Missed Signals

Missed Signals
(Bate / Mira)

Kalmari Town isn’t usually a place known for much change.

The sun rises and sets over the same little houses. The mail, usually run by the same people, gets delivered at the same time each day. Its little populace, most of them Squids, greet each other on their way to run the same errands.

Mira, personally, takes a comfort in the simplicity. It’s good and easy to understand.

As the sun starts to peek out over the horizon and the sky begins to shift hues for the beginning of the day, a Squid of blue and white steps foot from her humble home and makes her way down the well-worn paths to her shop.

It’s peaceful, quiet, as it always is. What few shopkeepers milling about getting ready for their own day wave at her as she passes, chirpy little greetings on their lips, and she waves back with the usual enthusiasm. A routine in motion, as it was for the last several decades.

Kalmari Town has, in all the years since its founding, run like clockwork, a machine of routine, and most of its residents preferred it that way. When something happened these days, it was usually few and far between. Its citizens weren’t known to treat change well.

At least, that’s how it was some fifty or sixty years ago. Times changed, and people with it, for better and worse. Kalmari Town and its people are different these days regardless of what elders would like to say. Mira would know!

Although an elder who valued the routine as much as the next, she tried to embrace it as best she could.

It wasn’t bad, in Mira’s opinion, to have change – people grew up, people passed, new and old buildings came and went. Everyone was a new friend to make, in their own little way.

Ask the youngsters that, and they probably wouldn’t get it. Seventy four and still running her pharmacy? When is she going to retire, finally take a rest? They always said it with a smile.

“Oh, sometimes a job is just too nice to be rid of! What would I do with myself then?” She’d tell them with a giggle. What other way would she meet so many people?

The sun is barely starting to brighten up the town when Mira arrives at her shop. The town pharmacy, not far from the hospital, and not far from home.

It’s just the same as she had left it, yesterday and the week before and ten and twenty years ago. She flips the lights on, heads to the back to check the refrigerated stock, and gets her little store ready for the day.

So many people indeed, she thinks. Mira’s shop had been a place of changing faces since she was young. People came and went, and being that it was the only pharmacy around, one saw a lot of different people. Change and routine intermixed.

An elderly squid in her youth who made silly jokes. A recently married couple with a baby who needed cold medicine. Those who came on the regular for their refills and bubbled up the little shop with stories of all kinds both tragic and sweet. Those from abroad, strange and amazing in their ways.

A hospital saved lives, she thought, but it wasn’t responsible for doling out needed medicine the way her shop was. She was, in a sense, a carer of her own, and she delighted in making friends with each face she saw. Making sure, in her own way, that they were happy and healthy.

In some way it was the heart of her life – the place where she met others, grew to love them, and broadened her horizons along the way. All fitted within one neat little Kalmari routine.

Mira’s job may have been the same thing day in and out, and she may be an elder these days, but she certainly wasn’t ready to let go of such a filling position. Her shop – her customers – they practically were her life. Every single face that came and went, no matter how the time passed.

Kalmari Town was a place of routine, and had always been, but it certainly wasn’t unchanging.

Mira contents herself on these thoughts as she works through her daily chores. The front of the shop – filled with over-the-counter stock and little treats for customers to grab on the way out – is checked through and resupplied, the floors swept and tended to. Easy work for a small place like hers.

Then, she deals with the medicine, filling orders for the day and prepares herself for whatever medicine prescriptions will come in later on. Labels are printed and stapled to the bags, put in cubbyholes in alphabetical order. Shipments are tracked for specialty orders headed to the shop and everything is disinfected.

Someone had complained once of the scent of pharmaceuticals – how could she stand it? – and well. She had been working here since her twenties!

As Mira hums and works through her orders, a hand grazes along the next prescription label in her to-do list. A familiar order that she has down practically to muscle memory, and a quick glance at the name on file tells her why.

Ahh. Bate.

A smile tugs at her mouth unbidden. Now there’s a name with a history.

If there was a reason for Kalmari Town to change, Sir Bate was it. An outsider, not unheard of, but the first one to settle down with a local Squid? Now that was a scandal.

Mira remembers him too well, and it comes with some embarrassment. She had never been an adventurous sort. She’d rarely gone farther than the next town for her supplies, and it wasn’t often one had seen anyone but Squids in those parts back in the day. She couldn’t have known any better than what she was taught. And what she was taught hadn’t really been the best.

