Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats
This is going to fall into the category of "Rose, why did you even write this, let alone post it?" and the answer is that I was trying to write fluff for a pre-established modern AU and it wasn't working. I promise I care them, I care them so much. More fluff is coming. Eventually.
Before, each team was a role. Three parts fit together not seamlessly but bound tight by the stitches. Manageable, managing, on their own, but better together. Unlikely accident. Happy accident? Any accident you cared to think about for measurably long after had to be happy.
Stop lying. The ropes are fraying, the happy ending cannot be tied up with bowed ribbon, ribboned bow.
Thread of fate binding, and all stupidly poetic that. A triangle, the most stable shape. But not a broken one. Fractal or a fraction? Each corner pulls its own weight.
Now, one was vanished, two were split. Re-parse, re-categorize, re-cast. Adapt to change. Haven't you always adapted to change?
Pyra didn't want to fight. Minoth didn't know how to cook. Addam didn't know anything more definite than where to mark, where to turn, where to wind down into this cold-slime hollow. Maybe he didn't even know that.
The bullets issued fast and the monsters died faster. Kill, kill, kill. It is not and it never has been all you know how to do. Why are you the only one with the strength left to do it? The will, even?
She looked on him with none of the same willful ire nor sheepish supplication that Mythra had ever shown. Her self-sufficience was gruesomely unreal. She didn't pity, she didn't ask pity, she nodded and watched and winced and went back to stirring something bland but edible, something tame but palatable, something safe but lifeless.
She was not plaintive, not lifeless, even as her other half, former self, perhaps had wished to be and wished her to be. In the spare moments when Minoth saw her move, really move, saw her capes flutter and her boots flicker and her flaming light bless their despair-dimmed sights, she was not empty. She was not a shadow, could never be a shadow.
Mythra didn't want to cast shadows. Never had she wanted to, even as she so wishfully left Brighid in her photon-fast dust. Left her in the dust. Rock in the desert, buried in the shift. Which casts deeper, steeper shadows, austere light or ascetic fire? You can't help but change people, Aegis or not.
Pyra was no coward, Mythra was no coward for making her, but he saw the struggle in her eyes. You are bright, were bright, our pneumatic girl, you are life and you don't deserve this guilt, not all of it, for becoming the snuff to a lighter.
What can it possibly do, good or bad, to hate yourself now? It is over, the comedown has come down. Unimaginable, to have that much hatred stabbed wicked internal for...for good reason. For good, terrible, horrible, awful, sensible reason. Because he never had that. Like Malos, unlike Malos. Amalthus in the middle. And he knows it, always knew it. Won't ever stop knowing, maybe won't ever start thinking it straight.
They walked to the chamber in a line, one, two, three, maybe four because Mythra walked behind Pyra as Minoth walked behind Addam. Shadows reversed. Doesn't match up. Maybe it does. Wasn't Mythra the guilt, and Pyra the pure? But Minoth wasn't Addam's guilt. For all the things the prince mourned, the Flesh Eater wasn't one of them.
The seal sighed pressure, the rubber gasketed the glass, but Addam so fragile as he peered pathetically in was not so bolstered. Minoth stood back, and Pyra looked into his eyes almost until the end, and then she forced herself to make eye contact with Addam. Forced herself to meet meting with her Driver. Forced herself to look upon the consequences of her mistake. No she didn't.
Mungo, gregarious Mungo, was more somber than Minoth had ever seen him, not that there had been many opportunities for that. The bushes of his eyebrows burned with shame, as if it was his fault, his failure that the delivery had gone the way it had. Addam shook, shuddered, collapsed against Minoth, and Minoth let him. Be a caricature, if you must, my prince, and you're not even that. What constitutes you, after all?
Had to drag him by the shoulders into the house. The doctor hadn't been standing vigil outside, he wasn't so stock-still grim as all that, but the silent, stale air inside did that for him. Sardonic favor. The last loud sound had been the cries of Torna herself. Why did she cry alone?
The house. Some house. Someone else's house. Leftheria, sunny but in a way that was false and thin. The sun didn't shine here. Malos knew what he had done, pupils screwed flat and calculating, and he had impunity. The sun here glared not, because if it dared to...no. There was no one left with the fortitude to glare back into it and blot it down and out.
Earth, makeshod soil, spongy, not stony. The islands scattered apart, just as they all were and had become. The pride of Torna was a virtue, and the pride of Torna was a group. Both broken, both shattered, both stained, both lifeless.
"Have you been watching over him?"
Minoth bit back the automatic, semi-caustic words: "He's not a child, Flora." Because...because.
Her voice had been strained with tears and the clench of Addam's fingers about hers. He didn't consider himself so outsider as to be misplaced in this room, not any longer, but there was something else he needed to be doing, and he couldn't think what.
"I have," was his ultimate simple reply. "Your husband is a strong man, but I'll flatter myself the protector in this scenario."
"And will you stay?" The ever-admirable timbre of a woman just as strong or stronger yet trembled. "Will you keep doing so?"
The reason was unspoken. First Hugo, Brighid and Aegaeon, then Milton, their Aegis whose name was unmutterable not least by she herself, who knew what had become of Lora's group by now, and...
"Can I ask you something?" Barest nod. "What was his name?"
Addam's face showed itself with haunted eyes; he was just as darkly invested in and again divested from the answer.
"Alexander," Flora said, and her dam fully broke then.
The maudlin gesture was damnably easy, like nothing in this world should have been at that point, but Minoth knelt next to her at the side of the bed, took her other hand, kissed the back, held it tight, bowed his forehead to it.
"Just as Addam is my prince, so will you be my princess, Flora. I will remain here with the two of you for as long as you need me."
Maybe not as long as you'll have me. Didn't need to specify the number, did you, you old fool, but it couldn't be helped now.
"Like a bodyguard?" Addam asked hoarsely.
The urge to snap at his Driver was faint but there. He substituted with another hand snaked across the sheets towards limp and accepting target. Ghosted over Flora's immobile legs. Ghosted.
"No, Addam, not like a bodyguard. Like a Blade. I still am one of those, you know."
"I-I know. But what does that mean for you? Surely you're not going to spend the rest of your life here."
Here? Where? Here in this house of death? Here on this sand that was not Torna's? Here when all the others save Azurda had long passed? Here where nothing ever happens?
Why don't you, didn't you, say that to Pyra, to Mythra? Surely she's not going to spend the rest of her life there. Here. The ground beneath our feet that she stole. Unwillingly, but she stole. Her fingerprints on the crumbling writhe. Light faded gray like her morals, our interpretations.
"Don't you think I'd like that better than the alternative?" And don't you think you would too?
Slowly, gingerly, he let go of the held hands. They found each other, and that was enough. Pitiful enough, but enough. Stood, walked to the threshold. Didn't say it, didn't want to think it.
They had to bury him. And Addam had only just buried Mythra, and if she was dead then he'd still buried Pyra alive.
"There's nothing I can do for you. Bit of a farce if I do stay. Just something that should have died with the rest."
Those damned threes. Those triangulated, necessitated, barbiturated threes. Be a stable shape. Be the only stable thing left in this world. What's your role? Doesn't matter. When they're dead too, maybe you can stop to think about it.
Related: this by green_piggy and this by redsixwing.