what would you do if i said i loved you?
One day I will stop shoving these three at you (editorial you, but also...yes, you!). Today is not that day.
Minoth wakes up to Flora's arms wrapped around his bicep and her belly shoved into his crotch. Nice to see you too, darling, is what he would have said if his first response hadn't been panic. Then, he sees Addam's chin tucked sloppily over her shoulder, and he calms down.
The early morning sunlight is thin, bluish as it flits in through the wooden slats of the blinds that cover the bedroom window that looks out onto the moor, but it's enough to illuminate the rest of the scenario: the duvet has been kicked all over, and the only thing it's still covering is Minoth's feet.
The rest of him, of course, is as yet uncovered. His Core Crystal burns loneliness or the stifling thereof; he's never...he's literally never been held like this before. Probably, a lot of Blades never have, never are. That's...thank the Architect he has Addam. Addam doesn't half understand anything about being a Blade, but somehow, intrinsically, without even knowing it, he understands this.
(I love Minoth. How do you feel about that?
I'm very glad about that. I think he needs it.)
Flora had needed it too, and understood and all. Absolutely melted at the very fact of Addam's presence, and Minoth's too, the way she couldn't hardly decide which way to turn, which hands to hold, which chest to burrow into.
"Are you overwhelmed?" Minoth had asked quietly, feeling a bit of it himself.
"I'm happy," she'd answered with a sigh, "and then I'm sad again when I remember that it's only for the one night. You will come back, won't you?"
You will come back, won't you? You will be alive to come back, and then you, Flora, you will be alive to come back to...won't you? If Minoth had anything to say about it, then yes, she would be, she will be. And Addam too, and Hugo and Lora and Mythra and Brighid and Haze and Aegaeon and Jin and Mikhail and Milton and all. They'd all come back.
"Flora, I don't want to leave," he'd said with a sigh of his own.
"Not ever?"
In one hand, her right, intertwined digit by digit, and in the other, Addam's left, grasped palm over knuckles. Your place, forever. Your Driver, forever. You'll never have another one. Not ever.
"Not ever."
The fatal jolt comes in his chest again now as he looks at her face, lips slightly parted and hair done by the birds because it's thick more than it's smooth. Malos could erase all this. All this, and he already has for countless other families on Coeia and even on their own very fair Torna. Just...why? His hope, or his despair. Minoth wishes despairingly that Amalthus has hope. Minoth hopes that Amalthus doesn't wish for despair.
But back to the current scene. Addam's left arm is tossed carelessly over Flora's chest, and the other is wiggled around behind her neck, lolling fruitlessly on the pillow. Minoth takes the hand, kisses it, loses himself in kissing it, then awkwardly slips it underneath his cheek with his own free hand. Addam doesn't wake. It can't possibly be that early, and Flora had seemed to be on the "early to bed, early to rise" regimen anyway, so...what? Ah, well. Not ever, and all that.
The indolence sets them heavy there for then another few hours more, and the sun is full up over the moor by the time Flora shifts awake. Minoth's half worried she'll prise her eyes open bit by bit until they blink open in an instant because here in front of her, next to her, practically underneath her, is a man who is not Addam, who is decidedly more physically intimidating just in general, and who has a bicolored stone oozing with grim portent quite literally mounted in his chest.
She doesn't do that, however. Instead, she just gives a lazy yawn, says, "Oh, good morning, Minoth," and leans forward, arms still arresting his, to kiss his Core Crystal again. Again! Third time's the charm, is what one might say, and one would even be right, because it's such a rush of feeling, how can something so limited to the outside when there is so much inside itself be so much? Then, the kicker: a smirk plays at her lips, and she scrunches up her nose and asks, "Where's mine?"
Even with the context that Minoth has, it's such a startlingly unexpected question, a teasing request for action ordered by someone so definitionally unassuming, and so Minoth gropes around in the sudden mental darkness for his excuse, and however lame it is, he finds it. "Flora, I'm trapped." He doesn't even mean in his mind.
She giggles. "Mmm, yes, that's right. I'm not letting Addam have you - you're mine, I decided." Yours? Yours, Flora? Oh, well. He'd said it, after all. And so your charlatanous chivalry does you in, Minoth, perhaps yet again it does so.
Something jabs in his Core. Violent. How could anything be violent, under the softness of the dappled light, under the firmest circling embrace of an entire body of love? And why? I'm not letting Addam have you. Of course she's joking. Of course that's nothing to be afraid of in the very least. And yet the stabbing doesn't cease.
If you can't have Addam, Minoth, who are you? Everything you've found, everything you've struggled your ugly mug for has been based around the subtextual consciousness of long-drawn resonation with a new Driver. His Core flashes emergency sirens at the thought of losing that. Not rational, not human, simply electric, simply single-minded, simply...a Blade. A Blade who sings one with his Driver.
