Story plan changes and scheduling issues kept this one at bay for a while, but it’s finally done. Time to start on the next one 
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Chapter 43
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It was nice to wake up from an unintentional memory reading without being drenched in cold sweat, though I wasn’t feeling all that rested yet. I looked around. It was still dark out; it couldn’t have been long since I’d fallen asleep, but since Pohatu’s apartment lacked a clock of any kind I couldn’t tell what time it actually was. Then again… I got up, loathe to leave the comfy chair behind, and made my way over to the telescreen. Making sure the sound volume was as low as it would go, I turned it on and eventually found a news channel that had a clock on screen: 1:32 AM. Unsurprisingly, at this hour, there wasn’t much news to report or to watch, so my mind drifted back again to what I’d just seen. This last memory was different, different from the ones I’d seen before. I’d seen some of the best and worst moments in the Toa Nuva’s collective history, but they’d always been… heated memories, I guess. Ones in which there was a lot of anger, a lot of arguing and/or fighting. I hadn’t really seen much in the way of happy memories, or ones in which some actual success was achieved without resorting to desperate measures; given the Toa Nuva’s current situation, I guess they didn’t come to anyone’s mind much. Granted, even this last one was in the aftermath of one of those desperate measures, but it seemed hopeful in a way that many of the others didn’t. Before, the memories I’d inadvertently picked up had always seemed somehow relevant to what the thinker was experiencing at the time… so, speaking of the thinker, how was he doing?
I found Kopaka still sitting by Pohatu’s bedside, empty pot at his feet just in case the need for it would suddenly arise. He was facing the bed, sitting in his usual, hunched over meditative pose. Walking into the bedroom, I noticed that his eyes were off in the distance somewhere, looking through the small, high window of the bedroom. I stood there for a bit, unsure of whether I really wanted to jog him out of it at this hour, but then he snapped out of it himself.
“Lis.” He didn’t move, didn’t look at me, and his voice had an unusual softness to it.
“Yeah, I’m here,” I replied, wondering whether or not he was going somewhere with the conversation. I waited for a while, but it didn’t seem like he was; he’d acknowledged my presence, but that would be it from his side.
“How is he?” I asked.
“Improving,” Kopaka answered. “He appears to be doing better than last time.”
“That’s good, I guess…” I wasn’t sure where to go with that, and once again, Kopaka seemed content to leave the subject be. “So, I saw something again,” I began, then waited, trying to gauge his response. At first, I got no reaction.
“Go on,” he eventually said.
“It… it was after something in Onu-Koro,” I recalled. “You were digging, like, actually making a tunnel, and you found Pohatu buried deep down with some Rahkshi.”
“Onu-Koro, yes…” he remembered. “I heard the rumbling sound and made my way to one of its vents… it had collapsed, as had everything below.”
“Right, and Pohatu and Onua were left down there while the Matoran escaped,” I filled in.
“They sacrificed themselves,” Kopaka said, his eyes falling onto Pohatu again. “I suspect they would have been left down there if I had not found them.”
“I could feel that,” I added. “I could feel you were… worried about them, and I could feel the weight lifted when you found him and he woke up.” I gestured towards Pohatu.
“Worried?” Kopaka turned to me, his voice taking on a harsher tone. “I was doing my duty, Lis. We could not leave them down there. Even if it was not me, someone else would have gone to search for them, and if not Onua would have survived on his own. He would not have left Pohatu behind. I simply happened to get there first.” His explanation made some sense, but he was being rather defensive about it, I felt.
“That’s unusually humble for you,” I pointed out.
“Not humble, practical,” he corrected, turning his attention back to the Toa in the bed.
“Look, it’s not a bad thing,” I pointed out. “I mean, I would’ve been worried, too. And happy afterwards. Like, let’s celebrate happy.” He didn’t pick up on the comment. I sighed: “Whatever… you still saved him.”
“So it seems,” he concluded. We sat in silence, him watching over Pohatu as always while I pondered the significance of him thinking about that time he saved Pohatu in our current situation. Then I got an idea.
“So, is that what you’re doing now?” I asked.
“Doing what?”
“Saving him,” I explained. “Saving him from… from himself. Getting him out of the bottle and all.” Kopaka sighed, his eyes staying on Pohatu as he seemed to ponder an answer. On the plus side, that meant he was considering not immediately shutting me down. Perhaps he’d even admit that I’d figured it out… okay, maybe that was too hopeful.
“No,” he finally said.
“No?” I was a bit taken aback. Why else could he have been thinking of that particular memory? “What is it, then?” I asked again.
“As I said before, you will see,” he replied, sounding agitated. He wasn’t the only one feeling that way, though.
“You already said we will not be staying long,” I reminded him, “so yeah, I guess you’re not here to save him, but you wouldn’t come back just to clean up his house either…”
“Lis…” he interrupted, his voice becoming stern without raising its volume. Its implication was clear.
