trans_9 | Last Straw

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She went straight to the Sensoriums. Her feelings were all over the place, and she had to get away from people right now. She remembered all too well what happened to Alex when he lost Luna: she knew she had to find a way to take her aggression out. There was pain and self loathing and unspeakable things she was sorting through, but right now it was nothing but anger she was feeding on. She closed her eyes when she entered, concentrating on the enemies she;s fought while she'd been on the ship.

The Terminators. The T-Rex. The Nightmare King's monster minions. The traps Hal had laid for them. They came one at a time but Katara was ready, steeling herself to calmly maneuver out of the traps, to find a way to take down the terminator most efficiently, and those alone took more than a few hours. It was when she got to the nightmare King's minions, however, that Katara stopped being cautious. Now she ripped into them, stabbing at them with ice shards and freezing them on the spot before blowing through them, and slowly her determined face gave away to that of rage. As she started to remember their fights, their hugs, their talks, she switched to the Bene Gesserit fighting style, her hits were starting to get more serious, leaving many injured in her wake, though she received a few cuts herself. When she was done an hour later, it faded, all of it, and she was left in water, where she had heard Sokka once talk to Toph about how she'd been like a mother to her, and she couldn't stand it anymore. She let out a scream, primal and pained.

"WHY?! WHY BRING HIM HERE JUST TO TAKE HIM AWAY?! ALL THIS TIME, JUST TO TAKE HIM AND NOT HAVE AANG HERE AND MAKE ZUKO FORGET WHAT WE ALL DID?? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME!?"

And she dissolved into tears here, the sun sinking into the clouds and leaving a dark, lonely pond.

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Ren had been on his way to the Sensoriums to try to feed Darkwing when he saw Katara's rampage. It was the kind of thing he'd seen a lot, from himself and Shinji. Fight to take away the pain.

"If you're going to fight," he said, hands in pockets, "don't do it because you don't know what else to do."

Katara turned, trying her best to compose herself, because quite honestly it wasn't like he knew what was going on.

"I have plenty of reasons to fight," she said, composing herself. "I was doing this so I could get rid of some aggression. I've had some bad news, and I needed to get the anger out."

"That helps," Ren admitted. "But what are you fighting for?"

He looked out over the wreckage of imagined enemies. "It's true we're in a situation where if we don't fight, we won't survive. But if you don't have that reason, then you'll burn out. It can't be as general as saving the worlds, otherwise you can just leave it to everyone else. It has to be yours and yours alone."

There was a little bit of a distant look on his face as he said this, thinking over his own causes.

Katara wasn't sure what he meant. She had been running the simulation as a way to stop her from taking her emotions out on anyone else. If he was really asking her what she was fighting for, she had an answer for him.

"I fight because no one deserves what happened to our worlds," Katara said. "I fight because I've seen what happens to people who are oppressed, I've been there. There are people on this ship who are learning to fight themselves, and I'll help them in any way I can. Whatever anyone thinks, whatever they fight, I know why I do. I won't let anyone suffer like we have on this ship."

She looked back at him, interrupter of her pain but curious now. "What about you?"

Ren smiled humorlessly. It seemed like there were more people like Shinji in the world--the ones who fought for everyone and no one, trying to do it because they thought it was right.

"That kind of thinking can leave you indecisive," he said. "When you're forced to make a hard choice, can that conviction give you the strength you need to make that decision?"

He took his hands out of his pockets, showing that he wasn't nervous about this, even if he wasn't going to go in-depth. "I have someone I need to fight for. I'm going to restore the worlds, but to save that person. She's still the reason I fight."

Here, Katara looked serious. "Always. I've been in my world, and lived more than a year in this one. If I have to make a decision that will help people, I will do that. You don't stop wars by wavering on the ideals you fight for. You give everything, and you help those that count on you."

She nodded. "Then she just be someone special. I know someone like that in my world too."

"Good," Ren answered. "We're not going to win by being indecisive. The more people who understand that, the better."

He nodded back. "Then you know what it means to have to fight for them. That they're important enough to do anything for."

"I'm not indecisive about the fight, no matter what happens," Katara said, looking deadly serious. "These people may have decisions to make, things they think matter more than stopping the Ohm. I don't. This mission is bigger than even my pain."

