you'll be in my heart
Addam Origo never wanted to be a Driver. Plain and simple, he never wanted the power-dynamical possession that came with resonating with a Blade and treating them as your own. Torna's traditions be damned, no one was perfect and he believed the crosswards implication of that impossible truth, that all-too-pervasive lie, of himself all too easily.
After all, wasn't he so literally, so genuinely a life-borne-out mistake? A fruit of his father's whimsy, as Zettar would term it, and naught but. Not fit to rule, not fit to reap, and certainly, then, not fit to resonate. Beyond any of doubt's deepest or shallowest shadows alike, not fit to resonate with the Aegis. With the lord of heaven above's own Blade.
But resonate he does. He receives Mythra, however unwillingly, and immediately he feels not only unfit but woefully unprepared for the task at hand. She is so singular, she is so very like the angelic goddess Amalthus could never have prophesized her as, especially not if and when following after the face-first brutal example of her brother, but the one he does pronounce her as.
She shoves away the covetousness, disdainful. Among the fear, Addam feels a stab of admiration. Itself, it is painted in fear. When it strikes into his heart, all that is left behind is the coating, and that may as well be all of bloody.
She is so unlike him. So self-possessed, so whole, so purposeful, so nimbly able to self-propel towards a goal. Born she is, and all she strikes towards is defeating Malos. Only, when she admits as much, Addam realizes that he'd rather she didn't.
If Mythra does not have her own identity, and he cannot give her one, then who is she? Who are they?
By the time of their encounter with any actual semblance of a travel group, Lora and Jin and Haze and Mikhail and Hugo and Brighid and Aegaeon pillars all, she is still...still the same as she was on that day. Still calculating, still apprehensive, still too flighty to be cared for. Still like she perhaps didn't want to be brought down here at all.
Speaking of those who didn't want to be brought down, there is Minoth. For him, Addam is a beacon, is a literal sun where his had been blinked out for quite some years. Minoth arrives, and now, oh, suddenly Mythra's got something to prove. This guy woke me up, and I really didn't care, but you? You, tough guy, with the boots and the bullets and all? I can't fall behind you.
There's never a moment of peace, with the two of them. If they're not yelling at each other, they're yelling with each other, and Addam can't exactly say he's partial to the frequency with which the singular compact syllable of "ass" leaves Mythra's mouth, parental role or not.
They yell and they moan and they bitch and they bicker but they're here and they're his, oh, they're his. There's no power to his possession, only weakness tendered in stilted kind, but it is dynamic. It is alive. They are alive. Oh, thank god. They are alive.
They get to live, the three of them history's bastards, while Hugo gets swept to the funeral bin and Aegaeon and Brighid don't even clink into the casket with him, and Milton has been struck down by the Architect's quite literal executor, himself mutilated, and Mikhail is likely next in cannon-foddered line, and Haze and Jin and Lora follow on as ugly, ugly, ugly consequence. Addam doesn't want to think about it, but being out of the woods is not something Lora's ever quite gotten to experience.
Petty comfort that you can decide not to think about it, don't you think? Addam's never been in the woods, and only hardly ever been in the trenches. He took Mythra and Minoth in with him, and brought Minoth and Pyra back on up and out. Which would be nice, almost, that there's motion towards something higher and better, but then they go right back down again, into the Spirit Crucible.
His tears solidify, sanctify, crystallize on the sheen-green gray-webbed floor. They crack under Minoth's boots, and he casts a rough hand at the side of Addam's cheek to keep the trajectory upright, to keep the sorrow from spilling. It doesn't work.
They're a team, yes, from the moment Minoth arrived they'd been a team, in the undercurrent if not in the overtone, but they're still only one third of a whole. Lora and Hugo could make it on their own, leaders of their own packs. Addam couldn't. And with Mythra gone...no, Addam can't.
He and Minoth fight together on the trek out. They fight the Phantasms, to test, and it is a motherlode of tears that deposits there. Minoth looks at Pyra, perhaps to laugh, but then he swallows it. From the look on his face, he's swallowed some bile, too.
Pyra doesn't fight. Not with her sword, and not with Addam. Pyra doesn't fight. Why, Addam thinks, is she being so even-tempered? This isn't like Mythra.
Of course it isn't like Mythra, you fool, she's not Mythra. Oh, to be sure, he says the name right, but what a little comfort that is.
"Pyra," he starts softly, and her head bobbles uncertainly, unnaturally, as she's stepping backwards up and into the capsule. "I won't forget you."
Pyra winces. There's a flash in her eyes, red-pink and something softer than the fire, than the ire. "But that's...you have to. Don't say that."