It had only been within the week of finally taking the mantle of pharmacist for herself. A fresh-faced young woman, armed with knowledge, excited and...very, very ignorant.

She still remembers it vividly, like it was yesterday. A Squid, seeing an outsider come through her doors. An outsider with gargantuan wings and even bigger talons, large enough to tear a hole right in her store’s humble walls.

Demon Beasts were dangerous, and outsiders weren’t much better. Brought trouble, everyone said. And she had panicked, her poor, young, ignorant self. The scream of terror in her throat still seems to ring in her ears.

“Get out! Get out get out get out!!”

Everything had gone flying off of the shelves, darned near everything just to try and hit him in the head and get him good and gone. And when that hadn’t worked, the broom had done just as well to swing for his head.

She’d been too dizzy with silly fear to listen to any of his words. Couldn’t have heard past the adrenaline and her own voice.

In the end, he had fled, and her store had enough medicine on the floor to wipe out a fourth of her stock. All in the first week.

It had taken Ellie – sweet, good Ellie, one of her best friends even now that she was gone – to come by and clear things up. At the time, Mira had been more than a bit doubtful. And maybe a little concerned for Ellie’s safety.

Mira turns the order in her hands and sighs.

She hadn’t seen much of Bate after that. Wary of the Squids who were wary of him, and rightfully so. It was always Ellie coming out to pick up his medicine, Ellie with some silly story of the newest Kalmari Town resident. Her boyfriend, her husband, and the routine they had made in their love for each other. Ellie always looked so happy.

Mira might see him occasionally on her town runs, during her morning walks, but their greetings were...brief. For awhile. She’d still been wary of him, although not unkind at least, for Ellie’s sake. It took years to unlearn that kind of conditioning, and all of them had still been young.

But she listened, and she saw him, and she learned, bit by bit, who this fellow was. A person just the same as them, and Ellie had never been hurt by him. Far from it. Just...a mailman trying to make a living.

She remembered apologizing to him for her behavior eventually. Bate, awkward but friendly, had been content enough to wave it off.

“Start over…?”

“Sure.”

She still never saw him in her shop, but it was probably owed to his schedule. It was fine. By the time Ellie passed away it was practically as if Mira had known him her whole life.

...Ellie.

Gosh, she still missed her. Mira had always thought she was the life of the town. And considering Ellie was a nurse, maybe that was more literal than one might’ve thought.

She remembered hearing about her passing, and it still felt odd because it had been just...a normal day for her. The sun was out, people coming and going, and yet someone so special had been lost.

Her heart felt like it had been shattered into so many pieces. She hadn’t been able to stop crying. Not for a good week.

And yet it couldn’t have compared to how Bate felt. Bate who had loved his wife so fiercely! Bate, who as much as they hadn’t known each other, had been devoted and so in love more than anything else. Anyone could see that.

She hadn’t seen him at all after that. It was like he had just...disappeared. And if she hadn’t, on occasion, seen his large shadow flying overhead, she might have thought the worst...

She’d always thought of him, in the years after that.

Time didn’t stand still when terrible things happened, but the routine continued, and people kept moving. Mira had grieved, and had come to terms, and Bate hadn’t. And that was alright.

She had asked Gordon about him, she recalls, when he took over medicine pickup. Never much to say but a slow shake of his head and some passing words. Maybe he had been suspicious. Or respecting his friend’s privacy. She hadn’t prodded further.

Mira wouldn’t quite understand just how much Bate had broken until the passing over own husband. The grief, letting him go, the visceral pit in her heart. It was like nothing would ever be good again, and the world...how dare it keep turning.

She had hated routine in that moment, and she, on some level, had understood him then. Strange and a bit funny, that her thoughts would have turned towards him when she could barely remember anything else.

...

Time had passed, as it always did. Routines continued. People went about their days, selling wares and cooking food. In the depths of the cosmos, nothing had really changed in the grand scheme of things.

Mira grieved and attended her little pharmacy, the same as always. Same greetings, same people, children who had grown into teenagers and older folk who steadily made themselves more scarce. It had all felt so lesser, without her husband, she had thought. A life on autopilot.

She hadn’t Bate, and at a point, hadn’t expected to. She had accepted that she may not have ever seen him again. She’d had bigger things on her mind. Years had passed, after all. Things kept going.

