sunseeker
"Minoth..."
Addam spoke with a tone far too gentle for Minoth's own wild and unemplacable comfort. Try though he did, he couldn't hide the tiny, automatic shudder it pulled from his neck, his shoulder, the left side of his chest. Addam stood across from him, hands at his own sides, face forlorn.
It had to be melodrama, to claim that no one else had ever thought of him so tenderly. To single out his own story as particularly poignant, magnetic and special. Right?
Yet Minoth was drawn to Addam, hopelessly and nearly completely.
With just that one word. Oh, words, words, words. And then Addam continued.
"Let me be your...friend. I cannot ask more of you than that."
Minoth was not ideologically opposed to friendship. Indeed, it was one of the great covenants of his literary corpus, that he should depict the great and world-changing power of a bond chosen by peoples outside of edict, beyond uptight morality. Friendship as both a choice and the absolute absence of one made by anyone, above or below a god, was the touchstone of untouchable value that beaconed its absolution to a hopeless and choiceless romantic soldier.
Hands offered. Hands taken.
But Minoth, have friends? Minoth, be touched and changed? Before that, be seen, reached, touched ?
Half the time he wasn't even sure he could be seen at all.
To say that it was unthinkable would be to yield unduly to dramatics. It was, in general, a concept capable of human (mortal) comprehension. Sometimes it was harder to deny than it was to accept. Minoth, however, found fear layered after fear.
How to voice this - academic - fear, though? How to take issue without taking point?
He set his feet, stanced to weather whatever wistful whims wended his way. "If that's what I'm letting you be, what is it I won't tolerate?"
Addam blinked, countenance shifting, at the question. He'd approached Minoth at the entrance to the Flesh Eater's loner tent, correctly guessing that he wouldn't be outright told to bug off from the first and that this was the coveted scenario in which Minoth couldn't just walk his rumpled, roguish self away. Every other time he'd considered doing it, Minoth had made himself scarce. Maybe with prescience. Maybe not. Either way, it was a skill of his, demonstrably.
"Beg pardon?"
"You're requesting that I let you be my friend. That's all you ask, you say. So what aren't you asking? What are you holding back?"
Now Minoth held Addam steadily, defiantly, with his gaze. If there be more, then show it to me.
Addam's own shuddering sigh betrayed his inobvious burgeoning discomfort at being rooted to the spot by another. He was not a squirrelly person; Minoth appreciated his ability to feel gravity when it was required, though he was also often far too unserious. Went to show how much this topic, closest to heart, had set him off jovial kilter.
Tension begat tenuousness, rather than tenacity.
"I cannot ask more because, in some ways, there is no more. I feel." Stammering. How could this be you, my prince? "For- from, rather-- That is, the company of one such as you...your friendship is the greatest possible gift."
"In some ways," prodded Minoth. He chose, hardly of his own volition, to treat the praise with a stern ignorance. In doing so, whatever measure of humble grace allotted towards the awkward topic fell away as well.
"I feel taken by you. I am a traditional person, Minoth. What do I know of the ways humans and Blades connect, of the way Lora wields her affection?"
"By definition, nothing, if you don't ask," Minoth retorted - really, without thinking. Just because it was the pat answer.
How many opportunities had been lost to the barbs of a creature whose evolution hadn't caught up to the relative lack of danger now present in its environs? That is to say, if Minoth's snappishness had ever been justified (and oh, it was a piece of work to throttle himself into semblances of easygoing), it certainly wasn't now.
Addam meant him no harm. For crying out loud, Addam meant him no harm!
Ignorance, in this respect, really was a forgivable sin, if it was a sin at all. There were so many worse things people could do, by knowing.
Regardless. Ignorance. It wasn't only - actually - Addam who lay to blame.
Apologizing to some unknown entity for the transgression of objectification, Minoth admitted to himself that Lora, the idealized patron saint embodiment of Tornan ideals, was alien to him. Tantalizing.
Those easy smiles. That genuine connection. No playacting at being her own wonderful self.
Architect, it was laughable how pathetic he was at this. And, apparently, Addam was just the same. The prince was still gazing at him cow-eyed, hurt a mere droplet of discolored water swiftly dissolved in wobbling unblinks.
"So you don't want me to give up, but you don't want to give yourself in either. I suppose you win and you lose."
"Creepy-crawlie like me's got a hard carapace. I don't flip easy."
Pessimism had set in, by this point; there was no winning to be had. In this moment, Minoth had lost grasp on anything he wanted besides refuge from the golden storm. The individual he'd found himself to be would henceforth be formed in the cavity of shelter provided by absenteeism. And, thus, Minoth did want Addam to give up. Why wouldn't he? He wasn't the one trying to change things. He wasn't the one scrying at threads while they yet hung loose in warp.
Take a titanic hint, will you, Prince?
But if Addam didn't take what was being handed out by an ornery paw, Minoth saw no other recourse to ushering him out of the tent and back into the common area with the others of his kind.
He couldn't put the seal of doom, the kiss of death, on it himself. No, he wasn't that strong, that hardheaded and incurious.
"If you'd like me to leave you be, just give the word. But please do give it, Minoth?"
Well. If arguments be the food of interpersonal growth.
"Come in."
"You- what?"
Minoth rolled his eyes as he pulled aside the flap and sidled through. "You rattle me. I don't like being rattled. Friends close, enemies closer, as they say."
At this, those storied eyes finally sharpened. "So I'm your enemy now?"
Not what you were angling for, eh, my prince? "Elysium forbid it. But I didn't say you were my friend, either."
"You torment me..." Addam groaned, ducking and stepping forward until he was swallowed by green canvas.
"That's one word for it."