The Folly of the Toa II - Chapter 47

Another ‘3AM chapter,’ in that I’ve stayed up way later than recommended on a work day to finish it, mostly because I just did not want to stop writing. I like to think that bodes well for the quality of the material, even though I’ll probably regret it in the morning…

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Chapter 47
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Silence ruled the train again for a while. Or rather, silence except for the constant noise of air rushing past the carriages as we proceeded towards our second stop.

“So, Seaside station is the one by Macku and the Toa Mahri’s place,” I recalled. “Is that where we’re going?”

“It is,” Kopaka confirmed. “Pohatu asked me to thank Hewkii, remember?”

“So he did…”

“Also, Hahli can tell the world of his death on her morning news program,” Kopaka added.

“Right… they’ll probably do a special or something to… well, to get people reacquainted with who Pohatu was,” I hypothesized. “Maybe they’ll interview other Toa and all that… you know, if it wasn’t for the fact that you want people to think you’re dead, you could really contribute to that, make sure that Pohatu’ll be remembered the right way.”

“I could,” Kopaka sighed, “but my brother’s memory will be in capable hands between the Toa Mahri.”

“True, it would be…” I agreed, but it was still somewhat disappointing to know that, beyond informing them, Kopaka had no apparent intention of helping the Toa Mahri and Macku to make sure that the legend he’d talked about, the entire reason that he’d decided to grant Pohatu his wish, actually became the official story. Then again, Hewkii in particular was probably as good a custodian for Pohatu’s legacy as one could find, and Hahli’s position as popular news anchor gave her a lot of power to shape the story in a positive way, not that Kopaka had acknowledged that as a useful thing before. I guess the stoic Toa’s attitude and behavior towards others, in the end, were subject as much to the whims and needs of the situation as they were to his moral code.

By this point, the train was beginning to slow again, and looking forward through it I could see the lights of the second station in the distance. Once the train had stopped, two haggard-looking Agori boarded, which more or less shut down any conversation on the last leg of the trip as far as Kopaka was concerned. Not that I was in the mood to continue either; he’d answered my questions, and emotionally and physically, the events of the night had left me quite drained. No doubt he was feeling the same. We just kind of… sat there, waiting for the train to roll into Seaside Station. When at last it did, Kopaka was quick to disembark, with me following right behind. As before, Seaside was a much cleaner and more tastefully decorated place than Station West had been, thankfully missing any unsolicited satirical artwork on the walls, not that Kopaka would’ve cared to stop and look if there was any. No, he made a beeline for the stairs, and pretty soon we were standing at the side of the road below the illuminated sign advertising the presence of the station below. A large city map posted beside the sign indicated we were about a block or two away from the beach, and well to the east and slightly north of the city center. I looked up and down the street. It was completely quiet, as was to be expected, barring the two Agori who’d joined us on the train at the last station; having emerged from the underground as well, they now turned right and proceeded south along the road, periodically illuminated by and casting long shadows in the dim light of the street lamps.

“This way.” Kopaka was already on the move again. In spite of the fact that both of us were seriously tired, he still kept up a quick pace, reaffirming what he’d told me about running out of time… but running out before what, exactly?

“Why the hurry?” I asked, half-running to catch up.

“Time,” he answered.

“Time ‘til…”

“We have about two and a half hours until sunrise,” Kopaka elaborated. “I want to be out of the city by then.”

“Ah, so we stop by the Toa’s place, tell Hewkii Pohatu thanked him, and then take off again?” I deduced.

“That is the plan,” Kopaka confirmed.

“Right, okay…” I nodded, but something didn’t quite sit right with me. Or rather, it dawned on me that Kopaka seemed to think he could just drop in on some other Toa at four in the morning, inform them that their mutual friend and fellow Toa had died, and then leave again without further explanation; that last part probably wouldn’t sit well with said other Toa. “You know, I don’t want to say you didn’t think this through,” I began, “but… if you tell them Pohatu’s dead, they’ll probably have a lot more questions than we’ll have time to answer.”

“They will not get to ask,” Kopaka countered.

“How so?” I wondered.

“I will leave a note,” he explained.

“Leave a note?” I wasn’t too fond of that either. “Your best friend, their friend is dead, and you’re just going to… what, slide a note under their door saying ‘hey, the Toa Nuva of Stone is dead’?”

“Not the wording I would use,” Kopaka pointed out.

“Well, regardless,” I continued, “if a friend and idol of mine had died, I’d much prefer to be informed personally than with a piece of paper.”

“I do not have that option,” Kopaka said bluntly. “As you said, they would have too many questions.”

