Kubo ♫ Kubo and the Two Strings (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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legionworld2016-11-27 05:27 pm
bachido) wrote in legionworld2016-11-27 05:27 pm
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[Open] The Tale of the Three Strings
Who| Open
What| Kubo said he'd tell his life story before Legion Legacies got to it. Now he's making good on that announcement.
Where| the Cafeteria
When| After the Legion Legacies announcement
Warnings/Notes| TL;DR canon review plus some death and violence towards a kid.
Five days ago, Kubo had announced his intentions to tell his life's story in full by a show of his own design. He showed up in the Legion cafeteria as he'd announced he would, and didn't draw attention to himself as he got ready. He paused to smile at a few faces he knew in the audience, but other than that, stuck to getting ready. The only changes from his usual short midday performances were Dave nearby, with his recording equipment already in position, and the stack of paper that Kubo set on the floor. It was a lot taller than usual.
When Kubo had set up his paper and done his final check that his shamisen was tuned, he took a deep breath and spoke loudly.
"If you must blink - do it now."
He struck his opening chord and blue paper snapped over the cafeteria's lighting elements, dimming the room to night. A full white-paper moon hung, illuminated by a bare light over a paper sea, rippling in tumultuous waves.
A folded-paper woman in a golden kimono rode the waves in a paper boat barely even as large as a canoe, her body language downcast, her paper hands loosely holding a shamisen. Even the tilt of her head suggested grief.
"Pay careful attention to everything you see and hear, no matter how unusual it may seem," Kubo narrated, playing on as the paper woman's boat rode the waves. "And please be warned, if you fidget, if you look away, if you forget any part of what I tell you, even for an instant -"
An enormous wave towered between the woman in her tiny boat and the moon. The woman raised her hand, holding a tiny paper bachi, and brought it down hard on a chord that Kubo played loudly on his shamisen, the sound ringing over the audience as the paper woman's magic cut down the paper wave.
"- Then you will not know the Tale of the Three Strings."
A black, rocky paper shore rose before the woman. But another wave rose behind her, crashing down and smashing her boat in two, plunging her under dark waves and hard against submerged rocks. Red paper scraps bled from a wound that cut the paper woman's face from eyebrow to lip. A tiny red bundle separated from her back as she was tossed about in the water, and both bundle and woman washed up upon the black shore.
"My name is Kubo."
Kubo held back a tremor in his voice. He had worked this story until it was just right, until it told
everything that needed to be told, even the parts which marked him out as less than a great hero. Things would change after he told this story - but they would change whether he told it or not, and this way, at least everyone would know the whole truth. Not whatever partial truth someone else decided was right to tell.
On the paper shore, the woman crawled with agonizing effort, trailing scraps of paper blood from her head wound, to reach the red bundle. She pushed aside a fold to reveal a baby, his left eye covered by a white, bloodstained bandage, and folded herself in despair around her wounded baby.
Kubo had tucked his own hair behind his ear for this performance, exposing clearly his eyepatch.
"My grandfather stole something from me. And that really is the least of it."
Daylight dawned over the rocky shore, and the cave atop the cliff where the music refolded the paper woman and her child, now older.
"By night, my mother and I hid from the watchful gaze of my grandfather - the Moon King. By day - "
The paper woman slumped, insensate, as her child performed chores around her.
"I cared for Mother. Her memory was weakened by my grandfather's attack, and her spirit would sleep for hours at a time, trapped inside her body. Every day, she faded a little more. But she always came back at nightfall."
Blue night fell over the cave again, and the paper woman rose out of her slump, turning her blank face, somehow now full of life and energy, to her child at her side. The music took an uplifting turn as Mother rose and played with her child.
"She told me stories of my father, who died saving my other eye - Hanzo, the mightiest samurai warrior who ever lived. By day, I took those stories to the village, where I told my father's stories and earned our living."
The paper boy ran down the road outside his cave, the paper mountain fluttering away to reform a paper village, where Kubo entertained villagers with his own paper magic, receiving tiny, folded coins in return.
"For eleven years, we hid from the Moon King, taking care of each other, telling stories. And then - I made a mistake."
Paper Kubo knelt before a stone shrine by a river as the light of day waned.
"At the Obon festival, I tried to seek guidance from my father's spirit. But while the lanterns all around me lit, illuminated by the spirits of my neighbors' loved ones, mine stayed dark - no matter how hard I prayed. No matter how much I needed my father's spirit - he would not arrive to guide me."
The bitter paper child balled up his dark lantern, but regretfully picked it back up as the night fell complete around him.
"I stayed out past nightfall, and there in the shrines, Moon King's daughters found me."
Eerie light and music chased away the bittersweet comfort of the shrines as two grey and black paper ladies with identical white masked faces attacked the paper boy, chasing him through tall trees.
"My aunts attacked the village, destroying houses, killing my neighbors, chasing me with one purpose in mind - to pluck out my other eye, and make me as cold and cruel as they were. But Mother found us in time."
Mother met her paper son at the edge of the half-ruined village, and with a touch of her hands, wings rose from his back and carried him into the sky.
The wings were a new effect, made of a biodegradeable glitter that Kubo had discovered listened to his music like paper did. They approximated the effect of magic better than paper would have. It had been tricky, too, for him to get the paper folded tight enough to blow in strands of individual hair, but he'd done it, and as his paper self flew away, he made a point of it to show him grabbing at his mother's hair, pulling one strand with him.
