the shops that need aid are those that haven't paid

---

Some uncountable number of years had passed before Jin brought it up.

It had been on his mind, heavy and lethargic, ever since the first time he heard of the attacks on Coeia - somewhere around 3560? No, that was too early. But it didn't matter. It had been at least a century, now. He burnt the journal, and though the events of that dread year 3564 were themselves burned powerfully bright across his unforgetting memory, the petty details of the things that had started to bring true unhappiness across his path, that of Lora and Haze too, were somehow the only things he was able to forget.

Yes, forgetting was now less a curse and more an unobtainable, unattainable, luxury. A luxury not exactly flavored for the tastes of mercenaries, but then again exactly so. They'd pass through a settlement closer to the heart of civilization than was their normal predilection, and Jin would attract dark looks for his genial humanoid appearance juxtaposed against the stone wall of the mask and the gravelly chill of his voice, the overall guardedness that he exuded.

Lora would frown, just a touch, but focus more on smiling away their disease than internalizing the offense. "Don't worry about it," she'd say. "They just don't know you like I do." And by the time they'd left the market stall with a rare spoiling purchase of Rhogul eggs not seized warm from the empty, unguarded nest, or even Ruska Flour imported from Gormott to thicken their evening stew beyond the empty pale of broth, Jin would indeed have forgotten about it.

Would have forgotten the niggling sting of being a Blade, of being requisitioned to subservience's role, of being the secondary feature in a world where the primary thing to notice was the Titans, the artefacted forms of Blades. The ground beneath your feet? Yes, and you walk all over us. All of you.

Lora didn't think that, of course. Hadn't thought that. Hadn't done that. But Lora's reassuring little smile, shaky itself, couldn't do a quantifiable anything in the face of an entire universe pitted against his kind. She'd only been a girl and for all her mustered-up courage and strappingness she was still...only a girl.

Still full of flaws, still porous where he made to be irresolute iron. Haze was made in much the same of her image, if he was in fact to follow the theory that not only were Blades universally tethered to Drivers, they sometimes based their whole being upon the humane example, in formative bondage.

Go figure. Just like Malos had said, it was inexplicable, inescapable. It wasn't just drunkards and thieves who awakened Blades as trinkets to enact that anti-revelatory desecration of their divine flame of life. Forged in what fire were Blades and their blades? That very blaze, of course. Of course. Go figure. Malos was right.

Malos was right. Malos was born to be right. Malos was forged in truth and complexity, in logic and action, Malos was not forged in hell. Malos was not the devil.

So why was he named so?

Mythra, angel-like and seemingly just as heaven-sent as Amalthus would have ever bothered to specify, deserved her name, on the surface. Once Jin had met her, after all, he'd found that she was no goddess in word or deed. There wasn't all that much that separated her from Malos, barring a healthy handful of centimeters from peak to crown. But still, when she rose up to call a blast of piercing, searing light from Siren, he could appreciate, at least aesthetically, that her name made sense.

(And Pyra's, of course, was so cutely patterned after it, perhaps after Lora's as well, but feminine names ending in an -a were nothing new, and it was obvious that as Addam gave the weak whisper, the barest thing he could drum up to resemble a respectful introduction...it was obvious that he didn't perceive it as anything more or deeper than that.)

Jin liked things to make sense. He liked to eliminate threats with the minimum violence, the minimum bloodshed, possible, and aligning facts and the figuring of the world was a particularly sensible way of doing that, he found.

Malos also liked things to make sense. He just...made his sense in a manner much more hands-on than Jin would ever prefer to.

The mark of evil is not dirty, bloody hands. There Amalthus: someone whose hands had never been bloody in his life (we can sit and consider whether or not Minoth told the tale of the bandits' insufferability, but it is inconsequential, perhaps immaterial) but whom had nonetheless driven forth all of the matteringest evil their world had ever seen.

Driven. Driver. Back, and forth.

"We've both killed. Both taken so many lives. Malos."

The way it was most intuitive for Jin to speak his name was something shallow, superficial, cast like a ball that wouldn't bounce down a long, cold, gray hallway. He didn't say Lora's name like that. Yes, the frost had edged on and around, but Lora's name was still warm whenever it passed over his tongue, whenever it rang through the empty artifices of his mind.

Even as she was frozen. Even as she was frozen.

"You're choosing now to bring that up? I would've thought you'd have been on about this back in that stinking alleyway in Mor Ardain."

As if he'd been in any state to argue then. Downtrodden in purest impure physical example, he had been. He deserved dirty looks from all the humans for falling so low, for taking his Driver's heart and abandoning the fierce pulse of her soul.

The Monoceros, in turn, was entirely too clean - antiseptic, even. Warship though it was, they sat in the mess hall listening to Mikhail make clangor in the control room and intoned exactly none of that intended conflict.

