Super Rocking Taz One-shots Fun Time

It Couldn't Take Everything

2049 words

Lucretia and Davenport have a bit of a chat after the Day of Story and Song and realize there was more to the single word Davenport had repeated than they had initially assumed.

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He never quite understood why his name had stuck.

The Day of Story and Song had long since passed. Of course, not easily. It passed with struggle. With pain. Like pulling a tree stump from the ground with nothing but an old wagon. It had been troublesome, and had caused a fair share of people pain, but it had passed. It had passed.

For much of Faerun, once it was no longer something new and exciting talk of the Hungers visits lessened. Rather from boredom or avoidance, no one was ever quite sure why they tried so tirelessly to block out memories of what had happened. Ghosts of the events still existed. Fissures in the ground. Destroyed buildings. While more than enough efforts had been made for clean up nothing could ever repair the permanent scars the Hunger had left. Yet, no one seemed to notice them. No one talked about them. They were cracks in the streets you side-stepped on your way to work. They were buildings which had burned down ages ago. No one cared for those things so long as they didn't interfere with their daily lives.

But Davenport did.

He noticed them all. Every rip and tear as rips and tears he had seen a hundred times over in the hundred worlds they had been in. Yes, they were familiar to him and everyone else who had been aboard the Starblaster, but that didn't make them any less unsettling. More so, he noticed the lesser-seen scars. The intangible rips and tears that had been forged into the other members of the IPRE in the near decade since they had been left in that plane.

Not all were bad. Many, if not most, were great. Beautiful even. Merle had taken the first chance he had to introduce Davenport to his kids, and Davenport had been shocked. The same man who had once complained about never wanting to settle down had kids, and ones that loved and looked up to him all the same. Magnus had changed as well. He had always been careless. Reckless. He acted first, thought later. Yet, Davenport got to watch as he adopted a dog, started up a training school. Somehow, he had become worthy for the word gentle. And Taako. Well, where could Davenport possibly start with that? Taako and Lup had been a package deal, something Davenport was immediately aware of when viewing their applications. Taako cared for Lup with all his heart. In return, he had nothing else to give. Of course, everyone on board knew that Taako respected them and maybe even liked them, but trust? Love? Those were entirely separate. Lup occupied those places in Taakos heart, and no one ever expected otherwise. And yet, Davenport re-met Taako as an elf who had let himself fall in love with a great man. As someone who had taken on a pupil. Who had begun to extend his capability of compassion outside just him and his sister.

Not all the scars left behind from Lucretia's actions were negative. Still, some were. And Davenport tended to notice those in himself.

For a decade he was hardly capable of saying anything but his name. He remembered that time to its entirety. It affected him. There were days when Davenport would wake up and feel the fuzz coming in. Not really. No, the voidfish were gone, no one could ever take his memories from him again. But he felt static hissing in the peripherals of his mind, lurking there like a grim reminder of who he had been, of what he had lost. A reminder of the shell of a man he had become. All his life Davenport had been someone who relished in being in control, who was even obsessed with it. For a decade, though, he wasn't. All he had had was a single word. Even then, Davenport had never been entirely sure why he had been given that.