If Ever I Would Leave You

Malos finds Jin in the alleyway. Sniffs the air, wrinkles his nose, talks - more pontificates, really - of beggars and ditches and drunks who've lost their way. Not such a grand fanfare, but it'll do. It'll have to. It's not as if they have choices, early, or think they do, late.

Too, it isn't in that moment, when their eyes lock, that he takes on all the guilt of the sunken Titans and what that's meant for those who lived on them, partially because the fact of the sinking itself has already had its time to settle.

He doesn't even know it's Jin, the same Jin he locked swords with just the same some fractious fractions of a century before, because any Blade lost and alone, directionless without their Driver, is the same as he is. Jin takes the offered hand because he realizes the truth of their situations, just then separate but about to become joint, and what he doesn't know is that Malos is trying to resolve some of his own guilt.

To reiterate, perhaps to paraphrase: Malos sees a broken Blade who will not know his name rotting in rainy streets and does what he must to make better on the shitshow that is this pathetic world - the world he's made, created in his destruction. Jin sees a broken Blade who has a vicious, violent name to embody in and of himself, and because he wishes he had such a similar way to wreck himself over so wholly, so wholeheartedly, he agrees to the quiet part said out loud. Yes, we are the same.

At first, Malos has no plans to keep this outcast. Just get him up on his feet, see how it feels to feel, and then move on. Certainly he doesn't need you messing up his life.

Then Jin bares his face beneath the cloak. The Core Crystal is red, shockingly red, and Malos has no immediate read on what that will mean. Jin explains it, grim and disbelieving, and something like a heart beating out of sequence, bloated in its disconnectedness, floating disrighteously in and at the central axis of the Aegis, nearly makes Malos double over.

So this is what became of Blades who lost their Drivers in the calamity. So this is, truly, the filth of humanity. How could she have done this to you? How could I have done this to you? Oh, Jin, you have got to move on. Certainly you doesn't need me messing up your life again.

Malos swears he will leave, swears he will extricate himself before it's too late. A blight on the world he was before, and so is he again, but now he has walked close enough to a mirror to see his reflection and he hates it, he hates it, he hates it. He doesn't know what else to hate but himself, but he has, oh, so much hatred, and so he hates it.

It is Malos who feels so dirty, so irredeemable about the whole thing, for all his bluster would seem to signal that he harbors not one single regret save that of not destroying Mythra like she destroyed him. It is Malos who sees Jin, even with a human's heart torn into his chest, as a messiah, as one who wanted to understand before and does do so now, so perfectly. It is Malos who bends himself to Jin's will. It is Malos who becomes driven.

All these things that Malos feels...perhaps he receives them from Jin. Jin who could barely bring himself to lift up his hand, by those painful seconds, minutes, degrees, each one painted in the infinite, uncountable, eternal deliberation; Jin who bore the weight of a thousand sins even though he'd only ever enacted the one and whose anger at Malos had near about vanished when he regarded the Aegis now as the higher being that he wasn't; Jin who thought that he would stain Malos with the blood that marred every hidden place on him.

I'll leave him, Malos thinks. Eventually, he will be able to stand on his own. All I owe him is the righting. If I stay any longer he will only grow to hate me once more.

(Malos revels in the quiet, peaceful neutrality of it all. You let me stand by your side. A Blade does not stand by the Driver's side.)

The longer Jin suffers, wallows in his self-hatred, the harder and faster Malos falls in to grieve with him. All this that was stolen from you - not by me, but by the system. I am but a cog, a tool, it is true, but I have gone on strike. I will rebel against my master. For you, Jin. I will. Much as it hurts, I will.

So Jin does not suffer alone. Hurt and grieve, yes, both of those walking corpses do it, and though they never truly move on from it, soon enough they begin to engage with the pain as a motive. And then Malos, even if unwillingly, begins to see Jin in a new light.

Springtime, truest bloom, comes. Fresher rain falls. Jin stands in it, lets it cleanse him. Malos watches. He is in awe. What a splendid soul, a beautiful being. How is it that I could know you?

I will leave you. I must leave you. I do not deserve you. You do not deserve me.

Oh, but I can't. Never. Never ever ever. No, Jin. Not in springtime. Not when you stand so alive, like this.

The mood of spring persists throughout all seasons for the remainder of the century. Jin opens, a flower of ice. Malos cradles the bloom in his hand and minds not at all when the melting of it trickles red in his palm. Indeed, he is blessed to catch it. Fluid of life, no matter what kind.

Still, one day spring turns to summer. Jin's plans are laid full out, and they begin to pirate Cores. What they will do with them, they are not quite sure. Malos tries to be active as they do it, but he finds it difficult. There is so much to observe, so much to revere.

There is a new, if not a renewed, vigor in Jin's movements. Sunlight as they cross from ship to ship, verse to verse over an ever-transient bridge, streaks golden over his silver hair, color flushes more fully back into his face (as much as ever could be said to lie there, for his paleness is borne of more than just everpresent cool purple lighting), and once Malos figures out how to make Jin smile, oh...

Not yet. Not while it is summer. Not even if I am a wretched dog upon your days. You are grappling with your purpose, what it means to have found Mikhail again - in that misshapen state that he's in too - and not so much grappling with me. I'll take you there. I'll make your dream come true. I'll catch you when you...

Fall. Autumn, the Ardainians might say. Malos doesn't ask what the common vernacular was in Torna. By now, Jin has confided every part of his bloodshot soul in and into Malos. If that was important to bring up, or even if it wasn't, he would have. Maybe he's content with leaving it behind.

Akhos has not left the memory of his Driver behind. Perhaps he would have, if Patroka had not been there. Would Jin have left this fruit-neutral goal behind if Malos hadn't been there to shape it with him? Malos will take no credit, of course. It's always Jin's dream. Always has been.

Malos's only dream was to leave Jin. Now, as the last leaves dissipate, dissuade through their crunchiest final words, his only dream is never to leave him. But Jin, seemingly organically acquiescent for all those pointless years, leaves Malos no choice. Did you plan it this way?

What do you think? Did he?

To cap it off, to come in with the clap of a bookend rather than an anacrusis to something most hopeful next, Malos, the proverbial drunk who's lost his way, circles back to thinking he's got no choice in the matter.

Again he pontificates, sneers his self-righteousness at Rex who'd never acted it, not once. Was that our sin? To think we were right? To believe it?

Not such a grand fanfare, eh? So maybe we didn't deserve one. Pretty crummy ending, after all.