follow on 'til the gold is cold

In Lora's core - her heart? or don't we all have something so critically central binding mind and body both and keeping us supraessentially alive? - there had always flown a certain sort of self-inflicting recklessness.

She'd had more pride than humility, at the stem of it, because the feedback loop of believing in yourself is the only autoperpetuating cycle we as living, sentient creatures truly need.

Right? We just need to keep going, to still and always improve, because we have to - and to heck with what anyone else would and will say!

Oh, she'd throw herself before any fire half for the experience of it all - she knew that she shouldn't be afraid, and where it didn't seem to quite matter one way or the other, on and in she went. Authority situations? No, count her out of those. But standing off with Gort? How bad could it be? She knew Jin would come eventually, so what was the harm?

How would it have been, indeed, if she'd been Mythra's Driver? Wouldn't things have been so much better, with that crucial foundation of trust? Could the folly of man be staved so easily by the matching, complementary folly of woman?

Perhaps not so, for Lora herself had already found and well had her peace.

In Jin's place, then, was where they had kept the sagacity, the caution, the fear. Whenever Lora felt afraid, she cast off the worries into Jin's waiting comfort. Rarely did she keep anything persistently gnawing to herself, inside. They had open, easy communication. They relied on each other...perhaps a little too much.

So, too, in the end, did Jin take up the mantle, and think it his absolute duty, his only calling, that he should resolve Lora's fear by way of submission to that carnal thing that was, in some ways, the only thing he himself had ever been afraid of. He was afraid, constantly, of what would drive him to it, rather, whether he knew so or not.

Oh, life. How terrifying. In some ways, quite a much more terrifying than death.

Pneuma dives before him, takes the blow from Amalthus's wild tentacle that certainly didn't particularly care who it hit, and is so sufficiently weakened that it's Mythra who lands in his arms.

She spouts some bravadoed bullshit about not getting her wrong, about it being, generally, for the greater good, but Jin hadn't really ever known any greater goods that got served in the foremost by anything other than personal stakes.

In Torna, it had been tit for tat. Jin hadn't known a purpose outside of Lora - did he even know now? that was a separate question - and he'd snapped at Mythra just the same as Brighid had, two adults, grown along some ruler of maturity, who weren't quite acting like it.

That last night in Spefan (the last night of normality, for they'd surely slept along quite a few nights along the trail to the Soaring Rostrum) had been the closest to true, deserved mutualism that they as primary, paragonical Blades had ever achieved.

True Driver this, Blades' lot of intuition that, and...talk of having no heart.

Thanks for before. Right? But you only did it because you couldn't just stand back and watch. Would have been...boring.

You can't just ignore it, can you?