“I’m just trying to figure it out,” I continued. “I mean, on our first time in the city there at least was a plan, but I’m honestly not sure what you’re going for here, and it doesn’t make sense to me. So, I’m trying to reason my way to whatever you’re doing.”
“Reason in silence,” he ordered, “or leave. You always have that option.”
“No, I can’t,” I countered, “because something’s different about this trip, and about you. Ever since I showed you what happened with Onua, you’ve been… different. I want to know what’s up.”
“I was working on the plan,” Kopaka explained, “and I had no reason to make you privy to it.”
“And I suppose you still don’t, right?”
“I do not,” he concluded.
“Fine…” I relented. “I’ll see you in the morning, I guess.” I turned and was about to walk out when he posed a question.
“What time is it?”
“Time? Little after one-thirty,” I answered. Looking back, I noticed just for a moment that he seemed… disappointed. Worried, even, and not just in the way that I’d been feeling ever since we got back on that train. It was more like a spike, like he realized he’d lost track of the time. “What’s so important about it?” I asked.
“Could you watch him?” Kopaka circumvented the question.
“Him?” I gestured towards Pohatu. “I could, I guess… Are you tired?”
“I have something I need to take care of,” Kopaka replied.
“At one-thirty in the morning?” I questioned. “What could you possibly do at this hour?”
“Not your concern,” he answered as he got up.
“You’re not going away, are you?” I realized, “not now.”
“No. I will be back,” he assured me.
“I wouldn’t put it above you to leave regardless,” I continued. “I mean, you’ve already walked out of here once. Why wouldn’t you do it now?”
“Because, as I already told you, I have unfinished business,” Kopaka explained. “What I am going to do will not affect that.
“I hope it doesn’t…” I trailed off as he moved past me.
“Just make sure he does not drown,” he instructed as he exited the room and made his way to the front door.
“How long before you’ll be back?” I called after him.
“One hour.” With that, he was out of the building, leaving me to wait and wonder whether he’d really come back. Granted, when he’d told me that he had unfinished business, it had always been implied that it was here, but somehow I wasn’t all that confident that he wouldn’t construct an elaborate ruse just to get away for good. All he had to do was to find a way to frame it around duty, I figured. Then again, if all he’d wanted to do was to get away, he could’ve done so already… Pondering this, I stepped back into the bedroom and took up his post by the side of the bed. Pohatu was still out cold, no surprise there, and judging by the state of the bucket he really was doing better than when last we met him. I recalled how that had ended; two brothers and former best friends, the only friend as far as one of them was concerned, at loggerheads over the question of the Toa Code… Pohatu counted among the many I’d now met who believed the title of Toa to be superfluous in this new world, while Kopaka championed it, if only to make some sense of the life he now pursued. From what Kopaka’d said afterwards, I’d figured their friendship had ended there in his mind, but his behavior now indicated that was far from the case. Still, in light of everything he’d told me, what could he possibly do here in as short a time as he’d said he’d intended to stay?
Getting nowhere with that, I instead found myself looking into Pohatu again. I’d gotten a look at what was left of his mind before, when he’d woken up and not realized who Kopaka was. It’d been a rough experience, given that I’d also seen their last goodbye before then, but it had become immediately clear to me then that Pohatu’s mind was slipping and had been for some time. The deluge of pain signals had shocked me, too. Now, with time to spare and with the Toa of Stone alone and at rest, perhaps I could look a bit closer… I focused in on him almost before I realized what I was doing; I was getting better at this. As I focused, the broad, baseline strokes of his mental state started to unravel and split into countless more detailed strands, anything and everything that he was processing contained within. Most of it looked normal, for someone asleep, though the same ‘dark spots’ that I’d noticed before were still there, and a few ‘red strands’ were interwoven throughout. A brain at rest it may have been, but a healthy brain it wasn’t, the damage of years spent drunk or hung over clearly evident.
After a while, an intermittent flash of activity caught my eye. At first, I thought it was some kind of cyclic process, I guess, some signal his brain sent to his body on a regular schedule, like the beat of a heartlight but slower. However, it was more complex than that, so I started to focus on the spot where it appeared. I waited a few seconds, and sure enough, it happened again… and for a brief moment, I saw something. An image, or a fragment of one, a small snapshot of a dream, perhaps. But dreams would present a constant flow of information, of some kind of process going on, which this wasn’t. I waited for it to appear again, hoping to catch whatever it was and get a clearer view this time…
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It’s dark… a cave of some kind, I suspect. But it’s not a natural cave; no way. Lots of columns are dispersed around its perimeter, and a carving of something is on the opposite wall, maybe… fifty feet away? That’s not my concern, though… There’s something on the columns and the floor around them, some kind of dark, green webbing, a grimy, organic looking substance that should have no space in a cave.
