the lamb seems right out of place

"I found it rather surprising, the way Malos spoke about Mythra."

"Hmmm?" Everyone was scattered about, following their audience with the king, left to unremarkable everyday pursuits, and it was the first chance Minoth and Addam had had to discuss things, quietly and seriously, since their moment alone on the ship flight to Indol.

But why this, of all things? Well, not that Minoth was particularly surprised, but it just smacked of incongruence, nay full-on dissonance of reasoning, that directly after Addam's father had so bluntly indicated an absence of any real care for Lora and Jin's bond, Addam would comment on something like this. Something so usually beyond his desired or actualized ken.

They were sat in one of Spefan's smaller rooms, Minoth with his notebook and pen laid out on the desk to write and Addam fiddling with a spare bit of macramé that he'd poached from Lora, but neither were really all that attendant to their respective hobbies. It didn't seem like the right time to be, with companions absent and no campfire bringing them, ringing them, all together.

Something lingered. Something hooked. Something jarred.

But true to form, Addam ignored it. "The way he didn't even address her, just looked straight to you and asked if you had given her to me. Like she was no more than a trinket to be passed from hand to hand - and, apparently, never to be passed into my hands."

Impatient when brought up against oblivious impertinence (yes, even and perhaps especially from Addam), Minoth turned fully around in his chair, crossed his arms over the top of the back, and cut to the chase. "Isn't that the same way your father spoke about Jin?"

"Well, but Jin is a Tornan treasure. There's nothing odd about that." Of course. Of course there isn't! Of course there is.

"Jin is a Blade," Minoth corrected. "And Malos is a Blade. Why would he speak about a Blade the same way humans would? Isn't that your point?"

Scratching his jaw, Addam scuffed his heels back against the bedskirt. Their rustle accompanied his confusion like misplaced, harbingering ostinato. "I suppose it is. You're far too clever for me, Minoth."

A joke for a joke (and stupid, both): "You make that easy, my prince."

Addam drummed his fingers over the tops of his thighs. Not so percussive as a tabletop, but they'd do. More music. More motion. More distraction. Stop it. "You always call me your prince."

Stop it! "What's the matter? Don't you like it?"

"I love it," Addam admitted blithely, "but that makes it sound like you consider yourself Tornan."

"And you've got a problem with that?" Minoth said it so jaunty, so airy, but there was a rapid, violent deflation in his chest. Who am I? What am I? Why do I have to care, anymore?

"Cognitive dissonance, wouldn't you call it?" Oh, wouldn't you? A funny thing, that.

"Hmmm?" Again with the humming (again with the questions). Are you misdirected, or aren't you?

Enough soundtracking. Enough questions. "You're not truly free of Amalthus. You don't act it, I mean."

Minoth acted a lot of things. Gruff, affable, cultured, surly...he knew his range, and it was well wide. But he couldn't act like he was free. No prisoner, of mind or cell, ever can.

"And why should I? I'm his Blade." Deflection. So easy. So, so easy.

"Minoth, you're-- Gah. And why does he deserve that honor, that privilege?"

"Why not?" Why? Not?

The preamble, the overture, was over. The tête-à-tête call-and-response, the questions, the answers, the antecedent-consequent consequences of your ancestors...it all comes to a head now. "He didn't want you for you, Minoth. Didn't you notice that? He only laid claim to you when it appeared that there was something being stolen from him."

A thief for a thief. Need I repeat it? "Yeah, so?" It wasn't as if Amalthus was wrong, in all strictness of brassy tacks. Minoth stole the emerald Aegis Core, and Addam stole Minoth himself. Things were not what or where they once had been, and their original keepers were not the ones who had effected those transactions - and not in the locales of the World Tree or the Praetorium laboratories, either, had they been. So that's stealing.

