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Gryphonadmin
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"FI/DS03: Someone to Talk To"
 
   LAST EDITED ON Dec-14-13 AT 12:55 PM (EST)
 
This is a scene that was cut from the Dìqiú Suite's Third Movement, Goodbye and Hello, As Always, because - when inserted into its proper chronological place - it disrupted the narrative. I present it here because I did promise when What's Past Is Prologue came out that I would examine one of that movement's characters a bit more in the next one. If you haven't read Goodbye and Hello yet, you should go do that first.

--G.


Friday, March 19, 2410
Republic City, Dìqiú

Having completed their task at City Hall, Corwin and Rohan were having a spot of lunch (well, Corwin was having lunch; Rohan was having tea) at the nameless sushi joint around the corner when someone approached their table. Rohan noticed her first; glancing up, he blinked in surprise at her approach, then rose from his seat and said, "Er, I'll just... go and... make certain Pivi is comfortable," before beating a hasty retreat.

"... Rohan?" a puzzled Corwin inquired of the space where the airbender had been; then he looked up and saw the person standing in front of him, and his confusion only deepened.

It was Zanya, the firebender from the Frostbite Point Ice Wraiths - a ruthlessly competitive, dirty-fighting professional bender with whom Corwin had had a difficult time a few days before, while subbing for the Temple Island Fire Ferrets' absent regular earthbender. She'd evidently taken some kind of personal dislike to him (possibly because she seemed to have a particular hatred of Karana, the Fire Ferrets' waterbender and a childhood friend of Corwin's), and had blatantly fouled him twice.

Now she stood before his table, dressed in civilian clothes with only a faint Fire Nation flavor about them, and glared at him with arms folded across her chest. Taking his first really good look at her, Corwin was mildly surprised to discover that, with her dark hair cropped as if by a prison barber, the willfully undecorative patch over her left eye, and her perpetual glower, she was effectively compensating for the fact that she was really not a bad-looking woman.

The silence stretched awkwardly for a moment. Zanya didn't seem to be looking for a fight - they were in a very public place, after all, and Major League Bending had very strict rules about that sort of thing. She just stood there, regarding him with a sort of neutral hostility, until finally he decided someone had to say something and asked,

"... Can I help you?"

Zanya kept her glower fixed on him for a moment; then - surprising him again - she sighed, dropping her arms to her sides.

"I don't know," she said. "Can I sit down?"

Corwin gestured to the seat Rohan had vacated. "Please," he said. As she seated herself, his natural hospitability kicked in, such that even though he had no reason to suspect her of any friendly intent, he automatically asked, "Have you eaten? The maguro is excellent today."

Zanya eyed him narrowly. "Are you for real?" she asked.

"I'm no more than 25 percent imaginary," Corwin assured her. Looking more closely, he saw the dark circle around her one visible eye and her generally worn appearance, then added, "You look like you've got something pretty heavy on your mind."

"You could say that," she replied sourly.

"Well, there's no sense dealing with it on an empty stomach, whatever it is," said Corwin pragmatically, signaling for the waiter. Zanya protested, but only half-heartedly, and when he went away again it was with a substantial order in hand.

"So," said Corwin. "What's up? I would have thought you'd be back in Frostbite Point by now. Don't you have preseason training to do?"

Zanya sat looking at her knuckles for a minute, as if gathering her thoughts, or possibly mustering her courage. Then, looking up at his face, she said, "The Ice Wraiths are finished."

Corwin arched an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Well, Kassa still owns the name, and he might put another team together under it," she allowed, "but Rockalanche and I both quit after our match against the Ferrets."

"Hmm," said Corwin. "I can see why he would have, he was plainly what they call 'not a good fit for the organization,'" he went on dryly, "but you..."

Zanya sighed, slumping back in her seat. "I know. But..." She looked up at the ceiling for a second. "I'm not sure I can put it into words. I'm not sure why I even want to put it into words." Fixing him with a one-sided amber gaze, she asked him in all evident seriousness, "Are you a witch doctor or something?"

"Well... not as such," Corwin said, then added, "I've certainly made no effort to bewitch you."

Suddenly animated, Zanya leaned forward, her elbows on the table, and said intently, "Look. All my life I've had to fight for what I had. You understand? I wasn't a little rich girl like Azana or a scholarship kid like Karana. And I didn't lie down for it, either. I earned everything I've ever had in my life with my fists. In my world, there were two kinds of people: victims and victors. Kindness was either weakness, or a ruse to get your guard down. To survive, let alone come out on top, I had to strike first. Always."

"I'm sorry to hear that," said Corwin sincerely.

"I think you really are," Zanya replied. Then she put her forehead in her hands and groaned, "And it's messing with my head."

