trans_9 | Denial? Just a little bit.

Entry tags:

Denial? Just a little bit.

Who: Kaya, open to all.
Where: Sensoriums
Summary: Ed not remembering her is sort of the last straw, so she's getting her aggressions out.
Warnings: Um. Are there any? TBA, I guess?

But so much for that now. Right now Kaya, who had had a pretty bad last few months, found the last straw was bringing Ed back and having him not even recognizer her had been the last straw. Now she was just standing here, around a background of water and streams, and she was moving in a combination.

First there was her own bending. Smooth, flowing each movement into the other, legs supporting the base as arms and shoulders tensed and drew forward, calling the water up and around her, making waves into developed whips, turning that into solid substances and back again.

And then, when the Bene Gesserit came into play, that slowed but accurate action became quick, deliberate fast. Her body become a putty oin increments as she geared for offensive kicks and movement, pushing her body to the limits here. There was no turning back, no moment of reflection.

At this moment, Kaya wondered what would become of her training, if they would form a base of strength and bending even she didn't fully understand yet. She would put aside those feelings of helplessness, of pain she could not do more.

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"An accountant? I have to admit, I have a hard time seeing you as one right now, but if that's what you say you are, who am I to argue something different? Then again, there was war and unrest anyway. the only way you didn't fight is if you kept quiet and allowed yourself to be beaten."

Which, Kaya mused, was not the way she wanted to live, not ever.

"I much preferred being an accountant, to being on my homeworld." She said that a little softly. She'd felt safe, behind her desk, among the mercenaries, with light-decades between her and her people. "But with the Vizsnunishne, I also served war. Sometimes we fought for justice, and sometimes not.

"And now we apparently are fighting for everything. And none of us can afford to bow our heads and keep quiet."

Not even her.

"Trust me, the idea of not having to be a part of wars and lies is a pretty enticing one," Kaya said. "But it can also be pretty painful, knowing that if I were to indulge in that notion, so much would go past me. But you're right: we are fighting for everything now. For me, I don't intend on keeping quiet. I want to get involved as much as I can."

Even if it meant pain later on.

"And I would be involved with you, Kaya. I've spent too long hiding behind a computer screen, hoping for someone to find me. I'd prefer not to die and have the last record of my life be 'Well, she maintained a solid data inventory.'"

She rolled her eyes outwards. "And if I manage to duck Death's swoop until the war is done and won, that would also be nice."

Kaya chuckled. "To be honest, I felt the same way about becoming a nurse. I wanted to, I really did, but it takes a lot of dedication and studying, and that takes away from my actual time fighting and training. I don't mind healing, and I always feel connected to my bending that way, but at the end of the day, bending really is my life."

This would get a nod from her. "I have no intention to die anytime soon. There's still so much in the universe I haven't seen yet."

She looked off into the distance for an instant. "To be honest, if you asked me 'what is your life?,' I don't know what I would answer. I haven't really looked. Most of my time has been spent un-making the life I was raised to." And trying to undo the damage. Some of it.

"What I've seen has been beautiful, but I know now that my experiences are only the smallest fraction of what there is to see." She gestured at the Water Tribe scenery around them. "Like this. I've never seen buildings made of water on a planet - if that's what they are. Is this from your homeworld?"

"I was lucky to know what I wanted to do," Kaya confessed. "I know that most people have so many things happen that shapes them, and I was lucky enough to be born with my ability. What I do with it, how I can help others, that's the real fun."

For lack of a better word.

She nodded. "On a part of it, anyway. This is what the Northern Water Tribe looks like. Or, looked like, I guess."

"I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to leave home, get married, and have lots of children, and live on Fle surrounded by luxury for all my days. But that was the wrong thing for me to want." The corners of her mouth drew far down. "The price was too high. Now I have to see what new path I can find."

Hopefully she would not have to go alone on that path.

"It's very beautiful. I suppose that with talents like yours, one person could build a building out of ice in very short order. Or a wall, or a bridge. Formidable."

"I wanted something like that, actually," Kaya said, smiling. "Still do, actually, and I have a man who's the only one who ever made me think it could happen. But back at him, and even now, that's only a short lived version of happiness. So long as we know that war is right over out heads and can take us at any time, who would want to play things safe?"

She knew she couldn't. Not now.

Kaya laughed. "Are you kidding? One person would still take a long time! You need several people, and they have to be very accomplished in their craft. These buildings were all made out of tender loving care. But yes, bending does afford us at least something strong to guide us in many ways."

"You can be safe. Or you can be free. But you can't be both. Horanckk told me that, once...But once you've been free, you can't go back to the safety you had before. It's not the same. It feels like blindness, like being smothered."

Even if she recreated Fle, somehow, she would not be going back. Or if she did, it would only be to destroy her world and all its people, for the good of the universe.