“I suppose so…” Kopaka turned right; we were now on the street there Macku and the Toa Mahri’s house was. “You know, I could tell them,” I offered. “You could be on your way, I’ll wait here, and come sunrise, when they’re up, I’ll tell them that Pohatu died. I mean, I was planning to come back here anyways, so, you know, why not?” Kopaka didn’t reply, so while the ideas kept flowing I kept going: “Plus, I could help them organize some kind of memorial, maybe, and even deliver a few words on your behalf. Except you’re dead to everyone except those Toa… hang on, should I tell them that you killed Pohatu or…”

“Lis,” Kopaka suddenly stopped and cut me off. He turned to me. “Do you not have some concerned friends who you promised to return to as soon as possible?”

“Oh, right…” I recalled. “Forgot about that…” Given all that had happened over the last few hours, the fact that Jahlpu and the others were still in Onu-Koro-Nuva had kind of slipped my mind. “I mean, I could call them again, you know, tell them that I’m staying with Hahli, Hewkii, and Jaller… that’d probably put Jahlpu at ease.”

“I am certain the other two will be delighted at the news,” Kopaka noted.

“Lerome and Kirall? Oh, yeah…” Now I remembered why I’d specifically not mentioned the Toa I’d met to my teammates. “I could have to have Jahlpu make up an excuse, I suppose…”

“No,” Kopaka shut it down. “Do not drag him into it. Keep your promises.” With that, he turned and started walking again.

“Uhm, okay…” I could tell there was a lot more reason in his mind for him not wanting me to stay behind than that, but clearly nothing that he was willing to share right now. Of course, that only made me more curious. Did his plan beyond this place actually involve me? That would certainly be a change of pace on his part; up until now, he’d largely tolerated my presence and occasionally made use of it, but never entertained the illusion that he actually needed me around for anything. He’d never shied away from telling me I had the option to leave either… yet here I was offering one, and now he told me to stay. No doubt about it; somehow his plan involved me, but how? Only one way to find out when Kopaka was being secretive… so I guess we were going with the note.

Soon, we’d reached the two-story house marked with carved images of the masks of four of its five inhabitants; Macku’s Huna, Hahli’s Faxon, Jaller’s Arthron, and Hewkii’s Garai. Gali’s presence wasn’t advertised, but in light of what I’d seen on the underground station that wasn’t all that surprising. All the lights were out. Never one to stop and take in the moment, Kopaka unceremoniously crossed the shallow front lawn, stopped in front of the door, and produced out an old-looking but blank piece of paper and a pen. Holding the paper up against a smooth part of the stone wall, he began to write.

“What does it say?” I asked; in the half-light I couldn’t just read it over his shoulder, though he was making no attempt to hide it. He didn’t reply, so I looked around for a moment… and just at that point, one of the lights in the room two windows to the right of the front door turned on. “Oh… looks like someone is awake,” I observed, careful to keep my voice down. Kopaka looked at the window momentarily, then turned his attention back to the note. “I’ll see who it is,” I offered, eliciting no further response from Kopaka. Taking his disinterest as permission, I activated my Volitak and walked over to the window to peer inside. The light in question was coming from the kitchen; looking in, I had to wait for a moment for my eyes to adjust. I could see that there was someone bent over in front of the counter… rummaging through the lower cabinets, I figured. After a second or two, the figure slowly, and with some effort, straightened out; it was Gali, apparently on what I could only describe as a midnight kitchen raid. Given that she’d picked up a large, as yet unopened bag of some kind of snack food, her intentions were quite clear. There was a something solemn in the way she went about it, though; the expression on her face, her body language… perhaps ‘defeated’ was a better word. No doubt this wasn’t something she was proud of, and to be honest it was quite dispiriting to see the Toa Nuva of Water reduced to… to this. As she pulled a large cup out of another cabinet and turned her attention to the cold box, I backed away from the window and quickly made my way back to Kopaka.

“It’s Gali,” I informed him.

“Gali?” he looked at me with just a hint of curiosity. “What is she doing at this hour?”

“Getting a midnight snack, it seems,” I answered.

“A midnight snack?” he asked as though the concept was entirely foreign to him. To be fair, it probably was.

“Yeah, she’s hungry, I guess…” I knew the real explanation, of course, and it laid more than a little of the blame on Kopaka. Just recalling how he’d berated her that evening, after all she’d done for him, got my blood boiling again. Kopaka? Well, he just kind of shook his head, his expression clearly telegraphing disapproval, then folded his note in half and leant down, intending to push it through under the door. Then I got an idea.

“Hang on,” I stopped him. He looked up at me. “You should do something for her, too,” I said.

“For Gali?” he questioned it as though the idea was ludicrous, which wasn’t helping.

