some enchanted afternoon

On dry days in Dannagh Desert, Addam's nose bleeds like a dirty word; profuse, and coarse, and hot-coffee exsanguinary. He uses up all of their clean towels staving the (fucking) bloody thing, and his head tilts back, and back, and back, exposing the broad bob of his quasi-eponymous apple and every other smooth curve of hale, hearty, arresting throat, skin stretched nearly taut for a rare change.

Just as rare is how silent Minoth draws as he watches, brusque and bewildered concern. Mythra is loud, quite loud, in her ejaculations of exasperation, and everyone else is stumbling all over themselves to express concern, confusion, consternation, polite and understandable horror-stricken disgust (was it Hugo that couldn't stand the sight of blood? it might as well be) in vague, flitting aborted hand gestures and mélanged single- or double-syllable words.

But Minoth is quiet. Minoth is not quiet like Jin, steely temperament as a direct device of presented discipline, nor Aegaeon, who is simply overwhelmingly strictured, nor even Hugo, struggling to contain the fresh abject paleness of his face, but in entirely his own fashion, he broods and attends and converses with peculiar charm.

When Addam's nose has at last stopped gushing copper-crimson filth (and I would never shame anyone for having a nosebleed, but I would tell them straight off, ew), Minoth resumes pace, thinking about what he's seen.

Addam has lived long enough, met enough nosebleeds, had enough people-- Sorry, bit of a mix-up there, won't happen again - anyway, the point is that Addam should have no reason to transport so completely and wholly into the realm of total absorption in his mortal affliction as to become a different object, in the seen scene, but he did, somehow, just there.

Minoth is fascinated with every aspect of Addam, every fitch and foible. His laugh, his pithy remarks, his talents and his lacks thereof; all of it is panacea to a Blade for whom conditional love from a narcissist is the norm and unconditional love from a whole, many-dimensional and myriad-splendored individual is...

Well, it doesn't exist. He can't quite convince himself to hold onto it, or that it will ever truly hold onto him.

(He knows, as the compulsory footnote, that whatever Mythra's getting is quite different to what he's been ordered, and further that this relationship may have some sort of death, eventually, when enough rotten change has bled out them all, but for now, of course, it is a bizarre and kitsch-flavored miracle, this thing of Addam's he calls a heart.)

So, when Addam turns to him and offers a grin, a laugh, a stray grasp at his near hand, even - yes - a kiss, Minoth smiles back at his prince, too punched-out on love to even think about punching back at the affection.