Kuvira was in the middle of a complex series of exercises Su had taught her, as practice both for metalbending and dancing, when she heard the hard clack of footsteps approaching her cell. She held the Moon's Anchor posture, where she curved her arms into a crescent arc facing towards her forward foot, and lowered her stance until it looked like almost all her weight had to be on her back foot. A deceptive pose, in combat; she could move relatively freely from here, hands and feet both, in ways opponents rarely expected. In dance, it was a purely beautiful pose, and Kuvira forced herself to keep that perspective in mind.
She wasn't facing the door. She rarely wanted to. Nobody was out there but the guards, and when people visited it had only been Captain Beifong and her officers. Kuvira had not enjoyed it when Captain Beifong herself had come; as different as Lin and Su Beifong were, they still looked similar enough for it to hurt.
So when she heard Suyin Beifong's voice, it took every bit of concentration she had to elegantly move from the Moon's Anchor pose to a normal standing position.
"Baatar wants to talk to you." Su's voice was sour, filled with no less resentment and hatred than when she and the Avatar had returned from the spirit world.
Kuvira didn't turn to face her. She had hoped—she had hoped many things. Apparently none of them mattered right now. She was proud of herself for not flinching, though, especially not at Baatar's name.
After a minute, Su apparently got the idea, and continued talking. "He'd like to know something. For that matter, so would I."
Kuvira let the silence stretch into another generous pause, determined to continue facing the wall.
"Why did you fire your spirit ray at him?"
She closed her eyes at the pain in that question. It was no less than she deserved, but... it hurt, hurt almost more to hear it from Su than from herself.
This time, the silence stretched unbroken, until Kuvira fought away the threatening tears and said, in a voice that held only the tiniest shiver of a shake, "At the time, I thought the only way to end the battle was to end the Avatar. I thought there was no other way to defeat her. It seemed to me, in that moment, to be the only choice." She paused, swallowed, let more of her own pain leak into her voice until it was tight and quiet. "It was not an easy choice to make."
"You could have killed me!"
Kuvira froze, instinctively reaching for the metal that—that wasn't there. She drew in a shaky breath. She was not going to turn and look. She was not going to look at him. He was dead. She had accepted that, had thought it almost worth the risk, almost—
"She was worth more to you dead than I was alive?" Baatar Jr.'s voice was ragged, lungs and throat no doubt burnt by smoke, body—if he wasn't dead he had to have been injured so much from that blast, even if the Avatar had not. Even if the others she had seen, coming out of the spirit world, who had almost certainly been with her all along, had been fine. The only reason for him not to have come alone, to have chosen to come with Su, would be if he was badly hurt.
It took all she had to let her eyes burn but keep them open, keep them dry. She could not afford weakness right now, not broken as she was. She couldn't—couldn't let them see her like this. She took a breath, forced herself past the hitch in her throat, past the muscles that wanted to shut down, and said, "That's not how it was. I—"
"You can't even look at me."
Kuvira tried to force her body to move, tried to unlock her legs, or at least her arms. "It's not—" she began, panic almost rising through her frozen control.
"No, it's all right." The bitterness in his voice surprised her. "You made your peace with the choice you thought you made, not with reality."
Before Kuvira could chase down words from the whirlwind in her mind, Baatar Jr. spoke again. "Let's go. I'm done here."
As the sound of footfalls retreated, Kuvira found herself moving again, caught a last glimpse of her fiancé – ex-fiancé now, she supposed – in a rickety wooden wheelchair, Su pushing him. They looked – looked like the family she had almost had. Looked almost as defeated as she felt.
Kuvira drew a deep breath, forcing herself to relax her body. Her nails had bitten into her palms, she noticed, detached. Well. That was something. She spread her fingers wide, brought them up to her chest, and began, again, one of the routines she had once practiced with Su, falling into rote patterns until she could almost truthfully say she didn't hurt anymore.
Until she wasn't thinking of the Beifong family anymore, or anything other than the next moment, and the next, and the next...