“Yes, really,” I answered somewhat agitatedly, though I still kept my voice down as much as I could. “It’s because of you that she’s in there right now; you came back to set the record straight about Pohatu, fine, but given all she’s done for you, you owe her.” Kopaka waited a moment before replying:

“I owe her nothing,” he said, much more coldly than I’d heard in a while. “Her failures are her own and none of my concern.”

“Maybe not, but you aggravated them,” I argued. “She saved your life; you bullied her into continuing to destroy herself. You do owe her; you owe her a lot, ■■■■ it.”

“And what would I do?” Kopaka posed the question as he stood up in his calm yet… challenging, standoff-ish way. “Kill her too? She would not want that, and as you pointed out, her legend has already been tarnished.”

“How about helping her instead?” I countered. “That ever cross your mind?”

“You already asked, and I already gave you my answer,” he replied. “Pulling her out of the hole she dug for herself would take years, years that I cannot afford to spend, especially not on the person who drove our entire team apart.”

“Oh, don’t tell me you actually cared much for the team breaking up,” I shot back. “All that did was give you the opportunity to leave for good. You relished that. That’s not what you were angry about, and it never was.”

“I pursued what I determined to be the best course of action, irrespective of what the others were doing with themselves.” Kopaka’s voice was starting to show hints of anger. “She was the one who let herself go; I merely told her the truth about it.” Okay, he was right on that part, despicable and unnecessarily harsh as what he’d said was.

“Okay, so you don’t want to spend a long time trying to undo what took her years to wreck, fine,” I relented, changing tactics, “but there’s got to be something else you can do, something acceptable to you and good for her.”

“Lis, there is not.” His voice softened somewhat; apparently he was changing tactics too. “You want to believe that everything and everyone can be fixed, but you are wrong. No one could fix Pohatu, not where he was…” his voice wavered slightly, but he pressed on, “… and no one can fix her. If they could, Hahli and Macku would have already done it.”

“Well, in Pohatu’s case I believe you.” I thought for a moment, trying to think of the right way to phrase things, to make an argument to Kopaka. “But Gali? No, she can be fixed. I’m sure of it, and so was Macku. But it requires you; like it or not, you command a respect from her that only a fellow Toa Nuva does.”

“Time I cannot spend for an outcome that is not guaranteed,” Kopaka summarized dismissively. He considered the matter closed with that, evident by the fact that he started to turn for the door again with is note, but I wasn’t done yet.

“Actually… not necessarily,” I pointed out. “You know, I think there is a way you can help her, right here, right now. It will only take a couple of minutes at most, and I guarantee it’ll help her to get back on track.”

“And this way would be?” Kopaka turned back to me, but didn’t sound hopeful.

“Apologize to her,” I told him.

“Apologize for what?” he questioned.

“For what you said,” I continued, “regardless of whether it was true or not. Okay, she’s not the sister you left behind, the one you knew. Hell, you don’t even believe she deserves the title of Toa anymore, fine. But you’ve told me multiple times that the truth only has value so long as it benefits the Matoran, or at least doesn’t harm them.”

“Lis…” he attempted to interrupt, but I wasn’t having it.

“No, hear me out on this,” I protested. “Let me posit a little scenario here: you apologize to her. You tell her, regardless of what you believe, that she’s stronger than that, than the depression that’s taken a hold on her, and you apologize for and take back everything you said last time. Her situation is not her fault, at least not completely, and you express confidence that she can get out of it. That’s it. You leave, you get to be out of the city by sunrise, but you’ve also shown her that not everyone has given up on her; not everyone that matters, everyone who she feels she really let down. And because it’s you, someone whose respect she had to earn and not Hahli and Macku who’ll do whatever they can for her regardless of the situation, that maybe, no, definitely, it’ll give her something to hold on to. It’ll give her a confidence boost that, with help from Hahli, Macku, and when I come back, from me, will give her the strength to make a concerted effort to save herself.”

“You can’t guarantee…” Kopaka tried to interject again.

“No, I can’t,” I acknowledged, cutting him off, “but it’ll give her a much better chance than I bet anyone else has done so far. And imagine she succeeds; imagine that, someday within the next few years, she’s physically back to who she was; a true Toa Nuva. Now, people can’t make fun of her as a failure anymore; if anything, her story is now one of a Toa who faced the darkest depths of the mind and came out triumphant on the other side. Just… imagine the day she does eventually die; she could be a legend to the Matoran like Onua, like Lewa, like you’re trying to get Pohatu to be… and like you. Is that not Duty?” I waited for a moment, but now Kopaka didn’t take the opportunity to voice his doubts. I could tell I’d started him thinking, but… was I getting somewhere? Time to drive the nail home. “All that could be the future,” I continued, “and all it would take from you is for you to get over your own pride and apologize, tell her you were wrong, whether you believe it or not. You could help her take her first step on a road to recovery, not ruin… and I’d like you to do it before even single steps are beyond her physical capability. She needs you, Kopaka; you’re the only one who can do this. Tahu’d do it if she didn’t hardline him on his job every time, and yeah, that’s exactly her problem, but you could make sure that that problem doesn’t become her undoing, and that it won’t interfere with her duty. That’s what it comes down to; if the three virtues are the most important principles that guide you, and Duty is chief among them now, then do yours. Please.”

