Everyday I've known, it grows only deeper

[bachido]

Who| Open to all
What| Kubo took a couple days off from Legion Training after Sariatu vanished, and now that it's been a couple days he's back to his old rounds.
Where| The Mess Hall and Hab Deck
When| The third Space Morning after Mall Planet.
Warnings/Notes| Parental death mention



- Storytime -

For three days, the midday meal in the mess hall had been quiet. The first day, because Kubo was visiting a planet-sized mall with his friends. The second two days, because he'd taken emergency leave.

His mother was gone, and if he understood the way people vanished from Legion sometimes, that meant she'd gone straight back to the moment of her death. It had taken two days of emergency leave for Kubo to be able to think of anything but that.

His father was still there, and that helped two days not become more.

On the third day after Sariatu's vanishing, Kubo was back to class, though still quiet and subdued. He was back to training, and still grateful that Wash hadn't let him cash in his Get Out of Training Free card.

And he was back to the cafeteria, with a brand new tale, one that didn't have anything at all to do with his recent loss.

He struck up the tune for the day's story on his shamisen.

"If you must blink - do it now."

Telling the story of when he and Pidge had fought a saber-antlered monster in the middle of the Silent Horizon mission was a better distraction than the day's earlier rituals. Pidge had been brave and strong and daring, snagging and subdoing the beast with her bayard, despite many near misses as the monster tried to gore both Legionnaires as Kubo worked to distract it. By the end of the story, when a flash-flooding acidic river had separated the two heroes, Kubo looked a lot livelier than he had the rest of the morning.

Getting back to telling tales felt more like getting back to real life than anything else had before.

- Exploring -

Kubo hadn't been put back on the Watch rotation yet, and that left him more time after the day's training to continue exploring the Hab Deck. There were new spaces that he had never been to, brought there by Legionnaires he hadn't met yet. There were his father's new caverns to see. There was the little house in the beautiful woods his mother had brought with her, and left behind her.

All in all it was peaceful and interesting and it took his mind off missing her, even when passing the little house. If anything, the house was a nice reminder that she'd been there at all.

And the other Legionnaire's pieces of habitat were a reminder that he still had many of them to meet, and countless new stories to learn.

- Let's make some memories! -

Kubo had gotten a number of interesting things on his trip to the mall planet with Wash and the other Legion kids. A few odds and ends for Mother, that rested on the family altar in his quarters now. A strange little clamp that, when clipped on his shamisen, gave it an enormous sound he had yet to play with.

And a truly serious amount of arts and crafts supplies. The glittery, gluey mass of pens, markers, pipe cleaners, special paper, and blank books took up half a table on the mess deck, and he and Beetle needed all that space to work with.

"See this picture?" Kubo was saying, showing his omnicom to his father. On the screen was a picture Kubo had taken of himself and his mother, his mother mid-bite of noodles with a rare goofy look on her elegant face at the candid photo. "Dave showed me how to do this. It's called a selfie! And when I do this -"

He patted a slim machine a little larger than his hand, pressed an icon on the touchscreen of his omnicom, and a print of the picture issued snappily from the photo printer, straight onto already adhesive paper.

"So you take the piece on the back off, put it in the book, and -" Kubo held the blank book, with its single new photo, out to Beetle. "It's sort of like a permanent memory!"

Thank goodness Dipper had explained to him what Scrapbooking was while he was in a place to buy supplies.

Comments

[agnominal]

The habitat the former soldier inhabited was...less cozy than most, to say the least. The landscape was one that was cold, desolate and alien, though obviously not inhospitable. There were buildings, reminiscent of a military outpost, though largely empty. People didn't really stay here for that long, given the rather unfriendly nature of it all.

One inhabitant seemed to break the mold, however. Further exploration of the installment would lead to the discovery of a small, lilac-point kitten, who was daintily making her rounds and let out a squeak upon discovering the new visitor.

Of course, there's someone else here too. But he'd be impossible to see, just yet.

