mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun
Minoth arrives, and the milieu is blithe. There's no urgency to his join-up, like he hears that there was when Brighid struck in at Mythra, and Aegaeon and Hugo stood them down, or when Addam and Mythra blasted away Malos's Gargoyle and then half made to do the same to their very damsel and damned man, or when Mikhail was picked up, or when Milton was brought down from the flood, or when Addam was entrusted with Mythra, and Hugo much of the same some years earlier, or when Lora awakened Jin and Haze each on their own run...none of that.
And of course, how can you, he, I, say that? If he hadn't entered the scene and the literal fray when he had, hadn't been cued in so harmoniously, Addam and the boys would have been crushed under a Jagron's unyielding, unfeeling, uncaring clawed paw with flat, immediate stomp and swipe. No urgency. What a big damn hero is you, is he. But it's not the same, he tells himself.
Because they're all bright and shiny and blistering with the innocence of youth. He's old, only he's not that old, he doesn't know or perhaps he forgets how old he really is, by multiple metrics, but he looks it, he feels it, Jin may be rail-thin and Lora quite similar thanks to their mercenaries' diet, good cooking or not, to say nothing of Mikhail's stature and situation...but Minoth is the bony one. Minoth is the old soul without anything to show for it.
The words come ugly and hard and gross off of his lips and tongue, and yet he doesn't chew them up and spit them out half near as much as they deserve...I'm a Flesh Eater. I won't say it, you already know it. There's far and enough chewing has already happened here.
He tells the story of Amalthus, Amalthus and the baby, Amalthus and the baby and the cliff, eyes unfocused, slouch away away away, and he stands apart, he stands apart, he stands apart.
"You mean--" Addam starts, useless and uselessly grave, and it takes all Minoth's strength not to tackle him crushed bones to bones crushed because he's always known everything Minoth means. Lora cuts in, and the mood stills, and he forgets about it...but does he?
Addam, his salvation. Salvation, or merely a salve? He never forgets, it would be pointless to posit.
"I'm just following this guy since he woke me up, and that's basically it," Mythra says.
That's it? That's IT?! You don't care? You don't care to care? You don't care to care to care?
Would that I could just follow this guy since he woke me up. Would that anything about my life - my life, it's a life, it's a living breathing thing in a way that Blades never see or hear or even really dream - could be basic. Could be fine and done and it. And you're lying! You have to be, you Aegis. You, from the same stock. Stock of pot of broth of soup and I put a lot of stock in what Addam says. I wish you did too.
He stares her down, and she stares him up, and the tête-à-tête as they consider indifference, ambivalence, complacence, and then that and those mutual, is horribly, horridly violent. Does Addam notice it? Mythra gauges him as as stupid, stoic, harmless. It's not too far from what Amalthus might have said, even if at times what Minoth had acted was too unstoned anti-stoic for his own good.
Fireside, Mythra elbows him, bratty and upflected, to say "Hey, what's your deal? How come you look all goofy?" It's a sharp contrast to the over-comported criss-cross of her legs, hands tucked between thighs for warmth and safety. Unsure of herself, she is, and so she's compensating. Insecurity. Lock me up for my insecurity. Throw me in with the lions' den.
Minoth knits his eyebrows together and tries to paint the blight of confusion out of his voice. She's not being cute and cuddly, she's being catty. The lions' den, truly. That's trouble. "Am I not allowed to show any emotions? Are we all just resigned to be robotic, like you?"
He means, of course, specifically upon the topic of Malos, her brother, and Addam, her awakener, demonstrably her father if she wasn't allowed to have a mother, because of course she's got her outbursts, already she has her temper flared and untempered.
The Aegis, high and mighty and perfect, snorts. A solar flare bursts out from the sun. "Emotions about what? About not having a Driver? You should count yourself lucky."
And he does count himself lucky. He came here in search of a purpose and a place of belonging, and there it was just as golden and perfect as he'd ever dreamed. He counts himself lucky because he does have a Driver, and he knows it, and even though most of the time he's not sure he cares if anyone else knows it, right here and right now he wishes the lucid, lacrid fact would burn itself clear onto the glint of Mythra's diadem.
Anyway, if he's so goofy-looking, what exactly does she think's going on inside his head? Self-gloomification? Fantasia on a braindead bandit? Goof troop number thirteen in sol minor, or all about how I became an independent free agent traded on the trials' floors of the world?
Thank the Architect she can't see him through the eyes he'd just as soon have believed she had peeping out of the back of her head, eldritchedly accurate angels and all, when they take that stupid, stupid, stupid photo. Standing jammed in next to Addam so close for no ostensible reason at all, he's got no choice. He looks like a kid half-rocked his way through a candy store, and he feels like it.
