where the raven flies, there's jeopardy

It started softly. Minoth and Malos, both devil-may-care in their incipient, almost literally nascent, independence from their Drivers, though the first was a little more sanguine, made their rounds of Indol and found solace in each other. Classically easy, that they should do so. That, needing a distraction from their joint and separate purposes or lacks thereof, they should recognize themselves by way of the other, that they'd submit to the mortifying ideal of being known with and through the only other person who'd ever cared about them as anything more than a spectacle.

(Did they need a distraction? One supposes that the attractions do indeed need one. One the main, the other the side. Triangulation casts, and importance was leveled. There was no mutualism quite as unique.)

Only it wasn't mortifying, nor was it idealistic. It was merely reality, and neither shied away from it during the actuation. The solace was surface-level, as were the aches - as much as the aches of the shared trauma of being born under a Driver and a world who and that, that and who didn't care, could be surface-level. He was your brother, your partner, the only one for you, seemingly, but how much did he even know about you?

He didn't know about you, because there wasn't anything to know. Both voyeurs, both the diligent students, both all-knowing as was only externed. Maybe they didn't want to look inside. Sometimes you let someone else be the armchair of your operating table because you can't bear to see what's inside you. But there wasn't anything much there, not yet.

Minoth fancied himself a playwright. An artist, a creator. He didn't like the contour of his story, so he told others. Told others'. From time to time, he sketched out the prose of Malos. But he didn't know, how could he know, that the Aegis would soon turn? That the divine revelation whose hand he took as they darted away from the doleful cadence of their Driver was an instrument of the most brutal destruction their world had ever and almost would ever see fit to have known?

It started softly, and it ended ugly. Malos came back from a sudden disappearance with purple-dried blood on his boots, and Minoth's first glance upon him was one of concern. "I've never seen monsters give you trouble before."

"New kind of monsters," Malos replied with a literally devilish smirk. "Humans. Oh, you've got it in you, haven't you? You'll just have to be my little exception."

Dark Blades were for justice. Minoth's Core pulsed so violently with the idea that he thought maybe it was splitting wholesale. "I don't...I don't want that. What's gotten into you?"

"My purpose. Don't you wish you had one?"

Minoth had made his own exploratory trips. He'd found a human, one all too singular, of his own. When he connected the dots of blood dripped over the bullet casings that bordered Malos's swaggering step with the very same that Addam got gushing from his nose when it was altogether too dry in Dannagh Desert, his itinerary then also became all too clear.

"Maybe," he replied vaguely. "Well, congratulations, and good luck with that and all."

Suddenly, the airiness of Malos's post-carnage gloat sharpened to a roaring point. Minoth felt the rush right through one ear and out the other, everything boiling emptiness in the middle. "Where are you going?"

"I know how to read you, by now. And I know that you know what you're doing isn't sustainable. It isn't safe." Minoth was reading the surface, the open book, the wanton nature of Malos himself as the instruction unit of the universe. As the executor, the executioner. Literally, rigidly. Academically. Remember, they were students.

And so, unbeknownst to Minoth, that was the exact rigidity of instruction that ripped through Malos's own crucifixial Core. This world isn't sustainable. This world isn't safe. So, scrub it clean. That's why you're here. No more to study, no more to watch, but to extinguish. Fires burning black, knowledge screaming white. Absolution, logosion, erosion of the soon-to-be-erstwhile. I am all efficiency.

Efficiency doesn't like exceptions. But, efficiency likes exceptions granted a hell of a lot more than it likes exceptions thrown and thrown out the window.

"Oh, do I?" Malos propped his Monado over his shoulder, cocked his head, grinned like a cat. "Come on, Minoth, where's your sense of danger?"

"I lost it when I found my purpose," Minoth bit off each painfully truthful word with impossible softness. "I lost it when I found Addam."

Malos's menacing mandibles grew incredulous. "What, that little bastard prince? He's a nut. He's got his head in the clouds, and I don't mean the ones that are down there." Monado pointed dismissiveness. Those clouds down there. Those clouds are what our Titans, our parents, are birthed and bathed in. But you don't care about that, do you? You don't even need to.

"Maybe he is." Minoth cursed the fondness of his blossoming grin. "But you're insane. I'm leaving."

Ravens flew over Dannagh as Minoth allowed himself the freedom, the mortification, the mortalization of walking there with Addam. He kept itinerant, still, never strayed to or stayed in Torna for too long, and then when Mythra came into existence he disappeared altogether, but he couldn't stay away. Couldn't be that much of an exception to his nature as a Blade. And every time the ravens flew, he thought of Malos. The world in jeopardy, and was that his fault? Maybe. No one would know until it was over.

And, years later, they met. Again. Of course, again. Malos still stood just as tall, maybe taller, and Minoth was Cole. I needn't say what that meant about his stature.

