Digging in the Dirt
Random link of the day: here.
Addam finds him on Indol accidentally, like one might find a particularly interesting rock. Only, when you're seven years old and you find an interesting rock, it's always the smooth ones. The ones with a nice jade glossy sheen, the ones that are somehow perfect and distinct. Perfect in their distinction and distinct in their perfection.
You don't find the ones that are ruddy and jagged with age and kick. Well, you find them, but what's the thrill and the worth in finding something if you cast it aside just as quickly? Like hearing without listening, like reading without understanding. And it's not in the discovery, really, either. Not in the continental conquestual sense. No, it's in the continued journey, the choice to keep going, to stay with someone.
The way they always say love is a choice, not an event. An action, not a passion. Infatuation is a passion, for some brief seconds. Addam is twenty and Minoth is whatever age a Blade is, seven years extant himself by that time, and Minoth doesn't have the smooth jade. It's in his eyes, but it's fierce and cagey there. It's on his back, but it's volatile and punchy there. Infatuation is a passion. Ether lines run hot.
No they don't. Addam is twenty and Minoth is whatever age a Blade is, only he isn't. He's a Flesh Eater. Addam never knew him before that, and he might have been daft but he wasn't stupid. Addam knows what a Blade looks like, knows what a Core Crystal looks like. Don't make this out to be a tryst, and it isn't, it wasn't. Addam sees the flesh of him, sees the humanity, sees the brokenness. Maybe he loves the brokenness. And Minoth...he isn't sure how he feels about that.
He's not a real Blade, not anymore. When he was Amalthus's (and, well, he still is), he wasn't much of a Blade anyway. Cold, distant, like his Driver made him and made him out to be. But for all he disliked the slimy Magister, then Quaestor, he knew one day he'd return to his Core and be done with it. Horridly hateable or not, the Indoline man was still somebody he didn't get along with. And if you don't get along with the person, the partner, you're bound to for life? Heaven forbid. Architect forbid it, but then he hadn't.
But back to now. He's not a real Blade. Real Blades are cybrous, not fibrous; whirring, not thrumming; digital, not analog. Fruit not chocolate, winds not strings, odd not even, left not right...go on, draw it so morbidly out. Out and away. If heaven should forbid, why, indeed it had, and something made of firmament rather than earth had come down to meet in the middle. It wasn't and isn't pretty.
Scars ravage his chest, and ether bleeds out from the cracks, so much like blood only twice as ghoulish-garish and sickle-sickly. He doesn't scab, doesn't heal. His regenerative self-healing and his ether shields deplete in effectiveness almost immediately, the exact way they weren't supposed to. The exact way he isn't supposed to...to be. That's the way he is. Or is he? Mar on his face not a birthmark, but it might as well have been. This is his destiny. To be a failure.
Is Addam also a failure predestined, then? Born of a tryst himself, and shunted away to live in Leftheria, only to be shuffled back into the fold and the fray by an ever-distant father who couldn't support the withering ends of his infidelity's aftermath enough to produce, funnily enough, a real heir. Someone truly and actually worthy of the throne. As it turned out later, maybe all that really mattered was wanting it. And did Khanoro want it? Maybe not even he.
So Addam isn't real. His father is, most definitely, but he's not. Addam is unreal. To have that much patience, that much kindness, when he quite literally shouldn't exist. (Hey, why are you measuring by Zettar's standards? The way he acts, he might as well have none.) Oh, Addam's no marvel of humankind, he shouldn't be uplifted sans caveat, but he is wonderful.
He is wonderful, he is marvelous, he is beautiful, he is everything. Minoth finds his way back to a civilization of mind after roughing through the wilds for a chance to taste something real, to get a scar from something he tangled with by choice, to brew and broil himself in the fires of life, real life, because isn't that what humans do?