Happiest I'll ever be is being here with you, Addam, no matter the reason or cause. (The history matters. The history always matters.) And you too, Mythra, if you'd only believe it. Can't help but care, almost instantly - if only because Addam's doing such a piss-poor job of things.
He shows it by sniping back in fine and even rare form, catches her by understanding her, and she doesn't want to be caught, but she lets the avuncularity eat away at the biting edge, slowly by slowly.
Starts responding to his mid-battle taunts and requests alike in kind, starts understanding the mutualism, starts letting their snark be an insurmountable joint affront upon Addam rather than the relentless struggle between an immovable object and an unstoppable force (they even get to trading places, of course, all the time).
They each bind each other to each other. Girl to gold to man to Flesh Eater to Blade to Aegis to Prince to the highest of us all, onward and upward and excelsior. I don't look like I belong with you, oh how saintly it is you look, but the clergy can be dark in service of a purer and more powerful goal. I rest in the chapel of a world that loves me, even if the only firmament of that heaven is this Tornan earth.
Indol did not love me, and Indol did not love Mythra, or Malos either. Torna, for all that matters, really matters, matters most, loves Addam, and we love Addam, and he loves us, even if he shouldn't, even if he's bad at it, even if we're silly and inconsequential and even if we fall all over sarcasm to lift ourselves and each other up to betterment.
It's not blithe. It's not insignificant. It is, bar none, glorious. It fills his entire blood-marred chest with warmth and light and gold. It makes him young. Forever, he thinks, like a fool he thinks, it will make him young. After all, no one ever told him not to look, to hope, to feel. Not anyone who mattered.
By the end of their journey, Mythra is elbowing him with the absence of malice, and saying "Hey, what's gotten into you? How come you look all mopey?" He looks all mopey, of course, because he knows it's going to be over.
And either they win, and life goes on, and he's back to bumming the Titans for mercenary work right when all the eligible normal folk will be free to beat their paths again, and beat him out of work...or they lose, and who knows how many people, souls or bodies or neither or both, they'll lose in the process.
Predicting doesn't help, and neither does the strained hindsight. How he wishes she'd have just stopped to do that one silly thing before she broke down, out, away. He'd certainly looked it enough.
And later, Pyra. The inevitability of Pyra. Is it more inevitable that the sun goes down, or that the fire peters out? But she is here, and as ever we discuss her. Minoth lives a million lifetimes worth of memories in his vicariousness and always there is the Aegis, always there is that brilliant pulsing anima spirit, blossomed whichever hue.
Always is never. Never is forever. We've been through it before. It's been through us before. Five hundred years is not a human lifetime, and thus it is not a Blade lifetime either.
"Some of them are good memories," Pyra says, right after she calls him "Mr. Cole". Her smile isn't fake any more than the rest of her is fake; so, as yet, it's a little fake. The milieu is blithe.
He almost feels like in another rehearsal of this conversation he'd have said something completely devoid of all meaning, something hush-up kiss-ass "well, I just wanted to get the point across" and of course everything lives and dies by the sword of serving your point.
You get the point across by exaggeration, by hyperbole, by being larger than life and it doesn't do to dance around the fact that he's smaller than life, now. Everything loomed large and the Praetor loomed larger and he bent down and threw up his hood and ignored it. Cole. You're Minoth's Pyra. At least she's still fine to look at, unlike you.
Mythra always got her point across. About herself, she didn't know what her point, what the point, was, but she always got to the heart of things. Not straightforwardness, no, but her own flavor of the same. Her own blinding brash scintillect.
He'd acted so shocked when he'd noticed her, and had it been only acting? Vandham's great bulk was enough to blot out even the most singular of pinpoints, and Pyra stood so unassuming. So young, he'd said Rex was, as the axis of his incredulity, and there he hadn't been lying - most of ten years younger than Addam, probably. Really, a child. Not someone who could just be compared to the petty throes of boyhood, but the literal idiom.
He'd looked down at the floor, Roc's talons, the creak of the caw and the absence of pure dichotomy, as he'd mused on about the price of an attempt, of a preparatory take. Roc was flashy for no unearthly reason, they made to be so proud and were made that way. Too unique to fall, were they. Somehow he'd seen that already.
He didn't start looking at the kids again until he started talking about Amalthus. Until he'd committed to his bits, and his sins into the bargain. Just like before. Just like...before. Recurrence, isn't it?