[bachido]

The only reason Kubo wasn't tremendously upset at having gotten separated from Beetle in the Hab was the two days he'd spent in his father's company, missing his mother and working himself up to terms with her vanishing, clinging to the belief that just because his mother was gone didn't mean his father was going to vanish at the same time. Father was much easier to get separated from than Mother. All it took was a moment of both of them being distracted in different directions -

- surely Kubo would find Beetle again if he kept looking, and there surely was no need to go running up and down the entire space station in a panic, as he had only a few days ago. Kubo kept running through this thought as he poked around the empty, unfriendly city, growing slightly more anxious as the moments went on, until he met the city's fluffiest inhabitant.

For a moment Kubo paused, looking at the kitten through the eyes of a boy who'd never had a pet, who'd never gone looking for a pet because he already had someone he had to take care of, and a pet would have taken up resources he and his mother just didn't have.

But he'd had a little time to move beyond that worldview, and a little time with Wash's cat to move more into a worldview that included kittens being so cute.

Kubo chuckled a little, sitting down and taking his shamisen off his back. A few strums and one of his papers folded itself into a mouse, skittering around the kitten to his tune.

[agnominal]

Immediately the kitten's ears pitched forward, and she hunched low to the ground to watch the mouse's movements. Back and forth went her eyes, as her little hindquarters shimmied behind her, before she launched her attack, skittering claws-first after the creature in the hope of catching it and tearing it to shreds.

When the invisibility faded, and Locus came into view, he did so in the shadow of the doorway to this particular section of the base. Just a shadow shifting into something a little more real, but he said nothing still. Just folded his arms and watched the boy entertaining Luna so thoroughly.

[bachido]

Kubo giggled, playing a little faster to urge the mouse out of the way of the kitten's claws. The longer the mouse lasted, the longer the game went on.

The mouse circled him, drawing the kitten on a fast little chase, and made a figure 8 in front of the door where Locus had allowed himself to be visible. Only then did Kubo notice him.

The music stopped, the mouse with it, and Kubo nearly startled to his feet. But he calmed in a second, vaguely recognizing Locus from around the ship.

"I-is this your cat?" he asked, leaving his music quiet and the mouse still for her to pounce on.

[jonesiseverywhere]

The habitat changes sort of abruptly, from a mountain, to a winding mountain highway, to the middle of a city, like it was made by, say, someone who'd only been three places in his entire life and wanted to consolidate them.

If Kubo can tell these things, it's a low-income part of the city it's based on, all red and brown brick buildings with smoking manhole covers in the alleys and bars in the windows. One building in particular is covered from road-to-roof in artwork, some of which might be familiar to Kubo as most of the art is of stylized Legionaries and people the Legionaries have fought. Most of them make the subjects look a lot more extreme than they usually do. Brainiac has never stared someone down in the manner of a dragon eyeing a meal, Dave's shades are nowhere near that big, the troll girl's tongue is of an unsettling length, Reaper is not normally a neon rainbow eye sore...

And there's Casey, mask down, working on something new with a can of spray paint. The image is of an angry charging monkey with massive teeth, someone he saw once and who kind of reminded him of Master Splinter a little bit. He doesn't see Kubo and he's got his earbuds in. This is way easier when he doesn't have to worry about the cops...

[bachido]

Between coming from a time long before and being in a time long after this one, Kubo still didn't really know what a poor part of town looked like. He just knew it seemed like a dismal place to live, stuck between buildings too tall to see the sky.

But the painted building drew his attention completely, and the big splash of toothy white made his heart clench and called him running straight over.

"You painted my mother!"

His voice was a little louder than he intended, eye welling a little bit.

"You - you really caught a part of her spirit," he went on, possibly the only person on the ship (maybe aside from his father) who'd see that ferocity, those emphasized enormous teeth, and get a little choked up.

The earbuds hadn't registered - nobody had showed him what those were yet.

[jonesiseverywhere]

Casey heard something odd and arrhythmic under the his death metal music, the way only an experienced metal-head can.

"Huh?" He says to Kubo over the still-blaring guitars. He totally missed his first sentence and he kind of wished he hadn't because this kid looks kind of upset. Casey loves getting attention for his art, but this is the first time he's ever seen someone be moved to tears.

