just like a certain prince

"I thought...you always know what to do, you're never lost."

Easy words, from Lora, who'd only known Addam for little more than a few weeks - only one or two, even, at the time. That was, of course, the impression he put on. He wasn't exactly maddened by it (again, from what she could tell), because it gave him a standard to apply to himself, and to apply himself to, but when it felt like a lie, his shoulders drooped.

Why would she trust him so absolutely, so soon? Just because she'd been ready to square up on the grounds of Jin's Core then didn't make it sensible for her to be sitting pretty now.

But it wasn't about being sensible. It was about intuition, and intrepidation, and the warm feeling everyone on Alrest, save a few persnickety-snooty noblemen and women, got when they saw Prince Addam Origo, Lord of Aletta and fourth in line to the great dragon's throne, et cetera. It was about simple sensibilities, in fact, and the sense that he'd never hurt anyone if he could avoid it, sometimes to the point of putting everyone's needs before his own (and even the incipient Good Lady Lora didn't do that).

So while Lora was wrong, she wasn't...wrong, per se. And she nudged Minoth about it for good measure - or perhaps he nudged her - once his simultaneously infinitely broad and infinitely narrow impression had been brought to bear. Maybe all people were like that, sure, more complex than they put on and what you could assume about them both, but Minoth was...a special case. Of course he was. He always has been. He always will be. Anybody could see that.

"So you've known Addam for a little while, huh?"

A "little while" could be the introductory innuendo to all manner of things - literally, a little while, or perhaps the wink-wink nudge-nudge instance of it actually being years, and years, and years, and you're not fooling anyone, you know? If Addam was somewhere just shy of mid-20s, then there was no saying Minoth hadn't known him his whole life, been a brother and a protector as much as a friend since bastard's epoch.

Minoth looked up from where he'd been examining the remains of Lunar Amaruq from a fight the night prior, squatted with one boot flat to the ground and the other bent supporting the somewhat impromptu squat. "That's right. Long enough to get on his nerves about his very-much-deserved nickname, as I'm sure you noticed."

Notice she had. So far Lora knew that Addam hated politics, most politicians, and holding the power of a Master Blade in the palm of his hand, except not. He didn't mind ghosts, or Aspars, or the loss of family heirlooms deep within a locked vault, or even militia members who strayed from their duties. Truthfully, she figured there had to be some deeper issue buried, even though he cried as easily as he breathed some days (in other words, he wasn't masking his trauma, if there was any), but her purpose wasn't to figure out how to tap that line.

"Sure," was all she said, however. "I guess I was just...wondering what you thought."

Said out loud, it seemed a heck of a lot more callous, but like the good strong merc she was, Lora just metaphorically puffed out her chest and stuck to her guns.

It was only after Minoth had made to get up and dust off his pants that she thought to offer him a hand, but then he was probably much heavier than she was, and perfectly able to handle himself. After all, being a Flesh Eater made him independent, and everything.

With the measured way he was watching her, too, Lora couldn't be sure that he would have appreciated the gesture, even if only slightly intimate, in conjunction with the rest of the conversation. She crossed her arms, and looked out over Aletta.

His response to the call came: "About the Aegis?"

If Lora was an eye-roller, hers would have just about fallen right out of their sockets, but she hadn't been for quite some years now, if ever. "No, not about the Aegis. About Addam - himself, away from all of this war business. What's he like?"

As the saying went, what's he like when he's at home? She didn't presume to actually put that much implicit context behind the inquiry, but it was possible...

Never mind that. The look Minoth was now giving her seemed to be almost the epitome of wisdom, with a infinitesimally subtle arched brow and squint of the opposite eye.

"He's the same."

Lora laughed, because she could. "I don't believe it. He's not like me - he's not been a mercenary, living from campsite to campsite all his life." This quite easily headed off the questioning glance of Minoth's looming judgement: What, and didn't you change? "Something has to be different."

