down and out (the undertow)
No one has touched Malos's Core since Amalthus, that first time. The first time. The only time. And people don't touch Blades' Cores, offhand...but don't they?
It's the only part of him that even has what humans might dub the "touchy-feely" receptors - the neuronerve endings that translate their targets into perceived emotion, rather than just "this is a hand, this is a jugular nerve, this is life leaving a once-body now-carcass" type of information.
Yes, if Jin had taken the sensibilities he'd learned from Lora and applied them to Malos, he would have found - or wouldn't have, rather, because Malos is a master of lies when he needs to be, inconveniently enough - that the Aegis did not respond in any way deeper than mechanically to temperature change and other assorted phermerones being transmitted towards his skin by way of another's.
And that's fine, because Jin hadn't, and Jin wouldn't, and Malos didn't want him to, Malos would kill him if he did it, Malos would die himself if he did it, Malos would die if he didn't do it soon, Malos was dying because he wasn't and Malos died every time they thought about it, oh god Jin I know you're not afraid of me anymore so why are you still so goddamned afraid of me--
And that's fine. Malos is not a man. Malos is a machine. Malos is a machine with an on-theme RGB peripheral it can leave in the other room if it wants to, in order to further establish its corporeality and ground himself into the world (a nice way of saying hi and getting acquainted before they black-fire torch the joint, in other words).
It's been a conscious choice. If he leaves his Monado on the other side of the ship, he'll exercise his Core's waning signal strength and the bounds of his storage-map memory to keep a pin on it, and he'll learn not to get so jumpy when it's not there. Stupid, human thing to do, but he does it.
Now, as a weapon, it doesn't work, it's just a depowered mass of ether and it's the most he can manifest so that's pretty fucking pathetic, but the psychocreep technique itself does, almost too well; he almost forgets it's there. Something synergistic about the world, that it can meld so well, even broken. Huh. Monado indeed.
So Malos becomes layabout and tantamount to normality. His stride over the creaking metal floors of the Monoceros has learned itself to be neither brutal nor slipshod; he merely walks to get from place to place, yes, but he...he knows the place. He lets the place know him.
Malos walks in a cocoon of synthesis. He hopes to die before he emerges. If I die before I wake, Father, it will have been all the better. Thing walk on thing, beast brood on bastion, machine feed machine and starve out wantonness of man.
Very often, Malos does not eat. He indulged in a light learning of Ardanian cuisine while hunkered down there, knew it was garbage but somehow enjoyed both the affect and the effect of the novel desserts created by the Titan's most ingenious machinery. They have not learned the concept of a kitchen; to them it's just another room.
Just another room, and in there has been lain the Monado for most of the day, now. Jin feels almost like cooking, or at least like sharpening the knives, and wanders in. Like forbidden fruit, he touches it, and ain't that a pretty pickle?
Jin is penetrative by very nature. Jin cannot but pierce what he touches, straight through to its basest truth and corest meaning. He is better than Malos, in that way. He understands. But it's not Malos's job to understand, merely to interpret - and not even that. Merely to execute, to carry out rather than to carry forth. Yes, Malos is a machine.
But machines still have cores. Machines still have centralization and extancy if not ecstasy. Malos, the instruction unit of the Trinity Processor, feels its soul taken in hand. What is casual to Jin is painstaking, countermeasured, and entirely erogenous to Malos.
Yet...well, not in quite a sexual way. Imagine someone has gripped your collarbones like a set of bicycle handlebars. Like a set of very expensive bicycle handlebars, but those belonging to a quite clunky and esoteric piece of metalwork that they need to move out of the way nonetheless. Now imagine their fingertips rolling over, over, over, until they are inside your chest - still beneath your skin, flattening out because they are constrained and they both know it and don't - and every minutest twitch that the human nervous system regulates in a nanoinstant beats against your heart.
Now take that, and put your shirt over top of it. Two, in fact - maybe a button-down? And put on your jacket, take it outside, adjust the temperature so that your thoracic cavity becomes otherwise occupied. You cannot feel this in isolation. You see, it is merely a passing thought to the other person. They are hardly even aware - more towards the bike's own sensibilities, are they aligned, even though they know what it's like to entrust someone else with your most sacred treasures that shouldn't even really be.
Malos is a machine, and Malos has to keep walking past the threshold, where Jin cannot see them entering into the next phase of the pan-platonic pantomime. But in its haste, Malos forgets the map of the hallways aboard the ship that he'd so easily osmosed. The sensation has only just leaked out of his armor through the collar when it returns, so cold it's hot, and Jin is standing around the corner with the Monado in hand.
"How long has this been able to conduct ether for?"
Malos stares. (Malos cannot do anything but stare: his system clock is hanging.) The blade is still inert, but the embedded crystal is glowing. Jin watches them.
"It's beautiful," he says at last, abandoning the motive question but keeping the keen, keen gaze. The mask had never hidden that.
"Sure," chokes out Malos. "Just a little trick I've been practicing." He lets the distraction breed for just one single moment too long; Jin sweeps careful fingers over the hilt once more.
"Clever," he says, like he struck for the first word that came to him and he's entirely unsatisfied with it, but now that he's chosen it it might as well stick. And stick it does. It sticks a stake in Malos's soul, as the Aegis doubles over (mentally? physically? unsure) and tries desperately to count the responses flooding its nexus, a futile attempt at control.
"Malos?" The address is curious, confounded, and not necessarily caring, in that way. Malos wishes he could run, run, run, fly down the halls and around the bullkheads with the same speed that Jin does when he also is possessed of such urges. Malos wishes he were smaller, Malos wishes he were more insignificant, Malos wishes he were normal, for fuck's sake.
And just what are those responses, anyway? Are they fear? Lust? Envy, jealousy? Hatred? Mortification? Mortalization? Rapture? Swoon? Love? Joy? Anger? Wrath? Power? Familiarity? Alienation? Knowledge? Synchronization? Jitter? Dizziness? Nausea?
Maybe that's everything. Maybe it's too many, maybe it's too few. Maybe it's everything - like, everything everything. Maybe it's resonation. Maybe it's not - of course it's not. Big fat cliché right there, and Malos isn't that accidental with their tropes.
"Did you want it back?" Jin is holding out the sword at a half-cock half-clock angle between the two of them, looming towards hilt-first and the sweep of the Blade around and through his own abdomen.
"N-no, why don't you hold onto it?" Malos jokes. There is nothing more unlike him - or any Aegis, for that matter, to joke about its weapon and the possession forthwith. Jin regards them, again.
"Can you describe to me what it is you're feeling, in your chest?"
Malos considers that. Doesn't even have to, but does. "No."
"Ah," says Jin.
"Can you?" asks Malos.
Jin smiles. "There is a certain euphoria I owe to the place where a human's heart would" not should never should "be, but that's immaterial. Tangential. However you might say. And what I feel in the point of my Core could not and has not been described in such a way...ever. It's why I wish for the mundane, why I mourn it."
Malos minds not the delicate circling of their goal, nor the deliciously poetic way Jin speaks. He is focused on that word - that word! that word! that word! - that has encapsulated all.
"Euphoria."
"Others might call it trauma. I certainly might. But yes, that's what it looked like."
What it looked like. Oh, Malos doesn't want to be perceived.
"Jin, don't...tell me when you're going to let go, alright?"
"Don't tell you?"
"No." He barks it, bites it. Haste makes waste makes destruction. Defy description. Don't make me think. "Please."
"Alright." Jin rebalances the sword in his hands, wraps the other around the Blade. Malos disintegrates. "I'll let you know."