Not Again - Part Six
Summary: Azriel had been avoiding her all day after their last encounter, she was willing to let him brood all he wanted. Y/n may have just found her way home, but it comes with a warning.
Series Masterlist
-Part Six-
Y/n was finally back to her research, she’d eaten lunch with the Valkyries, all of them starving after training much longer than the two hours they’d expected. They had ended up talking about books, recommending many of their favorites for Y/n to read, Nesta had promised to drop some off by her room later in the evening. She’d told them of the books she read back home, of Dorian’s personal library that he’d share with her whenever either of them visited, of the libraries of Orynth, filled with stories from every corner of the world. Books scholars had saved from Adarlan’s path of destruction, books her family had found on their journeys around the world, books written of their battles, of hero’s and villains, love and loss.
Once they’d gone their separate ways, Y/n had found her stacks of papers and the Walking Dead in the exact place she’d left them the night before. The scratched out notes making less sense now that she looked them over with a clear mind. She’d been trying to make sense of her rambling for hours, her mind going numb, almost ready to give up when she’d felt his presence.
He’d been avoiding her all day, just like she had avoided him this morning. If it was because she’d lain him flat on his back, or from the dark look in his eyes as he’d look down at her when she’d been pinned to his chest, she wasn’t sure, and she wasn’t going to spend the time wondering. If he had a problem with her showing him up, then he and his ego could deal with that on their own, it wasn’t her problem. And if it was the other reason, she had much more important things to worry about than the gorgeous male staring at the back of her neck. At least that’s what she told herself.
“How many times must you be told?” She doesn’t lift her gaze from her notes, “It’s impolite to stare.”
A cool touch caresses the skin of her ankle, a tendril of shadows gently wrapping around her. Usually she’d snap at the little creature, but instead she just looks over her shoulder at the source, at the male leaning against the doorway. That dark and heavy look in his eye was gone, replaced by that mask of stoic beauty. He doesn’t say anything, only stares into her eyes, and she fights the urge to fidget beneath his gaze. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of it, she refused, no matter how her skin seemed to burn everywhere his eyes touched.
“You’re so upset I beat you that you’d give me the silent treatment,” she clicks her tongue, turning her back to him, “You males have such fragile egos.”
Again, no response, and it digs under her skin in a way she’s sure her cheeky little smiles do to him. Fine, if he wanted to play this game, she could to.
“You’d think after this long someone would’ve house trained you.” She throws that exact irritating saccharine smile over her shoulder, “Teach you some manners.”
Something she’d always known about herself is that she’d inherited her mother’s temper, to her father’s eternal delight. Prone to freezing a room or lighting it on fire during temper tantrums. When he didn’t respond again, she could feel her magic stirring beneath her skin, wanting to lash out, but again, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. He could sit there and play brooding, tall, dark, and handsome warrior all he liked.
That little wisp of shadow gently tugs on her ankle, just enough pressure for her to look down at it, to follow it back to the male who’d taken several silent steps towards her.
She suddenly felt to small, to exposed, sitting there before him, her back on display. She’d been here for only two days and somehow she had already let her guard down. These fae weren’t her own, they weren’t friends she’d known her whole life, they were strangers who could just a easily kill her as she could them. Deadly warriors, skilled magic users, dangerous. She stands from her chair, turning to face him, hand in easy reach of her multiple daggers strapped across her body.
“Are you going to just stare me down, like some feral beast,” she snaps, letting that anger slip its leash, a warning to stay back, “or do you have something to say?”
Those eyes are suddenly not so blank, that mask ripped away to show the male beneath. And she saw that look, that darkness, that desire. It’d been the later that had kept him away, that had him coming back now. A predator stalking his prey, those whiskey eyes dipping down and slowly dragging back up, mapping every dip and curve.
That soft touch at her ankle turns into more than a simple caress, harder. Roughly locking her in place, keeping her from flying away even if she wanted to. He steps closer, and closer, and her heart is pounding in her chest in anger, in fear, in anticipation, she’s not quite sure which.
She has to crane her neck back to keep their eyes locked as he steps right in front of her. Gods he was tall, and gorgeous, and so close she could feel the heat of him.
“Where’d you go, Princess?”
Y/n jerks awake and Azriel pulls his hand away from her shoulder quickly. She’d been laying halfway on the table when he found her, her head resting on one of her arms, a pen loosely dangling between her fingers as if sleep had claimed her without warning. If he was being completely honest, he’d for the briefest moment thought it was cute, the way her cheek was smushed up against her arm, the soft snores that left her mouth. It’d taken him longer than probably necessary to lift his scarred hand to her shoulder and gently shake her a few times, whispering her name. Her skin was warm beneath his palm, and he’d hesitated to move when her lips had twitched up at the corners.
Her eyes frantically search the space around her, a pretty flush on her cheeks. When her eyes finally land on him she jolts, hand flying to her chest as if to cage her galloping heart.
“Gods, someone needs to put a bell on you,” she groans, falling back against her chair, hiding her face between her hands, “What time is it?”
“Well past your bedtime apparently.” He smirks at the glare she sends him from behind her fingers. “I just got back to find you like this.”
She gives him a curious glance, “Where have you been all day? Did your lord and lady give you the day off of babysitting duty?”
“Something like that,” he shrugs nonchalantly, “Why were you drooling all over your notes?”
She glares even deeper, the look in her eyes ice cold like the first night they’d met, “First of all, I was not drooling.”
He pointedly looks at the page she’d been hunched over, “Sure, okay.”
“Second of all,” she growls, shoving that paper across the table like it would hide the smudged ink, “answer my question, where have you been hiding all day? Ego a little bruised?”
She didn’t know the half of it, “I was sent out to check on something. I do have a job you know, and before you say it, no, my job isn’t just babysitting you, Princess.”
“I was going to say it was brooding, but close enough.” She gives him that exasperating smile, and it takes more effort than he’s willing to admit to not stare directly at those lips.
“It’s nearly midnight,” he says instead, glancing at the sky beyond the window.
“Is it really?”