"So you're with him, now?" He addressed it to Jin, because they were in the Monoceros (Cole knew how to keep his skeletons closeted, wily though he still was, and he wasn't about to have this anti-emotional reunion out in Fonsa Myma's town proper circle), but oh, the direction and the wordplay of it all. He could truly have been just as easily talking to Malos.

True to scene, Malos nodded, head cocked and jaw working. The recessed lights were harsh on his tilted cheekbone. "What, that mess with your pretty little head too much?"

Cole smiled, bit his lip, chuckled something humorless and airy. "No. I'm old, but I'm not a fool." Perhaps a fool to leave Iona alone, but Vandham would be over soon enough, so she'd be fine. Better to have something, someone, to worry about protecting than not. "What would you say he is, to you?"

If Jin was one for actually displaying his emotions on his face, and he never really had been, he would have frowned. There was no danger in the body that was Cole, yet this was something weighty. Why was there anger, tension, history here that couldn't be cited plain and out, the way Malos definitely always had been and the way Minoth could be too?

Malos answered in measured kind. "He's my Addam. That'll be the minimum analogy, or whatever it is you want to call it. Oh, I know he's more than that, but then there's probably a hell of a lot I never knew about you and him."

Cole studied Jin some more. Minoth studied Jin. They'd been brothers, of a sort, if being the passive caretaker to an unwieldy duo of Lora and Haze, Addam and Mythra, made you brothers. If being Flesh Eaters by so different token made you kindred. And it's weird when your ex dates your brother, isn't it? When you see someone change so much, and you weren't really there to watch either of them.

"Probably," he said at last. "But Addam made me stop wanting to kill myself. I don't see that happening with you two."

Guiltier glances on more guiled-up faces were never seen. Akhos and Patroka watched in the background, Obrona uncharacteristically quiet and Perdido a stone wall, as ever. When Akhos had wanted to meet Jin's old acquaintance the playwright, he'd imagined it'd be...much more gauche. Bouffe, even. But no one was laughing here. His sister didn't look quite murderous, no, but there was something brewing underneath her lips.

Mikhail was sat by the control panels, Cressidus hunched over Sever behind him. They were all Drivers, except Jin. None of them had Drivers, except Malos. So didn't that...yeah, scratch that out. They were all Drivers. And that's a hell of a thing to be. He had never had one. But he'd seen it, in all the deepest ways.

"Look, old man. 'D you get pissy if I said you ditched me when I needed you? And he didn't?"

As if. As if you'd needed me. You were the Aegis, and you said so because you believed it. Not because you were hiding behind the mask. The mask.

(And if that means now that you're not the Aegis, and his mask is yours...it's true. It's true. Gotta love the truth. Don't I? Doesn't he?)

"I wouldn't. Not because I think you're so right, but because I did what I needed to do. And now, you're doing what you need to do. I won't begrudge you."

Jin gritted his teeth. "I don't need judgement from you, Minoth. You were a coward."

Cole's hands had been reposed behind his back, but now he crossed his arms in front. He almost...almost did actually look like Minoth, like that. "I won't lie and try to fight you on that. My scrapped-together self-preservation instinct probably led to a hell of a lot of history being laid down. I don't bother thinking about the right and the wrong, now."

Now Mikhail burst up. Cressidus's creaking palm followed him, fruitless, for empty seconds. "Like hell you don't!" The phrase was backwards, but its intent was clear. "I've seen your stupid play - it's all a load of crap. She killed him! She killed him, and you act like she didn't do a lilywhite thing!"

So it was Cole's jaw's turn to clench. "I know. I know all of it. You know I've been alive the longest of any of you?" Apparently, implicitly, even Jin. The Paragon hadn't known that, for sure, but he had thought about it. In the whole mess of trying to puzzle out why Amalthus was still the grand and glorious Praetor, and not old and keeled like Rhadallis had almost been anyway, his youth and possible length of resonance with Minoth had certainly come into it. Okay, made sense. Worldliness and all.

"Ain't no excuse, Minoth," Malos spat the bullish first syllable of that cast-aside identifier. Identifier of the cast-aside. "We've all lived longer than we ever expected or wanted to. Grow up."

Cole pointed, and Mikhail's lips curled around his involuntary jerking shudder at being the silent target. Again. "He didn't get to. Neither of them." Because Mikhail's body was that of a young adult, but...no, not that way. Not ever that way. Unspoken, a third boy, and his mother. "And I'll sure as hell pin that on you."

Cole left, as Minoth had before him. Maybe he'd be called back into it, later, and maybe he'd fail again to mete his true disdain, because there wasn't time, anymore, for everyone to have their piece. As if that was any excuse. Why his curtain hadn't closed yet, he'd never know. He'd never...know.