Contrary to pattern, Minoth doesn't nudge Addam's bare shoulder a scolding. No hypocrite is he; he'll remember her too. He meets her eyes, and she his, against both their so despicably freed wills, and only then does she realize how viscerally he will, and how much longer he'll be around to do it than Addam will.
She feels sick. But if she goes through the motions of actually being sick here and now, it'll be the last thing she remembers for all how many hundreds of years she'll be tombed up in this chamber. The last real, physical thing.
Before she can stop it, her hand is crossing the surface-tensioned boundary between in here and out there, between still and silent and locomoted and loud, between solitude and solidarity.
Addam takes it, uses it as the axis instrument to bring forth the stymied words from where they're trapped underneath his froggish tongue. "I'm sorry."
Sorry that he'll remember her? Sorry that she has to want him not to? Sorry that she's right and he's wrong, that they had to fight because he did her, them, wrong?
Pyra doesn't really believe him - it's not that she thinks he's lying, no, or that he means her any ill will, but...but his sorrow seems performative. Like he still thinks she's just Mythra and everything he wants to say to Mythra can come to and through her just as easily.
Minoth seems to pick up on this, in fact. "We- I might not understand you, Pyra," and one supposes it's good that he hesitates on their side of things if any, "but I do wish I had the time to. And I hope...I hope we'll meet again. Someday. When you're ready."
How to interpret that? Is he also trying to talk through her, to Mythra? She hates that there's no way to tell, and she hates even more the way a flicker of Mythra pokes up its frustration to supplement. I'm Pyra. I'm not some fake shadow, I'm not a cover-up, I am who I am.
"When I'm ready."
"When you're ready," Minoth repeats. His finger goes up and Pyra processes it all in an instant, anticipating the careful tap on the Core Crystal that sends the overt, hackneyed signal of "who you really are inside", and that's apparently someone he so obviously doesn't believe to be her.
Why must it always be their comfort first, that they knew Mythra, and owned her as part of their group, and kept her close to heart, and appreciated her even when it seemed like I was the one they really wanted? Why must I be the stranger, the fake? Do they think "Pyra" is just an act? Don't they see that I am someone new, but that we still come as a system, a matched set?
His finger goes up to tap on the scar.
He didn't get the scar until after the experiment. Mythra had elbowed Addam and asked what the Flesh Eater's deal was some couple of shifty-eyed days in to his stint with them, and Addam had looked horribly blank-eared and shame-faced back at her and said, "He's had a hard run. I certainly hope you won't be boxing up on him now, since Brighid's gotten tired of it."
"'Hard run'?"
"He's not...who he was before. Not entirely."
Minoth's own ears had twitched back then, and he'd cast the hollow of his timbre over Haze's head at the original duo, without dropping a word of his narration. I hear you, gossipers. I've heard gossipers before. Your curiosity is not idle and neither is your motive, it instead genuine even if still self-interested. But I am listening. I am watching. I hear you. And not in the way that you think.
Perhaps. They were ringed around the fire, and Mythra stood apart, Addam her keeper more even than her caretaker, as ever. Who hears this? Who knows this? Who calls this life and love?
And since he'd heard, Addam amended, "He's still the same man I met. The same Blade, I mean. But he's different. I don't know, I suppose you'll have to ask him about it."
Down went the melifluity of melodrama. Minoth's voice didn't hitch once. His grip tightened on the manuscript, though. Quite possibly, the only difference that mattered to and with him was the difference that tied him now to Addam. That is to say, the meeting, or the meting? Either, and both. Any and all of the above, but not as a blanket. Nothing so comforting, so easy, as a blanket.
Mythra didn't snort, but she gave all the requisite negative-spaced appearance of it. "What's the big deal? Is it the Flesh Eater stuff? You said he's Amalthus's Blade, right? Like I said...he seems kinda sketchy."
Addam arched his own pale, unmarred outcropping of the supraorbital ridge, turned his head and the slight of his shoulders to face Mythra, but his feet remained planted. Something peaked, something unique, again. Something outside of our orbit. Yet I cannot cross the boundary. Come back into our atmosphere. Please. "And does the scar make him sketchy?"
What does the scar do? It doesn't bleed ether, it doesn't radiate electrified immortality or the lack of it, it just... "It just makes him him, I guess. Makes him this Minoth, right? I bet all the Minoths are sketchy. 's kind of his thing, right?" A huff, and a smirk. A step into the circle.
Unforunately, Addam didn't really hear that last. "Our Minoth," he murmured, and perhaps then he understood some of the slice of universe's moon that was being a Driver, was being in resonance with a Blade. But only perhaps.
And as to the man - Blade? Blade-man? man-Blade? - himself? She'd never actually talked to him about it, directly. Just, after that, the appraising looks had come inflected with something gentler, more nuanced, something more relatable and relatible.
