trans_9 | What dreams may come [Open, bendytimed to before GTFO plot]

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What dreams may come [Open, bendytimed to before GTFO plot]

In her sealed, silent, sensory-deprived meditation room, Roxie is sleeping. It's a special sleep: for all dreams are connected, she knows, and by spinning her mind out along the web of thought, she might step into others...

[Roxie is dream-hopping, getting a look at the subconsciousnesses of the other people on the ship. So, how it works - if you're interested, go ahead and post with a dream your character is having, and Roxie will slip into it, subtle at first but more obvious as she tries to satisfy her curiosity. Just her being around will make the dreamer more lucid and more likely to remember the whole thing when they wake up.

Also, feel free to ask any OOC questions in a thread here, or poke me on AIM at 'anagramarye'.]

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"Yes," Katara said, her voice practically steel. "This is the first time I ever see the Southern Raiders. I was pretty young at the time, so it was very scary. Before I was born, the water tribe fought them as best as they could, but eventually they captured all of the waterbenders...except for one. This is the day they supposedly finish the job."

The Southern waterbender disembark, but Katara drags Roxie away from the fighting. "It was a diversion," Katara said. "All the men could do here was fight anyway, there were no benders left to fight them. No, they came here with only one more purpose: to make sure there were no more benders in the Southern Water Tribe. Here."

Katara brought Roxie into the tent, and there was the captain of the Southern Raiders, Yan Ra. He turns, and where there was a full grown Katara there is now only a small, scared little girl with hair loopies.

"Mom, I'm scared!"

"Go get your father!"

Katara leaves, and the discussion between her mother and the Yan Ra lasts only a minute or two more. He asks her who the last waterbender is, and swears to leave the village alone if she tells him. She tells him its her, and that she would go with him peacefully as a prisoner.

"Sorry, we're not taking any prisoners today."

And when Katara and her father get back to the tent, Katara's mother is gone.

At that moment, everything seems to blur: the terrain, the raiders, and all that is left is white space all around them. Katara is back to her normal self: she is sitting with her legs pulled up to her face, a look of quiet contemplation on her face, mingled with sadness.

Roxie slides down to sit next to Katara.

"... I never knew my parents," Roxie says, and there's an uncertainty in her voice that, for a moment, makes her sound like a child rather than the adult she tries to be. "I've been a foster child for as long as I remember."

A tune (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KhY-NgtTjA), eroded by the static of years, starts to filter through the whiteness. "That's the only thing I really have from before..." She trails off, and her head tilts back. Her eyes drift shut.

In ghostly half-images that dot te whiteness, a cold, genius child is taken into homes and then rejected again when the families can't handle her strangeness - rejection of friendships, absorption into imaginary worlds, abtruse and unnormal intelligence. It doesn't really harden her - she was broken already, in ways more sprung from accidental nature than behavior.

Once, there is violence, from a man who simply can't understand and can't peacefully let; and then a bruised, broken girl stands in front of a burning house and throws a lighter into the blaze.

Roxie's eyes are still closed, losr in the music. One might wonder if these images are an intentional expression or if they might have just... slipped out.

Katara hadn't expected to see any of that at all, and she was completely overwhelmed. But now she was beginning to knot together pieces of the puzzle that was Roxie. Of what Roxie was, Katara was always only grasping, but now she had an idea of at least what she'd seen. Katara could not understand quite what it meant to be ostracized like Roxie was, or beaten down because she was different: the closest to that feeling was the Fire Nation marching all over her people.

But seeing thta glimpse if how cruel people could be to Roxie had spurned a feeling Katara hadn't expected, and her eyes brimmed with tears. She suddenly threw her arms around Roxie, and though closed, Katara glared.

"You're a different person, but that doesn't make you weird. I like you Roxie, you are more unique than anyone I've ever known. If people don't understand that...well, I guess you know I don't really get certain people sometimes."

Roxie jerks at the sudden touch, as if she was just touched by hot metal. She doesn't quite move away entirely, though her breath is a little quicker and less even afterwards. She isn't used to being touched like this, apparently.

Her eyes crack open, and as they do the phantoms in the blank whiteness are gone, and so is the music.

"Of course I'm weird," she says quietly. "Shyama doesn't give his blessings to... normal people." She sounds almost a little defensive about it.

She understood the recoil by now: people didn't really appreciate how affectionate she could be, and even Katara would admit this wasn't the best tme to even do that. She hadn't really expected to be so overcome with emotion, and especially hadn't expected to go back to a memory that haunted her still.

