Somewhat delayed, but now that we’re past 150,000 words we’re at last coming close to the end.
-----------------------------
Chapter 52
-----------------------------
I didn’t find Kopaka or Nuparu, of course. I probably wouldn’t have even if I’d had a week to do nothing but look for them, especially given that Kopaka wasn’t keen on me accompanying him on this particular errand. At least this time I felt a lot more confident that he’d be back than when he’d left me to watch over Pohatu. Having made my way back to the main road connecting all of the rings of the city, I spent pretty well over an hour wandering about parts of the upper rings adjacent to it all looking for him all the same, and I got a good idea of what daily life in the city was like. By two in the afternoon, however, I found myself back at the exit leading to the surface and feeling like I’d seen enough of the place. With little better to do, I decided to head back to the hotel and bide the remaining three hours there. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, and activity had picked up somewhat, though obviously not to the level of below. Arriving in the hotel lobby, I wasn’t much surprised to find Lerome sprawled over one of the couches, watching what looked like Kolhii pre-game discussion.
“They haven’t started yet?” I took a seat across from the Toa of Air.
“Nope.” His answer was accompanied by a hand gesture that he apparently gave up on halfway through. “Just still talking about what might happen.”
“Got any predictions?”
“Not really,” he sighed. “We’ll see.”
“Aw, not even a hint?” I tried to tease something out of him, more a reflection of my own boredom than any real interest. Normally, asking for predictions regarding these games was a surefire way to send Lerome into an excited and lengthy monologue comparing all manner of qualities of both teams, culminating eventually at a seemingly bullet-proof prediction. It often wouldn’t be, of course… but still, apathy was the last thing that I expected from him on anything Kolhii-related.
“Nope.” He dismissed any further analysis.
“Okay then.” I gave in, and we watched for a while as a couple of Matoran hosts unpacked the past strategies and performances of both Hewkii’s team and their opponents. At one point, one of them screwed up in a way that even I, someone who followed the Kolhii scene only in a very casual manner at the best of times, recognized, but even this normally inexcusable gaff didn’t get so much as a chuckle or snide comment from my brother. If anything, his unusually listless demeanor was making me wonder just how bored he’d been for the past few days. “Tired?” I asked him.
“Tired of this place,” he answered without looking over.
“Won’t be much longer,” I reminded him. “You’ll be among more festive company soon enough. Well, after the funeral.”
“True…” he acknowledged half-heartedly. We turned our attention to the telescreen again just as they switched to a pre-game interview with Hewkii, who made sure to remind everyone in whose memory the game was being played: Pohatu.
“Today, we’ll dedicate this game to the memory of that Toa who pushed to bring out the best in all of us…” Hewkii began his inspiring address. Again, Lerome seemed little moved even though one of his heroes was on screen.
“You ever watch him play?” I asked. For all I’d heard about it, I’d never actually seen Pohatu play kolhii; his retirement had come before I’d even been built, and I wasn’t sure whether or not the same held for Lerome.
“Hewkii?” my brother questioned.
“No, Pohatu,” I corrected him.
“Ehm… once,” he remembered. “Like, one of the first games I went to.”
“What was it like?” I wondered out loud.
“Pretty good, I guess,” he shrugged. “He did have some impressive moves. Too bad they broke him.”
“Do you think he should’ve left?” I surprised myself by asking, but hey, I had time to kill.
“Like, his retirement?” My brother paused for a moment; I nodded in confirmation. “I guess he could’ve stayed, but I wouldn’t have, you know?”
“Why not?”
“What else could he do?” Again, a half-hearted hand gesture hinted at Lerome’s frustration.
“Coaching,” I pointed out.
“Wouldn’t feel the same,” he argued. “Not after being the star. Nothing’s like being the star.” I’d seen something of Kopaka and Onua’s attitudes reflected in Jahlpu now that the latter was settling down, and had found it less than comforting. With this statement, Lerome basically nailed his Toa Nuva hero’s suicide note in his own words.
“Having spent my life at the summit, I can’t be happy anywhere else…” I recalled the way Lewa’d put it. Unfortunately, I did so out loud, much to my consternation.
“Yeah, that,” Lerome nodded. “Without the use of his legs, what was he gonna do that compared to that, right?”