"Oh, uh...yeah!" He doesn't really know Kubo, and he's not sure how to navigate this. "Saw her around the ship a few times, thought she looked pretty rad..."

It's just them and the music for a few moments, and Casey feels like he should say something more. "Uh...you OK, man?"

[crowskinovercoat]

The village of Aball was never a big one even before the Daemonblight thinned its numbers and left many of its houses abandoned outside the protective gates, and after the Advent it wasn't anything at all. But in the time between both catastrophes it was a quiet enough place - the work of strong hands and a strong people, full of the kind of close-knit love for each other that bred suffocating nosiness and earnest support alike. A village of nothing but wooden cabins - but to call them cabins was like calling a mansion a house, in a way, with their steep-sloped, high roofs of green wood, their elaborately patterned windows of stained and carved glass, the ornate lanterns hung by each door with stain-inked bowls to hold the candlelight in. Rough stone walls, parceled, interlocked, and metered by wooden posts, topped by carefully wrought iron fencing, gentle terraces inset between the walls where the path climbed through the sloping landscape - the attention to the walking paths curling around and sidling up to the assorted houses alone told a story of the people that could've lived here once. They were a scared people, too - no village so fenced-up could be anything else. Tall trees in their autumnal leaf stand watch over these houses whose rooftops reach nearly to their same height, silent and comforting.

It was small. It was fearful and provincial and didn't see much in the way of other people coming by. But the people who had called it home once dreamt big dreams deep in their hearts, and they wanted to share in each other's happiness all the same.

It wasn't here on the Habitat Deck before. Someone put it here, since Kubo's last visit, an empty memorial to people from nowhere anyone else has ever been. The only sound is a light breeze, rustling the treetops, sending leaves down across the path like a gentle drift of snowflakes.

There should be the sound of birds. There isn't. But if he cares to explore, he might find something else: a house, tucked down a curling path away from the others, squat and wide - like the one near the village entrance that's clearly where a merchant lives and plies his trade, but much less accessible.

There's a tale here, should be care to hear it. But his attention might be drawn instead to the family graves, their tombstones thick and well-carved with geometric patterns that likely mean nothing except to signify that whoever lies beneath them mattered enough to both the commissioner and the carver to do such careful stonework. There are two of them. Three names, all with the surname of Crowe, sit in the stone of the largest of the two graves: a mother, a father, and a daughter Celica. On the smaller there is no name.

But it bears an inscription despite this: "This little life will spread its wings and soar through the skies."

Someone has picked and placed a small handful of the flowers that dot the low hillsides surrounding the townhouses across them both. But whoever has done so doesn't appear to be here.

Maybe he finds that house, or maybe not. Maybe that merchant's house will hold more interest, its purpose self-evident from the way it keeps shelves outside, the trappings of a skinning and cleaning rack out back marking it for the butcher's house that it is in turn. What will the little storyteller make of it all? And where is the person who cared enough to put this piece of herself here in the Habitat Deck, regardless of who might one day find it?

Well?

[bachido]

Kubo would have explored this place eventually, even if he wasn't in the middle of a search, his wandering taking him down the silent paths, interrupting their silence with a call -

"Father? Father!"

And, eventually, with resignation - "Beetle!"

No bug responded, and Kubo paused on the new road to regain his bearings. The lonely house caught his attention. He took the road to it, taking in what he could gather of the tale from sight alone. The stones that reminded him of the shrines in his village, freshly flowered, a loss he understood too well.

Someone had been here recently to do their private mourning.

Kubo didn't want to intrude on that, so he turned to take the road back to the village.

"Father!" he called again, as much to catch Beetle's attention as to alert whoever owned this place to his presence, whether they want to avoid him or not. "Where are you?"

[crowskinovercoat]

Not the most social creatures, our Velvet. It says a great deal that she'd let others bear the sight of her past like this, without it meaning anything, but that she would, all the same, keep herself inside the house her family built, laid out on her bed, ignoring them, despite hearing their calls wing their way through the village so clearly. Even when hearing the crunch of their feet on the leafy ground outside her house, the pause when they see what lays there.

