more than words

For anyone else - for humans, that is to say - bumping foreheads, bowing stillness towards another, nuzzling bangs to bangs, is something quite simultaneously unobtrusive and unintrusive. It's just mild, quiet, normal.

But Jin's got a Core Crystal in his forehead. Jin's got a flash in his eyes. So that should change something when Malos is there next to him, shouldn't it? Malos was never, has never been, mild or quiet or normal.

For Jin, though, he's changing. A metamorphosis, almost, because it seems the most natural thing in the world.

Oh, Malos. How ever, how ever ever ever, did you come to care so?

They stand face to face, peak to peak, and the silence is almost too much. Suddenly, Jin just has to say something. Impulsive. Fresh. New. Has to seize at the truth by any means available, any means possible.

(Malos would give it to him at the slightest hint of a request, if Jin doesn't already have it in hand, but the immediacy of it craves action. Pounce on your conclusion. Grasp at what it is you want.)

"I-"

And then Jin hesitates. What exactly is it he means to say, says to mean, says to say, means to mean?

It's not fitting, for one such as him. Dirty with the weight of the world, a literally filthy hand that Malos deigned to take no matter the stain (because he was already wretched? because he was hoping to be cleansed?), he should keep sharp and dangerous, so that none should even want to come close to him. To touch him. He is not untouchable. Maybe he's just an untouchable.

But yes, it's Malos here. Malos doesn't care about any of that, or if he does, he's practically sitting inside Jin's mind, never dreaming of drafting up an alternative interpretation that would, should, could ever harm him in affect or effect, and is that love?

No. It's not so surface-level see-through as all that. Maybe love's deeper, or maybe it's this that's deeper. No matter.

Go gentle, when there is a good night. Feel soft at the corners, if you must. No one else will see you that way, anymore.

Anymore? No one was ever going to. Even Lora had been reluctant to really realize Jin's ways as not just pacifist but down and in, up and out, to his Core, peaceful. The Paragon of Torna doesn't just not like fighting for the sake of fighting, for power and glory, for conquest and kingcest, he doesn't like picking up a sword and slicing with it at all.

Blades - the physical implements, the things made of steel and not at all of ether - are for cutting. The only thing that is made to be cut is meat and vegetables, and of those really only the latter, and of those, well, ancient people didn't always have tools with which to transform their ingredients into anything different. They took their lots as they were given. Probably, the complacence brought its own mysterious brand of peace.

Blades - the sentient lifeforms, the things that steel themselves into being from out of the ether - only have one tool by which to transform their destinies, and that is their weapon. So if Jin has to, if he absolutely has to, he'll use it to protect the ones he loves and seek out the reasons, the reasoning, behind any who seek to bring them harm. Jin wishes that the pen really were mightier than the sword, but perhaps only in another universe, another sculpted society, is that truly possible.

After it all, and then again before it all, Jin and Malos trade in truth and justice. What one used to want, the other now lusts after. The intellectualism is essential, is quintessential. I must know. I must do. I cannot stop, I will not stop, until I have seen this spectacle through to its end. But I draw no joy from its enactment. I am not amused. No longer can I bear to watch, and not even to stand by.

So that's all fine and poetic. See it there, it is poetic. It is beautiful. It is not edged with eldritch horror, of the men alternately fragile and unbreakable who seek to attack and dethrone a lower god, and find thrills in each other's after-hours auspices in the meantime meanwhile. I say again, from back before we were departed into repetitive pontification: and, then, neither used to want the other, but they're still not lusting now.

Malos traces an idle finger, blocky but painstaking, across the scar that threatens to carve out and cave open Jin's entire chest, as well as those that lace underneath the individual pectoral muscles and associated fatty tissue, and he's not scoping out the structural integrity of Jin's bones so that he might snap the cavity open. His nose brushes into Jin's hair, but he's not trying to sniff out fear and menace.

Maybe the lack of shirts, pants, boots, pauldrons, overall coverage towards couvrage, does something for the general halo of harmlessness they seem to exude in the present moment. No hard, ugly corners, no crunchy bits that sure as hell will leave a bad taste in your mouth if you so much as cast a glance in their direction. Neither Jin nor Malos were made to look family-friendly. (Luckily for them, their family looks just the same, but we're not on about them here, today.)

It's even there in their most basic, unarmored appearances. Jin's chin is chiseled to a point, and Malos's cheekbones just the same, but they're not sharp. They're not weapons. Both have hair that seems spiky, defiant, shaded black and white to paint absolution into the airspace they occupy, too high up upon their multi-metered shoulders to ever touch but if you dare to enter its orbit, oh, you will be sorry--

Inescapable, then? Oh, but don't you see? It's not so deep-plunged as all that. They are not womanizing villains - and neither are they lilywhite angels, either, but it's not only the evil ones who can be considered in some aspect to be..."deviant". Not in that way, or really any other. They're not in it with each other for the sex, they are in it with each other simply to be together.

Simply to be together is enough. Anything else is unbearable, is unacceptable. I needn't beat you over the head with it, and neither need they. Now, all this talk of who and what they aren't, but who are they?

We won't say boyfriends. We won't say husbands. We won't say partners. We won't say Driver, and we certainly won't say Blade. These words are too simplistic, too general (I'll let the echo fly: they are too human) to equate to the relationship that these past five hundred years have seen build up, and then again build down. Has nestled, into a quiet corner, something precious, something ununderstandable, something worthy of recognition by the lord himself.

No, not commendable, exactly - but did I say commendation? Such a pronouncement works in and of words. I of all people could give you a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand words, and I could maybe, maybe maybe maybe, approximate it, in aeternia, and a picture could also do just so, much more glanceably briefly, but that's simply not the point of why we're here.

Words as I paint them, on and on and on through every inside-out exploration of the tensed-up prepositions, are meant to connote love through their denotations. They are meant to stretch language to their limit, to transcend what is normally said ears to ears and eyes to eyes. I fancy myself a bit of a wordsmith, something of an expert at digging impossibly rich pockets of emotion into the fabric of a world, our world.

But even I, sometimes, am not equal to the task that lays before these men. These boys, lost scared and afraid, with no one to cling to but each other, if you'll pardon the slight infantilization. (Hey now, I mean always to keep up at least some semblance of formality, so I'll make the injudicious concession of odd age implications so that I don't have to call it woobification - deal?)

"Were you going to say something, Jin?" Malos asks with a single broad finger tipped up under the other man's chin. The bottom of his palate is, again, soft. Jin smiles, breathes out, feels the subtle caressing resistance from the knuckle's not-so-blunt corner.

"No, Malos. I think you already know."