Chapter Text
Leather squeaking against leather, gloved hands gripped the steering wheel as the Satomobile swerved around rubble. Going about 170 mph, the car soared between two trolley tracks that ran straight through downtown Republic City. In the distance, the Colossus that stalked after it didn’t let up. An eerily steady chorus of stomp, stomp, stomp that only ever seemed to get closer. The structures that flanked either side— from prominent skyscrapers that stretched almost out of sight into a dusty sky, to the rundown family businesses that were forced to hide in their shadows— trembled furiously with each one. Even the Earth itself seemed to be threatening to split apart.
As the vehicle veered to avoid a toppled utility pole, a loose piece of scaffolding from a temporarily abandoned renovation for the Republic City heritage center building broke away. It bounced uselessly along the road, tearing the passenger center door half-way off its rear-hinges when the steel bracer made contact. Roaring wind poured in from the new opening, instantly filling the entire cab, ominous and foreboding as the car came dangerously close to tipping sideways into a full body roll with the impact.
Luckily, the driver— which was nobody other than you, of course— had been in your own fair share of no holds barred, highly illegal, triad-hosted drag races before. Some of which had been brutal enough, one would perhaps consider them an honest attempt to flirt with a one-way trip to the Spirit World. So, this, at the very least, was a piece of Mung bean cake. And, with the kind of ease that only came from practicing something a dozen and one times, you applied the lightest pressure possible to the brakes while turning the steering wheel in the opposite direction the car was tilting, slowly easing your foot off when it complied. The weight transferred to the front, restoring balance and allowing you to spare a blame-filled, scornful glance in the rearview mirror at the mecha suit.
Whether this cat and mouse chase between it and you had lasted five minutes, or five hours was anybody's guess.
“Guys, this… bzzzzt… exactly… bzzzt… the plan?” Korra’s voice— heavily static-y, thanks to the antenna on the roof being bent wildly out of shape— was borderline piercing on the radio.
You weren’t given the chance to fumble for the wired hand transmitter to answer her. Another ferocious rumble made everything, including the car, jolt off the ground. Parts of the left side trolley track detached— broken and bent steel snapping upright in defeat. A giant slab of brown-ish red concrete cross tie was forcibly torn up from under it and flung out, slamming against the reinforced windshield hard enough to cause cracks that seemed to tease you as they spread sluggishly across the glass.
Moments later, it was a grand show of the entire sheet shattering apart into tiny, glinting, blunt edged shards that rained down into the interior… Letting out a gasp, you let go of the wheel only long enough to duck down with your arms wrapped instinctively around your face to protect it.
“If… bzzzzzzt… don’t get back here… bzzzzt… this instant, I swear… bzzt–!”
Suyin was cut off as the Satomobile fishtailed, a particularly nasty squeal of nearly threadbare bias ply tires against asphalt making you hiss “shit!” as you brushed glass aside and shifted gears to turn down the closest alleyway that you could squeeze through. Somewhere between practically sailing over the bumpy track, clipping the brass headlight lamp against a chalkboard sign advertising ‘AvaTEAr: Teas & Trinkets’, and nearly losing control again when the same sign skidded underfoot, the Colossus caught up in a flurry of thunderous metallic roars.
Sucking in a breath of air, you watched as a beam of purple suddenly tore out the wall of the adjacent apartment building beside you. By just the skin of your teeth, you dodged most of the falling debris— though, some of it still dented in the car roof, further severing the radio signal— and shoveled a foot down on the gas till your toes cramped up in your boots in protest. You kept the car in a rolling roadblock, zigzagging in the tight space to make it harder to aim directly at you.
Several tense seconds of careful maneuvering after, the car flew out the other end of the alley like a drunk turtle-duck, and after a breakneck slam of the brakes, just narrowly avoided colliding with a bent lamppost.
With an exhale you had been struggling to hold in till it ached, you glanced at the radio as it fizzled out from the impact. One singular, pathetic, final “BZZZzzzt”-ing. Not entirely unlike the drone of an annoyingly persistent bumble fly, this sound also didn’t stop tormenting you until you slapped an open palm against it hard enough for it to sting through the driving gloves. Without the noise pollution, you could hear those stomps again, struggling to smash their way through the narrow streets of the compact cityscape. They sounded close. But then, didn't they always sound close? No matter the answer, you could tell there simply wasn't time to check if anything more important had been jostled. Sighing, you circled the car around in a random direction, leaving skid marks in the asphalt as you sped off.
