Owner of a Lonely Heart

It's peculiar how Jin always managed to walk between extremes, despite being an overall absolute person. His ice was always the coldest it could be, his blade was always the sharpest it could be, his step was always the quickest it could be. He was pacifistic and sentimental, yet he was never either maudlin or weak.

I am who I am. I do not change. So Jin had said, and it would have fit him - like an application opened with its default settings placed just so, sliders and buttons and all, and no convenient option to reset to default save removing the entire package from your hard drive wholesale.

It would have fit him, however, had he not then met Malos. Malos, similarly, was a whirlwind mixture of features, a cockeyed cock-up designed by the Architect and then redesigned by Amalthus, but without particularly too much care invested by either, all in all.

Broken people are all too eager to diagnose others as kindred. It's misery loves company, yes, but taken up another level, because sometimes misery truly loves that company, the individual and the heart and the soul and the body and the breadth of depth of connection that you cannot find, you will not find, you do not want to find because you are scared dead out of your wits to find anywhere, anywhen, anywhy, any way else.

Lora's heart beat lonely, angrily, hungrily, set exactly just so between all those same extremes of her original Blade. It was...not satisfied, really, but more quantified, qualified. Jin would have been perfectly content, would have made his peace, with just continuing on alone, wherever life now deigned to take him. He wasn't alone, exactly, and he already had well enough guilt to keep him from flying too high before he was ready, again.

Again, we invoke Lora's own attributes: simultaneously intrepid and timid as all get out, when it came to a few particular things, particularly those that Jin had drilled into her as the very manifestations of motive fear. Authority, lack of water if not lack of food, and distance from her Blades all worried her to no end.

Jin was no different. He kept hidden, skulking, made sure to only run his body down to the bare minimum of what anyone could call health and proper upkeep, and...and fell for Malos, little by little.

Because here was the thing Lora had, had had, that Jin lacked: forthrightness, to go with his own steady honesty. Love makes you blind, and humanity makes you fallible and stupid. Of course those two would always have agreed with that.

It started fairly simply, from a distance. Malos would leave the inn room in Alba Cavanich, to gather information or food or plain goddamn air from outside, and Jin would call after him, in his evenest of tones, "I hope you won't miss me too much while you're gone."

In response, Malos would blink blankly for only the smallest fractions of a second, and then he'd smirk and drawl out, "Sure, Jin. Keep the bed warm." And now it was Jin's turn to stare at his hands before moving one to his chest and the other to his forehead and think oh, Architect, what on Alrest is this? What in the name of all that used to be good and holy have I done?

Jin's remarks got looser; Malos's got ever bolder. Each wanted the upper hand, while also knowing that neither truly deserved it, in the end.

After one near-trip in the muddy cobblestone streets: "This will sound stupid, but please let me know if my shoes are ever untied, Malos."

It was something the Paragon would never have bothered to trifle about, especially not to or with others, before. "Why? You afraid of falling for me?"

Horrid man. Wretched monster. You sank Torna. Worse things have fallen for you. Or is there really anything worse, more wretched, than me?

"You're still stealing hearts, huh, Jin?" Cruel joke.

"Only the ones that are important to me." Go crueler.

They learned to fight together, harnessing the last remaining scraps of Malos's power.

"You know, gravity or not, I think I still would be falling for you."

"Dickhead. I don't love you, so don't get any ideas. We're just working together."

Lora's heart crumpled into a strangled ball and hid itself away for a good few days after that. To Jin, while the idea of loving anyone new, after Lora and Haze and Mikhail and all the rest, was terrifying, it was still far better than the alternative. What if he forgot how? What if he lost the capacity? Malos, of course, behind closed armor, didn't think he'd ever had it or ever would. What Jin was afraid of losing, Malos was afraid of gaining. Remember, humanity makes you stupid and weak.

Still, the heart jokes pervaded. They stole Cores after Cores after Cores, and what are Core Crystals but hearts whose crucial valves come prepared for quick and easy transplantation?

"Lora always said we should follow our dreams." He was comfortable enough to refer to the "precious Driver" by name, now. Malos had had well enough time to scrutinize her in her frozen tomb and form his own opinions, new or not, anyway.

"'S why I'm following you, Jin," Malos said, and immediately set his jaw and locked up his face. The Jin of 3564 wouldn't have noticed it beyond a surface level catch that something new was off and amiss. But the Jin who'd already lived through 3664 raised one eyebrow, cocked his head, and asked, quiet as a footstep in the woods, "Really?"

And, too, the Malos of, say, 3614 would have cracked a shitfaced grin, drummed arpeggioed fingers on the tabletop, and said sure, don't you believe me? Would have judged so potently on the answer, would have studied Jin like prey. But now, now that the guilt had well and truly set, it was Malos who wanted to be preyed upon.

"I owe it to you," he said, voice barely above a whisper. "Because of...of Lora." And this was the first time Malos had ever said it aloud, said it back.

Was it all just, only, because of Lora? Even if not just for Lora, for Mythra's disgrace and Hugo's death - not that Jin had ever particularly cared for the young emperor, but that of all the scummy imperialist thousands to deserve to die in human wars, that one tiny, exceedingly polite and patient Ardanach would not have been Jin's first choice.

"This isn't a very...altruistic quest we're on," Jin allowed. "Justice, as I've learned, isn't always pretty." Oh, Mythra and Malos would surely know about that. They accepted the likening a little more, now, Jin to Malos to Mythra to Addam to Lora and now we've come back around.

They felt themselves becoming human. They felt the erosion of their mechanical unfree will, saw that there was no real reason to be lonely, even if...even if this was the true and the only way, the singular path they had chosen.

Look before you leap, but leap, still. You've got to want to succeed.

"Still think you're awfully pretty, Jin," Malos mumbled, like he didn't want it to be heard; sure enough, now all he had to resort to was burying his face in his hands. And Jin could wait, could temper on another century and a half for good measure until everything snapped and they lost all the patience they'd been building up, or he could take those not-quite-delicate hands and recover Malos from his hiding place, like carving out a lonely heart from a lonelier chest, and...

"Can I kiss you?"

"Do you want me to cringe any harder?"

"Not particularly. I just want you to kiss me."

And Malos, who lived to make Jin's dreams come true, acquiesced. Maybe did a little more than that, but did it all the same.