She raises from her chair, putting the thing directly between them, a casual move, to casual. He notices there’s a tension in her shoulders, similar to the way she’d been in the garden that first night, like fight had switched to flight and she was seconds away from running straight through the balcony doors and flying away.
He cocks his head, shadows whispering in his ears, her heart is to fast, something’s wrong. Azriel could tell that himself, her heart hadn’t settled since she’d startled awake, and now she almost refused to meet his eyes. Something was definitely wrong, and he couldn’t keep his thoughts from spiraling.
Did she know that he’d spent the day flying just to cool off, that his blood had roared for hours and hours, that his mind had played the image of her below him, looking up through her lashes, over and over and over. Was she disturbed, disgusted, did the tentative bond they’d formed in the early hours of the morning snap and crumble to dust.
“I should go,” Y/n says, her eyes shift to the doorway beyond his shoulder. “Like you said it’s well past my bedtime. A female needs her beauty rest.”
She doesn’t move though, doesn’t take that first step that would bring her closer to him and Azriel doesn’t like the way it stings.
So he nods, takes a step back and waves a hand towards the door, “Goodnight then, Princess.”
She nods once, “Goodnight, Shadowsinger.”
And then she’s gone, rushing from the room. Azriel keeps his shadows firmly at his side, even as they struggle and beg to follow her, to catch her and keep her there with him. He’d already done enough, already scared her off. Mother above he was pathetic, his heart clenching painfully in his chest, absolutely pathetic.
There were more of those revealing clothes laid out on the dresser when she woke the next morning. Y/n noted that they were in the Terrasen green and silver that she had asked the house for. It eased her heart to wear those colors, made her feel like home wasn’t somewhere far across the stars.
Also laid out on the table by her seating area was a tray full of breakfast, it seemed the house knew she was avoiding a certain male. It may make her a coward, but she needed to put a little bit of space between them, that dream had shaken her, and she needed the time to pull herself together.
She wasn’t a stranger to attraction, to dreaming of males and females alike, to waking up in a bed that wasn’t her own. But this was different, Azriel was different. He wasn’t just some male who’d caught her eye, he was the guard who watched over her to keep her in line, he was the one who’d found her, bleeding and vulnerable on the garden floor, he was a stupidly handsome male from a foreign world who she knew next to nothing about. She had no business feeling anything for him, even if it was just lust.
It took her longer than she’d like to admit to put on a brave face and walk out her door. Azriel had left hours ago, she’d heard him walk into the hall, wait for several minutes as if expecting her to walk out, and then leave when she didn’t.
Y/n took the now familiar path to the dining room, where she found Feyre and Amren sitting at the clear spaces away from Y/n’s sprawling notes.
“Finally,” Amren sneers, “how long does it take you to get ready, girl.”
“Amren,” Feyre warns softly, “Good morning, Y/n, how’d you sleep.”
“Morning, Feyre. I slept fine, thank you.” She’d slept like shit actually, but she wasn’t going to say that and have to explain that a certain shadowsinger wouldn’t leave her mind. “Was there something you needed?”
“It took some convincing Amren.” Feyre gestures to the small scowling female, “But we’d like you to take a look at the Book of Breathings. It’s full of those marks and I wonder if you’d have an easier time looking for what you need.”
Y/n glances at the table between them, searching for the mysterious book. When she doesn’t find it Feyre’s hand comes up, snapping once, and all of a sudden a terrible presence fills the room. It’s heavy and old and whatever it is has Y/n’s defenses rising.
It’s not a book in the traditional sense, no paper, no leather, but metal plates bound by metal rings. It thumps onto the table, and the sound seems to echo around the room, through Y/n’s head.
“I’ll warn you,” Amren says, “the thing has a nasty habit of speaking out of turn. Don’t let it get to you.”
Feyre looks visibly uncomfortable in its presence, leaning back in her chair away from it. Y/n was half tempted to turn and fly out of the room, instead she sits before the ancient book.
Hello little stranger, it whispers, and she recoils away from it, teller of many stories, none of her own.
“Hello, creepy book,” she answers, “Do you have any stories to share?”
“Don’t humor it,” Amren snaps, glaring when Feyre shushes her.
I have many stories, it answers, many stories that may intrigue you, storyteller.
“Any on how I may get home?”
Look and see, it says, the answer you seek is already there, though I wonder if you truly want to see it.
Her brow furrows in confusion, “All I want is to go home.”
Ah, home, it sighs, what is home to you, storyteller? A castle, family, books, whiskey, shadows, a lover?
She forces away the image that comes to mind, “Terrasen, thats my home.”
Land of pine and snow, the book seems to take a deep breath, godless, the gods killer queen, the kings flame blooming year round. Why did it throw you out? Why did the stag turn his back on you.
Anger flares through her, “Enough.”
The Wyrd has plans for you, hesitate to turn your back on the gifts she gives you, it says, she will not take the slight kindly.
“I didn’t ask for a gift,” she snarls, “I didn’t ask to be ripped away from my home, from my family. I didn’t ask to have everything taken from me.”
And yet you have so much to gain.
Just like that it goes quiet, presence fading till it was nothing but a book. Y/n wants to scream, to force it to come back and tell her exactly how to get home.
“It hasn’t been that active since the halves were joined,” Feyre breathes, face pale.
Amren watches Y/n with curious eyes, “It’s interested in her, the same way it was with you. I don’t think we want to find out why.”
Y/n lifts her hand to the first plate, cold metal stinger her flesh. That ancient power floods through her, though the book stays quiet. It feels like the presence is weighing her down, holding her in her seat. She grits her teeth and forces the book open, eyes flowing over the words that she could not read, over the marks she could. It was a mixture of them, spells and marks, most she knew, some she didn’t. Those were the ones she focused on, the world seeming to hold its breath.
It took her several moments to figure out what exactly she was looking at, a mark she’d seen before, so similar to the one for unlock that she’d overlooked it the first time, open. It was so simple she almost laughs. Open, to open the rifts between worlds, to open a gate. That ancient presence seems to sigh in her mind, the only confirmation she needed before slamming the book shut and shoving it away from her.