Humans are vulnerable. Blades aren't. And then, in his head, he still isn't. He comes to Addam in Torna, in Aletta, four years later, and he isn't vulnerable. He's walled up, bottled up, pent up, let out the rage let out the rage let out the RAGE--
What rage? What's he angry about? What's been done to him? He went willingly, probably even swaggered his step on the way in. No accident, no grim turn of fate, that he is the way he is now. It's not a tragedy. Oh, Minoth knows tragedy. He's studied it, peddled it, imagined it and imaged it, again to try to create something real, but then what a farce that is, eh? Creation is inherently fake - even false, maybe. Not only does he make fake things, he makes fake things from fake basis. Just like his anger.
So what isn't an accident, then? Addam's care isn't. Minoth is the type of person to make you make a choice about him. Love him or hate him, or even be indifferent, but he doesn't just slip into the woodwork without making you carve out the knot for him beforehand. He blends in, but somehow he makes you know it.
Are you ready for the cliché? It's stage presence, scene setting. Chewing the scenery, if you care to be reductive and maudlin. Make your character big, so the holes seem smaller. What a particularly interesting rock, you are. Well...you were.
Rocks don't have flesh. Rocks don't have skin and bone. Rocks don't have spongy parts. That's what he is, a sponge. A spy, a voyeur, a creep. You're a creep, Minoth, you're a creep. Heard rumors, did you? You're not jagged, you're pointy. Pointed.
You know where your compass tip points. You know who you pinned, penned, as your Driver. It's him, and somehow it could only ever be and have been him. Mythra is the one that needs him and his care, but in you dart and sweep it away. It's not an accident. Not on either side. Soak it up and steal. Sneak-thief.
Stolen a heart, have you? But it's not stealing if it's given of own and owned volition. Addam wants to love him, wants to reciprocate the reaching, wants to meet the hands in the middle and say of course you're real, of course you're right, of course you're perfect. I don't care whether you are this way or you were that way or you were and are made to be something else entirely. I love you for you. And that's stupidly simple, isn't it?
Stupidly simple, like a boy would find a rock and shuck it into his pocket to take home, to show his mother and all his friends and then to stick it proudly on his shelf among all the other junk. Oh, I'm a trophy, am I? I'm your little pet Flesh Eater friend, your pet rock with legs and guns and a beating heart.
A beating heart. It's not mine. Whether they put it in me or I grew it myself, it's not mine. I don't want it. But then...but the part of it that loves you. Speak not of transience, maybe it was mine in the middle, somewhere...but now it's yours. And you can't do that to a rock.
Well, if Blades are rocks, never mind it, yes you can. Lora loves Jin and Haze, and they love her back - unconditional, if unbalanced. Hugo cherishes Brighid and Aegaeon, and they deliver twice the fury of philia in return - unconventional, if unquestioned. Turn it to the third troupe, then. Unconditional and unconventional, balanced by dint of meanest modal median and sure as anything brutally questioned.
You wouldn't peg Addam Origo as a champion of unconditional love, would you? No one would, inside observer or out. He has too many fears, too many unspoken prejudices for that. What you might find, however, is that he tries his damndest with Mythra, and no, he doesn't succeed, but it's not that he decides when to love her and when not to. It's the very fact that he can't that leads her to his and their doom. Because if you must compartmentalize, if you must be afraid, at least get your mind around it. Don't be afraid of the fear. The recursion can and will kill us all.
Recurse on the prose. Where were we, again? Oh, of course. Your pet rock with a smile you drew on to hide how drab it actually is, how you noticed the crags and cut your finger only after you'd jingled it in your pocket with the loose change and scratched up the pocket watch that you didn't want but your parents made you take because it's for your own good. Or the good of the world. Something magnanimous, I'm sure. But I...I'm not for your own good. I don't help you. You don't help me. You make me worse. You hear that, pretty boy? You make me worse!
You make me worse because I wallow in my dichotomization and think I do want the heart, I do, because the heart is what lets me love you, what lets me have you, what lets me need you. I make you worse. I cast the shadow on you that doesn't come from the sun.
