legionworld | [Open] The end of one story is simply the start of another

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[Open] The end of one story is simply the start of another

Who| Sariatu and anyone who wants to say hi!
What| Finding her way around, meeting some people, all that new person jazz
Where| Legion World, various common places - the mess hall, near the crew quarters, and on the observation deck
When| ...Now? Obviously after Kubo's whole autobiographical storytime dealio.
Warnings/Notes| This is a moon lady who turns into a monkey. Also spoilers for Kubo and the Two Strings I guess, if Kubo himself somehow didn't spoil you.

Sariatu is not sure about this whole "super hero" thing.

That's not to say she doesn't approve, at least theoretically, of what they're doing here. It's a noble quest, and an important one if what the Legion says is true, about all worlds being in danger. Still, these... code names and tight costumes and all that? Silliness that she's not intending to partake in.

She can simply be Monkey, apparently, if she has to fight. She can just use her name. All the rest of it-- well, Hanzo probably would've enjoyed it. Kubo, too. She, however, couldn't give a damn. So for now, she is wearing her own robes, when human, and has promised she'll attempt to work with the costume makers over the next few days.

In the meantime, she has a lot to get used to: technology, reminding herself how to fly (and with this entirely new way of doing so, thanks, ring), find her way around. Today, she's spending time in some of the more heavily-trafficked areas. Anyone near the crew quarters might run into an unnaturally large macaque, walking slowly through the area, looking critically and rather intelligently at its surroundings.

In the mess, one might notice the tall, regal-looking woman in the red and gold robes, frowning at the chef who's handing her a bowl of rice with vegetables and some sort of tofu. "I don't understand how a civilized society can not have fish," she mutters, none too quietly, as she glides away, her expression shifting to "slightly uncertain" as she surveys the large room and the many filled tables.

The same woman can be found, a bit later, on the observation deck, staring out at the shattered moon and the planet below. Her expression is relatively peaceful, and strangely smug and satisfied as she looks at the moon. She's feeling almost friendly, and will smile in acknowledgement at anyone she notices come near her.

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Somehow, a big monkey just chillin' around on the ship is more eyebrow raising than all the aliens and whatnot. Granted, Dave was used to aliens before even arriving here, but still. You'd think he'd be used to this kind of stuff in general by now.

"Shit."

A very eloquent greeting from the strangely-dressed teen that just turned the corner to find a macaque looking around the crew quarters. He keeps a straight face for the most part, force of habit, but a little wrinkle forms between his eyebrows, just visible over the rim of his shades, as he processes this new development.

"Are sentient monkeys an actual thing in some universe -- or this one, I guess, I don't fuckin' know -- or are people just bringing primates on board for shits and giggles now?" A pause before he adds, almost pleadingly, "Please say words back, I don't wanna be that weirdo that talks to regular-ass animals."

Monkey turns to survey the young teen, one eyebrow raised. He's only a couple of years older than Kubo, which makes her chest tighten, but she pushes that emotion aside.

"If people are letting large, dumb beasts run unchecked in this place, I think you would have a bigger problem than being the 'weirdo' who talks to animals," she says dryly, sitting. "And watch your language."

Clearly someone did not grow up with proper parental supervision and guidance.

Someone absolutely did not grow up with proper parental supervision and guidance.

"I'm getting lectured for my foul mouth by a monkey." It's not a question, just the kind of general statement one needs to make out loud to really make sense of it. "I guess that really is the way my life goes these days. Also, there's that dude with the dragon that is pretty large and seems pretty goddamn unchecked to me so that ship has already sailed. It is out of port and halfway to the new world by now. Half the crew is dead of scurvy and the sailors' wives have already gotten loney and started hooking up with the farmboys for solace."

If it's any consolation, that odd tangent seems less like a direct address and more a sidethought to himself, drifting more towards aimless muttering the longer he talks.

Edited 2016-12-03 01:08 (UTC)

She just sort of stares at him for a moment, because that was... that sure was a place that tangent went. Her hearing's pretty good, as a monkey. What the hell is this child.

She shakes herself out of her baffled stare pretty quickly, though. "I guess that would be strange," she admits, and stands up on her hind legs. Or... that's what it looks like she's doing, except she keeps standing up, fur rippling away into silk robes as she stands to her full, human height.

"You certainly have an imaginative mind," she adds. It's true. Bizarre, but imaginative.

Edited 2016-12-03 01:17 (UTC)

That is...definitely not a plot twist he'd expected, and an eyebrow arches over his shades while he frowns slightly in confusion. And yet, the moment where he progresses to acceptance is pretty clear on his face. After a moment, Dave just nods as if in understanding.

"...This is actually somehow less weird than just a straight-up talking monkey."