Of course, Minoth thought to himself, it's a hell of a thing that I'm even admitting to myself that Addam stole me, appropriated me, set me in my new position. Ain't I got legs? Sure as eggs is eggs, I've got legs. And my feet ache from all my walking, but that'd never stop me from marching on. If Addam hadn't done everything he'd done, I never would have ended up stopped and stocked in Aletta. I'd still be roaming. Still be roving, and my fate a cotton wisp and all.

A cotton wisp. I'll never be, I never was, half that innocent.

To speak of innocence: "So, I...well, it's a little coarse, to term it this way."

Minoth smirked, raised the unscarred eyebrow. "Go ahead."

"I'd like to lay claim to you all the time. I don't ever want to think that you're not mine, that you don't belong with me."

Belong with me, Addam said. Not to me, but with me. The other way of saying, I'm yours and you're mine.

I'm yours? You're mine?

"I don't ever want you to think that." So. So?

"I thought you said you believed I'd do better with someone else as a Driver."

Addam sighed, wistful. "Maybe. Maybe you would. But you don't just belong with me as a Blade belongs with a Driver. Surely you must see that, by now."

It shot a bit of a hole in Minoth's slowly-coalescing analogy: the fact that even just that tiniest brush of Addam's fingers over his wrist, over the course of the ether lines that gave so much feeling despite the cover of the armor, connoted all of everything that Amalthus had never done, had never deigned to do. Amalthus would never touch a Blade. Would never touch them, that is, unless he was in the process of reconfiguring their very being to suit him. Otherwise, that petty labor itself didn't suit him.

To sum up, then, it was yet another signifier of Amalthus's, to be blunt, scumminess, that he'd never indulge in the most human, humanizing thing of casual touch, even as he was so determined to make Blades more human if that was what it took to make them ever more powerful soldiers. If Addam didn't believe that he should be so engaged with Minoth for any reason relating to resonance, well, it made the whole thing a little less pat, but it did absolutely nothing to diminish the significance of the lingering.

Yes, I know that Amalthus can't touch me, in any capacity, because you won't let him. Not anymore. Not even that he's done anything new to me since you started caring...but you won't let him. The thing there is, he'd never really try. He'd never try to touch me. I'm below his station. I'm a Blade, and then I'm not even a Blade. I'm a Blade when he wants me to be, and an abomination whenever else.

"And how would you describe it, then? My prince?" Minoth prodded, just to let himself taste the peaceful epithet again.

"Oh, don't go trying that. You're not just counted among my loved ones because you're loyal, either. That is to say, I certainly admire that quality about you, but the way it reflects on me...that's not everything I'm looking for. That's not everything I've found."

Before he could stop it, the easy retort tumbled out: "Not me either."

"Oh?" Suddenly Addam's gaze was focused, directed true and real. He always looked at you when he was talking to you, but his eye contact hardly ever pierced. Hardly ever exposed anything deeper than the surface.

Was it...worth it? To reveal what he was thinking? To be so bold, to be so open? Not everything I've found. Just what is it that I've exposed to you, my prince? I didn't think I had any such nooks and crannies. Not for you to see, anyway. Not for...people, to see.

Shall I be transparent? Perhaps I shall.

So Minoth spoke carefully, each word a composed cousin of something spat. The anger was flat, dull, compartmentalized, but it could be stirred. Oh, how it could be stirred. "Before the experiment, I was never touched. I was never anywhere without Amalthus to even be touched."

Never. Never. Even just speaking of it brought recoil and shudder into his shoulders - not around the jacket, but within it. Never any contact, any feedback, any confirmation that the world was real. Minoth wouldn't go around seeking others who would give him the same, certainly, so in his ramrod repose he remained.

The quiet, obliging, receptacled page was the only friend he knew, and half the time he was afraid to even touch that, gloves or not. Because it will get dirty. A new journal, a nascent thing so pure, is only dirtied, is only tainted, by your scribbles, your foppish notes.

(Is that why he'd never written in the journal Addam had once gifted him, after first hearing about his love for writing and stories? No. Not even really...at all. That was different. Truly, it was. That was something alternatively precious. Something he would always hold tight to his soul.)

