_______________________________........ | Abandoned Rest Stop · Morning · In collaboration with |@KillamriX88] & |@canaryrose]Abandoned Rest Stop · Morning · In collaboration with @KillamriX88 & @canaryrose ____________________________________________________________________________. Chu Hua looked up, squinting at the glare of the sun in her eyes. These two seemed… earnest. Well, the woman did- the boy looked chagrined. She sighed nearly imperceptibly as Chae Won started speaking, giving Kanna a resigned glance. A day ago, she would’ve been happy to meet these two- fans were, or had been, her favorite part of her career outside of the game- but today she was just done. She didn’t care. “Uh-huh,” she said, face and tone flat. “Cool.”
Kanna returned a glance that said ”They’re your fans…” and would have left her to suffer the attention if it were any other day, but out here, any attention was bad attention. It was something that the both of them hadn’t really considered. Kanna had been so distracted by the events leading to their departure from the city, she’d completely forgotten that back in their normal lives, the both of them were very recognizable. The fact that their escape from the field in the middle of the game yesterday had been broadcast to the entire city only compounded the issue.
Besides that, she found herself fighting instincts she hadn’t had for years. There was no need to step up and put herself between Chu and potential danger, not when it was no longer her place and especially not when Chu could handle herself. Yet, she wanted to.
...Chu was right. An should have been here… She thought to herself, recognizing the face of indifference on her ex. She decided the least she could do was try to keep things cordial with the strangers since it’d been made apparent they’d be riding together. She preferred everyone in their group at least remained friendly for however long the duration of the trip across the desert would be.
”It’s uh…always nice to meet fans...” Kanna answered, struggling to change what would have been a practiced greeting to something more fitting to everyone’s situation. ”So… are you both… you know... Are you both Benders?”
Chae-Won felt her whole body cringe with shame as Kanna called her a 'fan'. Was it that obvious? Of course it was.
“I’m so sorry. I made it weird, I know I did…” Chae-Won groaned. Fortunately, Kanna seemed less begrudging of their presence and gave her a less painfully awkward topic to discuss. “Oh, uh… yeah I guess that’s the kind of thing we can actually talk about now, huh?”
Weiyuan, having been on edge the second Kanna had asked, relaxed as Chae-Won. It was true. The pathetically small silver lining to all this was that he was surrounded by people where, for the moment at least, he didn’t have to hide that part of himself.
“Yep. Both of us are earth benders. I’d been teaching myself for years, and then I ran into the kid. He insisted on learning, so I figured I might as well make sure he learned right.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “Neither of us are experts or anything. Obviously it's pretty hard to get proper instructions on how to do this stuff…”
Wait. Holy shit. That meant that at least one of the two women before her were also benders. Weiyuan coud see the lightbulb go off in Chae-Won’s head and rolled his eyes as she suppressed a squeal of delight.
She actually had something in common with her heroes.
“You trained?” That got Chu Hua’s attention. She stared at Chae-Won, baffled, looking the other woman up and down with a new appreciation. Training. Bending training. She had those tapes, but she had never imagined those skills might still exist. Bending was just a relic that she had been cursed with. Nowadays, it was something that happened to benders, not something that benders did. “How? Why would you do that? That’s… impossible! And insane.” She completely ignored the rest of the conversation, now fixing Chae-Won with an intensely interested and, frankly, confused expression on her face. She didn’t disclose her own status- it felt a little awkward- but she imagined it would be fairly obvious from the look of the fresh burns on her hands.
”Maybe she has ‘naked King Wu’ tapes too.”
“Shut the fuck up, please?”
Chae-Won’s brain completely short-circuited. Chu Hua was talking to her. Like actually paying attention and talking to her. Talking to her and actually interested!
“O-oh, I-I-” Aaaand then another hiccup interrupted her thought process. “Wait, naked who what now?” She blinked, but then decided it must be some sort of hilarious inside joke she wasn’t cool enough to know about. “W-well…” This time she was neither interrupted, nor too star-struck to speak. She began sweating a little, realizing the can of worms Chu Hua’s question might open with regard to her past. “It’s… um… a really long, lame story that I’m sure you wouldn’t be interested in. Let’s just say I got started one day out of necessity and… just kept going. I just needed something to focus on sometimes and bending was what I had. Then, like I said, I found the kid and had to keep myself sharp for his sake.”
Well it was definitely a long story at any rate. One they didn’t have time for, so for now she was probably safe.
That said, even Weiyuan was eyeing her with a look that cried “bullshit.”
“Necessity?” Chu Hua raised a brow, skeptical. “Why would you need this shit? It’s awful. I just… you know, I tried really hard not to… but, well. Here I am now, so I guess that didn’t fucking work.” She snorted, shaking her head. “That doesn’t make sense to me. And you, kid, you… wanted to know all this stuff?”
”I mean… didn’t you also pay a hundred thousand yuan for the tapes? Not that any of this makes sense. How does someone…” Kanna tilted the stick in her hand toward Chae. ”...Manage to never get caught while training and teaching when Chu was over here burying a part of her in her floorboards?”
