orendalogs | IT'S YOUR DESTINY!!!

The fact that Declan didn’t quite catch what Aoba meant made him wonder another thing, which in turn became an assumption: Guardians probably didn’t celebrate birthdays, or rebirthdays, the way ordinary people did. So showing up that one month and eighteen days ago—basically the same time Aoba hit his first portal, if the timelines were perfectly parallel—wouldn’t have been anything of peculiar timing.

Which then made him think, what, did he really want to construe himself as some kind of gift? Except Declan had said it first and more than a few times already, just in different words….

But wait, hold on. What was he—was he really? Yes he was. He was floating in zero G like he was on a chair. Like he was a client lined up for Koujaku’s roaming haircutting services. So should Aoba take on the role of stylist?

Oh why the hell not. Although Aoba had to chuff a laugh again for the absurdity of it all, it was comfortable again, and he pulled his way closer with the various handrails until he found another place to hook a leg and hover close enough, himself.

“Well I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask, but since you are asking me, I’d say….” He carefully brought a hand up, catching that main fall of Declan’s bangs between second and third finger to delicately lift it aside. “Well, you could keep the same style but just trim it back more, although you’d have to maintain it more often if you did. And if you wanted to be really drastic, you could probably get away with-”

Aoba finger-combed, then. Still very carefully, as used to the sensitivity of his own hair as he was, but he brushed back all of Declan’s hair from his face to reveal it in full. Glowing eyes, alabaster skin…and had Aoba really ever taken note of the way it seemed to shimmer, before? It was opalescent but still alive, still warm skin.

“You have really striking features, you know?” Aoba managed to say without any inwards squirming, just giving an honest opinion as had been asked for. “Ghost said you’re—” Wait. Abort. Restart. “I mean, have you ever seen pictures of any of those really old marble statues? Greek or Roman or something like that? You look like you could be one, just up and living.”

Was that a weird comparison? It was probably a weird comparison. But Ghost had pretty strongly implied he was originally Roman, Aoba thought, and the man just looked…statuesque. He definitely didn’t need to hide behind his hair, if that’s what he was doing.

Ghost's eye flicked over, watching but not shouting for Aoba or anything. If the truth spilled it spilled. No Guardian had ever remembered anything before, he didn't imagine his would be the one to break the mold.

For Declan's part, he found himself relaxing under Aoba's hands, the fingers through his hair working like they traditionally would on a person, soothing, relaxing. Bright eyes drifted half-closed as his scalp prickled with comfortable sensations. It ddin't occur to him that he'd never been touched so familiarly; military barbers weren't exactly so free with their contact.

"I've seen statues in museums and old parks," he mused, nodding slightly, though careful not to dislodge his head from Aoba's grasp. "And some of my books...You think I look like that?" he remarked, humming a soft sound of thought.

"They have really short-cropped hair or really long hair usually, that I've seen. But my hair isn't curly...should I cut it and style it up some? You just want me to show my face, right? So anything works?" Because making life decisions centered around Aoba was easy.

“I think something that shows off more of your face and eyes would be very flattering for you,” Aoba replied, trying to be neutral about it. If Declan wanted to change up his style that was his call to make. Aoba didn’t want him to feel pressured by what he thought.

Opinion offered, he set about combing Declan’s hair back into place for him before drifting back, reclining in the lack of gravity. Man, it would probably be really easy to fall asleep like this, huh? As long as you didn’t drift into anything painful. No pressure points, no struggling to get your pillow fluffed just right….

“But that’s just my opinion.”

Declan had definitely slept in zero G more than once, and would happily share the experience with Aoba. Eventually. Maybe. He had the strappy sleeping bag hammock thing for the task. But at the moment he was internally pouting over there not being fingers in his hair anymore.

"We'll see. Like I said, I'm not partial to this over anything else. It just...seemed the right thing to do, so I did it," he said, leaving his sitting position in favor of just a relaxed, idle drift, considering things.

"I didn't show you the rest of the ship, but there's a shower just like back at my place, a small table and two chairs bolted back there by the freezer and induction cooktop. The shower is adjacent to the bunk in the room back there just left of the engine duct. It's small, but there's everything you need to get by for a long trip. If you want to rest or shower, help yourself to everything."

“But the shower should only be used while the ship is landed somewhere,” Aoba finished with a nod, remembering that particular instruction as encouragement to take his shower this morning. “Got it.”

Ren was staring at him from his safe little shelf perch. Aoba noticed this and chuckled, holding out his hands. “Come on, Ren. Try it!”

Pointed little ears skewed in different directions. “Hmm. If nothing else I would be remiss in not figuring out how to move properly in a zero-gravity environment….”

