Kubo ♫ Kubo and the Two Strings (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bachido) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
legionworld2016-10-22 12:09 am
bachido) wrote in legionworld2016-10-22 12:09 am
Entry tags:
Closed to Wash
Who| Kubo, Agent Washington
What| Azula is shockingly good at pushing Kubo's buttons, and so Our Hero's second day Legioning is significantly worse than his first.
Where| the Hab
When| Before Murderworld.
Warnings/Notes| Crying about dead parents contained herein
The Hab was vast enough to get lost in, and Kubo was doing his best to get lost in it.
Shaken after his encounter with Azula, Kubo simply moved from one environment to another, putting distance between himself and the fiery soldier. The cruelty in her smile lingered as if she'd burned him with more than words.
He knew about cruelty, for certain. He'd known people who'd stick a knife in someone's wounds and laugh about it - he was related to those people.
But his aunts had not been mortal. Even his grandfather had grown kind when he became mortal, as if humanity itself were an inherent hallmark of compassion. As if laughing cruelty belonged to cold immortals alone. But a girl his own age had listened to him speak his deepest, most heartfelt sorrow, his wound that never fully healed, and she had laughed and called his mother and father weak for dying. Called him weak for being their son.
Kubo could not stop feeling shaken. How could one person say that to another? How could one mortal be so like his aunts after all? And yet she was here by the same means, for the same purpose he was. The same Time Trapper had selected him and selected her. The same Legion had taken from him the same oath they'd taken from her.
He'd thought such people would be similar as members of one village. Not one a compassionate storyteller, the other as smilingly cruel as the masks his aunts had worn.
Worse yet, it dawned on Kubo even as he thought it that it didn't matter if she reminded him more of the villain of his own story than of his heroes - she still was better suited to this task than he was.
His eye filled with tears as he walked, out of a deserted seaside city and into a path that meandered through tall aspens. Azula had made too many good points. He'd agreed to be a warrior for the Legion, but he'd be fighting alongside a girl with fire so hot it warmed the Sword Unbreakable, and his power was over paper. Paper that was flammable, and ran out. And his control over it was even weakened from what it had become back home. He was the son of an impossibly great swordswoman, and the mightiest samurai in immortal memory, but his skills with his sword and bow were basic. With his mother and father gone, they would never be better.
He dwelled, for a second, in the memory of his father calling him a hero for doing no more than taking care of his mother. The memory could never stop warming his heart. But a real hero would not be stumbling down forest paths with an eye full of tears, wondering how he was even going to do the task he'd sworn to do.
The only thing there seemed to be TO do was practice. He stopped in a clearing by a small brook and drew the Sword Unbreakable. Wiping the tears from his eye, he went into his first form, face already red from sniffling.
His mother hadn't just taught him the basics, she'd insisted upon drilling him in them, over and over - at least, for the time in his childhood she'd been lucid enough to expend much of her lucidity on training. Kubo ran through all of them once, twice, and by the time he was on his third repetition, the tears were flowing without any chance that he could stop them.
It was so futile to do what he'd already learned, over and over, when he would never learn anything more. His mother would never teach him to master the sword. His father would never teach him what the son of a samurai ought to know. They would never smile at him, share with him their wisdom, or do anything but give him a sense of their presence when he prayed at the Obon festival.
And there was no Obon festival to pray at, here.
Kubo sank to his knees. He let the sword fall aside and covered his eye with his hands, his tears winning out.
He was no hero. He was just an orphan who, with a lot of help, had been one once. He didn't belong here - and he barely even belonged back home, where nothing waited for him day to day but to play to a quiet village for never quite enough supper, with the grandfather who could no longer be blamed for destroying every person and every place he'd ever felt he belonged to.
What| Azula is shockingly good at pushing Kubo's buttons, and so Our Hero's second day Legioning is significantly worse than his first.
Where| the Hab
When| Before Murderworld.
Warnings/Notes| Crying about dead parents contained herein
The Hab was vast enough to get lost in, and Kubo was doing his best to get lost in it.
Shaken after his encounter with Azula, Kubo simply moved from one environment to another, putting distance between himself and the fiery soldier. The cruelty in her smile lingered as if she'd burned him with more than words.
He knew about cruelty, for certain. He'd known people who'd stick a knife in someone's wounds and laugh about it - he was related to those people.
