#tl;dr i'm a sucker for runya and blue's tiny spite and big goober dynamic

[gold-eyes-vengeful-heart]

Apologies

((Runya goes to deliver an apology.

Contains 5.2 spoilers! Also some vaguely gross imagery and also parental mental abuse of an adult child in the second half courtesy of @semper-miles Merceus being an asshole, mind that warning))

===

When Runya approached on the back of his Shinryu-egi, he would admit he didn’t expect to find Blue carving big furrows into the shores of the crater-lake with his body.

He dismounted and dismissed the aetherial construct without looking, his eyes registering his amusement at the Weapon. He kept skidding along, tilted to one side, in a vain effort to—Runya imagined—scrape off the crystalline substance coating the former injury he had from the Ruby Weapon. Even spotting Runya wasn’t enough to get Blue to totally stop, either; sure, he got to his feet and came thumping over, but when he paused in front of Runya, it barely took a moment before he hiked up one leg and started scratching at the crystal with his knee joint. It left him balancing on one foot, but he seemed steady enough, even as he craned his neck to look down at the much smaller Miqo’te.

{Runya-friend Runya-friend}

The little eager calls bounced onto his mind like raindrops. He couldn’t help but smile lazily up at the thing, even. “Ah, so you haven’t forgotten my face after all this time?”

The sarcasm earned him a flurry of mild huffiness, but as Blue kept scratching, Runya kept eyeing that leg and the shavings of crystals he was scraping off in the process. “...I can presume you itch.”

And he probably, in turn, should have expected Blue to project that feeling into his head so strongly that his body immediately echoed it, with a penetrating tickle that he almost doubled over onto before he started to rub furiously at the spot. “Excuse you, that was uncalled for!”

{Yes it was.}

“No it wasn’t.”

{Yes.} The thought sat there glacially, refusing to be moved even by him. “...You just did that to amuse yourself, didn’t you?”

The glacier-facade cracked and trickled merriment, and the Weapon physically chuffed like a laugh. And in response, Runya just raised a hand to his forehead with feigned drama, sighing heavily. “Oh, heavens save me, he actually has a sense of humor.” A strange thing, that. He had to say, after seeing what he had done to an entire lab full of Garleans, he hadn’t expected Blue to be...well, quite this human.

And yet all the same he knew full well from that panic that he had had a couple times over that the Weapon was indeed still a weapon. And there was something...off in the depths of Blue’s mind, too, he came to realize the more he hung around the creature. It lurked not quite at the heart of Blue but frighteningly close, a tattered void-like slash in his mindscape like a gouge across a throat. Every time it occupied his thoughts, it drew him silently closer, beckoning him towards a tempting and all too familiar madness that both begged for help and bit furiously at any being that dared listen—it both threatened to consume him and yet also didn’t quite dare consume Blue himself, held in check by rocky scarred tissue mountainous around its edges but not quite enough to keep him away it would be too simple to peek in and see what memory lurked under the surface but all the same he could catch a familiar glimpse of dead eyes and mountains of bodies twisted and gored and cracked open like eggs but they weren’t human and some were tall and robed under the layers of char and gore—

He jerked back from the contact as the black yet vividly blaring, projecting scar threatened to consume his vision entirely. Even then, it dotted across his vision, bug-like, making him blink rapidly as he looked up at Blue.

For his part, the Weapon had paused with his hind leg half up in the air, and his head was very slowly cocking to one side until he nearly turned it sideways in confusion. Strangely, he didn’t seem to have even felt Runya’s intrusion into that mindscape incarnation of ancient mental trauma, and even Runya’s secondhand echo of it just concerned him more than alarmed him.

{??????} A cold fish-slimy slap of worry flew right into his face. 

“It’s quite fine, thank you.” He waved off the now-crouching Weapon, despite how his body twitched and burned with secondhand panic not his own. His hand shook as he ran it through his hair. “I...aah, I shouldn’t have gone poking into your mind so offhand. That was rude of me.”