“What do you see?” a slightly anxious voice calls from behind me. I turn to see, standing on the stairs in a tunnel leading upwards, is a Matoran. He’s unusually small, and his colors make no sense, but…
Krrr-Chuck! SPLOTCH! The sound of some kind of mechanism going off is followed rapidly by a heavy blob of some kind of mucoid substance hitting me in the side of the head. My vision is gone instantly. Bolts of pain shoot through me as this, whatever this is, seems to set my nerves on fire. An ominous chittering sound accompanied by the unmistakable whirr of motors seems to be coming from my right… it’s an ambush!
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The memory ended as abruptly as it began; a mere fragment it may have been, but… what was happening there? Then I realized something; there was a flurry of signals flying all over the place all of the sudden, signals that weren’t there before I started to focus on that spot where these fragments appeared. Wondering what exactly they represented, I drew back a bit, trying to figure out the origin. Then I detected another center of activity, so to speak, which seemed to be slowly but surely igniting the region around it. At the time, I didn’t realize what that meant; I did notice that part of the same region that I’d just been observing lit up again, too, and quickly focused in on it hoping to catch whatever happened next in that memory fragment I’d seen. Given the duration of the previous fragments, it should’ve vanished before I ever cobbled together a decent picture, but instead, this one seemed to last longer…
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It’s dark, but this isn’t the cave. I can’t seem to focus my eyes at all, but the slight tint of brown as opposed to green to whatever place I’m in makes it pretty clear that this is not where I was before… it seems I’ve lost my opportunity. Still, I’m getting some of the smell of this place, and it’s an awfully familiar one. Slowly but surely, my eyes are beginning to adjust, and I can make out that I am in a room, probably looking at the ceiling. A spot of movement on the right side of my vision catches my attention; looking there, I notice a flicker of a shadow before it’s gone again… what was that? Is there something in this room with me? Who’s there? Again, I notice movement in my peripheral vision, this time to the left, or right in front of where I was looking before. Again, it seems to vanish the moment I look at where it appeared to be. What kind of phantoms… hang on, there’s something else.
My eyes slowly drift to the left, where something seems to be emitting a faint, blue light. Noticing it, I look towards the source; there’s two of them, but they’re just a little too bright to distinguish what they are while my eyes are adjusted to the dark… I look away slightly but keep the lights in my peripheral vision, then raise myself up to a half-sitting position and slowly turn back to the lights as I start to make out more details. Those two lights… they’re eyes! Eyes with a faint, pale blue glow, belonging to a dark figure that’s just sitting there, sitting on a chair and looking at me. It’s not moving a muscle, sitting almost at attention, but that gaze… it’s haunting, in the sense that it seems to look beyond me, into me, through me. What is this, this… thing? I start picking up on some details of its body. It’s armored… armored with shades of some dark color, but highlights in gold. Hang on… highlights in gold. In gold! That’s me!
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The moment it dawned on me that I was looking at the present, not the past, I immediately drew back from the picture, and from Pohatu’s mind altogether. That process, that igniting of the nerve endings was him waking up! I’d gotten so caught up in his mind, was looking so closely at what was happening there, that I’d paid no attention to what I was actually seeing. I blinked once, twice, then found myself fully back in the room. I almost jumped at the sight; Pohatu was no longer lying down, he was sitting half-upright just as I’d felt him doing for that moment, and his face, his eyes were dead-locked on mine. He said nothing, didn’t move a muscle, in fact he barely seemed to be breathing… like he was echoing what he was seeing in me, except in his eyes were empty. Like, when you look into anyone else’s eyes, you can usually see sign of life, of intelligence, ever so slight. Somehow you can just tell that. But here, in Pohatu’s, that spark was missing. His was a dead-eyed gaze, devoid of any sign of personality, of emotion, of recognition… like a man possessed, and nothing like the Pohatu I’d seen before. It was eerie beyond what I can describe, and for a second or two I just sat there, frozen in response, unsure of whether he would lash out, scream, or do something else I wouldn’t like at all, but he remained devoid of any motion whatsoever.
“Uhm… hello?” I said timidly. Somehow, I felt like I’d been caught in some kind of criminal act. Pohatu didn’t respond. “I’m Lis,” I introduced myself. “Do you remember me?” Not so much as a blink. It was like I was talking to a mannequin. “I was here before,” I continued, “a couple of nights ago. I was with Kopaka, your friend. Do you remember Kopaka?” Still nothing. “Tall guy, white armor… The Toa Nuva?” I tried again. “You served us breakfast. Bread and… something. Remember that?” Still silence. For a moment, I feared that his mind had locked up or something like that, and to be fair, with the way I’d looked, glowy-eyed, sitting motionless, and staring into his soul, I couldn’t have blamed him for being scared beyond his wits. Thinking that didn’t prepare me for his reaction, however.
