Los Endos ~ To Oblivion
gonna tell a little story with this one: Minoth and Malos were slated to go up against each other in an expansive character popularity poll and i somehow missed the whole thing and just as i found out that it had already happened this song came on shuffle (specific recording very important) and i was like hey they should beat the shit out of each other <3 and similar to this
The beach in Leftheria was silent. The war was over; Malos and Mythra were gone. Like it had never even happened.
Minoth walked alone, along it. It felt like it had been a century since...since those days, but perhaps it had only been half that long. Maybe a quarter.
The scenery was purple, generally. A gorgeous misty violet sculpted out the tendrils of the Titan that were pocked with a spongy, barnacle-like texture.
Barnacles never go away. They cling forever. Are barnacles alive? No matter. Barnacles do not die.
So there was something else purple, on the beach. Something...hunched. Crumpled. Half-formed, misshapen, disbelonging.
(Rather reminds you of yourself, doesn't it?)
"That you, Malos?" Minoth called out. You. Your personhood. I can recognize you. I couldn't but. I didn't need to submit to it, but I have. Oh, Lord, what an ideal this is. This will be.
"Minoth." He spat it, only he didn't. The syllables were slurred. Minoth walked up behind him, and felt the sudden urge to kick straight into his tailbone, only he didn't. Strangely enough, he tapped gingerly on the other Blade's shoulder. Malos didn't turn, only cranked back on his joints. Laid flat, up he stared.
Ragged streaks slithered across his armor, which before had looked crunchy and invulnerable, but now seemed soft, almost malleable. Not completely rendered, as it were. In the center, the Core Crystal was still mounted, carrying all the same surface glints of mistreatment but more importantly possessing a fracture from corner to corner that on any other Blade would have looked absolutely fatal.
"Never thought I'd be seeing you again."
Despite his affable, conversational tone, Minoth didn't sit. Didn't settle in for afternoon tea. The encounter was to be contentious, he knew that much. Maybe peaceable, but still not for babes in arms.
"Me neither." The slurring was worse, but somehow it felt intentional. Like Malos was conserving his energy for something greater. Thanks for the compliment. Glad to know I've earned your esteem, brother.
Brother? It seems so.
"I'd blow your brains out if I thought you even had a hunk of grey matter in your head." Left? Not even left. But not right, either.
And Malos knew so. "Why, you little-" And ah, yes, this retort was sharper, crisper. Barbed and ready.
Minoth, yet calm, stopped him. Not with actions, but with words. Not with the sword, but with the pen. Of course he did.
"Not like that. You think I'm so low? No. What I mean is...where are you, Malos? What are you?"
Not so long ago, you were just a shiny rock. So was I, but...I'll never be that again. Will you?
"Why did you make fun of me, during the battle?"
"Huh?" Idiot. Don't play dumb, I know you know.
But, Minoth would be cordial. To thine own self be true, and so to thine own enemies, realize that they are your friends and thus you need to keep them close because hatred, jealousy, envy, all can make allies when the troops are the most pathetic.
Bullshit. Shut up, narrator.
"Calling Addam 'my prince'. Tell me what on Alrest is your goddamn issue, huh?"
"You're pathetic." So Malos was all quips. Make it repartee, then. Step back, and be the bigger person. As if that could ever be possible. Yet, he doesn't exude it, anymore...
"Me? No no, Malos, that's your job. See, I loved him. I cared about him, and he cared about me. I was the living example disproving every lie you told. And you, computeroid, all you could do was make fun of me. Because oh, you certainly couldn't bear to see that I was right."
It was easy, too easy, to pontificate. Minoth hated himself. You're not righteous, you're just self-righteous. Street preacher, indeed.
Logos, the truth, saw through. Now, Minoth didn't know that, but it irked him all the same. "Is that so? Then how come you're not with him now?"
"I..." I don't know where that is, now. My best guess is that he doesn't know, either.
"You're a liar. Just like I said: pathetic."
With that, Malos stood, turned, raised his arm, posture exactly matched to that he had held when he had held his Monado. But the sword did not come. Something flickered in his hand, yes, more red than purple. A warning. And yes, Minoth was scared. But he didn't show it.
Malos, as ever, showed his frustrations plain and bare. He sneered, wound back his arm in the socket, and it dangled disconnected for a spare moment before the entire Aegis surged forward, death in motion.
(I thought death couldn't move. Is it alive, then, here? What a ridiculous question. I feel like I've asked them all before.)
