust and silent dreams. All Blades are, you might say, but she most of all.

And then...those dreams aren't silent. They're loud. She's brash and she's bold and then when she's quiet, hushed, stilled, because the stinging cold of earth's rejection, the rejection of a place that she might as well reject herself because she wasn't ever meant to be there, is way too white-hot burning sharp, the abyss is blindingly bright.

When Addam admonishes her for something that no one taught her any better not to do, that is his job to teach her better about, something so literally godforsakenly stupid as, I don't know, the right way to hold a fork, Minoth says something snarky and flicks his cheek, and that's something, sure, but it's not...that's not what she wants. That's not how the universe's architect could possibly want his children to live. That's not how her father, absent though he seems to be, salvation and all, could possibly have wanted her to live.

Maybe he didn't want her to live at all. If Malos thinks his purpose is so destructive, so literally end-all such that it doesn't matter if he ever does decide he wants to be-all, maybe she should think it too. When you meet the grim reaper and Death swings his scythe, she's not alive. They, an amalgamation of lost souls, can't really think for itself.

God's will. The will of the world. Addam Origo and the un-fair Quaestor Amalthus couldn't possibly be the Architect's chosen. The irony is too huge, the dichotomy too painfully wide even as the gray hair and matching initials strike up a stupid little ring of parallels. Did Malos think absolution his duty because Amalthus yearned for it, or did Amalthus hate the world because Malos had in fact imprinted upon him?

Imprinted. She's no duck. What did she get from Addam, really, at all? She got an unwanted proxy of parenthood - two, in fact, because Minoth counts too. Unfortunately. And back to him, in fact, because he's still waiting for his cue. Well, no he's not. Even he doesn't take the time to invest in her petty details.

Thoughts thunk and ditches dug, Mythra stares at Minoth out of the corner of her eye around the brutally suspended parting of her lips, and screws up a grimace, and she's about to shake out a straightening-up huff through each golden bangle of her pauldrons and cuffs, but then her mouth clamps shut and she storms away. If that's how it's going to be, if she's just a joke to them, then she won't suffer the stabilization of the dynamic that they forced her into.

The pattern trains, over and over, in with the parameter and out with the failed scan, they just don't seem to get it. Every laugh you people let me have, let me actually enjoy, is tempered only by the fact that yesterday you were laughing at me, that you think it's cute that I'm actually clever enough to be able to snark at you, that you think it's charming that Addam can't keep a handle on me.

My star shoots higher than he can handle. Oh, I will literally leave him in my dust. If I wasn't afraid to. If I actually felt like I knew how.

The desert's not much on hiding places, though it's stupidly easy to find bugs and other...miscellaenous tiny creatures lurking in every vice-tight crevasse. Everything's bland colors and gray shadows, and the cliffs are clammy against the open space in the back of her armor. It's weird to feel something touch there, because usually her hair covers it up and it's only her own smooth gold that finds her vulnerability.

Now it feels off, misplaced, intrusive, more organic and entropied than she wants to be and wants it to be. She shoves it up out of the wedging place, twists it up in fruitless knots, tries to force it into an almost imperceptible bun on the nape of her neck, claws out the diadem and jerks at the feathers making perch.

Her hair, much like the rest of her, is full and shiny and unapologetic, but now she wishes it would apologize for its light. It'd give her away anywhere, wouldn't it? If it were red, maybe a reddish-brown for good measure, it wouldn't reflect so much luminosity. Wouldn't make her like a lamp in the darkness for those weaker to follow. As if.

Over the past few days - more a couple of weeks, actually, and why is this whole Malos thing taking so long? why do I have to have enough time to start to care about these people? - the way Minoth has gone to bat for her has shifted, and he's gotten less demonstratively jocular, more grave and subtle and inward-looking. Probably, he now thinks that she's a problem for him to solve, a character for him to study, a loose end to tie up. Before it was just fun to rib on Addam for being so hapless and impotent, but now he's not joking. Great.

Joking or not, towards her he comes, Addam at his side. The gait of his walk cycle is so wholly different to his resting pose, and the slouch of his knee as he makes to so accommodate offends her. Can't you stand any other way? Why are you like that? Why are you so different from me?

But Mythra is made of stardust and the universe's dreams. I'm the Aegis. Who could I possibly meet besides the singular, the disordinary, the extraordinary?

If there's a problem with her, really, it's a problem with their whole trioed and triaged group. Brighid and Aegaeon are obviously a matched set, sword and shield and fire and water joined about the infinitely stable axis of Hugo. Jin and Haze are Lora's Blades. That sentence in itself brings together all the harmony of the atmosphere. The swirl of ice and wind and whichever element she as a Driver decides to wield make perfect synchronicity. A perfect storm. Everything fits.

