I Don't Think So | Rose's Fics

Teen And Up Audiences | No Archive Warnings Apply | Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Video Game)

Torna: The Golden Country DLC, Not Canon Compliant - Torna: The Golden Country, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Established Relationship, Developing Relationship, Polyamory

Blades were merely the tools. Merely the tools. Blades didn't need saving, right? Blades didn't need saving because their plight was already assured. Blades unborn, Blades never babies like that precious child he was too late to save. How could they be saved from the very nature of their existence? ...Ah. And how could humans from theirs?

Chapters

Chapter 01: Not On My Watch - Minoth steals the crystals [2021-06-17]
Chapter 02: You Alright In There? - Minoth and Malos talk [2021-06-18]
Chapter 03: Easy Does It Now - Addam comes home [2021-06-20]
Chapter 04: That's A Poor Attempt - Minoth and Malos bond [2021-06-23]
Chapter 05: Let Me Follow Through - Minoth and Malos bond further [2021-06-24]
Chapter 06: That's The Way To Do It - Addam and Minoth make up [2021-07-05]
Chapter 07: Don't Lose Focus - Flora awakens Mythra [2021-08-17]
Chapter 08: No Half Measures - The group meets with Amalthus [YYYY-MM-DD]
Chapter 09: Whatever You Say - Epilogue [YYYY-MM-DD]

Minoth was a Blade. Despite the fact that he couldn't remember how long it had been since he'd felt any sort of connection with that identity - even before the...before - he was a Blade. An odd thing, because he felt, at least privately, that he was the sort of person who should have had a last name. Blades never had those, though. Who did, come to think of it (Amalthus didn't, you see)?

There was Addam Origo, Hugo Ardanach, Oren Sol Esteriole...all monarchs - and they were such that they didn't even need them! No tradition of the royal we and subsumement of assimilation was to be found here, apparently. Well, but playwrights could be mononymic too. Just...not with a name like Minoth.

Still, Minoth was a Blade. When he stood on that cliff on Coeia and watched his Driver complete his descent into nihilism, to say nothing of true madness, the man spoke of hell on earth and a desperate, long-foregone hope that the Architect would save them. Humans, he must have meant, because humans were the ones that perpetuated the war and the atrocities, humans were the ones that fought and pillaged.

Minoth was a Blade, and that meant some good things too. It meant he feared no man nor monster, because his aim was, well, not so much fair true as always deadly accurate, and his knives cut deep and his footwork was a marvel and he was a quiet menace but he was powerful, of course he was. All Blades were, all Blades should be, should they not? His eternal youth and formidable strength were always his greatest assets.

Well, as a Blade, they were. As a...thing that should not exist, his talent became hiding in places he shouldn't be, hearing things he shouldn't hear, writing things that were beyond what should have been his own ken. Because he didn't have either of those, anymore. His mind became his treasure. But wasn't that how it should be, anyway?

When Amalthus went up that great tree, alone and wickedly, pitifully determined, Minoth watched his transport sail to the base with forlorn eyes. The Quaestor was truly just a speck too small to see against its towering yggdrasilidity, and Minoth didn't suffer him the indignity of being watched through binoculars. Eventually, he came back down, of course, looking hollow and worn and now almost pitiable, but with a twisted line gashing his face: a smile, a sickeningly victorious smile.

His...erstwhile experiment had kept healthy distance ever since that day (oh, so praise the incident, in fact), and studied the spoils from afar. Rhadallis was summarily unfazed, only claiming the totality of the experience for the glory of the Praetorium, and let the chips fall in a hopefully advantageous pattern forthwith. It was so horribly wrong.

Because, you see, Minoth, a Blade-not-a-Blade, knew one thing if he had knowledge at all, and that was that Amalthus, the Prime Quaestor of Indol for lack of a last name to add gravity, should not be allowed to awaken any more Blades, come down from the very Tree of Life or not. Whether he would become kindred with those spirits by the exact same token or merely a homologue thereof was immaterial.

The glowing pouch Amalthus kept on his person at all times contained two beguilingly iridescent cross-shaped Core Crystals, and never let them truly glow in sight of him. If Minoth could do one thing to stop the impending, awful storm he feared, it would be this.

Staying out of the gilded spotlight as he did afforded Minoth little opportunity to easily slip into the deepest sanctum chambers, to take the Crystals at night. Then again, if he had to hazard a guess, Amalthus more likely than not slept with the supposed "holy artifacts" of "divine revelation" on his very person. Lithe and lizardous, he was. 'Twould be a challenge indeed to pinch something so dear out of his possession, even for the most skilled of sneak-thieves, of which Minoth was not one.

He took to hanging around Amalthus's office instead, an austere room that had been blithely granted to the Indoline man along with his quaestorship. Of course, someone like Amalthus would never deign to awaken a Blade in their bedroom, because that implied that you were attempting to foster a genuine, positive personal relationship with the shiny blue datanomically-imbued things, and goodness, we couldn't have that, now could we?

It was on one auspicious afternoon, though rainy, that Minoth, from around the corner underneath a sconce, caught Amalthus strolling agitatedly out of his professional chambers, a bleak scowl decorating his woefully smooth features. He was shaking out a wince in his wrist, though he stopped as soon as he came into full view of anyone who might be around. He went out, and Minoth went in - don't mind if I do, in fact.

The purple Core was on full display, shimmering with phantom malevolence. The pouch where its sister Crystal lay was slumped carelessly behind it atop some packet of doctrine or other that Amalthus was doubtless trying to pawn off on Rhadallis, or, failing that, Baltrich - failing that, nothing, but that was a foregone conclusion, so really Minoth would probably just take it to Baltrich himself for an afternoon of shared ridicule. Oh, he didn't like the Magister, far from it, but they could be companionable if they so chose, especially if aided by a common interest - certainly far more companionable and common than Amalthus ever was with anybody.

Minoth didn't know why he'd termed the green Core as a sister, or why Amalthus had chosen the purple one. Both preened power from within and without, one that could be equally protective as destructive if you'd only let it. It wasn't as if many Indoline spared a thought to their favorite color, or favorite anything, besides chapter of the bible, probably (if those were even genuine, which they probably weren't).

Ah, but Minoth got lost in thought far too easily. Why was he bothering to reminisce on Amalthus's motivations, on the culture of the blue-skinned monks that he'd never fit in with and never would, was at this very moment planning to steal - literally - away from in suavage and style? A violent violet flash distracted him from his distraction just then.

The Core was no longer a Core, in fact, but a person. "Ah, shit," Minoth whispered to himself, and the newly-awakened Blade, clad in bulky, foreboding armor, heard him.

"You got a problem, cowboy?" he asked, looking him up and down with an appraising and unimpressed eye.

"You're bonded to him now, aren't you," Minoth offered feebly, subconsciously knowing that the Aegis Blade would know exactly who he meant.

He snorted. "Nah, I just liked to pretend to wake up to fake him out - he's as much of a bitch as I thought, right?"

"'Bitch' doesn't half do him the bitter, bitter justice he deserves."

"Nice," the other Blade pronounced with a grimace. "Went too far this time, though...now I'm out the Crystal."

"So you are..." Minoth mused. "You've got a name?"

He thought for only the merest half a second before replying. "Malos." Minoth was taken aback. "Why?" "Why? The fuck? What's your name, you bastard? Asking me why my name is..."

"My name's Minoth," he answered the last question quietly. "I don't know why it is and I'll never know why, but your name...it means 'bad' through and through. I just couldn't possibly think where you might have gotten it from except from him."

"And if I got it from him, I'm more or less stuck here, is what you're saying."

Minoth shrugged. "Would be true of most Blades. I got fucked up, so I don't have to stay. You think he's two for two on bad pulls?"

Malos gave a wily grin, eyebrows arched in sharp dichotomy. "Maybe so, cowboy. But, then again..."

"You taking me out of here assumes two things: A, this guy really is so bad, and B, you're so much better."

Minoth considered this with a pained expression. "Let's just say both of those are subjective, and I'll hope for your eventual consensus."

"Okay..." Malos said slowly, "...okay," and there, he was conceding at last, only it was the last of what? Two minutes? Fuck this adventure already. He was tired and he wanted to retreat back into the Crystal - it seemed much more advantageously shaped for containing a humanoid body than most Cores, anyway. And how did he know that? How did he know it, indeed.

"So, where are we going?"

"Torna," Minoth answered smugly. "Ever heard of it?"

"Dragon Titan, sort of a sandy-grassy biome type of deal, used to go all super saiyan in times of old?"

"That's the one - and you're going to tell me just how you knew all that later. Much, much later..."

"Whoa there," Malos called, arresting the leather-covered shoulder as it lunged forward with a single powerful hand. "What's there for you, us, anyway? I get that our Driver - or whatever - is a dickhead, but what's the big deal?"

"Malos," Minoth started, turning around and mirroring hands clasped over acromions, "I honestly think it will rot your brain."

Malos snorted, again. "Okay, Dad. So Torna?"

"Torna. I've got, ah, a good friend who lives there." The fond smile that blossomed on Minoth's face as he said so portended much more than just good friendship, but Malos, uncharacteristic for even his nascent self, didn't pry. Yet.

They hitched a mum's-the-word Tornan craft on a sales run, having handily exited the sanctum during the ubiquitous post-lunch stupor. Minoth had presented Malos with a spare poncho, which he begrudgingly donned, before they scooped up the other Crystal and entered the thin-though-glistening sunlight of the day (rain miraculously, metaphorically cleared), and the disguise served them both perfectly well for all of the week-long journey to Aletta Harbor.

After Minoth had penned down any lingering thoughts from their first meeting and Malos had assessed all of his armor and physical prowess (he won at arm wrestling out of sheer strength, but Minoth still beat him sometimes with a bit of clever mindplay that Malos soon learned how to ape flawlessly, and then the advantages were gone), they took turns gazing out over the Cloud Sea and falling asleep with head on each other's shoulder, or chest, or whichever.

Indol's metaphysical spire somehow weighed heavily on Malos's heart despite his so dearly brief existence there, and it was just as Minoth had expected: kindredness was one hell of a quick-drying bond, even or perhaps especially between Blades. This bond held fast, while the one Amalthus had tried to forge, if you could call it that, left only haggardizing effects in its latent half-hearted tackiness.

They didn't do much standing up the whole time, so rolling over onto Torna's shores didn't come with much sea-leg-shaking. It was the air that was remarkably different, not from that of the deck of the Titan ship but from that of Indol - the vatican-like place had a distinctly stale taste, like uncut leaves of a book that nobody had ever cared to read. Malos decided to break the silence with a crass comment, as ever.

"Oh, this is your boyfriend's house? Pretty shabby - still don't understand why we had to leave Indol in such a rush. Yeah, it was gaudy, but it was still nice digs."

Ignoring Malos's fruitless kvetching, Minoth strode up the narrow stone steps of the garrison (even when not in wartime, of course it was built for a purpose) and clanged the knocker with ease.

A Tornan soldier in inscrutable gray-gold helmet answered the call, and Minoth gave a friendly, if slightly boisterous, knuckle-knock at the headpiece. "Hey, Vez, anyone home?"

"Master Minoth! Good to see you. Yes, Lord Addam and Lady Flora are at home."

Minoth shoved the armored head now. "I meant you, you clown! Nice to see you too - and I hope your grandmother's well." The man known as Vez ducked his head in obliging thanks as he let and led them in.

"My prince? You in there?" Minoth called out to the empty hallway. No answer, but a petite woman in lavender dress and mahogany plaits soon emerged from a room on the right side.

"Not today, Minoth," she said, shaking her head and setting the plaits asway. "He's away on Gormott. Vez has been getting a little turned around lately - his grandmother's really not doing so well," she added in a low whisper.

Minoth waved an affable, conversational hand of his own. "He'll be back soon, though?"

"Tomorrow, should be," she provided agreeably.

"Okay then. Flora, this is Malos. My first hope is that I've just saved him - and myself, finally - from our favorite Quaestor's blue-tinged clutches, and my second hope is that we can stay here in the interim while we figure things out."

"'In the interim,'" Flora mocked him sweetly, perhaps a little snidely. "You're silly, Minoth - of course you can stay, like we've been very obviously trying to convince you to do for years. And Malos, you're welcome too, of course," she said, giving a half-curtsey in his direction.

"Thanks," Malos muttered, unsure exactly what to do with the courtesy. After Flora stepped away, he regained some of his swagger.

"Oh, your boyfriend has a girlfriend! That's a shame for you, isn't it?"

Minoth shook his head, rolling his eyes. "Flora! Come back in here, I forgot something." "Oh?"