It's the simplicity of the talking monkey thing, maybe. He's too used to excessively complicated shit these days. Murderous omnipotent ultimate spirit dog carapace man? Sure. Oddly maternal-sounding monkey that is actually an Asian woman in disguise? Yeah, that's fine. But simply a talking monkey? What the fuck.

"I'll keep that in mind," she says, folding her hands in front of her. "Magical talking monkey: weird. Magical woman who can turn into a talking monkey: less weird."

She lets out a soft sigh, eyes flicking around. "I wonder, young man, if you could help me? I haven't quite learned my way around yet, and you seem more familiar with this place than I do."

Kubo hadn't been looking up when he entered the observation deck. If he'd been looking at anything other than a missing thread in the sleeve of his battered, excessively worn robe, he would have seen the woman standing at the opposite end of the wall of windows, and would have recognized her before taking his shamisen off his back and turning his attention to the tuning pegs.

But he wasn't looking up, he wasn't attending to his surroundings, and he WAS treading by now a very well-worn path to a window ledge where he liked to sit and practice his shamisen. So he kept his eyes down on his strings as he settled into his windowsill seat and began playing.

Several notes in and he continued not to look at the deck, turning his gaze to the Earth. So many people looked at the enormity of the Earth and felt small or inconsequential in comparison. Kubo could not, though. Not when his mother had seen that view and more, each beautiful beyond comparison, and she had loved him more.

His fingers danced effortlessly through the song as he smiled through his memories - at ease, familiar with this place, and a little lankier than when his mother had last seen him.

Dave nods, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. Is that a response to her analysis of his concept or weird or to her request? Who knows.

"Yeah, I've got more than my fair shair of experience navigating labyrinthine fuckin' cold metal corridors by now." Belatedly, he realizes he own language, and even looks slightly abashed for a moment. It's easy to completely dismiss complaints over his coarseness from dudes like Wash, but he can't help but feel a little bad when it's coming from what seems like a decent older lady. "Sorry. I mean, yeah, I can do that."

The shamisen is a surprising and familiar sound, one Sariatu hadn't expected to hear in this place but is pleasantly surprised to find has survived this long. She doesn't turn around when she hears the playing begin - it reminds her of Kubo, and if she doesn't turn around, she can pretend for a moment that it is.

She only allows herself that daydream for half a minute, though, before she turns to see who has brought her this sound of home in such a strange place-- and freezes, her heart caught in her throat.

She takes a deep breath, casting her mind about to see if the distance that had beset her for so long was returning, making her see things that weren't there, maybe seeing a stranger as a familiar face. But the longer she looks, the more details she sees that don't follow. He looks older - not much, but enough that a mother can tell the difference. His father's robes are more worn, and slightly less large than they used to be.

And, when she listens, she hears the familiar, almost-unnoticeable quirks of Kubo's playing that she'd heard for so many years.

She takes a few steps closer, eyes wide, her robes rustling.

"Kubo?" she asks, her voice sticking in her throat enough to almost be inaudible. She licks her lips and repeats herself, a little louder. "Kubo?"

Her smile widens a little, in that slightly distant, mysterious way that mothers have sometimes. He corrected his language without reprimand, that time, and that bodes well for his decency, in Sariatu's opinion.

She inclines her head gratefully. "Thank you. These are, indeed, labyrinthine cold metal corridors. I don't relish getting lost in them." It's her own way of trying to tell him that she doesn't mind his strange way of talking, just to be considerate of the language he uses to do so.

She starts walking - not sedate but not speeding along, clearly expecting Dave to fall in with her and direct her. "Now, the first thing I'd be interested in finding is this... Habitat I was told we each have?"

He hadn't heard her voice in two years. He had no idea how much of her voice he'd forgotten.

When he looked up at first, it was with polite blankness, wondering which woman on the ship knew his name to be getting his attention.

He hadn't forgotten how she looked, though, the color of her robes and the path of her scar and how she looked at him with all the love in the world, all the love in the cosmos.

Kubo sucked in a breath. He was imagining her. He had to be.

No, he didn't. At least one person on the ship had died in their world. He knew. The Time Trapper could pull people out of time. There were so many ways she could be here. So many ways - but it had been too much to hope for - but now -

"Mother!"

He didn't manage to get his own voice loud at first, the surreality of his dead mother standing over the view of the earth with him lifting. She was real. She was here. By the miracles of this place, she could be.

His movements had been slow, but he suddenly grew fluid and fast, slipping out of the shamisen's strap and setting it down to get out of his window and run to her.

His mother was here. She had been too much to hope for and yet here she was, and he could not get his arms around her fast enough.

"Mother!"

There was sobbing imminent in his voice.

She bends over instinctively (not as far as she had, how long has it been since she saw him?) when he runs to her, so he can put his arms around her neck, and the immediate rush of relief and joy and love all but drives her to her to her knees, pulling him with her and into a proper embrace.

"It's all right," she murmurs, holding him tightly, kissing the top of his head. "It's okay, I'm here. Oh, Kubo."