“What is it?” Feyre asks, “Are you alright?”
Y/n nods, “Get that thing out of here.”
Amren snaps her fingers and it’s gone, “What did you find, girl? Did it give you what you needed?”
She nods her head again, “I need some paint.”
Tag List-
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"Ah! You're one of those," a voice came to his ears.
Nuparu turned to find a tall Gaquri standing at the entrance, looking at him curiously.
"I am a Toa," he corrected.
The other nodded: "Yes, I do know that. Forgot the name is all. You're a, uh... Ko?"
"Onu."
"Hm! My mistake. Which element is that, again?"
"Earth. Do you need something?" the inventor cut their small talk short, lightly tapping a tool similar to a wrench against the skeletal frame of what appeared to be a heavily modded chariot: "I'm working on a project."
"You know where Berix is?" the Gaquri asked. He raised an arm: an interesting weapon, with a jagged light blue blade at one end and some kind of projectile mechanism attached to the handle, dangled from it casually. "Wanted to drop this off to him. The thornax launcher's been jamming up more often and I know that boy can make it work like a charm again."
"He's getting parts," Nuparu answered. His eyes rested once more on the blade and he added, tilting his head intrigued: "You can leave it here if you want."
"So you can study some original Bara Magna manufacturing?" the other joked.
"It's not really my field, but it looks remarkable."
He watched the organic being laugh heartily as he approached - with a fairly heavy limp, he noticed: "Remarkable! Now that's a bit of an exaggeration, kid. I made these from some bones, whatever viable scraps I could find from wrecks of the Core War, and a few patches across the years when I could afford it. It's held together by spit and whatever Ackar's friend did to make it spurt water."
"From what I understand, spit doesn't seem like a good adhesive."
"That's what we say here to mean something's parts are real shoddily connected together."
"Hm! Like dried mud. Or aluminum sheet."
"That's the idea. Ah, where should I put this, anyhow?"
"There is fine. What's with your leg?"
The Gaquri gave a grimace: "Nothing much - just my knee acting up," he replied, patting the guilty joint. "Something must have gotten rusted. It happens."
Even through the lack of expression of his mask Nuparu treated him to a baffled look.
"What?"
"Organic parts don't rust," the Toa sputtered. "At least, ours don't."
The other eyed the tendons and muscles peeking through black armor, and his lips perked up in a little smile.
Without a word he placed his weapon on the least cluttered corner of Berix's work desk before redirecting his now free hands to the side of the faulty knee, messing with what appeared to be the graceless stitching of a large wound: his fingers sank deftly into it and pried through the gaps enough to loosen the whole thing, and before the less organic being's flabbergasted eyes pulled down the fake skin and meat to reveal a fully mechanical joint, complete with pistons and springs and even what seemed like wires.
"Don't worry," he chuckled with a wave, "Ours don't either. But most crusty old Glatorian like me haven't been completely flesh and bone in a long time."
If the inventor's attention had been piqued before, he was completely captivated now. He was leaning on his seat towards him, vehicle project all but forgotten, intently studying as many details of the prosthesis as he could see from that distance.
His eager interest made the other laugh again: "Why all that surprise! Don't you see something like this on you every day?"
"Yes, but I'm not you!"
"And what's that mean?"
"You're all flesh! And meat! And skin! How does that work?"
The Gaquri considered something for a moment. "If you can get me a seat and figure out what's wrong with it, I'll be glad to let you have a closer look," he offered at last.
Nuparu pulled the stool from right under himself so fast that he fell on his ass.
He then placed it down with extreme care and patted it insistently.
The other barely held back a snort.
His implant hadn't caused this much of a scene since the first day it had been up and functional.
"The name's Tarix, anyhow," he introduced himself as he sat down a little heavily. "Since you'll be rummaging knuckle-deep through the insides of my leg for the next thirty minutes."
"Hm," Nuparu replied as he kneeled until his mask was all but grazing the joint.
Tarix waited a dozen seconds, and added: "You got one too, Toa?"
"One what?"
"Name."
"Nuparu."
"I see. Ah - nope, nope, don't-" his fingers quickly pinched the mechanical being's and lifted them away from the scarified tissue binding the meat to the metal: "That's real flesh, don't peel that - the nerves still work, you'd put me through the pains of Plude."
"What's that?"
"You folks have a place in your lore built just to torture you forever?"
"Yes, Karzhani. I've been there."
"Huh. Well, I've been to Plude too back when it still existed, and I'll just say that the only good thing the Lord of Sand might've done was collapsing it on itself. So, you get what I mean about the pain."
"Hm. Yes, I can imagine. But how do I - see, to check the individual parts, I'd need to pull them off..."
"Oh - hold it, let me just..."
Angling his leg in an uncomfortable position and hunching down with a hiss, the Glatorian set to work carefully pulling screws loose with the help of an empty pipe he'd fetched from his pocket. The small parts dangled from their sockets without falling, just distant enough from the point the metal touched to allow the top and bottom pieces to be pulled apart without needing to pull the much more easy to lose components out of the whole.
"Hold the calf a moment, will you?" he muttered with the pipe now stuck between his teeth. Nuparu complied, holding the lower half of the leg still as Tarix worked his magic on the inner wires. At last, satisfied, he unfurled his back up once more and puffed satisfied: "There, pull."
When the Toa did so, the prosthesis came apart as easily as a house of cards. Suddenly, in the mechanical palm was a whole calf, still warm with life and undoubtedly organic.
Tarix watched genuinely amused as Nuparu tested the ankle in his hands and on the ground, miming an attempt at a walk as though playing with a very concerning doll with nothing short of pure unadultered fascination.
He posed it as if stuck in a sprint: "Can you feel this?"
"Not a single thing," the Glatorian replied. He patted the metallic femur's exposed head: "And neither can I here. The connections are all in the wires, they go right into the nerves, see? So long as they're apart I can't feel crap anywhere from over here," and he pointed to the flesh that stopped around the middle of his thigh "To the rest of the leg underneath. Not that I should be able to, frankly, if we wanted to abide by nature's whims, but luckily for me us Spherus Magna natives never cared much for that."