Curving a careful hand around and under the right side of her jaw once she had stepped back in, he pulled her close for a quick kiss, then added, "Just a little thing."

When she had sashayed contentedly out once more, Minoth turned back to Malos and pointed a tired finger into his face - thank the Architect it was only across, and not up (or down, which somehow seemed worse). "Now you shut the hell up, okay?" Shockingly, Malos did as bid.

Left standing directionless in the manor hallway after they'd made their greetings, Malos and Minoth had only each other to turn to, and no other immediately apparent goal. Well, but not that Minoth would let him know that - just another part of his at-times-all-consuming bravado, and likely yet another similarity they shared.

So, with that in mind, he dragged Malos by the four-pauldroned arm out to the moor to breathe in the fresh air and take in the flora, fauna, forta, et cetera. Just what every growing boy needs, after all.

"You ever milked an Armu, Malos?" Farm work, in fact, could do wonders for the soul, but Malos apparently wasn't of the mind to accept such a sage truth.

"What kind of a stupid question is that? I'm only a week old, and they don't have cows on Indol, that's for damn sure."

Minoth nodded knowingly. "Naturally they don't - I'm teaching you new words. That question was rhetorical."

Privately, of course, Minoth knew that it was a poor example of one, and he also winced at the way he was unintentionally further carrying out the "Okay, Dad" relationship that Malos had set up. They were, for all how odd the term sounded, brethren - oh, say brothers-in-arms, that's better, and even being nine years older by awakening standards didn't quite merit the dubbing of paternal status.

Even if Minoth was a little older than Malos by pure dint of manifestation's eternal age in appearance, it didn't do. He already hated the power dynamic that came between Drivers and Blades enough, but he wasn't even Malos's Driver and he was already feeling it. It was, in a word (or two, if you must nitpick), colossally depressing.

As ever, Malos saved him from thinking too hard about it - if Minoth had to wager, his guess would be that the mainline purpose of Malos's snark was to deflect away from his own deeper machinations before they swallowed him whole. Rather alike, then, they were, once again.

Regardless, the banter: "What is this guy, a farmer?" A good guess, even though the Armus were about the only thing vaguely domestically agrarian present on Wrackham.

"He'd like to be, if he wasn't a begrudgingly titled Tornan noble." Minoth didn't add the crucial bit about "bastard son of the king, who only has one, and fourth in line to the throne unless he's assassinated by his uncle out of sheer spite, and so it's begrudging being done all round," because how did you explain something like that, each peculiar nuance and all?

Even if it wasn't half so complicated as his own story, with all the mental and physical sturm and drang that came with it, it was a far cry from normal things that normal people got up to. That made it okay, then, he supposed, because the two of them weren't normal in the least, but still weird.

Look at him, woolgathering again. That was Malos's cue, in fact, as he took in the opportunity for ever-so-slightly-mocking amusement. "Oh, so that 'my prince' bit wasn't just a joke?"

Again, Minoth felt pitifully small despite their approximately equal heights. He stowed the feeling with an empty threat. "No joke, Malos, and if you ever give me lip about it I'll-"

"You'll what?" Malos prompted, hand on hip as a more open, less defensive stance than crossing his arms. Minoth conceded the advantage with impunity despite himself.

"You're right, I couldn't think of anything. Anyway, the Armus. Don't tell Flora, but that's part of the reason I never did come out here to stay. I might be good at herding cattle, but I wouldn't want to be married to it."

Malos snickered at this last. "What?" "Oh, nothing. Just-- You? Married? You're not half as tough as you wanna seem."

"Kitchen's in there, Malos," Minoth replied dryly, pointing over his shoulder at the manor.

"Huh?" "Save your pots and kettles."

"Fine, fine, they're saved, asshole," Malos said with a snort. "You really got jokes, huh?"

"I like to think so. You have too, don't you worry. I'll get them out of you someday."

Detecting the barest wry tone, Malos narrowed his eyes playfully in response. "Are you saying I'm not funny the way I am now?"

Minoth smiled, closing his own eyes to reflect, but didn't answer before changing the subject. "Now that we're off of public transportation, we should really get down to more brass tacks."

"Why? Whatcha wanna know?" Not that he was wrong, of course. It would have been suicide to whisper conspiratorially about stolen Blades and bitchass Drivers and the like while attempting to disguise themselves as humble traveling salesmen without a wile in the world.

"Why, I'd like to know what you know. You don't expect me to pick up a traveling companion with such obviously awe-inspiring quantities of knowledge and such a dashing personality with which to comport them and just take it at face value, do you?"

Malos crossed his arms and rearranged the expression of his eyes to match. "Minoth...are you flirting with me?"

The Flesh Eater stiffened a touch, signaling that he wasn't quite at ease with the choice of action himself, but lifted his eyebrows in agreement nonetheless. "If you don't mind, yes. Better that than the alternative, I think."

"The alternative?"

"Lording what I've done for you, or with you, over you. Even just there it sounded bad. But there's something to start with. I doubt many Blades, even those that have matured to rarity, know what flirting is when first awakened."

After all, some human princes didn't know and couldn't pick up on the concept even after being virtually immersed in it for the longest time. Such a reality wasn't exactly to their credit, on either count where it had turned out.

"Hang on a minute there, cowboy," Malos interjected. "Same goes for you - I don't think any of those Indoline were teaching you how to be a pickup artist."

"I get around," Minoth replied smoothly, arching a jagged eyebrow in sharp contrast. "Now stop making it about me! How do you even know what Indoline are? The only ones you saw were those we walked surreptitiously past in the plaza. How would you know that they've got such dull, dry personalities - the absence of them, really - so easily?"

"I guess that's the one thing I don't know: how I know it all. I just know that I have the data for all life in my Core, and that I was conscious enough to see that the man who was trying to awaken me was surely going to abuse it. The other Crystal that he brought down with me...that Blade's powerful too. She needs to be protected just as much as I do. Or feared, maybe."

"So I was right?" Minoth mused with interest. "She is a she?"

"Well, as far as I know," Malos said, shrugging. "Don't know too much else about her, but we were made to be partners, I think."

"Very intriguing. Are you keen to find out more?" The question was accompanied by a knowing tap on a pouch tucked just behind Minoth's belt.

"...maybe. Gotta figure out what's going on with my own self, first. Come on, tell me about those cows, and I'll let you pick my brain."

The exchange was entirely agreeable, and so they spent the rest of the day in just such a fashion. After late dinner of Ruska Dumpling Soup and Lucky Colorful Salad, because of course Flora had remembered Minoth's favorite, the Flesh Eater ushered his charge into the main hallway of the next floor down.

"Well, in you go," he said, perhaps a little too unceremoniously. "There are guest rooms all along here, pick whichever one you want."

"And where will you be?" asked Malos, trying to keep a nonchalant tone.

"Oh, I don't know," Minoth drawled just as aimlessly. "Maybe here, maybe there, maybe with Flora, maybe not."

"Make it here." "Here? Where's here?"

Malos all but threw his hands in the air at the stupid question. "For crying out loud, Minoth, I'm one fucking week old. Give me a break if I don't want to sleep in yet another unfamiliar place on my own." Despite his best efforts, he felt all too wound up to broach the subject with anything but brute force as a shield.

Minoth, however, responded in a very alternate kind. "Mind telling me a little bit more about those nightmares you've been having?"

At Malos's feral glare, Minoth amended his question. "So I know to hold you back, or hold you down, or whichever. So I know how to help you." Oh. That was...huh.

"It's like...they're like flashes of violence. It comes out of this disdain, like how could I bear to be lying there next to you when you're the way you are, and there are humans out there who don't deserve the air they breathe."

"And do you agree with them?" The offer of psychoanalysis was not entirely unwelcome, Malos supposed.

"Not right after, or even right before, but when they're happening...I'm powerless to think anything else. Makes free will seem like a hell of a sham."

The second statement came with a shudder, which Minoth caught in stride. "But you know they're wrong. We're okay, then. That's a relief."

"Not much of one," Malos muttered darkly. "Hmm? How so?"

"Well...what if I hurt you?" The admission was again all too vulnerable.

"You're worried about that?"

"I just said I was, Minoth. There something you know that I don't?"

Minoth took a scoffing breath in and out and in, shaking his head.

"If there is, it's not much, and its share of truth is fast fading. But no, I just meant that if you were truly worried you'd hurt me, you wouldn't ask me to stay with you. You trust me, and I'm grateful for it."

"Well...sure. You're a tough old stallion."

"That's not what you said earlier," Minoth taunted with an arrogant lift of his chin.

"You're not the only one who's allowed to be sarcastic, you know!" Malos returned, shoving his shoulder. Touché. With that in mind, Minoth directed the discussion back on track.

"Let's both not be for a moment, shall we? I'll bet anything on the Cloud Sea or underneath it that those dark urges you're having come from Amalthus - and allow me to specifically note down my unironic frustration at the fact that he's the one who made me the way I am."

"Alright, noted - duly, dully, and otherwise," Malos said, waving the words, words, words away. "Come on, I'm tired."

Tired heart met tired soul, and they picked a room at random in which to bed down. Finally, Malos was able to shuck off countless unforgiving plates of armor, leaving only the black leggings and gray top made of a thick mail mesh underneath (Minoth helped, of course, having a comparatively much simpler process of disrobing). And, true to his word, Minoth lay close, ready to hold and help if ever the need came.

It only came once, thankfully, but both Blades found themselves not wanting to let go, and they ended up remaining there with Minoth inelegantly collapsed on top of Malos when Flora poked in to wake them the next morning. She made no comment as to their sleeping arrangement, only giving Minoth a knowing smile and letting them know where to find victuals for breakfast before heading outside to check on the Deviled Onion and Lucky Lettuce crops.

"What's the plan now, then?" Minoth asked as they perched on the side roof of the manor that early afternoon, having done with their meal and a few chores that Flora was grateful of some extra strength with which to take care thereof. His airy rejoinder was unexpected, and Malos eyed him cagily.

"That another rhetorical question, Minoth? Your plan is to sit up here waiting until Addam gets back, and then you're gonna join him in plowing the fields ad infinitum. Your life's already cut out for you, for whatever reason."

"Doesn't need to be," Minoth offered benignly, drumming his fingers on the wooden slats. "I've as much of an alliegance to you as I have to him, especially if, or maybe even when, those two get around to having kids."

The reminder of their hosts' marital status as it pertained to Minoth, for Malos at least, was nothing if not "Huh. Awkward."

"Indeed. We've got to look out for each other, haven't we? You fancy a trip back to Indol?"

And then, the sudden juxtaposition of sentiments had Malos screwing up his eyes with a mighty effort. "Minoth, you gotta pick a line to toe. Where lies your heart, huh?"

He thrust out ticked fingers as he spoke. "Is it with this Addam, or is it me, or is it Amalthus? You know you wouldn't like it any better than me if this whole thing was just a charity event." For all Malos cared, Minoth could act his father, his brother, his lover, whichever, but being a savior was something he couldn't, wouldn't tolerate.

"Malos, Malos," Minoth practically sing-songed, though he contained the condescending notes with admirable skill, leaving only the affection. "It's nothing like that, nothing at all. I just thought maybe we'd do ol' Blueface a favor and bump him off." As he said this, he flicked the recently rhythmic fingers across the roof to gesture out towards the moor.

Everything with him was a movement, a motive, a way to help set the mood the way he wanted it. Malos found that he didn't mind it, so much, but could definitely imagine more opportunistic men doing much of the same and giving none of the same comforting assuredness. Speaking of...

"Hold on. Which blueface, and which one to bump off?"

"Hey, watch your tone - that could be racially insensitive if you keep it up."

Malos couldn't quite tell if that was meant to be a joke, and the more he thought about it, the less sure he became. "I-- Whatever. Answer my question."

Minoth waved an careless hand to illustrate exactly nothing. "Well, I meant Amalthus in one and the same, but I've no exact quantification on how many favors that would be, and how many side projects we'd take up while we're there."

Malos's face cast over with something only the slightest shade this side of absolute horror. "'Side projects'? What's gotten into you, Minoth? You're not the type to go genocidal, and we both know it - not from my special Aegis knowledge, just because I know you." It wasn't even a lie.

When Minoth didn't respond, Malos grabbed his head by the jaw and made forceful eye contact. Within the ocean blue eyes were pupils shrank up with the drought of something all too precious. Malos nearly started back in his shock.

"Minoth!" Still no answer. His next tactic employed was to lay a hand on either side of Minoth's face and shake, gently at first but more and more aggressive in his ever-growing panic. "Minoth, what the fuck? Answer me!"

