(part 1 here! it's not required for reading this piece, but they are connected, so it'll make more sense if you read the first part first!)
The door to the sewing club slides open with a loud BANG!
“Yo.” A tall, intimidating guy with blond, braided hair strolls in, with all the casualness of someone taking a trip to the convenience store.
You gape wordlessly at him from where you're sitting, still jolted from the lound and sudden bang. Who is this? What does he want?? Has he ever heard of knocking???
“Let’s go eat, Mitsuya, I'm hungry as fu– oh, sorry, didn't see you there.” he strides into the room, pausing when he sees you. You can only blankly nod in response, the movement itself almost pure instinct, brain still running on fight or flight mode.
A light chuckle comes from your right, and you shift your gaze to the lilac haired male sitting next to you. He shoots you a reassuring smile before turning his attention back to the blond, now standing in front of him.
“Gimme a moment, yeah? I'm almost done here.” He motions to the school jacket in his hand. Your school jacket, actually. You accidentally ripped it while you were at school, and Mitsuya insisted on helping you fix it, waving away your voiced worries of taking away his precious lunch time.
He returns to the current task at hand, hands swiftly and fluidly sewing the tear up, masterful after years of practice. Your gaze returns back to the blond guy as he pulls up a chair from one of the nearby tables and plops down across from Mitsuya. They seem familiar with each other, the way both are relaxed in each other’s presence.
“Oh yeah, this is Draken, by the way. The guy I was telling you about.” Mitsuya pauses briefly from his sewing to introduce the new person in the room. You immediately perk up at the familiar name. Well, that clears up a lot of things.
“Draken? The guy with the matching dragon tattoo?” You ask, eyes alight with intrigue. Draken snorts amusedly.
“I see you've heard the story.” He turns his head so you can see the familiar dragon tattoo inked into the left side of his head, the exact mirror of Mitsuya's. Your mouth forms into a little ‘o’ at the sight of it. “This tattoo is mine, by the way. Paid for it and everything.”
Another snort, from Mitsuya this time. “Right, I'm sure you paid for it fair and square.” A smile dances on his lips as he continues sewing, eyes focused.
“Hey, who was the one who ate all my rice first?”
“Um, excuse me…” Your voice turns Draken's attention back to you. “If you don't mind, could I take a closer look at your tattoo?” You shyly ask the blonde male.
His eyebrows raise at the bold request, and you hurriedly add on to your previous question. “It’s just that, I've seen Mitsuya's one before, but I couldn't really get a full view due to his hair covering most of it. It seemed really cool, so…”
The explanation seems to placate him, and he smiles reassuringly, the sight easing some of your nerves. “Yeah, go ahead, knock yourself out.”
You brighten up at that, immediately moving your seat to Draken’s left and wasting no time in studying every detail of the tattoo.
“Woahh…it’s so different seeing it in its entirety! It really is beautiful…”
“Heh, right? I thought it would’ve been such a shame, leaving such a cool design to stay hidden in some dingy alley, so getting it as a tattoo was a no-brainer. Didn’t expect this guy over here to do the same, though.”
“Hahah, you really made the right decision. It fits you really well!”
“Yeah, and it fit with my name too, y’kno? Draken, dragon. Really helps with making a name for yourself.”
“Ooh, that’s a cool detail!”
As you ooh and aah over the inked dragon on Draken’s head, unconsciously shifting closer and closer to him, you don’t notice how Mitsuya pauses in his work, quietly staring at the two of you with an unreadable expression on his face.
“Have you seen the actual mural? It’s way bigger than this tattoo.”
“I haven’t, actually.”
“If you want, I can bring you sometime—”
“[name].” Mitsuya cuts in loudly, both your heads snapping towards him at the sound. He raises the repaired jacket in his hands with a smile that doesn’t really seem to reach his eyes. “The jacket’s done.”
“Oh!” You hop off the stool and gratefully accept the jacket as he walks over to hand it to you, lilac eyes never leaving your figure as you slip your arms through the sleeves, blissfully unaware. “Good as new! Thank you so, so much, Mitsuya.”