"I'm not saying you're normal. I don't think you'd mistake it for anything but a lie if I said otherwise. But even I know the difference between saying you have a gift and you're different from others than saying you're just weird. People don't just think of weird as different, they look at it as a threat, as something that has to be put away. Can you blame me if I don't feel that way towards you?"

"But I--"

"I can't," she admits, and her tone is the softest and friendliest it's gotten so far. She takes in a soft breath and then lets it out again. "Thank you, Katara."

"...but could you stop touching me?"

Katara retreated from Roxie. She knew that she was being a bit of motherly, and definitely annoying to the younger girl.

"I'm sorry," Katara said, looking downcast. "I know I'm a little too...in my way. I won't touch you anymore."

Katara looked ashamed. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," Roxie says, and she wiggles in place just a little. "I'm just not very good with people touching me."

One might wonder if the negative association has to do with all the injuries she's suffered in the course of her 'job'.

Which, if she thought about it, Katara thought she could understand. As it was, she knew that some people just weren't very good at physical affection (Mai being one of them who simply didn't get it). In Roxie's case, Katara knew she'd have to stop mothering the girl: it came as instinct now, and she knew not everyone reacted positively to it.

Asuka, after all, reacted pretty baly.

"Sorry about that," she said sheepishly. "I know I can be a pain with that. It's just...instinct, I guess."

Katara closed her eyes and they were back at ember island again.

"It's okay," Roxie says softly. "It's not your fault. It's just one of my--things."

She looks silently down the length of the beach, and at the water. "...it's kind of nice here."

"Understood," Katara said, though she did offer Roxie a smile. "In your line of work, I can imagine its kinda required not to really get touchy feely with people."

Katara smiled. "Yeah. This is actually Zuko's summer home on Ember island. Nobody goes there anymore, so we went there to train and ready ourselves for the big battle with the Fire Nation. I never got to really enjoy it because we were too busy scared of our lives. It's actually pretty beautiful."

Katara closed her eyes, and now the two of them were at a clearing with mounty terrain.

"Hm. Scared? What happened?"

Roxie lays back, arms folded underneath her head as she looks up at the sky.

"This was right before our big fight against the Fire Nation, and the whole reason we went to Ember Island is because Azula chased us out of the Western Air Temple," Katara said. "When we went to Ember island, we were getting ready to fight the fire nation. The scary thing was a comet was also going to pass over that day, one that would increase the firebender's power ten fold. When you saw me fighting Azula? It happened that day, and she came close to killing Zuko and me. She wasn't counting on being outsmarted, that was for sure."

Katara's heart raced. "But it was scary for another reason too. That was the day that Aang would face against the Firelord by himself. I never really got to see it, to be honest, but I was scared that day that he might not come back alive."

"But he did," Roxie says, and she goes silent as she looks up at the stars.

"I don't really fight very smart," she says, voice quiet. "But it's not really possible to fight smart against the things I have to fight." Her mind is sliding over what could have been many opportunities—but, on the whole, she is right, sort of. "And it's not safe to risk not being straightforward with a lot of them. If something escapes while you're pulling something fancy..."

She fights for keeps, is what she's saying.

"Yeah, he did," Katara said, following her gaze. "And we won. He did what he said out to do, and he was able to do it without killing. It was one of the things I love about him: how willing he is to go out of his way to help others."

Katara nodded. "I'm a martial artist, and it wasn't just intelligence that beat Azula. She was skilled in every way, and her bending was at ten times its power, and she WAS powerful. I'll say what I did was smart, but the truth was I also had to be quick and react before she struck. That was instict and training. I was...glad I didn;t have to actually kill her."

And what Katara was saying plainly was that martial arts could pay for keeps too, but if you were lucky it wouldn't have to.

And that, Roxie has a hard time wrapping her head around. Not at a conscious level--she understands the idea, certainly--but at an unconscious one, where the message really has yet to sink in. Every fight she's ever had, until she was taken by the ship, has been life or death. Captured, she would be make an experiment and subject of torture, not a prisoner. And she can afford no mercy to the cho.

And beyond that, there's a little part of her that wonders how much easier it would have been if there had een someone around to just shoot this Azula in the head at the beginning. Lethal pragmatism.

But it's not something most people could understand.

And so she spends long moments silent.