Where was the soul?

Jin knit his fingers together and pressed the tips deep into the ridges between his knuckles and tendons. Gauntlets off, gauntlet about to be thrown down. Only they hadn't been half that confrontational since the Soaring Rostrum. Every occasion for argument since had petered out into fear, hesitation, reluctance. Jin was living on borrowed, stolen, time, and Malos was living on borrowed patience. It was all the same, in the end.

Malos watched him stew, elbow slung up on the table with his wrist marking the drop-off from the flat plane. His other elbow was propped a lever arm as thumb and index found purchase under his jaw and along his temple. Almost studious, he looked.

"I've been thinking about this for a long time. Why you're named the way you are."

Rather than snap or bluster, lean back and cross his arms, Malos simply cocked his head, and his operative hand followed to facilitate. "Why should it be any more important than why you're named the way you are? I mean, what kind of a name is Jin? If it wasn't yours, I wouldn't care in the least."

Well, the kind of a name that Jin was was the name of a quiet, storied hero. Jin? You don't mean from Torna? Obviously from Torna. There is no other. Paragon.

And Malos wasn't quiet.

"Your name has...linguistic significance," Jin mused vaguely, fighting the urge to grasp at Malos's visible hand as an anchor point. "You must know that."

"I...I know," Malos replied, and though the faltering was incredibly telling, he managed to remain just as vague if not more. "It means 'bad', it means I'm the scary monster who comes in the night and kills you. Ha."

"Ha?" Jin repeated back, tone dry as mud.

"That's your job, now. I don't really do much of the killing. I guess that's how you tied me."

My job. It was once quite literally your job, you took it so seriously even as you made a boredom-staving game out of it. Have I become like you? Is that why we are together, now, because we are the same? Because the imprint cast?

"So don't you want a new name?"

Malos looked away. Jin watched the arch of his jaw, watched the jugular pop. That is what a killer watches, is it not?

Perhaps that is what a lover watches. Jin watched Malos listen for Mikhail more intensely, then. Such an idle thing. Such a peaceful thing.

You'd never done anything like it before. Is that why I love you?

Eventually, the wayward dopoint returned. "Isn't that cheating? You didn't get to have a new name. You didn't even get to have a new brain. So why should I get one?"

Jin scrawled this crucial confession down like a schoolboy's notes, and then he set to simplifying. What can you conclude, from this? Please show your work.

(Jin does now still fear forgetting, later. He covets the eidetic. Malos is one.)

Malos is a Blade, only Malos isn't really a Blade. You are a Blade, only you aren't really a Blade. If Malos is a Blade, he dies when his Driver dies and receives a clean slate upon which to stack new memories once he returns to the living. If he returns to the living. If you are a Blade, the very same.

(Who even cares about that identity anymore? The Architect doesn't, and yet he does. You don't, and yet you do. So it matters. You can't forget. You mustn't forget. Lora is frozen. You mustn't forget.)

But neither of you are really Blades. Neither is Mikhail, either.

And so, everything that foundates, inflects, and even pimples the Dark Aegis's dread history should belong to him, them, now as ever. He does not forfeit his past even as he forfeits his future, his supposed destiny. You did. Why shouldn't he? In the very same way, that is.

"You're not...bad to me, Malos." Jin attempted to round out, to deepen, the "o" this time as he said it. It seemed more human, more real, to do it that way.

Jin wasn't a very real, very human name, he didn't feel. Once when he was much, much younger, he'd mumbled something of the same, and Lora had stopped their hand-holding (this for comfort as much as for safety) trek to turn her biggest tweenaged gap-toothed grin up at him and say, "Well, I like it. I think it fits you. Right? So I like you very much."

A bit of circular logic. Malos didn't like to talk in circles.

"Okay, so? I knew that."

"You didn't," Jin prodded. "You don't know everything."

Malos snorted out a breathy, lips-parted smirk. "Yeah, sure. I don't know everything. Not anymore." Very adamant that he once did. It made sense, after all, to try to reclaim the positive out of what horror, even that eldritch, his name could portend. "But I know you."

"Me?" Jin offered, catching on to the thread of smugness as perhaps more a lifeline than he'd ever, ever intended.

"You." Grooves, ditches, were still digging. Malos pulled them to safety. "I'm not bad to you, and you're not bad to me. But you're bad to yourself. You act it, and you feel it."

"And you?"

"And me."

Circular logic, implicitous of the same.

"Why do you care what my name means, anyway? I already know you love me when you say it."

It was not romance, it was not a dinner date at the cafeteria bench, it was not anything so simple as that. If Jin hadn't lived this long, he might not have been able to even start to comprehend it. Sometimes he feared they'd reach the end of it all before he could.

For now, the bravado could serve. You pretend to be what you want to achieve. You pretend you know something when you want it to make sense. "And I know you."