"She had enchanted my father's robes, to fly me away. And she had given me a magic charm, to protect me when she was not with me. I would have given up those things gladly, if I could have kept her with me instead, but all I took with me was one hair from her head -"
As the paper boy was flown away by his own wings, the sisters emerged from the decimated village, and Mother raised her hands, charging into battle. With a concussive chord on the shamisen and an explosion of paper and the magic effect of the glitter, Mother dissolved in a show of deadly power that threw the sisters back, fragments of her golden robe falling like dead leaves in the sudden silence.
Kubo held the mournful silence, then brought his bachi back down. The scene shifted, leaving Paper Kubo on a blank field of white, fragments of white paper whirling around him like snow in a blizzard.
"I awoke in the Farlands. My mother was gone. My village, destroyed. But I was not alone. My mother's last magic had brought her wooden Monkey charm to life, to protect me and guide me on my quest to find the magic armor which my father had once sought, the only weapons strong enough to protect me from the Moon King's evil power."
He played out their journey across the snowy Farlands, the shelter they'd taken in a dead whale, the pranks Kubo had played on his gruff protector with his growing paper magic.
"I followed Monkey through the Farlands. She was bossy, and harsh, and the most encouragement she gave was to encourage me not to die. But she cared about me. And when something snatched me out from under her nose, she sprang to protect me -"
On their walk through the snowy Farlands, strewn with statues of giants, a buglike creature snatched Kubo up, menacingly huge, four-armed and armed with a bow. Monkey leaped to attack -
"-but she didn't need to. I had been captured by one of my father's own samurai warriors! Once a man, he had been cursed to wander the Farlands as a monstrous, giant beetle, with no memories of the noble warrior he once had been. But he knew my father's crest, and he knew Hanzo's name, and so he pledged himself to our quest. We set off in search of the first piece of armor - the Sword Unbreakable."
Kubo carried the tale on through their trials against a towering skeleton demon as large as a building, the guardian of the Sword Unbreakable. Though he lingered on the action of the quest, he made time to include the forgetful Beetle's jokes and Monkey's demonstrations of determination and skill, the devotion that grew between the three of them. There seemed no real need to include a scene upon the Long Lake of Beetle teaching Kubo to fish, or all of them sitting down to a shared meal, except to show that Kubo had loved his strange companions. And they, too, cared deeply for him.
"I had been sad and scared when my quest began, but I was very happy to share a between two creatures who cared enough to protect me and teach me," Kubo said, strumming the last cord on that peaceful scene.
"Night fell as we found the second piece of armor - the Breastplate Impenetrable, beneath the waves of the Long Lake, guarded by a Garden of Eyes! Terrible monsters that showed truths to distract heroes and keep them underwater until they were drowned, or eaten. When Beetle went searching for the Breastplate and didn't return, I went after him - and found two things. The Breastplate Impenetrable, and a truth."
Kubo fell silent as he illustrated the battle beneath the waves between Beetle and the Garden of Eyes, the samurai bug shooting paper arrow after arrow into the enormous, staring golden eyes, snatching Kubo from the jaws of the monster, where he had fallen, drowning, trapped in a golden-eyed gaze. When Beetle had dragged Kubo back to the surface, to the boat of leaves where Monkey waited, Kubo's music brought the glitter that symbolized magic back into the scene as Monkey cradled Kubo, like a mother cradling her half-drowned child. The glitter formed an image of Kubo's deceased mother around the paper monkey.
"Monkey was not my mother's creation. She was my mother - living through the charm she'd enchanted, so that she could continue to protect me after her own body had died."
How could he convey the mixed confusion and yet joy he'd felt, at finding out that his beloved mother had not died after all, but had stayed even past death to protect him, even in a body not her own? How could he rightly tell the audience how confused he still was, that she'd not told him who she was from the start?
It was the part he'd struggled over the most to craft, and the music hitched only a little as Kubo guided the paper boat to shore, and the heroic trio off it.
"In a cave by the lake, she told us her story."
Kubo settled the trio in their cave, and began a story-within-a-story, using a maple leaf and a flower to illustrate the two main characters of his parents' love story.
"As the daughter of the Moon King, she and her sisters had come down from the night sky and killed many noble warriors. On her father's orders, she arrived before her sisters to confront the mighty Hanzo on his quest for the Armor of Legend. 'You have offended my father,' she told him. 'Now you must die.'"
"They fought. Hanzo was strong, but then he stopped. The Sword Unbreakable lay forgotten as the samurai said four words that changed everything - 'You are my quest.'"
The figures ceased to strain against each other, the Moon Princess lowering her sword, accepting the samurai's touch as he put his paper hand on her face.
"She had seen the wonders of the universe, but the warmth in my father's gaze was more powerful than anything in her cold realm. In recognizing his compassion, she recognized her own. She spared his life. He gave his life to her."
Kubo lingered on this tale, allowing the paper figures to dance among red and gold stars, illustrating their love as it grew before a small, red paper bundle drifted up, to be shared in their arms.
"And then they gave me to each other. But my grandfather found them. His rage at her betrayal shook the heavens."
The paper story-within-a-story fell away, leaving Monkey, Kubo, and Beetle in the cave by the lake, bedded down for the night.
"That night, I made another mistake," Kubo went on.
The scene darkened, and a single beam of spotlight illuminated a new figure - a man in pale blue and white, playing the shamisen to wake the paper Kubo.
"I dreamed of an old man, who told me where to find the last piece of the armor - and I believed him. I lead Mother and Beetle to Hanzo's fortress, where my father and his army had died to save me."
Kubo played through the journey, illustrating the landscapes they'd crossed, the affection that grew between the three as they traveled. The song filled their silent journey with a sense of joy and comfort that only faded when they arrived, at nightfall, at the half-demolished fortress.
"As we explored the wrecked castle, Beetle wondered why the Helmet Invulnerable would be here -"
Behind Beetle and Kubo, one of the sisters rose, surrounded by the billowing smoke of her evil magic.