But his aunts had not been mortal. Even his grandfather had grown kind when he became mortal, as if humanity itself were an inherent hallmark of compassion. As if laughing cruelty belonged to cold immortals alone. But a girl his own age had listened to him speak his deepest, most heartfelt sorrow, his wound that never fully healed, and she had laughed and called his mother and father weak for dying. Called him weak for being their son.
Kubo could not stop feeling shaken. How could one person say that to another? How could one mortal be so like his aunts after all? And yet she was here by the same means, for the same purpose he was. The same Time Trapper had selected him and selected her. The same Legion had taken from him the same oath they'd taken from her.
He'd thought such people would be similar as members of one village. Not one a compassionate storyteller, the other as smilingly cruel as the masks his aunts had worn.
Worse yet, it dawned on Kubo even as he thought it that it didn't matter if she reminded him more of the villain of his own story than of his heroes - she still was better suited to this task than he was.
His eye filled with tears as he walked, out of a deserted seaside city and into a path that meandered through tall aspens. Azula had made too many good points. He'd agreed to be a warrior for the Legion, but he'd be fighting alongside a girl with fire so hot it warmed the Sword Unbreakable, and his power was over paper. Paper that was flammable, and ran out. And his control over it was even weakened from what it had become back home. He was the son of an impossibly great swordswoman, and the mightiest samurai in immortal memory, but his skills with his sword and bow were basic. With his mother and father gone, they would never be better.
He dwelled, for a second, in the memory of his father calling him a hero for doing no more than taking care of his mother. The memory could never stop warming his heart. But a real hero would not be stumbling down forest paths with an eye full of tears, wondering how he was even going to do the task he'd sworn to do.
The only thing there seemed to be TO do was practice. He stopped in a clearing by a small brook and drew the Sword Unbreakable. Wiping the tears from his eye, he went into his first form, face already red from sniffling.
His mother hadn't just taught him the basics, she'd insisted upon drilling him in them, over and over - at least, for the time in his childhood she'd been lucid enough to expend much of her lucidity on training. Kubo ran through all of them once, twice, and by the time he was on his third repetition, the tears were flowing without any chance that he could stop them.
It was so futile to do what he'd already learned, over and over, when he would never learn anything more. His mother would never teach him to master the sword. His father would never teach him what the son of a samurai ought to know. They would never smile at him, share with him their wisdom, or do anything but give him a sense of their presence when he prayed at the Obon festival.
And there was no Obon festival to pray at, here.
Kubo sank to his knees. He let the sword fall aside and covered his eye with his hands, his tears winning out.
He was no hero. He was just an orphan who, with a lot of help, had been one once. He didn't belong here - and he barely even belonged back home, where nothing waited for him day to day but to play to a quiet village for never quite enough supper, with the grandfather who could no longer be blamed for destroying every person and every place he'd ever felt he belonged to.
no subject
And then Kubo starts talking about another conversation he's had, and for a moment Wash goes utterly still. Kubo says he talked to a girl, but Wash hears the words in Felix's voice, complete with the vicious sneer and the twirl of a knife-
It's not a good association.
He yanks himself out of that headspace - Felix got what was coming to him, he's not a problem anymore - and back into the present. They're talking about Kubo right now, not him. And evidently they're back to fitting in, or feeling like you don't.
"I wasn't kidding when I said it takes all types," Wash starts, trying to figure out how to approach this from a different tack. "Like I said, you need balance on a team. Not everyone can be on the front lines all the time." He's casting about in his memory, trying to figure out if he's ever heard of anyone fighting with music before, and against all odds he finds something.
"You know, one of my teammates told me about a game once. It's a storytelling game, where a group of very different characters band together and go on quests."
Simmons talked his ear off about Dungeons and Dragons one night when Wash couldn't sleep, and of course he remembers it now. It is unbelievably nerdy and he will never tell Simmons he's using it. Ever. He will never live it down. Worse yet, he'll get recruited to play, and that's about the last thing he wants.
"Of course, there are warriors and archers and fighters, but there's also a type of character called a bard. He told me that bards use songs and stories to confuse and distract their enemies and inspire their team to do better in combat. They don't necessarily have to be swinging a sword on the front lines to be helpful, and they're still a very important part of the team." Wash shrugs and leans back a little. He's pretty sure he's not being subtle, but he might as well make is point clear: "Maybe the Time Trapper thought the Legion needed a bard."
