orendalogs | IT'S YOUR DESTINY!!!

“Huh.” This time the sound was just thoughtful, rather than confused. Aoba didn’t have to ponder it very long before he was nodding, though.

“Yeah, okay,” he agreed, with more warmth than those brief little words might imply. Declan was smiling again, which in turn brought a mirror of it to Aoba’s own face. “I can do that for you. It’ll be fun. I mean, hopefully I won’t have too much time to spend filling it up with things before I’m headed back this way, but I’ll fill it up with as many things as I can think of.”

"It's something you can do every time you go home! We get you a different container and put it in a different place. Decide on a time for me to get it." He sighed, smiling, more relaxed about it all than he'd felt in a long time. They were making enormous assumptions about being in the same universe, but maybe faith was enough?

"That's the most comforting thought I've had since thinking about you leaving. I'm much less scared." Because yes, the murdermachine behemoth was scared.

Well color Aoba all shades of surprised. Sad he’d been told, lonely he understood, but scared? The arms Aoba still had crossed in thought tightened slightly around himself, subtly changing the gesture to a self-hug. As much as one should only expect to learn more and more things about another person when they’d really only known each other a short while, something about all of Declan’s surprise bits of depth just made Aoba more and more happy. He’d wanted to be a friend for the Guardian—and he was achieving exactly that.

Finally, Declan wasn’t talking like he’d never see Aoba again after this. Now it was planning, and expectation, just like it was for Aoba.

“Of course, I’ll bring you all kinds of things in person, too. Things that would survive a couple hours’ walk a lot better than a few ages in a box. If you can’t come to Granny’s cooking, then I’ll have to bring Granny’s cooking to you!”

"I'd like that very much. Should I...hm. I'll write a letter of apology before you go, too. Just in case. So if you go home and you've been missing a long time, we can at least explain some of it. I'll tell the truth. You were stuck in a warzone and it wasn't safe to send you home at first so we needed to wait until we had an escort plan. I'll apologize for keeping you and maybe it will help a little?" He nodded to himself, kitting his fingers together on his stomach and relaxing there, looking at the stars and imagining bridging the gaps of time and space so gently.

"While we're at the Reef I'll look for a nice gift for your grandmother. It's customary, right? Gifts for family elders?"

“I’m already going to have to explain this whole Chosen One business to her,” Aoba pointed out, a little less mirthfully. “Ren has pictures and things as evidence, but…okay. You can do that. I’ll have to read it to her unless you want some help writing it in Japanese, but I think once the…context is explained to her, she’d appreciate the gesture.”

But the offer of a gift got a short laugh out of him again, though. “As long as it’s not anything to make her feel like a family elder! That just makes her grumpy.”

"I can write in Japanese. I can learn anything. Our technology is much more advanced in regards to learning and teaching. I can learn while we're on this trip," he pointed out, gesturing vaguely.

"Common root languages are in all Ghost memories, since as Guardians we encounter a lot of different nationality recordings. I know Russian," Declan shrugged, before adding, "And everyone in the City speaks a pidgin language with English, Chinese, French, Spanish, and Arabic roots. It's very musical, actually." He hummed softly to himself, nodding in self-agreement. Yes, while he was alone in the hours Aoba rested during the trip between locations, he would endeavor to learn Japanese. It would be good to speak and write something familiar to the other man, even if he could obviously speak and read anything else on his own just fine.

"I wouldn't know what to get to make her feel old," the Titan admitted, tilting his head slightly. "The oldest person I know is The Speaker, and he's just like anyone else."

So…he didn’t want help? Aoba wasn’t sure if what he felt was disappointment, or if he just felt a little ignorant for assuming the language would prove a literal barrier. Being spontaneously understanding of all languages he might encounter as a Chosen had been remarkably convenient but—well, no matter. It was more important that Declan wanted to do it for Granny, and there was no way Aoba couldn’t take that as a sweet gesture on the Guardian’s part.