"Oh, come on," said Corwin sharply, making her glance up at him in faint shock. "You're what, twenty, twenty-five? I cannot possibly be the first nice person you've ever met. In fact I know I'm not; I can think of at least three you met before me."

"Maybe," Zanya allowed. "But you're the first one I can remember really believing in. And now I can't help wondering if I was wrong about the others." She shook her head. "You don't understand. There was never any place in my world for doubt. I knew - I knew - that I was only doing unto others before they got the chance to do unto me. But then you came along. You and the Ferret girls, you'd never worked together before, and you were making the most pathetic rookie mistakes..."

"Thank you," Corwin put in dryly.

"... well you were, and then... the three of you, you just... turned it around. Turned it right around and whipped the three of us like we were kids on a playground. I didn't even go home that night. I just walked around and around the city, trying to figure out how you had done it. At first I assumed you had cheated. Because I would have. Because that's how the world works, right? Except however I turned it around in my head, I couldn't work out how you could have done it.

"Sometime around dawn, I finally realized that you hadn't," she admitted, sounding strangely crushed by the realization. "You three had just... beaten us. You got hold of yourselves and came together as a unit without any practice or training because... you trusted each other. We could never do that. Kassa and I worked together for years, but we never trusted each other; we were just reasonably confident that we had more to lose than gain by turning on each other. And Rockalanche, well... you saw."

The waiter arrived with her order then; only when he had laid it out before her and withdrawn did Zanya continue speaking, in the hushed and vaguely awed voice of someone who has just recognized a great and terrible truth:

"You didn't beat us by being better benders... you beat us by being better people."

Corwin frankly thought that might be overselling the issue a bit, but he was hardly going to split that hair. She did have a point, and at the moment he couldn't grudge her a little hyperbole. Instead, he said nothing, only made a noncommittal grunt, covering his lack of a response by taking a drink of water.

She didn't seem to be expecting one, anyway. She sat looking at her food as though not certain what she was supposed to do with it, then began to eat mechanically, like a hospital patient who has little interest in food, but has been ordered by her doctor to get some on board.

After a few minutes of this, she put down her chopsticks and asked him abruptly,

"Who are you?"

Corwin looked up from his own meal and smiled slightly. "Everyone seems to want to know that lately," he said.

"Please don't play games with me right now," Zanya told him, surprising him yet again with her use of "please". "I need to know. You're obviously a foreigner, and you bend earth like no one I've ever seen before... where did you come from? Where does Karana know you from? Who are you?" she repeated, now sounding slightly desperate.

Corwin considered her for a second, then said, "OK. I'll tell you. But you might not believe me, and I want to ask you something in return."

Zanya hesitated, but only for a moment; then she nodded, looking determined, and said, "OK. Anything you want to know. Just tell me who you are. Maybe if I know that, I'll be able to figure out how you were able to turn my whole world upside down."

So Corwin told her. Not the complete and unexpurgated version, because that would have required complicated adjustments to her cosmic Weltanschauung he simply didn't have time to make, but the version that included his being from the Big Universe and his lifelong association with Avatar Korra, anyway. Zanya took it all in, not interrupting, and then sat in thoughtful silence for a few moments after he'd finished, picking at her food.

Then she said slowly, "You're right, that's hard to believe. But then, I've had trouble believing a lot of stuff that's gone through my head since Tuesday night." She sighed, a long, deep sigh, and looked glumly at the table again. "I don't know what to think. For the first time in my life, I don't know what to think." Then she looked up and said, "All right. You answered my question. What I do with the answer is my own problem. Your turn."

Corwin looked thoughtfully back at her for a second. She probably expected him to request more information about the difficulties of her childhood, or to investigate further her behavior in the bending arena.

Instead he asked her point-blank, "Why do you cover your left eye? I know it works."

Zanya went pale and actually drew back slightly, her uncovered eye going wide and its pupil contracting with shock. For a moment she looked like she might bolt; then she got hold of herself with a visible effort, clenching her fists on the edge of the table and reining herself in.

"No," she said quietly, as if to herself. "A deal's a deal." Then, looking him in the face, she said, "But you've got to promise me you won't tell anyone. No one knows about this. Not even Kassa."

Corwin nodded gravely. "Done."

Looking slightly afraid now, Zanya glanced furtively around the restaurant. The lunch rush was over now; empty tables had appeared all around the dining room, and none of the others near the corner where Corwin sat was occupied. Only a couple of the staff were in sight, and they were off tending to other matters. They were as alone as they could get in a public place.

Moving slowly, almost as if unwillingly, she reached up and lifted the patch away from her left eye, flipping it up onto her forehead. This revealed the fine mesh, much more obvious on the inside, that made it so she could see out with it in place. Then, after steeling herself, she raised her face and looked him in the eyes with both of hers.