Nuparu hummed: "How'd you get it like this, anyways?"
"Oh," the Glatorian shrugged as though it were the most normal thing in the world, "Blew up."
"It just exploded?"
"Not by itself, of course, someone shot the whole thing out of me."
The Toa treated him to an appalled look.
Tarix waved a hand harshly, chewing on his unlit pipe: "The Core War was absolutely barbaric, kid! I've witnessed stuff I wouldn't wish on a Skrall. When I saw that half you've got there in your hand fly over my head as gracefully as the ugliest bird known to any being with eyes, I thought I was going to die of shock like a Mountain Striker with a broken wing. I still have no clue how I managed to keep awake through the bloodloss and pain long enough for the fixers to figure out I was still alive enough to be taken down to the medic."
Nuparu regarded the half of a limb in his grasp with newfound horror and fascination. A whole portion of leg, shot right out... He wasn't sure if even the Vortixx could have had something capable of doing that. Oh, sure, they had plenty of possibly worse things, but even the most blunt tended to have slightly more complex effects than just 'blows a chunk off of you'.
And the fact that they had managed to rebuild the broken joint and connected it to the rest of the nervous system was nothing short of miraculous, compared to the same thing done on a mechanical being - whose organic components regenerate, too.
"And all Glatorian have something like this?"
"Us older ones, yes," the other nodded. He watched with a sort of lazy interest as the Toa turned his attention to the mechanism of his prosthesis, checking for damage as he had promised. "The rookies tend to have the usual stuff, thank goodness - scars, plaques, maybe a limb, some fingers..."
"Fingers?"
"Yes, some of them. They tend to nip 'em a lot during training, you know, when they start to get the hang of it and stop holding their weapons like they're gonna grow a mouth and bite them - they cut tendons often those first few times. Or just the whole thing."
"Really?"
He chuckled, playfully waving his fingers: "Gresh keeps losing them. If you look closely you can tell which phalanxes are still his."
"I thought he was good at fighting."
"He is. He's just young. And a little too brash at times."
Nuparu hummed, moving onto the piece of implant attached to his thigh: "You mentioned limbs, too," he noted absentmindedly: "Is that also common, during training?"
"Losing them? Oh no, that happens out in the desert. Or, used to happen... Well, the desert's still out there, just smaller, so I guess - point is, you'll sooner get one cut off by a Bone Hunter or chewed up by a Vorox than find a fellow Glatorian who'll do that to you, on purpose or not. We made sure to try and avoid that sort of thing when we made the rules for the job."
"And plaques?"
"Oh, these," and he tapped some strange metallic protrusions on the top of his legs, on the side of his arms, and on his shoulders. "Nothing special, they keep armor in place. Easier than having to strap it on. We install them when we come of age."
Their shape was somewhat familiar: "Berix has them too, I think."
"I think everybody gets them - Agori, Glatorian, Skrall..."
"They are pretty useful," the Toa nodded.
He couldn't really imagine how they could have managed to stick armor to themselves otherwise. Maybe through some cloth? But then it might chafe their joints, and they'd have to find a way to insert it in the metal anyways...
He hummed thoughtfully, wracking his brain as he tried at once to figure out both the logistics of putting armor on fully organic beings and whatever was wrong with the implant.
So concentrated he was that he actually jumped a little when the pipe gently smacked his shoulder.
Tarix had a strange look on his face as he pointed down at a spot on his prosthesis: "Don't - it's nothing to be worried about yet, just, watch it," he warned, "That coil there you've got near your index, she's real frisky. Won't be a problem now that it's taken apart, but when you stick it back together you'd better avoid even just so much as grazing it - it'll pull my calf back at top speeds to kick my ass. Been like that since the start."
"Oh! Sounds painful."
"It is!"
With a hand already rummaging through a box of springs, Nuparu offered: "Since I'm here already, I could replace that..."
"Ah, there's no need really," the Glatorian quickly stopped him.
"But it's a liability."
"If it's out in the open like this, yeah, but - well, when it's covered it's a lot more manageable, and the wires-"
"It's still a malfunction. I can fix that without any trouble."
"I get it, but it's - I - hm! Let me explain. See, when - if I cover it up, see, with my-"
"The fake flesh?"
"Yes, that - it still jerks back if touched, but not as hard, you get me?"
"But it still does."
"Yes, and here's the - the thing is, I also have my nerves connected, right? Right, and when the coil gets touched and makes my leg jerk, it... Er... See - have you ever - hm! Hmm-hm. Hold on. Do you... Is there something that you know is not good for your body, but when you do it it just feels nice?"
"No."
"Alright, this complicates things."
"Oh! Oh, no, wait - when I cut metal with a saw, I like to keep myself as close to the sparks as possible so they can hit me because they tingle. It's fun. Do you mean like that?"
"Eeeh, close enough! That's what's going on with that coil."
"It tingles?"
"It... Uh... Sure, let's. Call it that."
The change in tone was weird, and he seemed to be somewhat embarrassed about having brought the subject up.
Now, in regards to asking personal questions, Nuparu tended to be as uninterested in other beings' private matter as much as a Kofo-Jaga is in lightstones.
However, this was directly related to the machinations of an impressive, if a little primitive, handmade mechanical joint.
So yes, he would have loved to pry.
The mental manifestation of Turaga Whenua repeatedly smacking him over the head with his drilling staff was currently the only thing keeping him from inquiring on any activities Tarix might have enjoyed dabbling in outside of his work hours, but luckily for the Glatorian that singular imaginary scenario was also an extremely effective deterrent for any Matoran or Toa that had ever at some point of their lives resided in Onu-Koro.
As such, the Toa just shrugged and diverted his attention onto the object the Gaquri was now nervously twisting in his hand: "What's that, by the way?"
The total swerve in subject matter destabilized the Glatorian briefly. He looked down at his fingers, then back at the Toa.