He's older. He doesn't fit into her arms quite the same (though it's not an alien feeling at all, of course). She doesn't even care, right now.

It means he survived.

Memories of their homey cave rose up to overwhelm him with the familiar smell of her hair, vivid as a sunset. His tears dampened her collar. This wasn't like the Obon festival, when her smile had been beautiful through a filter of gold, and her touch had been light like a breeze - her voice as clear and true and near as it was now, but the substance of her presence gone.

She was here, and he never wanted to risk letting her go to fade away.

"I'm sorry," burst out of him, through his tears, muffled by her kimono. "Mother - I tried to come for Obon last year - the rain destroyed the lanterns and put out the lights - I tried to talk to you anyway but I couldn't - I tried -"

"Shhhh, it's all right, little one." She puts a hand on his cheek and pulls back just enough to catch his wet eyes with her own, brimming with unshed tears of relief and joy. It's been more than a year, then, if he's speaking of last year's Obon festival.

"Kubo, do you think I would blame you for the rain?" She gently wipes a tear off his cheek with her thumb. "You don't need to apologize for things you can't control." She lets out a shaky breath, drinking him in. "Look at you. You made it home, then? You're safe?"

So she was back from the dead? She was still asking about his safety - Kubo touched her face back, grief and love and happiness all in conflict through his tears. She was back from the dead but she didn't remember that he'd made it home? He'd spoken to her from the spirit world -

"Yes," he landed on, realizing that was the important point to make just then. "Yes, I made it home. Two years ago. I'm fine."

'Fine' was a strange word to use when using it made him break down into a new round of compromised tears. Fine, but missing her every day. Fine, but always wondering in the back of his mind if he could have paid better attention, stopped his aunt from murdering his father, allowed his mother to have better last words than telling him to run for his life.

'Fine,' but never able to talk to anyone about the facts of their deaths, because his grandfather had become a kind old man who'd have been devastated to know what harm he'd done Kubo, what horrors he'd caused. Grandfather no longer deserved that pain, but some nights, the story had rested so heavy in Kubo's heart, with no one to tell it to.

'Fine,' but revisiting that story had been cathartic like ripping off a scab. The wound was a little smaller, but it bled all over again.

"I missed you," he settled on, when he'd controlled his round of tears again. He wiped his eye furiously. "I missed you so much."

A nod. "There's a whole level of that sh-- stuff. 'S big mishmash of random landscapes and city blocks and whatnot all cobbled together like an amateur cartographer after a bender." Hands shoved deep into his pockets, Dave shrugs. "No idea if there's any way to find a specific person's place short of just wandering around and looking for the familiar stuff, but some people picked some strange as hell pieces of home so at least it makes for an interesting walk."

As if he isn't one of the people with a strange as shit personal habitat. But Dave does love chucking rocks around his glass house, so whatever.

'Fine,' but still hurting in ways that she cannot mend, because the wounds are too large for even a mother's kiss to soothe away. She makes soft shushing noises and kisses his forehead, tucking his bangs behind his ear.

"Don't lie to your mother," she says, reproachful, but only a tiny bit. A little sharp with love underneath. He hadn't really seen that side of her until Monkey, but hopefully that time together gave him a chance to get used to it. She's more herself, as a woman, than she ever had been in his memory.

Hopefully she'll still live up to his love.

"Don't lie to your mother," she repeats, a bit gentler, "but I won't ask you to tell the whole story now. There will be time for that later."

She smiles at him, proud and relieved. "Two years," she murmurs. "They brought me here and I've been so worried-- I didn't know if you'd been able to outpace my sister. With no one else there..." Well, no one can say it wasn't worth worrying about, given her sister.

He'd started to protest, wiping his eye, even smiling a little. "Really, Mother, I've been -"

But then she brought up his aunt, and his smile vanished. It always kept coming back to this, the moment he'd saved his eye, but not managed to save his mother or father, and taken his own relative's life in the process.

"I didn't . . . outpace her," he said. How many times was it going to hurt him to tell this tale? How was he going to hurt his mother by telling her he'd killed someone she did once love?

"I killed her."

There wasn't an easy way to say it, and no use dragging it out. She'd said not to lie to her.

"With luck, then, I'll be the only one who requested a bamboo forest," she says. If nothing else, though, she's sure it'll make for an interesting journey.

"Forgive me, my manners are..." she trails off. Her manners are severely atrophied since she hasn't met anyone new except Beetle in years. "Rusty," she settles on. "I am Sariatu. Thank you for your help."

Love... is not the right word for how she'd felt about her father and sisters, in their home in the heavens. Respect, admiration perhaps, loyalty. But not love. She'd perhaps loved them in the sweet moment between meeting Hanzo and losing him the first time, but it was abstract then, and Sariatu doubts even then if she did.