How dare I? How dare I be there? How dare I walk at your side? Because Blades are supposed to walk behind the Drivers, see, but Minoth never learned that. Amalthus made him walk on ahead. Scout the danger, take it for himself.
Minoth gets his injuries, takes them in stride, gets them warmed over by the sun and the sand like a human would, except not like a human would. Somehow there's something different in the way Addam leans over him, worries over him, get away from me, prince - did I mention he's a prince? Because of course he is. Don't be so royal, don't be so noble, get your fretting, fripperish eyes away from me. I don't need your pity. That's what it's all about. Pity.
Nature found remarkable doesn't get pity. It gets praise, it gets admiration, and oh, Minoth doesn't want those things, not from Addam, but he'd so dearly prefer them to what he does get. He wants to sink into the woodwork, wants to be the woodwork, wants to be something unremarkable.
Ah, here's the rage. Better to be cast aside than to be cast as something you're not. Minoth knows about casting. He does it automatically. And he knows, oh how he knows, that no one wants to be the romanticized mistake. That's more purple and lividating than his bullets ever will be.
He thinks all this in the span of the desert crossing, as a matter of fact. There's much to be seen there, even if he feels like he's seen it all before. It's harsh. No it's not. The heat is harsh, but the sand is soft, slippable, palpable, thought-provoking.
It's just sand, Minoth. What could it possibly make you think about? It makes him think about grit. About will and choice and reality and tangible things. How he hasn't ever touched Addam. Hasn't...hasn't ever touched Addam. Hasn't ever been touched.
The photograph had been a real point of embarrassment and frustration for Lora, because she'd wanted a replication of the photograph with Ornelia, for her and Jin, something to make her equal to what had come before. Her insecurity, as ever, that she isn't good enough, even though simply what she is is all she ever needs, needed, to be. No, not complacence, because of course she can and must still improve, but she doesn't need to be anybody but Lora.
In the picture, she is Lora, slightly out of place and over-humilitous even as she's standing in the center of the frame with hand on hip. Jin looks awkward behind her, but he's behind her. That's all he wants. She should realize that.
She should...realize that. For him and for Haze, only Haze still needs her permission to do that, apparently. She's standing to the side, cast-off, like the very hand-me-down clothes, even though she looks prim and pristine and adorable as ever, and she completes their little trinity.
The Ardainians aren't quite a trinity, but they are a trio, and their triangulation is even more perfect. They don't touch, either, but they don't need to. If you're genuine, you can touch even the most iron, industrialized heart with your own, and Hugo isn't just that way because he's young.
There's a wonderful facility to him, to his range of emotions and the way he selects them to deal with the matter at hand. He's deceptive, sometimes, but he isn't deceitful. All three of their group's Drivers are very honest, aren't they?
So what's the honesty to be harvested from Addam's grip of his shoulder? Milton has his hand on Mikhail's shoulder, but still, Addam's the only one who could be said to be touching someone else, another adult, in the picture. Why is he doing that? Why does he feel the need to do that?
Between the Jagron and the village inn, there isn't much time for Minoth to form his impression one way or another. He's still busy jarring himself up and being jarred by the whole affair. Watching Jin and Lora, spewing some kind of trumped-up appraising words from his mouth but for once in his life not really knowing, even caring, what they are as they come.
Carbon gets hardened into diamonds (more shiny rocks, and perfect ones) by pressure, by time. Minoth hasn't had the pressure, not really, but he's had the time. He clenches his fist as Addam's hand lays so casually over him, the loose-ribbed material of his collar so definitely not his skin or anything close but yet feeling like it, and he tries to carve in the pressure. Tries to imprint the feeling. At night when he can't sleep because really he wasn't made to, and obviously he doesn't deserve to, he clenches his fist, gloves bared and nails digging into his palm, and tries to remember.
Addam is there, he's right there, and he makes Minoth a diamond in the rough so effortlessly, without hardly saying anything. Minoth, damn his selfish eyes and everything else, wants to stumble up onto his knees, pick up his sorry boots, and wander over, almost like it's an accident, put his own hand on the shoulder that's so wretchedly available, so open.
