Kiss That Frog
Let me parrot, as I always do: Aegaeon is a very precious, very special boy. He is so important, and he must protect and be protected at all costs.
"My hair really has been getting the way whenever I fight," Lora commented at the tail end of just such an everyday endeavor, bemoaning for once not the honestly ratty tail that trailed behind her (that is, when she let it go, and that was fairly often nowadays, sorry to say) but the piecey reddish stuff that fell brashly over her forehead. "Time for the fringe to go?"
Aegaeon cleared his throat, and mounted his maneuver. "A good idea. 'Twould help to bring out your beautiful eyes."
It was true, bronzy gold and rusty red made a charming combination. On Lora, the features were more vivid and outwardly buoyant then they were on Haze, despite the marked similarities between the two. Ah, but they were still a picture-perfect pair.
Also paired were they in their tendencies towards bashfulness. "O-oh, you think so?" Lora stuttered out. "Well, thanks, I suppose."
"Aegaeon, you have got to stop coming onto Lora like that," Brighid admonished casually as they stepped away into their naturally preformed and performed threes (plus or minus a child-sized companion here or there, of course).
"Coming onto her, Brighid? I have done no such thing." Oh, really? "I think you did. The implication was obvious, to me, anyway."
"I merely gave a suggestion and complimented her eyes. Any other would have done the same, and with no ill intention. Just as I did."
"Of course we know that," Hugo put in, "but it's not so clear to the others."
Aegaeon tilted his head, and the dangling tubes chimed lightly as they collided against each other. "But Lora appreciated it. She expressed her appreciation directly, and voluntarily. I do not feel that anything is out of place."
Brighid sighed. "Lora is an easygoing person, as is Haze. When you snuck her those sweets yesterday - yes, I saw, of course I saw - she simply smiled and joked along. And yet..." She passed the mantle off to Hugo, and he took it up with stride and purpose, as ever.
"If I did it, everyone would say 'Oh, look at the emperor, isn't he charming - and so young, too!' But when you do it, Aegaeon...people aren't quite sure what to think. Half the time they might not even be sure it's a man approaching them."
Breathe in, drop one, two, three, and out with the stark sentiment. "Well, they would be right on that count. I am not a man, per se."
"You're a Blade," Brighid observed, rather unhelpfully. At any other time, the watery fellow would have drawn up to his fullest posture to meet such a denotation, but now he just shook his head and helmet. "No, Brighid, I didn't mean it quite that way. Just...that I am not a man, per se."
"You already said that, Aegaeon, and now even the two of us are more confused than we were when we started!" Hugo was the most patient of their trio, always (aquine diligence notwithstanding, in fact), but even honorable he had his limits.
"Gah...it's nothing." The prim, perfectly-combed head shook itself. "Aegaeon, it's not nothing. You are my Blade and my companion, and it would be remiss of me to even once think of not attending to your needs."
If Aegaeon could blush, as he had once claimed he did when approached with much of the same demonstrative behavior, he would have been. One supposed that probably, in reality, he could not, but he blushed, flushed, and groused, a little bit, nevertheless. "Your Majesty...but that is my job."
"Can I not return the favor?" Hugo asked in his sweetest tone. Ah. "I...suppose you may." But, at this juncture, he didn't, moving on to a more pressing, or at the very least more concrete and discernible, issue.
"One favor I don't need returned, however," Hugo said, accompanied by the air of a supplicatingly wagged finger yet remaining with both hands arrested primly behind his waist, "is your egging on the others to goad Haze and I together like Ponios feeding at pasture."
"And Haze doesn't need it either," Brighid added. "She may be the most gregarious of us all, but your remarks made her more than a touch uncomfortable."
Some compliment it must be, to be systematically admired and sized up as a potential royal escort, despite your birthing as a generally incompatible race and kind. Uncomfortable, indeed.
Aegaeon again saw none of that, however. "I simply wish to protect and uplift you all. If I have a positive thought, should I not voice it?"
Driver and partner Blade made twin noises of endeared frustration. "Not...not all of them, Aegaeon."
The phrase was pat and the moment was complete, so Hugo dipped his chin, offered Brighid his arm with a bright "Shall we?", and they made to step away towards the group amassed around a tree from which Haze was attempting to retrieve armfuls of Cotton Branch, with Minoth and Addam's help as they lifted her up on their shoulders into picking range (and with Mythra's unqualified heckling at her picking technique).
Addam was a man. Minoth was a man. Jin too, as he stood watchfully by. With their prominent, distinctive, and very human physical features, the fact was obvious. Quite frankly, it would be hard to imagine them ever being anything else but firmly that. And meanwhile, he...
"Your Majesty, Brighid..." "Yes, Aegaeon?" They swiveled back in his direction, Hugo providing the eye contact and Brighid providing the inquiring posture.
"About what I said, earlier." Always so stiff of him - it was but a brief minute ago. "We are all ears," Brighid said encouragingly nonetheless.
"I am not a man, per se," (they groaned at his repetition), "because I do not believe that I experience gender in the same way that you do, my liege, or even that you do, Brighid. Masculine pronouns and language serve, but..."
"I wouldn't exactly say water has a gender, no," Brighid offered. Steady, she was, in her analytical, analogical pronouncement, but uncertain. What an awkward conversation to have. To have to have? No, it wasn't an obligation. But still, Aegaeon was and is an awkward Blade. He probably always would be.
"I'm sure we could think of you in such a way," Hugo continued the thought, "but it seems rather...indelicate. Imprecise. A conceding couching, for our unaware ears and sensibilities."
Aegaeon smiled, at last. "No, no, Your Majesty. I think it is a perfect description. My waters rush on, and they need not be tied to the binary of your human gender. Nothing can ever tie the waves down."
"And no suitor or suitress, either...?" Brighid plied at the subject, her lips twinging upward themselves.
"Indeed." The blank eyes could just then not be called something so bleak and unfeeling, for their Aegaeon was always so feeling, and without a scarcest trace of ulterior motive - even if he was to be forthright. He was, that is, and only in all sincerity, always.
There was one incarnation wherein his words, perhaps intentionally, made manifest effect on another katana wielder, a dark, Dark, and poetic Blade named Perceval, but by all accounts in the grand scheme of things it was quick and fleeting (in fact, Perceval wrote some of the very poetry about it and told him of the same).
And Aegaeon? He may be quick on his feet, but nothing about him ever could be described as fleeting. Simply relentless, genderless, and ever-generous...as the tides.
These three...they didn't deserve to die. None of them did, but alas...