"-and I realized my mistake."
The fight that followed was brief, with Monkey wounded and the sister confining them with smoke from her pipe. With the trio held hostage, the paper sister dragged one hand down the side of paper Kubo's face.
"My mother's sister prepared to take my eye. But before she did that, she told us another story - how my father, Hanzo, had taken taken my mother from them, and so they decided that it was only fitting they take something from Hanzo as well. Something besides his life. They had taken his memories, taken his humanity, and cast him into the Farlands. Just as my mother had been with me the whole time, my father had been with us as well. I didn't have to wonder why my father's spirit had not come to me at the Obon festival anymore, because he had never been dead at all."
With the story revealed, the sister flung Beetle into a broken wall. But when she turned back to Kubo, the paper boy had managed to free one hand, and he struck the sister with his bachi, shattering the bottom of her mask and the magic pipe that controlled her magic smoke.
"I fought to protect my eye. I fought, to protect my mother, dying of her wounds. I fought for the chance to speak to my father again, this time knowing who he was. He fought for this too."
The sister advanced on Monkey, crawling with the pain of her wounds, ready with swords to kill her diminished sister, but a thrown sword knocked her into a nearby wall, burying her under rubble. Beetle dropped the remaining three swords in his hands, and he and Kubo ran to Monkey.
She lay dying, the violence halted for this one last moment in which the three could be a family again.
"And then I made another mistake. I didn't pay attention."
A paper sword stabbed Beetle clean through. He fell dead as Kubo fell silent, his shamisen screaming with tension - horror, fear, grief of a family twice taken from him. The sister pulled her sword from Hanzo's body. Kubo fled, reaching for his shamisen. The sister brought her sword down, cutting the paper monkey in half. She raised her sword again to Kubo as he reached his shamisen, lifted it, brought his hand down on the strings in a chord so loud it broke two paper strings and sent a concussive blast surging through the whole cafeteria, powerful enough to stun the audience, cracking the paper sister - and her mask - in half.
Silence hung, silence that lasted a little too long over the unmoving paper figures. Kubo had not been foolish enough not to rehearse this scene, and he'd felt the grief when he'd previously played it through.
But the grief was different - harder - with the whole of the story behind it. This portion of the story that he had never performed before, that was so hard to put any words to.
He had to keep playing. He had to keep telling the story. But he'd forgotten the words he'd planned to say next.
I didn't mean to kill her felt like a thing he should want to say. But he didn't want to say it.
He sucked in a ragged breath, decided not to speak. He moved his hands back to the strings of the shamisen, and played the night into day.
"A scroll in my father's fortress told the truth," he said, his voice back after all. "The Helmet Invulnerable was in my own village. I had a long way to go before I would reach it - and the Moon King would come for me at night. I took only my father's bowstring, to go with my mother's hair."
The paper Kubo raised his bachi and broke the last string on his shamisen, the single note gathering paper around him like wings to fly him home. Night fell as he arrived with his stringless shamisen in his village, retrieved the Helmet Impentrable, and sent the surviving villagers into hiding just in time for the arrival of the Moon King -
"In my village, finally, he showed his face - the same old man who had guided me wrong in my dream. The same old man I'd been foolish to listen to. Now that I had my father's armor, but didn't have my father or my mother, I was ready to kill him."
- the pale, white-and-blue papered old man walked in a spotlight that made him glow like the moon, through paper wreckage and against the tense, grieving paper boy, his every motion too fluid and calm among death and destruction to be anything but frightening.
"But he was stronger than I was. Stronger - and more terrible than I had ever imagined."
The Moon King's form expanded, excess paper folded inside his human form expanding outward until he fit the image of a monster that ruined a child's life - a flying, armored snakelike beast with a huge jaw full of sharp teeth. The paper boy fought against him, taking one of the Moon Beast's eyes, but it was clear that the boy was losing in spite of the advantage of his armor, in spite of his fury and his hate and all the grief that had given him the certainty to strike out with his sword.
The Moon Beast threw the boy into the forest, stalking him among the trees, where Kubo had to choose between the Sword Unbreakable, and the shamisen that he no longer had strings for.
The paper monster wound amidst the trees, closing in slowly.
"The Moon King had wanted to take my eye, so that I couldn't look at another person and see their humanity. Feel their compassion, their love. So that I wouldn't have a reason to want to stay on the human world. He wanted to take me to a place beyond stories, because when he looked down on the world, all he saw with his blind eyes was hate, and death, and suffering."
Nevermind that the Moon King had been the cause of all the suffering in Kubo's life. The unspoken, lingering fury of this fact still choked Kubo's words.
"But for every ugly thing in the mortal world, there was something else that was beautiful. My mother saw it."
The paper kubo took the strand of his mother's hair, and strung his shamisen with it, as the Moon Beast wound through the trees.
"My father saw it." He strung the shamisen with the bowstring.
"And I saw it, too."
The paper boy plucked one hair from his own head, and with it, completed the stringing of his shamisen.
"For all the awfulness that the Moon King had brought into my life, I had memories to match them. My neighbors had memories to match them."
Paper figures emerged from the trees to gather around Kubo amid the shrines, as the Moon Beast closed in on them, picking up speed, as Kubo raised his bachi preparing to strike with the shamisen, the tool he knew so much better than the sword.
"Holding those memories deep in our hearts, we stood against the Moon King. He had tried to take my mother's memories, but she never stopped fighting for me. He had tried to take my father's memories, but he still found us, and loved us. The Moon King tried to take those memories because with them, together, we were stronger than he would ever be."
