In The Cage

I don't always provide song links for my PG pieces anymore, but this one might benefit from the fantastic fan-illustrated version. Again, loose inspiration that helped charge a little bit of the completion.

Malos was never constricted, constrained, in the first two years of his life. He went wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted. The want in that phrase...usually connotes wantonness. Yeah, sounds about right.

Well, almost. Killing would have been wanton if it wasn't what he was made, machined, milled out from and into silicon synapse to do. He's efficient, is all. Fabulously violent, almost flamboyant as he kills, kills, kills.

He doesn't even kill, he eliminates, flames black with their expediency, like they hadn't even been given the time to fully flare. Being fast, being free, being cynical and unburdened, it's a nigh-orgasmic thrill. How wonderful, to fulfill your purpose. And so well, too.

When he sees Mythra, then, he sees what it would be like if someone did contain an Aegis. If someone did try to clam a lid on something so naturally feral, and then, of course, what would happen if it didn't work. She's not fulfilling any kind of purpose, and it's ridiculous. It's pathetic. Not that he needed her to show him, let alone tell him.

She lies when she tells him, that these humans, the ones of the moment being Tornans because he's gone around and sank some others, are brave and strong and true, even. No they're not, they're liars. They're lying to themselves and somehow they've managed to lie to her too. Silly Mythra, silly sister. He knows, somehow he knows, that she was like him before. Before she got wrangled into being the way she is now.

And how could she have been that way? She came that way. He came this way. Of course he did. Like dolls, he's the model of masculinity and she's the model of femininity even though neither of them should know or care about something as pitifully human as gender. Dolls for humans to play with. Is that all they are? He's not.

What if she didn't come that way, off the factory belt and floor? At first glance, he wouldn't have thought that it was her Driver, that dumb little bastard prince Addam Origo, being the cynic. Jin, the steely man of ice with the stupid mask and all, looked far more the part of someone who'd scorn the world, even if not someone who'd become fatally arrested by that fear and shun like Addam so clearly had. Idiot.

Looking the part. As if. Minoth, that selfsame idiot, that was his hogwash to peddle. He was still doing it, allied with someone who'd agree. What a weakling, what a waste. Malos didn't need to be like him, and he wasn't. He wasn't the wretched heap of flesh observing with crafty eye. He was above them all. Above the humans.

During that time, humans and Blades were all pretty much considered one to him. All scum picking themselves up and flinging themselves down again across the face of the world, all ordained by the Architect to flow in disgusting mangled-inheritance line. So why was the Aegis created apart? Why else? To eliminate them all.

To eliminate Jin for being so foolish as to let himself become attached to a precious Driver, that idiotic little girl with her annoying optimism and the irritating way she bounced on the balls of her feet as if she wasn't survival-trained to smash her dainty little boots in your face with the weight of a thousand unenacted sins.

Little girl. She was all of twenty-seven years old, he observed. Far too old to be acting that way, even for a human. There was some maturity in there somewhere, but she forced Jin to take it on. She caged him up like an animal, made him be slower than he was meant to be, made him the sous-chef to her grand plans of being a knight and helping people and oh boo hoo, look at that, she's fallen on the ground.

That's where she came from. You don't deserve him. Lora, Lora, Lora. Precious Driver, maddening thriver. But oh Logos, the logical, he knows that's wrong, and he hates being toyed with as he makes his conclusions. Okay, try again. Eject. Reboot. Connect.

Lora's one of the only good ones. Probably, the other two are too. Still, they've all got their inhibitions. Who put them there? For a split second, Malos thinks he'd like to find out. For curiosity's sake only. For the staving of tedium.

Oh, taking the seal. Indeed! Taking the Tornan Titan out of its cage. It was only put there because humans were stupid and weak, centuries ago. He didn't even need to make his gory speeches about craving death and throwing themselves on oblivion, the proof was right there. They had done it, and like rats skittering through a maze only for a time did they make the non-nuclear choice to stop doing it, but then they found other ways.

That's how determined they were to kill themselves. Of course, even Amalthus. Why did he awaken Malos if not to set loose the scourge? A bioweapon of truly epic proportion, he was, from the breadth of his chest to the depth of his data. He stretched his fingers, cracked his knuckles without another digit's assistance, mounted the partition he was made to execute. The logic unit acts just the same no matter the instructions.

There was an insane delight he found in goading Mythra on, in pulling her out of her prince's cage into the real world. The real world, of course, being the epicenter of their analytical supremacy, the absolute height of their wild-eyed storm. There wasn't anything in this world that mattered, except for those singular moments where Elysium dreamspace became a decadent nightmare shaded real.

Then he hurtles into the Cloud Sea and dies, and he was the one in the cage the whole time, she was the one who was free, even in that twisted way, because she was there with the humans. Out of the cage and into the waiting room. Damn it. Jin's going to die because of that pest of a girl.

And then he doesn't, still because of her, and everything Malos knows gets jammed into a corrupted sector, disks drilled and existential referential trees uprooted. The world is a cage. There is no escape. He wasn't made to kill, but now he's going to kill his maker. For Jin.

Who was doing it for before...? He doesn't know. Now there is only Jin. And instead of having a Driver who pins him in to futility, Jin opens up the entire world, and Malos is then almost sad that they're going to destroy it. Huh. Who would've thought? Not him.

This is just such an intensely Malos song, I cannot believe it didn't smack me in the face harder before. Here are the lyrics just to completely overstate how literal the allusions are.