My notes. My scribbles. My soul. What if I'm wrong? What if I'm dirty? Indol is so clean, but I'm brown. I've got this scar, a birthmark, and no one in Indol has a mark on them. The blue is so pure, so gently molded, and here am I with my dark, angular face, far too boxy and jutting for the elegance all around me.

When I wash my face, to scrub away the sepia, hairs fall from my eyebrows. Always. There is no end. They are always falling, they cannot be pruned back and away. There is no end. The frames upon the windows of my face, of my soul, are too jagged, they are not perfect. So I must be wrong.

(When I wash my hair, spidery-long strands also fall, and it is eternally confounding that the whole of the mass growing from my head is still so thick, but yet I've never cut it. As a choice, that must have been wrong. Must continue ad infinitum to be wrong. So very, very wrong.)

Slouching is wrong. Crossing your arms is wrong. Letting your hair down is wrong, and so is tying it up when part of it escapes from the elastic.

Writing doctrine, translating the old Judician bibles, is right. Writing stories about people, and hope, and love, is wrong.

Love is wrong. Touch is wrong.

But you are wrong. Those things are right.

They are just not for you.

Addam processed this, chewed on his lower lip. "I...if you'll pardon the accidental implications of a statement like this, old friend, didn't Amalthus himself ever touch you?"

He hadn't sounded like he'd wanted to say it, and Minoth grimaced, from the implications or and and from the lack of them. "Never. Even when he confiscated my notebooks, he never laid a finger on me." He took them because they were wrong. Not because he wanted what was in them, but because he was trying to keep me from being wrong. He cared about me. He never wanted me to be so horrible, the way I am. So wrong.

Something on Addam's face twitched - perhaps something larynxial, perhaps something olfactory. Definitely something perturbed. "Hmph."

"Hmph?" Minoth arched an eyebrow, crossed his arms, all in motive reflection. Reflection of the wrong.

"Makes him sound rather lilywhite, doesn't it? When in fact he enacted the most invasive event a Blade can possibly endure, and so casually too. It...gah, it makes my blood boil."

But he is lilywhite. Isn't he? Everything in Indol is white. Is pure. And I wasn't that. "Addam, it's fine, I promise. He just...made a mistake." In awakening me, he made a mistake.

The lid on Addam's self-professed unruly pot clanged. He didn't think so. "Made a mistake? Minoth, you mean to tell me that you, the most verbose, articulate, dramatic soul I know, would think to reduce what Amalthus did to you to the insignificance of a mistake? I didn't even have time to say how furious it makes me that he confiscated your notebooks! Those are your lifeblood, you've told me so yourself! And he just...snatched them away from you?"

"Hmph yourself. Of course he did. I'll just say that I'm glad I was never jotting down anything particularly incendiary towards him when he did it." Of course you are. Because those thoughts would have been wrong.

"Well...alright. Fine." Not fine, said the scarcest snarl on his prince's face. "So he did it. Do you mind if I ask you a further question?"

"Go right ahead. The floor is yours, my prince," Minoth offered with a flourish of his fingers that only illustrated what a gulf the space between the desk and the bed truly was.

"You said before the experiment. What happened after?"

After. After, after, after. He never thought of it as after. There was only before, and now. Before, when you had a chance at redemption, at being right, and now, when you see what a stupid, stupid, stupid pipedream that was. You were never meant to be loved, Minoth. Before was only your lies. Before was only the grayscale preview version of your cinematic blood-red lies.

Blood. Scalpels. Hands clawing at his Core. It had once been blue, and pure like the rest of Indol. Only now, when they sought to change it, did they touch it. That didn't quite make sense, did it? Because it was the one part of him that matched their expectations.

Lower your expectations. Nothing about you was right. Ever. They, who care and who know and it takes someone who cares to call you out on your bullshit and tell you what a fucking failure you are, no one who doesn't care would ever do that, would ever tear you up from down and left from right and, practically, limb from limb--

You were never good enough for them. Because they deserved better.