"A pipe?" he replied.
Nuparu squinted at it a little better: "That does not look like a pipe." he decreted.
Tarix lifted an eyebrow, curiously: "It's just an Agori pipe."
"That's not a pipe," the inventor insisted.
"And how should a proper Toa pipe look like, then?"
"Matoran pipe, maybe-" the Toa scoffed, rolling his eyes and making the other chuckle a bit while the mechanical hands went right back to checking on his implant in the midst of his correction: "First of all, it's far too small to be of any proper use; second, that seems to be made of wood, which is the worst material for this kind of thing - even if you could fit that tiny piece in a proper hydraulic system, long time usage will lend it to rot and come apart much faster, which is why we used to trade iron with Le-Koro to avoid the whole village from caving in on--"
"Oh!" Tarix interrupted him all of a sudden, smacking the object on his palm with a hollow sound: "Oh, you meant - no no no, it's not that type of pipe! It's a, uh -- pipa! Nagele! Sghitt!"
"Don't curse at me, please."
"I'm not cursing at you, it's just different names for this! You really don't have a word for-?" then he cut himself off as he seemed to remind himself of something evidently obvious: "Ah - well, I mean, you don't have a mouth, of course you can't smoke..."
"Yes we do."
"You do?"
"Yes? How else would we hold our masks?"
Tarix blinked, briefly wondered if he should have asked, and decided it didn't matter: "But you don't smoke? At all?"
"No? Unless we get catastrophically overheated or are set on fire," Nuparu replied as he attached the disjointed calf into the thigh again. "Both of which in all fairness have happened before. Not very often, but they have happened."
"No, I meant... Ah, hold it, hold it..."
He stuck the unlit pipe back in his mouth, puffing out nothing a few times with a thoughtful expression on his face.
"See - it's a bit like the coil and the sparks again, the matter with smoking," he decided to start explaining: "There's certain plants, if you dry them and burn them well, that make really pleasant smoke."
"How is smoke pleasant?" the Toa muttered.
"The smell can be," the Gaquri shrugged, "And the taste too. Wait-" and he gently knocked the foot of the pipe on the top of the Volitak before the inventor could interrupt him again "-Wait a second, I can't very well clear this up if you keep cutting in. Alright, so the bigger part here, the bowl we call it - you need to press the dried plants in here and light them up, only a little before the whole thing burns up; once they're charred nicely, you inhale through the shank, and then you puff it back out. That's how the smoke gets in your mouth and you can taste it."
"And how does it taste, then?"
"Ah, depends on what you smoke," was the whistful answer. "Same goes for the smell. The Lebori have a certain bark that gets real flexible when wet - they make whole pipes with it, they burn up real well, but it's a bit too sour for me. Before the Shattering there used to be a type of kelp I liked, and Kiina said they had River Eyes up near the Dormus that made some terribly sweet smoke."
"River Eyes?"
"It's a flower! Small, round, blue, and it grows on river banks. Never got to try them, though, and it's better I don't go around asking for some with the lungs I've got. Like I said, smoking's the same as the coil and the sparks: feels good to do, but it's bad for the body."
Nuparu hummed deeply, rummaging inside the knee as he handled the hanging wires carefully.
"I think I figured out the problem," he announced.
At that Tarix perked up: "Rust?"
"One piston has developed a limestone growth that makes it much harder to move properly, and as a result one of the springs is bent out of shape and chafes right against the nerve."
"Ah! Well, damn. You can get limestone in there?"
"If it's humid enough, it can build up over time."
"Hm... Alright, I guess all those years sweating in arenas and whatnot were bound to do the trick eventually."
"Also there was rust."
"Hm. Where?"
"Three screws. I changed them already."
"Wait, really? When?"
"While you were talking about the Core War."
"Huh! You're quick. And quiet."
The Toa shrugged: "I like working."
He pulled the prosthesis apart for a second time, laying the calf down on the floor. He then leaned back to search through a tool box brimming with bits and pieces - bolts, nuts, coils, springs, and all sorts of other things - with what his mask's stillness still managed to convey as a focused furrowed brow, evidently still thinking about what course of action to take now that he had pinpointed the anomaly to fix.
Changing his mind, he stood up and made his way to one of the various piles of junk and assorted more or less useful knicknacks to start looking for something in there instead.
"Speaking of the Core War," he said, implying he wanted to start a conversation but without really adding to that sentence.
Tarix waited a few minutes, puffing out in silence while watching him shift towels or bottles until he found what he was looking for (a clean enough rag and flask containing a murky liquid), before figuring that he was waiting for some kind of permission to continue on the admittedly not particularly pleasant topic: "Yes?"
"You said other older Glatorians also got implants like this from it."
"I implied it, but yes, that's the case."
The Toa hummed as he settled back before him: "And they're all knees, like yours?"
"You want to ask what their own prosthesis are?"
At that, he got no response.
"You can, by the way," Tarix reassured him, "It's been a damn long time by now, it doesn't hurt as much as say, eighty hundred years ago. We've been living like this long enough to joke about the whole thing and whatnot."
Nuparu mumbled something indistict as he soaked up the rag and began scraping the limestone off of the metal with it.
"Don't act all shy now, kid! As I said, it's no trouble." the Glatorian repeated. A sly smile curled the corners of his lip: "You can't get embarrassed like this every time you have to ask about new possible clients, you know," he jokingly reprimanded him, "Otherwise you'll have a hard time getting any."
"I don't want to be paid!" the Toa replied. "I'm just curious, is all! This is... Well, I didn't expect it to be something you'd have."
"Oh, don't worry, not everybody's missing a whole chunk of leg like me," Tarix chuckled. "We Glatorian like to keep ourselves distinct from one another."
"In implant too?"
"Of course! Let me think, now..."
He inhaled a long breath through his pipe, leaning back a little as the kid continued on with his work, and exhaled with a whistle.