“Sure, yeah, I can see that,” I hastily reasserted myself. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have worried so much; no way Lerome could put together that what I’d said were actually Lewa’s words.
“After a life at the summit, there’s no way down…” he gloomily trailed off, turning his attention to the telescreen again. I did the same, but as so often lately a worrying thought crept into my mind: why did that phrase seem to resonate so much with him now? True, my brother had a reputation for being a bit annoying at times, but more due to his irresponsibility than the petulance that had been evidently on display today. Was there more than boredom behind it? With Lerome, I figured the best way to find out was to be more direct about it; nuance and metaphors weren’t really his thing.
“Do you feel that way sometimes?” I asked him.
“Hm?”
“Like we’ve been at the summit, and now there’s no way to go but down,” I explained. He took a moment to think.
“I guess,” he shrugged. “I mean, we’ve done the Toa things, and now there’s none of that left to do, so yeah, it does kinda feel that way: like there’s no place you’d really like to go.”
“We’ll all find something,” I began before realizing that, so far as I knew, Lerome was the only one of us who had yet to do so, making it very much a case of ‘easy for you to say.’
“Maybe, but what?” he asked. “Yeah, Jahlpu’s all happy here, and Kirall’s doing… whatever she’s doing, but they had plans already, you know?”
“Didn’t you? This whole ‘tour the planet’ thing was your idea, wasn’t it?” I recalled. Of course it’d been his plan: only he would’ve come up with it. “Last I checked, you still had plenty of planet to cover.”
“Yeah, but… it’s over now,” Lerome admitted. “I mean, it was meant to be a tour as a team, like a bonding road trip, you know? We all barely knew each other by the time the Skakdi were done, so I thought: hey, let’s have some fun and see the world while we’re at it.” Honestly, even that thought was more than I normally credited him with concerning how he came up with that tour plan in the first place, but at the same time, calling it a bonding trip for a still fledgling team was probably the most positive spin one could put on his activities for the last month or so. “So we did it for a while, had some great times, then you left and we’re all like ‘okay, fine’ and moved on to Le-Koro-Nuva and had more great times… but it wasn’t the same, you know? We didn’t have the whole team anymore.” He looked my way as though he believed I had some kind of explanation.
“Yeah, but it wasn’t like I was all that into it by that point,” I reminded him. “I mean, eventually the parties get to be too much, and I wanted to find… something. Something else to do, something that made me feel better about myself. Something Toa-worthy.”
“And did you?” he sat up.
“Yeah… yeah, I think I did.” I mean, given that as Toa we were practically walking reminders of history anyways, I figured recovering and preserving history wasn’t a bad idea.
“What is it?” he asked with some revitalized interest.
“Oh it’s… uhm,” I tried to piece together a way to describe it without bringing in the fact that I’d be doing it with other Toa, some of whom Lerome’d practically be dying to meet. “It’s an expedition someone’s planning. Recovering artifacts and such.”
“Really?” Apparently the word “expedition” triggered his interest as much as the mentioning of the name of any of his heroes probably would’ve done. “Where at?”
“Oh, it’s not exactly your kind of thing,” I dismissed. “Underwater.”
“Underwater? Ugh…” Lerome feigned a shudder. “Didn’t pick you for the swimming type, sis.”
“I’ll probably get a Kaukau,” I explained. “That’s solve the major problem, at least.”
“Yeah, that’d work…” my brother’s attention drifted off again for a moment.
“So the tour’s over?” I asked, already knowing the answer but seeking to keep the conversation going all the same.
“Yeah…” he admitted. “I mean, let’s be honest: I can’t afford it on my own anyways, and now that everyone’s gone off and done their own thing there’s not fun in it anymore. The Super Epic Toa Team is dead.”
“We should’ve come up with a better name,” I remarked.
“We shouldn’t have been needlessly made Toa,” Lerome corrected, suddenly with a bitter tone in his voice.
“What, you don’t like it?” Tahat was news to me.
“It was fun for a while, but now it seems so… pointless, you know?” he continued. “In the end, all we’ve gotten is more pressure to do something… what’d you call it?”
“Toa-worthy?” I attempted to fill the gap, still kind of marveling at Lerome showing much more of a conscience than I thought he had.
“Yeah, that.” He leant back in his seat. “We can’t be Matoran anymore. We’re not Matoran anymore. We’re supposed to defend the Matoran, and if the Matoran don’t need defending we… well, what do we do?”