The Moon King battered against a sudden sheen of the glittering magic effect, surrounding Kubo and his neighbors as he strummed a chord on the shamisen. Another chord, and the magical shield grew stronger, formed figures of people standing in and among the living villagers. A tall man and woman stood on either side of the paper Kubo, their hands on his shoulders.
The Moon King, enraged, lashed his tail, struck the glittering barrier once more, and was consumed by the effect of Kubo's last chord. When the gold of Kubo's magic cleared, nothing was left of the beast but an unilluminated paper man.
The villagers gathered around the kneeling figure, Kubo closest to the old man.
"I greeted my grandfather. He no longer remembered being the Moon King. He no longer remembered being my grandfather. He asked me for help remembering his story." he paused, before admitting - "I hesitated to give it."
"But the villagers gave him another story to live. They told him he was a kind man. They told him he was generous, and gentle, and adored his grandson. He took this kind story, and I believed he could live it. So my grandfather came to live with me as my family - not in the way he'd wanted, but as he'd tried to do, after all. And given the opportunity to be kind, and learn compassion, he didn't waste it."
It was strange, now, that Kubo's heart should ache a little for the grandfather he'd left behind, despite the pain in his heart that still bled over the loss of his parents. There would be time for that later, though. His story was not yet complete.
"I had one more thing to do, before this story could have a happy ending."
The sun rose as Paper Kubo watched the villagers depart with his grandfather, and, alone among the shrines by the river, sat and folded two paper lanterns to place on his own shrine.
"I had to speak to my mother and father. I had to tell them that I was grateful. I had gotten to meet them. I had heard their wisdom, and felt their kindness. This story had been a happy one - but it would be happier if I heard them once more. And this time, when I prayed for their spirits to visit me at the shrines -"
Lanterns floated down the paper river, as two beams of spotlight illuminated Kubo's lanterns for his parents. The paper boy carried the lanterns to the river, set them down, and waited as the floating paper lanterns of his neighbors' loved ones rose out of the water, the paper folding into beautiful, golden herons that flew in front of the paper boy and his lights.
When they had passed, the paper boy stood no longer alone. Beside him knelt a man and a woman glittering in gold, their hands on his shoulders. The paper woman tucked the boy's bangs behind his ear, exposing his eyepatch.
"-they came to me. And we ended the story together."
Kubo struck the final note on his shamisen, and at that conclusive sound, the paper scenery and golden herons unfolded, stacked themselves quietly and neatly, and the last fluttering sound of Kubo's materials brought the story to its close.
"The end."
What| Kubo said he'd tell his life story before Legion Legacies got to it. Now he's making good on that announcement.
Where| the Cafeteria
When| After the Legion Legacies announcement
Warnings/Notes| TL;DR canon review plus some death and violence towards a kid.
Five days ago, Kubo had announced his intentions to tell his life's story in full by a show of his own design. He showed up in the Legion cafeteria as he'd announced he would, and didn't draw attention to himself as he got ready. He paused to smile at a few faces he knew in the audience, but other than that, stuck to getting ready. The only changes from his usual short midday performances were Dave nearby, with his recording equipment already in position, and the stack of paper that Kubo set on the floor. It was a lot taller than usual.
When Kubo had set up his paper and done his final check that his shamisen was tuned, he took a deep breath and spoke loudly.
"If you must blink - do it now."
He struck his opening chord and blue paper snapped over the cafeteria's lighting elements, dimming the room to night. A full white-paper moon hung, illuminated by a bare light over a paper sea, rippling in tumultuous waves.
A folded-paper woman in a golden kimono rode the waves in a paper boat barely even as large as a canoe, her body language downcast, her paper hands loosely holding a shamisen. Even the tilt of her head suggested grief.
"Pay careful attention to everything you see and hear, no matter how unusual it may seem," Kubo narrated, playing on as the paper woman's boat rode the waves. "And please be warned, if you fidget, if you look away, if you forget any part of what I tell you, even for an instant -"
An enormous wave towered between the woman in her tiny boat and the moon. The woman raised her hand, holding a tiny paper bachi, and brought it down hard on a chord that Kubo played loudly on his shamisen, the sound ringing over the audience as the paper woman's magic cut down the paper wave.
"- Then you will not know the Tale of the Three Strings."
A black, rocky paper shore rose before the woman. But another wave rose behind her, crashing down and smashing her boat in two, plunging her under dark waves and hard against submerged rocks. Red paper scraps bled from a wound that cut the paper woman's face from eyebrow to lip. A tiny red bundle separated from her back as she was tossed about in the water, and both bundle and woman washed up upon the black shore.
"My name is Kubo."
Kubo held back a tremor in his voice. He had worked this story until it was just right, until it told
everything that needed to be told, even the parts which marked him out as less than a great hero. Things would change after he told this story - but they would change whether he told it or not, and this way, at least everyone would know the whole truth. Not whatever partial truth someone else decided was right to tell.
On the paper shore, the woman crawled with agonizing effort, trailing scraps of paper blood from her head wound, to reach the red bundle. She pushed aside a fold to reveal a baby, his left eye covered by a white, bloodstained bandage, and folded herself in despair around her wounded baby.
Kubo had tucked his own hair behind his ear for this performance, exposing clearly his eyepatch.
"My grandfather stole something from me. And that really is the least of it."
Daylight dawned over the rocky shore, and the cave atop the cliff where the music refolded the paper woman and her child, now older.
"By night, my mother and I hid from the watchful gaze of my grandfather - the Moon King. By day - "
The paper woman slumped, insensate, as her child performed chores around her.
"I cared for Mother. Her memory was weakened by my grandfather's attack, and her spirit would sleep for hours at a time, trapped inside her body. Every day, she faded a little more. But she always came back at nightfall."
