another day, another night, another fight

With Minoth, it's not just a pair of pathetic leftover wrecks limping their way along to eternity, no end in sight save for the blunt and ultimate one they could choose to place anywhere, except they're placing it after a hell of a lot more obstacles than anyone would ever think it necessary for them to do, and don't half know themselves why they're doing it.

No, not just that. Now it's a trio. But nevertheless.

Given the promise of other people to run with, other men who also got screwed over a fair bit by the vilest pale blue statute of absolutely zero convictionary principles and elements of composed appearance that matter at all to anyone at all, he rides along willingly.

In the morning, he'd watch lazily as Jin and Malos bickered over whether it was right to thieve breakfast, whether it was necessary to cook raw meat or buy that already roasted, and then he'd get up and wind his way out the door behind their backs and return ten minutes later with sweet smoked fish and tomato confit from a vendor who'd never look twice at the armored likes of the Paragon and Aegis, and lay it down on the table and turn his chair thirty degrees in the other direction as he'd begin to scribble something down.

"Where'd you pull that?" Malos demanded warily, jerking his eyes away from Jin's own frigid squint and scanning Minoth's clothes for any significant or insignificant changes that would indicate material or immaterial payoffs he might have made.

"Ikthus," was Minoth's short yet artistic reply. "Merve knows me."

"That's not a good thing," Jin remarked, turning away from the inquisition and busying himself with the fish nonetheless. "I knew we shouldn't have stayed in the capital for this long."

Minoth laughed. He laughed! "Come now, Jin. Don't you think, if said woman knows me just as I say that she does, that it'd be a sight more suspicious if I just up and disappeared with you two mysterious hunks, leaving not a sign about my wellbeing for the people who care - yes, care - to see me around?"

Malos rolled his eyes at the uncomfortably colloquial descriptor applied to him, but said nothing. Jin, meanwhile, huffed, making clear just how much more raw he'd become in affect since leaving the likes of Addam and Haze behind (to say nothing of Lora), and promptly proceeded to swear rather...obliquely when he ripped the top piece of fish asunder as he tried to peel it back.

"See, there, how much more on edge you'd be all the time if we didn't let ourselves get at least a little bit established."

"Since when did you become such a fine country gentlemen? We're supposed to be miserable out here, you know."

It was Malos, speaking Jin's sentiment for him even though by rights that was a monumental crossing of wires and created confluences, partner here to partner there passing by the sheer impersonal enormity of being a Blade of Amalthus in between.

And that was the kicker: "Maybe we are, but I still have my wits about me, eh? I sold Amalthus's earrings to get us that," Minoth replied with a jerk of his head towards the table; he still hadn't paused the menial but plodding process of writing while mired in contentious conversation. "Been waiting for the right time, and I can think of none better."

The interjection was brutally random, contextless, and Malos's eyebrows went wild as he tried to process this new and sorely unwanted information.

"We're not here for jokes, Minoth, clever though they might be."

Minoth nodded, crossed something out, traced back half a line for review, notated something abstract in the margin, and then shut the notebook with a snap. Perhaps it was something about getting ahead of the distraction. The pen was laid down - not quite as a gauntlet, but then he couldn't control the others' interpretations of what he'd just done.

"Sure enough, Jin. But we're all still alive, by whatever miracles or lacks thereof, so my attempt, my thrust, is that we should at least try to live with it."

Ah. The inadvisable statement. The sentence that should not have been. Trace back half a line and half again, now, would you, Minoth? But you can't undo it. You never will be able to.

"We're not here for jokes," repeated Jin. "We are not here to be alive at all. Because, in case you haven't noticed, there isn't much point in that."

Minoth blinked, swallowed casually. He was halfway in between appraising and amused, but nothing further.

"This world does not like us, Minoth."

If one squinted their ears, one could hear the sound of Malos's jaw locking, the screaming sound of a silent "And I know it sure as hell hates me."

"How do you know that?" No "Really?" to usher in the accusatory question, no, just the question itself. We're not here for jokes.

Jin crossed his arms, and his cheekbones worked furiously underneath the juts of the mask. "How do I know what?" He knew exactly what Minoth was asking, but he'd never let himself appear disarmed enough to say something so base as a "Huh?".

And, so, the snap and the strike had been motive, after all. Not one week in, and there was already trouble.

"How do you know this world doesn't like you? How do you know there's not someone left in it who wants to love you?"

Stood up, all three, their heads were about level. Jin's Core held highest, then Malos's, then Minoth's. All were marred in some way - one red, one cracked, one half and half of both. And, now that Minoth had stood, he appeared ever more equal to the others there with him. The lithe, almost slimy impression of a man-about-town who'd abandoned his identity as a living weapon completely had begun to wash away.

"The world is nothing without people. You can't say anything - I mean anything, anything! - for sure if you haven't asked people."

