been trying to think up some lore on aliit boost's parents because i know so little about them. matiu (dad) and mohi (mom) were probably high school sweethearts. his mom became a bank teller and his dad was a librarian.
if you've seen leverage redemption, robert blanche (the librarian from the bucket job episode), is a good frame of reference for him.
matiu was a hero in their little town, hiding kids from bullies and sheltering them from their weird families. showing them through book recommendations that better worlds exist than the one they felt trapped in. giving them something tangible that sparked hope.
he'd been a fixture in that library since he was a boy himself - always had his head buried in a book or three. it was his favorite place in the world, right up until he made a home with mohi. it still remained a close second after that.
their house wasn't a large one, but there was an extra room that very quickly became a library of his own. he had a system for sorting his books that only he could make sense of, and by the time boost was in middle school he had so many of them that the shelves were full and they had started to collect in stacks on the flat surfaces.
he read boost to sleep most nights, and when comet and sinker were over, he liked to read to all of them. they'd drift off several times, but try valiantly to keep peeling their eyes back open to hear what happened next.
he liked to write notes in the margins of his books - something that drove little boost crazy. he couldn't believe the audacity of scribbling inside a perfectly good book. matiu would reach for a pen while reading to him (sometimes to underline parts boost really liked, or make notes of how he changed the story to be more suitable for him), and boost would narrow his little eyes. matiu would squint right back and they would pause like that, in a standstill, until matiu inevitably lowered the pen to the paper very slowly. he was so endeared by the way boost would huff at him.
matiu made tapes of himself reading all kinds of books (children's books were his favorite, i think, because he got to do lots of voices) and they were kept in a special part of the library for those who couldn't or didn't want to read the physical copies. when he died, the library offered all of the tapes to boost. he took a few of them, but he asked them to keep the rest; he couldn't think of a better way to honor his father and ensure his legacy lived on than allowing him to continue to read to people.
sometimes, the pack still huddles together in their apartment in keldabe, piled under mounds of blankets, and puts on one of matiu's tapes so he can read them to sleep again.