That was it. I’d put everything out there, tried to put as logical and as ‘Kopaka’ an argument together as I could to get him to do something that I knew didn’t sit well with him, with that part of him that he refused to acknowledge yet that so informed his decisions. Somewhere inside, he had that voice telling him that he was better than everyone, better than Gali, and that she deserved everything she’d gotten herself into for breaking up the team in the way she did. In its own twisted way, that little voice that I’d seen as Shadow Kopaka had informed and guided every action he’d taken, every step of the plan the first time around, even his decision to head into the mountains in the first place. I was sure of it. But I knew he could be better than that; I’d already seen it when he’d gone back for Pohatu, even if how exactly he made that decision wasn’t exactly clear to me. Perhaps it had something to do with him seeing how Onua met his end… it wouldn’t have surprised me if it did, given that he had spoken quite well of the Toa Nuva of Earth before. Still, as I stood and waited for his reply, I wasn’t particularly hopeful. His decision on Pohatu was a difficult one, one that I couldn’t blame him for being reluctant to repeat, even if this time around it would cost him virtually nothing. All I knew is that I’d made the best argument I could muster, and I couldn’t have forgiven myself if I hadn’t.

Kopaka’d just… stood there, motionless, looking me sternly and squarely in the eyes while I made that argument. Now that I’d finished, he was still looking at me, but his dark expression had faded and his eyes were way off in the distance, as though he was looking through me and his mind was really somewhere else. He was thinking, lots of things shooting back and forth in his head; that much I could tell. It wasn’t unlike when I’d tried to get his attention for my apology on the train back to this city, shortly after I’d shown him how Onua had died. Had he been thinking about Pohatu’s request then? If so, he faced a similar choice now; to go with that part of Shadow Kopaka that remained and rationalize the choice away by citing the, in his (or rather, the voice’s) opinion, low odds that Gali would actually succeed, or to go with duty as I argued and put his pride, his ego off to the side. For me the right choice was obvious, and I think it would’ve been to most people, but in a sense I’d asked Kopaka to act against part of himself, and as such it wasn’t surprising, if discouraging, that for a minute or so he kind of seemed at war with himself. I suppose that, even if he did choose not to apologize, at the very least I could take some satisfaction out of the fact that I’d posed a question that took him serious consideration to answer.

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#####author’s notes: Lis and Kopaka banter on form as always in this one, though this time it’s not just a question-and-answer session regarding their previous actions. Rather, Lis come to realize that maybe, just maybe, she’s more to Kopaka now than just a periodically annoying tag-along. On that note; looking back, I’m actually pretty proud of how Lis has developed in this story from an observer with the habit of probing deeper than she should to someone who not only has put together a serious argument for Kopaka to do something he wouldn’t consider himself, but who also seems to factor into his plans now in a way that anyone but the Toa of Ice himself normally doesn’t…

I’ll post more chapters as I finish them. As always, post any questions, comments, and/or observations below. Enjoy!

7 Likes

ill give a like for effort even though i havnt got to this point yet

1 Like

and I’ll give you a like for the effort of trying to catch up :grin:

Either your keyboard went wild, or 3 AM got to you.
Or both.
I can’t even figure out what this one was supposed to say.

2 Likes

Sometimes copy-pasting out of Word seems to makes things go berserk… happens, but usually it’s at the end of the chapter, not in the middle of a massive paragraph, and since I proofread things in word I usually don’t notice stuff like that that goes wrong afterwards. Either way, I fixed it. Will proofread the copy-pasted stuff in the future, just to make sure ridiculous, half-baked older versions of sentences don’t show up in the middle of the final posting. Thanks for pointing it out :thumbsup:

1 Like

Oh, don’t copy-paste to the boards from Word. Use an intermediary, like Wordpad. Personally, I always write my stories in Wordpad (because I don’t like being autocorrected or getting squiggly red and green lines everywhere, but that’s just me), copy them to Word for proofreading once I’m done, and then copy them from Wordpad to the boards. I’ve never run into any weird things like this.

Don’t just open a word Document with Wordpad, though. Things get weird.

~W12~