DEAR DICTATOR → zuko

╸three : the threshold

Nari barely feels the numb aggravation. The same applies to a burn around her neck. Or the clawed scratches on her leg. Or the burn lashed across her cheek. Like minuscule pins and needles attacking each area, a small pain sparks remembrance. "Akio wouldn't let me go and I screamed. He burnt me."

"Your father demanded he paid for what he'd done. He wanted you to be able to show Akio the fear he had shown you, and you did, dear." Rai's tone is sweet, but there's venom behind her plotted words. As Rai sniffles and cups a hand to Nari's cheek, the young girl melts into the embrace.

Nari gives in to the illusion of a motherly tenderness. She's delusional, surely, as she's well aware her mother would never do this on any occasion, and neither would she.

Rai provides another sniffle, and this one holds real sentiment behind its false intentions. "Honey, Akio was hurt. Badly."

"How bad?"

The pursing of her mother's lips has Nari sweating bullets. There's an unspoken sorrow in her face, and as the woman seldom flinch Nari knows of her trouble. The news which Rai brings is far from good, far from anything Nari could be comforted by.

The way Akio so easily presumed he could take her down, the look in his eye, it tears knots up in Nari's stomach. Her gut freezes like ice, heart tightening at the memory, yet she is empty and small. For such an event which demands such distressing emotions, why are the weakest ones dominant?

Nari bites her tongue as she awaits the news.

"Akio died, Nari. You killed him." What was once a honeyed voice becomes hard as rock as Rai speaks, words hitting heavily against the younger girls ears. They ring. The silence which plagues the room has become detrimental.

Nari wishes to move to her mother, but the spell which Rai has casted bids the air too thick to do so, and under thin covers atop her bed, she waits.

No further news is given. Rai doesn't move her thinly pulled lips, doesn't give any indication of how she should feel or what she she do.

Providing ease, and to their obliviousness, Hikaro and Tayiko enter the room. Their presence is signified by the swift swing of the door and it's click.

Nari instantly pretends to fall back asleep, breathing steady with eyes fluttering to a closed; to Rai's knowledge she passed out from shock or weariness.

"Has she woke yet?" Hikaro's voice bellows in the room, providing a deep rasp in contrast to the previous mother-daughter conversation. "Does she know?"

Nari feels a weight next to her. It's Tayiko, this Nari confirms from his weight against the creaking bed and the soft, hesitant touch to her shoulder. It's almost as if having to sneeze, feeling that tickle within the nose and waiting only for it to subside in a moment. "Should she?" Tayiko's voice is akin medicine to Nari. He has always been nice to her, like a pedestal to rely on when their parents were pot holes. Even if she grew jealous of the constant glory he received, hearing Tayiko helped lighten the extremities of what has occurred.

And as far as those go, Nari hasn't fully processed them.

Rai tightens her grip on Nari, all ten delicate fingers clasped around the smaller hand of her daughter. "I already have,"

"So she woke?" Hikaro inquires.

"Briefly."

A sigh of relief escapes Hikaro's mouth, but the settling signals he's still at unease. Sure, Nari is okay, but what are they to do with her? His daughter is a killer.

Hikaro almost has more at stake than Nari herself; he could lose his social standing, his colony, his job, his family could lose their home, all respect included.