Voice of Reason
It starts - this painful, stagnant dialogue of fears and preassumptions and unassailable walls - when Minoth is standing stiffly in front of Aureus, behind Amalthus, as usual, and Addam is standing somewhere among the Tornans across from him, them, as usual, and there is a woman standing next to him, much shorter and even that much more uncomfortable-looking in the dress uniform.
The woman has blue eyes. She's quite young; her snub nose isn't the only thing that betrays her. Her blue eyes flick around, watching watching watching, as her ears, beneath elaborate yet homely-messy braided bun, politely bend to the dull tone of the conversation between Khanoro and Rhadallis.
Amalthus is important; is a self-starter; is on the rise. Addam is important; is a self-starter; is on the rise. Addam is not lazy, but he is unambitious. That is the crucial difference between the two.
And this woman? This woman is ambitious. Her blue eyes (that's the third time you've said it, yes, we know already, they're blue, they're blue) are boring into Minoth's and he knows that look.
She is fascinated. And he is terrified.
But this is Minoth we're talking about.
Minoth is always terrified by the plain and scary work it takes to pull to safety.
Addam tells him.
Minoth wishes he didn't, but Addam tells him.
Writes him a letter, pulls him aside, takes him out for lunch in the city, whatever it is.
Addam tells him.
"Flora was quite taken with you, you know."
The animal that is Minoth snarls and shies. The human (person) that is Minoth resumes his social-presenting off-time swagger and replies, "You don't say? Must just be because I'm so perfect."
And flings a hand at the scar, with his middle finger first, and slices open the pad of his thumb on the envelope.
Flora was quite taken with you.
Flora was quite taken with you.
...
Flora is quite taken with you.
And now what the very fresh hell are you going to do when she sees you again?
None of the shopkeepers in any of the cities Minoth's ever been to, but particularly Indol, have ever taken a very vested interest in his social life. They notice when he's particularly gruff that day, or particularly cheery, but that's about it. They keep their mouths shut in regard to the bright-eyed companion that sometimes tags after him, and about the dull-eyed but bright-minded supervisor that he is always particularly depressed to appear with, fully masked.
None of Minoth's kindly small-talk friends give two hoots or two shivers about whether or not some girl on another Titan likes him, fancies him, won't stop looking his way--
And he's only seen her the once; she him, alternately, more to the point-edly.
So, in a way, he wishes they rather would do that.
He wishes someone else would take a mind about this thing.
It'd save him the trouble of the decision, and of the caring.
He wriggles away from future meetings with her - future meetings where she might be present. Yes, she's pretty, yes, she's clever, yes, she's all these things, and so esteemed by Addam, even though Addam is periodically absent with his news and it had taken a while after for Minoth to be told that yes, we had a wedding, yes, that's my wife, yes, yes, yes, yes!
Yes!
Yes.
Addam is happy.
Addam just had the one statement, and that was it.
Addam's not dangerous.
Not like Flora.
Flora's not dangerous. It's just that Flora throws everything out of balance.
That's my wife.
Does she know something he doesn't?
The problem with Minoth's problem is that he doesn't feel like explaining it to anyone, because it very well might not exist.
Perhaps Flora doesn't exist. Did Addam send him a letter? Didn't Addam send him a letter?
There a dozen Tornan women who could have had some reason to stand among the delegation, for which politick issue Minoth has no idea, he tries on a very square purpose not to, but there are, there must be, she could be anyone.
But she is Addam's wife.
Oh, go away, go away, go away-!
And then, eventually, he is in Addam's house, because he might be a Blade turned to Flesh Eater with guarantor an Indoline powercreep (he shouldn't hate him, shouldn't even dislike him as a person, but he does, doesn't he, he does, there's naught to be done about it, he does) but he's not in witness protection; he is, eventually, going to have friends.
Addam's house is a thing he has because they had to give it to someone - maybe Khanoro did it to make Zettar mad (of course he didn't, have you seen Zettar's siblings? Addam's existence is an act of providence) - and it's also a thing Flora has because they had to give her to someone - rather, they had to get Addam someone, and he said her, I'd like her, and maybe Addam has this same problem, maybe Flora likes him and maybe he's being Addam back about it, how much d'you bet?
Her eyes are blue.