He suddenly lurched forward, his mask coming within a foot of mine, bared his teeth, and produced a noise that I can only describe as something that started as a kind of bark but ended more as a loud hiss. “BRWASSSSSS!” I’d never heard the like of it, and for moment it all but scared the wits out of me.
“Whoa!” I bolted upright and took a step back from the aggressive display. Pohatu looked up, his eyes following mine, then suddenly clicked his teeth made that same primal sound again. “Hey, calm down,” I beckoned, raising my hands to try and placate him. “I’m not here to hurt you, I’m not here to do anything…”
“Go!” he exclaimed in a voice that was his yet not, between all the hissing and bared teeth. “GO AWAY!” he repeated, then followed up with the weird sound again.
“Okay, okay…” I continued to back up, and just in time as he suddenly reached out with one arm while supporting himself with the other and took a swing at me. “What are you doing?” I didn’t know what to make of this. Now that I was out of reach, Pohatu sat there, supporting himself with his arms, breathing audibly and quickly, and with his teeth still bared. He still hadn’t blinked.
“GO!” he repeated, “Go away. Away… hsssss” he trailed off into the hissing thing again, but then lurched forward and hurled up a yellowish, foul liquid; the remains of his late-night drinks. Reflexively, I reached for the pot, but doing so moved me closer to him, and he immediately reached out and whacked me in the side of the head with his hand. I managed to grab the pot, but by the time I was back up and out of reach of his arms the damage had been done; the smell of alcohol filled the room as the sizable volume of liquid began to soak into the carpet, leaving a few solid chunks behind. I almost threw up myself in response, but took a step back again and avoided looking at the floor instead. Pohatu shouted “Go away!” again, his voice getting raspy and his display now enhanced by trails of the liquid and spittle still running out of his mouth. “GO AWAY! GO! GONE!” I honestly didn’t know what to make of this; had he gone mad? Was he somehow possessed? If so, by what? For that matter, the amount of noise he was producing was bound to attract unwanted attention soon.
“Stop it!” I shouted back, hoping that perhaps volume would get through to him. It didn’t.
“GO AWAY! GO AWAY! BRWASSSS!” he hissed, howled, and shouted as though those two words and that sound were the only thing he was capable of producing. Whatever state of mind it was, clearly I wasn’t going to get to him with words… I had to try something else.
Given that I was out of his reach and that movement was… let’s say tricky for him, I decided to enter in on his mind again to see if I could calm him from the inside. Standing almost in the doorway, I focused on his head, trying to get passed the savage look on his face that was still leaving me shaken. Soon, those signals were coming into view again, and I noticed it was chaos in there. Lots of red signals among others, but just in general Pohatu’s brain seemed to be in some kind of frenzy, making it difficult to discern anything meaningful. I kept trying, blocking the noise out as much as possible, and eventually noticed a particular area that seemed to be sending out a boatload of signals. They were bright ones, loud ones if you will, dominating ones, and they were flooding his brain. This… this had to be it. I didn’t know exactly what the consequences would be, but I decided that I had to dampen this somehow. So I put up barriers, trying to surround this… region, to stop the overriding signals from getting out. It was hard, very hard, but slowly I started to see some success. With me blocking as many of the panic signals as I could, things did indeed start to slow down. Momentarily satisfied, I drew back a bit to get an idea of what he was looking like now.
His eyes were still locked on me, but the look of aggression in his face was dropping, changing to one of bewilderment. I could best describe it as a deer-in-the-headlights look, one that signaled panic could still start at any moment, but at least now he was quiet. So, I kept at it, hoping that dropping that panic even further might bring him to reason. It didn’t, really. He calmed down, but rather than the return of the Pohatu I knew, I drew back at the end to find it was as though he’d lost interest in me completely and had fallen asleep again, still sitting up. I stood still, watching, and waiting to see if he would wake up, or lie down or do something else, but no, he was shut down again. I was shaking and sweating all over; Pohatu’s sudden hostility and my exertions in calming him had left me drained. Still, I laid him back down and put the bedsheets in order, trying to ensure everything visually was just as before. It took a while before I felt comfortable enough to sit down again, though; that image of Pohatu, or rather that Pohatu that wasn’t Pohatu, was still at the forefront of my mind, and it was awfully scary… was this what happened when someone truly did lose their mind?
Was this what madness looked like?
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#####author’s notes: back to business as usual on this one; Kopaka’s got things to take care of, apparently, and Lis has to watch over Pohatu for a while. Writing the latter’s spiel of madness was challenging; I wanted him to appear as basic, as un-Pohatu as possible, and that was difficult to write. Still, I’m quite satisfied with how it came out.
I’ll post more chapters as I finish them. As always, post any questions, comments, and/or observations below. Enjoy!