Heedless of that fact, the words slip out of his mouth: "I don't want him without you." Slipping through the back of his mind, the realization that of course Addam feels the same. Not to say that he'd thought about giving up one for the other, the misplaced prioritization of a fool, but that he framed them up thusly, and they came in a matched set. Addam, and Flora, and Minoth. Symmetry.
A stupid collection of thoughts, really. There's no saying this whole affair wasn't a trumped-up trussed-up dream. It was ridiculous! To have it all go so smoothly to plan, to have everything laid out storybook-style, to say here is a prince and there is his princess and you, my friend, are their long-awaited knight in shining armor. They love you! Can you imagine that?
No room for imagination, no time for romantic escape, because Flora is still right there, blue eyes watching his work underneath the jagged, ever-rustled eyebrows, and then he feels something soft and cool laid atop his cheek. Her hand, cupping around the brunt of his jaw and relaying all its smoothest sympathy. "Do you feel alright?"
Like a renaissanced painting, it is, the way he's being cradled between the two offering appendages, and he wishes the symmetry would extend itself so that he could simply be practically buried underneath the wholesale warmth and light of the Origos. Of course he feels alright. It's quite possible that he will never feel better. Again it is the cue for the most obvious thing.
"Flora, I love you." And sometimes that can be an admission, sometimes it can be a confession, sometimes it can be an affirmation or even a reaffirmation, sometimes it can be a statement of every single fact of life in one. Here and now, it's a little bit of each.
Flora smiles, petite and comported at first but then so wide she can't contain it. Minoth feels his cheek getting squished, slightly. A very silly picture indeed. "Oh, well. I think that's awfully nice for the three of us - the four of us, in fact! I'm very glad you came, you know."
It's everything, it's everything, in a desperate mottled flash his entire pitifully small earth-lived routine and accustom passes through the anti-barren receptacle that is his Core and he thinks, what on Alrest would I be doing if I hadn't come here? Again, where would I be without him?
Quite possibly, he'd be just the same, again viewing through the lensed constancy of reasoning, because Addam is still as yet unconscious, snoring less like a freight train and more like a miniature Azurda. He's so far away, and yet he's only the miniscule distance of a Flora blocked off. Well, Minoth rationalizes, if I'm a Blade, which I am, then I'm supposed to want to keep my Driver as close as possible. Supposed to want them in and on my heart.
His compromise is, oh, ridiculously maudlin, even base sappy, but he retrieves his right arm from...wherever it had become to been lazing, and wraps the whole around Flora's upper back, hand cradling her head. Addam's hand comes yet trapped in between, and isn't that just a precious little bit of choreography. She giggles again, and gives a muffled but squeaky "Hey! What's this all about?"
Minoth can't keep from laughing, laughing, laughing as he bows his nose and lips to the crown of her head. "It's about you, and how you're adorable. I'm not letting him have you," he repeats, and the laughter spills all over ungraceful snorts, "you're mine, I decided."
The mutual quakelike mirthful shaking of the both of them eventually does rouse Addam, and he's guffawing right in with them before he's even had time to think himself reveille, but when he finally does gain the full consciousness of their situation, he lays a questioning hand on Minoth's forearm, and then when his Blade's cautious, grateful acceptance rings true blue in his eyes and in his Core, he smiles full out.
Perhaps Flora can barely breathe in between the itself breathless squeeze of their combined embrace, but oh, does she mind? Not one iotaed scintillaed wit. Their chins dig into her skull, ever so slightly, and yes, she knows that they're kissing, to whatever degree of depth. Even if their voices are a little hoarse, a little husky, it's impossible not to catch the implicit attributions. (Or, in other words, they can never put even the silliest nimble-bitted thing past her.)
"Oh, I do love you. I have for so long, you know, but I was scared to say."
"Like this? I never would have believed it."
"Maybe not like this, no, but maybe that's part of why I didn't say. Knowing what's inside your head is almost as hard as knowing what's going on outside of it, I find. Sometimes."
"Hey, makes this easy, then, huh?"
"What do you mean?"
"Outside your head, 's just me. Flora too, even if that's not near often enough. Inside, you just told me. Same thing. Nice to have things match, ain't it?"
Symmetry. Blessed, blissful symmetry.
Flora sighs, and the sound is tiny but still so wonderfully awfully wistful. "Oh, but don't you have to leave, now?"
"Hey." Minoth loosens his grip slightly, prods Addam to do the same, and tugs her ever so gently upward, so her head props its own third of the trio in between theirs. "Let me be the pessimist around here, alright? I haven't even gotten to kiss you yet. I ain't goin' anywhere."
Maybe that's a pessimist, maybe it's a realist, maybe it's even an optimist.
"Not ever?"
They kiss her cheeks in marvelous, harmonious, symphonic concerted tandem, and she's too light-headed to even care about breathing, then.
"Not ever."
here's hoping you're just absolutely melted xoxoxo