The thoughts cycled through Minoth's mind with nary an outward sign of their presence. He collected them, distilled them, made them parseable. Addam didn't want to know about all that. Nobody wanted to know about that. Addam was only asking because he was being nice. Because Addam was always nice. (And Addam deserves better than you.) So be nice back. It's the fucking least you can do.

"After, I associated being touched with being hurt. With pain, and violation, and scars. Shopkeepers would see me out by myself in the market square, and they'd lay a hand on my arm - the most innocent thing in the world, really - and ask me what they could help me with. I hardly ever answered. Too busy thinking how much I wanted them off me, off me, off me."

Get off me, can't you see you'll hurt me, can't you see the only thing I've ever been good for and ever will be good for is being hurt, and hurting others? I hurt Amalthus, by being a failure of a Blade, by being awakened by another Driver before him, by looking the way I do when his goals are not suited, are not served, by a Blade like me. Any other Blade would have come out of the experiment correctly. Right. But I didn't. So.

Get off me. Get off me before I turn you into a failure too.

Minoth's inner turmoil surely must have rigged up some kind of adverse signal on his face, but he couldn't tell exactly what. Whatever it was, it was enough to make Addam shuffle in his seat (perhaps retreat back and into himself), and spasm his fingers uselessly in the yarn. "So, when I...?"

Oh. Guilt. And yet, the thought immediately upended all of the erstwhile stormclouds in Minoth's mind. Addam. Addam Origo. Prince of Torna, Lord of Aletta, Driver of the Aegis...and my Driver. When he...yes. Yes. Of course. Absolutely.

Before was not before the experiment. Before was before Addam. And this after, this second act, was the only one that would ever matter.

So here, when he said as much, Minoth flushed hard into all of the waxing, the sophistry, the emotions that were so wrong - not wrong, not fucking wrong, right. "When it was you, Addam...impossibly warm. Soft. Real, positive feelings. I felt like my Core was being cast in a shell of gold, and nothing could ever harm me again."

Not about the explicit, but the implicit. Not about the actions of others, but the feeling of one's own self. You are worth knowing in that way, you know. Don't you?

Addam engaged him on the poetic impulse. "Does it still feel like that?"

"Mmm. Better."

"Does it ground you, would you say?"

"I...yes, it does, but Addam, obviously you already knew that." That moment in the Praetor's chambers had done more than enough to solidly confirm that.

Addam nodded, hummed. "I assumed so, but now that I know for sure, I think I'd take every chance I can get to do it more."

"You already do that," Minoth protested. Make it make sense, my prince!

"I think you underestimate me, my dear."

Oh, but enough sophistry. "Just 'dear'?"

"Well, aren't you? To me?"

"To you," Minoth repeated, confounded.

"To me," Addam repeated just as uncertainly, but perhaps in a slightly different flavor, with an engaging bob of his head.

"Not to him."

Addam's annoyance at the inane interruption radiated off of him in a veritable roiling wave. "Well, alright. I didn't think we much cared about that, now."

"He's my Driver, Addam," Minoth explained, as if it were obvious and then again as if it were subtle. "I don't have a choice."

"That explains a lot, doesn't it." And, simultaneously, nothing at all.

Here came the wave, and there broke the dam. Might as well get it over with. "I just don't get it. What did I do? What didn't I do? What was it about me that made him treat me the way he did? What is it?"

Tears threatened. Hard and ugly, just like every other spare portent of his ruffian's face. My eyes are still blue like my Core will never be again. And now even my eyes betray me.

Minoth bowed his forehead to the heels of his hands and jammed in, hard. Stop it. The vulnerability is wrong. It requires maintenance. It requires someone being bothered to ask after you. It is wrong. Why do you put your suffering out into the world? (But someone has asked to know, haven't they?) Are you crying for help? (But someone is offering it to you, aren't they?) Stop it. Get some help. Because that is wrong.