(Of course there are no bodies underneath those graves, not here.)

It also says a great deal that she can only bear to hear them go unanswered for so long. There's a stir in the house as he starts down the path, the boards creaking a warning underneath heavy boots as they clack and thud their way across the floor inside.

She turns the doorknob with a click and pushes the door open with her shoulder. Steps out and down the first step, one hand resting by a fingertip against the doorknob, and then stops there.

If this were a battlefield, and she were the hunched, wraithlike blur of blood red and smoke black and bone white that she could be in those moments, her appearance would be a fright indeed, that oversized and thoroughly tattered greatcoat billowing out around her and ripping her silhouette to shreds. But here on the steps of her house it sits heavily on her shoulders and does little else except look worn out.

She lets herself look at him quietly for a moment. He couldn't be much older than -

"He's not here." It comes out sharp, abrupt, closed off. "No one's here but me."

[i_got_this]

South wasn't exactly the most observant when it came to other people and their feelings and needs, but she had noticed the lack of usual musical entertainment and it's sudden return. She sticks around after she's eaten and finds Kubo once he's done.

"Hey kid, glad you're back. Got a little two quiet here."

[bachido]

The smile Kubo managed for South came more easily than his smiles had earlier. He still had the sunglasses she'd given him back in his quarters, still put them on occasionally to pretend to be as cool as Dave.

"I'll try not to miss too many more days like that," he said. Storytelling had been good for him. "I'm glad to be back, too."

His mother would have wanted him to be back to his storytelling, too.

"How was the story today?" he asked. "Anything you want to see next time?"

[i_got_this]

"Yeah man, that story was pretty great! You tell more like that, you'll definitely get me coming back. This place gives you plenty of material for a good story, doesn't it?"

She grabs a chair and spins it around to sit, resting her arms against the back of it.

[ghost_bait]

Miku's hab is a quiet space. The area is one she had remembered growing up in - and thankfully free of the unquiet dead. There's a large house far off in the distance, traditional, with a wall around it to keep out wild animals.

Not that there are any here.

The air smalls sweet and summery, and down the hill from the door, Miku is sitting on a blanket. It's hard to tell her expression from this angle, but her shoulders are tense, and she pulls a long string up over her head before picking up a kite. It's pink, and shaped like a butterfly.

[bachido]

Kubo hadn't seen many houses like this, that reminded him of his homeworld without already belonging to him or his mother.

Maybe his father had come this way, drawn by the familiarity. But when Kubo headed towards the house and found Miku instead, he paused. At least he could ask her if she'd seen Beetle.

"Excuse me!" he called, hoping not to startle her.

[ghost_bait]

Miku's shoulders bunched in surprise. At least she hadn't screamed?

She put down the kite and looked over her shoulder, turning more when she noticed Kubo. They didn't talk much on their mission together, but she recalled him. "Yes? Is something the matter?"

[deafleppard]

"Sorry, but I might've blinked during the performance." She remarked, unable to hold back the urge to... blink. Fortunately, they were fast and quick blinks, so it wasn't like she missed too much! It was until he was done that Gwen gave him an appreciative clap.

"That was pretty good, by the way. How do you feel right now?"

[bachido]

"I think I can forgive it this time."

Kubo winked. Or, well, blinked. It was debatable *which* he was technically incapable of doing.

His expression went more pensive as he considered.

"I'll be okay," he settled on, which wasn't the truthful "still sad." "Mother would want me to go back to this."

He'd never not miss her, but it would get less difficult . . . eventually.

"Thank you for asking," he went on, remembering his manners. "How are you?"

She'd been on the Silent Horizon with them, and he wondered if his story had drawn up any bad memories of her own.

[deafleppard]

"Nothing's blown up and nobody's been kidnapped so far. So I'd say my day's going pretty well so far." Which, really, was all Gwen could ask for. You know, that and trying not to think about the impending doom that awaited them if they didn't succeed at their mission.

But she just about did that every day.

"But hey, there's still time for all of that change."