Minoth's knee doesn't fit as he stands. Minoth's hair doesn't fit when he ties up his ponytail. Minoth's scar doesn't fit when she tries to sketch his face.

Addam's asymmetrical too, with his mismatched pieces of shoulder armor and his stupid golden sash and his own little tuft of unwieldy hair secured with the very same tie - really, Mythra suspects that they share.

The least symmetrical thing about Mythra is the leftward sweep of her bangs, and that's complemented by the diadem-like band around her right thigh. So she matches. She's made up the balance. Even, it's their fault, not hers.

She prepares to blame them for it with every mark of tone and stance as she slides up to a standing position, hair drifting down behind her again without a trace of erstwhile manglement. Hand goes to hip, the ultimate casual defense mechanism, and she taps her right heel to give subconscious intensity. The beginning cut, twice as fresh and adolescent as usual: "What do you want?"

Addam's face flickers with guilt, and while that's deserved, again Mythra feels, wretchedly suddenly, uncertain. "I want you to understand that we care."

"You--?" Instantly there's a worm inside her mind fuzzing up the circuitry, spreading this fresh poison that sounds like such a false promise, except why would he even say that if he didn't really think it was true? Mythra crosses her arms, but doesn't turn away. Brave face, strong posture, maturity. "You don't care."

The "we" also registers exception. Why does Addam think she cares what Minoth thinks? Hell, why does anyone care what Minoth thinks? Hey, she'd ask the rest of 'em, just for kicks, and they'd probably all agree with her. ...oh. No. They wouldn't agree with her. Just on principle. So maybe she'd never find out. Eh, big deal. She knows she's right.

To her distinct surprise - in fact, to her dreadful wrongness - Addam doesn't sigh histrionics, or blithely repeat his point, or insist that she's simply not listening. Instead, he purses his lips with an undercurrent merely signaling a steadying of his own step, and asks her, "Why do you think that?"

Why? It makes her shoulders shudder and her neck twitch. Why should she have to explain it? It's obvious, isn't it? Even if you're not the Aegis. Really, he should know better than her. He should know better.

"You don't treat me like you treat him," she says, thrusting her chin in Minoth's direction and watching with sick satisfaction as his ears and nose indicate recoil. Addam shows a little bit of the same, but there's more palpable pain on his face. "You treat me like a baby."

I want you to understand, he had said. Hadn't said "I want to try to show you" or "I want to make it clear" or anything actually conciliatory and mutual. Just "I want you to understand," the way you want a child to understand that you look both ways before crossing the street and say please and thank you when you ask for something you want.

Why don't you say please, Addam? Why don't you learn your manners? Why don't you treat me like a person - like an equal? If a Driver and Blade are one in body and soul, do you have the fractions scrawled up to show me why my figuring takes smaller measure?

Scratch what I said earlier. It doesn't matter if he means it or not, because it's a stupid thing to try to mean. It's less declarative, more imperative. I don't really care if you understand, she reads from him, I just need this Gogol off my back that you simply won't behave. Behave.

Yeah, she gets it. Must suck knowing that Malos is out there rampaging for the hell of it, and me here looking like I'd do the same if you set me off the wrong way. So there's my point. You set me off every goddamn day.

Huh. Might help to say some of these things out loud. But she won't. He doesn't deserve that. If he's old enough and smart enough to be the Driver of the Aegis, he should be able to figure it out - him and his boyfriend, because her conclusion of earlier about Minoth casting her as a puzzle to be solved rings all too true now. An expedition into the unknown, a reconciliation with the animator. So big and dramatic, right?

Yet they don't look half as pathetic as she thinks they should. Minoth is obviously the leader of this excursion, and Addam had come only slightly behind him almost entirely lacking of a hang-dog dragged air, so now he speaks. Now he takes his lead. "You're no baby, Mythra. You're older and grander than all the rest of us combined."

"Oh, sure." The distance between her rock-styled seat and the ground is still creating an unbridgeable gap between them, and she looks Minoth in the eye for once. Addam too, but sometimes he stands like such a small man that that's not really a rare phenomenon. She's stared him down (or up, rather) many a time, and it's easy, really, until she gets tired of it.

But anyway, her impending line. "That must make you feel real nice to say. Look at me, I'm Minoth," and she schools the bend of her knees to match his telltale one, "I'm a Flesh Eater and I get to choose my Driver and I swear all my loyalty to Addam because my prince can do no wrong."

She realizes too late that she forgot to actually hammer in the bit about making up fancy phrases that make everyone ooh and ahh and say oh Minoth, you're so wise, won't you write something about me someday? She doesn't tack it on, because everything she did say hits just as hard if not harder. Hits all the way to home, and neither of them have got one.

Minoth is still staring at her. There's something like wonder in his eyes, and nothing like anger or offense.