{...Very rude.} The concern soured into a sulk and heated into an accusation. {I don’t look into YOU like that. Even if your whole mind is like that.}

The two words didn’t need to be explained, at least; Blue knew immediately what he had been looking at, and perhaps he wasn’t entirely wrong that Runya’s entire mindscape was little else but a vast wound in and of itself, with only the faintest hints of something more around the edges—and even then he couldn’t stop picking at it long enough for those little hints to take hold.

“Perhaps.” He still waved off the notion with one hand. “But I do swear that I won’t be nosy without good reason. Does that sound alright?” And the second he got a grudging agreement, he continued, leaning on his elbows on the tip of Blue’s jaw. “And I actually came here to ask you a question. You do know that Macbalor isn’t an enemy, don’t you?”

The Weapon’s discordant jangle of negativity clashed against his thoughts so ferociously it put him in mind of jars of marbles being thrown down the stairs. Loud. Disorienting.

“Ah, come now...” Runya waggled a finger in his ear as if it would stop it ringing after that...that. “It’s an honest question, Blue, if you don’t mind.”

But no matter how genuinely honest the question, Blue didn’t want to cooperate; he could feel that much. The Weapon snorted and the gust of ocean-smell wind ruffled his robes.

{Pilotnotpilotpilotnotpilot—} The confusion, Runya could nearly taste; Blue had wanted to run but he couldn’t with her exerting that pressure on his mind, no matter how subconsciously she did it—he remembered the small Garleannotgarlean being brought to him as a last resort and he refused until she broke through his will like butter but even then he fought the whole way down the corridor as she made him move—

Runya actually snapped his fingers at Blue as the right half of his vision and the left half of his vision disagreed so wildly so that his stomach churned with nausea—one eye stuck in Blue’s past and the other stuck in Runya’s present. “Ah ah ah, you’re going to make me ruin your lovely paint job if you keep doing that.” And his head felt liable to explode, but that was obvious, he hoped. “Focus, Blue. I would prefer not to get shoved out of my own head again.”

Luckily for the both of them, he listened and did exactly as asked. The Weapon took in a deep breath and audibly blinked, and the wild torrent of uncontrolled memory receded to just a trickle of faint impressions. {...Sorry.}

“Even if I didn’t have a literal safety mechanism for my brain, I still do not enjoy migraines and feeling as if I’m going to lose lunches I ate years ago.”

{Said sorry.}

“Just a reminder that it’s unpleasant, is all.” He gave Blue’s nose a pat, the claws on his gloves clicking lightly against the metal. “You have a very loud voice. Mine pales in comparison.”

{Like it though.}

Runya cocked his head and flicked his ears forward. “Well, there’s a good thing.” He wasn’t going to question why, particularly not when even the most tentative of pushes on that front met an unyielding wall. “I should be honored, I suppose.” {Work with. Not over.} But whatever that enigmatic remark meant, Blue wasn’t keen on explaining. Instead, the top hatch hissed open, and he wordlessly peppered Runya’s mind with the urge to go run, fly, run. To move. Boredom, perhaps, but the reasons were irrelevant to Runya.

(It was so easy to get addicted to that feeling of power—and that was even without the Resonance active. He could, for a while, be not in a carved-apart-sewn-together nightmare of a body, but in something fluid and powerful and vibrant in a way that even a normal, healthy body would never be able to give him.)

“Oh, as you wish, dear.”

— — —

Shifting patterns of light roiled over Legatus Silentius’ face, as he replayed the footage over and over. Footage not just of the VIIth Legion’s vaunted Ruby Weapon, but also of his Weapon, dueling fighting clawing flying biting, until it flew into a rage at the sight of the monstrous Van Darnus and tore her apart. He scrolled the recording back automatically, without conscious thought, his attention so focused on what was before his eyes that he almost missed the soft thuds of footsteps behind him. Almost.

“Sir?”