His eyes soften at your sincere words, a warm smile naturally finding its way onto his face at your happy expression. “No problem at all, [name].”
“I’ll get going, then. I don’t wanna take up anymore of both of your lunch time.” you say, turning around to leave. You shoot Draken a wave as you walk past. “Bye, Draken! It was nice meeting you; maybe I’ll take you up on that offer to see the mural sometime.”
“You too, [name]. I’ll see you around.”
Mitsuya coughs lightly, and the sound prompts you to continue moving towards the exit. He follows closely behind you, reaching forward to open the door before you can.
“Thank you again, ‘tsuya.” You say once more, turning to him with a bashful grin.
He huffs amusedly. “Like I said, it’s no problem at all. You can come to me anytime if you have any problems.” Your lips curl up even more at that, cheeks tinged with the slightest pink.
“Also,” He lets out another light cough, and you can’t help but take note of the way his ears are tinged red, how he suddenly seems to be avoiding your gaze. “You don’t…have to take Draken up on his offer.” he quietly says, words slowly turning into mumbles, the red from his ears slowly spreading to his cheeks. “I can bring you…if you want. And,” His face is fully red at this point, words so quiet you had to lean in to hear them. “if you want to look at the tattoo up close, you can just look at mine anytime…” he trails off, eyes looking anywhere but you.
You gape at him. This was something you definitely weren’t expecting. Despite your surprise, you can’t stop the giddy smile spreading across your face, giggling as you try to hold back your teasing. He’s already flustered enough; you suppose you’d spare him, just this once.
“Okay then.” You wave at him as you step out, eyes twinkling with mirth. “See you, ‘tsuya!”
Mitsuya watches your figure go until you disappear from his sight, sighing in relief and slight disbelief as he closes the door to the club. He hadn’t really planned on saying that, but the words just… slipped out. Something about the way you looked at him made them bubble up until he couldn’t contain them any longer. At least your reaction was positive.
He turns around, fully prepared to put the whole thing behind him, only to be greeted with a razor-sharp grin. Draken wiggles his eyebrows at him, looking like a cat that just caught its prey. “So…someone got jealous, huh?”
Mitsuya lets out a suffering groan. “Please. Don’t tell anyone. You didn’t see anything.”
Draken cackles. “Maybe I’ll consider it if you buy me a karubi don.”
He’s so telling everyone.
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Ko-Wahi was a short variety of generally not necessarily pleasant things: it was desolate, cold, harsh, and - when the winds didn't rush after one another through the icy peaks with low howling shrieks, cutting through the frigid aether like claws of an enormous Rahi reaching out to grasp any wayward Matoran foolish enough to dare wander in its territory - it was abnormally quiet.
So it reasoned that if Kopaka, Toa of Ice and Hating Being Around People, was not found anywhere else, he had to have secluded himself to a place that at the very least resembled the environment he had first felt at home in.
He didn't even flinch at the rush of air that accompanied the stomps which suddenly stopped by his side.
"You're late," he only commented.
The jovial jab Pohatu had ready for him froze in his throat, and he tilted his head slightly in genuine confusion: "Late?" he repeated.
"I expected you to be here five minutes ago," Kopaka replied.
"You were expecting... Me?"
"Of course I was," the other replied matter-of-factly: "If there's something I can depend on, it's the fact you'll chase me down to the ends of the silver sea just because."
The Toa of Stone blinked quickly a few times, eventually smirking back: "And if there's something I can depend on, it's that I'll always find you somewhere snowy and deserted."
He then leaned a little closer and proceeded to add, in a goofier tone: "Like your heart."
The gentle elbow punted in his side made him snicker as he successfully evaded it the first time; he cackled a bit louder when the second jab actually hit.
His friend did not dignify his amusement with any verbal response. Instead, he extended his finger.