"They're the only good memories I've got," he croaks out. "The best ones I have." Stupid tautology. Or is it...well. Logic was never his thing. Talking about true and false. Funny, isn't it.
He hears it, hollow and deeper than it should be (should have ever been, maybe, but no, she was and is, is and was her own), in the back of his pitifully small shrunk-up skull. What's gotten into you, Minoth? How come you look all mopey?
"Are you okay?" Pyra nudges - only with her voice does she nudge, because her hands are still clasped below her waist and her shoulders prop low and even. She's never nudged. And yet, she's never budged. Not that she's had the chance to.
"Are you?" His hands are behind his back, so he's tied up with a bow too. Too nice. Too, too nice.
Before she can answer, if she even wanted to, Cole continues his trend. "About your Driver, that boy who's with you..." The boy who's with you. Not the boy you're with. Partners. Teammates. Equals. Yes, someone can equal the Aegis, if she lets herself be seen, reached, touched. If she doesn't count herself lucky to not have a Driver, or want to, anyway.
Anyway. "His name's Rex," she says, parrots, or seems to. Seen, reached, touched. "He's a good person, with a kind heart." Perhaps so.
And then before Cole can stop himself, he blurts out (only it doesn't hardly feel nor seem like blurting, because his mouth opens too slow for that - not that he ever took up that his beloved prince's beloathed role in any full measure, ever) the reciprocation, "Reminds me of a...certain someone."
Pyra's acknowledgement is hardly more than an idle hum. She has to know, doesn't she? She knew him. She met him. She...saw him.
(Seen, reached, touched.)
But that wasn't Addam, after the end. Of course it wasn't. Okay. Are you okay? Okay.
"You will be careful, won't you? I've seen...we both know what you can do."
Pyra nods, if a little more shaken still a little more engaged, now. "Of course. I'd never use that power if there was another way. And that's...what I hope for, but..."
Cole shrugs, makes a minute readjustment of his shoulders. "I wasn't lying, out there. I trust you, and I trust that you know enough to know who I'm talking about."
The ether lines casting over and down her sides glow something crucial in their fluorescence. Those are the same. The same.
"You'd never do it," she starts slowly, working at her wrist in somehow the most demure way possible, "if there was another way. So I think I believe you. You do trust us."
"I do," Cole says, parrots, or seems to. Seen, reached, touched. "And I trust him, too." Stupid reiteration, but necessary. Whoever wrote this dialogue stilted it, was stilted. Probably, there's a reason. Perhaps so. Never if there was another way.
Her final word to him is merely a murmur. "Thank you...Minoth." And again in some back-trace dump heap tacked up against his drawing board is the clichéd phrase, that oh, I'd almost forgotten that name.
He could never forget. It was almost pointless to posit.
On the radar blip, on she goes. He watches, hand clamped over Iona's tiny shoulder more tightly than he'd like to admit, as Rex questions her, says she called herself Mythra, as if the blonde is the fakeout, when Cole knows it's not even Pyra that's any fake. She's new. She's old. She's eternal. She's a blink in time. Pyra is as much the Aegis as Mythra was, is. She carries all the same burdens, if not sometimes more.
Reminds me of a certain someone, indeed. Mythra torches Rex for all the same crimes she committed under Addam's over-watchful care. That Vandham guy, also a reminder. Cole knows. A mentor, and then he's gone, so Rex is left to shore up the rest of his not-so-princely un-inherited heritage all by his lonesome.
Except not, because he's got those girls on his side, at his side, and they've got him. If the one will stop yelling at him, that is, and Cole hopes, prays, knows that eventually she will. Eventually.
Right now, the shock of being the object of safekeeping from the inside out, not the outside in, is what stops her in her fleet-footed tracks. Confused, puzzled, confuzzled, Mythra squints at the brown-blue boy of cheer in a bottle and can't get a read. So, she decides, she'll let him keep reading out his own open book to Pyra. Again, leave it all to Pyra. As ever, as ever, as ever.
Cole doesn't let them back into the playhouse, necessarily, and if they're following anyone it's Iona - he'd bet on that, anyway. He huddles up in the office, humors the yet shaking shaken girl with a narrated first few sentences of a book he chooses for her, and before he knows it his head is collapsed to the hard, ugly brooches that make up the bellsleeves' border of his cloak.
He's still asleep when Pyra takes her second turn at being told this Rex is just Addam parte deux, is the living legacy she's got to play counterpart to in gracefullest stride, and of course he doesn't know it makes her break down into tears when fetal-formed Azurda says it. He doesn't know that maybe, just maybe, it's ever so slightly his fault.