Kanna was wracking her brain listening to the multiple perspectives of the same issue. An issue with which she had very little exposure to until only a few days previous and had since then only dedicated time to finding a way to run from. On one hand, Benders were hunted and killed and those who knew they could bend before the accident had spent their lives hiding or trying to bury their powers for fear of the impact it’d have on their lives. On the other hand, there were those who had somehow managed to train and even teach others who wanted to learn. Something wasn’t adding up or maybe she just never understood the whole picture. The world was afterall a big place and Ba Sing Se by itself was massive. Maybe there were more solutions to the problem than Kanna had originally believed buried within the city. Unfortunately for her, that solution hadn’t come in time to save her mother. Instead, she was watching two people put together a puzzle that was supposed to explain their lives and why they ended up where they were. What decisions they made, why they made them and what if anything they could have done to change the present. It was as if anything related to bending was a shit show, just as they’d been told.
”Not to mention that she’s right. This is shit. Why try so hard to want it?” Kanna asked, almost as if addressing all three present.
“Look, I’m not a philosopher or anything, and I don’t want to get preachy. You’ll just have to trust me when I say there was a time when I needed it to work for me, OK?” Chae-Won told them. Meanwhile, she had indeed seen the burns on Chu Hua’s hands. She didn’t speak to her directly, but she did have one other thing to say, “But it’s not like it’s a disease. I’ve seen what sick people, monster’s, look like. Astonishingly, most of ‘em weren’t benders… Bending is just another thing in a long list of bullshit people have chosen to tear each other apart over. It helped me when I needed it, and that’s good enough for me.”
Weiyuan fidgeted with his collar as she spoke. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the glass wasn’t even what she was referring to, but it was all he could think about when she talked about bending like that.
They hurt me when they found out about my bending… and they hurt me when they didn’t know about it. If there’s no difference, then why shouldn’t I? Weiyuan mouthed the words, forcing a weak whisper out, though he didn’t really care how much they understood, nor was he in the mood to explain further. He just knew their attitude toward their bending was annoying.
It reminded him too much of his other self…
“I didn’t say I was sick or a monster,” Chu Hua retorted, crossing her arms. She was getting a little heated, despite herself. All that rage inside of her from yesterday was bubbling up, and she rubbed the bridge of her nose.
It wasn’t that she had never though herself a monster or resented herself for what she was. She had, and in some ways, she did. When she was a kid, she had taken showers as freezing cold as they could go. When she was a teenager, she had burned herself, trying to get herself to associate fire with pain, to get rid of it all. It had never worked. How could these people be so seemingly happy with it?
“Listen, I-” She noticed Weiyuan trying to speak and stopped herself in her tracks, trying hard to pay attention to his words. Her face softened after she heard him speak, however soft it was. How could it not? “Kid, I… I just know I wouldn’t be in this spot if I couldn’t bend. I don’t know if you can understand, but I have- I had- a career, a life, a family. If I hadn’t lit a stadium on fire yesterday, I would still be planning my wedding for next week. Now I’m not getting married at all. Fuck, what time is it, 9 AM? I’d be in bed with my fiancee second-guessing my choice of cake frosting, not in the desert preparing to travel to god knows where so I won’t be executed.” She started to get a bit choked up towards the end of her sentence, balling her hands into fists.
Kanna remained silent, finding herself yet again in an emotional situation with someone who needed another’s touch. Who needed the very woman they had both left behind. The worst part of it all was that she could no longer relate. Kanna was no Bender, nor was she expecting to wed anyone. She was just on the run from a life that knew none of the struggle any of the other three had to live through. Then there was Weiyuan who had surprised them both when he started to speak. Only thing was, his voice was like that of a broken whisper and nearly impossible to hear in the ambience of the crowd around them and strong winds from the storm in the distance. In her effort to understand him, it was only then that she noticed the lines carved into his neck half hidden by his messy head of hair. Her eyes glanced from him to the scars marking half of Chae-Won’s face and then to the burns on Chu’s hands.
”I’m… sorry.” Kanna said softly, again as if to all three although she was still looking at Chu. Kanna was afterall half the reason Chu was in the middle of the desert away from the one thing she probably needed. Even if the alternative was death, their running wasn’t shaping up to be much better. Not when every other person like Chu was broken in some way and had the scars to prove it.
“I get it. Maybe not specifically that, but none of us ended up here for happy reasons,” Chae-Won said. “And I don’t expect to change your mind about bending today, and I’m almost certain youm don’t want me to try.” There was more she wanted to say, but it wasn’t her job to lecture Chu Hua freaking Yuan. Besides, she was a grown woman who now would have plenty of time to think things over.
“But, if you do want to talk about any of that stuff, we’ll have time… so… just say the word,” she concluded. “Doesn’t even need to be about bending, really. Gonna be a real boring trip otherwise.” Then again, maybe a little boring wouldn’t be so bad right now.
"Yeah, I don't think we're getting... 'boring'." Kanna said, peering into the sky with a hand shielding the light from her eyes. "...What is that?" |