Something scarlet flashed below either of their sight lines. Putting a terrified palm to Minoth's Core, Malos immediately had to jerk it away: the hard, glassy surface was burning with unnatural, even preternatural, heat.

What to do? What on earth to do? He wasn't dangerous in this state, it didn't seem, but no one could hope to know what was coursing through the Flesh Eater's mind. If it was anywhere near as gruesome as the last words he'd uttered, something needed to be done about it, and fast.

With a reluctant grimace, Malos summoned the smallest possible flare of darkness ether with which to smother the nonexistent flame. Before he could apply it, Minoth suddenly fell gracelessly prone into his lap.

He looked fragile, spent, but not unconscious. A muted whisper confirmed that hypothesis: "A shame I liked sleeping on top of your chest so much."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Malos snapped as his arms fell haphazardly over Minoth's prostrate form.

"That was the violence, wasn't it? The dark thoughts."

"What are you-- Oh...shit." It was enough to make them both feel like slumping, and Malos did just that, half-roughly half-clumsily repositioning Minoth to lie back on the flat of the roof next to him.

Not only was Malos's Core and Driver link perpetuating a cycle of destructive impulses within, by proximity to another Blade's Crystal, it had propagated them like the deadliest, most invisible virus. It seemed a miracle come down from the Architect their father himself, that Malos hadn't been more overtaken in his own right on any of those seven days and nights past.

"I'll have to get something to cover it with," he murmured, mostly to himself but glad of the company to muse to. Minoth nodded absently, eyes drooped half shut.

"I probably should, too. Been making do with a cloak or a poncho all this time, but I can't keep putting style over stealth." He let the quip age in the air a while before continuing.

"The first part of the thought was mine, though. About dealing with Amalthus firsthand."

"You really hate the guy that much?"

"Well." During the theatrical pause, there was the soft sound of a smirk.

"He's very hateable, isn't he. Self-righteous, and always the first to take matters into his own hands because he doesn't think anyone else is up to the task, unless he doesn't feel like it wholesale, and then you'll never know who it is you're really dealing with."

"Kinda like you, then."

If Malos expected to draw ire by that woefully correct comment, none came. Instead, Minoth was quiet for a long moment. "I meant that in a bad way. But you're right. I try to curb that when I can."

Still, Malos found himself undaunted, even encouraged, by the notion. "So it'll be you and me both, pal. If we got away from him fine enough this far, we'll just have to keep on being fine. Not so bad, is it?"

Now lacking the former lack of discretion that would have allowed him to simply lay his head on Malos's chest once again, Minoth settled for taking his fellow unique Blade's hand as he turned on his side and closed his eyes fully, blocking out the rest of the gray of the hazy day. "No...not so bad at all."

Stargazing is rather pointless if you're laying out in the middle of the day, isn't it? So don't call it stargazing - that would be a sight too romantic anyway. Call it two lonely, tired men of dubious Bladekind composition and unwillingly shared Driver taking a nap together on a roof because once again they're really not quite sure what else to do, instead. The waiting game is only exacerbated when you've also got to wait for the impending knowledge of whatever it is you're waiting for, after all.

They were still laying there, now both well asleep after Malos had watched Minoth's heaving breaths peter out for a good while, when another Tornan craft, this one smaller but more official-looking, docked in the harbor some hours later. Flora stepped out to the garrison entrance to watch its passengers disembark, neatly retying her plaits as she did so.

When she saw who it was about to enter their peaceful domain, she couldn't help but smile fondly: Addam, after a hushed and rushed discussion, scooped up the Gormotti boy he had in tow and made the meager but necessary jump from gangplank to harbor with all valor before hurriedly setting him down again. The inbound travelers then stood still a moment, making appraising looks at each other, seeming to solidify a commitment and say "Well, would you look at that. We're here now."

Flora didn't call out anything to interrupt them, just leant on the railing and observed. Vez, taking a brief respite inside for a drink of water and the like, would surely be surprised at this turn of events - oh, well. She didn't begrudge him an ounce of his worry. It was quite a different thing, being both young and healthy and having no one to take care of who really needed it. As long as nothing was up with the two most recent new occupants of the homestead, all would remain well.

Her first rejoinder to Addam as he and his charge ambled up the steps, the prince giving his princess a quick peck on the cheek in his delight to see her, was not quite so straightforward. "Welcome back, love. You've got a visitor."

"A visitor?" His interest, naturally, was piqued.

"Or perhaps guest is more precise. Or, no...one guest and one long-sought fugitive, only they're both fugitives..."

"Flora!" Breaking out of her lexicographical reverie, she smiled sweetly up at him. "Yes, Addam?"

"Never mind the words, are you trying to tell me that Minoth's here?"

Her smile turned from saccharine to genuine, perhaps even a little flushed. "The very one."

"Well, then I'd better introduce mine. This is Milton, there was a flood in his village and...when did he arrive?"

"Yesterday, Addam. He came from Indol with a friend."

"Okay, right. So yes, this is Milton, his parents both passed away, sadly, so he wanted to come with me-- Did he look the same as ever?"

"Yes, Addam. Very handsome."

"Good, good...so Milton here-" "Lord Addam, she knows my name already!"

Flora was trying to swallow down a smile, but it kept popping back up onto her lips without fail or pause. Addam peered anew at her, sheepish, and she finally let it blossom. "Go, Addam. He missed you too."

Flora and Milton watched Addam gleefully hustle out to the yard with partly amused, partly bemused countenances.

"Is he always like that?"

"Not for me," she said, shaking her head, "but I don't mind. Now, about you."

Milton crossed his arms defensively. "I don't wanna talk about it."

"Well, Milton, neither do I, if that's okay with you. I just think you should wash up before dinner. Will you need any help?"

His shoulders rolled back as if he was about to prop his hands behind his head, but ceased their motion at the last second. "Not me, lady. I can take care of myself!"

And yet, here he was as a foster child, more or less. Flora was nothing if not up to the task. "Good, I thought as much. Here, I'll show you to the washroom." Plan stated, inside they went.

As a much more restless sleeper than Minoth, it was Malos who ended up greeting a haplessly grinning Addam from atop the high wooden wall outside.

"Ahoy up there! Are you the friend?"

"Are you the boyfriend?" Malos called back, a subtle challenge as much as it was a spirited rejoinder.

Addam put a stroking hand to his chin in mock seriosity. "That all depends on what he's told you. My name's Addam Origo, anyway."

"That's the boyfriend. I'm Malos. Nice to meet you, my prince."

The phrase seemed to activate a sleeper agency in Minoth, who immediately stirred and rose up to glare at Malos.

"Did I just hear what I think I heard?" he demanded with none of the aura of a man who had just been asleep for several hours with no concept of time available nor amenable.

"You couldn't think of anything, remember? It's free real estate." Defeated again! Oh, but what was this?

Addam's smile was like a miniature sun all on its own for all how overcast the rest of the landscape and surrounding skybox looked. "Addam...it's good to see you again."

"And you, Minoth. Have you finally caved?"

Minoth spread his arms wide, wishing there was actual sun to soak in as he did it. Well, but Addam was more than good enough, perhaps even better, as a substitute. "That's right, Prince. I'm yours to keep for good, now."

The exchange that followed was brilliantly quickfire as much as it was eminently lazy.

"Why didn't you tell me you were coming?"

"And what would you have done if I had? Bake a cake? You're no great chef, my prince."

"You wound me, Minoth! But won't you come down?"

"What, do you want me to jump? If you try to catch me, then I'll really wound you."

"On grounds of intent or actuality?"

"Try both, on both sides."

"Minoth, what the fuck are you guys talking about?" Malos whispered, eyebrows wildly akimbo.

"Don't worry about it," was Minoth's infuriatingly useless response as he gave an avuncular pat to the other Blade's shoulder. "It's not your intellect that's lacking, far from it. We're just patently unintelligible, as a rule."

"That's a dumb fuck kind of a rule, if I ever heard one." What was the point of communication with somebody you cared about if they couldn't understand you? It wasn't as if Malos was all too well versed in the practice, but still. Now, as an intimidation tactic, it was an excellent idea, but he didn't voice this thought, and Minoth rolled ahead heedless.

"See? You learn something new every day."

"I don't see how listening to you spout cryptic bullshit is learning, but okay."

Briskly departing from that side conversation, Minoth cast a sweeping arm towards the moor front below them. "You mind jumping first, my friend?"

"What, so I can be the one to crush him alive?"

"Well, no. I'd kill you if you did that - not wound, kill. But I rather think I'd let you catch me." The look Minoth was shooting him was not at all veiled in its provocativeness, yet Malos didn't exactly feel affronted.

Following a showy exit from the roof by first Malos, then Minoth, the latter caught in the former's arms, it was in fact Addam who was affronted, or possibly intimidated, and he was made doubly so by the sight of Minoth playfully kissing Malos on the cheek. He huffed slightly and turned away, eliciting polite amusement from Flora, who had broached the outdoors again and was watching the whole affair with crossed arms and quirked brows.

Minoth felt his features fall into an expression slightly morose before he turned an animated face on Malos and rolled his eyes, as if to say, "Look what I have to put up with around here - but I'll take care of it, just you watch." Malos returned his passenger's boots to terra firma with due care, and Minoth made to advance on the scorned prince.

"Addam..." "What is it?" Addam snapped. "What could you possibly want with me anymore-!?"

His petty protest was suddenly interrupted by Minoth's lips ghosting over the top of his ear and around down to the lobe, and then the Flesh Eater's arms wrapping contentedly around his chest from behind. "Still everything, Addam. Don't you worry."

Addam couldn't help but relax into the embrace, though he still felt more than a little touchy. "If I'm everything, then who's that?"

Reluctantly, Minoth let go to allow them both to turn and regard Malos. "Him? He's..."

"Go on, tell him I'm your boytoy, I don't care."

Minoth gave the pouting Aegis a slow, measured look, artfully matched in stance of hips and eyebrows. "You care, Malos."

"Well sure, I care. For all you're finding out about me, I really don't know shit about you. You plan on revealing any of that any time soon?"

"In time, in time, my dear Malos. Shall we?" Minoth offered breezily, gesturing towards the manor now in plain view. "To avoid further discussions of favoritism, I'll just have to offer my arm to Flora."

She accepted without hesitation, while Malos and Addam conferred in silent glances and then shouted in uncoordinated tandem: "You've got two arms, you know!"

Even from just that brief repartée, it did rather seem that they all knew where they stood: Addam and Malos were both doomed to be eternally confounded by Minoth, because he just had that so inmitable way about him such that you could never stay mad at him for long, and evidently Flora was too continuously charmed to ever take issue with the way he doted on her or departed from doing the same.

"That's cute," Malos muttered to Addam as they walked.

"You think so?"

"Sure. I mean, where does this guy get off?"

"Wherever and whenever he damn well pleases, I've gathered," Addam responded, sympathetic and even endeared despite his exasperated tone.

"With your wife?"

His answering nod was less a marker of agreement than it was a silent lift up to the heavens and its requisite ricochet back down to humility. "With my wife."

It was only a little disheartening to see how much more comfortable Minoth became as soon as he was properly back at home with Addam and Flora. Malos would have taken up the proverbial torch of offense himself if the phenomenon wasn't so helpful in contexualizing the whole apparently not-sordid affair. Quite literally, he let his hair down, something he hadn't done at all in the week past (and fuck, was he beautiful), and as soon as they had reached the kitchen, a perfect base of operations for whatever it was they needed to do, Minoth readily leaned into Addam's arms and let him play with it.

Flora joined them, too, cuddling up to Minoth like he wasn't, in fact, a rare specimen of interspecies fuck-up by his own admission, but rather was just unambiguously a cherished soul who finally, finally belonged. Here a reinforcement of sense, there a reinforcement of confusion. They looked so happy it was almost disgusting - not in the world-hating way, but...gross.

Then, in came Milton, and the balance was tipped yet again. "What is this, an eye for an eye? He brings home an Aegis, so you bring home a catboy?"

"I didn't know you'd be here, Malos," Addam replied mildly, freeing Minoth from the burden of answering the quip for once and seemingly ignoring the foreign word. "If you can summon up some patience, I'm sure we'll all get along just fine."

"Is that the guy you were talking about, Lady Flora?" It wasn't an odd suspicion, given how one might have picked apart the descriptor of "fugitive" and decided that the rogue clad in scar and ponytail was the intended one, but then again he had gotten the names mixed up, so there wasn't much to say for it.

