always one more tomorrow

Thank the Architect, no one really paid attention to what happened to Addam after Torna's fall. Amalthus couldn't afford to, after all - his chips were stacked on Zettar's insidious myth, and he couldn't unsell it for a moment.

Of course, he'd stopped paying attention to Minoth's wellbeing years ago. A Blade that takes its will into its own hands would never be or have been of any use to him.

Minoth had taken hold of his own will, and now pressed it one step further: doubled back upon the inhumane idea, what use was a Blade who'd lived past the time of serving his Driver? Even though his lifespan was compromised, how unearthly long did he have to live?

So he struck at his Core with one careful electric-blue knife, and found himself still standing. Maybe that was the flesh, or maybe it was what a Blade was meant to be able to take, which no one had ever had the stones to test out. For a moment, the urge to go farther yet seized at him. He wasn't going to die with Addam, so what was the problem with dying now?

But...no. There he stood. He offered to Addam that precious shard of his Core that had fallen, where before he'd needed to blindly entrust the whole. Addam, somewhat bereft of the inclination to so foolishly try to cling to a "normal" and "untainted" human morality and mortality, took it.

And now, sitting at his desk in a playhouse in Uraya, listening to the nondescript gray-haired man in the kitchen sing a song of Old Torna, Cole thought that he had no more use for another tomorrow than he would have had if Chanson, as they called him, had not come with him, all this way.

But the kisses were far sweeter than the songs, even after all this time. Cole's- no, Minoth's general tendency wasn't to think about the fact of it all the time, but when he did, it was with quite a grand exposition. He mused from the beginning to the end, only the end hadn't come yet, and what would they do when it did? When did it become overstaying their welcome? Thank the Architect, indeed.

He'd ponder on these things when Addam, who hadn't lost a one of his most irritatingly boisterous tendencies, would come over and beg pardon to sit on his lap, and bring nothing but chatter with him, because his hands were too dry to work the clay anymore, and Minoth always found that he sung far too loud up close.

"Don't know how I would have fared, if I'd had to do it alone."

His thumb was almost too crooked to rub at the ruptured place where the pure center of the Core that had been Minoth's rested, seated in a quick-and-dirty gouge of skin into which the tendrils of free ether had so greedily and fastidiously hooked.

That same quizzical, crafty look Addam's face had always had crossed it now again. Oh, you fool old bird. I've been watching you for too, too long.

"We did it for Torna, didn't we?" Tch. The wounds we've borne, indeed.

Cole grinned, cuffing the side of Chanson's wizened, crow-footed face with the hollow clap of a palm. "Not me. I did it for me and you."