Blue night fell over the cave again, and the paper woman rose out of her slump, turning her blank face, somehow now full of life and energy, to her child at her side. The music took an uplifting turn as Mother rose and played with her child.
"She told me stories of my father, who died saving my other eye - Hanzo, the mightiest samurai warrior who ever lived. By day, I took those stories to the village, where I told my father's stories and earned our living."
The paper boy ran down the road outside his cave, the paper mountain fluttering away to reform a paper village, where Kubo entertained villagers with his own paper magic, receiving tiny, folded coins in return.
"For eleven years, we hid from the Moon King, taking care of each other, telling stories. And then - I made a mistake."
Paper Kubo knelt before a stone shrine by a river as the light of day waned.
"At the Obon festival, I tried to seek guidance from my father's spirit. But while the lanterns all around me lit, illuminated by the spirits of my neighbors' loved ones, mine stayed dark - no matter how hard I prayed. No matter how much I needed my father's spirit - he would not arrive to guide me."
The bitter paper child balled up his dark lantern, but regretfully picked it back up as the night fell complete around him.
"I stayed out past nightfall, and there in the shrines, Moon King's daughters found me."
Eerie light and music chased away the bittersweet comfort of the shrines as two grey and black paper ladies with identical white masked faces attacked the paper boy, chasing him through tall trees.
"My aunts attacked the village, destroying houses, killing my neighbors, chasing me with one purpose in mind - to pluck out my other eye, and make me as cold and cruel as they were. But Mother found us in time."
Mother met her paper son at the edge of the half-ruined village, and with a touch of her hands, wings rose from his back and carried him into the sky.
The wings were a new effect, made of a biodegradeable glitter that Kubo had discovered listened to his music like paper did. They approximated the effect of magic better than paper would have. It had been tricky, too, for him to get the paper folded tight enough to blow in strands of individual hair, but he'd done it, and as his paper self flew away, he made a point of it to show him grabbing at his mother's hair, pulling one strand with him.
"She had enchanted my father's robes, to fly me away. And she had given me a magic charm, to protect me when she was not with me. I would have given up those things gladly, if I could have kept her with me instead, but all I took with me was one hair from her head -"
As the paper boy was flown away by his own wings, the sisters emerged from the decimated village, and Mother raised her hands, charging into battle. With a concussive chord on the shamisen and an explosion of paper and the magic effect of the glitter, Mother dissolved in a show of deadly power that threw the sisters back, fragments of her golden robe falling like dead leaves in the sudden silence.
Kubo held the mournful silence, then brought his bachi back down. The scene shifted, leaving Paper Kubo on a blank field of white, fragments of white paper whirling around him like snow in a blizzard.
"I awoke in the Farlands. My mother was gone. My village, destroyed. But I was not alone. My mother's last magic had brought her wooden Monkey charm to life, to protect me and guide me on my quest to find the magic armor which my father had once sought, the only weapons strong enough to protect me from the Moon King's evil power."
He played out their journey across the snowy Farlands, the shelter they'd taken in a dead whale, the pranks Kubo had played on his gruff protector with his growing paper magic.
"I followed Monkey through the Farlands. She was bossy, and harsh, and the most encouragement she gave was to encourage me not to die. But she cared about me. And when something snatched me out from under her nose, she sprang to protect me -"
On their walk through the snowy Farlands, strewn with statues of giants, a buglike creature snatched Kubo up, menacingly huge, four-armed and armed with a bow. Monkey leaped to attack -
"-but she didn't need to. I had been captured by one of my father's own samurai warriors! Once a man, he had been cursed to wander the Farlands as a monstrous, giant beetle, with no memories of the noble warrior he once had been. But he knew my father's crest, and he knew Hanzo's name, and so he pledged himself to our quest. We set off in search of the first piece of armor - the Sword Unbreakable."
Kubo carried the tale on through their trials against a towering skeleton demon as large as a building, the guardian of the Sword Unbreakable. Though he lingered on the action of the quest, he made time to include the forgetful Beetle's jokes and Monkey's demonstrations of determination and skill, the devotion that grew between the three of them. There seemed no real need to include a scene upon the Long Lake of Beetle teaching Kubo to fish, or all of them sitting down to a shared meal, except to show that Kubo had loved his strange companions. And they, too, cared deeply for him.
"I had been sad and scared when my quest began, but I was very happy to share a between two creatures who cared enough to protect me and teach me," Kubo said, strumming the last cord on that peaceful scene.
"Night fell as we found the second piece of armor - the Breastplate Impenetrable, beneath the waves of the Long Lake, guarded by a Garden of Eyes! Terrible monsters that showed truths to distract heroes and keep them underwater until they were drowned, or eaten. When Beetle went searching for the Breastplate and didn't return, I went after him - and found two things. The Breastplate Impenetrable, and a truth."
Kubo fell silent as he illustrated the battle beneath the waves between Beetle and the Garden of Eyes, the samurai bug shooting paper arrow after arrow into the enormous, staring golden eyes, snatching Kubo from the jaws of the monster, where he had fallen, drowning, trapped in a golden-eyed gaze. When Beetle had dragged Kubo back to the surface, to the boat of leaves where Monkey waited, Kubo's music brought the glitter that symbolized magic back into the scene as Monkey cradled Kubo, like a mother cradling her half-drowned child. The glitter formed an image of Kubo's deceased mother around the paper monkey.
"Monkey was not my mother's creation. She was my mother - living through the charm she'd enchanted, so that she could continue to protect me after her own body had died."
How could he convey the mixed confusion and yet joy he'd felt, at finding out that his beloved mother had not died after all, but had stayed even past death to protect him, even in a body not her own? How could he rightly tell the audience how confused he still was, that she'd not told him who she was from the start?