・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・・
“C’mon, c'mon, c’mon,” you begged, foot married to the gas pedal. “C’mon, girl, just a bit more…” If you were speaking to yourself or the sputtering engine was up for debate.
The toe of your boot pressed into the floorboard, the speedometer maxing out at 191 mph. At every desperate rotation of the steering wheel— the road alternating between smooth pavement and uneven cobblestone— the dent in the roof dipped just so that the crown of your head bumped painfully against it. You growled in agitation after the sixth time, swinging northwest down yet another alley, the sides of the car scraping against the walls from the tight fit and sparking.
Some of the sparks landed on you through the open windshield, causing you to curse under your breath and sharply guide the Satomobile into a wider passage. If the way the streets got spectacularly bumpier from potholes was any indication, then you were in the lower part of downtown’s residential district now.
You narrowed your eyes and weighed all your options. There weren’t many emergencies exits through here. At least not ones wide enough to fit the Satomobile through. Truthfully, this was the absolute worst possible place in the whole of Republic City that you could have gotten cornered in. In a purely greed-motivated effort to cram as many low-income apartments as possible into one space, everything was built practically flush together. One endless parallel line of weather-worn, carbon-stained, dilapidated buildings. Regrettably, it seemed like you only had one real choice: straight through.
Except there was absolutely no getting through what lay up ahead either. Your poor planning had been predicted and accounted for, judging by the way the Colossus stood there in the roadway with its cannon arm raised directly at the Satomobile. As the shot was powered up, you made your choice. Curving the beam, just milliseconds away before the vehicle and the left leg connected, and you were crushed between the two… You crawled through the windshield and rolled out, putting an unhealthy amount of trust into your amateur earthbending to help soften the blow to your body.
It did. As well as it could, anyway.
“Ooof…!”
The shout you let out as you skidded to an abrupt stop against the curb was drowned out by metal meeting metal. In a rain of sparks, the car hit the leg head on, promptly folding inward like an accordion into itself. You raised a trembling hand to cover your eyes at the explosion of white-yellow stars falling to the ground and dying out. As you did so, the crumpled vehicle changed directions after the crash, taking a streetlamp or two with it before it smashed into an apartment complex’s window. Finally, the Satomobile rolled to a stop— dense, greyish smoke drifting out of the crater it had left in someone’s living room. In the aftermath, there was a line of destruction that looked like a scene out of one of Varrick’s cheesy action movers.
And it would have been oddly beautiful… if it’d done anything other than the equivalent of a scratch to the other participant. Tearing your eyes from the wreck, they drifted down to the left leg again, crinkling your nose in frustration at the barely-there scrape marks in the pristine platinum.
“You’re a fool …”
Kuvira’s voice was biting through the loudspeaker.
Dragging yourself onto your elbows, you glared up at the entirety of the Colossus. Larger than life. Cold. Deadly. Like the woman who controlled it, really. When you tried to get up to face it— to blur the line between friend and foe one last time— you let out a whine and flopped right back down. Absolutely everything, from the back of your head all the way down to your sacrum, to each and every one of your ten individual fingers and toes, throbbed.
“...And you’re in my way!” And you almost considered just letting Kuvira land that hit so you wouldn’t have to move again.
But you would never give up that easily. You would go down swinging till your last breath or not at all.
Sharply twisting your body up and over the curb, you prevented yourself from becoming a smear in the hole Kuvira left in the road. Rising onto your haunches, a hand came to press at your bicep, hissing when your fingers came back speckled with fresh blood. Your father’s old aviator jacket had ripped in several places in the skid earlier, leaving your skin prone to road rash that burned with every micromovement. It didn’t help that your muscles felt just about as useful as Moon peach jelly.
“I am.” Your mouth moved to say more. Perhaps to further nettle her, the past three years since she left Zaofu behind to become a dictator in the forefront of your mind and spilling onto the tip of your tongue.
...But Kuvira would never allow you to waste her time with talk. She was a deeply... deeply... impatient woman. The arm side-swiped out from where it’d been imbedded in the road towards you, and you vaulted over it with some difficulty, using a hasty wall made out of the road as a temporary shield as bricks and glass shards alike erupted from the building beside you both— burying the platinum limb in a pile of dusty, jagged rubble. Kuvira growled, trying to shake it out from under. "Send more power to the arm! Now!" she hissed, the barked orders to her technicians just barely audible above everything else.
Your face twisted in thought, gauging you had about a millimeter sized window of opportunity. Bending at the waist and rolling a couple of feet out of the way, you swiftly rose up onto one knee and used your bending to topple what little remained of the building onto the limb before Kuvira could pull it completely free.
