Men Of Our Times

Hearts beat to breathe. Hearts beat, on and on and on, forever unless they fail, to circulate life into every appendage, every farthest and most insignificant outcropping of a human's body. Without the heart, a human is nothing. Your heart makes you what you are.

(And who is it that makes your heart? Forms it, out of blood and bone and sinew?)

What is a heart, to time? What is time, to a heart? Marked, metronomized, choreographed. If you run out of beats, how will you walk on?

Forever, unless they fail. And for a Blade, it will never be due to any failing of their own that they stopped living on to forever. They are never alive to know, to blame themselves, after all. If they did fail.

Never.

Perhaps, then, it was a failing of Jin's that he let himself, made himself, live on past Lora. Failing of the morals? Failing of the discipline? Oh, tsk tsk, poor Paragon, you didn't take your death like a man. For shame.

For shame. For honor. For peace. For glory. For none of those. For Lora.

For Lora? Not for yourself, Jin? Odd. I would have thought...but, then, a man, a soul such as you...you'd never do anything so grim and stuck-down to what everyone baser would have thought.

Paragon. Your horns point upward, higher. You stand taller than us all. A pillar. Paragon.

Made to serve, and then again made to serve. Is that fair, do you think? And the answer is, of course, no. But Jin had a very many opinions, and like that very classic masked man of few words, he kept almost all of them to himself.

For whom did Jin's heart beat? To what course, to what rhythm, to what end?

To what end. The end of the world. Always, the end of the world.

Why are we so preoccupied with death? Why are we not, for instance, so, just as, preoccupied with the incipience, the nascence, of what it means to be born, to be alive? You should know, shouldn't you - how the human body prefers the taste of fresh things because it has trained itself against the bite of that which will harm.

(Does death mean you harm, when it comes to kill you? When it comes to take you away? Does life and all requisite liberties mean you so much of a favor, when they drop you in again? Again, and again, and again? Is that why you were afraid? And are you, anymore?)

So what if you are made up to be all and only harm? Shouldn't all recoil from you? Who should want to connect with you? Who should ever, ever, ever, think themselves able despite any and all magnitude of their willing?

And when they, we, make it, what can we do? It will not happen all at once. It takes time. It takes a multitude, a millennium, a maelstrom, of all times.

Thus: you into me, and me into you. Malos, oh, you made Jin believe that the world was corrupted beyond all point of savior, beyond all point of failure. And Jin, oh, you made Malos believe that there really was one good soul, one splendid soul, worth believing in above all, above none.

How can those things coexist? Won't you kill yourself chasing after that bitter-cherry end? What a reversal of roles. Only, not so much. For the Blade still believed in the Driver, and the Driver still worried about the Blade.

Isn't that how it should be? Don't you think?

Don't you think, Malos? What is in your head, anymore?

(Only Jin. For puppies, for children, for the innocence of those childlike and not merely childish, that is sweet and silly, to think only of your love. And certainly, better that than to think only of your hate. Don't you think?)

Before, it was me into me, and you into you. No one halted Malos's viscious feedback loop. No one told him that Amalthus was wrong.

(Break, break, break. Malos, broken. Jin, broken. Jin, you broke him. Jin, you broke him. The binding condition is not true. Not anymore.)

In truth, no one ever did tell Malos that Amalthus was wrong, directly. Jin knew that his vendetta against the vile Magister-Quaestor-Praetor was tended and tendered for all of that man's sins in full technicolored inauspicious glory, but did he ever sit down and tell Malos, that is wrong and you were wrong? You are not bad but you were wrong?

(The technicality? The exception? A Blade who lives past the death of their Driver is an exception. Perhaps Jin wouldn't have minded that so much if he'd ever gotten to see Malos do the same.)

No. Jin said, implicitly, that Amalthus was right, when he acquiesced to Malos's higher, and then again lower, purpose. Amalthus was right to see, to cede, destruction, because now we do the same. Your power given to do it...a weighty thing, but doesn't it serve what we need? We will get there. I, Jin, the Paragon of Torna...I have always worked in service of a goal.

The clock ticks. The heart beats. Whose heart is it? Whose hand has taken it to wound and to be wound? How are you faring, along towards your goal?

Blades' hearts and minds are one and the same. Thought and action, word and deed, love and life, darkness and death...they all live together, swimming in the same vastest ocean of possibility. It is too much. It is not enough. Wasn't one lifetime enough for you, Jin? Wasn't one purpose enough for you, Malos? Or didn't you like the one you were given?

One might even posit that Malos didn't hate Amalthus, the person and the body and the soul, the way he perhaps should have. Malos didn't hate Amalthus for what he did to him. He hated Amalthus for what he did to Jin. Malos didn't even see that Amalthus had done anything to him at all. Just woke me up, and I ain't ever following around a bitch like that again.

For a while, then, Malos followed no master. No master but his father, and even he, they, absent. Malos was so ever-present in his own moment, but still he was absent. Checked out, autopilot. No room for hate, no time for romantic escape.

And then, when he was with Jin, Malos's eyes were open just as much as they were opened. He never looked away - he couldn't. Just as he didn't hate Amalthus for any of the right reasons, he didn't see into Jin's eyes for any of those commensurate. There is precious distance between a sycophant and a supporter. Too, you'd think that only one of those could be mutual. Wouldn't you?

Don't you think?

Amalthus was not a man of the caliber, of the quality, that Jin and Malos were. His time, the time beaten and counted and kept, set no tether on Jin's clock. Good riddance. Within Jin's beating heart there was another Core, another truer purpose. He gave it to Malos, and Malos gave him his.

Malos couldn't help but give all that he had, all that he was. He took everything from Jin, didn't he? He didn't see that Amalthus was the one who took it, truly. Not absolved, are you, but neither needing of this horrendous absolution. Yet, still, somehow, the Praetor presided over all.

It is my heart, isn't it? Is it not my treasure? Is it not my world? Can't Jin be my world?

Oh, so you still want it, then. You want the world. You want something precious to hold in your hand.

A Core Crystal is precious - like gems, like jewels. Like a heart. Take my heart into your hand, and take my hand into your heart.

Do not come, do not go, on our time, in our times. Go on your own time. Please, you deserve it. Something better. You deserve each other, and each of you became something better, something greater, something more heartwrenchingly, heartrendingly great.

(Again I will ask: how does one render a heart? In, or out?)

The times made you what you are, didn't they? Time flows cruel, Jin. Time doesn't flow cruelly enough, Malos. And in you fold, in you fold, in you fold. To each other. Let it be blessed, what you can do.

Hold onto your hearts. They will not beat forever. Not, not even for you. You, men of our times.