It was the part he'd struggled over the most to craft, and the music hitched only a little as Kubo guided the paper boat to shore, and the heroic trio off it.
"In a cave by the lake, she told us her story."
Kubo settled the trio in their cave, and began a story-within-a-story, using a maple leaf and a flower to illustrate the two main characters of his parents' love story.
"As the daughter of the Moon King, she and her sisters had come down from the night sky and killed many noble warriors. On her father's orders, she arrived before her sisters to confront the mighty Hanzo on his quest for the Armor of Legend. 'You have offended my father,' she told him. 'Now you must die.'"
"They fought. Hanzo was strong, but then he stopped. The Sword Unbreakable lay forgotten as the samurai said four words that changed everything - 'You are my quest.'"
The figures ceased to strain against each other, the Moon Princess lowering her sword, accepting the samurai's touch as he put his paper hand on her face.
"She had seen the wonders of the universe, but the warmth in my father's gaze was more powerful than anything in her cold realm. In recognizing his compassion, she recognized her own. She spared his life. He gave his life to her."
Kubo lingered on this tale, allowing the paper figures to dance among red and gold stars, illustrating their love as it grew before a small, red paper bundle drifted up, to be shared in their arms.
"And then they gave me to each other. But my grandfather found them. His rage at her betrayal shook the heavens."
The paper story-within-a-story fell away, leaving Monkey, Kubo, and Beetle in the cave by the lake, bedded down for the night.
"That night, I made another mistake," Kubo went on.
The scene darkened, and a single beam of spotlight illuminated a new figure - a man in pale blue and white, playing the shamisen to wake the paper Kubo.
"I dreamed of an old man, who told me where to find the last piece of the armor - and I believed him. I lead Mother and Beetle to Hanzo's fortress, where my father and his army had died to save me."
Kubo played through the journey, illustrating the landscapes they'd crossed, the affection that grew between the three as they traveled. The song filled their silent journey with a sense of joy and comfort that only faded when they arrived, at nightfall, at the half-demolished fortress.
"As we explored the wrecked castle, Beetle wondered why the Helmet Invulnerable would be here -"
Behind Beetle and Kubo, one of the sisters rose, surrounded by the billowing smoke of her evil magic.
"-and I realized my mistake."
The fight that followed was brief, with Monkey wounded and the sister confining them with smoke from her pipe. With the trio held hostage, the paper sister dragged one hand down the side of paper Kubo's face.
"My mother's sister prepared to take my eye. But before she did that, she told us another story - how my father, Hanzo, had taken taken my mother from them, and so they decided that it was only fitting they take something from Hanzo as well. Something besides his life. They had taken his memories, taken his humanity, and cast him into the Farlands. Just as my mother had been with me the whole time, my father had been with us as well. I didn't have to wonder why my father's spirit had not come to me at the Obon festival anymore, because he had never been dead at all."
With the story revealed, the sister flung Beetle into a broken wall. But when she turned back to Kubo, the paper boy had managed to free one hand, and he struck the sister with his bachi, shattering the bottom of her mask and the magic pipe that controlled her magic smoke.
"I fought to protect my eye. I fought, to protect my mother, dying of her wounds. I fought for the chance to speak to my father again, this time knowing who he was. He fought for this too."
The sister advanced on Monkey, crawling with the pain of her wounds, ready with swords to kill her diminished sister, but a thrown sword knocked her into a nearby wall, burying her under rubble. Beetle dropped the remaining three swords in his hands, and he and Kubo ran to Monkey.
She lay dying, the violence halted for this one last moment in which the three could be a family again.
"And then I made another mistake. I didn't pay attention."
A paper sword stabbed Beetle clean through. He fell dead as Kubo fell silent, his shamisen screaming with tension - horror, fear, grief of a family twice taken from him. The sister pulled her sword from Hanzo's body. Kubo fled, reaching for his shamisen. The sister brought her sword down, cutting the paper monkey in half. She raised her sword again to Kubo as he reached his shamisen, lifted it, brought his hand down on the strings in a chord so loud it broke two paper strings and sent a concussive blast surging through the whole cafeteria, powerful enough to stun the audience, cracking the paper sister - and her mask - in half.
Silence hung, silence that lasted a little too long over the unmoving paper figures. Kubo had not been foolish enough not to rehearse this scene, and he'd felt the grief when he'd previously played it through.
But the grief was different - harder - with the whole of the story behind it. This portion of the story that he had never performed before, that was so hard to put any words to.
He had to keep playing. He had to keep telling the story. But he'd forgotten the words he'd planned to say next.
I didn't mean to kill her felt like a thing he should want to say. But he didn't want to say it.
He sucked in a ragged breath, decided not to speak. He moved his hands back to the strings of the shamisen, and played the night into day.
"A scroll in my father's fortress told the truth," he said, his voice back after all. "The Helmet Invulnerable was in my own village. I had a long way to go before I would reach it - and the Moon King would come for me at night. I took only my father's bowstring, to go with my mother's hair."
The paper Kubo raised his bachi and broke the last string on his shamisen, the single note gathering paper around him like wings to fly him home. Night fell as he arrived with his stringless shamisen in his village, retrieved the Helmet Impentrable, and sent the surviving villagers into hiding just in time for the arrival of the Moon King -
"In my village, finally, he showed his face - the same old man who had guided me wrong in my dream. The same old man I'd been foolish to listen to. Now that I had my father's armor, but didn't have my father or my mother, I was ready to kill him."
- the pale, white-and-blue papered old man walked in a spotlight that made him glow like the moon, through paper wreckage and against the tense, grieving paper boy, his every motion too fluid and calm among death and destruction to be anything but frightening.