“Rude…” you quipped through heavy pants, flicking your eyes up at the head. “I wasn’t… hah, fuck… done… yet.”
One other thing you knew from eleven years of first-hand experience, however, was that Kuvira also wasn’t an idiot. The other arm came down to punch at the ground. And for a moment, when the circular shadow loomed just over your head, you thought you might really, actually be a goner this time-
That was, until someone wrapped a wire around your ankle and yanked you with full force out from under it. As the resounding, furious craaaaaaack! of platinum against pavement echoed in your ears, you gulped. Dangling in the open air from only your foot, Republic City passed by under you in a dizzying blur that caused you to screw your eyes shut. You had never liked heights. You preferred the comfort of the control you had over a car over the unpredictable nature of a biplane or an airship.
You tried to wiggle enough to peek up at your savior instead of the ground. “Thank y-”
“Can it! You’re in a whole heap of trouble, young lady.” Lin hissed. The older woman bent the wire up to hold onto you more firmly by the waist. “You're lucky that your idiocy just now didn’t get you killed.” she added, and you would’ve pouted at being cut off yet again if you possibly could.
They swung a bit further, before you were roughly dropped down on a rooftop. It was agony to rise to your full height.
"I'm trying to say thank yo-”
“I. Said. Shut. It.” Lin shook her head, grumbling something that sounded like ‘kids these days’ under her breath as her arms folded tightly across her chest. “Do you have any idea how worried everyone was?” she added, as if you needed a reminder of Suyin's screeching.
You rubbed absentmindedly at the waxy, ragged edges of your sleeves, your other hand curled into a fist. “Look, I know what I did was, well, stupid,” you admitted. “But I was just so... so angry. I really thought that I could wear her down eventually." Rolling your shoulder with a wince, you continued, "I wasn’t thinking straight anymore.” Or at all. “… I’m sorry, Lin.”
Something like a flicker of mild understanding flickered over Lin’s face, her eyes rolling. “Tch. Say sorry one more time and see what happens,” Lin warned, sending you an accusatory side-glance.
“...Sorry.” You pursed your lips in realization. “Oops.”
Lin’s own upper lip curled in distaste. A low, defeated groan escaped from between her thin lips and she rubbed at her temples, shaking her head. “Just stay out of it.” And her tone left no room for you to dare to defy her or ask for a compromise. The other woman spared you one of her signature glares, pointing her pinkie and pointer finger to her eyes before twisting them back around in your direction. “I mean it.” Lin turned to jump back into the fray with a swoosh of cables. “Get to safety.”
“Hm.” You stopped massaging your arm. “Just stay out of it.” you mimicked. “Get to safety.” As soon as Lin was a speck in the distance, you shed your father’s mangled jacket, giving it one last look over.
Neither of you had ever been particularly close. But it’d been the only truly sentimental thing he left behind when he and your mom had gone missing on one of their many round-the-nations trips when you were twelve. Because of that, it almost hurt to rip a strip of the lining out. Almost. With the deed done, you haphazardly tossed the jacket aside and began to wrap the cotton fabric around your bicep, muttering under your breath the entire time. When you were satisfied, you tightened the knot with your teeth and flexed your arm, checking your handiwork with a deep frown.
It would have to do for now. Your eyes trailed from the hastily bandaged wound to the horizon, following the distant explosions of neon purple.
Even from all the way over here, the battle going down in downtown Republic City was nothing short of breathtaking.
You stepped forwards towards the ledge. Across the thick, dusty, yellowed skyline, you watched as entire skyscrapers were used as battering rams by both sides of the fight. Korra and her crew were more than equipped to take over from here. You knew that. They had actual experience with fighting the long, hard struggles. And you knew Lin was, like always, ultimately right that you would be better off slinking away to lick your wounds with the rest of the remaining evacuees Pema and Wu were in charge of leading to safety. But something about admitting defeat— especially now, when you accomplished close to nothing except to make yourself look incapable— blinded you with too much rage to accept the truth. It would be a cold day in the southern Earth Kingdom before you admitted anything to Kuvira, of all people.
A hand came out, bending a chunk of the rooftop and holding it offensively above your head, aiming your pointer fingers at the Colossus. Black dots of metalbender and airbender alike flicked around it. One eye trained on its swaying and swatting form, you smiled— in the way where the cruel curve of your mouth was seeped in bitterness and resentment.
“Now then," you whispered, "let’s see if we can’t go toe to toe a second time, eh?”