and i look at all the sights we've seen and i say to myself, there's something in my eye - i think it's you
In Gormott, from a quiet peninsula off the Lascham Cove, they stare down at the clouds. Sunrise, daylength, duskbreak. These clouds are a sea but they are not a sea, they are not an ocean that lurks so deep you're scared you'll find the stars if you swim down far enough.
Aren't they?
Jin doesn't like to talk about Morytha, or Torna, for that matter. So they don't. They go everywhere else, they look everywhere else, they talk about everything else, because they're not just traveling in search of Mythra - of Pyra, rather. They're looking for something else, if they can find it; it's just doubtful, to themselves and to everyone around them (not that that's so many) if they ever will. One might call it a self-fulfilling prophecy, then, might one? But no matter.
Wherever they go, they stand together (they always said they'd go together). Hands lurking, dangling, by matching-armored hips, but not holding each other, because that would be a concession of unknowable form, and Jin and Malos work best when they're finding answers, when they can know exactly what their next goal is and how to scrape their way like hanged men whose necks and backs and spines connecting are so weary, too weary, to its scion of finish.
They don't spend much time in Argentum - the auspices of the Goldmouth Titan, that is to say. Far too busy, far too alive. If anyone here has aspirations for death, they'd never dare to show it - bad for business, you see. Each looks at the Nopon and finds alternate gory joy and joyless glory in the way the little creatures shrink back, shocked and afraid.
Wish they wouldn't do that. I don't like being a monster. Do I?
Tantal is cold. Jin, Ice Blade though he is, doesn't actually like being cold. Doesn't like trudging his boots through the snow. He looks at Malos and thinks, at least we're not hiding. This Titan hides under the clouds because of its shame. If we are ashamed, we do not show it - even, we do show it. We are wretched and that is all we are.
Aren't we?
Uraya is not cold, but it's not exactly warm either. It's...sticky, stagnant, everything seems to move but it's not in a way at all vital. The ether particles glisten-gloating through the air aren't half as lively as they should be. Stay here too long, and you'll just rot away and die. Others have it better. You look through the translucent roof and try to see it. But it's hard to really, truly see the light.
Coeia and Spessia, smaller haunts, are both gone. Of course they are. They're been gone: one arid, inhospitable and desertlike in its desertion, the other marshy, squishy, decidedly unpleasant. Jin doesn't miss the opportunity to visit either of those. Only, he does. And Malos does too. But then, there's not much use in being a completionist when soon enough your records won't matter, and you can't get mad at the game when you were the one who squirreled away your advantages (your disadvantages?) as you played it. So spend your time wisely, one supposes.
(Temperantia is dead. Jin doesn't mind at all that Malos killed Judicium as it rested preening atop. And thus they don't go to Indol either, if they can avoid it.)
They visit Leftheria. Malos, the big lunk, spends five, ten, fifteen minutes trying to get his sights straight around the blinding sun - he half looks like he intends to jump, dragon-rider style, straight into its heart and beat the light out of it, and isn't that just a touching bit of dramatic irony - before giving up and sulking in a nearby sand cave.
Jin joins him, of course he does, because he is nothing if not faithful (or is that the other way around? they've not both changed all that much, in totality), but the salty, cloudy spray is honestly more than a little bit annoying, especially as it acts a threat to his silky-smooth hair that's never known a tousle.
(Lora's knew plenty, of course, so that was the one duty she took on - to be human, to be flawed and to be seen as such, to be mortal, to be-- To be or not to be. That is the question.)
I've had enough, says Malos, and Jin says, okay, sure. Haven't we all? Nature's not kind. And then again, neither is nurture.
(If one can call it kindness of a higher power that we are together...no. We can't. This isn't a favor done to anyone, and least of all to us. Isn't it?)
They see Mor Ardain. In between the coughing because of the dust and the dioscur, Malos asks, do you think this Titan is male or female? It could be neither, too, in a roundabout way, but for the purposes of the anatomy that the Architect built, scaffolded, erected, the dichotomy will serve. And Jin says, how should I know? Why should I know? Why should I care?
In my Core I have the data of all Blades and Titans. That's what Malos has always said. But in this moment, he doesn't pretend to understand the wants and needs of a creature that was once humanoid - nothing understandable unless it's humanoid, isn't that right? He didn't understand Siren. Siren understood him. Siren didn't have to do anything else.
So whether or not the sagging chest is due more to mammaries or pectorals, whether this Titan is a mother or a father to all its children (and after all, wasn't it always said that Torna was the only one with a matrix? so maybe Aegaeon and Brighid...), whether perhaps its composition was always so rusting-rotting in its industriality or was instead more mechanical...they leave those questions behind.
They won't matter, soon enough, after all.
In the center of it all is the World Tree. Of course. In the center of their minds is also the World Tree, because it's the only place left to go.
Only way out is through? No. Only way out is down, down, down, down.