and the nurse will tell you lies
Jin stumbles away from his past, but not quite toward his future.
Chapter 01: of a kingdom
Chapter 02: beyond the skies
When Jin thrust Lora's heart into his chest, consuming it with his flesh as much as with his bone, he did it nigh-autonomously. Those words, from his journal of a prior life and thus a different person, a different soul, were transformed, transmuted, into animal action. As soon as Lora consented to the carnal act, Jin commenced. And now...now he didn't know when he would stop. If he would ever.
Lora is dead. Lora is alive. I am dead. I am alive.
Where is Haze? Schrödinger's little kitty-cat priestess, only not, she is both dead and alive. For she could not possibly have survived, and yet she is not floating in this purgatory wherein I reside.
Relentlessly, I reside. I preside, for I do not rest. The entire grove is cleared of soldiers, stars and titanica, before I can blink.
I won't blink. If I blink, I will miss it. If I blink, I will fall to eternal sleep and I will die.
Am I already dead? Who can tell me?
I cannot stop. I will not stop. When I die, Lora will be forgotten. And thus, I cannot die.
Perhaps I cannot be killed. Perhaps I am indestructible. A manaical laugh chases groundlessly through Jin's throat at the thought that perhaps he, the most transient and perishable of all creatures in this world, leaving no mortal mark even when the consciousness fades, will be the last thing extant in this world.
The Architect did not design for Flesh Eaters. The Architect did not set providence and provenance upon me. No, Jin's not laughing, but he feels mad. He feels righteously, risibly mad. Only someone insane, a Blade cast beyond recourse, would find a way to live past their Driver.
How did I do it? I don't know. I can't remember. Who was my Driver, anyway? I can't remember. I don't know.
Maybe I'm not the same Blade after all...?
But, then, how did I get here? There's no one around. Everyone...
Jin surveys the corpses, counts them automatically. Oh. There's no one around. I killed them all.
Right. The field is cleared. I can rest. I can breathe. Only, I can't. There's something wrong with my lungs. Something obstructing their expansion and compression in the cavity of my chest.
That's not right. All Blades, even insane ones, can breathe. Even...even the Aegis could breathe, until they died. So that says something, right? Why can't I breathe?
Oh, Architect. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lora.
Jin stumbles to a grassy outcropping whereupon he can lay down his sword, stab it into the ground much more heartily than when he cased it unceremoniously, with truly deadly precision, through thousands upon thousands of soldiers what felt like mere moments before, and sit.
Sit, and collect his thoughts. When was the last time he had sat? But for the night they spent sleeping at the outskirts of a small forest before being interrupted by Gort, not since eating breakfast the morning they left to confront Malos. Maybe? He can't remember. The sleepless fireside nights have all faded away.
He pulls off the mask, has to peel it off from where sweat and blood, and yes, tears, have mingled upon his forehead. His forehead...
His Core Crystal. All this evil, all this gore and pain and desolation and desecration, for the saving of the contents of that tiny kite-shaped stone. Is it blue? Is it red? Is it even there anymore? Jin reaches up a painfully tentative finger to caress the point, but feels nothing. His finger has gone numb. So has his forehead, leaving only a peculiar buzzing behind.
What's that? Rigor mortis? Dead man walking, only I'm not walking. I'm sitting down, getting ready to be lain to rest.
Jin blinks without blinking and realizes he's lost track of his right arm - squinting reveals it held motionless in front of his face, mask still caught in palm, and then the left completes its descent wiping regret down over his browbones, cheekbones, nosebones, until he has buried the entire corporeality of his head in his hands.
His memories, empty memories, leak out through the cracks between his fingers. If they're going now, he won't try to stop them. He has already done all he could possibly do to salvage this unsalvageable situation.
Oh, what's that, Jin? Giving up already? You can't tell me there's nothing more here for you, now can you? After all, if that were true, you wouldn't have done this. Right?
Right?
Shit. I can't stop. So up Jin goes, and starts walking. He limps, but doesn't notice it. The bows on his calves come undone, but he doesn't notice it. He drags himself ragged all the way back to Lora's place of unrest and falls to his knees, then goes prostrate entirely with his Core Crystal slammed into the hard, dirty earth. A trembling hand brought to that crucial place comes back red. But Blades don't bleed.
Red as blood. Stinks like blood. I'll use your blood as a balm for my wounds.
A monster. That's what I am. I am both dead and alive, and I cannot live just as much as I cannot die.
Does it even matter anymore? Did it ever?
Elysium, they say. Paradise on earth, they say, only it's not on any kind of earth, it's up in the World Tree. Maybe when I get there, I'll know.
And of course, by the time Jin gets up there, he has only exponentially increased his twin measures of digust for both himself and the world. Killing Lora didn't help, and neither did killing Haze, or Mikhail. Not that he tore the boy's, his son's, Blade Eater body apart the same way he ruined those of his daughters, of his sisters, but it's all the same, in the end.
Complacence is killing. Inaction kills. Jin's relentless search for answers, in fact, never led him beyond the lies he told himself on that day, not until it was, truly, too late. Malos believed them too, but he wanted others. He wanted contradictions. He wanted to be sold other truths, if they were out there to be had. And he, too, only accepted Jin in totality when the other Blade was already gone.