Wrong or not (and ain't that in pattern), Addam tugged gently at the wood between Minoth's elbows, trying to bring the chair closer if he could not bring Minoth himself in to his arms. But for all his petulance, Minoth stirred, cracked his neck and groaned as he staved back the tears, and then threw his hands down and shoved the chair back to instead install himself on the side of the bed next to Addam.

The outburst ran counter, ran contrarianism, to all the previous train of thought, and Minoth wasn't...wasn't quite sure how to follow it up, to move the scene along. If you don't know what you're saying yourself, then surely you can't rely on others to bring forth the true and correct conclusions. So what is it?

Minoth studied his thoughts. Studied them for a long, long time. Addam watched, looking hesitantly in with brow furrowed and lips parted. The tears shook him, their unshakeable rock, and eventually, instead of any coherent musing, all that came out were grotesque, pitiable sobs.

"Why didn't he love me? Why couldn't I ever do anything right for him? It wasn't fair! It wasn't fucking fair."

Addam's arm crossed around Minoth's back then, and it almost made him jump. The touch. The contact. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

"Don't do that," Minoth started slowly, dangerously. "He wouldn't want you to do that."

But Addam didn't stop. "I know," was all he said.

"You don't know!" But Minoth didn't jerk away. "You don't know what it's like, to be his Blade! I wasn't allowed to do anything. I'm my own fucking person - do I look to you like someone who needs to be told what to do, what I can and can't do? Of fucking course not!"

"I know." The sobs still wracked. The grounding still jolted.

"What did I do? Architect, what did I do to deserve this? I didn't fucking do ANYTHING!"

And Minoth collapsed, shoulders shaking, against Addam's chest. The other arm wrapped around him to close the circle, close the vicious loop into comforting, and they sat there for several eternal minutes.

"I know," said Addam, rubbing careful circles between the ether deposits. "I know."

You don't know anything, Addam. You don't know anything and yet you're still so sure that you love me, that I deserve to be loved.

What on Alrest did I do to deserve this?

Thoughts collected. Atmosphere stilled. "Minoth."

"Mmm...yeah."

"Are you alright?"

"'m fine."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Do I want to talk about it. Any more? Or at all? Oh, you're not so callous, Addam, but still, the cognitive dissonance strikes yet again.

How about we stop that, as a rule?

"Sure," said Minoth. "You can keep talking. Ah- no, we can keep talking."

He pulled himself up, straightened his back, and fidgeted once or twice to shake out the itches. Addam watched him, face fearful but fond.

"Are you ready?"

"Sure," he said again. "Action."

So Addam set in. "Minoth, it's not anything you did. Look at it this way: do you think I treat you the way I do because of anything you did?"

"I..." I'm not sure. But I sure would like to know.

"Ah, no, you're right." Addam waved a hand, jovial once more, to clear away the dissonance. Yet again! "You are very special to me. But still. You know?"

"No, I don't," Minoth answered honestly. Too honestly.

"Minoth, look at me. Do you mind if I touch your face?"

"I...suppose not." He could feel the tension in his eyebrows, jolting forward as they knit, but he ignored it. Let it...let it happen. Isn't it just like you said?

Don't you want this?

Torn between caginess and complacence (as ever, as ever, as ever), Minoth closed his eyes and submitted to the moment. He'd expected gloved hands, but instead it was Addam's bare palms that came up to meet, to caress, to cradle the sides of his cheeks and the undersides of his jaw.

"Minoth, will you look at me?" came the prompt again. And Minoth looked. There was the gold. It was flawed, it was malleable, it was fit for a fool such as this world had never once and would never again see, but it was gold. It was shining. Oh, it was precious.

"Amalthus is not a good person. He has let hate and cynicism take hold of everything he does, and he has done it willingly. He acts on those negative impulses every day without once showing regard for how wrong they are, or for those who are affected by them. It is not your responsibility to fix him or to please him. Do you understand that?"