Better just to smile lopsidedly. “Then I think if you don’t know, I won’t risk messing things up by telling you. If you’re just thinking of her as someone like anyone else, then you’ll probably do just fine on your own. It’ll be a genuine, unbiased gift, straight from the heart.”

"Aren't all gifts supposed to be that way?" he asked, tilting his head a bit to look over at Aoba curiously. Well, biased maybe a little, at least in the sense that some gifts were supposed to convey more meaning than others. His gifts for Aoba would naturally be different from gifts he'd send to Aoba's grandmother, but that was because of personal feelings. When he looked at a thing and felt something in his chest acting funny and started thinking about Aoba, then he knew it was something he needed to get for the man. Would he feel the same about a gift for his Grandmother? He didn't think so...

Aoba was different.

"I'll try to pick something nice and useful, but not to blandly utilitarian. Pretty without...being a frippery? You think that would work?" Like what...slippers? That seemed kind of too impersonal. He'd have to find something lovely without being pointless. Like framed art. Art felt mostly pointless to him. He liked looking at beautiful, real things. Nature. People. Some artifacts that he admired for their age and purpose. Mac was a magpie. The things Declan picked up were different from the nonsensical baubles the Warlock liked. He retrieved things that made him think of other things, like Aoba. Something was beautiful because of the emotion it elicited, not because of the feeling it was designed to convey.

“Well there’s gifts you get because you’re expected to give one, because it’s polite, or traditional, or a holiday or something. A lot of times it’s really generic and boring, both getting and receiving gifts like that, because either no thought or only really shallow thought went into it.” Aoba shrugged, jostling his hammock-cocoon a bit. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. You sound like you have the right idea, anyway.”

With a bit of squirming, he freed one arm and held a hand out, roughly twenty centimeters below the top of his own head. “She’s about this tall against me, if you’re thinking clothes. She does basically all the cooking, and she’s a retired doctor that still does house calls for the neighbors sometimes.”

And bringing her up…this time, it didn’t hurt at all. There was no homesick heartache at the mention of her, just the happy imaginings of a…long-distance introduction between her and his new friend.

"Hm. Okay. I'll look around and see what I can find. It has to be something that people wouldn't get suspicious about, too. So nothing too technologically advanced or that would be insanely costly in your time. Like gold and diamonds aren't really worth anything anymore, but back then I understand it was quite limited. Hm. Well, maybe something not too mad. Does she wear jewelry? Awoken are fond of ornaments," he muses, gesturing with his fingers vaguely, a motion he intends for sparkling things.

"Hm. I know our main goal on Venus is information about Chosen Ones and portals to other places, but is there anything else you want to know while we're there? With Ren and Ghost scanning the files at a make higher rate than ourselves, we can spend time exploring other topics of interest if you like? I'm going to learn about Japan." Yeah, he already decided that. He's gotta be culturally sensitive, Aoba.

“She’s a pretty practical lady,” Aoba responded to the first, chuffing at the thought of presenting her some kind of expensive gift. He didn’t imagine she’d be completely unappreciative, but she might act skeptical or throw in some lecture about the value of money, first. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her with more than a simple necklace and a hairstick.”

The second, on the other hand, was another of those left-field changes in topic. Or it was until Declan ended with his desire to learn more about Japan, bringing a brief tightness to Aoba’s chest.

“I—I don’t know, I didn’t think about anything like that,” he faltered briefly, flattered or a little embarrassed or somewhere between the two. Should he learn about Ancient Rome, then? No, that had no bearing on anything at all. Declan was just a person, now.

"Hm...would it bother you terribly if I spent a little time reading?" he asked, reaching up and rubbing one earlobe lightly, brows perked in questioning.

"I don't want you to be be bothered or bored. It would be terribly quiet if I just sat there in silence for a few hours. Hm. Maybe...I shouldn't. I'm supposed to be spending this time with you, not indulging my curiosity. There are a lot of displays and things still intact at the library. We can look through those? It's sort of like a museum at this point..."

