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❝ it's a shame ❞
· • -- ٠ ♛ ٠ -- • ·
NARI TRIES TO toss her hesitance to the side like an apple core. Kick it along some dirt path she'll never find again. She tries to shove it down– that weak, futile, meaningless pit of pause– as her eyes stare ahead to the Lei Tai platform.
She is far from ready, in physical and mental matters both. She needs to pull her hair back, roll up her sleeves, crack her spine from all the tension weighing down broad shoulders. It has been some time since she's fought so avidly. From the north pole and prior, Nari at least trained daily. Now it dawns on her that she hasn't beaten someone up since Azula's ploy to throw them behind bars.
But her short hair cannot be tamed, and her back will only suffer more tension during the Lei Tai which is soon to come.
Nari focuses her attention onto Ryo, numb to the millions of other stimulations. She lowers a glower as he chuckles to his underlings. A sly smirk covers liquor-coated lips every time he slithers his head over his shoulder. When their eyes meet, Nari's stomach flickers with some electricity, a flame of heat under her diaphragm. Anger, perhaps, or stress. Maybe fear, she has grown quite feeble since the north pole.
As a hand wraps around her bicep and pulls her backwards, Nari decides that spark is excitement.
Tana pulls her far from the platform, far from the earshot of others, with a demeaning look upon her watery features. Blue eyes narrow into Nari's– two yellows that still focus somewhere foreign. "Aye, Ikko," Her words are sharper than a blade of water she'd use to slice through skin and bone. "Listen up. I ain't got time to repeat myself."
Nari tries to blur out the cries and chatter of overly excited Daofei, the boisterous laugh of their leader. In vain, they only simmer to whispers– she can still fixate on those who rumor Nari's demise. "You've seen Ryo fight once or twice, but you ain't 'eva fought 'em." Nari's hands buzz with anticipation as she sends Tana's words in one ear and out the other. Her fingers burn with a flame so lethal it'd total the Caldera City; her shoulders squeeze the vivid energy through her spine, mind racing far too fast to comprehend a thing. "He doesn't make a sound when he strikes, he won't stop after he draws blood, he won't stop after you're dead. You can't fight him."
The fire bender recalls a fight she shouldn't have gotten away with– a pity to say, but her battle against Hika and Hoji was skewed towards her failure. After all, what fire bender can win when a raging blizzard laughs at their every move? "I can fight him, and I'll win too." She swallows spit down a cotton throat. The only way she downed Hika was by using Hoji's bending against her– taking an element so foreign and resorting to hands-on combat.