She looks at him, trying to read the intent as plainly out of his eyes as she'd been able to from his demeanor. He wants to belong, doesn't he? Yes, of course, he does. And his intent, exactly, on just how to do that, is...?
But Minoth doesn't plan on making it available. He just looks back at her for several painful moments too long, and then exhales involuntarily and turns away.
It's not as if this is the only information she knows about him, two stares and a hunch. She knows everything Addam's told her about him, and the information has only flowed one way because of something about Addam that makes him unwilling to waste Minoth's precious spare time, or something like that, and he's learned the same only finally now, and how about that, isn't that nice, you want me, oh, and then what did your mother say?
(Why did Addam put this visit together?)
And she can stand there, thinking, "Oh, he's so handsome," or she can...
"Minoth, do you understand how desperately I want you? I want your creativity, your sensitivity, your laughter...all of you, every part, as much as any person has ever wanted another."
Shut up, Shut Up, SHUT UP-!
"It's not that I don't believe you." He looks horribly resolute and doleful. "It's that I don't care."
But she gets him in the sitting room - gets him to exhume the nest of delusions haunting his hollow life, hello, how are you, how are you, and now let's spend another four hours because you asked me and I'm going to tell you about it.
"Flora," he whispers darkly, like so many fluttering insects are caught in his throat, "do you know-- Do you know why I cleave so tightly to you?"
(It isn't a lie; he's leaving the front door open while he can slip through the mirage of his rampant morality out the back.)
His formality gives her pause in a much more desperate, ungrand way than she has ever expected to broach. It is as if the very act of attempting to don his narratorial garb has wrenched away his own self-knowledge, and he asks the question as much of himself as he does of her. Who knows the answer? Not he. Not she.
She determines to make it up, just then; aspires never to leave him tangling on such loose ends as the thread of a senseless romance unstitched to any fabric of a Flesh Eater's grim, twofold reality.
"You're afraid," she says simply. His hair rustles against the pillow, and it is the pillow of which he is afraid. They have pillows, in Indol. The pillows are even very cool, as her hand, in Indol. But everything is cool, shallow, in Indol. Everything is frightfully caricatured and sparse, in Indol.
There is nothing in Indol. There is only within and without, on and off. If the great opalescent dragon that carries her has a heart, a core, it is one shrouded in the pale bloodthirstiness of those such as Rhadallis and Amalthus, even Baltrich.
Even Minoth's fear is not in Indol. Minoth's fear is something he owns, but it's not something he can ever shed, nor is it anything Flora can wrest from him. Minoth's fear owns him.
"You're afraid," Flora says again. She can hear her eyelashes fluttering, those many many waning birds. In color, her truth is a bright haleness, the pink of plumply and properly calciated moons at nailbeds (if with just a touch of connotationally anemic purpling). She exists for no other purpose than to be perfect - but she is not perfect, for you see, she wants.
Flora wants. Dearly, horribly, inexorably. Flora flails, castigates and arrests, herself or her surroundings (in this way she is relieved up out of them rather forcibly, as a container removed from the fridge whose puzzle-piece belongingness cannot be restored in two minutes' time when the milk has been poured and the muffin eaten and the hand dirtied with pleasant grease), at the sign of irreconcilable complication. Always, she does this. It is trait; it is theme; it is trauma. She acquires a repetitive stress injury by way of inuring - herself, or her surroundings.
Flora wants, so Flora lies, but we as any audience of hers (always captive, ever captive) would never know it if not the curtain had been drawn so bleakly aback. (Remember the inuring: she doesn't believe herself to have lied, and so she hasn't, which is the peculiar thing about self-generated opinional tautology. Continually, she propositions herself.)
Her lie is innocent, undetectable. "I don't mind that you're afraid." That is step one of social satisfaction, for Minoth: not to be minded. To be thought of as vaguely helpful and pleasant, if thought of at all, and never to be minded, ever. And never to be loved.
"You know it so easily," he replies, despondence. He looks anywhere but into her eyes, and that itself is a childish performance of askancing search; playact by sigh, that you are tired, that you are hungry, that you are destitute in strange incommunicable ways that well-off-ness hides; that you are dead in the face of your offered helper beyond help. "No one knows who I am."
Contradiction would be foolish, rude, suicide. Assent would be worse.