“We try to be something better to the Matoran,” I concluded before making what at this point had to be a colossal understatement. “I mean, I’ve thought about this a lot…” I paused for a second to think about it some more, “and the best conclusion I can draw is that if the Matoran don’t need warriors, we’ll be leaders. Examples. People they look up to, ‘cause, you know, that’s what they do when there’s Toa around.”
“Literally,” Lerome smirked.
“Yeah…” I felt his flippant remark rather undercut the point I was trying to make, but went on: “take Jahlpu: he’s not doing anything that’ll protect the Matoran, but he’s going to lead the way down there in the mines, and you know he’s going to work hard at it. In doing so, he’ll inspire many Onu-Matoran to do the same, ‘cause they want to be like the Toa of Earth, and that’s worth something. Worth quite a lot, I’d say.” Of course, I left out how that’d worked out for the last Toa of Earth who’d made the mine itself his life’s work, but that was a point to be made to Jahlpu, not here.
“They already have someone to look up to, though,” my brother argued, “again, quite literally.” He mimed the position of the massive statue of Onua’s arms.
“True, but Onua’s not around anymore,” I pointed out, “and maybe they could use a fresh reminder, and one who many of the younger ones relate to more.”
“Onua 2.0 for a new generation,” Lerome smirked again.
“By the same token you could be the Lewa of this generation,” I suggested, momentarily ignoring how that’d worked out for Lewa.
“Be head party animal of Le-Koro Nuva?” Lerome asked incredulously. “I know you ain’t been there, sis, but let me tell you: those guys already know how to throw a party.” Yeah, he probably had a point there, and one that for the moment I really didn’t have that much a reply to. He sighed again, his spirit returning to earth. “Anyways… even Lewa was more about the adventure, and he didn’t leave much for anyone else, you know? Besides, he knew how to survive out there, and I… well, I don’t. And before all that he saved a universe; how could I live up to that?”
“He helped save a universe,” I corrected, “and with that comparison you’re blaming yourself for not existing in a universe in need of saving. I’m glad that we don’t. You’re looking way too far.” Even he should’ve seen that.
“Too far?” he questioned, sounding a bit frustrated. “Okay, try this for closer: he got along with people, and led exploration teams that went out for years at a time. I couldn’t even keep four Toa together for more than a month.” He momentarily widened his eyes and opened his hands for emphasis; it took a moment for what he said to sink in for me, but once it did, I suddenly understood where he was coming from, what all his behavior added up to. This wasn’t Lewa I was looking at, no, I was seeing hints of Gali, hints in how much more significant the breakup of his Toa team was to him than to the other members, myself included. When the Toa Nuva broke up, Gali couldn’t move on like the other Toa did, not after everything she’d done to keep the team together… and while our team had existed for only weeks in its entirety, in his way Lerome had tried to fill a similar role while being the de facto leader to boot. Now that the team had disbanded, he more than any of us was left feeling empty and unsure of who or where to turn to, or worse blamed himself for the breakup of the team, even if he wasn’t that great at articulating it. In Gali, that empty feeling manifested as depression; in Lerome, it manifested in mood swings and general juvenile behavior to mask the insecurities underneath. Generations apart we may have been, but the more I thought about it, the more the problems we were encountering were the exact same ones the Toa Nuva had struggled with thousands of years ago, when they went their separate ways. Having made that connection, I suddenly realized what to tell him.
“No one could’ve kept us together for long,” I began, remembering what Kopaka’d told Gali the night before. “After the Skakdi, there was no reason for the Super Epic Toa Team to exist, and even Lewa or Pohatu couldn’t have done anything to stop that if they were here; if they had been able to, don’t you think they would’ve stopped the Toa Nuva from breaking up first?”
“Uhm, yeah, I guess…” Lerome voiced his thought process in all its uncertainty.
“For that matter, it’s not like Hewkii and the Toa Mahri are all together all the time either,” I continued, gesturing at the Toa Mahri of stone on the telescreen. “They split apart because, without the need to defend the Matoran to unite them, they all had different paths to take. That’s what’s happening to us now: we have different paths to take.”
“Their paths led them to broken backs and death by volcano and tunnel collapse,” Lerome pointed out grimly.