Pohatu followed where it was pointing, staring at the same vast expanse of white he had just sped through (luckily without having to skid through any frozen snow - perhaps one of the very few things he certainly did not miss about the island of Mata Nui), and found nothing.
At first.
His pinprick pupils, so used to the desert sun, struggled a little more, trying to tighten even harder or widen ever so slightly: even with the clouds shielding his eyes from the sunbeams turned blinding as they were reflected on the candid coat of snow, the uniformity of the colors confused and unified all that supposedly existed before him with only few exceptions. There was snow, snow, snow, more snow, a leftover Visorak web, even more snow, another patch of snow, something looking vaguely disgusting half covered in snow, some more snow, a lance of light reflected from a point just outside the clouds' range, a vast amount of snow, a smaller amount of snow, snow, snow, and one last puff of snow over there. Riveting!
But Kopaka seldom pointed at nothing at all just to stretch out his finger; and once he truly focused on the exact location he was indicating, Pohatu saw.
He saw a jagged thing, sharp end splintered and jutting towards the sky like a blade, ever so slightly greyer than the pallor surrounding it; he saw its missing half laying mournfully among the powdery ground, defeated, cracked, open wide.
He saw its entrails, eroded by the weather, far too small to properly distinguish one object from the other from this distance - still they glittered grey and blue in the lack of color as if to remind in silent screams of their existence, once, as tools and furniture and inventions of scholars, before they'd found themselves abandoned in the wake of their master's leave as strange crystalline gore only partially hidden away in the haste of a half hearted burial.
He saw dozens of the jagged corpse's kind - once pillars, columns, immense bastions, now nothing more than ruins. Enormous animals frozen in place, never to thaw awake once more.
He saw frail, beautiful exoskeletons awaiting with such tiredness to be crushed, replaced by larvae in the bowels of which knowledge would thrive.
The wind passed between them without strength, not even lifting a snowflake.
"Breath-taking, isn't it," Kopaka murmured.
Pohatu nodded in silence.
They simply stood there for a long time, side by side, looking upon the carcasses of Ko-Metru's knowledge towers.
Looking upon what was left of a city of legends.
There had never been a Matoran called Kopaka, in the Turaga's tales.
He had never competed with Ehrye as they rushed to run errands for the seers in the hopes of one day being allowed to stand beside them at the top of those magnificent crystal constructions, spending days pondering and reading stars, uncovering the secrets of the future to the point of turning the very idea of tomorrow into such a mundane thing; he had never known Nuju, never looked at him with awe, or respect, or burning envy. He had never walked those streets, or skied down those slopes, or travelled to the Colosseum inside of a protodermis chute.
And yet he had found his chest aching as he had listened to those descriptions, from a nostalgia that wasn't his own. As though Vakama and his stories had handed him a coal that had long singed the Turaga's hand, still weakly sizzling, that now burned his palm in turn.
Mata Nui had been all he'd ever known as far as he was concerned. There had been nothing before; and if there had been, it wasn't the land the Matoran had been forced away from.
Yet despite knowing as much, despite the attempts to soothe the dull pain that had no place in his logical mind, in the long last hours he'd gotten to spend on the chiling peaks surrounding Mount Ihu the Toa of Ice had been unable to keep himself from wandering away from the material world into absentminded daydreams, trying to construct a memory that had never been there, a life he had never lived.
He had imagined Ko-Metru many times. He had imagined Metru Nui as a whole many times, the orderly archives, the silvery canals, the smoky furnaces, the dangling cables, the unmoving statues - a world for smaller eyes (like his never had been) to see. He had imagined the Colosseum, its inner mechanisms, even the Vahki guards, despite their presence being nothing but an annoyance at best and a source of uneasiness and dread and outright danger at worst. He had imagined himself getting in trouble with them often - who would they have been, to tell him what to do? What made them any different from a Bohrok?
He had imagined them often, but he had never seen them. Never whole. Never alive.
As he stared at what remained of a city of seers, he ached to have been there. Maybe he would have understood better. Maybe it would have hurt more. Maybe it would have felt more like home.