What does someone look like, who knows who Minoth is? What does someone look like, who answers his deprecation with equal impatience and lack of platitude? What does someone look like, who quantifies and qualifies him as really, truly real?
Not gray-haired and grinning. Not brown-haired and businesslike, as being businesslike pertains to a locale - a domain - homey.
Tears should spring for such a winsome tale, that a Blade of any stature lacks Brighid's precious tinctured reason. All onlookers should cry for Minoth, the Blade that wasn't, the Blade that isn't, the Blade that can't be because he's too busy fighting with himself even to fight with his keepers, who are wholly unintelligent as his predicament is concerned.
Flora Origo cannot give Minoth safety, because Minoth would be hurt by safety. Flora Origo cannot even convince Minoth that he is truly better off without Amalthus, and she removes her hand from its placid, wilful intrusion as she realizes that.
She tells Addam. If that is a betrayal, then Minoth is right, but for Flora in her own self there's no one else she tells things to; Addam's memory is only for knowing her, and a little bit for crop rotations in the back there.
"Do you really mean-" And he stops short, better suited to past tense as his motion grows historic.
"I have never meant anything, and I never will," Minoth says, not coldly, in a far-off voice of dry disbelief. The formality clutches him, cleaves him from his anchors just as his heart squeezes them in grips of leather and flesh.
"I don't know fond words..." Addam's voice shaves absent. If uncareful, he'll swiftly retreat, by what appears as accident and what cannot, by the same token as Flora's lies, be truly ontologized.
"You? Not know..."
"I'm a prince. Your prince. I've got to look sharp or else risk being cheesy." But the thought has struck, just in time. "Oh... Your prince."
The fondest words of all, Minoth knows. Addam mouths to himself what a beautiful load of nothing that semi-abrasive epithet means, to itself and to the world.
"My prince... Your Addam. Isn't that more like...?"
He could think faster; he doesn't trail off because he's stupid or slow. He cannot, on any count, botch this whole thing for the want of being mature and dignified as Minoth's self-remonstration will permit. Deliberate, is the word. It tastes of a hard cheese with a pale purple rind, and the knife in fine accord.
My Minoth. Not right. Too samey. The cheese clots, clogs, cloys.
"My beloved one."
Minoth blanches, then colors.
Not right, is it? But...
"There's nothing else you are. No half-baked descriptors."
Flora hasn't spoken for these many minutes on end, and Minoth is quite sure it's because she, in fact, feels stupid - he should know, since he does. That while standing in their house, which they own and occupy without threat of seizure, he repeats, ever reaffirms, to himself that they are lying, that they are simply making nice, that it is impossible to solve this game by playing.
It's a lot of talk, and not a lot of action. A dialogue is nothing without its stage directions.
But Minoth knows not how to act yet, how to respond. He imagines that Flora might be angry at Addam's sudden boldness, in comparison to his recent aloofness to the whole idea, were she not, as aforementioned, feeling so frivolous and empty-headed.
She'd been going about it all the wrong way. Minoth - and he realizes this to himself, not only narratorially, as one might "think selfishly" and implicitly be seen as in a state of sole self-admonition - did not want for understanding, for willing ears. He did not, and he does not. He wants for that same self-knowledge. No one knows who I am. And that is why I do not know. I must be built up from my bones as a child who first encounters a well-meaning stranger; I cannot be borne of introduction, when there is no individual here.
Minoth looks at them. Blinks. Stays very, very still - quite still - as if he is expecting the time limit to expire, the motion made that he walk out the door, his lease on crucial conversation bleakly expired.
Addam and Flora do not move. They, too, it seems, know the value of stillness, afore confusion.
Minoth produces his notebook from his pocket, eyes not leaving his watchers. Pulls the pen from its magnetic snap along the spine (thank you, Addam, and thank you, Flora, if it was your idea, at base, in truth). Twists the tip free.
How loyal I am to you, my great and gentle one
The stature of sound is in laughter, and not lies
Your song much slower and much lover the better for it
As the fatter bird nests deeper in the forests of ambition
I want to be nothing at all
Trails off the last letters. Replaces the pen. Reads the flourish of nonsense words back with lips parted.
Stands. Regards Addam and Flora. Reaches out a hand; shakes and embraces.
The visit is over. The rest of Minoth's life has begun.