"But I'm his Blade." Stupid fight. Stupid obstinance. You know who you are, Minoth. You know that's not it. You know it. You know it! Trust in knowledge, the real learned and earned kind, don't just take it from him - or from Addam either. Can't you do that?

Why can't you?

"Minoth. You are not Amalthus's Blade. You-- You are not Amalthus's Blade."

Right. "...go on, finish your sentence."

"You know what I was going to say. But that doesn't matter. I am not the one who makes you distinct from him. That destiny is yours to choose, and I know you want it. I know you have it in you to chase after whatever it is you may want."

Fold now into the aftermath, into the coda, into the reprise. Come down. It's alright. He is here. "I don't have to chase, Addam."

"Well, no, that's right," Addam fumbled, and Minoth felt his face rock with the sudden instability of his prince realizing that he had no earthly idea what to do with the Blade he held in his hands. "I'm not trying to tell you that you have to do anything, merely stating what I've observed, and-"

Minoth cupped his own hand around Addam's right wrist. Carefully, underneath the contention, he'd slipped off the gauntlet and glove. Hands to hands. Hands to hearts. Hand in hand, and heart to heart. "Addam. I don't have to chase Addam. Because Addam is right here."

Addam fell silent, so Minoth took his cue. Pulled the hand away from his cheek and kissed the palm, swore loyalty and fealty, laid all that was most precious in his own self into all that Addam had to give - all that he would give, because Addam Origo always gave everything he could.

"It's not over yet," Addam managed at last. "We've not seen it all through. I might not be your true Driver. You know that, don't you?"

Minoth grit his teeth, chewed up the fear and spit it out cold. "You said I'll succeed at finding whatever it is I most want. I said that's you, right here. Can we cut the crap, already?"

Addam still looked uneasy, but he let himself nod. "You're right. But still, there's the actual encounters with Amalthus to be getting on with, and whatever wrenches Zettar will throw into everything, and I...gah, I wish Adele were here."

"You what?" The placement of Addam's wrists into his grip made it awfully convenient for Minoth to shake some sense into his prince, into his Driver, but he didn't do it. "All of a sudden, in the middle of a political fistfight of a war, you want your pregnant wife to accompany you into the fray? You're too funny, Addam. Try another one, I'm sure you'll get us all laughing in due time."

"No, no. I don't mean that. You know I don't mean that. She's just so much better at these things than I am."

These things. "I don't think that's quite true."

By now, the hands had drifted down into the space between their respective laps, and though Addam squeezed affirmation into Minoth's palms yet again, he wasn't about to agree in literality. "There's no need to tell me white lies to stroke my ego, Minoth, I know my capabilities - and my shortcomings, too. You do tell me enough about those."

Minoth scoffed a laugh. "Oh, sure. A clown's a clown, Prince. If I didn't tell you what was up, I'd basically be a liar, and that'd make me just as much of a snake as my Dr- my old Driver. And as we've well established, I'm not really anything like that. Not anymore, and I wasn't ever."

"That's right," Addam nodded. Triumphant, indeed. "I know it's not so easy, but you really do have to believe me and Adele when we tell you that we love you, and that you are so much more than what you came from. If you don't, then I don't know what that'll make me! I suppose that's me trying to tell you what's up, eh?"

"Sure, sure. But that's to my point, Addam. What I'm saying is that I don't think anyone could be better at loving me than you." Not Adele, not anyone. Because a Driver and Blade are one in body and soul, and you may be piss-poor at getting that straight with Mythra, but I think we've carried it off pretty well, all things considered.

"O-oh." Blushing, blushing... "Well...yes. I certainly hope that's true. Because if it weren't, then eventually you'd leave me, and that would break my heart, there's no doubt about that, and-"

"Addam."

"Yes, my love?" Oh, you cheeky bastard. And your hand on my cheek, again. I guess I'll have to hold you to it. Or...no. I won't even have to.

As the Architect is my father, I will never, never know what I've done to deserve this.

And neither will you, Addam. "Shut the hell up."