"But he was stronger than I was. Stronger - and more terrible than I had ever imagined."
The Moon King's form expanded, excess paper folded inside his human form expanding outward until he fit the image of a monster that ruined a child's life - a flying, armored snakelike beast with a huge jaw full of sharp teeth. The paper boy fought against him, taking one of the Moon Beast's eyes, but it was clear that the boy was losing in spite of the advantage of his armor, in spite of his fury and his hate and all the grief that had given him the certainty to strike out with his sword.
The Moon Beast threw the boy into the forest, stalking him among the trees, where Kubo had to choose between the Sword Unbreakable, and the shamisen that he no longer had strings for.
The paper monster wound amidst the trees, closing in slowly.
"The Moon King had wanted to take my eye, so that I couldn't look at another person and see their humanity. Feel their compassion, their love. So that I wouldn't have a reason to want to stay on the human world. He wanted to take me to a place beyond stories, because when he looked down on the world, all he saw with his blind eyes was hate, and death, and suffering."
Nevermind that the Moon King had been the cause of all the suffering in Kubo's life. The unspoken, lingering fury of this fact still choked Kubo's words.
"But for every ugly thing in the mortal world, there was something else that was beautiful. My mother saw it."
The paper kubo took the strand of his mother's hair, and strung his shamisen with it, as the Moon Beast wound through the trees.
"My father saw it." He strung the shamisen with the bowstring.
"And I saw it, too."
The paper boy plucked one hair from his own head, and with it, completed the stringing of his shamisen.
"For all the awfulness that the Moon King had brought into my life, I had memories to match them. My neighbors had memories to match them."
Paper figures emerged from the trees to gather around Kubo amid the shrines, as the Moon Beast closed in on them, picking up speed, as Kubo raised his bachi preparing to strike with the shamisen, the tool he knew so much better than the sword.
"Holding those memories deep in our hearts, we stood against the Moon King. He had tried to take my mother's memories, but she never stopped fighting for me. He had tried to take my father's memories, but he still found us, and loved us. The Moon King tried to take those memories because with them, together, we were stronger than he would ever be."
The Moon King battered against a sudden sheen of the glittering magic effect, surrounding Kubo and his neighbors as he strummed a chord on the shamisen. Another chord, and the magical shield grew stronger, formed figures of people standing in and among the living villagers. A tall man and woman stood on either side of the paper Kubo, their hands on his shoulders.
The Moon King, enraged, lashed his tail, struck the glittering barrier once more, and was consumed by the effect of Kubo's last chord. When the gold of Kubo's magic cleared, nothing was left of the beast but an unilluminated paper man.
The villagers gathered around the kneeling figure, Kubo closest to the old man.
"I greeted my grandfather. He no longer remembered being the Moon King. He no longer remembered being my grandfather. He asked me for help remembering his story." he paused, before admitting - "I hesitated to give it."
"But the villagers gave him another story to live. They told him he was a kind man. They told him he was generous, and gentle, and adored his grandson. He took this kind story, and I believed he could live it. So my grandfather came to live with me as my family - not in the way he'd wanted, but as he'd tried to do, after all. And given the opportunity to be kind, and learn compassion, he didn't waste it."
It was strange, now, that Kubo's heart should ache a little for the grandfather he'd left behind, despite the pain in his heart that still bled over the loss of his parents. There would be time for that later, though. His story was not yet complete.
"I had one more thing to do, before this story could have a happy ending."
The sun rose as Paper Kubo watched the villagers depart with his grandfather, and, alone among the shrines by the river, sat and folded two paper lanterns to place on his own shrine.
"I had to speak to my mother and father. I had to tell them that I was grateful. I had gotten to meet them. I had heard their wisdom, and felt their kindness. This story had been a happy one - but it would be happier if I heard them once more. And this time, when I prayed for their spirits to visit me at the shrines -"
Lanterns floated down the paper river, as two beams of spotlight illuminated Kubo's lanterns for his parents. The paper boy carried the lanterns to the river, set them down, and waited as the floating paper lanterns of his neighbors' loved ones rose out of the water, the paper folding into beautiful, golden herons that flew in front of the paper boy and his lights.
When they had passed, the paper boy stood no longer alone. Beside him knelt a man and a woman glittering in gold, their hands on his shoulders. The paper woman tucked the boy's bangs behind his ear, exposing his eyepatch.
"-they came to me. And we ended the story together."
Kubo struck the final note on his shamisen, and at that conclusive sound, the paper scenery and golden herons unfolded, stacked themselves quietly and neatly, and the last fluttering sound of Kubo's materials brought the story to its close.
"The end."
[After the performance]
So he did what seemed the easiest thing to do to steady himself after a draining performance - he went to go get a bowl of noodles.
Sitting himself in a portion of the cafeteria where he couldn't be snuck up on, Kubo ate quietly hungry enough not to sort out his feelings just yet.
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And then silence for a few moments, while he fiddled with the crust of his sandwich. Did you at one point think he was cool? The news is out, Dave Strider is really just an awkward nerd.
"So, uh." Dave paused, for a moment doubting whether he should be bothering the kid at all before deciding that well, it's too late now. "You doin' alright?"
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"I'm a little tired, but I'll be fine," he said. He had a bowl full of noodle soup and man was revisiting old, sad memories easier when he was guaranteed one of those to recover with. "At least now I've told it. I hope -" he paused, looking at Dave's face. "Are YOU okay? I know it's not the happiest story in the world."
It had been hard to live. Maybe it was also hard to hear.
"Thanks for helping me again. It's still strange to me to think that people can watch things that happened without having to be there to see them."