Which hurt to say aloud, but it was true. She had been taught at least that much by her teachers, both from her world and the ones stuck here.

Ren was still bothered by Katara's explanation, so he said, "Don't let yourself think that you're not important, that you should sacrifice yourself for the greater good. If you do, then the ones counting on you have lost."

Great, he was sounding like Shinji now. It was getting harder to keep his philosophy separate from his friend's, no matter how much he kept telling himself that their ideals couldn't coexist.

Katara chuckled. "Ok, I think I might have given the wrong impression. If I were to get killed, it would mean that we would be short one healer as well as a fighter. I'm never going to be on that much of a self sacrifice kick. I'm going to help people, but I plan to stay alive doing it."

Yep, definitely not one for dying for a cause unless there was no other choice.

Good, she had a sense of humor about it. That was actually reassuring--contradictory as it sounded, it meant she was serious about not getting herself killed.

"That's a relief," Ren answered. "I've had too many self-sacrificing idiots to last me a lifetime."

"With all of the training I've gone through? That's not going to be something I'm going to be doing anytime soon. They'd better have, like, a robot army and a bunch of monsters to take me down."

Which, actually, HAD happened before.

"How many idiots?" She was curious.

There was Shinji, of course. Tezuka also counted. And Yui got close to it near the end.

"Two," Ren answered. "Maybe three."

But Shinji was so damned persistant that he managed to get a bit of that behavior in everyone.

"Only one's been the worst," he said. "But one is enough for anyone."

Katara laughed. "I know people a bit on the extreme side, actually." Strangely enough, she was forgetting her own pain for the moment. "One of the people I care most about always put the worries of the world ahead of his own. He truly cared about all of the people affected by the things wrong. But he needed people that cared about him to make sure he didn't go overboard."

She thought of Aang a moment. "One is sometimes all you need."

And that was Shinji in a nutshell. Did they know the same people or something?

"The same with the one I know," Ren added. "Too determined to take on the troubles of everyone, and he thought he could find a way to change them. Naive and stupid. Somehow or another, he still ended up a better person than just about anyone I've known."

Katara nodded. "Mine took a big risk, the biggest most have ever taken. He could have lost his very self taking down the person the way he did, but he was determined that it would be bloodless. He wanted to win his way, and he did."

She smiled. "Stupid self sacrificing people. Gotta love them though."

Yeah.

[Sorry! Had to wait for him to get re-approved!]

"Got to do something with them, at least," Ren answered wryly.

Katara giggled. "I'm guessing they cause you headaches in your world too, huh?"

"Too often," Ren groaned. "My life made a lot more sense before I met them." It also had a lot less purpose, but he didn't like admitting that to himself, let alone to someone he'd just met.

Katara, who had no idea about that, would be just as happy to point it out in a shocking similarity. "Sometimes that lack of logic is a good thing though. My life made sense before I met a certain person, but it was more harsh than anything. A person who acts like that usually needs someone to bring them down to earth, but what they can accomplish is equal to the trouble they put you through."

Katara learned that a LONG time ago.

"It did make things easier," Ren had to admit. Mostly because it was easier to win when he had someone on his side, but Shinji had also been determined to shoulder other people's burdens, no matter how much it hurt him. Ren had been equally stubborn about keeping his burden his own, but when someone was trying to help you carry it...it did feel lighter sometimes.

"Well in my case, he was willing to help anyone, but he was also very, very powerful. In a way, I think it was destiny that we would all meet at the time that we did. All of us in our group, we all had our reason for joining together, and our own secret pain. That, I think, was something that kept us and all of our personalities together. It made us function we with each other."

Edited 2010-10-31 02:20 (UTC)

That sounded a lot like what Shinji had said about Odin making the timeline repeat itself. Everything had happened exactly the same, except that Shinji had days where he remembered everything that had happened before.

"Maybe there is something that draws us together," Ren admitted. "But I'm not so sure it's destiny."

Katara shrugged. "It's different for everyone. The important thing is not to fell tied to destiny but to work within it, making the choices you feel are right. With the person I met, everything just seemed to fall into place, but the road to where we needed to get was always with peril."

"If that's the path that worked for you, then good," Ren answered. He was always going to resist against it, personally; mostly because he didn't like anyone telling him what to do.

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