"Mythra, take over! I need a quick break," Minoth would say. Instead of "What, can't hack it?", "I gotcha, big guy," Mythra would say. And Addam would listen over it all and feel a greater rise in his chest from those quick-snapped quips than the flip of the ether itself, gold to gold.
So now. In the crucible. Dark and dank and lacking of all those things gold. Addam watches Minoth tap a single grave gloved finger to his left cheek, over the lines that etch out, sketch out, his worlds of wordly weariness. And perhaps he thinks he understands.
Pyra does not make Mythra misshapen. Pyra does not make Mythra broken. Pyra is in some ways inseparable from Mythra, not just because they share a body (or seem to, and who is to question what is truly inside of any Blade, let alone the Aegis, let alone this one), and certainly Pyra is now new and whole and real and a sign of everything Mythra has gone through up to now and into the future.
Pyra is Pyra. And with that one terrifyingly simple ununderstanding gesture, that educated-uneducated shot in the literal dark for what could be the truth most valuable, most poignant, most formative of home, and with Addam's feeble, impotent gaze over it all, they are all cemented into each other's hearts and minds.
Addam, and Minoth, and Pyra, and Mythra behind. Waiting in the wings. Waiting as the wings. Waiting to fly, but not before she is ready. Never before she is ready. Maybe never again. Who is to say?
Addam is still holding Pyra's hand. She pushes off of it, now, doesn't fall out of the mount of the capsule for something so base and backwards as a hug, but Minoth catches the prince's hand as it falls. Braced around her, their sorrow so visceral. Too real. She doesn't want it, shouldn't need it, but it will be a long and lonely time, indeed. Rather feel this warmth than the burn of the vomit.
Mythra did not leave because she is wanton. Pyra did not arrive because she is subservient. And, too, they are not halves of a whole, no, they do not make up everything in exact what the other lacks. Pyra is not, necessarily, temporary.
Creeping around the barren edge of his uninformed confusion, Addam turns over a leaf of what will cut the deepest. He truly will not be alive to see Pyra outside of the shell of her inception. He will never see Pyra knowing Minoth, and Minoth knowing Pyra. She is not Mythra. They are not the same. Even, he doesn't and won't ever love them the same.
Minoth's wave to her is a salute of misunderstanding, of half-relation in almost the same way that he is only half a Blade. They sink the ship, and he waves his goodbye to Addam all the same. He's walking away, gait slow, eyes shielded by their own willful ignorance from Flora and the baby sitting on a bench in the village, after Azurda has taken them back to Leftheria proper. Not that anything not Torna could be proper for those housebound Origos.
Addam stops him, clutches arms about shoulders and yes, hands over those vulnerable places on his back.
"Why are you leaving now? Why are you leaving me?" Why you, too?
"Addam," Minoth starts, without pulling back. "You don't want to be a Driver. You don't want to be my Driver."
The tears start again, and here they do not cohere into anything more significant than a pathetic wince. "You know that isn't true."
Minoth pulls back now. He moves Addam's insistent hand away from his shoulder, and places it instead on his Core.
"My place isn't here, anymore." Reluctantly, princely palm claps then to chain-covered chest. "But I'll always be in there. For us...I think that's enough."
I had finished a sizable portion of what I envisioned for this piece, which I had planned to finish in the same one sitting, before stepping away for a couple of days, and when I came back it was not with the intention to, for this piece specifically, do more research about and incorporate plural identities, whether in the form of DID or OSDD (there are differing opinions on which Pythra more closely aligns with), but as I worked through the section immediately following Sorry that he'll...? through His finger goes up to tap on the scar., knowing that I wanted Minoth to interact there and seeing what unfolded line by line (sometimes the story just happens to me, without planning necessary!), it became clear that that was something I needed to either go all in on or scrap completely.
With that in mind, I set this down for another long while, and asked if Calico, an alter xemself, would like to read what I had written, as though the responsibility does lie entirely on singlets to take up the mantle of research and self-education, without checking for his opinion and a little bit of guidance to know that I haven't, well, still managed to pull harmful characterization out of my ass, this work would be both disrespectful and incomplete.
Again, this was not meant to be an exploration of Pyra's identity and her relationship to Mythra as the "original" personality - it was just supposed to be another fluffy-angsty Team Addam piece about Addam's flaws in how he loved his Blades. But enough is enough! I simply thought I ought to bite the bullet and do it right. With xer help and understanding, which is so dearly appreciated, I believe now that I have.
If you did enjoy this piece (or even if you didn't, really), I don't just recommend, I implore you to read Calico's piece about Fei's system in Xenogears. It is beautifully written from the heart by someone who would know, and it deserves all the recognition it can get.