But would he have noticed? Any of the beauty, the lack of strife? Would he have liked a life such as this, spent either pondering on who knows what, or reading pages of history before they were even written, or running around tirelessly for people who did both former and latter? Would this sight have stirred something deep in him now, or would his amnesia have kept his feelings at a distance?
His chest hurt. Something inside it ached terribly, pushing hard against his muscle and metal, like a fish suddenly rushing to break the still frozen surface of a lake in a bout of claustrophobia.
He felt strange, uncomfortable.
Like something misplaced.
Kopaka's eyes wandered over the crystal towers, suddenly overwhelmed. He let out a shuddering, watery breath, as quiet as he could.
He needed not worry about being heard.
Pohatu was too enthralled by the sight before them to notice his momentary frailty.
He gazed on, unable to tear his his eyes from what his brother regarded as an enormous grave he could not mourn properly, and beheld only a thing of beauty.
It was not the vast expanse of Po-Wahi's desert, nor the infinite lushness of Le-Wahi's jungles, the burnt forests of Ta-Wahi, the Ga-Wahi reefs, the cavernous labyrinths of Onu-Wahi - it could not even compare to the frigid landscape of Ko-Wahi despite all their similarities, and he could tell from a first glance.
Ko-Metru and its siblings could have never been what the Koro of Mata Nui had been - they were not a breathing nook interwoven in the world around them: they were carefully constructed bubbles, encased, entrapped within themselves, the wild nature that once had run through it tamed carefully only to cry out despite its weakened form once the binds upon it had been snapped to pieces and left to rot.
It was not beautiful in the way he knew a land to be; it was not open and grand to the point of being frightening. It was shut on itself, broken, a pale imitation of what it had been.
And yet he found it all so gorgeous.
It had embarrassed him at first - not feeling. Remaining still and unfazed as the Turaga had longingly described what the Toa of Stone should have regarded as home, a field of statues tirelessly carved by artisans of his people. He had struggled to imagine it properly, managing only hazy scorches of some undefined place, like a mirage in the desert; and hearing his brothers and sisters wonder aloud, so curious, of how they would have expected their Metru to be, he'd been all but mortified at his own lackluster enthusiasm.
Had he really grown so self centered? All the world seemed to feel as though it had only started existing with his birth upon that fateful shore.
A city of legends on the other side of the sea... He could not have ever pictured it.
But now he was there, walking upon its streets, traveling across its lands, and it looked nothing like it had been described: it looked shattered and lost, and broken, and rusted, and standing still where it had once stood so proud and shining only to spite the cruelty of time that wanted it to bend and turn leveled.
Pohatu had lost himself between scattered remains of monumental statues, details sanded down until unrecognizable, or filled with what little life could make its home in such a crevice. He has searched between the broken Kanohi nobody had ever melted down again, seeing his and his siblings' likenesses over and over and over and over, he had followed broken cables back to the towers from which they had once served a purpose, raced along empty canals to make a sense of them, peeked into tunnels the roofs of which had been torn open like dissected anthills.
Metru Nui had never been whole, not for him.
It had always been this gorgeous wreck, this beautiful ruined landscape. He could not imagine it as anything less; he could not see it as anything mournful, or dead, or ugly.
Each toppled building was where it should have been. Each destroyed spire was exactly as the Great Spirit had intended it to be.
Such a frail, stubborn, lovely, wild thing.
A tragedy and a celebration.
Glowing brighter than the twin suns with every ounce of its incomplete, breath-taking beauty.
Kopaka felt something tug very gently at his arm. When he turned, he noticed Pohatu still hadn't taken his eyes away from the shimmering remains of the towers.
"Did you want to show me this?" the Toa asked, quietly, quietly.
His friend looked back to the sight before them and swallowed a heavy knot in his throat: "I did," he replied.
The grip on his limb tightened ever so slightly.
Comfortingly.
"Thank you." Pohatu whispered.
Kopaka did not answer.
They looked on.
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