"So, let's see - Vastus, he's got a good chunk of his lower spine replaced and, oh, 'bout three quarters of his intestines," he began: "Kiina had her hip crushed and put back together, and that should be... Ah, nope, nope, half of her left hand and the whole ulna too. Telluris I haven't see in a long while now, but unless he's figured out how to place his brain in a tin can I'd bet his head's all that's left. Certavus, bless his memory, I don't think he had a single original organ left by the end, and Gelu's got bionic feet - one foot, one leg, right, a whole leg, so then Strakk was the one who got his eye shot out and his nose crushed. And the jaw, of course. I don't remember if it was him or Malum who cracked his head but I do think it was him, because Malum had the femur that got split in half and it worsened with that problem with his ribcage where the metal was corroding and messing with his blood... Which is why he had to get his marrow replaced in his leg later on. Oh, and Ackar also had to... Ah, wait, which one was it? Right, right. Ackar, poor guy, his back itself is worse than a Plude street but his real problem's his right shoulder blade, which got essentially pulverized - I was there, ghastly sight - so they had to replace the whole thing, and that was bad enough; but then, and this is the fucked thing, the implant actively degraded the rest of the arm, so he had to keep replacing bits and pieces of it until it was just completely gone."
Nuparu lifted his head, eyes wide and flabbergasted: "The fixing made it worse?"
"It did! He kept having trouble moving it."
"How?"
Tarix raised his shoulders: "Beats me," he replied just as baffled. "It's a common thing for Tapyri, honestly. It's hard to tell if the material's bad quality or has trouble with the heat. Perditus too - after he got half his leg replaced, the damn thing somehow managed to melt halfways and left him limping almost worse than he would if he just didn't have it."
"And he can't replace it?"
"It's grafted onto the bone and the muscle has grown over it. They'd have to carve the whole thing out with it, it's just not worth it."
The Toa stared at him positively appalled.
"That is horrid," he spat, punctuating the adjective with a harsh yank of his hand over the faulty piston, thus launching a loosened piece of limestone to skid across the floor.
"You're tellin' me, kid."
"That's - it's inadmissible. It's insane."
"And I haven't told you about the Agori."
"What about the Agori? Were they fighting too? Do they-?"
"No, not fighting, usually - it's something we got in common with your lot: we're basically the same species, but we are much bigger and they're much nimbler. So you had us larger folk tearing one another to bits properly, while they tended to work as scouts if they weren't busy trying to put us back in one piece."
The Gaquri interrupted himself to stretch his arms up, pulling one towards his head.
The movement produced a loud 'crock!' roughly around the height of his shoulder, followed by much softer pops crackling all the way up towards his wrist as it twisted.
Satisfied with the sound (which instead made the inventor a little uneasy considering their conversation), he moved to massage the sides of his spine with his knuckles, rolling his neck: it seemed to make a curious ticking noise in place of a meatier sound, filling in the quick pauses of Nuparu's rag scrubbing the limestone away.
At last he puffed into his unlit pipe: "If you look at the older ones - the Agori, I mean - you'll see they've got less lower half than upper."
"That makes no sense."
"It does if you don't count implants. We've got them a bit everywhere, I told you, but an Agori with an arm prosthesis is a real rarity. They've got them mostly between their soles and the top of their hipbones."
"And why's that?"
"It's 'cause the lucky ones stepped on mines."
The Toa hummed thoughtfully.
He did not raise his eyes from the almost clean piston: "And the unlucky ones?"
"Well, we were trained to aim for either the neck or the head."
Ah.
Those certainly had been unlucky.
For every thing Toa and Glatorians seemed to have in common, a complete opposite came around. To imagine a Toa willingly kill was already hard, though not impossible - the Mahri themselves had been met with the chance to do so once or twice, and it had been tantalizing to say the least; but to envision a group of his brothers and sisters being not only instructed but even trained to kill, and especially to kill Matoran...
Well, he was glad he did not live in that kind of world.
"That's just how life is," Tarix sighed in the end. "Nobody wins. They've got their metal hips, and I've got my leg held together by wires and pistons. And an artificial diaphragm."
That snapped Nuparu out of his unpleasant musings: "A what?"
"That one wasn't the war's fault, though - well, it was, but it came in later. See, I had some sharpnel that got stuck in there but nobody noticed, and then one day I got a shove in the wrong spot during a match and just stopped breathing. So I had to get a mechanical one, and when I have to put myself under any sort of strain I need to hook myself up to an oxygen supplier to make sure it doesn't collapse under the effort - you know, that tube thing you might have seen on me, sort of like yours."
"Your gills?"
"I..." the Gaquri briefly did a double take. "You call those gills?"
"Yes?"
They blinked at each other briefly.
"Yeah," Tarix conceded, "Yeah, I guess those would be gills for you folks, huh. Makes sense."
"What was it that you had to replace?"
"My diaphragm."
"What is that?"
"... The muscle?"
"Which muscle?"
"The... The one that makes the... Lungs? Work? I understood you did have lungs?"
"Lungs work on their own."
"No they do not?"
"Yes they do. They are muscles."
"No they are not??"
Before Nuparu could further argue his point by lifting his chest plate and forcing Tarix to behold the disquieting spectacle offered by his very much clearly autonomously moving lungs, the unmistakeable noise of a small variety of hollow brass objects gracelessly crashing on the floor and being hurriedly chased after by stomping feet attracted their attention elsewhere.
Berix did not notice them as immediately as they noticed him, since he was busy making his entrance on all fours as he scrambled to pick up a bunch of scrap metal that had spilled from his arms.
The other two beings made no sound as they watched him curse to himself after stepping on a rogue bolt. They decided to simply observe him in silence much like an equipe of entomologists observes a particularly frenetic spider panicking for some kind of fault in its web, making no motion to lend the young Agori any help as he crawled along the ground to collect the scattered pieces of his scavenged treasure of junk.
It was particularly fascinating when he accidentally shoved several bolts in his mouth to the point of almost stuffing his cheeks with them, realized his mistake, and spat them in what looked like an exhaust pipe.
He almost cried when they fell out of it and rolled away again.
Then he lifted his eyes briefly to the other two silent beings in the room and failed to recognize them.