“You don’t have to be talking to be good company, Declan,” came another amused chuckle, Aoba waving a hand dismissively before tucking them together, thumbs hooked in the hammock. Without gravity to hold them down, he had to be all the more conscious about where his arms were drifting off to.

“Just because nothing’s coming to me off the top of my head, that doesn’t mean I won’t think of something while we’re there. I could just grab something random and browse around. You don’t have to act like you have to entertain me. If I can look over to where you are and see you’re enjoying yourself, that’s still spending time together.”

"Really? Hm." he asked, glancing over curiously before smiling faintly and looking back to the stars. That was...really nice to hear. Declan talked a great deal with Aoba, far more than he ever did with other people aside from Mac, and that was because the man harassed him incessantly. The Titan liked being in places such as the bar, but he didn't want to talk as much as listen, watch sometimes. He liked reading and being quiet and just sharing space. The times Declan didn't feel alone at home were when he tucked himself onto the cushioned nook against the balcony window at home and read something he'd found in one of his many patrols. He liked Little Women the most, but he'd read a lot of pre-Golden Age literature just because he could. The world wasn't so silent and lonely when filled with the words of great authors, and while he was a little slow at reading and retaining things, once he did it stayed.

"I wish I lived in your time," he stated abruptly, sighing softly. He didn't elaborate on the statement, just making it and leaving it at that, but he thought that if he had, he'd very much have liked Aoba to find him. Maybe whoever he was before could have used a friend, too. Especially one like the other man. He wondered, would the other him have been such a coward with his feelings? In the past, was he brave and bold? Or just as alone? Sometimes he pondered those things, but he never wanted to know badly enough to ask Ghost, and he knew Guardians weren't supposed to, anyways. Still...he wondered if the Declan of before were a better man that Aoba may have looked to, romantically.

See, it was comments like that which could leave one wondering just how the train of Declan’s thoughts worked sometimes. A long enough discussion on one topic, and then bam, non sequitur. But it wasn’t bad, just…curious. Quirky.

He slowly nodded, thinking that yeah, that would have been nice. No war. No being raised from the dead over and over. Cramped conditions, turf wars, and an island you couldn’t leave, but—no Darkness. And maybe even the Traveler would visit in their time and render all the things that Aoba could complain about obsolete. If they were both in his time together, he wouldn’t know anything about the time of Darkness that he would never live to see.

Except if Declan wanted to say that being brought back by the Traveler was worthwhile just for the chance to meet him, then it was equally true that-

“Except, if you were, you wouldn’t be here to help me right now. You’d be stuck back home without me.”

"It seems I suffer misfortune and absence no matter the course," the Titan mused, smiling vaguely and tilting his head enough to look sidelong at Aoba before closing his eyes for a time, drifting in space and thought.

"But, in either scenario, I still get to welcome you back." Because they weren't going to consider that Aoba wouldn't be able to return. Positive energy into the void. That thought in mind, he reached out, gripping the edge of the grating and pulling himself out of his hammock.

"Hm. I'm going to turn the gravity back on and rest a while. If you're tired, you can go ahead and take the bunk and I'll rest in the cockpit. I want to make sure I get some sleep before I take over the controls. Navigating contested territory can't be done by the autopilot, and I took patrol assignments in all the locations we're visiting to make sure I'm relieving posts properly. Rest between will be more sketchy for me."

Aoba considered that, imitating Declan’s movements to squirm out of his hammock as well. No sense staying in it if the gravity was coming on, he’d just get slammed onto his head!

“If you need to sleep, you should take the bunk. I don’t want to think that you were sleeping upright in a chair when you could have gotten better quality rest than that.”

It hadn’t been all that long since he’d gotten up, technically, so Aoba wasn’t tired on any sense of it being late into the day, but…he didn’t feel too drained after the emotional turmoil of the night, either. And even if he did, Aoba was just a passenger. A weapons-carrier at best. Declan, the actual Guardian, had no business giving up the only proper bed to him.