Ariadne’s voice. But it held hesitation, weakness, and when he craned his neck around to look sidelong at her, she stiffened.

“Have you come to bring me your sister?”

“No sir.”

“Hmm. The Weapon, then; have you captured it and dragged it back here?” Ariadne swallowed. “Sir, I came to tell you that Angerona is on the move. She disappeared again—“

“I did tell you,” Merceus interrupted lightly, “only to interrupt your father with news of your successes...not your failures.”

The reprimand set Ariadne’s shoulders even stiffer than before, but really, he had told her that her only purpose now was to drag her wayward sister back here. He had not, for a moment, insinuated that he would tolerate one of his blood failing him. “Were you expecting help, Ariadne?” He smiled. “This isn’t the first time she has very suddenly eluded even your sight. And Celia’s. I don’t care why; I just want her found again. That is the task I set both of you to: finding her, and also finding the Weapon that is key to irreversibly ensuring our dominance over the weak. I did not send both of my loyal daughters on such a simple task only for them to come crawling back demanding assistance with something they should have no issue with.”

His chiding done and met with silence, he languidly returned his stare to the screen, the projected light flickering across his eyes. To no one in particular, he spoke aloud. “The Seventh was always short-sighted. They just wanted to repeat their same old mistakes, expecting that they just had to work this time.” He chuckled. “We were on to something, with this Weapon. Even in the hands of the unworthy, it carved through one of Baelsar’s glorious projects. One of the others even steals our Sapphire Weapon’s name...”

The smile disappeared. “And yet, none of us could get it to fight even half as well. It disobeyed us, routinely made us override its mind just to make it move...It refused to show us this potential, and yet here it does just that in the hands of some useless savage.” Or at least, he was quite certain that had been an Eorzean; no one else would dare stand up to the Empire. “If you do drag that pilot back here alive, Ariadne, I will be very sure to squeeze whatever foul spell he’s cast on that thing out of him before I finally let Celia have a little fun with him. But if you have to kill him, very well. I will not have both one of my daughters defying me and our Weapon being used so casually by a savage.”

Ariadne frowned, as she came to stand by him, but not too closely. (Experience, perhaps, informed her how terrible an idea that could be. “He loses control of it...there, though. When that Darnus monster appears. That’s more like when it went berserk at Celia—“

“It would still be a grand help, Ariadne,” he interrupted testily, “if you were able to drag him back here so we can dissect him properly instead of guessing.” He would not be reminded of failures—

“It has to be fond of him, somehow, to let him do this...” But Ariadne visibly winced as Merceus walked over and painfully clapped her shoulder with an even wider smile.

“This family does not make friends with things, Silentius. Nothing ever could, with that beast, even if they tried. And if it wouldn’t willingly cooperate with the very people that gave it such power, there is no chance that it is willingly cooperating with an Eorzean, either.”

“Of course, sir.” She only relaxed once he let go of her, and she turned to salute to him. (A sharp, precise motion, born of practice unyielding until he had been satisfied with it.) “I’ll take a magitek ship and continue the search, Legatus. By your leave.”

He had half a mind to deny her, after she came crawling back empty-handed and begging like some pathetic worm. But...for the moment, his mercurial mood took a turn for the marginally more lenient, and he just dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “Do not fail me again. Bring her back, bring the Weapon back, even bring the savages’ pilot back...or don’t come back at all.” And even then, he wouldn’t suffer such failure of his bloodline to live...but he didn’t need to say it out loud. Ariadne swallowing audibly was proof enough she didn’t need to hear it, either.

“Yes sir.”

He would find those three, even if he had to go out and find them himself. Even if he had to sacrifice all of what remained of his family and his men to do it. Even if he had to kill them with his bare hands. He would not tolerate such an insult to his pride as a Legatus to continue existing unhindered.

The Weapon was his. Angerona was his. And the savages all belonged to him, even if they refused to believe it. They would see, when he had the full extent of his power aligned...they would all see.