Family Snapshot

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"I'm sorry," said Lora. "When did this become a group thing?"

When indeed? It had started as just her, and then Jin had joined up in a way not at all martial or militant (more maternal, even), and then many years later there had been Haze...but then, it, they, came all at once. Mikhail, then Addam and Mythra, then Milton by the slightest separation, then Brighid, Hugo and Aegaeon, and finally Minoth.

So you're a little late in asking, Lora. The group was more or less completed just the prior evening, but it's been growing all the while.

Once Teo's snapped the cheesy first pic, Haze, the most vocal proponent, targets Minoth, the most vocal opponent, wriggling past Mythra to bring the cowboy and associated prince to the foreground. "Come on, Master Minoth, you're one of us now! You're part of the family!"

So she jerks the two of them to the center with one arm hooked around each of their elbows (how she had separated Addam's arm from Minoth's shoulders remains a mystery), and Addam of course takes to the notion and setting like a fish, while Minoth stands there struggling not to roll his neck and shoulders along with his eyes - it would upset the delicate balance, you see, but his internal version of the same has already been upset, so there's not much for it.

After Haze is satisfied with her due diligence of motive cheering, she pulls Mythra in to replace her: "You guys are a team! Don't you want to remember that?" And Lora, for all her mild disappointment just a few minutes earlier, is looking on with arms crossed and expression approving. Great. A team. Of course she believes it. It's all down to her that they even are, really - the individual trios, or the eleven of them as a whole.

Suddenly finding himself with nothing to do with his arms, the both of which suddenly feel altogether too long and heavy, Minoth slings one over the top of Mythra's head, careful not to poke into (rather crush, really) the diadem or the feathers on her headband. She's got her arms crossed too, but she'd been doing that long since before his elbow poked into the center of her cranium and his hand knocked her earring off kilter, so that's no grand revelation. If Addam's disappointed that he can't fling his own exuberant appendage around Minoth's collar to forcibly ground the Flesh Eater again, he doesn't show it.

He doesn't show it. Just stands awkwardly, though still cheerily, off to the side, as if it's just a Minoth-Mythra duo portrait and he, the failure of a Driver, for both of them, really, shouldn't try to come any closer. If Minoth hadn't enacted his anti-trademark lazy cowboy move, they'd all still be standing wholly separate. Disparate.

Now, Aegaeon and Brighid could stand behind Hugo just the same and not come within a centimeter of his personal space, but they'd still quite obviously be a unit. Haze would never stand so disconnected from Lora, and Jin could never extricate himself from his long-overarching protective duty for more than a second, so they'd always look banded together. Even Mikhail, skinny and shrimpy, looks like he belongs. And Architect, good for him. He's probably never looked like it before.

Minoth hasn't either. Because of his scar, because of his Core Crystal, because of his hair, because of his armor...we've been over and done with it before. He hasn't. Addam hasn't, because of his eyes and perhaps also his hair. Mythra hasn't, because of her Core and because she looks like she could never earn even the slightest, faintest of a scar on her pristine Blade body. Once again, they're the subtroupe of misfits. The picture would show that. Worth a thousand words, it always would, no matter how they stood together.

But they're eleven, that's right, and so once the vaguely awkward Team Addam photo-op has come to pass, Milton barges in to shove Mythra out of the way (Minoth sidesteps gratefully out of frame for real this time, if not for good) and stand proudly in front of Addam, whose hands go just as proudly to his shoulders (and what a relief that is). Look what a fine young man he is, now! Three years of traveling will do a lot for your character, and the other seven before likely made no detraction thereof.

Then Milton insists on one of just him and Mikhail, the latter of whom is not-so-gently nudged to really smile this time, won't you Mik? That's after Lora slips in to stand by Addam, the kids' guardians, more or less, and so the efficiency of swapping in and out (haha, isn't that just topical) gets a little mangled, because of course they can't forget Hugo. One, two, three, the Drivers, sibling-like, stand in a triangle, then in a line, then in a circle, and they laugh and they cheer and they forget their failings, for a moment. For the moment.

Whatever you do, do it for the moment. Aegaeon, relax. You should be open to new experiences, and this isn't even one. Brighid isn't exactly assimilated herself, after all, so Jin bites back a smile as he clears the staging area and corrals the Jewel and the Aegis to stand together and be memorialized. Makes it sound like they're dead, doesn't it? But maybe they don't want to be immortalized, exactly. Not like this. They stand back to back, arms crossed with the unfortunately closed-off mood of the entire affair so far, but crane necks, if not eyes, back and around to get bearing on their rival. And that's better, isn't it? There's a story in that.

