even the hummingbirds will feel the earthquake

[unrestraint]

"She's going to be here at any point now, Naga, calm down," Korra laughs, ruffling Naga behind both ears as they rest out on the edge of the city, close to the wider terrain that's available in the suburbs. Ever since Korra mentioned meeting up with Abby, Naga has been practically thrumming with energy, and that's on top of the excitement that Naga already gets whenever she has the opportunity to spend a full day with Korra.

Sooner or later, Korra thinks, she really needs to move somewhere with doors wide enough to allow Naga inside. Being away from Naga in a small apartment is just too lonely for the polar bear dog.

"I'm going to teach her how to defend herself, okay, so you're going to help us out," she instructs, trying for a vaguely stern looking expression. "You're twice as big as most guys, but I want to teach her how to protect herself against people bigger and stronger than she is. So when I'm demonstrating to her, it'll be on you."

Naga tilts her head, tail wagging once.

"Stop judging me," Korra says with a sigh. "I would have asked Naruto to help, okay, but he needs to focus on his job and not just break shadow clones off whenever he wants to do multiple things at once. His attention span is terrible—"

Naga interrupts with a bark, then starts bounding towards someone in the distance. Glancing up, Korra grins and waves eagerly.

"Abby, hey!"

Comments

[warmandsad]

It is a small thing, Abby thinks, and goes to argue such, but it would push them into an endless circle of what is and isn't okay, and deep down she knows Korra's right. She's just not sure that she deserves any better. Or did, back then. Biting her lip, she nods. "Yeah, you're right. I don't know why I thought it was okay."

But she does, of course. Asshole that Bryce might have been, he paid her attention, and that's what few people did. Pathetic, she knows, that she'd take being treated like dirt over being treated like she didn't exist. She can only hope she's a little different now. She likes to think she is.

[unrestraint]

Seeing Abby's expression relaxes Korra's shoulders slightly, and even though she's never been good at it, she tries to understand more where Abby's coming from. Tries to understand what Abby might have been thinking during that whole relationship. Korra hasn't had much experience with romance, herself, but before meeting Naruto, she remembers her interactions with Mako all being fairly disastrous. Neither of them treated the other extraordinarily well.

It's remarkable that their friendship persisted in spite of that.

"Because you loved him. Something about him," Korra concludes with a small nod. "And that makes you want to accept everything else, because next to that love, you think other things shouldn't matter. But there are people who are better and worse for us, I guess. That's what I've learned since coming to this city, anyway. I was pretty set on one person back home, wouldn't let myself think of anyone else, but then you meet someone new and wonder why you were so stuck on that one person in the first place."

[warmandsad]

"I didn't love him, believe me," Abby says, shaking her head and huffing out a breath of a laugh. For all the fucked up nature of their relationship, all take and no give on his part, she gives herself enough credit to know that it wasn't love. But maybe she's right about the something part, maybe what she loved was to be wanted.

But that doesn't matter, now, and she hates that Bryce even worked his way into her mind. This is supposed to be about starting over. "He was a total asshole. I just didn't have a lot of friends back home. So."

She hesitates and then shakes her head again, looking over at Korra. "I'm sorry. That's so not what I wanted out of today. I just kinda suck at moving forward, I guess."

[unrestraint]

"Are you kidding me? You're totally moving forward," Korra says, easing into a smile and shaking her head as she reaches out for Abby's hand, giving it a squeeze. "You're able to look back on the situation and see things that you didn't then. You know that you'd make different decisions now if the same situation came up again. And if you say you didn't have a lot of friends back home, that means you have more here, right?"

On some level, Korra wonders if she's thinking too simplistically. But... she believes wholeheartedly in everything she says. Abby doesn't strike her as someone who wouldn't be able to stand up for herself. Maybe she wouldn't do it with a punch and a kick like Korra herself would, but Abby has a resilience that Korra can easily see.

She just needs to believe in it.

"Remembering what happened in the past isn't a bad thing, either. It helps us keep those lessons in mind for the future."