"Mythra," he starts slowly, "if you were going to choose another Driver, who would it be?"

Another Driver? Who does she even know? Not Amalthus, easy, or the rest of the Indoline creeps and hangers-on like Zettar, just for good measure. Not Hugo, because yeah, he's harmless enough and even pretty funny sometimes and when he betrays his formality to try to relate to her it's especially gratifying, but he's...nah. Not Hugo. Not Lora, either, because somehow that brand of pep is just shaded slightly too vivid, too contrast-crunched, for her to latch onto.

Addam doesn't have nearly enough contrast, enough shading, on his wits and whims. His bright gold is altogether too much for Mythra herself to handle. And yet, Minoth complements him. His dark doesn't exactly match her light, but his spare traces of earth - maybe the flesh had come from a human particularly compassion-driven - are shot through with every bit of warmth from Addam's chosen electricity.

Too, she and Addam make a nice backdrop, even a lighting kit, for Minoth's niche of drama. If Addam had a different Blade, if Mythra had a different Driver, he wouldn't slot in as well, so well, with either of them.

Because her brain is wired for mathematics and sufficient, necessary completeness, she has to call up the inspector on the third facet. She, there with Addam and Minoth...somehow she doesn't know what to conclude.

"I'd choose Addam," her response comes just as inching-aching gentle back, and she steps down from the miniature plateau keeping ever-mindful of her stance. Suddenly the both of them are so much closer than they were before, and Minoth uncrosses his own arms, and Addam steepens his angle to close the box.

She didn't say that for Minoth's sake, and Addam didn't move closer to box her in. "I wouldn't choose someone else. It's just...hard. Since I'm not a normal Blade. I don't think anyone could do all that much better."

Because of course they couldn't - pin it back on her again, because Addam is the perfect Driver for Minoth. Do they always get along? Absolutely not, Minoth is a trainwreck at really expressing how he feels about this his own personal salvation in any way more direct than asking to borrow money, which Addam gleefully hands over as if they're married and he just happens to be the one currently holding the checkbook. But still, they're so strong and so right together.

"Why is it so hard, being my Driver?" The question sounds too open, and the aperture aimless. "Addam?" she redirects.

Rather than scratching the back of his head or working at his wrist to make motive the thinking silence, Addam lays his hand over Minoth's shoulder as the propping prop. "Mythra, I'm entirely ready to admit that I'm just not a very good Driver. I never really wanted to be one, and...well, you know all too well that that's bled over into how I've treated you. That's on me, and I know it."

"But at the same time, and I hope you won't take offense to this, old friend, Minoth's certainly not normal." Minoth grins, almost sheepish, shrugs his unburdened left shoulder with an amused lift of his eyebrows and smirk of his lips, and adds quietly, "You said it, Prince." So they're on the same page. Honestly, that really is good to know.

"Minoth's not normal," Addam continues, "and you're...not normal either. Maybe by the same amount even though by different turns, I couldn't say and I don't think it matters for me to try. He came from the ground here on Alrest, maybe even from the inside of Torna herself. Every day I thank the Architect that we were lucky enough to find each other."

It's sweet, it really is, and Mythra's nonexistent heartstrings wrench. Why does she feel like the "but" that's coming is about to be so horribly bad?

Addam stops his vaguely romantic waxings, stops catching the side of Minoth's eye, and holds out his hands. They look half like an offering, in and of themselves, and half like they're expectant, waiting for something to be placed into them. Something crucial, something incredible.

Oh. They're waiting for hers.

She takes the offering, cautiously, and his grip is shaky, but it's vital; tenuous, but tenacious.

"But you, Mythra," and this time when they make eye contact it is true and targeted and all too real, "you came from the skies, from the heavens, you came from Elysium! Knowing what Malos can do with the power he was given is terrifying and I will not lie to you, I am terrified." The cling becomes a squeeze on that last word.

"But I cannot imagine where we would be without you. Seeing you here on Alrest with us, seeing all the things you do know along with all the things you don't, being able to teach you and to learn with you is inspiring beyond my wildest dreams, aspirational towards this or not."

The puzzle is coming together, the pieces are being muddled into place like bits of iron drawn by a magnet, but it's not clear yet.

"Minoth, do you mind...?"

What, does he want a moment alone with her? Is this somehow about to get even weirder than she thought?

Well, it gets weirder, maybe. Weirder like seeing an aurora is weird, like seeing the blazing orange ether wings of the Tornan Titan is weird, weird like seeing Addam and Minoth grounded together at her back is weird.

"Tell me something, Mythra," Minoth begins like he's about to tell a time-honored country fable. "How does one even begin to try to teach a star?"

*listens to a song* hey i wonder what characters/ships this could be about-- oh nvm. it's minoade. platonic flavor plus their daughter here because !!!