Meaning he then proceded to jump almost three whole bio straight in the air once he figured there were people looking at him - landing on a screw.
"FUCK!" he whimpered.
Tarix waved: "Hello to you."
"Do you need help?" Nuparu asked with a notable delay.
The Agori kneeled to the ground and skidded across it: "No no no, I'm good! I'm good, I'm - hey, hi, Tarix, hi, when did-? What are you-? Uh," he said nervously as he tried to catch as many nuts and springs as possible, "What is going on there? Is it, did I interrupt or, should- should I leave? Again? Should I leave again?"
"Nuparu's fixing my leg."
At that Berix snapped his head with a deafening gasp to look directly at him, the most betrayed expression to ever grace his face plaster across it.
"But I wanted to do that!" he cried out in anguish like a desert fox cub experiencing the horrors of its mother's tongue bath for the first time: "I told you I could do it, I- I replaced Gresh's ribs and, and I fixed his lungs when the Skrall got him and he hasn't had problems with them since, I told you I could do it, I'm good at fixing-!"
"I know that, and Gresh told me you did real well," the older Gaquri stopped him, "But - don't take it personally, kid, you're good and all, but when it comes to my leg I only trust you as far as I can throw you and believe me, it ain't far."
"But then why does he get to do it!" Berix wailed, pointing at Nuparu still scrubbing off the limestone.
"He's got a whole body like this, I'd imagine he knows what to do."
"But I know what to do too!"
"I told you, I'd rather have a specialist on it."
The Toa briefly wondered if being a descendant of the Water Tribe had something to do with how outstandingly wet Berix could will his eyes to look, or if it was just a specifically Berix thing.
Mabe it was an Agori defense mechanism. After all, it would have been pretty hard to want to hurt something that appeared to be the personification of the verbs 'to whimper', 'to whine', 'to sob', and last but not least 'to wail'.
Whatever the origin of such an expression of anguish, Tarix was not immune to its effects: "Oh, don't be like that," he finally pleaded with a tired but guilty tone, and pointed off to the cluttered desk not too far away: "There, I've got something for you too, alright? I came in 'cause my Thornax launcher's busted and you're the best with 'em. Could you fix that for me? Pretty please?"
That was enough to light the younger being's face up again.
With the sort of excited thin howling laugh that a mischievous ghost might have, he scuttled away to the mess of a table that was the headquarters for most of his projects: onto it he dumped the rest of his scraps, not caring even in the slightest that it only helped to worsen the general situation he already had going on as he was already completely absorbed by the thought of the inner mechanics of the weapon at hand.
The perfectly good chair right beside him thoroughly ignored in favor of sitting on the ground in a curled position that would have made a shrimp suggest booking an osteopathic appointment, he immediately started tinkering around to figure what the problem was with the drive and precision of a blood hound.
That had been perhaps one of the best things their unplanned collaboration had brought Nuparu - aside from all the knick-knacks and thingamajigs and vehicles and tools he'd been able to make or just plan out with the Agori, of course. Watching Berix work on something was such a fun and fascinating experience: his intensity gave his body language a sort of visceral desperation that contrasted his careful fumbling motions, pulling pieces apart with his scarred skeletal fingers and letting them fall all around him as though discarded carelessly - yet he somehow always knew where to search when he needed them again, and if in the middle of his fixer's frenzy you asked him for a specific nut or a gear he could pick it up without even looking, always on the first try. The thunderous act of creation and its rhythmic symphony played on rough instruments whisked the both of them away from the world at large, but when the Toa managed to pull himself back to reality (whether done or stumped or just in need of a break) it was enjoyable if not just all-together mesmerizing to observe the other hard at work on his own project.
A loud bang was not enough to deter him from the launcher either.
The equally loud voice that followed with an exasperated bark did, however: "BERIX! THE DOOR!"
"RIGHT! RIGHT- RIGHT, HOLD ON!" he squeaked hurriedly, abandoning (with a little more care) the weapon to scuttle away as fast as he could to the entrance of their laboratory.
The figure that emerged from the held open door replied to his rambling apologies by grunting every few steps - not without reason, seeing as they were carrying the carcass of an older model of chariot intertwined with some other mean of transport that had clearly gotten lodged sideways in its back, trying to balance the hellish thing on their shoulders in a way not too dissimilar to how a shepherd might carry a too small Mahi tired from a day of running wildly.
The mess of a car accident was dropped rather gracelessly onto the first largest spot of floor available; freed from their herculean weight, the being sighed and pulled back their arms, making the rather dull metal vertebrae poking from their skin creak in a somewhat unsettling fashion.
Nuparu briefly wondered if they were encrusted in limestone too.
They sort of looked like it.
Hm.
Now he had to wonder if it was a common yet not very well-known problem for organic beings with mechanical implants. Maybe it had to do with an excessive production of sweat?
While he was busy pondering that, Tarix grinned at the sight: "Hello, my beautiful wife who sucks at killing me," he crooned lovingly.
Vastus turned to him with a smirk, thin feathers raised and brows slightly furrowed in a manner that was much more fond than annoyed: "Hello, my beautiful husband who can't aim for shit," he replied; upon noticing the Toa kneeled before him, he cheekily added: "Committing adultery, I see?"
His partner wheezed a loud gurgling laugh: "Twelve thousand years we've been married! Twelve thousand years and now you mistake me for Gelu!"
"For who?"
"What, you haven't heard about--?"
"NOT IN FRONT OF MY PROJECTS!" Berix shrieked.
The Lebori chuckled - it was a strange sound, some kind of hiccuping hiss - and reached out to rub his hand all over the younger Gaquri's head; the kid swiveled away from him with a soft rattling noise as his annoyed trembling arms shook his scales against one another, face contorting into a piqued grimace, and returned to the launcher to tinker the other two away from his conscious perception.
"And where'd you get that?" the Glatorian inquired, pointing at it with his chin as it was common to do in his tribe and getting no answer.
"It's mine," his husband reassured him, "He's fixing it."
"Jammed again?"
"Seems like it."