And then the prayer shrine.

Mira had gone to the forest to pray, she recalls. To find some kind of peace in the grief and listless routine of her life, and to pay respects to the departed. There was a certain peace in it, and it was a kind of disruption that she had sorely missed.

Thinking back on it, she wonders if Nova hadn’t been trying to tell her something. Why else would she have met Bate there, at the shrine, when nobody else had been present, doing the exact same thing she was?

Their eyes had met, then, for a moment. And Mira felt, for just a second, as if she had finally been seen, past the routine and the smiles. Bate was there to pay respects to those departed, and he had looked so listless, and she could only have seen herself in him right then.

“...Hello.” Mira had told him.

“Hello.” He had said right back.

And somehow, that had been enough.

Mira’s routine had continued as it always had. On the surface, everything had stayed most the same. But when it came time for Bate’s medicine to be picked up, as the usual routine went, it wasn’t Gordon’s face she saw in the pharmacy that day.

Bate had smiled awkwardly, a little sheepish. Maybe he felt like he had been intruding. Mira was just thankful to actually see him again. She’d smiled and greeted him, asked him about his day, and things...went!

It was nice. It was good to actually get to see him again, to get to know him after those decades had gone by with nothing. Older they were, with children and grandchildren aplenty, but it was like very little had changed since Ellie had been alive.

Mira had missed it. How nostalgic it had been.

Mira thumbs idly at the label.

Feelings were funny things. Even in her old age, they were strange things to interpret. She had always enjoyed their conversations, as short as they were sometimes, and she had always worried a little bit when one of his boys came by to pick up medicine in his stead.

Getting old, she knew. She felt it herself in her bones. And she worried for Bate as much as she looked forward to seeing him.

Mira wondered, wryly, what that meant. Part of her already knew.

Bate had been a steady friend all these years, and one of the few who understood her in a certain way few had. Old souls with a lot of history, even if they’d never been the closest.

The routines continued, but people came and people went, and as Bate’s boys grew, they made themselves steadily more scarce. His old friends gone and his family spreading their roots, as family often did.

They were getting on in years, and it could be a bit lonely without someone to share their life with, couldn’t it. Without a good friend by your side...

Such silly, girlish sentiment! Thinking of love and relationships at the ripe age of seventy four. Mira feels the laughter bubbling in her throat, quiet and fond.

It’s not a crime to not want to be lonely. To want something more than just a pleasant friendship inside store walls, a few words about children, weather, and the news. It’s not a crime to want to spend one’s waning years happy.

Both of them deserve that, after all they’ve been through, but Bate especially. And they’ll always miss their partners, and they’ll always cherish them, long and dearly departed. But Mira knows her husband would have wanted her happy, just as much as she thinks Ellie would have wanted Bate to live just as well.

Time allowed someone the maturity to understand these things.

Would Bate want the same thing she wanted? She isn’t sure. But...well. There can’t be any reason not to try, can there?

There’s a festival coming up, the first one of summer. And with Mira’s family off attending to their own devices, she could use a friend to go with…

“Hello, Mira.”

Well, speak of the stars and they’ll surely appear. And she hadn’t even gotten his order filled.

Mira let out a quick breath and turned to face Bate across the counter.

He was as he had always been; wings gargantuan and relaxed behind him, face ever hidden behind that mask of his. One hand held to his cane for support, and he put a bit more of his weight to it as he stepped closer. Even through the mask, his smile was obvious. She could hear it in his words.

“A little slow on the orders today?” His voice turns with idle laughter in his throat.

Mira makes a noise of fond exasperation and waves him off even as she rushes to fill up his prescription. “Oh, what do you mean? Me? I’m never slow!”

It’s easy to talk to him and banter and tell a few jokes here and there. It hides the little rush of nerves well and allows her the opportunity to turn her face away so as to hide the dusting across her cheeks. She’s usually so prompt and punctual. Bate’s never had to wait before…

“Here,” She says only a few minutes later. Filling Bate’s order is muscle memory, and her eyes are still as keen as they were fifty years ago. It takes no time at all for her to package it all and hand it off. “Sorry it’s a little late. I was...a bit indisposed!”

“Not to worry,” He waves it off easily, tucking the bag in one of his pauldrons. Lucky that he doesn’t need anything refrigerated! “It happens from time to time. Medicine will do that..”

