Interlogue: Loss

Throw it away. Throw it all to hell and away. That was what they'd done. Everything he had thought Mythra and Addam had built up together gone in an instant because Malos knew how to push her buttons. Of course he knew. Better than Brighid, or Jin, or Lora, or Milton. Milton...humans became currency, to the Aegis who wanted, perhaps only needed in the basest possible way because he wasn't even able to know reasonous wants, to wipe out the exchange. Barter with a life not because you want to save others, those of others, but because itchy-trigger dynamite spark of heavenly light goes off all too fast when there's no pin to hand for the grenade that's been kicked around for far too long.

It wasn't his fault. There wasn't practically anything he could have done the whole time. He was useless, plain and out useless. Not a healer, not a shields-front tank, not a tactitious trickster (he was too big for that, fancy feet be damned), not any of it. The same exact descriptors applied, and then didn't, outside of battle. And yet...

Damn. Should've taken better care of those kids when he'd had the chance. Should've said thanks to Aegaeon when he'd had the chance. Should've given Brighid a last embrace when he'd had the chance. Should have...should have told Addam he loved him, for real, when he'd had the chance.

Flora and their child were both dead, rocked off the side of the Titan during one of the initial tremors and eviscerated by a wicked crag in the stone. Why had she been outside at all? No one knew. Minoth watched the passing of the grim news with hollowly forlorn eyes, for once in his life not being haunted by excessive overthoughts until after the fact. Instead, his mind had gone blank.

He hadn't stared at Addam nor Vez, moreso the space between them and the gestures of hands that gave practically no presence. He didn't offer his support, either. They both knew exactly how disgusting it would feel to take that mindset of laying claims and finders keepers and actually apply it, even in minutest measure. Addam became distant; his eyes almost never focused in the same spot again.

He left to seal away Mythra, now Pyra, the object of their utter destruction, the living sword by which their hard-won happiness had been cleaved away. She believed it too, of course; that was why she existed now, fiery and fierce yet peaceful and plaintive. I never want to hurt anyone again, she must have thought, and then made herself de facto incapable of the same. Addam had never stopped, not like that, for all his fear. Maybe he should have. To Minoth...it would have been all the same.

Years later, so many long and painful years later, another man came and gave the impression of a Driver. His other Blade, a fabulous cockerel-like bird named Roc, was proud and practically unaffected; they were a warrior through and through, and so was he, yet he was also a cast-out noble who put an achingly admirable amount of care towards every single person they helped as freelancers.

Vandham. Addam, practically, if you rearranged the letters. Minoth didn't see things in his old age, but he thought himself hallucinations, started warping the words together to put a poetry to his life that hadn't ever truly seen itself out and through. When he chronicled their adventures, because of course he did, stitching together all the anecdotes he'd ever jotted down about them and for them, it came out as nearer to revisionist history than anything else. He excused it in his mind, said of course Addam deserved to be remembered as a hero, as a perfect man, as the one whose flaws were the only thing that served to make him human instead of features that only more made him depressingly so.

The only one who needed to be depressingly human was him. Cole. Pseudonyms served, of course. Minoth was...call it a cliché, but he'd wanted Addam to be the last one he ever heard say it. Even to preserve that breathless, crushed mumble. Minoth was dead. Shouldn't he be? He died with his Driver.

Not that Addam had perished so quickly. Probably, he'd wanted to. And Mi- Cole had left him to die like a feebly flopping fish. Did they flop because they wanted air or because they wanted to exacerbate the need for it such that they'd wither and waste there on the spot?