"Bet you just didn't clean it properly."
"You don't know that."
"But I'm right," Vastus teased him as he approached to steal the pipe from his mouth. "And over here, what's going on?"
"He's fixin' up my leg. Nuparu, by the way, that's his name - he's a, ah, Ko- nope, Onu-Toa, he said - thought it was rust but I had limestone in it."
"We can get limestone?"
"Might be the sweating," Nuparu interrupted them suddenly. He fixed his unmoving mask onto the Lebori: "Can you turn around, please?"
Tarix snorted at the other's brief baffled blink: "Hey now, kid, I get you've put your hands in me and all, but you shouldn't go around just checking my wife out like that!"
"NOT! IN FRONT! OF THE PROJECTS!"
The Toa looked between the three of them with no clue what any of them was going on about: "I thought there might have been crusts on the vertebrae," he explained. "Since I have the solvent at hand already, I could handle that already if it's the case..."
"That's what they all say," the Gaquri snickered.
His confusion was palpable.
Vastus flicked a playful finger at his husband's head, warning him: "Berix is gonna kick you out at this rate... But I'm sure it's just some dust, kid, nothing to worry about."
"It still would not hurt to do a simple visual check."
"He's right," Tarix interjected while trying to snatch his pipe back and failing: "Maybe you've been building up a limestone deposit this whole time without knowing it."
"I don't have limestone."
"You don't know that."
Vastus smirked at him as he turned around for Nuparu to check: "But I'm right."
"You can't keep answering that and get away with it."
"I can if I'm always right."
The inventor gave a high pitched hum: "False alarm. That's just dust," he confirmed.
A triumphant grin briefly met the Gaquri's eyes as he rolled them.
Nuparu reached into a box to pull out a short variety of springs in order to compare their size with that of the one that had been bent by the affected piston, now cleaned and hopefully ready to work smoothly; careful not to dislodge anything else, he carefully pried the ill piece out and hooked up its replacement.
Satisfied with how the procedure had done, he pulled himself back a little and announced: "I have another question."
"Shoot," Tarix answered instantly.
"What do 'wife' and 'husband' mean, exactly?"
A hot second of silence passed in which the Glatorian regretted opening his mouth.
He glanced at Vastus.
His wife glanced back.
The quiet persisted.
"We're married," he answered lamely at last.
The question he dreaded slapped him in the face with outstanding punctuality: "And what does that mean?"
Having had his fun of seeing his husband's best full-body impression of a yam turning exponentially smaller when fried to a crisp piece of coal, the Lebori finally intervened: "You folks have contracts?"
"We do."
"Marriage is a contract between people where you become part of one other's family. And tribe, if you're from different ones like us."
A vacuous gaze met his explanation.
"Alright, what's confusing you?"
"The 'becoming part of' thing."
Vastus shrugged, his feathers puffing out for a moment before returning flat in a way similar to how certain avian Rahi did before starting a very long song: "It means we become relatives," he tried again. "Here, look - Tarix is a Gaquri and I'm a Lebori, so my family and hers come from different tribes. By marrying me she became a sort of honorary member of the Jungle tribe, and everybody treats her almost as though she was my brother, or my cousin; in the same manner, I became an honorary member of the Water tribe and I'm treated like her sister or cousin."
"So... It's sort of like assembling a team?" Nuparu tilted his head, puzzled: "There's no need for a contract for that. All Toa consider each other siblings already."
The other clicked his tongue as though he'd bitten it by accident: "I shouldn't have used that metaphor," he muttered.
"Why not?"
"First of all marrying your actual blood-siblings is frowned upon."
"Why? What's a blood-sibling?"
"I'll tell you when you're older. Secondly, I can assure you marriage is nothing like siblinghood."
At that, the Toa frowned: "It sounds the same to me."
"Your knee and Tarix's look the same to me, too," Vastus argued: "They're both made of metal, so they're the same thing."
"They really aren't." then he blinked, bright eyes flashing briefly, looked to the ceiling to recollect his thought, gave a loud hum, and met his gaze again: "I see your point."
The Glatorian smiled: "Good kid."
"Back to the point - how do 'wife' and 'husband' fit with all that?"
"That's just how you call someone who's married."
"So they're synonyms?"
"Yes, pretty much."
The answer seemed to satisfy the inventor greatly.
"I'm learning so much about your species today," he commented in a giddy tone. He returned to the discarded robot calf on the floor, dusting off its mechanical parts to make sure not even small amounts of debris would interefere with its functions; just as he plucked it back into the bulk of the implant, he looked again at the two Glatorian and told them with complete and total earnestness: "You know, if you were significantly smaller, quadrupedal, perhaps vaguely insectoid and incapable of speech, Turaga Whenua would have the best day of his life writing down and trying to decypher your absolutely incomprehensible habits."
That was the highest compliment an Onu-Matoran from the island of Mata Nui could bestow upon someone.
It was not categorizable as such by perhaps any other being in the entire universe, considering the source of such an idiom had been cut off from all other known civilizations and it was generally not considered particularly flattering to be told that you would make for a great petri dish for one's paternal figure to microscope if you were any less sentient, but luckily his tone did manage to properly convey the positive nature of his otherwise insane sentence.
So instead of knocking his head off with roundhouse kick, Tarix and Vastus smiled awkwardly in an attempt at not laughing in his face and just replied: "Thanks."
His Volitak did not have a mouth, but Nuparu's grin was blinding.
Berix chose that moment to shriek triumphantly.
"Fixed!" he declared, Thornax launcher hoisted into the air like it was the second making of the Element Lords.
The older Gaquri turned to him with eyes wide: "What, already?"
"It was encrusted with Thornax juice!"
Not even the time to feel bashful about such a silly and easy to fix thing hindering his battling performance so much that his wife was already leaning down into his line of sight with a smirk so wide that he could have just bitten his whole head off with it.
"What did I say?" he teased.
Tarix sighed, a weary smile on his face: "You cannot keep getting away with this."
"Yes I can," Vastus gloated, "If I'm always right."
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