"But you know," Katara said softly, "I've been lucky. I guess I know that now, when a situation like the Yeerk happens, you have to react. Sometimes, you have to be ready to kill. I don't like thinking about it, but there are times when I've been prepared to, just in case. I just hope when it happens, I do it for the right reasons."

It wasn't anything Katara had told anyone. She wished that she could still not be willing to kill, but now she was beginning to understand something: some people could be vicious, and could go after everything and everyone you loved. You had to be ready to do everything to NOT kill, but if you had no choice, you just had to.

And it bothered Katara that she couldn't be like she used to again.

"Aang could always do and be a person that could not kill. To me, Aang reached a state of consciousness between spiritual and material, and always wanted to preserve human life. I have to admit I'm not like Aang."

"Hmm."

Roxie smiles just a little bit. "And I'm not, either." Not at all. She works for the good of the many over the one... and in the most efficient ways possible.

Katara somehow felt a little better confessing that. That wasn't to say she didn't still feel horrible for having that feeling, like she was a jaded person who couldn't believe enough in the goodness of people. When it came to having these feelings in jail, it wasn't too hard to have nightmares about what she thought was happening to her.

Here the scenery changed again, and there were the people that had caused her to rethink her decision about trust. First there was Jet, someone she had admired. She saw him as vividly as she had the first time they'd met: charming, an inspiration to his group, a rebel who'd been hurt by the Fire Nation. The next scene he became different, willing to sacrifice a village for killing off some Fire Nation soldiers and using her and Aang to do it. She remembered clearly how she'd felt that day: shocked, betrayed, almost dirty. It would follow her when she saw Jet again, only he would be a shadow of that boy, now forced by the Dai Le to obey their silence on the war. Jet would break free, but it would cost him his life doing so.

She could see Hamma now, a kindly old woman who was just getting by. Katara went with her shopping in the market place, and then she found out Hamma was actually a waterbender like her, also from the Southern water village. She would learn that all the waterbenders were imprisoned by the Fire Nation, forcing Katara to become the last one. Katara would also witness how capture had twisted Hamma too: the woman would learn a very powerful technique, bloodbending, to control human beings once the moon was full. She would force people under the mountain, imprisoning innocent people and justifying their capture with her own many years ago. Katara would fight Hamma, break free of her bloodbending on her, then fight Aang and Sokka when she made them fight her and each other, and finally Katara would bloodbend Hamma herself to prevent her from causing any true damage to her friends. In the end, Hamma would triumph anyway, forcing Katara to use the taboo bending no one else knew of.

And Katara, now, saw the double of her again, in the Fire Nation uniform, a grim smile on her face. She stood between her and Roxie, her hands blood stained and dirty.

"Maybe you are strong enough after all. I didn't expect you to after that Yeerk. One more push, and maybe you can get there. Wanna test it out?"

The doppleganger made a slashing movement and landed a high kick toward Roxie, producing a flame midair that would burn the girl.

Roxie doesn't move but to bring up an arm to shield her eyes, letting the flame wash over her. There's the stink of burning flesh as the sudden burst of heat scalds her.

She looks between Katara and her double, apparently less concerned by her own injuries than by the sudden, odd dichotomy.

A moment later Katara was at her friend's side, her hands out in a threatening gesture. She looked deadly serious now as she stared down her "alternate." She was sick of this: that version of her was making far too many appearances in her dreams. She rooted herself in stance.

"If you lift a finger to hurt her, I'll make sure you regret it," Katara said, her voice quiet but very, very serious. "I will do that to anyone that tried to hurt people I care about. But don't think for a minute that I'm going to lose control and be like you. I know why you're here, why you make appearances in my dream now. A part of me is still scared that I'll become like her, and as long as I'm scared of that, you exist."

And like that, the other Katara disappeared. Katara knew it wasn't permanent: as long as she was scared of becoming like Azula, or scared of what would happen when she was forced to kill, that Katara would exist. She understood that now, just like why these dreams had been bothering her more lately.

She was fairly certain Roxie had helped with that.

"I'm sorry you got hurt," Katara said, her eyes downcast. "I guess I don't control that part of myself as well as I think I do."

"It's all right," Roxie says, her voice dry and small and cracking. The pain, though, if there is any, doesn't show through to her (seared, half-melted) face. She turns slightly, half-consciously, moving the burned side of her away from Katara. "Everyone has inner demons."

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What dreams may come [Open, bendytimed to before GTFO plot]

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