The right one, as he had noticed before, was that distinctive amber-brown color, bordering on orange, that was stereotypical of firebenders... and the left was a clear, bright blue, not too unlike his own.

Corwin looked momentarily confused. "Why would you hide that?" he wondered. "It's beautiful."

Zanya blushed flame red - it might have been the first time she'd ever been complimented on anything other than her ruthlessness or her bending technique - and hurriedly snapped the patch down, covering her blue eye again.

"My mother came from an old Fire Nation family," she said, her voice hushed and hoarse. "Maybe even older than Azana's. So did her husband." She let that sink in for a second, then added with cold emphasis, "Obviously my father, didn't."

"... Ah," said Corwin, and then, "That's hardly your fault."

"Apparently my mother's people disagreed," said Zanya with a bitter smirk. "She might've gotten away with it; I turned out pale and black-haired, like her... but the eye gave her away. They sent her to a sanatorium and me to an orphanage in the North. Not Fire Nation enough for my mother's family, but to the other kids there I was - well, I won't trouble you with the details."

"It's no trouble," said Corwin, and he was faintly surprised to discover that he meant it. Why his heart should go out to this willfully unpleasant creature he wasn't entirely sure, but there it was.

She reminded him a little of Liza Broadbank, in that brittle and precarious time before she had gone away and become Liza Shustal, scourge of the spaceways. With Zanya there was that same sense that her malformations of character might not entirely be her fault; and that she could go a number of different ways from here, not all of which boded well for her future. He still wasn't attracted to her - he'd never had a thing for Bad Girls - but he did feel an undeniable compassion now.

"Look," she said, though there was little heat in it. "Don't try to be my buddy all of a sudden. I didn't come here hoping you could fix me. It was just an impulse. I saw you and I wanted to try and find out how you got inside my head so easily... and I still don't know. This was a waste of time." She got up from the table. "Thanks for lunch. If I find out you told anyone what I just showed you, I'll kill you."

"Zanya," he said, but she left without looking back.

A few moments later, Rohan reappeared, seating himself and pushing the remains of Zanya's lunch discreetly aside. "Since the restaurant isn't on fire," he said dryly, "I'm going to guess that went relatively well. What did she want?"

"I'm not really sure," Corwin admitted after a few seconds' thought. "Maybe just... someone to talk to."

"Someone to Talk To" - an S5/DS03 Extra Scene Mini-Story by Benjamin D. Hutchins
special to the Eyrie Productions Discussion Forum
© 2013 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited


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  Subject     Author     Message Date     ID  
  RE: FI/DS03: Someone to Talk To Meagen Dec-14-13 1
  RE: FI/DS03: Someone to Talk To twipper Dec-14-13 2
  RE: FI/DS03: Someone to Talk To JeanneHedge Dec-14-13 3
     RE: FI/DS03: Someone to Talk To Gryphonadmin Dec-14-13 4

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Meagen
Member since Jul-14-02
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Dec-14-13, 03:52 AM (EST)
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1. "RE: FI/DS03: Someone to Talk To"
In response to message #0
 
   > she asked him in all evident seriousness, "Are you a witch doctor or something?"
>
> "Well... not as such," Corwin said,

More of a soreceror, and in fairly defined areas that have nothing to do with bending, organised sports, or interacting with women. (That last one is not a supernatural ability, just natural charisma refined with the help of some very good teachers.)

--
With great power come great perks.


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twipper
Member since Jan-8-03
197 posts
Dec-14-13, 12:51 PM (EST)
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2. "RE: FI/DS03: Someone to Talk To"
In response to message #0
 
   This scene was very nicely written. I can see why you pulled it out, but it works very well as one of those little moments most of us have occasionally on our own that just kind of defy easy definition.

Brian


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JeanneHedge
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Dec-14-13, 01:13 PM (EST)
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3. "RE: FI/DS03: Someone to Talk To"
In response to message #0
 
   Nice. I hope you do find something to do with it, especially since references to it still remain in Goodbye and Hello.


Jeanne


Jeanne Hedge
http://www.jhedge.com
"Never give up, never surrender!"


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Gryphonadmin
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Dec-14-13, 01:19 PM (EST)
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4. "RE: FI/DS03: Someone to Talk To"
In response to message #3
 
   >Nice. I hope you do find something to do with it, especially since
>references to it still remain in Goodbye and Hello.

Well, it did still happen, that's why it's here as a mini and not, say, on the Symphony board as a "cutting-room floor" fragment. It just didn't fit into the main movement's narrative. And yes, I expect this is not the last we (or Corwin) will see of Zanya.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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