Author's Note: Well, I'm afraid I've hit a bit of a life setback.
I woke up this morning with a terrible migraine and sort of dully unhappy feeling that something wasn't quite right. It's a hard feeling to put into words.
Things didn't get better as the day went on. I found that I had to read Chapter Twenty-Three four times over in order to catch all the grammatical mistakes I'd made while writing it, which is embarrassing for someone like me, who makes a living out of knowing how to use a semicolon properly.
Hoping to improve my mood, I went to the movies, which proved to be a huge mistake. I won't tell you what I saw, so as not to spoil anything for you, but I ended up crying through the last thirty minutes of the movie...and then I discovered that I couldn't stop.
Forty-five minutes later, when David came home from work, I was still crying. He's very good at handling this sort of thing, and is pretty used to it by now, since it's been eleven years since my brain injury, and we do have this problem sometimes in my household.
Unfortunately, I seem to be having what I affectionately refer to as a "stupid brain episode," or a period of time during which my brain chemistry is not functioning at its highest due to a very serious injury I received some years ago in a car accident. This is likely to result in blurriness, headaches, insomnia, nausea, and irrational mood swings. The doctors have explained to me that these episodes have something to do with proteins not replenishing as they should. I am not myself a doctor, and so I've taken their words for it. They only way that I know to solve these brain episodes is to take it much easier for a few days, and sometimes to stay away from bright shiny confusing things like computers or the harsh light of day. :-p
Nothing bad is going to happen; I'm not to get hurt or any sicker, or anything of that nature. I may, however, have trouble updating for a few days. I'm considering going to stay at my parents' house until the storm blows over, just so that I don't totally screw up David's day-to-day rhythm, and the internet connection there is very slow.
Thanks in advance for your patience. I really do appreciate it.
Now, hopefully, I'll be able to write this next chapter. I'm going to do have to do it a bit more slowly if I don't want to misspell everything, so bear with me. Let's see how this goes.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Several of the Turehu were standing outside the palace when Moana and Maui emerged. Ngaire and some of the others were glaring, but Moana's Grandma was there as well, grinning from ear to ear and giving Moana two enthusiastic thumbs-up, apparently totally oblivious to the dirty looks she was getting from her sister handmaidens.
Moana smiled and gave her a little wave.
"Maui," she said, turning to face him, "you know the Grandma I'm always telling you about? Well, this is...hey, are you okay?"
Maui looked more than a little dazed, and was staring off into empty ocean, apparently not paying much attention.
"Maui." Moana put her hand on his arm.
He blinked, looked down at her, and then smiled distractedly, nodding.
"Huh? Oh, yeah," he mumbled. "I'm good. You say something?"
Moana reflected that the stress of being dragged down into the underworld and hunted by goddesses and deadly bodies of water was probably starting to get to him at last. Everybody had their limits, after all, and she couldn't really blame him. It was long past time to get both of them back to Motunui.
"This," repeated Moana patiently, "is my grandmother, Tala Waialiki. Grandma, this is-!"
"Oh, I know who THIS is," declared Grandma, grabbing Maui by both shoulders and holding him away from her to take a good, slightly too-long look at him. "You're the troublemaker who's been giving my Moana all these excuses to go on adventures, aren't you? Never thought I'd meet you in person...and you're not exactly what I expected, for a demigod, but I bet you get that a lot, don't you?"
Maui looked sort of startled, then shrugged dully and said, "Uh...yeah, you're not exactly what I expected either."
Grandma cackled, then gave Maui a hearty slap on the back and released him, nodding at Moana.
"This one," she leaned in and whispered to Moana, "is going to be a handful. Good for you, girl, and good luck. It's not every woman who can say she's bagged a demigod, you know! Hah!"
Moana flushed, shaking her head emphatically.
"Grandma," she insisted, "I, uh, think you've got it wrong. Maui and I aren't...I mean, we're not exactly...right? Maui? Hey, back me up, here!"
Moana had expected Maui to object to Grandma's obvious and embarrassing mistake right away, but instead he was just watching Moana's face expectantly with an eyebrow raised, like he was just as interested in her answer as Grandma was.
"Uhhhh....aaaaanyway." Moana coughed. "Really great to see you, Grandma, but I think we'd better get going."