"No, Milton, that's the other one. Come on, perk up those ears of yours, careful listening is a practiced skill."

"What are you, his mom?" It was sarcastic, plainly, because he was Gormotti and she was very simply human. Nonetheless, the Origos, Milton and Minoth included, all swiveled to stare blankly at Malos.

"What?" "His mother just passed away, Malos." "Oh. Well...shit."

Many eyes, blue on two counts and gold and green alike, retrained upon him for the crass term - hey, not his fault there were minors about. "Sorry about that, kid."

For a moment, he considered ruffling the ashy blonde hair, but then decided against it, wary of disturbing the matching ears nestled therein. Milton, remaining surprisingly aloof for all his ten years, only scrunched up his nose and squinted menacingly (that is, he tried).

Ever excellent at diffusing tensions, Flora ushered them into a tangential topic. "Here, Milton, there's a pull-out couch in the sitting room off of our bedroom, you can sleep there. Let's get it set up now."

A little weird to shove him on a random couch instead of in an actual room and bed, but then there was something to be said for closeness. Minoth gave Malos a nudge as she moved to lead the boy towards said room.

"Oh, uh...did you need any help with that?"

Flora turned almost mechanically to look at him, head bobbing irregularly. "No," she clipped out with an over-bright smile, and turned once more to go. Regardless, Addam followed her.

"Wha- Minoth, you set me up!"

"Set you up, set you down, whatever. Just trying to make you feel at home." The Flesh Eater had parked himself squarely in an elevated chair by the counter, lurching chin onto palm, and was observing Malos with bleak curiosity. The expression almost made him want to do something abrupt and unpredictable, just to give Minoth a turn, for once.

Well...maybe later. "Alright," Malos started, taking a seat of his own. "Make me feel at home. Tell me who you are."

"With pleasure. Merely supply me the angle...?" Architect, so fucking full of himself.

"Let's start with 'I got fu-' uh, effed up." (His conscience was now everclear, even with the young Milton out of the room.) "What's that mean?"

"I'm a Flesh Eater," Minoth said, like it was the simplest thing in the world. "Your persistent creeping feeling of how 'I'm the way I am' is due to my having human cells, as a result of an experiment Amalthus had me undergo. Well, not to say that I didn't go somewhat willingly."

"Again, you hate him that much?" "Again, I hate him that much," came the solemn repetition.

"The last time I saw him, he smothered a baby, the only survivor from a house ransacked by bandits - in cold blood, he did it, though I think I could tell he was suffering. I wish I could understand why, but then again I'd never want to be anywhere remotely near that headspace. You and I...we've got to rely on each other to avoid it."

The air was silent for a long moment, sobered and stiff. "So what about these two?" Malos continued eventually, poking his nose forward at Addam and Flora as they trotted back in, holding hands like there was something positively philterous in the atmos.

"He's my Driver. She's his wife. I love them both dearly, and unless there are secrets being kept around here, they love me just the same." No secrets, indeed: it seemed practically an incantation, the way they descended upon him once again with adoring eyes. "That clear things up for you?"

"No, Minoth, it clears up absolutely nothing. I thought Amalthus was your Driver, not this guy."

This guy. Oh, this guy. A faraway look came into Minoth's eyes for his incoming exposition. "Amalthus was my Driver, when I was awakened. After I saw the worst of what he was capable of, I shunted myself off right quick to the Origos' humble abode, when I could. Much better for one's all-around well-being, I find."

Malos, quick to the punch, gave a guess at the shape of it: "So you can just pick anyone to be your Driver?"

"That's right - or it seems to be, anyway. I'll bet even you could do it, what with your extenuating makeup."

The sudden proposal jerked Addam out of his plaintive reverie, absently whispering something to Flora as he had been. "Now wait just a minute, Minoth. I think I worked rather hard to earn that privilege. You can't just go bestowing it upon any other man who walks through the door."

Yet again, Minoth prevailed, like he didn't even have to try. "I won't argue with you, Prince. I'm not saying Malos could be my Driver, I'm just saying he could drive me. Big difference. You're still my one and only, always."

"I'm gonna gag."

"Rude of you, Malos," Minoth snipped with stupefying patience. "Flora is an excellent cook, if that's the least of her infinite other talents."

"Will you stop fawning all over them? I get it, you're in love, or whatever."

"Never." "I swear on my father..." "Suit yourself."

It wasn't as if the dynamic was unpleasant. Far from it - their time at Aletta so far had really been nothing if not enjoyable. And yet... "Is the kid gone, still?"

"He should be, Malos," Flora replied, face calculating as much as it needed to be to figure on his next words.

"So, Minoth." "Yours." "Sorry to rag on your ménage à trois, or whatever this is, but you're a fucking asshole."

The Flesh Eater did in fact look slightly hurt at the jab, but as with just about everything else, save perhaps only talk of Amalthus, his main air was one of amusement. "Need I say it again? You, also, are the selfsame."

"Boys, boys, play nice!" Addam interjected.

"With him?" Malos snorted. "Not a chance. Not until he gets off of his high horse."

Again, Minoth was quieted. "I apologize. I didn't mean to unsettle you. I'm just...very happy to be here."

Aw, hell. Malos's shoulders sagged at the sappy comment. "Yeah, yeah, I...I get it."

"No, Malos, you don't get it. But I hope to make it so that in time you will - or can, at least. I won't force you to do anything."

The look painted across Minoth's face then was achingly genuine and genuinely sorrowful. Malos almost felt bad for engendering it the way he had, but all things in due course, he supposed - or however it was that the insufferable Flesh Eater would put it.

It was just (or perhaps only much) as it had been the night before: dinner of something delicious, taken late once again after Minoth had regaled the Origos with his latest play styled bouffe, and then time to bid a blunt adieu, and welcome to the cover of true nightfall. The last two left in the dining room were the post-Indol duo, and Minoth made his parting remarks with unusual but blessed brevity before strolling away.

"Wait a minute."

"Yes, Malos? Did you need a kiss good night?"

Infuriating, infuriatingly gorgeous shithead. "Fuck off. You're gonna go sack up with your boyfriend and his wife, and leave me alone down there - again?"

"Oh, you weren't going to follow? Come along, then."

With that, Minoth started in walking again. "What?" Malos had to step double time to keep up - he had the larger torso, and Minoth the longer legs, so the upper hand was his...when?

"If there's one advantage of this being a holding of the state, it's that some of the furniture is so expansive as to be extravagant. One of that some is the bed in the master suite."

"I don't see-" "Not that it much matters, if I'm going to be faceplanted in somebody's tits or other again."

"Oh." At last, Malos allowed himself a small grin. "This is ridiculous, you know."

They had reached the threshold, and Minoth returned the expression, with something mournful mixed in as he laid a gentle palm on the side of Malos's jaw. "I know. But isn't it nice?"

(And of course, it would be silly to put overly much thought and consideration into how they ended up sleeping, but indeed there they were: Minoth blissfully snuggled up to Addam's chest with Malos holding him from behind and Flora tucked under Addam's other arm holding whichever free hands were nearest to her. Ridiculous! But wasn't it nice?)

Somehow, some braintrust had had the spectacular idea to leave open the blinds on the bedroom window, resulting in absolute floods of lukewarm sunlight arriving at the very crack of true daybreak and casting the haphazard pile of bodies on the bed into brilliant relief. For whom to see? Only an unwillingly awakened Malos, of course, and he observed with eyes lidded as much out of silent derision as out of fatigue.

At some unknown point during the night, Minoth had made a glorious coup consisting of exactly one lightly snoring Flora and was cuddling her close on the far side. That left Addam with nothing and no one to hold, save the oh so conveniently placed Malos, and hold he did, with clownishly affectionate and comically sweaty arms. They were, quite frankly, impossible to peel off.

"This is so not what I signed up for," Malos grumbled, breaking the silence so deplorably thick with contentment. Joke, joke, joke, boyfriend, boyfriend, boyfriend, what the hell was this? Pretty nice, is what it was.

For all the noise he'd made about it, the Origos practically radiated warmth and safety. Minoth was his own self-contained extension, in a manner of speaking, and then an aberration therefrom; he was prickly despite himself, a walking, talking self-defense mechanism cloaked in bravado and leather.

Endless directories full of data for every creature alive or dead across all time, immemorial and otherwise, didn't serve much good to quantify and qualify, to fucking figure out his current situation. If Malos wanted to, he could dig deep and look up the history of Minoth, find out if he'd come with that scar or he'd earned it (either possibility was equally as likely), find out when he'd first been awakened, find out what made this guy up and what made him tick, if plain observation didn't serve well enough.

In another universe, Malos found himself thinking, he would have done just that. Would have taken his marching orders from the first and most powerful raison d'etre he'd ever felt and gone on like a good little soldier. After all, what had the Architect made him for? To be Daddy's good little soldier, probably. It explained why he was the brute, the dark-armored bulkhead of a humanoid to be so heavily contrasted against the other Aegis who he knew so strongly was his sister.

And yet, here he was, falling in so close with the humans themselves, a couple of agriculture-happy nobles who didn't much care for the status, apparently, borne upon the perfectly logical yet aggravatingly nonsensical bridge that was a Blade who'd been handed a raw deal and had turned it in his favor like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Maybe it was, even if the Architect and his monked scholars hadn't said so. So, what to do next? Pull in the holding arms closer, and nod off for another couple of hours. They weren't going anywhere, that much was for sure.

It was Minoth who officially awoke first sometime later in the morning, stretching, wincing, and rubbing his scar like he suspected it had somehow morphed in the night (scratching the phantom itch, was really what he was doing). His eyes worked and adjusted to the light for some seconds before settling on the varied arrangement of muscular shoulders visible from the other side of the bed. Ah, to be safe and home.

"I think this really will work out, Flora," he whispered, pressing a gentle kiss to the crown of her head. Unfortunately (that is, all depending on your point of view), she was their resident mama bear at all hours of the day, and so she only groaned and nuzzled closer into him. Layabouts they were, the lot of them! Well, but there'd be time later for there to be no time to stop and breathe. Taking it in now might very well end up making for the savior of pacing later.

And, speaking of pacing, in came Milton, nearly boxing his eyes out for all how mightily his fists were working in the sockets. Slowly, he transitioned to just the side of his index knuckles, then the heels of his hands, and then up went the arms in a truly feline yawn. Rather silly, because his eyes consequentially shut without caveat, but to each their own way of greeting the day. To greet with the day, of course, there were no less than four adults sharing the bed in front of him. That's a little weird, don't you think?

If Milton could see Minoth watching him, he made no sign, instead shuffling to the foot of the right nightstand and stretching a careful arm over Malos. His voice was an ungraceful shout-whisper as he began to mercilessly needle the fleshy part of Addam's shoulder with insistent little pokes.

"Hey! Lord Addam! What's with all these people?"

It took some doing, but eventually Addam jerked awake. "Wha...? Oh, Milton! Er, good morning?"

"Yeah, it's alright. I slept better than I thought I would."

Milton's tone strayed sheepish to say "Thanks for taking me in, again," before he continued, "I just don't know about all these other guys."

Addam, taking sudden notice of the referenced "other guys", scrambled for a helpful rejoinder. "Yes, well, ah-- Flora, are you awake?"

"Mmh...? What is it?"

"What am I doing on the other side of the bed holding Malos?"

She quite literally had no way of knowing, hidden within Minoth's arms as she was, but you can't keep a nimble woman down, and she was more than ready with the answer. "I don't know, dear, but I hope you're enjoying yourself."

Rather than continuing to do so, for the purposes of enjoyment or otherwise, Addam slipped his arms as gingerly, not to say unobtrusively, as he could back into a less handsy position, then sat up against the headboard and put a grimacing hand to his back.

"Better watch it, old man," Minoth quipped from the sidelines. "That back of yours is gonna go one of these days."

"And the same to you, Minoth! Just what happened to your creaky cowboy bones, hmm?"

"Well, you know what they say. 'Flora heals an aching soul,' and all that." Indeed, they could just about have melted into the sheets, so close was he holding her, so it surely must have been quite a healing embrace.

"I'll have to assume you don't feel like sharing, then."

"What, with you, Addam? What's mine is yours, you know that."

"Is that so...in that case, do you mind sparing me a kiss?" Gross.

Malos had stirred once more and was engaged with Milton in a mutual sizing-up beneath the lovey-dovey exchange, so it was an easy bonding opportunity for the Gormotti boy to whisper conspiratorially, "Hey, you think it's something they ate?"

"Nah," Malos replied, "they're just nuts. Say, how's it feel, being the only one with any sense?"