“Aa. Too bad your Rhyme form isn’t your real one. It’d come in a lot of handy right now, wouldn’t it?”

“This is true, but in the absence of such a thing, I should at least experiment,” Ren ultimately agreed, picking himself up and hunching at the front of the shelf with a very lifelike waggle of his back end as he gathered for a jump.

He did very well with his trajectory. And then when he collided with Aoba’s arms, they both went gently tumbling.

Declan reached out with one arm, catching Aoba and Ren and looping in, tucking them both briefly against his armored chest before righting them and gently letting go, smiling softly.

"Let me know when you're ready to have the gravity back on. I'm going to do the engine checklist and a few other things. If you need me and I can't hear you, your suit has a communicator and there's the ship comm on the navigation panel. Ghost can show you where it is."

Nodding once, the Titan shoved off the nearest wall, then pulled himself through the main area to the panel leading into the engineering duct. A moment of adjustments and he was disappearing in the shaft full of wiring, pulling himself down the ladder therein.

Ghost remained with the other two, making himself available to nudge them somewhere or explain things. Or just be a friend where he could. He did cautiously follow them around, mostly fretting over Ren, it seemed.

Aoba was left to wonder if gravity was even necessary, himself. Maybe he’d change his mind after the novelty had worn off, but then again, how could it? He’d never experienced anything like it.

One more thing to add to the list.

He also thought Ren was enjoying himself at least a little, even if he wasn’t showing it the ways that he and Declan had. They experimented with the ways that the Allmate could, essentially, do a controlled ricochet from surface to surface, since he wasn’t equipped to pull himself along the railings and other handholds. With Ghost helping, and Ren’s various systems updated to the point that such calculations were quickly refined, it ended up being not too hard at all.

Aoba liked these downtime moments to interact with Ghost directly, too. He was as much a personality as Ren was and he wondered, in a way, if Ghost helped fill a companionship need he’d have gotten from Beni back home. Maybe if he gave them time alone to talk, Ren would enjoy it. This was the most his Allmate had spoken and truly interacted with anyone since the night before.

At one point he saw that Ren had a variety of windows open as they spoke, including holographic images of his humanoid Rhyme shape, but by then Aoba had pulled his way back to that second seat and strapped himself back into it just to ‘sit’ and watch the stars. Another thing on the list.

Ghost found Rhyme shapes very fascinating and asked quite a few questions himself. It was at the least a very short-lived era of human entertainment, and apparently unique to the island Aoba hailed from. He mused idly what sort of body he might have, what he might look like. He mused, too, what type of Allmate he could have been. Then again, he supposed he'd probably look just like himself as an Allmate. Still, to have a human form might have made life easier. Or more complicated, since he wouldn't be quite as mobile or transmat as flawlessly. But if he could design a shell for a Ghost, that allowed humanoid mobility...

Nonsense, he shook himself, returning to more simple conversation topics.

Declan returned about twenty minutes later, floating into Aoba's peripheral vision. Drifting himself over, he tapped the man's shoulder and nodded behind him.

"Come on. There's an observation window down below. I strapped some hammocks to the flooring grates. With the gravity off it'll be just as good as laying down and looking straight up into space," he whispered, leaving Ghost and ren out of it for the moment.

“Hammocks?” Aoba repeated, smile a little quirked at what sounded to him like a pretty whimsical idea. That didn’t mean it was bad, though, so he undid the bits securing himself to the seat and pushed himself out of it, this time with much better coordination than all his flailing about before. “Alright, lead the way.”

Ghost and Ren seemed to be bonding quite well, so Aoba simply wasn’t of a mind to disturb them. Maybe he and Ren could have better luck at addressing their own quarrel the night before, too. But later. After he saw whatever space hammocks looked like.

Slightly more utilitarian than whimsical, but still a generally light-hearted appearance in an otherwise very militaristic setting. Two padded hammocks with zippers on them were clipped to the floor with carabiners, loosely hanging there as though Aoba and Declan were the ones upside down after "climbing" the ladder through the engineering ducts.

Just as he said, a little further forward towards what was the cockpit up above, a large observation window curved along the ship's keel, grid scaffolding around it. That metal grating was what he attached the hammocks to, meaning that once they were in them, they'd only see out the bubble of the window. It was as close to floating outside as they could get without suits.

Helping Aoba maneuver into one of the two, Declan slid himself into the other and half zipped himself in, scooting around a bit before relaxing with a long sigh.

"It's not all of space around you, but it's pretty close...It's not the best way to sleep, but it's good for a nap, or just...drifting off in thought, sometimes."