"And are you people?"

Malos, in between the Flesh Eaters, shifted uncomfortably. It wasn't as if he was stupid among men of higher intellect, no, far be from it, but the fact that he was the one who had destroyed so many people hadn't seemed to come into it. Just then, it had been him and Jin antagonizing Minoth, and now Minoth was fighting back, so the Aegis fell by the wayside. Did that matter?

He owed no debt of philosophy nor sophistry to Minoth, at least not at the present moment. Because he wasn't...he wasn't people. Was that the crux of it?

"I'm not if you're not," spoke Minoth at last, in answer to Jin's awkward yet deadly question. "And that's fine enough, but this isn't the way to convince me. If I see you turn a single shade closer to Amalthus, it'll be me moving at the speed of light to get far, far away, you can be damned sure of that."

"Ah." It'd take a surgeon's eye to see the quirk of the very outer corners of Jin's lips up into any kind of a victorious smirk, but Malos had them. Something leapt in his chest at the sight - maybe he'd never seen it happen before. Maybe, based on what he'd osmosed from humans, he'd like to see it again.

"So you mean to keep us human?"

"Alive, Jin. I only said alive. You don't have to make it into an issue of us and them. If there were humans that wanted to come with us, I'd let them. But, that's not only my decision. I don't think Malos here ever knew a human who did anything right, so I'd defer to him."

And wasn't that us versus them? Wasn't that reintroducing the inflection of species as yet another fold among the myriad wrinkles of what, if Jin and Malos were to be believed, was such a straightforward belief-proofed plan?

"Think you're missing something there, comrade," Malos cut in. If Minoth raised an eyebrow, it wasn't in preparation of retort. "What should I have against humans in any way differently than you two? If I believe you, then I believe you. If I don't, it's not like I've got the evidence as to why."

Oh, look who's a scientist, Minoth thought, but didn't say it. Instead, he cleared his throat, worried at a knot in the wood of the table, scuffed the toe of his boot on the floor.

"Look. I've known you, Jin, and I've known you, Malos." He dipped his chin toward each in time. "As people. Not as soldiers, not as weapons, not as abominations of the universe. I've loved you both, because I find it in me quite often to love people."

Eyes met, blue and gray and blue-gray. More, perhaps, was said than had been said for the last handful of minutes, for the last handful of years. Luckily the fish was meant to be eaten cold.

"So it'll take me a while to unlearn that, now. Still not sure whether I wouldn't, in fact, prefer being with you to being alone. But I don't want to get mired up into something I know I can't stomach, so I'm trying to be myself, still. Are you yourselves, still? Do you think?"

Are you, Jin, exacting and not just ruthless? Are you, Malos, cocky and not just overconfident?

Are you, Minoth, loving and not just mourning?

"You're a sap," Malos said, and luckily spoke over Jin muttering, "You're a fool."

Minoth nodded. "That's right. And I'm a person, and I'm alive, and I'm here as long as you'll have me - as long as it's you that's having me, and not some half-dead given-up shells."

The gallery of eyes wobbled impatiently again. It was a terribly brittle thing, this dogma or willed absence of one. Would he feel the same in a century's time, when he'd lived well beyond when any human, and thus any Blade, had really ever lived?

That was the point. The point was to find out. No one had ever done it before. It was Jin and Malos and Minoth who were going, and not some experiments, not some scraps. It was just them.

It would always be just them. And then Malos bumped Jin's arm, and Jin shook his head but smiled with eyes lidded and chin low despite himself, and Minoth nodded back and sat down to count the rest of the coin he'd pocketed - to see, that is, how long until he'd have to start writing for others again, to earn their keep.

"You think you'll win this argument tomorrow, Minoth?"

"Haven't run out of words yet," the playwright answered. "You've always been an excellent sounding board."

"What, we're not good enough to be called your muse?"

Sighing, Minoth reached for a scrap of fish and dropped it into his mouth along with a particularly golden piece of tomato. To Jin's horror, he then proceeded to wipe his thumb and forefinger on his pants (to Jin's delight, he cursed as he remembered that the slick substance coating them had been oil). "Not with that attitude, Malos. You've still got a fair bit of growing to do, you know."

Tch. "Thought you said I was a hunk."

Oh, and yet another sigh: "Yes, dear, you're very handsome."

There, at last, Minoth's point had been proven, for a different Malos would have incensed at the gentle mimicry, and the same Minoth wouldn't have been half so confident doing it. A different Jin wouldn't be laughing, wouldn't think it possible that he would need to (so that is neither the Jin of the past nor the Jin of the future).

A different collection of experimental Flesh Eater, wayward Paragon, and endbringer Aegis wouldn't have ended up at this pass, but as yet, the choices they had made had landed them here. Until the next day, they'd try to hold the pattern, and look to each other to bring what, at times, they each would lack.