Milton considered for a moment, but only for a moment. "Feels pretty good, I'd say. They never told us kids anything, back in my village, so I had to learn to pick things up for myself."

Malos smirked. "You're pretty sharp, for a ten-year-old."

Said ten-year-old nodded up at the others. "And they're pretty dumb, but you don't see me complainin'."

Little by little they rustled themselves up, through ablutions and whatever other relevant details of an arising there are, and assembled in the kitchen for breakfast. You may find yourself saying, as I am, gosh, they sure do set a lot of time by eating, but after all, isn't that what a family does? And so, gathered around the spacious counter they were, Addam and Minoth picking at a pot full of leftover Energy Stir-Fry, Milton munching on a Moonbeam Banana, and Flora and Malos scrapping together sandwiches of Barbed Tomato and dried Amber Sweetfish.

Need I say it again? It was agreeable, companionable, and peaceful, if that milieu hasn't aged to be positively sickening in its sweetness by now. To be sure, what else would you expect from such a tale? Torna as a Titan was unmistakably more alive, more rustic, more real than Indol was, despite the sheer beauty of the other dragon's form. Well, as ever, it was time for Minoth to upset things...just a little bit.

"My loves, I think it's about time I explained to you about our Malos here."

Flora cocked her head to the side and made an appraising face. "Oh, is there much to explain? I just assumed he was...like you, you know." The experiments more refined, the taint less obvious? It only stood to reason.

In an unexpected moment of reservation, Minoth didn't make an immediate answer, instead looking to Malos to let him speak for himself. "You mean, you thought I was a Flesh Eater? Nah. I'm an Aegis."

"An Aegis...?" Addam tasted the word, unsure if it deserved reverence since it had been so easily tossed off the day before.

"One of the first two Blades forged by the Architect - the other one is in this pouch, waiting to be awakened," Malos clarified.

"That's the explanation for how you can be here without your Driver, then."

Minoth made a quiet, preoccupied face at Flora's musing, but none of them noticed, Addam swiftly moving on to the all-important question of "And so, who awakened you?"

"Amalthus." "Ah. Not so good, then."

Malos shrugged. "It's okay. Never really met the guy, though he did seem like a slimeball from what I saw. Minoth here spirited me out of the place before he could do any more damage."

"Any more?"

"I get these...homicidal urges. Amalthus's messed-up outlook combined with my supernatural powers means I'm afraid I might do something drastic, one of these days."

Mutely, Minoth tapped meaningful fingers on the counter near where Malos's hand lay.

"This seems like a rather crucial piece of information to have kept from us all last night," Flora said, keeping neutral with wonderful facility.

Malos, cheek propped on fist, stared down at a smudge on the counter, and Minoth cracked his neck, finding his voice then.

"Didn't want to just write him off as a doomsday murder weapon, now did we?"

"Oh...yes, of course." Wasn't that what all Blades were? It wasn't, it patently wasn't, and yet the reductiveness was unavoidable. Oh, even for their golden boy Addam...

"Not to be rude or unfeeling, but if you're really that worried about the safety of those around you, why don't you just return him to his Core? That'll take care of the previous Driver's influence, and he'll come back again, won't he? If you're careful."

Well. That's a statement that deserves its own paragraph, if ever I saw one.

Malos's reaction was gray-violet eyes constricting to pinprick points. "If you're careful" - and what other way was there to be, with glowing, ether-flowing life taken in hand? Flora, prescient of the impending storm, gave a quiet "Milton, cover your ears" with face and fingers pinched. What a...what a thing for him to say.

Minoth's choices of calculating gaze from the prior day had nothing on his current ears-flat eyes-bleak brows-furrowed look at Addam. With the absolute absence of speed, he beckoned Malos closer with a careful index finger. Then, that single finger was joined by all the rest as he took Malos's chin in hand and very pointedly kissed him full on the mouth. It wasn't intended to be the target of voyeurism, or a trigger for jealousy, just a gesture of truth.

When he had finally let go, he turned back to Addam with quiet menace, still steeling every ounce of patience. "Now, just who's going to do that, hmm?" The prompt was accompanied by a cavalier hand tossed in the air, followed by three more demonstrative points: "Not fucking me. Not fucking you. Not fucking her."

If Addam didn't know any better, he'd have thought that Minoth was turning heel and tail on him, but in that moment he wasn't so sure he did know better, and so his face just looked the paragon of abject bewilderment.

"Just for that, we're not going to let you resonate with the other Crystal - and that's a light sentence." For Addam, petrified of the concept of true resonation as much as he was that of ruling, no sentence could be lighter - what was the catch?

"Now, hold on just a minute. I realize I didn't have any basis for that comment, actionable or otherwise, but what would be the problem? Amalthus is his Driver, isn't he? I don't think that makes any issue for you, Minoth, if he's offed."

Minoth made a low noise. "Unfortunately, as much as I'd like to see the man dead, it won't help us any. Amalthus is not his Driver."

"He's not?"

"I would get it if I just didn't have one," Malos cut in, quick to latch though slow to proceed, "but I'm pretty sure I do - you know, what with the fucking violent influences and all?"

Milton's ears were no longer covered, if they even had been the first time it was advised, and the acting parents collectively resigned themselves to abandoning the pursuit of trying to rein in their foul-mouthed guests (or partners, or whichever).

Shaking his head, Minoth made to only further confuse matters. "Amalthus isn't your Driver," he repeated. "I am."

"You what?" Malos started, blinking incredulously.

Minoth ignored him, however, addressing Addam and what, to him, was a more critical point: "That's leaving aside the fact that you just suggested we end someone's life rather than try to help them escape and heal from something that was in no way any of their doing or fault - someone very important to me, no less."

A stricken face? Well, it wasn't much of an apology, but the bareness was significant. "I...I'm sorry, that was careless of me."

Far more than just careless, Minoth thought, almost wanton, but he didn't sense any deep-seated malice from the Origos towards Malos, so perhaps it would be best to just let it lie - for the time being, at least. "Don't be such a prince, Prince, and it'll be okay."

"I don't know about that," Malos allowed quietly, "but whatever. Say it's okay, fine, dandy, but go back to the part where you're my fucking Driver?!" Flickers of panic had drifted into his voice as he frantically tried to acquaint himself with the idea.

Minoth, meanwhile, was eerily calm, almost like he'd practiced it. "Why else would you be able to share information from your Core, even unwanted as it was, so easily to mine? Near as I can figure, you've imprinted on me like a duck, my dear."

"But you're-- But you're a Blade! You can't be a Driver!"

Minoth screwed up his lips like he wanted to spit. "For all intents and purposes, Malos, I am not a Blade."

"Sure, sure. If you're not a Blade, then how come you said he's your Driver?" Malos returned with surprising deftness, jutting his chin at an Addam who still looked like a kicked dog (and well he should).

Minoth's own face fell, a little bit, as he followed the gesture. "Maybe it's wishful thinking, but in the most important ways it's true," he said. It was obvious that it wasn't himself he needed to convince as he did it. "Addam Origo is, least of all things, my Driver, and I'll keep saying it proudly long after he's dead and I have to soldier on anyway."

"Blade, Driver, Driver, Blade, listening to you guys is like playing Nopon-Pong," Milton cut in, and Malos hated the subconscious agreement that he was onto something, mechanically at least. "What's the point? Who cares which is which and who's who, you're both just people, right?"

Malos snarled then, catching aggravation from a source unknown - not the bad kind, but aggression nonetheless. "Watch it, brat. When I said you were the only one around here with any sense I didn't mean that for real."

Milton crossed his arms, but instead of turning up his nose just waggled his ears and pressed on. "Nah, I think you did. And I'm right, aren't I?"

Minoth's eyes had gone impossibly soft, despite their edge of gravity. Fucking asshole probably loved kids, or some shit. "Milton, I wish you were right. I wish it didn't matter and in some ways it shouldn't. But, this is real and it is both a blessing and a curse, one that we will have to wrangle with, Malos. Think, now, doesn't it make sense? What other explanation is there? And besides, it doesn't make for a half bad awakening, eh?"

He didn't exactly want to deny it, but-- "But you never even touched my Crystal, it was gone before you could!"

Minoth took a deep breath in, pursed his lips, and breathed it out. "That's the unfortunate part about it. Not that I think so highly of myself as to say that I should be the Driver of an Aegis, but it's not a horrible responsibility, in general. We just have to be glad that I got to you when I did."

Got to you when I did...and when was that? "Wait...oh, I see what you're saying. All those times he tried to resonate with me, he put his thoughts, his influence in, but when the time came for me to actually awaken, you were the one who was there to bring me into the world."

There it was, the non-lacking intellect, and all that. "And Malos, I couldn't be any prouder if you were my own son." If Minoth hadn't been so busy delivering that choice bit of snark, he'd have had time to look it. Perhaps better for him that he didn't, however; Malos had to stifle a colossal snort, and substituted a fiercely arched eyebrow therefor.

"Hold it, hold it. You just made out with me. Enough of this psuedo-parental crap."

"Agreed. Now stop acting like a child."

"Me?! You're the one who-" "And you love me for it, don't you?"

"I feel something strong about you, that's for sure."

Flora was watching them with a fond visage, something sketched full of complexity and intent, and Malos quicky took notice - it was a welcome respite from the maelstrom of befuddlement Minoth had just stirred up.

"Putting that aside for the moment, because, uh, fuck," (and here Flora's lips gave an involuntary twitch), "let's go back to that other thing you said. If Addam's not gonna resonate with my sister, who's gonna do it, huh? Not fucking me, not fucking you, not fucking h-"

"What did I just say, Malos?" Minoth cut him off, leaning dangerously far back in his chair. "Childish of you to assume that Flora wouldn't be a perfectly good Driver for the other Aegis."

Indeed, Flora's expression was now smug, indicating that she hadn't exactly needed Minoth's artful defense of her to encourage her to the point, but that she'd take it gladly any time it was offered - and the trepidation where?

"As you said, she's your sister. Like deserves like, I think. A woman would understand and appreciate her better, intrinsically."

Squinting, Malos tried to piece the reasoning together. "I don't see how that comes into it."

The referenced woman leaned forward and laced her fingers together to make a resting place for her chin. "Well, maybe it doesn't, but even a silly reason is sometimes a good enough reason to try." Oh, so throw the reasoning out the window, then. Fine, whatever.

And yet, the need to make sense of it all still pervaded and prevailed. "I can't figure her out."

"No?" Minoth batted back, quizzical.

"You're sitting here telling her she's gonna become a first-time Driver with one of the first Blades ever made, and instead of going 'Who? Little ol' me?' she looks like a cat catching a promised mouse."

"We're all very compelling characters, Malos, as I'm sure you've noticed. If she's nervous about it, we'll never know."

Flora tapped a playful finger on her cheek. "I don't hate to admit that Minoth's right. And besides, you're not so tough, are you? She'll probably be tougher, and then that won't say much."

It was all Malos could do not to grimace at the thought. He knew, logically, that she was just making a pseudo-spunky quip about girl power, or some similar crap, and that it wasn't anything to get riled up at, but was she really fooling herself with these little lies?

"Oh, how very human. You're here in your own house, not a threat in sight, and you're still lying to cover up the real truth. Are you afraid of it?"

"I'm not afraid," Flora replied mildly, "just a little proud, maybe. And maybe that's the same thing, but I'd give it the benefit of the nuance."

Liar, liar, liar, fancy words or not. "Yeah...you're afraid. You're afraid! You're scared that somebody's gonna see through, because you're really not who or what you say you are - no humans are."

Addam, jumping to his wife's defense, put a hand in the air between them as a motive hope towards diffusion. "Really, Malos, I don't think that's necessary."

The hand was roughly shoved up and away by a stocky, insistent finger. "Of course you don't. I'm telling the truth, and you humans can't handle the truth."

"Malos--" "What? I'm right and you know it."

"Malos, stop."

Minoth, likely self-conscious of his penchant for over-narrating their discussions, had been silent the whole time, and after his most recent controlled outburst he was now tacit again. They all were; Malos had indeed stopped, and it seemed he had done so less out of fear or deference than sheer inability to continue. The force that had propelled him through his morbid tirade was vanished by absolution. The air had gone thin, and Malos absently wondered why he was always so attuned to such a phenomenon.

From that quietude to solicitude Minoth swiftly went, slumping over and slamming the boniest parts of his wrists into his temples. "I said I would never do that. Architect damn it, I swore I would never do that!"

Malos tried to condition his voice to gentility, but it came out jagged nonetheless. "Do what?"