What a stupid, what an inspired, what a vapid, what a divine choice of costuming. His shoulders are open. His arms are open. Something screams in Minoth's chest. His arms are open.
The screaming doesn't stop. Is it his Core? His heart? His lungs? His ribs? He buckles on his holsters and scales the nearest rock face to get to somewhere higher up, somewhere where the air is thinner. So breathing's harder, yes, but then it'll make his screams, real vocal things, carry farther too. Maybe he wants that.
Don't scream without a reason. Don't cry wolf or bull or any other, at its heart, peaceable animal, living as it was made to do, not hurting anyone, not imposing, not muscling or jostling or any other off-script thing. Maybe you can scream if you hurt. If you have a reason. Just like the heart and its intransience, I won't stop to think about why I hurt if you won't. Deal?
Stop bargaining, just do it. He almost wants to collapse himself back asleep up there on the cliff, and see if they'll even notice that he's gone. Oh, they'll notice. Not just because they're all big boys and girls and can count to nine, eleven, just like their...none of their mothers or fathers taught them anything. Not a wholesale ever, but certainly not the things they were supposed to teach.
None of them, literally none of them, were ever children. Take the humans, they're all that count anyway. Hugo was more or less born as an adult, Lora was born into hardship drawn from both the impoverishment and the degeneration, Mikhail was sold as a slave, Milton's childhood was swept away in the flood...and Addam was born a bastard.
He was allowed privilege and priceless time. He's had it better than any of them. Who am I talking about, then? Myself, or Addam? Get out of the first person. What a crude, childish place to be. It's too easy. Not that he'd say there was never any art made in it. No, he wouldn't. But for himself, he would.
Addam, the first man. Minoth has seen plenty of men, Indoline and Ardainian and Urayan and Tornan and Spessian and Coeian and Gormotti and Leftherian alike. The shapes blend together, the statures and the postures and the cadences and the scruples or the lacks thereof. Really, in the end, they're just a conglomeration of characters that he peels off a layer of when he needs. And Addam? Addam was the first man he ever truly saw.
He looks down and the gray hair is silver in the moonlight, the glints off of Mythra's diadem not half as precious, not half so precious. They're headed to Auresco, the golden capital of the golden country, and of course Addam belongs there, is the only one who could ever lead them there. If Minoth wasn't already bruised and battered from the inside out, he'd be kicking himself for his hero worship.
How many effusive thousands of words will he write, when it's all said and done and he's punted himself halfway across the face of Alrest or even all the way off, as far as society went, about how much of a hero Addam was? What's he even done? Not handle Mythra, not command an army, not beat down Malos and his shoddy un-nature-nurtured morals through sheer force of will and companionship. What's he done? He hasn't done a thing.
He hasn't done a thing and he's never done a thing and yet as Minoth's mind grinds itself to mush he's done everything, he's done all the things that matter and the only things that ever will matter. Maybe this was supposed to be a happy story. Why? Wish fulfillment, is what they call something like that. Escapist entertainment, slices of lives whose pies are so far up in the sky they're specks, caught only by the nets of dreamers frittering their lives away with the intention of never stomaching the portion that's sitting served up on their plate and growing clammily colder by the week, by the day, by the hour, by the minute.
And is that Addam? No, not really. He does what he's called to, however reluctantly. He hadn't wanted to resonate with Mythra, the Aegis, but it isn't as if he shuns her outright. Damn if he isn't bad at communicating his good intentions, though, and hell paved so prettily, and all that.
Is Minoth going to hell? Do Blades go to hell? Do humans? All manner of stonework patterns already detailed, as a matter of fact. By his Driver's logic (that of the first? the original? the arbiter? the impassive? the impasse?), he's already there. Heh. Ain't that cute. It's so easy to fall in with the naysayers. Easier than...easier than this.
