you never know what you might find in the night

Mature | Major Character Death | Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Video Game)

Minochi | Cole | Minoth, Adel Orudou | Addam Origo, Adel Orudou | Addam Origo's Wife

Torna: The Golden Country DLC, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Nightmares, Dreams, Polyamory, Heavy Angst, Inspired by Music, Source: Genesis, Source: Phil Collins

Ooh, I'm just a busy bee, still alive in my hive...

A playwright loves drama - feeds off of it, and if he's good literally lives off of it. He needs scenario, substance, panache and flair only sprinkled gratuitously onto a solid base of something that motivates itself, gets running with the hardiest of legs to it all on its own.

But Minoth is not so professional a playwright, anymore - that is, he never was, and he's finding it harder and harder every day to keep at this metamorphosis into a new identity, in which being a Blade...no longer matters.

And maybe it didn't. Or maybe it very much did. But this scene, this dream (yes, we know it is a dream, that is no last-ditch baked over-under-through corn-flavored "plot twist" or foppish facsimile thereof to come later) is full of nothing but fluff. It's useless, a giblet of empty meaning to be discarded long before the first draft cuts itself through.

Maybe Minoth himself is useless. But he dreams anyway.

To give it a gimmick, he dreams of all five senses: sound, sight, smell, taste, touch.

He hears Addam's laugh, full and rich, boyish and then aging, little by little by little by a lot, and then the gray hair isn't only inexplicable, and the crow's feet are there to stay, and he is seeing those bright, bright golden eyes, so warm and so real.

Standing next to him is a little lady wrapped in the scent of bittersweet winter, and there is the taste of dumpling soup on his tongue, and a small, cool hand caressing his cheek; he lets the spoon-holding hand droop and looks up into her eyes.

She is sitting across from him at the table, and she smiles at him. All the impulses assault at once, and then their impressions rip numbly away.

Flora is not there anymore. Neither is Addam. He doesn't know what happened to them - or, no, he just isn't sure if he knows he thinks he remembers he realizes he dreams he cries he screams he--

He doesn't like getting distracted. It kills his productivity when he is distracted. And oh, Architect, shouldn't this dream be useful?

So he tries his very damndest to return. What do lovers do when they are in love? They...they dance, don't they?

Always, they danced. They danced about the kitchen, rustic gavottes of trying not to step on toes until they all pulled off boots and shoes and shuffled socks over the stone, and they danced over the moor, airy-light traces of running as fast as possible with her in their arms and oh, they so very surely were not touching the ground...

But eventually, all must come down. Before his wincing, flutter-shut eyes, lids seizing more painfully then they have any right to considering how long the scar has been healed, Minoth sees Addam prone on the Soaring Rostrum, Flora supine and ragged on the deck of the evacuation ship.

Because he was and is Amalthus's Blade, Minoth has never had overmuch trouble finding beauty, philosophy, arcane meaning in all manner of horrifying sights. That is to say, when Amalthus passed judgement on that cottage in Coeia, he was too shocked and dazed to make any coherent judgement of his own, and every sundering made by Malos thereafter needs must have been only the grimmest black portent of something greater.

No truer personal ugliness had he ever seen than the anger and futility felt in those moments, with absolutely no more faithful truth lurking behind.

Oh, and what's the point in that? Shouldn't he be chasing the intoxicated, incredibly overenamored high of just those few moments prior?

He wants to. He needs to. He needs to see that golden light, that warm pink glow, that love divested into two or three or four human forms, the counterparts he swears he was always meant to have.

But he can't. He won't. He never will again.

He isn't there to hold him through the night. She isn't there to call him soft, sweet, silly things and ease away all the pain.

They wouldn't laugh now. They would cry. He hears it. They aren't here to be his ladders and companions along them to heaven.

He opens his eyes, turns over the pillow, and resolves that this shall be the last dream, if he can even effect that much. Pathetic curtain call.

Father, oh, Father, if we should still so iconographically call you so (and oh, this is the most pious I will ever be, you can be damned sure of that), why must I keep living, and dying, and dreaming so far beyond the loss of my own most treasured happy ending?