"Command you." The Flesh Eater's face looked haggard with the haunt of old, painful memories made doubly squared worse by this freshest compounding. "Amalthus used to speak to me in that tone - I'd just be joking, or musing about life, and he'd whip it out. Minoth, stop. Malos, stop. Goddamn Drivers should stop, is what."

Both Addam and Flora flinched back at his words, like they were complicit in a microaggression that was fast flipping its cosm to macro. It was fairly obvious that Minoth hadn't been referring to humans at large, since the dichotomy didn't actually run that way de facto, so then...huh. He really did get around. Good for him, even. And for Malos...?

"Minoth, wait." The Flesh Eater didn't answer, seemingly hell-bent on manifesting the concept of burying his damned eyes in the security of Flora's chest. "If you're my Driver, then...don't we share a bond?"

"Maybe," he muttered. "What? Come on, come out of there."

How had Malos so quickly understood the metaphorical 'there' in which he was? Regardless, come out of there he did, features still crestfallen but ponytail whipping.

"Maybe we do, maybe we don't. As far as emotionally, person to person, I think so. I'd like to hope you think so, too. But as Driver to Blade...?"

The eye contact was desolating, raw, abscessive. "But as Driver to Blade, what?" "I'm afraid to find out."

Malos had never reached out for a link, had never so much as interacted with his true nature save for that single conjuring of his element the day before, which had been fairly kneejerk well despite all the hesitation that had preceded it. There'd never been any need, any impetus to. For a Blade, a week was a long time to go without being, well, Blade-y. What did that make him? Even if he accepted that Minoth was his Driver, the actual past event of resonation was yet faraway, hazy, insignificant.

It was this, here, this connection that they needed to be forging face to face and Core to Core, that cemented it, that would draw them together if only Minoth would let him. The sudden ferocious, gnawing pull in his Core threatened to swallow him alive, like he suspected no connection to a man like Amalthus could ever do, but he resisted, because in that moment he wanted nothing more than to cling to Minoth like a lost storm finding another's eye, and that just couldn't be.

"You're...afraid of what Amalthus gave us." "Mmm."

He looked pathetic. The bravado, the prissing and the preening and the performativity, all had fallen away and he looked pathetic. He looked, Malos realized it must have been, the way he saw himself inside his own head. Not a man, not a Blade, not an anything and then folded back precious formless again on his anger because his lot wasn't so bad, was it? Buck the fuck up! But it was. If it could bring someone like him low like this, it was.

When Malos spoke again, almost none of that imagined tenderness came out, and he wasn't sure he regretted it. "But we're so much more than what Amalthus gave us - and don't try to hide, I know you know it."

It, the mannerism, made them alike, didn't it? Minoth perfect on the outside but broken on the inside, Malos soft on the inside but tough on the outside. Surely the Quaestor had had and continued to have none of that, not in any way that was appreciable or endearing.

"Hell, you have this whole other life. It's not even an other life, it is your life, for all you were in my face about it yesterday." He had one, he was someone already. The thought of that radiant promise falling away so suddenly just before Malos could get any real purchase was terrifying. His lips twisted uncomfortably as he considered the conclusion at which he had arrived.

"Is it me?"

"What?" Minoth's tone was sharp, of a sudden.

"Is it me you don't want?"

"Malos, I...no. No. I'm fully committed to helping you, and helping myself, into the bargain. I want so badly for us to be okay, and together at that. But can you blame me? Truly, can you blame me?"

There was a vigorous yank in the ether; his piece was done. "Maybe not, but I can try."

"This isn't like you, Minoth," Flora admonished from the other side of the table where she and Addam had been quietly clutching hands. "Where's the clever cowboy who stole all those supplies from Amalthus's laboratory and distributed them to the refugees? You know you can be good, even and especially despite him, and you will be."

And now I really can't figure her out, thought Malos, because on what planet would anyone ever have expected this woman to endorse petty theft? Her interjection, though not exactly unwelcome, was uncomfortable. To Malos, it felt forced. Clearly, she loved Minoth, they both did, but maybe they never had understood. Maybe he had never let them.

No matter; the argument continued. "That was Addam," Minoth offered morosely.

"Oh. Well, still, you two are pod peas. If he did it, it's likely that you were there with him. Have faith - or courage, or something." Flora was thus easily swayed to believe the facts as Minoth had presented them, but Addam...not so much.

"Oh, no you don't, Minoth, that was you. Don't try to get out of this by deflecting Flora's esteem onto me."

"Addam..."

"It's just as she said, you're the cleverest of us all. I would never have even thought to do half the amazing things you've done."

"Addam--"

"There isn't much that's out of your range, really."

"Addam, will you stop, already? I don't need this pity party!"

So, he'd done it again. This time, however, there was no crumple of resolve, no brutal self-flagellation, and there was no way Minoth hadn't been aware of his words, if not beforehand than certainly during or immediately after. Neither was lesser, and he'd felt attacked by the notion of being made to seem greater.

Malos snorted, now fully absolved from his moment of blessed weakness. "More of a glory party, but okay. You're the only one who's allowed to put any respect on your own name, is that what you're saying? Come on, man. I'm grateful for you, I really am, but you gotta pony up."

Minoth ran slow thumbs over his eyebrows, eyes temporarily made wild by the motion. "Pony up to what?"

Once again, Malos was caught against his own armored shell, and to it he went. "To not fucking being afraid!"

The eyebrows went back down, but the tempo ticked up. "And you think you can change me that fast?"

"Hell no. You're a stubborn fucking asshole and I can tell it'd take years, centuries, to change you in any direction you didn't decide on your own. But I'm like that too, right? We can't let you sit and stew on this because there's just no point to it. We're in this together, you and me - and the himbo and his wife."

"And me too!" Milton called from the other room (apparently he had had the good sense and decorum to usher himself away from the unfortunately so adult discourse at some point, though he was still plainly eavesdropping).

Malos sighed, but it was more the issuance of a breathy grin. "And the catboy too."

Minoth, regaining some of his conversational ease as buoyed by the gentle, hesitant touch of Addam's hand, rejoined with gusto: they were all above the spectra, now.

"Malos, I'll pick just one bone with that diatribe." Accusations of a tantrum, childishness? Fuck off. Still, Malos answered politely. "And that is?"

Minoth raked a casual hand over his forehead and single bang before replying. "I may have started it, but we can't just keep going around calling Flora 'the wife', she's a person in her own wonderful right."

Flora smiled - for all Addam's insufferable cheeriness, she seemed to do that a hell of a lot more often than even he did. Ah, but each one could mean so many different things. "No, no, that's alright, I know where I stand."

"Even if you don't, it will be as you wish, dear," Minoth sing-songed.

"What, and you'll just let him call me a himbo?"

"Indeed I will, Addam. You're beautiful, and the sooner he thinks so too the happier we'll all be."

"Father Christ, don't you people have anything to do around here besides sit around and be gay?"

The instigator of said indolent activities made a pouting face and tilted his head. "Malos, I'm hurt. What was the first thing you saw me do when we came into this house?"

Easy - predictable, even. "Call for your boyfriend."

Broaching himself over into a blatant violation of personal space, Minoth tapped a knowing finger to the side of Malos's cranium. "Stage direction and dialogue are two different things, darling. I kissed Flora, in fact, so I rather resent your implication that all I want in life is to lay about and neck with you and Addam."

For the briefest second, Malos considered trapping the wayward finger with his own hand, but then that didn't mesh very well with his accusation, now did it? Hypocrisy didn't suit, if they were going to be honest. Toeing the line, then, and leave it for later...

"Well there better be something else I can do around here besides that!"

"Do you perhaps fancy a trip to the garden to pick the caterpillars off the lettuce leaves one by one, Malos?" Flora drawled sweetly, with Minoth grinning utter satisfaction behind her as they stood up to clear the dishes.

To Addam, then, with all speed. "Do you happen to be free this afternoon?"

"I most certainly am, to spend some time with you - let me make up for my dreadful faux pas, even?"

Milton, detecting the telltale signs of something awful boring (possibly a glut of accounting work) coming soon to a manor study near him, hitched a hike to the outside with the gardening crew, and so the day truly began.

"You were awfully calm back there."

Flora's instigatory words were the first to break the relative silence of their chore's proceeding. They had long moved on from the caterpillars and were now simply thinning various and sundry overgrowths.

"Flora, you know I'm the picture of comportment," Minoth replied with excessive swagger. "Nothing can sway me."

"You're a cad. You know exactly what I'm talking about."

"Do I?" A cad and a clod, and many more, probably, if he was going to keep this act up.

"Addam said something incredibly unfeeling, and you practically rolled with it caveatless."

He didn't reply, but yanked harder at the weeds.

"I won't pretend to know what's in that knotted-up head of yours, but no rational person stays as calm as you did."

Now he paused. "So, maybe I'm not rational. Didn't you ever think of that?"

"I know I am, but what are you?"

Sitting back on his heels, Minoth squinted through the sun up into the vague direction of Flora's torso. "You've got jokes, huh?"

She smiled; he was right, it was a blatant joke, without nearly any point to it. It wasn't often that she tossed those off, but the effort to get him to respond more genuinely had been a successful one.

"I've got you. I'd like to keep you, too, and not have you blow up later, whether at Addam or at Malos." Or at her, of course, but that was a foregone conclusion.

"You're not afraid for your own sake?" Oh, caught out. And yet, she'd never tell.

"Of course not. It's like I said: I know where I stand."

"And you wanna know where I stand." Minoth straightened up, and catching full sight of Flora's face removed a glove to run his knuckles whisper-softly along her jaw.

"How many years is it that I've known Addam - six, almost seven? I know him. I don't even doubt it, because after all so much of him is written plain on his face. If I had to turn on him...Flora, I don't know what I'd do." What he'd do, where he'd go, who he'd be.

"Surely you can't be that directionless," she countered, feeling a little panicked herself.

"Perhaps not. With Malos, maybe I'll find a new direction."

Her face fell, almost imperceptibly but far from too minutely for him to notice. "Ah, see, you don't like the thought of that. I knew you wouldn't. We've got to have patience for each other. It's the only way."

"Patience is one thing, but complacency?" Banter of their own she'd just started up, then.

"What, are you my mother now?"

"No, I'm your wife, or nearabouts. I want you to use your words - you've got so many as it is, you must be able to spare a few for your dear, sweet Driver."

"I'd call you dear and sweet, love, but not him."

"Don't try to fool me," Flora said with a tweak of his nose, "I'm almost never as asleep as you two want to believe." Oh, heaven forbid it!

Minoth clutched a feigning hand to his chest. "You wound me!"

Now she waved a petite gloved hand of her own. "Your pride can take it. But, you know...talk to him. It's all you used to do, so don't forget to talk, really talk, about the things that matter."

"Flora, Flora, Flora." His fluttering fingers were back at her chin now, admiring with aching fondness. "How could anyone ever be your better star?"

Closing her eyes, she leaned into the offered prop. "Hmm...maybe they couldn't. You'd better start trying again if you want to find out, though."

Minoth gave one final caress, then kicked the last bit of dirt over the hole the weeds had left. "Is that our job done for the morning, then?"

"Yes, I think so, if Milton took care of his corner. Where did he get to, anyway?"

Tilting head and eyebrows alike with a sympathetic look, Minoth made the slowest possible jerk of thumb past the fields out onto the moor, towards a cliff where said Gormotti boy was perched next to a Tirkin, seemingly engaged (the both of them!) in animated conversation.

It was all Flora could do not to scurry over to interrupt. "Oh, Milton, don't-!" she called pitifully after him.

"What?" Milton straightened up and gave a wave to the Tirkin, who waved craftily back, before jogging back in the direction of the garrison. "They're friendly," he explained upon making it in, "I like to talk to them. See, look, that one's watching the vegetable patch."

Flora sighed and looked to Minoth for solidarity. He carried none, however, only crossing his arms and giving Milton an approving nod. Sigh, sigh, and sigh again.

"You could make friends with just about anything or anyone, couldn't you?" she offered at last.

Milton grinned himself, brushing sweaty pieces of hair out of his eyes. "I mean, sure. I might as well try, right? Everyone could use an extra smile around."

Smiles and making friends, however, was not exactly what was taking place within the manor walls, as Addam worked through the ledger and Malos idly pointed out his arithmetic mistakes. They continued like that for some time, and every time either of them tried to pull at a thread of actual conversation, it devolved into grunts and head tilts. That is, until Addam decided to cut to the chase - and what a snapping race it was.

"Malos, do you want to kiss me?"

"I- What?"

"Just what I said. Do you want to kiss me?"

"That's a cop-out, Addam, what the fuck?"

