Keep Talking, Funny Man

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Addam is an idiot. It's an easy, depthless statement, but it's also a diagnosis, a prognosis, a roadmap and a blueprint for everything less easily reconcilable that's to come.

It gives Minoth a frame, however proper or improper, in and into which to set of all the prince's thematic and irrelevant actions, because if one expects the predictable pattern, one can react with capital confidence, and Minoth is, once again, quite constantly and consistently concerned with reconciling away all of his harmless, overwrought anxieties.

He presents, you see - well, both of them, but mainly Minoth - as someone who doesn't care in the slightest what anyone thinks of him or expects from him. He's an independent operator, a solo pilot, a dashing and debonair dark knight who just so happens to have a wonderful sense of humour and conversational air, as a bonus. (Well, so that one's not Addam.) Minoth, the Flesh Eater, doesn't need anyone else's approval, nor their initiative, to guide him in his earthly choices. He'll stride along just the same.

Is what he wants you to think. And since he wants you to think anything at all, he quite obviously throws his whole empty wallet in for what people think of him, even if not in a particularly vain way.

But we're talking about Addam here - or at least, Minoth wants you to think so. Wants you to think, moreover, that the two, cowboy and prince, are not ever-intertwined foils whose actions, though overall more or less completely mutually divested, reflect upon each other infinitely, as fractals, perfect imperfect shapes that very nearly bring a tear to the stoic all-seeing eye.

Minoth wants you to think that he doesn't care about Addam and that Addam doesn't care about him, because if you think that, then he can too.

And since Addam is an idiot, Minoth can think that with impunity. Either Addam's too stupid to light upon the connection so clearly present, or Minoth's too smart to ever go for such a fop. After all, a Blade who can choose his Driver is one in a thousand (and here Minoth will only fully adjust his idiom within the bounds of his own personal semantics, no matter how many Blades there actually are in circulation), and a Blade who chooses for a Driver someone as oblivious and happy-go-lucky as Addam would have to be just as dialed-up dumb.

Dumb lucky. Because what's the difference between oblivious and avoidant, happy-go-lucky and devil-may-care?

Turn that frown upside down, cowboy. This guy's in love with you.

Still, Minoth can win regardless. So long as he lives in the liminal space of permanent suspension of disbelief, he's safe forever.

Addam's still an idiot, see, because now he's supposed to himself that Minoth likes him back, or some such. That they can help and heal each other, through as-yet-unrealized (this in the active, transitive sense) feelings of comfort, safety, security, and beyond all that, attraction.

Sure, Addam's handsome. Minoth knows himself to be, too. Sure, he's got money, and a halfcock-fugitive Blade who isn't, really (halfcock, again, of course) doesn't, nor a claimable roof overhead.

Why doesn't the Lord of Aletta go spy on the Paragon, if he's that hard up, for charity or for chopping up?

What does it even solve, really? Hell of an assumption to make, Prince - it's the only kind of ass you have.

"Minoth."

Uh oh.

"Yeah?"

"May I ask what it is you're running from?"

Running from. Tch. He's not running from anything.

Addam, who already has more than enough outsize distorted responsibilities to deal with, between his farm, his role in the ramshackle fortress of Tornan politick, and the Aegis, of all people, places, and things, makes it sound as if their happenstance relationship, even bond, sprung from anything more than an unlikely friendship in a sort of mutual adolescence (Blades aren't ever children, unless they're permanently children, but they do have license to be unsure of themselves, at some early time and state, yes?). As if their larger lives are just a distraction from each other, and anything else is just a coping mechanism, a clever device by which to hide, rather than the other way around.

If Minoth's running from anything, which he isn't, he's not running from some sort of world-scaling "we would find each other in any universe" predestined pairing. That much is the simple truth: the Architect could not be more phenomenally uninvolved in the daily happenings of Alrest, and what he does have his finger in has gone all to haywires. Why should Minoth suppose himself so privileged?

(Why should he suppose himself so privileged as to be able to ignore what's been laid out in front of him?)

Bonds aren't forever. No matter who goes out first. Ain't a guy allowed to keep to himself?

But he hasn't, is the trouble. He's been bought in to all the obnoxious taunts and banter, all the wistful sighs and sonnets, from square one. He hasn't kept his nose up and out nearly as well as he likes to think he has, as he knows he should.

And Addam's not stupid. He's not a child, nor a manchild.

(Is Minoth's internal metric really just that anyone more voluble and human-sounding than Amalthus has to be? Sorry, Jin.)

He has more than enough social intelligence to know that if Minoth were actually bothered by the implication that he show off his form for, Elysium forbid, anyone other than an "eligible girl", he'd make prickly and say so; he wouldn't laugh, full out and beautiful, on the sighing rejection of Addam's offer to "kiss it better."

(He's never laughed so much before. Never had so many fond moments to balance out the inflection points in conversations that, years prior, would make him stone up and resolve never to speak again, the discomfort far too great. Why on Alrest would he ever want to take a sure-thing chance on ruining that?)

If Minoth didn't actually want what Addam's been dishing out - and more than that, glibly offering to give, arms wide -, they'd all know it. But instead, what they all know (yes, all of them, even Aegaeon) is that Minoth is savouring every bit, stringing the sentiments along with the ease-bringing promise of impossibility. Nothing can go wrong if he simply doesn't allow it to happen. Nothing can go right, either, but he's bent himself to believing that the aftermath is worse, if he goes for it.

Addam's steel-blossom resilient and bright-n-early bullheaded; very surely not convinced of any such thing. Instead, he believes with his whole too-grand heart that if Minoth would only let him try, it'd at least be lovely for a passing moment.

Sometimes Minoth catches him teasing at the bond, probing into gold-flecked ether, trying to bring himself closer at the cracks, in his own bumbling-stumbling inexplicably-irrevocably human way. It's an observation that pairs crushingly with the recollection of the way Addam interacts with Mythra: gated out, a nuisance.

A Driver isn't owed acceptance from all or any of their bonding Blades, despite the wish for cooperation. Minoth doesn't have to feel sorry for Addam, and indeed, he won't. He might even acknowledge, eventually, that it's the same sorrow covering introspection of both himself and his prince. It's not as if he's behaved anywhere near as shuttered and self-defensively with Addam as he had and has with Amalthus, because they're not guilty of quite the same things.

But Addam knows what this is. Minoth knows, too. The comeback is easy: "Don't ask me to do something we both know we'll regret." Present us have bigger problems. Future us don't really matter. And past us, well...

Past Minoth has been carrying that sorrow for quite a while, hasn't he?

Addam's not going to leave him. He's not going to leave Addam - not as the catalyst, but quite possibly as the symptom. His freedom's all he's got, and he's yet to find the proof that pairing up with a Driver doesn't diminish that right down to dead.

He shouldn't want an escape hatch, after all. That's how he'd know, full-truly, that hedging his bets had been the right move.

There's a right question to ask here. Something that feels, but doesn't yield. Something that queries, but doesn't promise. Something that takes that hopeful look in Addam's eyes (those clever, clever golden eyes) and makes it mean something.

Let's put our backs into it. Let's consider it, at least.

"Show me what it is you're running towards."

As he turns back to the nest of Dharma Crickets he'd spied earlier, trying to be as subtle as possible with the way he rubs his lips together, smoothing away the last veneer of ever-so-slightly-woody taste mixed with a strange sheen of handsome electric metal, Minoth thinks - lets himself think, with impunity and with just a touch of noble curiosity -:

Oh, Addam, my prince, my prince, my prince... That was the smartest thing you ever could have done.