No. She did not love her sisters, however cold that might sound.

She does love Kubo, however, and she smiles sadly when he tells her what happened. She is so sorry he had to do that. She is so proud that he was able to.

"Good," she says firmly. "That means neither of them are waiting for a chance to try again."

"Dave," he offers in return, and takes his hands out of his pockets like he intends to...what's even appropriate here? Defintely not a fistbump, she probably doesn't even know what that is based on that outfit. A handshake? Do you do that for women? It seems like the kind of shit you pull out when meeting someone's dad for the first time. Shit.

Awkwardly, he hesitates a few moments befoee shoving his hands right back into his pockets and turning on a heel, inclining his head in the direction of the hall ahead.

"There's a lift to the hab deck down here."

So smooth.

It was just impossible for Kubo to imagine a world where his mother didn't love something. He'd learned so much about her warrior's side on his adventure, but that had been a few vivid days set against 12 years of sweet, gentle memories.

Her answer, though, relieved him. It lifted a weight from him in a way that even Wash and Dave had not been able to do, and Wash and Dave had nearly talked that weight entirely off his shoulders.

'I killed my aunt.' 'Good.' sounded so like his mother, in a way he hadn't been letting himself have the comfort of thinking.

His eye welled up again. He exhaled hugely.

"I'm just . . . so happy," he said, his words an enormous contrast to how he kept pausing to heave breaths that were nearly sobs. He wiped his eye once more, and put his hand back on his mother's arm. She was here, and he could touch her, he could hear her, and even if she faded and left her body again, as she'd done all the time he'd known her in her human form, he could take care of her until she came back.

And she would come back. She'd come back from the dead for him once, then again at Obon, but to have hoped for a third time outside of the visitations from the realm of spirits had seemed too much.

"I'm just so happy to see you - hear your voice again - it was so long, waiting after Obon, and I didn't know if they had Obon here -"

There were too many feelings, too many joys and sorrows getting in the way of his words. Too many things he wanted to say, too many things he didn't know if he'd be saying to her again, or for the first time. Now was the time for practical questions.

"Mother - what's the last thing you remember? Do you remember coming to see me with Father, at the last Obon festival?" His eye lit up a little, remembering it. "How is the spirit world? Were you and Father happy there? Is he coming here too?"

His eye welled up all over again, speaking of his father. Please, please - if he could have one of his only two wishes, why not hope for both?

What are these time shenanigans. Ugh. She feels bad having to tell him she doesn't remember the spirit world, though if he saw her and Hanzo at Obon, she can't imagine they weren't happy there.

She holds out a hand to silence him, then says (with a hint of a smile, because she's joking), "Stop. You get three."

She squeezes him a little tighter, then sighs. "The last thing I remember was seeing my sister standing over me with a sword, swinging it to cut me down. While I"m sure Hanzo and I will be happy in the spirit world, I don't know if he'll be coming. I don't even know how I got here, aside from what they told me when I arrived."

She smiles a little. "But if the two of us have reunited, I see no reason why we can't hope for Hanzo to come as well. As long as we remember it is unlikely and don't count on it."

"Oh no," Kubo protested, humor creeping in through his tears. "If I only get three questions, then you only get three, and I've been here longer. I know my way around."

He gave her a sassy little smirk that dissolved into a sincere, adoring grin almost instantly. On the surface, "maybe we'll see Hanzo but don't count on it" might not have seemed very hopeful, but it was a whole lot better than "he died and we'll never see him again," and Kubo had heard that for 11 long years.

But the grin faded too as she told him that the last thing she knew from before this moment was watching Hanzo die, again, and then being killed by her sister.

Kubo put his hand on her face again, serious, too grown up for his age.

"Mother - I'm so sorry," he said. "I wish I'd been paying better attention. If I'd seen her coming, if I'd warned Father - you could have had better last moments -"

Judging by the crack in his voice, this had weighed on him. For two years.

She takes his hands in hers, shifting them so (finally) he's not practically sitting in her lap, and looks into his eyes intently. "No. Kubo, that was not your fault. I could have been more aware. He could've made sure that she was dead." She cannot let her little boy feel like it's his fault. She can't. "You are still a child now, and you were then. It should not have ever been your responsibility to look out for us. Certainly not then."

It has been, she knows. It was for most of his life, his responsibility to look after her. But she's been here hours and has felt as much herself as she had when she'd become Monkey, and spirits willing she will not have to put that responsibility on him ever again.

"What we had in that moment," she says, even as tears well in her eyes unbidden, "was more than we ever expected to have. It was not what I wanted, but... we had him, Kubo. If only for a moment, our family was truly together again, and I never thought to even dream of that happening while we were alive."

She'll grieve. She won't put the responsibility of carrying that grief on Kubo. She doesn't need him to carry that for her.

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[Open] The end of one story is simply the start of another

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