Please don't change.

[isthisapidge]

Pidge can't help but blush. Yeah, she was there but hearing it from someone else...she sounds like a hero from some classic epic. Especially from Kubo, who wears classical story-telling like a name-tag.

When it's over she applauds as hard as she can. She knows he's had...a setback.

"Thanks for leaving out the part where I nearly knocked myself out on the monster's back."

[bachido]

"It really didn't take up as much time as you thought it did."

Sure she'd made a miscast with her weapon, but what mortal had never made a miscast with a weapon that tricky? Anything that flexible was hard to learn!

Anyway, Kubo glowed at her enjoyment of the tale. What was the point of telling epic stories about great heroes if those great heroes didn't enjoy them? He'd told epic stories of one great hero for years, with no hope that great hero would ever enjoy them, and now that he was surrounded by heroes . . . no better opportunity for storytelling had ever presented itself.

"If we have another, I hope it's less terrifying in the moment," he admitted, laughing at himself a little.

[isthisapidge]

She chuckles. "I think you're just being nice, but thanks."

He looks pretty happy, and she has to admit, his smile is infectious.

"I thought the best stories came from the most adversity...I mean, you aren't wrong, but still."

I AM SO SORRY FOR THE DELAY

[themightybeetle]

"A...'selfie'?"

Beetle would likely be entranced with it nonetheless - their faces, frozen in time, for him to look at any time he wanted to - but Kubo's own excitement is infectious. And what it promises - he takes the book almost reverently, turning a page with wide eyes. This is...

"...this is great! So I can just, put anything in it?" Don't mind him, already looking around for something and- picking up one of those fuzzy lengths in a hand, using another to shape it, and bam. Right on the page!

...

Right off the page. Looks like someone didn't press down hard enough.

DON'T EVEN WORRY I'm just glad you're here! :D

[bachido]

Kubo watched his father's reaction closely, looking for approval, hoping for as much enthusiasm as the idea of being able to record all these memories for Beetle's benefit had given him. He wasn't disappointed.

"That needs some glue," he clarified, reaching for a jar with a little laugh. "Where do you want that, here?" he asked, spreading glue carefully on a page.

He looked up, patiently waiting for Beetle to place the pipe cleaner, added - "I have a lot more pictures of Mother and me." His smile was still a little sad - but this was still a happy time. He was still here, in this wonderful place, with his father. With a chance to get around some of the ways the Moon King had hurt him.

"I'll put them all in the book," he promised. "I'll write down everything Mother and I did here. It'll be like you were with us the whole time. And I'll write down everything you and I do here. We can record the stories together!"

Anything that meant more of his father's attention was wonderful, anything that gave him an excuse to sit and dwell in the beautiful memories of his mother's second life in the Legion was wonderful. He'd spent so long back in his home dodging memories around his grandfather, not wanting to hurt the kind old man with tales of the cold, cruel King he'd been.

"That way you'll never forget again. Even if -"

-Even if I vanish too, he stopped himself from saying, wanting desperately not to seriously think about that possibility.

"That way, you'll never forget," he said, finalizing it. "Well -" he thought about it. "If you do forget, you'll always have this to remind you. It'll be like the memory never went anywhere at all."

PARTIES WITH

[themightybeetle]

Right. Glue. "Here," Beetle affirms, setting the shape there. It's not really a shape at all, just sort of bent in to...something...but he seems satisfied after he gives it a final tweak. And then another, hand on his chin, and then he nods and leaves it be.

Just in time to catch Kubo's expression. He blinks once, and then tilts his head, considering. "Well then, you'll have to tell me them," he declares, reaching out to squeeze Kubo's shoulder. "Right as we're making the pages, so they go in those, too." And he could enjoy the stories for what they were, and how Kubo's face lit up with them. "How'd you come up with this idea, anyway? Would have been useful to know before."

Don't mind him, just still working on the page with his spare two hands. Though he does have to glance down to make sure he's doing things right- while he may have the extra set, alas, he has but one face. (Two would be nice, maybe, but wouldn't he have to eat twice as much?)