“I’ll be fine. I’ll stay up with Ghost and Ren.”

"If you're sure?" he replied with a dubious tone, nodding once. "I have to go on patrol as soon as we arrive on Venus. It's for the best, anyways. I took the rotation around the academy so a group of us can clear it out before I take you there. I should ask where you'd like to land, actually," Declan mused as they made their way back up to the main deck.

"There's a few different places around the academy, but I want to land on a spot you'll enjoy looking out at while we're camped. So there's the The Cinders, The Endless Steps, and the Ishtar Cliffs. The Cinders are big steel gray rock formations and black-wood trees, and sulfur pools of gold and blue and green that look like gemstones scattered in the dark ground," he made a sprinkling motion with one hand.

"The Endless Steps are white stone monoliths and Vex ruins reaching out of a vast jungle, and the Ishtar Cliffs, on the Shattered Coast, are just outside the academy and look out across the sea at the volcanoes. They have blue flames," he added the last with a look, knowing Earth volcanoes weren't gaseous.

"We can visit every spot, of course, that's not an issue. But we shouldn't constantly relocate. It may disrupt the wildlife. Or draw unwanted attention," he pointed out, waving lightly to Ren and Ghost before floating over.

"Would you be alright with me holding you while we turn gravity back on?" he asked, holding his big hand out for the Allmate, his other hand gripping one of the ship frame beams as Ghost drifted over to the controls. Whether Aoba or Declan held the dog, a moment later the gravity was back on, their collective bodies all weighing down again. That was the strangest sensation of all, to the Titan. Being forced to recognize the great bulk of himself.

Declan had thrown Aoba for a loop again. At first it began with having to puzzle through what Declan meant by clearing out the academy—only to realize on his own that a patrol meant looking for enemies and routing them if necessary. He’d learned that well enough when Declan had been making his calls home, offering vague but nevertheless eye-opening descriptions of what it was he did out in space as a Guardian.

That was when Aoba also realized that a patrol meant the Academy wasn’t what he’d envisioned at the word. They weren’t going to some outpost or far-flung place of learning tended secretly by the space equivalent of monks in the mountains. The City was The Last City. There were no other human settlements! Declan was taking him to do research in abandoned ruins. Why else the gear he was clad in? Why else the weapons for him to carry? God, what was Aoba, stupid? He kept being given pieces of information and failing to put them together into a meaningful whole!

So Aoba didn’t say anything sensible at all. He barely was able to register the way Ren kicked off his shelf and landed in Declan’s hand, looking like nothing so much as a tiny black puff in the Guardian’s safe grip. Instead, clever man that he was, Aoba blurted as gravity returned and he grabbed at his handholds:

“You have to patrol for hostile forces and you’re worried that camping might disrupt wildlife?”

What about battle, what about gunfire? But camping was disruptive??

He’d be touched as per usual by the Guardian’s gentle soul in a moment or five. Right now, it just sounded like absurd priorities.

"Well, yeah? When you fire a weapon you hit what you aim at, and they're low environmental impact. The hostiles don't care about the environment but I try to, and landing a ship can crush a lot of things. I landed on a bird nest once and wouldn't land for weeks after that. Ghost transmatted me to the surface every time. I still feel terrible when I think about it..." He shook his head, shoulders hunching a bit as he leaned and placed Ren gently on the floor. Ghost floated over to whisper to Aoba.

"He crushed some eggs and cried. I tried to tell him they were still in the nest because they were infertile, but it was the principle of it, he said."

"And food in some areas is scarce so it's hard to pick a nice-looking landing spot because if it looks nice it probably tastes nice for the local fauna," Declan added, pacing back and forth in the cockpit to check readouts, read through messages from the Vanguard, and review his bounties. It was highly unlikely other Guardians worried as much as he did. Particularly to being driven to tears over a smashed birdnest.

There it was. The foot-in-mouth moment. Silenced Aoba right quick.