"I dunno, seems pretty sleepable to me," Aoba countered lightly, feeling equal parts silly and comfortable. But Declan looked silly too, his big form snuggled into the other hammock, so Aoba avoided feeling too self-conscious. Then he wondered, was this what caterpillars felt like inside their cocoons? "Ren would probably tell you I can fall asleep anywhere."

He found he was grateful for the lattice across the glass, as it kept him from feeling like space was too close or that he might fall out into it somehow. Past that, it was beautiful. Even if you could see the stars from the Districts, he was sure it was impossible for them to look as clear as this.

"I can, too, I guess. Since I sleep in battlefields and such, when I choose to. We don't technically need sleep, but it taxes us mentally so it's best to rest. One of the few things we treat normally," Declan chatted, yawning softly towards the end. He wasn't really tired, just relaxed, gloved finger stretching out and pointing.

"At this orientation it's hard to tell, but that's the constellation Ophiuchus. If you keep traveling over this way," he pointed to another dot of light in the vastness, "You'd reach the Andromeda galaxy. But back this way," he stretched and sat up a bit, pointing opposite where they were heading.

"That way is The Reef and the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Did you know space is actually really full in the Milky Way? There's many miles between things, but there's actually debris, asteroids, meteorites, derelict ships and stations, old satellites. All over there place, lots of stuff. Even back in your time, space isn't empty...just...vast."

"I'd never even seen stars before I wound up in Steelport. That was maybe the only good thing that happened in that place: the first time I happened to look out a window and realized the stars were visible."

It was another way of saying he was only vaguely aware of the various things Declan mentioned. Even if they'd been properly oriented, he wouldn't have known what 'Ophiuchus' even looked like. Still, he was back at a point where it was easy to talk again, so he engaged the conversation.

"Back home, construction just gets built up higher and higher, so there's nowhere a normal person can go to really see the sky. Either all you see is buildings overhead, or there's too much smog and light pollution, things like that. There might not be any war more significant than gang turf wars in the Old Resident District, but it doesn't have any really beautiful places like you've shown me so far. Maybe Platinum Jail does, but no one like me would ever get to go in there."

"Why would anyone want to go to a jail?" Declan asked, shifting in the hammock to look at Aoba instead of the stars. As far as he was concerned, it was a better view.

"I can't say that you're better off here or not - you have family and friends back there - but I do wish we had more time. That I could...just keep showing you the things out here. The beauty still in the universe despite everything else. It's all so vast, I don't think I'd ever run out of things to give you."

…Had he just thought it was easy to talk again? Because clearly he jinxed it. Not…as bad as he could have been, though, because the particular wording of what Declan said had a specific something he could focus on instead of the threat of bringing heat to his cheeks again.

“Declan.” The Guardian’s name, said just for emphasis, as Aoba gave him a dry but not unfriendly look. His following words were softer, anyway. “Do me a favor and stop talking like you’re never going to see me again, alright? That’s my promise. Even if I don’t know how long it’s going to take, or how the timelines really meet up, I’m going to come see you again.”

He can’t turn the gravity off on you, Declan, so instead you’re getting chided by a human bagworm. Are you impressed yet.

"What? I wasn't!" he protested, shaking his head. "I really wasn't. I just mean, you won't always be here. You have your family to think of. If we don't figure out a way to get you home through the portals you take, then we'll end up using a Vex gate, and that's a one-way ticket. So if you come back the way you got here the first time, it'll be harder for you to find your way home the next time. Then who knows how long I'll have to wait to see you again?" the Titan huffed a sigh, pouting a bit as he rolled in his hammock and stared out the window.

"I can, and will, wait forever. Quite literally. But it will be very sad, you know?"

Did he know? Maybe he didn't. Maybe that all tied back to him viewing things more trivially than he should have. It quieted Aoba again, at least for a few moments.

"... Maybe I don't," he admitted, since keeping his opinions to himself had already been remarked upon. Let's see if he could avoid falling into that pitfall again.

"Everything has happened so fast on my end, I keep assuming things will continue that way. The portals that go from Midorijima, to Steelport, to the City, are just one long walk now that I know that path. I guess that's my own kind of hopefulness, like yours is for the Earth going back to normal. You tell me not to be sad about how the Earth is now, so... is it really that different from not being sad until I see you again?"

"Yes. It's different," Declan replied softly, shifting a bit, still gazing out at the starry fields.

"You don't think about the Earth as it is right now and think 'So what's the point of going on?' but when I think about never seeing you again, I worry that the all that brightness won't come back into my life and I'll just...fight on, because I don't know anything else. It isn't fair of me to put that weight on you, and it isn't for you to fix...but it is different."