If correlation and causation tie together into fault. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Mythra would know. Right?
As much as Cole would have so sincerely shilled the bit about forgetting the Minoth name, the Blade name, and been so false and hackneyed in doing it, he's not lying to himself when he thinks about how seldom, precious seldom, he's undone the cloak and actually bared his Core to anyone. Iona knows, but he's not...not made a showcase of it.
He thinks he catches a flicker of suspicion, of dawning, of moon looming, in Nia's eyes and ears when he says it. When he bites it off ugly, again. He doesn't like being ugly. Doesn't like being a symbol of all that's bad in the world despite all his very best efforts to stave it away by any markeroven mechanism.
The rest of the thesis is matter-of-fact, tried and true, done and dusted, there I was and here I am. He registers the devotion of mental energy that he doesn't want Nia to have to be so bitterly like that. It's not good, oh, she's so young, but what does he even know, Drivers can look like just about anything these days. Maybe that's just a tale for another time.
Gained nothing at all. Don't tell the kids lies, Cole, Minoth, but it's not as if they'll know. You know. It's not as if they'll know.
Rex swears upon all his honor to bring their quest off right, and yes, Cole trusts him. Not blindly, like he'd so foolishly trusted Addam, but here with the tempering none of them had had five hundred years ago, despite their meted individual share of mature age.
Her boots tap. That's Mythra's cue, not Pyra's tic. Cole keeps walking, squirrels himself away, thinks nothing of it. Bodyswapping's probably not easy. Heh. He should know. In a...roundabout way.
He keeps thinking nothing of it on the surface, but just underneath, underneath the cruft and the beard and the eyebrows and the red-gray tinted haze, he's counting the seconds, metronomizing the taps. Not that it changes a wit of his surprise when she rushes in after him, all gold and white and green and bangles of buckles of bucked-up gumption.
His strength stands to catch her, as he is infused with hers. This isn't what he'd thought all those years ago when Addam had uttered two words and caved in his entire psyche, and the actualization is almost more powerful than he can handle.
He always thinks of his darkness as a storm, if he's not actually down to the earth in the desert, something low and thunderous and all-encompassing and, when you least expect it, deadly. He loves the wordplay of a storm clinging to port, of finding its own purchase, of being something vulnerable even as it is something volatile. So the sun rises up against the storm, and makes its peace.
The sun comes into the eye, even though he can't see her, not fully. Everything is lit up practically electric, and the dust motes scatter. No, it's still dark. But right there, in the middle of the room, where Mythra and Minoth are finding the only closure they each may ever be able to get from that far-away time, the sun can set in its golden bowl and none will need to cry out again for the mess to be set to right.
"I miss him." Not as a replacement, not as the original. I just. Miss. Him. Mythra may have done out her own exit, but that doesn't change the fact that she didn't get to say goodbye. To either of them, really, but all Minoth had done was stand there and look morose. Fat load of good that had done, in the long run.
Cole thinks, quietly, that he'd like to ask her what she was thinking, if she had been awake to think, then. What she'd have said to him, alone in his office with his mad-maudlinly reminiscing self. Would she have relayed the lines he'd thought? Would she have asked him why he looked so sad?
Probably, she wouldn't have. Because she knew and she knows. And now it's his turn.
"I know," Cole says, and he feels his voice cast back into its older, haler timbre. He flatters himself comfortable enough, after all this time, to put his hand on her hair, depress the love and care into it, stroke over and around and through something simultaneously less and more artful than the over-round muddle of his signature.
Minoth was sharp and bony. Cole is round, perhaps moldy. Not a thing sticks but the stinting shrubs of the man, the myth, the being he once was. But Mythra, here, reminds in a blessedly physical way. Even though this memory isn't one he's ever lived before.
"I know," he says again, an assertion as much as an assignment, a conferral, a conference, a confluence. Mythra shudders, but there is silent strength.
It wasn't bland, it wasn't basic, it wasn't shadowy, it wasn't shunned. It was everything. Those were your best days. You would have been satisfied if they were your only days. But you live on, and you usher the youths onwards, and you will make better days out of every new one that comes, because every day there is still the chance of an opportunity like this.
"I know," he says a third time, as if recalling Addam to life, or trying to, anyway. What is the pattern? When will it end? You can end it, if you're determined enough. And oh, she is. He, she, they, are.
Oh, you, the wanderers of the lost, say goodbye, say goodbye, say goodbye.
"I know," for the fourth and the final and she is one of them, both of her, all of it. I miss it. "I miss him too."