Probending Circuit Round One - Firsts
Team: Ba Sing Se Badgermoles
Position: Earthbender: The first time someone had to make a very important decision.
Prompts:
1: Pillow
9: Cabbage Merchant
11: "Nothing's impossible, the word itself says 'I'm Possible'"
This is set just after Su gives Lin her scars
Su punched her pillow, trying to make it softer. She couldn't remember the last time she slept on this one. With Lin staying at Tenzin's most nights, she didn't need one, so Su had gotten into the habit of using her sister's, not her own. She had told herself that she did it just to annoy Lin, but she had grown used to the scent of lavender shampoo that lingered on the pillowcase, and without it, she felt empty.
Punching the pillow again, the young Beifong wondered if she should sneak back to the house and take Lin's one for good as she set off to Gaoling to live with her grandparents, but decided against it, she had taken enough of her sister's things already, like the beautiful, emerald green designer coat that Lin absolutely loved. Su crawled over to her bag and pulled it out, wrapping it around herself, breathing in the familiar smell of lavender. If she closed her eyes, it was almost as if Lin was giving her a hug, like she used to when they were younger, but she would be lucky if Lin so much as looked at her ever again after what she did. Katara said she would scar, and Su found herself wondering if her sister would be able to sleep on her cheek that night. Shoving the thought out of her head, she tried again to soften the pillow and get some sleep, but she ended up lying awake all night, regretting driving that car for her friends.
Su hadn't been required to leave immediately, but she knew that the longer she stayed, the faster she would feel guilty for cutting her sister, so she had run home as soon as she could and grabbed only essential things and left the city that afternoon, without so much as a goodbye. She had packed a spare set of clothes, Lin's coat, a map, money, and a whole heap of paper to write letters to her friends, who were most probably in jail by now. That morning, she pulled out the paper and tried to write letters to her friends, but nothing came. The only thing she knew exactly how to word was a letter of apology to Lin, but her pride stopped her time and time again whenever her hand brushed the paper in her bag as she went to pay for something.
She had made it out of the general area of the city, and into a little town called Xen Di, where she stopped at a café for lunch. As she sipped her coffee, a little voice in her head nagged at her.
"Write to her, she's your sister. You owe her an apology."
"She hates me, she'll either burn it or send it back."
"She doesn't hate you, she's mad at you, but you're her sister, she loves you."
"Half sister."
"Same mom, different dads. So what? You're blood, Su."
"It's not worth it. I've been chipping away at her patience and trust for years now, and until yesterday, she had tolerated it. But I scarred her. For life. Literally. The possibility of her forgiving me is one in a zillion. It's impossible for us to be friends again after what I did."
"Nothing's impossible, the word itself says 'I'm possible'"
"Not with Lin, she's so stubborn. She'll hate me for the rest of her life."
"Well, just write a letter, you don't have to send it."
"Argh! Shut up!"
Su realised that while she had been debating whether or not to write the letter, her hand had written one of its own accord:
'Dear Lin,
I want to say I am so sorry for what I did. I honestly didn't mean to hurt you like that. I guess that with mom working all the time, I only ever had you. And now that you're a cop and in a serious relationship with Tenzin, I felt like the only solid thing I ever had in my life was being taken away, and since you wouldn't play with me like we used to, I thought being stupid and rebellious was the only way to reach you. I didn't stop and think that while I may have gotten your attention whenever I acted out, I was hurting you each time. I'm sorry. And I'm sorry that I didn't think to try and get your attention any other way, like asking you to have lunch with me, or trying hard in school to make you proud. What I'm trying to say is that I'm sorry that while I could trust you and go to you any time I needed someone, you couldn't come to me. That is my biggest regret, after hurting you yesterday. I hope that with time, you can find it in yourself to forgive me, and we can start over and be friends like when we were little.
I'm sorry, Big Sister, and I love you so much. I hope you get everything you want in life, because you work so hard and are the most deserving person I know.
I love you, and I'm sorry.
Su.'
Sighing, Su put the letter into an envelope and addressed it to her sister. She left a few yuans on the table and found the post office, where she stood, debating whether or not to post it, when she was approached by a man.
"Excuse me? Are you Suyin Beifong?" The girl turned around to come face to face with a man, he was oldish, with dark skin, grey hair and goatee, wearing traditional Earth Kingdom clothes.
"Yes, how do you know?" She asked, suspicious.
"Your bag has the Beifong emblem on it, you're definitely not a police chief and you're not old enough to be your sister, so you must be Suyin."
"Makes sense. What did you want?"
"I'm looking to start a company, and I'm looking for a Metalbender to help me make prototypes for my inventions, you'd be an executive on good pay and free room and board, we'd travel the world and make a lot of money. Are you interested?"
"What would we be making exactly?"
"Inventions, mostly, and we'd be selling cabbages on the side. I'm not calling it Cabbage Corp for nothing, you know!"
Su pondered the offer.
"You don't have to say yes right away, I'm in the diner down the road, my cabbage recipes are a huge success and I'm selling off the franchise to start Cabbage Corp, you can come to me tomorrow with your answer."