So take it slow, Jin. Even if I already know how things end, I can't help you. I can't tell you. Whatever your final fate may be, the truth is the truth. Whether you like it or not, you've still got a long, long path to walk.
In other words, dead or not, you've still got a hell of a lot of memories to make.
Just as Jin had realized immediately on that sunny day in Gormott that their proverbial life's rain had struck again, and Lora was in danger, so too did Haze realize in an instant that something, a dreadful something, had just befallen her Driver.
It wasn't uncommon for her to feel a sudden decrease in Lora's current stamina, whenever she (however foolishly) made use of the Swallow's Flight tactic that Jin had taught her in order to help gain an unexpected edge in not-quite-quick battles.
Now, what had Haze tried to teach her Driver? Once they'd picked up a healer Blade, a quick advantage lost its immediate lustre. It was plain to see that both Jin and Lora could now fight stronger than weaker for longer than shorter; most monsters couldn't heal themselves and thus would soon fall via quasi-attrition.
Slow down, Lady Lora, Haze had said. Please fall back, please let me heal you, don't you know that caution will win the day? But whatever caution Lora had ever had had more or less been trained into her by Jin, or by fear (and those are, of course, something of the same thing), and then leached back out by the very presence of Haze herself. So Lora scuddered on, with Haze shuffling furiously after in her wake.
Yes, Haze was well attuned to the sensation of Lora being in trouble, and quite often by conscious choice. The only trouble was...she shouldn't have been able to feel that crucial condition when yards, kilometers, miles (cross the systems, swap the locale) stretched boundless between them. One moment, they'd been okay, and then the next, cannon fire had broken out, and Lora had shoved Haze and Mikhail one way and dragged Jin the other.
Haze is still running, running, running, even now, Mikhail's tiny and already very, very pale hand squeezed to straining in her grasp. Away from the battle, towards the refugee camp, on and on they go, single-minded. Rather, Haze is single-minded, any lingering indecisiveness washed straight away as by the driving rain.
"Haze," Mik squeaks, "what about Lora? Don't you have to help her? Don't you have to help Jin?"
Jin? Jin, needing my help? To say nothing of La- of Lora.
Haze bites her lip so hard it bleeds a sickly puce green, gives a jerk on the arm she's dragging. The Architect only knew why Lora had shoved her away, had turned around into certain danger with positively no safeguards in place. Likely, it was to make sure Mik got to safety, because his death among Titan weapons would be brief and bloody, rather than faded and ethereal as Haze, fairy-like, would go.
Likely, indeed. That was probably, all in all, it. Lady Lora had always been looking towards the future. She wanted to build the house in the country not just so she and Jin and Haze could rest but so orphans, people like her deserted from and into far worse circumstances, could have a new chance at life, and safety, and freedom. Always, there was plenty to be getting on with, and spirits to be kept up and grumpy compatriots to be cajoled.
That would explain why Lora still, even now, refused the help of healing that Haze had tried to demonstrate, over and over, time and again and again and again, was essential, was the very gust of life. Sacrifices and priorities had to be made and taken up; you couldn't always have it both ways.
And that, right there, is why Haze decided she'd simply stop trying. Lora hadn't shoved her away as a preliminary countermeasure to preserve the safety of younger, more precious lives. She'd done it because she didn't particularly care to have Haze around, sharing her face and her clothes and her gait and her life and her love and her--
The first blast comes on the outskirts of the refugee camp, meant to scatter any armed adults so the weakest and most tractile, tractable subjects hiding, sheltering within could be escorted out and away to Indol, and to the labs.
Mik sees it before Haze hears it, but they both wince at the same time.
"Haze, don't we-"
But Haze just tugs Mik along again, now all the more determined to fill out that alibiblical assignment, of protecting Mikhail and the rest of the refugees to boot, instead of showing them all that she's just here because her Driver didn't want her.
Because...because...the tempo in her mind scales up and down and out and through like a crazed metronome, back and forth and forth and back between do I want to live do I want to die do I want to win do I want to cry do I want to be right or do I want to be wrong wrong wrong she doesn't want me she doesn't want me she'll never want me she never wanted me I was a mistake an accident a fluke a failure oh god oh Architect I can't TAKE it anymore--
And the second blast comes. Haze drops Mikhail's hand, shoves him as far away as she can so that he stumbles to safety guided by her strongest, swiftest gale, and then she turns back to the Titan weapon and stands proud as anything Core-first in its path.
She would have died anyway, would have returned to her Core and left Mikhail alone just the same. And of course she knew that. Haze is not stupid, Haze was never stupid. Neither was Lora. In desperate times, they both did positively idiotic desperate things.
If Haze had thought about that, she would have realized that Lora wouldn't even remember her, come tomorrow; none of them would, if Mikhail didn't survive. And then she would have thought further in on it and realized that Lora wouldn't want to remember her, didn't want to remember her and never had, and because of so much more than just foolish fixation on Jin, Jin, Jin.
Apart they came, at all those selfsame fraying seams, and it didn't matter who was wrong and who was right, because Lora was mutilated twice over and Haze was doubly shut up in her Core, to account for all that Jin failed to follow through with.
No, unfortunately for Haze, and for the rest of us and them and all, the impact did not shatter her Core, merely knocked it well askew, primed for Amalthus to tell it, and her, quite a many further alternative truths; in other words, to tell her, like a night nurse calming a seizing patient, all his sweetest, sickest lies.