Minoth just shook his head, though. "No, no, I mean it. He's the very same."

"What, does he walk around with a greatsword strapped to his back all day when it's peacetime, then?"

Now Minoth's eyes rolled, but only lightly. He waved a searching hand to his right, and looked up somewhere in that general direction too. Then, his fingers but for the index folded in, and his roving eyes settled.

"The crafting. That's common, right? Hobbies?"

Lora cocked her head to one side, palms now cupped about elbows and rattail swaying benevolently. "Hobbies?"

"Well, you know all that tinkering Hugo does - it's the kind of thing that's hard to learn, easy to master, and easy as all get-out to notice a mistake in once it's all said and done. Addam picked the opposite - throwing pots and sculpting figurines is easy to learn, hard to master, and doubly hard to pick apart in any way that matters."

Children could do it. Hugo, while not much younger than Addam, still claimed literal childhood in contrast with his meteoric ascent to the throne - it had been four years already, so he was squarely pinned as the baby emperor, the boyking whose shadow loomed so much larger than his stature.

Meanwhile, Addam...?

Lora scoffed, but it was in a way that belied all possible confidence. She was confused, and more than a little too intimidated to make harsh judgements of a Blade without a Driver whom she'd only just met; considering that Minoth was intimidating enough to be walking the fine line between Addam's infinitely expansive good side and the grim, dark, nigh-nonexistent event horizon of his bad side on mere show of force alone, Lora didn't intend to get into a fight with him.

So her scoff was more of a throat-clearing issuance of confusion. "You don't think Addam takes up pottery because he enjoys it?"

You don't think Hugo dissects machinery because it interests him, almost beyond even his own comprehension sometimes, as it has since he was barely able to talk? Oh, Aegaeon would go on, and on, and on, if he were only given the chance.

Minoth smiled gently, breathing out through his nose with eyes lidded. They opened, after a time, and focused somewhere over Lora's head. Not up to the sun or the World Tree, quite, but seeking upward nonetheless.

"Are you kidding? He loves it. The kind of pride and joy he gets on his face when he finishes a piece...that's something I think we should all aspire to. Some days I can't understand how the Architect fit that much love into one human person."

"Could he put more into a Blade, in general, do you think?"

Now the Flesh Eater looked her dead in the eye - dead, I say, as if his steady gaze wasn't brimming with the cautious hope of all life, wasn't keen and humming to get a good look in every chance it got. "Isn't that what affinity's for?"

There wasn't even time to think about the exact meaning of what Minoth had said, whether Lora agreed or not and whether it actually tethered in coherently to the rest of what he'd been saying. Isn't that what affinity's for? Isn't what?

Lora's pupils shrank, or maybe they dilated, and her mouth fell open and her eyebrows cleared the fringe. "Minoth, that's..."

It was like she'd heard something she wasn't meant to hear, like Minoth was forcing her to eavesdrop on a particularly private conversation - and then again it didn't even feel that serious. It would almost be uncomplicated, but for the fact that that question put perfect pitch on the tune of it being very, very complicated indeed.

This was the crucial confession of a man who was nice to everyone he met until he had a reason not to be - he only seemed intimidating because he was so very quick to the trigger at diagnosing those reasons - and who had a bevy of those reasons that concerned Mr. Addam Leigh Origo, enough to make him turn tail if he was feeling critical enough, but didn't.

Couldn't, maybe.

"The same things an enemy of his could scorn him for, could find infinitely annoying and worthy of belittlement, are the things everyone else loves about him. Me most of all. Because it's him."

Minoth's tone had gone very, very soft, to accompany the shift in his eyes. "The only way to judge him wrong is to judge him at something other than surface level, because he's the same all the way down - all the way up, even. And if that doesn't make sense, well..."

The smile that overtook Lora then almost made her cheeks hurt. "Yes, Minoth?"

He grinned back, bumped her arm with his elbow as he made to walk back into the village proper. "It will soon enough. Guaranteed."