Su nodded. As the cabbage merchant walked away, she went back to thinking about posting the letter, only to find she had pushed it into the letterbox. She sighed and found a clearing for the night, where she Earthbent herself a tent and thought about joining Cabbage Corp or going to her grandparents. She didn't notice the pairs of feet that followed her from a distance. She had to make a huge decision, and she hadn't had to make any like this before, Lin always did it for her. Sighing and hugging her hard pillow, she wondered what her sister would do in that situation.
"Obviously, she'd go to Gaoling. Joining him is a huge risk, don't you remember the stories Uncle Aang told you? He's bad news."
"But I'd be cooped up in that stuffy old house! It'd be unbearable!"
"You'd be safe and able to practice your Earthbending whenever you wanted, and Grandpa Lao would give you whatever you want."
Su was pulled out of her thoughts when someone bent her tent down and she was left sitting in front of three men, one bending fire in his palm to light the night. They were dirty looking, all with greasy brown hair and tatty clothes, and they were all looking at her like Uncle Zuko's dragon looked at his evening meal. Immediately, Su wanted to be at home, safe with her sister. But that wasn't happening.
"Well, Little Lady, where have you been all my life?" Asked the Firebender
"Staying away from people like you." Su retorted; comebacks always came easily to her.
"Come on, Sweetheart! I think we could make you very happy."
"Why? Are you leaving?"
One of the men lost his patience and chi-blocked to stop her from fighting back, once he did that, another man jabbed her with some sort of sedative; she lost consciousness just after she heard yells and felt the earth moving around her.
Su woke up to a pounding in her head. Opening her eyes, she realised that she was in her usual bedroom at the Gaoling estate. She tried to sit up, but someone gently pushed her shoulders down.
"Easy, Su, that stuff they gave you is very strong." The person, obviously a woman, started dabbing her face with a damp facecloth, and although the room was dark and the figure was standing at an angle that didn't allow the light to reach her face, the sixteen-year-old knew exactly who she was the moment she leaned over her, and the girl's long, black, lavender scented hair tickled her face.
"Lin?"
Her sister exhaled loudly, and sat down on the chair next to the bed, crossing her arms.
"I haven't forgiven you. I just - you know what? I don't have to explain myself to you." She looked away.
Su sighed, turning her head to look at her sister, only to be hit with the smell of lavender from the pillow.
"This is your pillow."
"And?"
"Thank you."
"For what? The pillow or saving your ass from those jerks back there?"
"For everything."
Lin rolled her eyes, and went back to dabbing Su's forehead with the facecloth.
"When I leave, we're through. Do you understand? If you send me letters like you did yesterday, I will just return them. I will not answer any of your calls, reply to your letters or talk to you if we ever meet again. When I go, we are no longer sisters. Got it?"
"How long are you staying?"
"I leave tomorrow afternoon. Ugh, don't cry, you brought this on yourself."
Su sniffled, realising that she was indeed crying, she began to blurt out what she had wanted to say:
"Lin I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to hurt you! I don't want us to be apart! I don't know what I'd do without you to tell me what's right from wrong-"
"You never listen anyway! You are so infuriating, Su!"
"I'll listen now!" She sat up with more success this time, looking her sister in the eye. "Tell me what I should do! You always know what to do!"
"You're not joining Cabbage Corp for starters." Lin began, leaning back into her chair.
"You knew about that?"
"I followed you out of the City to make sure you actually got to Gaoling and didn't just join a triad. I told the Cabbage Merchant you weren't interested. Secondly, you are giving me back my coat. And thirdly, you'll leave me alone."
With that, Lin got up out of her chair and turned to leave.
"Why did you save me?"
"What?" Lin turned to face her sister again.
"Why did you save me from those men? You could have just left me to be taken by them, and then you wouldn't have to bother with me again."
"Because, no matter how much I loathe you right now, you are still my sister, and sisters take care of each other. That's why I saved you."
Lin left the room without letting Su say anything else.
The next day, Su saw Lin once, when she was leaving to go back to Republic City, she watched as her older sister walked down the drive and out of her life for the next thirty years. Despite her sister's warnings, Su still wrote to Lin, and as promised, she always got them back in the mail, unopened.
She never heard from the cabbage merchant again, and she was glad. Thirty years later, she read the front page article that told her he was sitting in a Republic City prison for being involved in the Equalist movement. Looking back, Su realised that she had made the biggest decision of her life that day. She had decided to be more like her sister, instead of traveling down the path of crime she had started on the moment she got into the driver's seat of the getaway car. She made many important decisions in her lifetime, but Su believed that that one was the most important, and because she had made the right choice that day, Su didn't need to rebel to get her sister's attention, and now she didn't need her sister's pillow to feel close to her, but she kept it anyway, because to this day, she could swear it still smelled faintly of lavender.
Little note to the Judges: Thank you for reading and if it's not too much trouble could you pretty please send me my individual score and some feedback after the team scores are released? And if there is a spelling mistake with an 's' in place of a 'z' it's probably because I use Australian spelling XD. Thank you so much!