"All right then." Grandma shrugged. "Don't be strangers, now...although I suppose it won't be too long before we're neighbors. No rush, of course, don't you worry. I'm not going anywhere." Again, she grinned.
Moana looked at Maui, who opened his mouth to say something, but then apparently changed his mind. Raising his fish hook over his head, he took a deep breath shut his eyes, and muttered, more to himself than to Moana, "well...she said it would still work. At least...I think she did. Here's hoping."
"Wait," began Moana, "what's that supposed to-?"
Maui swung the fish hook, and then, in a flash, he transformed into a shark, catching the hook in his mouth as it fell. Glancing down at his own fins with some concern in his eyes, he swam in a quick circle, swished his tail experimentally, and then nodded, looking relieved.
"Oh," murmured Grandma, no longer smiling. "Look...you're bleeding."
Maui tried hastily to wipe his bleeding right fin off on a nearby bit of coral, but he wasn't fast enough. Moana saw the five little puncture wounds in the fin, and wondered if maybe he'd scratched himself during a transformation, maybe with his own talons, just like he'd raked her back when he'd carried her in hawk form.
"Go on, Moana," encouraged Grandma, giving Moana a friendly shove towards Maui. "Looks like your ride is here."
Maui held out his left fin to Moana, and she took a quick look over it to make sure that it, too, wasn't injured. Then she hung on tight, kicking aggressively with her legs as Maui propelled them both up to the surface and out of Rarohenga.
Hopefully, thought Moana fervently, this will be the very last time.
They broke the surface near the beach of Maui's island, and found the brand-new canoe they had made, re-floated and apparently totally undamaged, waiting for them.
"Huh," said Maui, once he'd climbed into the boat and had returned to his human form. "Looks like the ocean ended up on our side after all. How'd you win it over?"
Moana shrugged.
I told it the truth," she said. "I helped it understand why I wasn't the enemy...how we were really still allies after all. That said, I wouldn't be too grateful for the ocean's help. Honestly, if it hadn't been for the ocean, I'd probably have made it down there a LOT sooner."
A jet of water jumped suddenly out of the sea, smacking Moana directly in the face. She spluttered, shook her curls, and then held up her hands in a gesture of apology.
"Okay, okay! And the ocean was responsible for getting that cloak off the Turehu girl, and coming up with the sand idea to help me sneak past the taniwha, so obviously, it played a huge part in your rescue, let's be fair."
The water subsided again, apparently satisfied with that. Rolling her eyes, Moana wrung her hair out over the side of the boat, then tied it hastily back out of her face, and stood up.
"Next stop, Motunui," she said, smiling at Maui. "I don't know about you, but I'm ready for a nap, a meal that doesn't come with a death sentence, and some company that's actually alive. If you're super nice to me on the way home, I may even let you be the one who tells our village elders the story of how you protected me in the underworld while bravely escaping from the clutches of Hine-nui-te-po and her fearsome sea dragons." She winked.
"Hah," mumbled Maui, smiling wryly. "Yeah...that's okay, thanks. Fair's fair, and this time, I'm pretty sure it's your story."
He looked down at his mangled hand again.
"That looks terrible," murmured Moana, taking it gently and turning it over in hers to examine the injured palm. "Does it hurt?"
"No...not really. It's nothing." Maui shook his head. Moana half expected him to pull the hand away from her, but he didn't. Instead, he cleared his throat, obviously uncomfortable, and looked almost disappointed when she carefully returned the hand, placing it back, palm-down, on his knee.
"So," she asked, "how'd it happen? Or, is it something embarrassing you don't want to tell me, like, you cut yourself on a bunch of coral when you weren't paying attention?" She gave him a teasing grin, but he didn't return it. "I'm sure we can turn it into a great story, if we try. 'Maui, Hero to All was fighting bravely with the goddess of death when she stabbed him with one of the five-pronged wooden stakes she kept hanging on the palace walls!' Or, you know, something like that. We'll work on it."
"Hey, Moana," interrupted Maui, obviously thinking about something else. "Did you, uh, mean that stuff you said to the ocean, back on the island?"
"Hmm?" Moana frowned. "Mean what stuff?"