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"I'm cool. Seriously, I know being too pure and too good for this world is like, your whole schtick, but you can ease up on that a little. You can sulk and care only about yourself for a little while like everyone else."
Dave shrugged again, pausing to snag a bite of his sandwich -- good old PB&J. "It'll be sick, just wait and see. I'll mess around with it a bit, get those production values up and all that shit, and upload the video where everyone in the goddamn universe can see."
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"I don't know what you mean by that," he said. "I told you, I killed someone. Look at how people talked to Dipper and Wash for defending themselves on the murder planet."
Between that and taking actions that had lead to his allies - his own mother and father - dying, he wasn't expecting to have too many fans after this.
"I mean . . . when you say too pure and good for this world, it makes me think of some of the kids back in the village." He paused, getting his thoughts in order. "They're nice, and they're polite, and they've never felt in their hearts truly that they wanted to kill someone. Much less done it. They might have if they'd ever known how it felt to have to wait for someone who loved you to wake up and be themselves, or if anything really horrible had happened to them. But it's so much better that it didn't," he added, hastily. "My parents would have raised me that way if they could, too, but . . . it just doesn't sound like my life. Anyway, it was two years ago that all this happened," he added. "I don't need to sulk. I've had time to be sad."
Nevermind that he was crying over it just a little more than a week ago, because someone had said a mean thing he didn't expect.
Maybe the Time Trapper would even agree with him, that he wasn't much of a hero, and send him home.
He didn't want to think about that. But if it happened . . . he didn't want to be surprised into sorrow either.
"I just hope nobody else was too upset. Maybe I should have said a little more about why I was telling it. Or warned the audience it had so many sad parts."
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"Okay, it's mostly a personality thing. But dude, you cannot stress over that kind of stuff, especially not based on the shit some anonymous assholes with unrealistic ideals for their heroes say. It sounds like a bunch of people here have gotten their murder on at one point or another, probably for decent enough reasons. Hell, I killed my own brother-slash-genetic-father once. Do you think I'm a worse person because of it?"
To be fair, he doesn't necessarily think of himself as a super pure soul or anything. But that one inicident of murder does not play into it.
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He now wanted to know what that reason was. "If you want to tell the story sometime, I'll listen."
He could even help Dave tell it, if that was what Dave wanted. Kubo considered that idea, wondered if anyone not accustomed to telling stories would want to do as he'd done. He could help with that.
"I can only understand where they're coming from because I guessed the Legionnaires before us must have been powerful enough to never need to kill in battle. So maybe they've never been in that position, because they've been protected by people too powerful to also be in such a position. But even if they were . . ." he shrugged. "We have to do what we can, not what someone else could before us. It's not fair of them to hold us to someone else's standards, but they must not know what it's like."
He shrugged again. "I'm done worrying about it." It didn't sit right to him, letting people say cruel things about his friends unchallenged, but Wash had made it clear there wasn't really a resolution to be had against faceless people on the internet. "They will think what they think."
He'd done everything he could, for his own story at least.
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Of course, he couldn't have brought himself to do it if he hadn't been sure Dirk would be fine in the end. He could do a lot of shit just because it had to be done, but flippantly hurting his friends without the assurance that it could be fixed was not one of them. But that part goes unsaid, because his core morals and limits and whatnot aren't the point here. The point is he'd done some shit some people wouldn't agree with, with or without context, and if that made him a morally gray person then so be it.
But there Kubo goes, being way too nice and understanding for his own good, and Dave scowls down at his sandwich. "No, see, the whole moral here was that even decent people have to do fucked up shit sometimes and those assholes are 100% in the wrong if they think they get to lecture anyone about tough decisions that had fuckall to do with them. This is what I meant by too pure for this world, christ. You don't have to sympathize with people who aren't gonna take the time to see things from your point of view."
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Kubo stared at his friend with an expression that was the most of a combination of sympathy and a deadpan as he could make.
"That's a very complicated story."
At Dave's last point, he looked down at his bowl of noodles in thought.
"You're right," he agreed, after a long breath. "I don't have to."
He ate his noodles, thoughtful, before finally adding, "I might still do it."
He was just too accustomed to it. To thinking about all the sides of a story.
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But there Kubo goes with his understanding and sympathy even for complete dicks, to which Dave sighs and gestures vaguely in the other boy's general direction.
"Again, you make my point: too good. Too pure. I think my teeth are rotting just being in the general vicinity of you. I'm sending you my dentist bill, by the way."
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"Are you mad at me?"
He didn't think he'd done anything wrong, but there were so many different cultures here that it would be easy, probably, to step over some line he just didn't know about, and Dave seemed very frustrated with him. Talking about rotting and bills and -
"If this is about the work I asked you to do, I'd be happy to pay you." Kubo looked aside, eyes narrowing in thought. "I . . . don't know how to get to my money, but I could ask -"
He didn't want to have offended his friend, but if he had, he wanted to make up for it.
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"What? Dude, no." Dave frowns, attention immediately 100% focused on Kubo with his sandwich forgotten for the moment. Hell, how does he makes this clear? He settles for sliding up his shades so Kubo can see his face properly, much more readable with his eyes actually visible. They're bright red, oddly enough, and he has to squint slightly in the regular lighting. Sixteen years of near constant shades-wearing may have impaired his vision and left him a little light sensitive. "You didn't do anything wrong. I'm not mad, just messin' around, alright? It's at worst like, mildly frustrating to hear you being way too nice to people who don't deserve it, and that's not even really your fault or anything to feel bad about, just..."
He bites down on what will probably just dissolve into more confusing babbling. Sighing, Dave shakes his head and nudges the shades back down into their proper place.
"Just ignore me. You're fine, I promise."