"Well, maybe you're right. Maybe I'll think of the words later. But right now, it seems like a pretty good place to start."

"Tell me something. Is it Minoth rubbing off on you, or the other way around?"

"You want to find out?"

"No, I don't think I do. I mean, it's not like you people are tossing me around like a fucktoy, but..."

The propositioning party rolled his shoulders, crossed his arms, cast his eyebrows upwards and his gaze to the side. "Ah, it's just one thing after another with me, isn't it?"

Malos only groaned and rolled his own eyes. "Stop right there. I'm not going to sit here and listen to you bemoan yourself until I feel too bad to begrudge you. Minoth probably lets you do that all the time."

Addam's tone suddenly shifted icy. "I think if you knew just how much dignity he has you'd be well surprised. Just because he's comfortable enough with you to be as flamboyant as he is doesn't mean he's comfortable enough to show you his true fears."

Ice, meet impassive black flame. "Okay. So? Why lord it over me?"

Why indeed? "Minoth always came to us, always, on his own. We accepted him as he was, and that was a deal of doing in itself. Now he's come with you. I've either got to accept you as you are, as a part of him, or I've got to block you out, because I do not want him to leave again."

The "do not" came enunciated in titular text. So what do you want then? Negativity was a hell of a sinkhole.

Malos prepared his next words with accusatory tone. Did he have the moral high ground? Perhaps not, but he could pretend it preternaturally better than any of them ever could. "When do you people have time to talk about all this? I haven't heard a word of it."

"If I were feeling more snide," Addam returned slowly, "I'd say that we've got time to do it every time you refer to us as 'you people', but you're right. We haven't talked about it. And maybe that's...maybe that's a problem."

"You're very concerned with what he does. More than anything else, it seems like." But, well, the Aegis could have answered his own question, if he'd thought hard enough about what Addam, or any other human, even Blade, was like at their core or Core.

"What else is there, if not the people you love?"

Malos shifted his jaw loosely back and forth in its own space of socket. What else, indeed.

When Minoth came marching back into the house, it was with Flora in hand and step all too straight, like going to war without knowing what at or who for. He moved the back of her hand to his lips, then dropped it back down to his side and unlaced their fingers; the presenting of arms, as it were. He hadn't hugged Addam, chest to chest, since he'd been back. If he did, now, that would be surrender, one towards, yes, complacent complicit remissive peace.

So, he didn't, only approached awkwardly to ask of the pair that had remained inside: "You two get along while I was gone?"

"Oh, absolutely-!" Addam didn't get much past the tail end of his affirmation before Malos recklessly punched his shoulder, and hard. "Fucking liar."

Something clicked and locked in the back of Minoth's mind, but he kept, as ever, neutral, jocular among and over all. Perhaps that was his mistake. "Well, I can't say I quite blame you. It's not like you've got much in common besides me." Ha ha, of course - a love triangle! That should solve everything, sans doute!

"That was the point, wasn't it?" Malos gritted out in response. "To stop having to go through you?"

The pillar remained unshaken, even casual. "Yeah, I suppose it was."

Said the immovable object to the unstoppable force, as they traded roles: "Well it didn't work. This guy's still an ass."

The predictable response, of course, would have been Minoth quipping a "Now, now, no need to get all hostile," but he didn't, of course, because he was stood at parade rest, if not full attention, and what was that if not preparation for hostilities? He made no rejoinder; the room was silent.

"Okay," Malos conceded after the painfully long moment, "he's not an ass, and we probably had some pretty meaningful conversation. But we're not best buddies all of a sudden, if that's what you wanted."

Milton stretched awkwardly in the corner, likely expecting lunch but finding none of it, only more childish adult drama. Flora nervously fiddled with some knick-knacks on the counter. Observing his input going summarily ignored, Malos made to join her, but his hand was smacked away. No orders had been given. The air was yet still.

Somewhat unlike him (but then who among them was it like?), Addam was the first with an itchy trigger finger. "Architect, you look all wrong standing there like that. Won't you touch me, or something, please, I can't stand it!"

"Addam-" "PLEASE!" As he said it, almost yelled it, Addam thrust his own hands down to grasp at Minoth's, and finding them lifeless, flopping fishlike, only became more terrified and confused.

"Is this Amalthus? Malos, is this-- Do you know what's happening to him?" Malos didn't reply, let it alone.

"Addam." Even though Minoth had spoken the name before, this word carried all the gravity of being the first one since "supposing it was." And, Addam was caught equally off guard - that is to say, his response was the main axis of recognition.

"Wha-?" "There's nothing wrong with me. Nothing is happening to me."

He and Malos, as soldiers both, objects of the downwards-topside facsimile of their Elysium's heaven, had, for all intents and purposes, nothing wrong with them. They were as the Architect had intended, weren't they? He wasn't around to tell or care. "Then why, Minoth, please?"

"Maybe this...our act is over."

Where to cut off the uncertainty of the maybe? Was it declarative or still as yet a conjecture? In the background, Flora put a fearstruck hand to her cheek. The place where it had been kissed, though at times she could never remember where that had last been, was not the lockpoint of a long-concealed weapon but instead the ribbon about roses, even shyster's cyclamens, laid at a grave. None should mourn the warlike, but who was he when arms were downed?

At last, over all her consideration of symbolism, she found her words. "Minoth, when I said to talk to him, this isn't what I meant."

"You put him up to this?!" Addam cried out, whirling to face her but still remaining tethered to Minoth's limp palms.

"I did nothing more than encourage him to talk to you - and not in that nonsense banter of yours. I love you, the both of you, you know, and not just because I'm the trinket wife. Not just because I'm any wife at all, but if you keep acting this foolish I'll keep wondering if that really is all that keeps me here."

"And what about him?" Addam jerked his head at Malos.

"Me? I'm not the one who made the jackass comment, that was you, bucko."

Taking stock, counting heads, it was all the same every time they clashed. Yes, Malos realized, Minoth, Addam, probably even Flora but it didn't count from her so much as constantly emanate, they were all right. This family, or cheap imitation thereof, needed to get it together, and fast.

"So you're all against me?" Addam continued, however pathetically. "Truly, even you, Flora?"

"I don't know enough to say," she replied, more deflected.

"Bullshit. Bull-shit!" Malos burst in. "You know exactly enough. What, you think I think you people were born yesterday? I'm the one who was born yesterday, and already I know a fuck of a lot more than the both of you put together."

"Just what is it, Malos, that makes me so infantile? What is it that I've done?"

Malos studied his Driver's Driver with a calculating, impatient eye. "You said you didn't want him to leave? Well think about the last person he left. I'd have thought someone like you would be trying a hell of a lot harder not to end up like that."

"Wha- me turning into Amalthus? What on earth makes you think I could be so...so evil?"

Minoth, still for far too long, shuffled his feet and bowed his head like he'd been waiting for a cue.

"Addam...you're not the villain in my story. You never could be. But saying something like that, suggesting that a Blade is less a person than a prop, to be reset at a whim? That's more like Amalthus than any humanity-hating speech either of us could ever come up with."

Try as she might, Flora couldn't have stopped him from speaking in metaphors, but perhaps that was for the best. To Addam, however, it seemed he still hadn't quite gotten through.

"Damn it all, Minoth, is that what this is all about? Because of that one petty little thing I said?"

Petty? Petty?! Like the most heartfelt wishes of a child, no matter how fantastical, was it petty. "It's life and death, Addam, for the gods' own sake," Flora stamped out. "I knew I never married you for your intellect, but this is too much."

Where before Malos had been all too ready to give Addam a shove by whichever protuberance was nearest and most convenient, he wasn't exactly sure how to communicate his gesticulation as it pertained to Flora. He settled for a bump of her upper arm. "See? You know."

"Knowing or not knowing, it doesn't make a difference," she said, and bumped him back. "Look, you all, this may be a bit of cabin-on-top-of-the-transport-Titan, but before we make any further rash decisions, I think it's time we awaken the last member of this cockeyed family. Addam, please, just apologize if you know what you've done wrong, instead of just trying to minimize it. And Minoth, give the poor man a hug, will you?"

Again with the puppy-dog eyes, Addam looked as he uttered his stammering supplication, and was he really such a poor man, one to be pitied? But Minoth was nothing if not a loving partner, and so he went, and whispered careful words, and stroked fingers across temples, and tapped at Core and heart, and drew them together like sutures across a wound. Was the battle over? Perhaps it was only just begun.

Thankfully, when they moved to the first floor down to embark on Flora's proposal, they had the good sense to do it as a conscious group. Not hand in hand in hand in hand, no, but without minding that they perhaps brushed arms or leaned this way or that into each other, or even away from the same.

"Will you sit by me?" Malos asked furtively, once they had reached their intended destination of a room studded with veritable obelisks of comfortable furniture.

"Huh? Sure, I'm sitting right here." Minoth had known it was him who was being addressed, but any further understanding was either pretended out of existence or full-on slicked like quick, steely rain straight away.

"No, I mean..." Malos raised his hand a few inches in the air, then dropped it, fruitless. "What?"

"I didn't get to have this with you. Will you...y'know, sit by me?"

"Oh." Minoth, it seemed, was still rather in his own self-erected padded cell of another world. "Of course."

Just as they had agreed, if Flora possessed any trepidation about the impending event, she displayed none of it, only accepting the pouch from Malos without flourish or hesitation and aligning herself approximately centered in the middle of the den. Only four others to be strewn about didn't make much of a ceremonial ring, but as one Aegis to the other, their self-determination should, if all was right in Elysium, make and have made its own triumphant arrival.

The awakening wasn't half as quiet as Malos's had been, however; there was a solid five minutes in which Flora disappeared behind a practical-not-practical curtain of brilliant golden light with only the barest tips of her silhouette visible. When the makeshift firmament had cleared itself away, like neatly tearing down the walls of heaven to not-so-politely request entrance inside - would she ever in fact right the imposition she had made, if it was indeed one? - it was to reveal now two feminine figures, one short and familiar, the other taller and unfamiliar both to those surrounding her and as described them in her eyes.

In the anti-haze of photons, she had grasped her Driver's hand, and Flora smiled none too falsely at the gesture before the Blade realized what she had done and snatched the offending appendage away, face reddened.

"Oh, that's alright, but-- Ah, hello. My name is Flora - what's yours?"

"I'm...Mythra." Her voice was low, not unlike Malos's, with a down-to-earth grittiness that well contrasted her lily-white slip of a dress and gold-green pauldrons.

"Mythra. That's a lovely name," Flora pronounced, trying to sound encouraging and welcoming.

"Thanks, I guess." It hadn't worked; Mythra yet turned inward. Well, nothing to do but soldier on.

"We've rather a full house for your first time out, I suppose. Everyone, introduce yourselves." She pointed at each one in turn: "I'm Milton!"; "My name's Addam, pleased to meet you."; "Minoth, at your service."; and, finally, most simply, "Malos."

"That's not your name," Mythra said, automatic and almost mechanical now that she had been given something concrete and precise to latch onto.

"What?" Malos snapped warily, starting up and away from Minoth's gently clutching hand.

"That's not...don't call yourself that."

"Father give me strength, what is it with you people? First him asking me why I'm named the way I am, and now you telling me it isn't even true!"

Mythra crossed her arms, not huffing so much as reinforcing her position. "Hey, it's not my fault you're walking around with the wrong name."

Malos mirrored her, all too eager to throw down, even with his more or less newborn sister. "Oh yeah? And how do you know Mythra's even your right name, huh? Getting off on a real good foot there, sis."

"Logos," she said quietly. "Your name is Logos." She had ignored him, undistractable, and cut straight to her point. Rather like her Driver, then.

"Logos." Minoth spoke the name almost reverently, and in that moment Malos (Logos? Who am I?) had to realize that, shit, this guy's in love with me. It was borderline scary how hard and fast he seemed to fall. Then again...was he any different?

Follow in further on that thought... "No." No. "Huh?"

The Dark Aegis sighed, already impatient at the impetus of the illogical act of having to explain himself.

"My name is Malos. I don't care if it means bad, or if it's fake, or it's not what Father ordained for me. My name has been Malos the entire time I've been alive, and, well...the way this guy says it I don't think I'd ever want to hear anything else."

In fact and after all, not very logical of him in the least, but there it was.

"Oh my god. No way." Mythra had to bite her lip to keep from full-out cackling, and eyed Addam and Milton as she did it to see if they were getting the same thing, the same signal.

Malos craned his neck and gaze in at his sister, eyebrows working wildly. "What?" As if it wasn't obvious.

"You're gay for Ponio-boy here? What the hell did I just walk into?"