He still wants to know who told Kubo all that bullshit about equating death to weakness, but one problem at a time. Convincing Kubo that he's a valuable member of the team comes first.
no subject
This was the one he hadn't figured out how to turn into a good show yet, though. But thinking about it didn't distract him enough not to notice Wash's hesitation - it struck Kubo again that this conversation was hard for him too.
He put his hand on Wash's arm, concerned, before considering Wash's words.
"A bard," Kubo repeated, trying out the term. A storyteller who distracted and confused, who inspired the team. Well. If that was an actual job description, then, obviously there was a reason he'd been chosen. A reason that, he realized hopefully, was based on his skills, not on his father's deeds or his mother's legends.
"Oh."
For a second he let that thought roll around in his head.
"That sounds like a job for me," he agreed, feeling a little hope.
If he wasn't expected to be His Mother and Father's Son, if he was expected to be Himself, that was entirely different. Those expectations were far from each other.
He'd still killed his aunt, though. And Legionnaires didn't kill. Yet there he sat, thinking only still, with the memories of that night so fresh, that he wished he'd reached his shamisen sooner. So that his mother's last words could have been something other than "Kubo, run." So that his father hadn't had to have last words yet.
The Legionnaires were too good for those thoughts, but here Kubo was, replacing their vanished compatriots, and having those thoughts.
He glanced at Wash, though, wondering how much of his suggestion was correct.
no subject
But that's a problem for the future.
"And that's why you're here," Wash says calmly. "We needed a bard, and from what I can tell, you're a good one."
The statement is met with silence, and Wash is starting to realize that for Kubo, silence means he has something else to say and is having trouble with it. He meets Kubo's gaze. "What else is on your mind?"
no subject
Kubo wiped his eye again, silently this time.
"It's . . ."
It might be what made Wash agree that he wasn't a fit for the Legion, that their standards were just beyond him.
If he was going to say it, he had to at least say it clearly. He had done this thing. Hiding it was impractical. Hiding it might just end up with him in another position where he was expected to defend his, or someone else's, life. And then what would he do?
Really? What else could he have done? What DID Legionnaires do?
"I already broke one of the Legion's rules," he said. To state flatly that he'd killed his aunt was theatrical, but it wasn't the whole story. "It was my aunt who killed my father. Then my mother. She was going to take my other eye."
What could I have done? He wanted to ask it, but not in defense of himself. Really. What else could he have done? Should he have tried to talk her out of it? Should he have been ABLE to, when his mother was about to die and his father was already dead -
Should he have been able to save her, like he'd spared his grandfather?
"I used too much of my magic," he admitted. If he'd had more practice, if he'd had more control, maybe he could have subdued her. Then found the reserves in his heart to give her a life, like he'd given his grandfather. Maybe that was what the Legion wanted from him. That sort of control, and those wells of forgiveness.
"I killed her."
no subject
She killed the people I love and was trying to kill me, so I killed her is a perfectly logical progression of events for Wash, and he has to take a step back and divorce it from his experiences. He's a soldier, a trained killer, and Kubo is definitely not; obviously this is going to bother Kubo a hell of a lot more than it does him.
"I don't think you need to worry about getting kicked out of the Legion," he starts. "You weren't exactly a Legionnaire at the time, so the rules didn't apply. If they applied retroactively, I'm pretty sure most of the people here wouldn't be eligible to be Legionnaires to begin with." They had soldiers and mercenaries and superheroes and people who had survived apocalypses here; there was no way that most of the new arrivals didn't have some form of body count. "They certainly wouldn't have let me join.
"Plus, the rule isn't 'don't kill ever;' it's 'use lethal force only as a last resort.' Under Legion rules, you do everything you can to stop someone without killing them, but sometimes that doesn't work. Sometimes the only way to defend yourself or to keep someone from killing someone else is to take them out first. It's not always an easy choice, but sometimes it's your only choice." He's long since gotten used to making that choice - defend the life you value more - but Kubo hasn't. The first time is always difficult. "Your aunt killed your parents and was trying to hurt you. That is absolutely self-defense, and nobody here is going to fault you for it." And if they did, Wash would talk with them. 'Talk.'
no subject
Not with that much fear and sorrow and anger in such a small space of time. But maybe it was still possible, and he didn't do it.