Maui seemed to have a hard time navigating that question and, to Moana's amazement, he flushed.
"Um, you know, the stuff about...well, me."
Moana continued to look blank. "What stuff about you exactly? Sorry, but it's kind of been a long day, and you've been sort of the center of attention for a while, so I've told a lot of people a lot of things about you. You're gonna have to be a little more specific."
"Right." Maui gave up, waving that away with one hand and sitting back in the boat. "Forget it, nevermind. Stupid question, anyway. I mean, you wouldn't have said it if you hadn't meant it, so..."
He trailed off, staring out to sea, and Moana raised an eyebrow at him.
"Yeah, uh, I'm completely lost," she admitted. "Are we talking about something? Because I get the sense that we're talking about something, but I have no idea what it is. Is there a reason why you're being so...weirdly vague, all of a sudden?"
"I told you to forget about it," muttered Maui.
Moana shrugged. "Sure, okay. You're the one who brought it up in the first place. We can drop it...whatever it is."
Swinging the boat around, Moana set a course for Mount Motunui, reminding herself that, when Maui's hand was feeling a bit better, it would be a good idea to ask him if he could please put the island back in the sea where it belonged.
"Hey," began Maui, "so, I've got a hypothetical for you."
"Uh...okay." Moana gave him a doubtful look. "What is it?"
"Let's say," Maui went on, "that you've got a chance to meet one of your two heroes of legend, right? Let's say we're talking about, um...okay, Kupe, the mortal Octopus-hunter who discovered a bunch of islands across the sea, or Tangaroa, god of the ocean. If you could spend a day hanging out with either of those two people, who would you pick? Like, which one do you think would be cooler to get to know?"
Moana stared.
"Look," insisted Maui, "it's a serious question. Just think about it."
Moana couldn't imagine what was serious about the question, but she shrugged and gave it some thought.
"Well," she said slowly, chewing thoughtfully on her lip. "I guess the Octopus hunter was pretty cool, but didn't he kill his brother and steal his wife, or something like that?"
"His cousin," Maui corrected her, "but, yeah, basically. Still, he was a lean, mean, Octopus-fighting machine...with pretty much super strength! That's gotta count for something, right?"
"Maybe," agreed Moana, "but...okay, if I'm being honest, then I think I'd rather meet Tangaroa, assuming he doesn't try to kill me like most of the gods I've met so far have done. I mean, and we know this first hand, it'd be really nice to have a god on our side, and anything I could learn from Tangaroa would help me to become a better wayfinder, a better, sailor, and a better Chief to my people, probably. Plus, Tangaroa's been around since before the dawn of time, or so they say, and he'd probably have a lot to teach me about my ancestors and the tribes that came before ours...so yeah, yeah, I'm sure I'd rather meet Tangaroa...not that Kupe wasn't cool. He was cool, but...well, you get what I'm saying."
"I was afraid you'd say that," mumbled Maui, sighing. "So, we're going with the God. Figures. Are you sure? Super strength doesn't do it for you? What if it was Tangaroa, and um...oh, and that one guy who could turn into a dragon. Tuhisomething. Tuhirangi, he could turn into a dragon. That's pretty badass, right? If you had to choose between him and the sea-god, who would you-?"
"Maui." Moana sighed. "I kinda get the feeling there's something we're not talking about, here. What is it you're actually trying to say?"
Maui looked down at his right hand again.
"Nothing important," he mumbled. "Tell you what, we'll talk about it when we get back to the village. Your parents are probably freaking out, right now. Let's just focus on getting home."
Moana didn't really want to let the matter go, but Maui had a point. Even with the ocean on their side, she needed to focus on what she was doing in order to get them back to Motunui as quickly as possible. There were some ugly, dark clouds on the horizon that were making her nervous, possibly indicating a coming storm.
"Fine," she agreed, "but we'll talk about it later, okay? romise?"
Maui nodded reluctantly.
"Sure," he sighed. "On my honor as a...well, yeah, I promise."
Author's End Note: ...and there we have a little character development for your Monday evening.
Tomorrow is another day. For now, I'm going to close my eyes for a bit, listen to my Moana soundtrack, and remember that the world is a good place and that we can try again in the moning.
Night, everybody! Thanks for reading.