And then the facial animation only doubled in its measure of self-assigned ridicule. "The fuck, Mythra?"

But indeed, there Minoth the horse-whisperer himself was, sat with side of cheek cupped in palm propped from elbow on thigh and gazing wistfully up at Malos. Somehow the thought of his, Malos's, being just the same had seemed a hell of a lot more tossed-off when no one else had noticed - and that is to say, Malos himself hadn't truly comprehended what his own not-so-idle musing had meant, and still wasn't truly making to do so.

"Well come on," Mythra started, cranking her forearm at the elbow to further indicate her impatience. "What's the deal with you two?"

And, well...Minoth wasn't particularly golden about explaining the real truth of his situation to people so...not willing, but able to hear, and yet he figured he'd try anyway. It had to come out sometime, and it wasn't all that checkered, chequered, lacquered, or lackered, all things considered, but ah, what a deal to be with, and to have with you. With you and others who were also with you. Oh, stop stalling, Minoth, the semantic thesaurus will still be there when you get done.

So, the orator cleared his throat. "I stole Malos - your brother, right? - newly awakened, and you still a Core, from the Indoline Quaestor who stole you both down from the World Tree. Prior to that excursion, he'd taken me in, half by compellance and half by volunteering, to be made into a Flesh Eater, a wretched hybrid of human and Blade physiology spurred forth by a brutal combination of hubris and disdain."

He shuddered, as he always did, at the grim reveal, not to call it a revelation. Was it such a bad thing? Had he really been all that mistreated? Just like he said: half of the motivation, the permission, was his own consent to volunteer. But then was there coercion? Just because your abuser so conveniently gives you an out doesn't mean you have to thank them for necessitating it. In context or out, the deed is and was done. Always.

"I just thought...well, I thought that any and all Blades deserved better, maybe, but now that I know Malos...I'm sure of it."

"You do too." "What?"

So, Mythra seemed to have a thousand casually world-rocking observations stored up her now apparently not-so-lily-white sleeved gloves. "Stop acting like you don't."

Minoth's eyebrows lowered, and his jaw set. "Please don't pretend that you know me." Because after all, that's my job, to make you do that - when I want. The audience, and all.

"I'm not pretending. I know everything about you that Flora was thinking when she resonated with me. Or I feel it, anyway. We're going to kill Amalthus, aren't we? For what he did to the boys she cares about."

"Kill him?" Addam repeated. There was a grimness to the two-word phrase well despite Addam's ever-airy, ever-hearty tone. It couldn't be... "Flora, that's not like you. Just what are you saying, Mythra?"

Mythra rolled her eyes, even smiled a touch. "Y'all are too cute. No, I didn't get that from her, but I doubt a human like that's gonna repent any time soon. He hasn't even been after you for what you stole? Guy has no morals at all."

"He wouldn't have known it was Minoth," Malos pointed out, and quite astutely, he seemed, for all how obvious a detail it was.

"So? He would've blamed you if he thought it was worthwhile, but he didn't. He's just waiting for another shoe to drop."

Ah. Maybe so. "You're very clever, Mythra," Flora said appraisingly, her first true comment on the matter as she'd studied up her opinion.

"Well, you know." The Light Aegis shrugged a signal of her comfort in the room. "Like Driver, like Blade."

"So what are we, then? A family or a fighting force?" Addam put in, now noticeably from his somewhat removed position on a spare couch.

Of course, if this was fin scene, Minoth would have pointed his most theatrical wry amusement at his Driver and said, "Get it straight, Daddam, of course this is a family," and led the cuddle pile pile-on, but it wasn't, and there was still planning and plotting to be done, so all he said was, "How about a little bit of both? Oh, and say...side projects, remember? Not the genocidal kind."

Their newest member, of said familial unit or of said farewar unit, was on this like the very flash she, well, was. "So we're going? When?"

"Not so fast, Mythra," Minoth whip-turn countered, assuming the paternal position himself then. "It's a little stupid, I think, to make a shiptrek surge onto Indol for the express purpose of murdering one perhaps, or perhaps not so, unsuspecting Quaestor, and then hauling off again just the same. Almost feels cliché."

Mythra snorted, and so did Malos. They took a moment to glare at each other, and then the brother figure conceded the floor. "What, like it's been done before?"

"I don't know," their playwright answered, shrugging with a light momentary close of his eyes. "You tell me. Has it?"

Then there was a pause, and Minoth's query hung in the air. Mythra's lips assumed a position uber-neutral, and she took a long look at Malos. A very long look. After a moment, his features shifted to match, or rather to accommodate, hers. Very interesting, if a little off-putting.

"You enjoying this telepathy, Malos? Or is this unwelcome mind games from the fairer sex?"

Flora swatted weakly at Minoth's shoulder in retribution for his insouciant and slightly offensive comment, casting him in the rough direction of the other husband-like occupant of the room and of her heart, but he remained where he was sat, still observing the Aegises' contact, of eyes and otherwise. Eventually, Mythra bit her lip and cracked her neck back and forth, expression painted a slight tinge of discomfort rather than her usual (indeed, even from just this long, or maybe short, alive) confidence.

"I see the future, not other futures. Or pasts."

Why the long silence, only to give a simultaneously vague and Titan-shaking response to a question far faded? Flora's frown was then matched to her Blade's. "You're a little cautious all of a sudden, Mythra."

"Someone has to be," came the cut back.

"Something wrong, Mythra?" Addam piped blithely up from the couch once more.

Milton, yet quiet, just yawned; it was hard to get a read on this girl. Was she for them, was she against them, was she gone loopy for Minoth like the rest of the nuts in this house? One could never tell.

"It's...a lot. Being alive, all of a sudden." Ah. Indeed.

"I can't say I quite understand," Addam began with a slow lift of his chin, "because, and I know it's silly to say, I've never been a Blade. I've never even awakened one, myself. As you must have been able to parse out from the ether signatures, or what have you, I've become Minoth's Driver. It's very gratifying, to have earned that trust - probably moreso than most Drivers ever get to say, because they're struck with it implicitly from the very outset."

"You're rambling, my prince," Minoth prodded, but there was a melancholy fondness coating his face and voice.

"I know, my love," the very mini-monarch returned just as fondly, "but it's only true."

Now, at this, Mythra's eyebrows near about hiked clean off her face, through her bang and probably scraping past the diadem as well. "Wait...three of you? You're all...y'know--?!"

"Afraid of saying something offensive, partner?"

Finally, Mythra flopped into a chair and gazed fully up at Malos, now not hindered by her own diminished comparative height and even able to be proud of it. "Offending you seems like it's a crazy amount of fun. So no, I'm not afraid. I'm looking forward to it."

Twin sneers, again and as ever.

"Alright, you two," Minoth broke in, "enough with the offending and the mind games and the looking forward - to the future or anything else. Just what is our scenario, here?" Brass tacks and grounds basis and all, indeed.

"His Core is corrupted." The factoid was delivered sharply, snappish, as if a flatness to it would help de-dent the dome.

"We knew that," Minoth said just as flatly back.

Mythra groaned, rolled her eyes yet again. "What, do you just know everything, Mr. Gaywright? Come on. What could you possibly know about it that makes me so redundant?"

An interesting thought: Mythra, as the second awakened Aegis, redundant? If Malos had been second, would he be just the same? They were rather starkly polar opposites, brawn to beauty alongside the brains to brains. And then she had what he had, and he had what she had, and they were siblings in the strangest, truest right.

"Okay, okay." Minoth crossed his arms and assumed his stiffest rhetoric-delivering position. "I deserve better, and you're not redundant. How could you possibly be, since really the both of us have corrupted Cores and apparently you've got access to some information Malos doesn't have?"

"What?" Malos's neck gave a hitching twitch. "What does she know that I don't? Come on, partner, he might not know everything, but I do, and you know it."

Mythra ignored his petulance, for the most part. "Flora, how do you live around here? These guys are assholes. Come to think of it, what are you even doing here?"

"If you're asking me for advice, Mythra," Flora started with a sorrowful smile, "I'm afraid I won't be able to give it. Addam's my husband, and, well, and so on and so forth from there. You're up against it, love."

Truly, she was. "Assholes like I've never seen," she'd been about to say, but then she'd never seen anything else. Father above, what a way to start your life. Life. Breathing. Being alive. Why was that...why did that seem so important?

A rather rounded clap brought Mythra out of her existential reverie: Minoth, now bowed eyebrows to thumbs, trying desperately to direct their little troupe back on track. "Stow the family tree for now if you please, dear," he gently prodded Flora.

"Now. The information that you have is Malos's supposed real name. I asked him shortly after he made his debut from the crystal what his name was, and he said Malos. This isn't some nickname we've come up with, he knew his name was Malos the same way I knew my name was Minoth. The same way you knew your name was Mythra, only without quite as much hesitation."

Hesitation. Ha. "You think I might be a little less confident than he is when there are five people waiting here to see me, and not just one? Something in the protocol suggests that a Blade has one Driver, and one person to greet, you know?"

It seemed important because it fucking was, she told herself. Being alive was kind of a trauma, really. Traumas. At least a dozen she could call up by name and characteristic, for the purpose of...what?

Those five people were still gazing expectantly at her. Okay. Well. If I have to be a star.

"Anyway. I can see the directory where Logos works, in our Elysium administrative space. He's pretty disconnected from it, but it's up there. He should be able to see mine as well, username and all, but if he can't, I'm betting that's the corruption."

Something in Mythra's description seemed to engage a crucial mechanism in Malos's mind. "In other words, the permissions are messed up."

He with a week to process his power and purpose, arrived with murder on the mind but still kicking, and she there for no presentable fraction of an hour in which to assess but gifted the straightforward snap of her nascent influence. They understood each other implicitly. Nice.

"That's right. And maybe we don't need to kill Amalthus, but we need to pay him a visit, so we can get you straight." Oh, even nicer. "You know, even though obviously that's not possible."

Malos swung a mighty hand at the back of his sister's head, but it was without any more malice than would be necessary to intend to mess up her hair and carefully perched diadem, and now, no, they didn't assault Addam with affections for his having brought them all together, but they did sit a while, brewing their calm before the storm.

If the point of it all was to point fingers at Amalthus, then Malos and Minoth had been doing a pretty good job of it.

"Came back wrong..." murmured Minoth. Mythra's eyes snapped to him. "What?"

What, indeed? A trope not normal to Alrest itself, considering that "coming back" was an everyday phenomenon (even though those that knew those that came were already gone, gone, gone). But a peek from the novels of Morytha, and one that had long entertained Minoth.

When you "came back wrong" you were not quite right; not quite as you'd been left, as those who found you had possibly hoped. But Malos - and Mythra by extension, possibly - had come back wrong without ever having a right to cleave to, to judge his bases by.

"What, is this a social visit?"

"Are we free? Father above, is it really over, Minoth, are we fucking free? I mean, I know it wasn't really all that long and all in all it wasn't that bad but-"

His semi-mindless rambling was stopped in its tracks by Minoth's lips meeting his Core Crystal as if they'd been laser-guided. When the Flesh Eater finally came up for air, his eyebrows were loosely knitted and the eyes themselves were unfocused. They yet swam for a few moments before being returned to concrete things with the help of hands locked on the sides of Malos's face.

"You are so beautiful to me, you know that?"

"You remember that time when Addam got so scared and angry, when you wouldn't touch him?"

"I remember," Minoth answered mildly.

"I understand that feeling completely, now. When you touch me, when I can touch you...is it idolizing to say that that's fucking everything?"

"You're a son of the lord up in heaven, Malos. I don't think we can begrudge you a little outward look to see what all the peons are fawning about."

"You're not lying, are you?"

"To the living, breathing word of God? How could I ever?"

"I'm just a person, Minoth."

"Oh, and I love you for it."

"Word of the gods, meet god of the words, huh?"

"Don't flatter me too much, darling, I'll get a swelled head."

"Swelled? You're swollen. Ain't nothing I can do to stop it."

"Odd choice of descriptor, but I'll take it."

"Hey, I don't pull any punches."

"Minoth, do you think...do you think it's possible that what I, we, got from Amalthus was real? Was actually what Father meant for us to be?"

"What do you mean?"

"Agh, how would you say it...do you think that's the way the story was meant to be written?"

Minoth smiled. It was a plaintive, nervous regret, but it was one, and it deserved gravity for all that it was so silly.

"No, Malos. I don't think so."

Once more I'll recall my (hilarious, at least to me) theory: Mythra is a standard user, Pyra is on parental controls, and Pneuma is sudo'd in.