If Minoth were a real Blade, he could have, would have, snapped his fingers to his triggers and manifested his knives to block the assault, but they didn't come fast enough, they never did, the hinges hung both physically and metaphysically. Some force of unknowable shape surged against his chest. His Core fought back, but oh, so weakly.
When he awoke from the smiting, Malos was there in his face, neck cricked over broken, mouth a gruesome leer.
"Get away from me," said Minoth. Pleasantly, like he'd just been asking Lora to pass him another slice of bread. Go on, Malos, go play. Somewhere far, far away from me.
(Complacence. If you let him go now, who knows what will befall the world? You can't not care. He doesn't care, so you...you can't not care.)
But Malos didn't get. Malos, then, didn't seem to get it. So Minoth raised his arms, shoved them at the general vicinity of an upper-torso area, and though for one confounding moment they seemed to pass through the ethereal matter, in the next Malos had indeed moved. Only a little bit, though. His feet were still stuck in the same place.
"Malos." No reaction. A high-pitched whirring sound that Minoth felt come from beneath the tympani's skin, and an absence of hot, heaving breath from the Aegis, but other than that, no reaction.
But those are signals, aren't they? Signals to noise. Why do I discount them, just because they're not human? Not all Blades are humanoid. Not all Blades are even easily parseable beast silhouettes. Legitimize them, will you? That was Malos's reaction, his response. Frozen fear and the inability to change the past, the present, or the future.
Just like me, there with Amalthus. My words had been stolen off of my lips and stuffed so uncomfortably into my Core, and all I could say was "Huh." We needn't all be so verbose, so articulate, all the time.
And so if that was a legitimate participation in this conversation, this dialogue, this uneven rat-snatched tangle, Minoth could respond in kind. Gauntlets bashed across the Aegis's face, and he stumbled back. So your head's still solid. So your head's still thick.
Thoughts, incoherent, spilled out from the Core and up into Minoth's brain again. Out of his mouth. The evil tumbles out. "I could have been like you. I could have stopped you from ever being born, or whatever the fuck it is you call what happens to us. So if I tell you to get away from me, you better get the hell away from me."
Don't you dare disregard my agency. Don't you dare still be that much like him.
Something in, at, on, around Malos snarled. Like a mirage, Minoth saw the arm passed in front of his mouth, wiping disgust from his chin. And that's alright. You are allowed to have your anger, Malos. Just as I have mine.
Just like me. I could have been like you. I am like you. Jesus fucking christ on a crucifix. Hell, hell, hell.
So Minoth prepared himself to fight. Psyched himself up, and then again ground himself down. No longer was it just about the insults, and the injury. No, something fateful rested here. Malos yet had will. And what he would do with it...the lord only knew.
As it turned out, nothing. With the extensive damage to his Core exemplified by one crucial hair-splitting crack, Malos had already overexerted himself. He thrust himself into Minoth's orbit again, yes, and his presence was quite real, and all of his willful bravado was like grotesque vomit the way it spilled so violently out of him and into Minoth's face.
No long-drawn, deep-wallowed century did they spend wrestling like piggish teenagers too wired-up buff for their own good. The fight was just as pointless, though. Where are the parents? The sisters? The supervisors? Doesn't anyone care?
(Usually, one lets brothers play fight because one knows that eventually they will snap out of it, and look at each other, and think, I love you but I'd never ever say it. Not so here. Not so.)
And then, as Minoth grappled with Malos's chest, and tried so viscerally to disregard just how absolutely fucking unimaginable that prospect would ordinarily (ha! as if) have been, he realized something. Rather, he felt something.
He'd never felt it before. Never even consciously thought about it. Certainly not in this context, but then what other would ever have been half as poignant, and then again half so feasible?
Malos's body, the stratified remains of bulk and bluster, felt like his own. Felt like the weakness, and the atrophysphyxiation, and the absent pulse of life's ether. There may have been more Flesh Eaters, and then after those the Blade Eaters, but Minoth had never met another and oh, by the Architect, he had never wanted to meet another. For now he knew what it was like.
You can't be chained to this earth, can you, Malos? You're not like me. You are not like me.
(I am not like you. Still churning on that, but I think it's true. I hope it's true.)
What was Malos, if he didn't have a body? There was something different about him, Minoth knew that. Knew enough to suppose that Malos, even dead, could still claim possession over what it meant to be alive.
(How can you claim something if you don't know what it is? That's the perennial, even overdone, question, isn't it? Of course it is.)