“Yeah, some of them did, but that’s where we can learn from them and not make the same mistakes,” I argued. “And yes, it might be a while before you feel as great about things as when we were all doing the planet party tour, but if a former assistant weaver can find something meaningful to do as a Toa, then I’m sure you can.”
“Yeah, if you put it like that it sounds easy,” he agreed without much enthusiasm, “but I won’t have you or Jahlpu around to constantly dispense wisdom for me along the way.”
“Give it time,” I advised. “Also, just because our paths are different now doesn’t mean they can’t cross every once in a while.” For a moment, there was no reply beyond a shrug.
“You do have a way with words,” he eventually gave in; a slight smile reappeared on his face.
“Yeah, I’m proud of that one,” I admitted, juxtaposing the pride in words with indifferent hand gestures. The cloud hanging over us was clearing… well, the mood anyways, as a sudden crack of thunder outside reminded us that real clouds still very much dominated the sky outside, now once again pouring heavy rain as they had earlier in the morning. Spirits lifted, we watched as the kolhii match finally got underway. It started off slow, but it wasn’t long before some of the moves that Pohatu’d made famous started to show on Hewkii’s team, though not enough to get them a decisive point lead over the course of the first half hour. Only after the half-time break did the pace of the game reach the frenetic point that really made it entertaining to watch, if only for the challenge of tracking the ball while it traversed the entire length of the field multiple times per minute through heavy offensive play on both sides. My eyes frequently diverted to the clock, however, and it was right about three-quarters through the match when it was about to strike five.
“Looks like I gotta go,” I explained as I got up.
“Aw, you’re not gonna stay for the ending?” Lerome questioned with somewhat sarcastic disappointment.
“I’ll be back, definitely before the funeral,” I assured him, “but I’ve got to take care of something first.”
“Alright, but don’t drown out there,” Lerome quipped. Outside, the rain was coming down harder than ever before; I paused for a moment on the porch to look up and down the street, but initially I spotted no signs of life. Only when I looked closer did I see a figure standing motionlessly by the entrance of the railway station through the veil of water. Knowing there was no real cover from the heavens between where I was and the train that was undoubtedly waiting somewhere in the gray space beyond what the rain allowed me to see, I resigned myself to getting drenched either way and headed for the station. The figure was indeed Kopaka, cloaked and still equipped with the stick he was using as a cane, standing there as though to prove that rain made no difference to him, an act of defiance against the obvious that in retrospect was but the most harmless example of such behavior on his part.
“Careful, you’ll rust,” I pointed out once I reached the station in an attempt to make light of the miserable weather. He turned and headed for the ticket booth without comment, and I followed right behind. The Agori manning it made some quip about the rain as well before asking where we’d like tickets to, only to be presented with what remained of the tickets to Ko-Koro-Nuva that Kopaka’d gotten several days before in New Atero; we’d never taken the second leg of the trip, and having confirmed that we were still eligible to board the Agori sent us on our way towards the train. It was virtually empty, to the point where Kopaka only seemed to bother with moving all the way to its last car as a matter of habit or principle than for any practical reason. Completing the stubborn behavioral pattern was the fact that he made no attempt to dry himself off whatsoever once we finally sat down, though in fairness he’d have been a pretty terrible Toa of Ice if he’d found being cold and occasionally wet to be worth complaining about. All the same, I felt compelled to ask:
“Cold?”
“No,” he curtly replied.
“Ah… is this where I get to see whatever plan you’ve come up with?” I got down to business.
“No.” Apparently, it was not the time for business, but at some point within the next six hours, it had to be; that was how long we had before reaching Ko-Koro-Nuva… and therefore, how long I had to think of the best way to argue against him going any further.
--------------------------------------
#####author’s notes: long breaks and chaos in re-starting school meant this one was much-delayed, though it was also in large part due to the fact that I spent a lot of time thinking about how exactly to go about Lerome’s side of the conversation. Having already done part of this with Jahlpu, I wanted to finish this stop by tying together some of what Lis’d seen with the irresponsible jerk that was introduced something like 20 chapters ago, and I’m quite pleased with how that worked out, though by the end it’s definitely high time to get back to the star of the show: Kopaka.
I’ll post more chapters as I finish them. As always, post any questions, comments, and/or observations below. Enjoy!