“Not wrong,” She sighs. Even at the best of times, something will eventually, occasionally, sneak up on her. Or her suppliers. “And how have you been? Anything new?”

The conversation is easy, familiar, one they’ve had a thousand times but which never got old. How are the kids? Bate beams. Talks about his youngest, that the boy’s family is coming to visit for a few days.

“I bet Kirby will be happy to see you again,” She remarks with a smile of her own, and Bate lets out a noise akin to a chuckle.

“Not as happy as I’ll be to see him,” He says. “Meta and his family are busy, but I always think they could do to visit more often. I never get to see my grandboy as it is!”

“I do know the feeling...!” A grandmother herself, Mira could understand it.

So it sounded like her little festival idea was off of the table. If his family was coming over, it was probably for that. A shame, but...maybe she could figure something else out.

“I’m sure you three will have a wonderful time,” She beams at him, and Mira certainly means it. Kirby is going to have a great time – that boy can eat and there are stalls aplenty to pick from!

“Thank you. I think so too,” Bate sighs, and the conversation ambles on from there.

It’s easy for time to go by when Mira is talking to Bate. Even for all that it’s mostly the usual filler fluff, Mira enjoys it. How is her family? Oh, fine, you know how they are. How are the rest of his boys? Good! Anything new happen?

Mira doesn’t notice just how much time has passed until the bell to the shop has rung three times and customers begin to idle through. Embarrassing, that she keeps losing track like this! Nobody else here for a prescription at least…

“Well,” Bate sighs eventually. “I suppose I need to get going. Don’t want to keep you busy with everyone else around.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” She waves lightly. “I’ve always got time for my best customer!”

“Your longest customer.”

“Some shops consider that the same thing, you know…”

She gets a breathy, rough chuckle for her joke, and Mira feels her face stretch in a smile without meaning to.

The summer festival is out. But that doesn’t mean she can’t try for something else, can she? He’s starting to turn away, waving at her and nodding his head. It’ll be the last chance she has for a few more weeks…

“Bate?” She calls. He stops in his movements and blinks at her in question.

Don’t get cold feet. She is seventy four years old. She can do this.

“I was wondering…” She taps her hands together, scrambling for the right words. “If maybe you would be...available? Sometime tonight? If-- If that’s too soon, I understand. Another day! But if you’re open…”

No time like the present, she supposed. They weren’t getting younger.

Bate stares at her for a long moment. Mira holds her breath and swallows back the dusting of pink on her cheeks.

“Do I have anything I need picked up?”

Mira blinks.

Bate reaches into his pauldron to pull out the medicine bag, feeling of it in his hand with an air of lost thought. “Everything feels like it’s right here. Did Mends miss anything? He’s usually never that late…”

Mira watches blankly as he mutters to himself, about not leaving her in the store that long, about any hiccups he has with his medicine he needs to ask about.

She...probably should have known he wouldn’t have gotten it. Ellie was his only real experience, wasn’t it?

“Oh, shoosh. It’s alright! No medicine worries, everything is fine. Go on, go about your day.” And she can’t help the small laugh that leaves her, waving him off despite the protests, ushering him on out of the store with a pleasant goodbye.

It’s fine, she thinks. He’ll come back. He always does.

Routines don’t ever really stop, after all. She’ll have plenty of chances.

-The End-

Part 2 >>

Artist Comment:

July 22, 2023

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Let's just say it's a miracle Bate found Ellie. XDDD The boy is so very oblivious to even the simplest of signals, hahaha~

If you remember, I introduced Mira awhile back~ She is a good friend of Bate, and if you read the literature above, she has a thing for the old warrior. \\\>v</// This takes place when she's in her mid 70's, as well as Bate. Both have lost many in their lives. (By this time, Gordon, Ramset and Gravel have all passed on.) They've known one another for well over 50 years now, and if you read the story, she's quite interested in pursuing a relationship with him~ They only see each other when he picks up his medicine (and that's only like once or twice a month) She wants to see him outside of her business- as companions, friends, something more. But it looks like Bate didn't catch on. >x<;;;; No worries, she's not giving up yet!!!

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The literature written for this illustration was commissioned by my good friend, Dogblog. (dA- Shadowrealmprincess) ^v^ I think she did an absolutely amazing job introducing her. I hope you love Mira as much as I do, cause I have a few more illustrations and stories for her~!! ^o^