She shrugged. "I'm afraid your talents are quite alien to me; I don't know how they scaled. Is there an upper limit on how much one person can bend, then?"

"In my case? I've lived life safe, and I've lived it free. I prefer the latter over the former. That bad thing about being here is that we literally ARE living both. We know there's a war, we know we have to fight, but we also have a degree of safety, enough that we know, whether we face it or not, that we're being lied to."

Kaya nodded. "Bending is like anything you learn: it takes skill and strength and dedication, not to mention energy. Even a bender can get tired if they overextend themselves."

She glanced aside, picturing the caverns full of pods. "We aren't safe, not while our friends and family are hostages. Not while this Bleed erodes our souls - if that IS what's going on - so that any of us can be repodded at any time. Freedom of information, that is what we're missing. We don't even know what our enemy is doing, or why."

Now wouldn't it be embarrassing if it turned out the Ohm attacks were just some elaborate ritual that made dimensions invulnerable to penetration from the outside, and invisible as well?

"At least with all the humidity in the air here, you are never without the tools of your trade." As it were.

Kaya quietly internalized this. It was hard enough, knowing who was dead, but when person after person she cared about and loved went into the pods, her morale would fall pretty low, and made her wonder if it was worth it to form so many bonds with so many people.

Of course, she'd think of Billy or Nokosi currently and remember that even if they were podded tomorrow, despite sadness she was happy to know them.

"Yes, and that's why I'm starting to wonder if I should just start finding ways to prepare others somehow. I feel like what we've been doing the past few years is coming to a close. i don't know why, but I feel, soon, we'll finally find out the truth."

She smiled. "Trust me, nothing makes me happier. I'm glad that I also know how to defend myself even without my bending."

"We met the Ohm at Lirath, and defeated them. At a terrible cost, but we did win. We have the Tapestry. The Daligig have graced us with their personal attention." Just a tiny bite of sarcasm in those last words. "I agree that we need to spread everything we know, plant seeds of knowledge in every mind (and perhaps a few inanimate objects while we're at it) so that if we go, what we know will live on."

Anwei smiled and took a heavy metal cylinder from her pocket, studded with parallel sliding switches. "Your weapon is more useful than mine. I could set this to cut through a person, but then it would go through them and into Stacy, and that wouldn't do. It's probably best as a disorientation device." Blind your opponent and run.

"I don't want us to wind up like the previous crew," Kaya said. "And I want to find out the truth. All those people who died because of what wasn't told to them: I don't want them to have died in vain. And after all we've been though, including Aang from my world, its something that drives me, every day."

Kaya laughed. "It's not just a weapon: in fact, of all the benders in my world, you're least likely to have waterbenders fighting to hurt people. We mostly used our arts to defend ourselves and to heal others. Of course, that's changed after time."

"The truth is here, somewhere. Buried, obscured, hidden under layers and layers of diversion and time and forgotten memories. We need to put on our helmets and mine it out, a little ore here and a little ore there; refine it, make it whole, and use that as our weapon. Truth is the weapon that can be used again and again and never lose its bluntness."

There were a number of candidates who could stand a little session with the weapon of truth. That Daligig who had tried to flay Howard alive, for one.

She could see that; fire seemed to make a more photogenic weapon than water. "What made the waterbenders change? War?"

It was a good analogy, one that Kaya was sure that even she would not have been capable of refuting. But she had a point too: if they expected to find out anything that was happening in this place, they were really going to have to look at the nooks an crannies and start to break more rules.

"I agree with you there. If we can pool together our resources, I'm sure that we'll be able to get to what's behind everything on the ship, an then we can really start to trust Stacy."

She hoped.

"Yes, war," she said sadly. "While our sister tribe in the South were raided and depleted, we in the North were able to successfully defend ourselves due to the terrain. It also meant we were isolated from all the other nations, and there were some pretty archaic traditions my people still held true to."

A sad glance at that. "Even Stacy may not know everything that we need to know. What could be easier than to delete information from her mind, or partition it away? But there are other sources of information, outside the ship, that we should find a way to contact."

Surely they were famous; couldn't they find a way to trade on that fame?

"I can see how that would happen. My people are also isolated, but that is because they have raised their hands in war and conquest against so many other peoples that no one will trust them."

"That's the kind of thing I have to leave to you guys," Kaya admitted. "Like I said I know very little about how we would be able to help Stacy regain all of the things that she lost. But if you're right, and there are other ways we can help her, then we should do it."

Famous. Kaya still had no real understanding about how that worked. Maybe one day she would realize what was involved in something like this.

She shook her head sadly. "That is a shame. Let's hope we don't have such resistant allies when it comes to what we're preparing to do."

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Denial? Just a little bit.

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