Chapter Text
Day 4# Clinch
verb (used without object)
Boxing. To engage in a clinch.
Slang. to embrace, especially passionately.
(of a clinched nail, screw, etc.) to hold fast; be secure.
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When the Echo comes, it does not ask for permission.
Before the Calamity, when life was both simpler and harsher than this dwindling between light and shadows, Rin loved to watch bar fights. He even instigated some, for the sake of being a thorn in someone else’s side: there’s a special kind of fun in stepping out of line and back again, when the riot starts.
(Sometimes I wonder how you do it, Thancred says, one of the many evenings at Horizon, what does it take for a single man be so incredibly aggravating?
And Rin shrugs and says: a lot of panache, because that’s what he learned then. You just need to pick your mask.)
It took a careful mixture of gall and patience, but with enough training he learned to read the signals, the tells, the chinks in the armors. Some people’s giveaways were dead simple to spot; others took time, like unfolding a new map.
To this day, however, he finds no such thrills as the clash of bodies. The tension bursting like the frailest of bubble. The dance — grotesque, beautiful, sharp — of flesh. There is beauty to be found in the clinch of fighters, when the blows stop and both contenders sway in place, fastened like a clasp.
The Echo embraces him much in the same way. It is a fight Rin is not ready for.
It sneaks on him unaware. Through the sockets of the Monoe mask Rin has donned for the ceremony at the Mih Khetto amphitheater and inside. Not a wall, but a warmth. Not a surge, but a pull.
He arches back to strike, claws unsheathed, the wood of the mask covering his startled snarl, but the embrace swells from within, deaf to his fear. Like a moon, lulling the tide to sleep — and though I’rhinn expects the blow, it does not come. He sinks fast, body and conscience yielding to something much greater, much more ancient.
Then, there is silence. And in the silence, light.
(Before the Crystal speaks, he wonders if this is what he sought all along. The sweet relief of surrendering; of dissolving, of being nothing and whole at once)