And there went the heat in Aoba's cheeks again, though it was dull and dampened by concern into something more like shame than outright embarrassment. Because yeah, okay, that was pretty different. He'd really affected Declan that much, huh....

But the Guardian wouldn't come with him, and Aoba couldn't stay. Not until he'd gotten home and made sure everyone was okay, and that they would be okay in his future absences.

"You're not forcing a weight on my shoulders if it's one I don't mind bearing," Aoba told him, an unwittingly Reason-esque mirror of something Desire had said before. "I'm going to come back someday."

Maybe he was too trivial. Maybe he still had plenty more things to think about it. But it hadn't changed that it was what he wanted to do.

"I believe you will," he replied with a slow nod, looking down at his hands for a moment, rubbing thumbs and forefingers together, the gloves creaking softly. He honestly did believe Aoba would return, and while he didn't have any particular time frame, he didn't believe it would be too long, either. Then again, "too long" was a nebulous estimate, at best, particularly for someone who could be as infuriatingly patient as the Titan.

"Maybe when you come back, the fight will already be over?" he remarked, smirking faintly. Even he wasn't naive enough to believe that for a second, but why not play optimistic?

"If everything were better here...would you do it the other way?" he asked, genuinely curious, glancing over at Aoba again. "Would you bring everything you care about here instead?"

Huh. Now there was an angle of it Aoba hadn't considered. He was quiet briefly, doing just that.

"If we assume that anyone I asked would be willing to come... I absolutely would, I think. For all that you say humanity achieved even greater than this before the war began, you're still leagues better now than things are back home. There's more space, more advances... and if there were no war, people could go anywhere they wanted. Not be stuck in cramped Districts with gangs fighting over territory and other stupid things like that."

He crossed his arms a little, wondering. "It's hard to imagine Granny leaving that little house, or Koujaku giving up all the attention he gets doing women's hair. Mizuki has his tattoo parlor. I'm a junk shop clerk. Haga-san has been kind to me, but it's not exactly a classy job when you think about it. Except for them, I really don't have anything tying me down, but I think it would be different for them."

"Your Granny could have a house in the countryside here," he mused, just fantasizing for the sake of it, being that they had the freedom to do so.

"Anywhere, really, but the air in the mountains is good for the elderly. People still need their hair done here. And tattoos, and junk shops. This world seems different to you, but some things never change." He clucking his tongue in thought, gazing out the window again.

"It would be nice to meet Aoba's friends and family," he hummed, smiling softly. "The world that made you is important, too."

An amused chuff from Aoba, putting some cheer back in his mood. Declan did this daydreaming thing pretty well, huh? More proof that he was a much more thoughtful person than many other people seemed to realize.

“Well then put that one down along with the hope of the war being over by the time I get back,” he answered, borrowing off of the Guardian’s earlier suggestion. “Then there will be nothing stopping you from coming to visit my side of things, too. There aren’t nearly as many pretty things to see, but if you think my cooking is okay, then you’re absolutely going to go crazy for Granny’s.”

He nodded in agreement, choosing not to voice his concerns that his connection to the Light that kept him alive might be severed by exiting the world in which the Traveler sat nearby. He didn't know the potential ramifications of leaving, and while it would be worth the sacrifice to follow Aoba, he chose not to propose anything negative might come of it. Instead, he quieted, thinking about meeting an old woman, asking permission to take care of Aoba. Learning about the things he wouldn't say by asking his friends, walking the streets of the place Aoba called home.

He decided then that when Aoba left, he would fly back to Earth and seek out Midorijima. He would walk those streets, put his feet on the ground that the other man walked, a thousand and more years away. Perhaps that would ease the pain he knew he was going to feel?

"Aoba...write me, when you leave," he murmured, tilting his head and looking to the other man. "Think of a place you can write something and leave it for me to find today. Something in metal or stone, and hidden. And tell me where to look before you go. I can't write back...but it would put me at ease to know you were there."

“Huh?” Aoba looked back over at him, puzzled. The idea wasn’t fully articulated so at first Aoba thought, leave Declan another letter? Like the notes he’d left pinned in place by that first gifted crystal? Well, sure, that would be easy enough. But what did metal or stone have to do with—

Then something clicked and he realized, Declan maybe didn’t mean now. Maybe he actually meant, “You mean, like a time capsule? If…if I bury something in the past, it’ll survive to the future?”

Also if he decided (had decided) to do so, it would have to already exist. It would have existed even before the Aoba of now agreed to the idea, in fact. But Aoba didn’t have a head for time travel so this spin of paradoxes and certainties didn’t occur to him. The idea of a time capsule was achievement enough for his simpler mind.

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