Once the words were off his chest, though, he had to consider Wash's words - the very legitimate point that if the Legion was full of people who were more warriors than him, like Wash, like Azula, he couldn't be the only person with a body count. It was a very logical conclusion - he'd just been too upset to think with that much logic.
"I should have thought of that," he said, after a long pause. "That . . . people in wars would have . . ."
He'd liked the ideals inherent in a group of heroes who fought, but did not kill ever. He'd been happy to think of stories peopled by heroes with that kind of skill, that kind of restraint and control, but heroes like that -
Maybe they existed, but they had to be so rare. He couldn't be the first new person brought to the Legion who wasn't up to those standards.
His mother and father wouldn't have even been up to those standards - and in that context, Kubo wanted to reconsider the word.
"I don't know much about being a soldier. Or other peoples' stories here, yet. I didn't mean to -"
To what? Assume Wash hadn't killed? That was . . . not something to apologize for.
"- it's kind of you to listen to me like this," Kubo settled on. "I didn't mean to drop all of my problems on you. I must look pretty foolish."
But it really helped him, to have perspective.
no subject
Still. "Just because you could do it later doesn't mean you could have done it at that exact moment," Wash reasons. "You did what you could with what you had. Doing something different later doesn't make what you did before wrong. It's still self-defense." Wash will stand by that as long as he needs to, or as long as it takes Kubo to believe it - whichever comes first.
And then Kubo picks an interesting sentence to come back in on. "Would have killed each other?" Wash finishes it for him, shrugging. "It's war. It's not pretty, but that's what happens." Killing someone on the battlefield is a hell of a lot different than killing someone out of revenge, and Wash is happy to leave Kubo thinking that Wash's kills have been battlefield only. Kubo has enough problems - there's no reason to add his own to the pile. Not when he's (mostly) dealt with them.
(That's what he tells himself, at least.)
"It's almost like you're in a completely different world with people you've never met before and technology beyond anything you've ever seen in your world," Wash deadpans, and remembers to follow it up with a small smile to make it clear he's joking - not everyone is fluent in sarcasm, and Kubo's had too many terrible things said to him today for Wash to add to the pile, even accidentally. "For what it's worth, this place is new and strange to everybody. You're not the only one with problems, you're not foolish for having them, and it's definitely okay to talk with someone about it." This is, of course, coming from the person who bottles up everything and knows it. Do as he says, not as he does. He moves his hand from Kubo's shoulder, ruffling Kubo's hair instead. "Plus, I asked."
no subject
Or maybe it did the opposite, too, and made people as cold as Azula.
Kubo let out a long breath. "Thank you," he said, "for asking."
He tucked his knees up to his chest, arms around himself loosely, contained but no longer so tense. He tried to return Wash's smile, and it was small, but he did mean it.
no subject
Speaking of asking - there's one thing he still wants to know, and maybe now Kubo is in a better frame of mind to answer it. (Or Wash might wreck Kubo's mood by asking. That's a possibility too, not that it's enough to stop him at this point. Damn.) "As long as I'm asking things...the person who insulted your parents - who was it?"
no subject
Kubo shrugged a little, his expression wry and distasteful more than sad sad. "Her name was Azula. She didn't know what she was talking about."
He'd read his audience carefully, and what he'd read had shocked and scared him, but now that he was climbing back up from breaking down, one cruel girl, even if she was shocking, still wasn't the horror she'd reminded him of. So she was easier to deal with.
"I think she's a lot like my aunts. That's what she reminded me of. Powerful and cold and blind to the worth of anything that wasn't the same. I told her the story of when Mother, Father, and I fought a giant skeleton demon and found the Sword Unbreakable -"
He realized he was getting off-topic, but also that he was smiling again, really smiling. Those few memories he had would never cease to be joyful, no matter how cruel another mortal became.
"I don't know why it surprised me so much. I've just never heard anyone mortal say something so cruel. She just . . . reminded me of them."
A shudder crept back into his frame.
"I just didn't expect it. Now that I know, I won't fall apart like this again."
It was as much a reassurance to Wash as it was a promise to himself. Azula had alerted him to cruelty that could still be committed by mortals. The cruelty was easier to face when it wasn't related to you, when the cruel people couldn't hurt you any worse than you'd already been hurt. Nobody could kill his mother and father again.
It wasn't comforting, but it was true.