Only...no he couldn't. Malos would not be Malos, really, if he were incorporeal. Just as Minoth had taken it upon himself to disconnect himself from the Minoth that had occupied his body - her body? - before him, Malos's personality was that of a Blade's incarnation. So perhaps I would not hate you so, my brother, if you were not the insufferable jerk that you are.
But you can't die, can you, Malos? You will never become another man, another Blade.
In his mind, then, two scenarios rolled out on forking paths. In the former, Minoth stops grappling and starts gripping, brings Malos down to the ground, cups gentle hands over his swinging fists, bids him calm down. Says, you're not alone anymore. We can get out of this together. Both of us.
But they were living in the latter, weren't they? The life in which Minoth cannot ignore that Malos stole thousands, and in particular two, just because he was having his own petty dick-measuring contest with his sister. The moment in which Minoth knows he cannot bear to pass any benefit to Malos, doubtful or not, that he's not the one whose toys need to be smashed now, in this final battle.
Malos's Core was flickering its distress signal, and Minoth realized he hadn't ever gotten a full, complete, stable bearing on its current state. In one swift motion, he ducked his arm down, over, and around Malos's, to lock it in to his side, repeated with the other, and then he hunkered down and squinted.
Cracked. The face fully broken. Not mottled, not changed from the inside out, but damaged from the outside in.
How poetic. Malos brought this upon himself, more or less, but the evidence was exterior. Minoth had done nothing, in the end, to bring about his own corrupted transformation, and yet his indication was interior. So you cannot win, in this world. Not us. We were doomed from the start.
Let's end it together, shall we? Present tense, as a treat. To make it easier, quicker, more vibrant, for us poor unfortunate souls.
"Malos," Minoth whispers, the Aegis's faltering form brought in close again. "Haven't you had enough?"
Malos groans. Logistically, he sure as fuck has. He can barely respond, much less actuate.
So let Minoth take up the instructions. "You gonna behave?" he says gamely. Malos's answering motion is assentive.
Lay him down, just as gentle. Pat a desperate hand to the pompous pompadour dampened with something less like sweat than slick leaking ether. No need to truss him up all pretty; we don't need good looks, where we're going.
You can kill any Blade by their Core. You can. You have to.
Sorry, you have to be able to. Right? That's all I meant.
Minoth draws his knives, for the last time. Positions the slanted tip to jut straight into the offering crack. As Malos grows frenzied with the truer apprisal of his situation, Minoth doesn't try to appease him, doesn't try to get him to stop. Instead, he joins his brother.
First it's scrapes, scratches. Indentations in the gouge. Then, he adds height to the strikes. Wind-up, follow-through. Chip, chip, chip. Bite away at the data. It's already gone, probably. His knives aren't meant to cut, after all. They're just meant to damage.
Don't think yourself any more artful than that, Minoth. You're a brute-force instrument, even if you're not causing a blunt-force trauma right now, necessarily. You punch things to get them to back off. You rely on the fact that people are afraid of you to stand them down from crossing you. You are just as reprehensible as every other goon in the world.
"Are you the devil, Malos?" Minoth pants out. "Am I a demon? Is that why we were born in the dark?"
Malos still doesn't answer, but his breath gets huffy. Somewhere in there is a smile. And then, it shuts off. Instantaneous. In the Core, Minoth's killed the amusement. Killed the mood. Killed the vibe. It will never come back. Inspirateur that you think you are, you'd like to believe that even your deepest intrusion can suffer it out of them.
(Can't do it? I can bring it out of you!)
But you can't. Literally, you can't.
The gash is wide enough for both knives to fit into, now. It's deep enough for the barrel to shove all the way in. He could do it that way, of course. He's got two. Always has. One for him, and one for his partner.
Weren't even made to be a loner, Minoth. No, this destiny is what you were made for. So do it, already.
But not quite like that...? No, not quite like that.
"Malos," says Minoth then. Abruptly, with animal urgency. Malos's hands vibrate, trapped in a tensed-up pose. Time hangs. Motion stutters through. He's got to have heard. Architect, I can't have messed things up this badly, even now.
(Yes I can. Yes the fuck I can.)
Without waiting for further rejoinder, Minoth grabs Malos's right hand and slams it to his Core. Right as the palm hits, anti-resonation, he fires. Something black and dark clenches. When he opens his eyes, he doesn't.
The beach in Leftheria is silent. Malos and Minoth are gone. Like it never even happened.
turns out i'm just a sucker for volatile and even violent divorced energy :]