and so with gods and men, the sheep remain inside their pen

A cradle of ice, a network of wires; Jin is somewhere inside something that he is fairly certain was never made to be a place in which one can be. Things begin from here, he thinks, and maybe they end here, but they don't...nothing lives, in here.

So do things live outside here, then? They must. Can both be true? They...must.

He is in his own matrix, he finds. Within, without, with and without, no Driver or Blade in sight...a Titan is not this independent. So Jin, now, still cannot be.

Now he begins to ponder the question of whether or not he was even ever alive. What is there to possess? What is there to ring dominion over? Was my body ever truly mine?

Some core impulse says yes, when something dark, black, volatile enters the periphery of his vision (to his newly compound and compounded eyes, the thing, the beast, appears as if it must have teleported, or otherwise instantaneously materialized from elsewhere).

It's not often, in recent memory, that Jin has refused Malos. Only...only just before, in Megrez. Before everything changed.

Uncertainty is not something quite familiar to Jin. The truth has always been highly apparent to him; when it's not, he stops at nothing to seek it out. Even in those five hundred years, little was the time that he felt truly lost. He had made sure of that. So now...

"Why are you here? You can't...be here...?"

"Tch." Malos almost laughs. Only almost. So close, yet so far. "That's what Pyra said."

Same Malos. Same, old, Malos. There had always been a peculiar flatness to his voice, even in rooms that should have carried an echo. In here, there is absolution. Jin hears only Malos's voice exactly, precisely, as it issues. Is it different? Is it the same? Where has he heard that, it, before?

But, regardless, his first statement is still true. "I find myself agreeing with them more every day." Would he continue to do so, if he had the chance, the choice? Maybe that's...not for him to know.

Malos speaks out that incipient truth: "A little too late for that. You're dead."

"But you're not." Odd as this is, that much is patently obvious, to Jin. Malos is not dead. If Malos were dead, he'd be talking a hell of a lot differently.

Wouldn't be saying things like... "Soon enough, Jin. Soon enough. Who were we really out to kill this whole time, anyway?" Like that.

Jin doesn't answer him. He wishes he could turn away, cast up the icy shell and shoulder and ignore Malos - and that would be good enough, for the Aegis, since Alba Cavanich it always has been. But he cannot. No blind eyes are bestowed to him. His morality, that wicked justice, faces up to him now.

A shame Amalthus had put such a fetching magnet to Malos's needle's, storm's, eye.

"I always thought I'd go first."

Jin bites. "Not together?"

"Nah. I thought I'd die for you. Like, I anticipated it, and...well. You know."

Jin gulps; the atmosphere of the room beats like a sick cocoon, a strangled aorta. If he breathes faster, will the whole thing collapse? If he had moved faster, would it have been over sooner?

Chances, changes, choices, truth.

"Malos, wait."

Confoundingly, Malos waits.

"Is that what you think of me or what I think of you?"

Did you choose to come here?

Gray eyes flash violet; the core unit processes a great many things, nigh instantaneously.

"I dunno, Jin. You tell me. What's the difference?"

Did you?