Minoth climbs back down the hill again, lies back in place with his armor tugged ruthlessly over every possible crecipice of invitation once more. I'm closed. Closed for business, and closed for pleasure. Addam chokes on his snore, and something jerks on Minoth's Core. Ah. That's still open.
Jin and Haze have bare hands, the Ice Blade forearms as well; Brighid and Mythra have bare shoulders, the Aegis even legs sometimes; and Aegaeon is so clinical in his flow that it doesn't quite count to observe the darkest navy of his composition and try to suss out whether he's got anything un-shored in his defenses. Hugo is also buttoned-up, but his eyes are deep enough to account for any overall semblance of closure, close-off. Lora's skirt sways in its shortness and there's not a thing off-putting about her.
He tries to be open himself - he can't help but, the way everyone's all over the weapon sharing and the craft exchanging and the calling out of attacks and the gathering of provisions and the fluffy togetherness of it all. Softened, they are, and he is. Like a rock shouldn't be. Sometimes being a rock is a good thing. Sometimes it's safe. Safer, anyway.
They reach the capital in due force and fortitude, and it's harder to hurt, to want to hurt, here. It's a beautiful place, and Addam's set so beautifully in it, even as Zettar snarls at him and Khanoro condescends without appearing to and Minoth watches like a peon from the plaza. What good are you, as Addam's Blade, if you can't even stand behind him? Can't even stand behind him.
The second time, he does, but it's only after a failure has forced him to, only after Amalthus has whisked away, only after Malos had caught them standing apart. Malos doesn't need a Driver and he's stronger for it. He came from Amalthus, too. Why can't Minoth be that way? Why do you need him? He doesn't need you. Yes he does.
There is one night, exactly one, when Addam slips out of his own bed in the inn and crosses over to Minoth's place of reposement, idiotic braid dangling over splayed strands of just as idiotic ponytail, and he whispers something soft and desperate, and Minoth blinks himself awake and his lips twist up and his fear invests his eyes something calamitous, and Addam's hand closes over his, and Minoth thinks, why now? Why this?
He's been caught with his armor off in more ways than one, and Addam smiles wanly like he didn't just make dead men walking out of the both of them as he wriggles into the space Minoth leaves - and isn't that the Blade's job? one like this Flesh Eater, anyway - and breathes his teary little shudders into the dark curve of Minoth's deltoids.
What is this, my prince? It's weakness. Minoth's hand goes stiffly over the too-broad torso and catches on the heaving corporeality with a damning jolt. Like mutualized scaffolding built of balsa, they're not going to be supporting anything this way, not either of them and certainly not both. He hates it. He hates Addam. Oh, no, he doesn't. He never could.
Suddenly their time in Auresco is a futile blink, the fluff a cotton wisp, because now he has to be a rock as two of their number have become those anti-shiny trinkets again and a third so gruesomely seems like she wants to. (See, a fourth does too, but he can't. Not anymore. Not ever.) No time for the thoughts to settle, no time for the anger to boil over, no time for anything at this dread and dreaded point. Regret, of course, is all that there is left.
Minoth doesn't look back, doesn't even spare a second thought to that whole other branch of the mess that kept itself, herself and whatever the gender of the other, balled up and dolled up all too neatly, away at the homestead. Not for another three hundred years does he think about it, and then they're all dead.
Cruel time. He's got it, now. He had it, then. He wasted it, in between. Wasted it digging in the dirt. Ground yourself? No, please don't. Keeping your head in the clouds, apparently, will save you all the trouble.
Needed to do a wide-angle broad-strokes character-study-type deal for these guys, so there you have it. It wasn't meant to be half this angsty, and I truly mean that this time - I almost wish I could have left that untagged, though. Perhaps this reflects a little more of how I feel about this pairing from a meta stance. No, it's not something that needs to exist, and it didn't and doesn't in canon, in all honesty, but it's art that I have in my head, and now you have it. I do hope you enjoyed. <3