There's always a story. Haze poses with Addam and Aegaeon, all three endeared; Jin comes to replace her as what one might term the third father figure of the group; Lora, Haze, Mythra, and Brighid giggle (really!) through a trite but true (we won't say tried and true, because it hasn't been, yet) "girl power" stance; Mikhail, Milton, Mythra, and Minoth bond over being the most m-agnificent of them all - this collection Minoth's idea, and bless him for it; Hugo stands with Mikhail and Milton, just the slightest amount taller (whether that's down to posture or predetermination, one cannot say); Jin and Aegaeon and Minoth, the stoic sorts, and then Aegaeon and Brighid, new yet familiar experiences indeed...

Yes, there's always a story. We couldn't loop through the vennish diagram this many unique and heartfelt ways if they weren't family (yes, without the article), if there weren't all these tiny beautiful connections to be harvested out of the day's fabric and framework. Minoth, always Minoth, realizes this, and if he has to take it to heart by force, then so be it.

"Addam," he starts uncertainly - which is to say, only Addam would ever notice the minisculest tremor vibrating through the undercurrent of his voice, and ain't that a pretty pickle. "You wanna try that first one again?"

It wasn't even the first, but of course Addam knows what he means. "Love to," he responds gamely. And only Minoth would ever notice the golden gratitude coating every inch of his tone. Minoth still hangs his arm over Mythra's face, but by now she's warmed up to it and even somehow manages to get him to put out his other elbow for her to prop hers on. Addam, suddenly lost once again, waffles for a bit before somewhat reluctantly turning his back and mirroring Minoth; Mythra obliges in kind.

See, Addam? You've got to concede, a little bit. You've got to trust what's coming from the ether and its associates. Nothing could tear us apart, now. So it's all okay. Or rather, it all will be, in the end. Won't it?

One by one by one by two by three by four by nine by eleven by the whole damn kingdom of Torna seeming to smile on their silly little day, and Lora realizes, what would I want with a picture of just me and Jin? Jin and I will always be together, so there's not much use in that. He'll always be my same Jin, he'll never change. And me? I have to keep changing and improving, there is no other way. It's not as if this moment is such a baseline.

But they take one anyway - two, even, one with the mask and one without, because of course Teo's not bothered about it, he'd already expressed that much more than effusively enough - and Lora does her best to stand straight and proud, no hand propped at her hip to signal the slight discomfort of, gosh, all these people. Why should she be uncomfortable? They're family, aren't they? They all belong together.

They won't all always stay together, though. She knows that, they all do, deep in the shadowier parts of their hearts. They just...never could have expected how horribly, how fatally, it would all fall apart.

Now, in the end, Jin took the group picture, but Minoth took the individual shots, just after they were printed. Going to write some vignettes, he said. About you all.

(About us. About the reason I'll still here, and not with Amalthus, or Malos, or off alone by myself with my whereabouts summarily unknowable.)

He never finished them, though. A personal project like that was well suited to flagging behind other, more topical pieces: a pastiche on Lora's knighting; a stinging satire about the Quaestor's ascension and then again about his descension, his corruption; a heartwarming tale of the community spirit that washed over Auresco even and then especially in the wake of destruction.

Then, the subjects themselves flagged away. Abruptly, not really in any fashion of one by one that could matter, but the notion was one of decay nonetheless. Soon enough, Minoth couldn't look at the stack of snapshots tucked into the foreleaves of his primary notebook without choking a little on something that tasted half like bile, half like nostalgia as it rose in his throat.

So as Jin burned the group, Minoth burned the individuals. One by one, with an old Tornan lighter, he went from corner to corner, and watched the paper curl. He singed his gloves on a fair few of them as he crumpled them in his fist - can you guess which? I think you can.

A family is made up of many interwoven parts. You can't forget your brothers and your sisters. You can't erase their impacts on the world, because every step you take is emblazoned with their influence. You're still alive, so what you call "the world" is actually only your world, when you get down to it. You don't shape the path you take, but the path you take shapes you.

There's no time to try again. Not really. And yet, put another way...

You can't let go of your past. (You can't get it to let go of you.) But you can try.