Left standing awkwardly in the space behind the seats, Aoba spent the moments necessary to gather his thoughts in finger-combing his hair carefully back in place, ponytail split in its usual halves to either side of his neck. He couldn't imagine crying over crushed eggs, himself, but he didn't hesitate in thinking he'd most certainly feel bad if it happened.

"... You're too kind a soul for war," he thought, words voiced without real intention.

He stopped what he was doing, looking over his shoulder slowly to gaze at Aoba a moment, bright eyes blinking. After a second he smiled, shrugged, and looked away, heat creeping.

"War doesn't care who you are, just what you stand for," Declan replied quietly, tapping his finger on the ship screen before straightening and turning. He raised a hand, reached out almost to touch Aoba's face before looking at his fingertips like they were independent and out of their collective minds. Clearing his throat and smiling again, the Titan shook his head and moved past the trio of onlookers.

"It's sad, though, don't you think?" he asked, turning briefly on his way to the bunk room. "That the universe is so absent of people that think like me, that you think I'm special somehow? It shouldn't be so rare for someone to just...care."

…Again. There it happened again, and this time Aoba was more conscious of it. A hand extended, veering away. This time it even bubbled up in his thoughts to think, Declan wanted to touch him? But when he had before already, what was it about that particular reaching that Declan kept stopping for?

So tell him it’s okay to. It’s not that hard. came that background muttering, remarkably quiet for the last while but now stirred up again. But before Aoba could decide if he even had the courage to, the Guardian had moved past them. Right. He needed to sleep. Aoba didn’t need to be distracting him with his own idiocy right now. Besides, maybe he held back for more complicated reasons—like, you know, not being comfortable with how Aoba had acted the night before.

The other resident of his mind only snorted at his dig.

But Declan paused, Aoba listened, and in the words was something enough for him to respond to no matter the complications around everything else. Even if things had been one-hundred percent normal, their interactions untroubled by odd thoughts and alter-egos, it would have needed to be said.

“Even if the universe was full of people that think like you, you’d still be special.”

Silence reigned in the tiny space for a moment, Ghost's big blue eye flicking back and forth between the two as Declan stood there, staring at Aoba. It wasn't a hard gaze, but soft. Moved. His large lips parted, pinched, parted again, the bottom compressed a moment in attempt to form a word and ultimately failing. He blinked, shaking his head slightly, as though taking himself out of some trance before inhaling deeply and uttering a notably tremulous sigh.

"If you say so, it must be true," the Titan murmured, cheeks colored and eyes glittering with more than their usual shimmer. Swallowing and puffing a little sigh, he reached up, patting the frame over his head with a few echoing slaps, trying to start his motor again before retreating to the bunk. In the other room he stood in front of the little bed with it's army green blanket, staring through everything. A few seconds ticked by and he slowly lurched forward, collapsing face down into the bed, hands tugging the pillow down to cram his face into it, trying to banish the burning in his skin.

He was going to have a very hard time getting to sleep.

Edited 2018-10-31 22:35 (UTC)

Aoba didn’t even know how to take that reaction. It didn’t feel bad, but it did feel…complicated. Aoba stood in place for a little while after the Guardian had gone out of sight into the bunkroom, squeezing his hands in troubled fists. There was a dead-eyed stare being leveled at him from the back of his thoughts. Funny how he could tell it was so, despite there being no true sight involved. Power of a shared imagination?

Ren sat at his feet, looking up at him with a steady expression. After a sigh of his own, Aoba picked him up and returned to the cockpit, sitting back in the seat which he presumed would have been the co-pilot’s, had someone of the appropriate skills been present. There were those bolted seats by the kitchen area, sure, but this one had the better view.

“I don’t know if I’m an idiot or what,” he murmured to his companion, fingers buried in dark fur.

After a low sigh of his own, Ren answered, “I do not believe ‘idiocy’ is the problem in any way, but I do believe this is proof that it is unwise to let your other side control your actions without mediation. Desires are not meant to be freely indulged. Now you are dealing with the consequences of such.”

And here we go again, went the background mutterings.

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