Long, Long Way From Home

((OOC: Sorry for the delay. I had absolutely no idea how to reply up until now.))

While she'd waited for the kid to arrive Von emerged from the woods, running up to her and leaping up to her hand, scaling her and coming to a rest on her right shoulder. He'd disappeared just before the fight as he always did. He wasn't fond of fighting, and in any case he'd be an unnecessary distraction in the heat of battle which she could rarely afford.

"Hey! You made it. I got the crates. The rest are back where I left them. Let's go get them before someone else finds them."

Tamura had barely heard him approach. Adrenaline was still coursing through her veins, and she could hear her blood pump in her ears, its steady beat reassuring her that she was indeed still very much alive.

"Yes. I did. Somehow," she replied with a weak smile. She couldn't manage much more right now. The adrenaline and battle rage were slowly seeping out of her, she could feel just how extensive her exhaustion was right now, and she could start to feel the pain from the various small cuts, bruises and burns she'd suffered in the fight, pain which the adrenaline rush had shielded her from until now.

"C-Could you do me a favour and go get the crates yourself? I think I'm going to sit here for a while and just, think," she added softly as she half sat half collapsed to the ground, breathing heavily. She was feeling light-headed, her vision was swimming pretty badly and her legs felt like they were made of jelly, but she was alive. The cynical part of her was praying to the gods that this kid wouldn't prey on her temporary weakness, the more optimistic part of her was glad she had someone to watch her back for now. "Maybe I'll take a nap too..."

She didn't really have time to hear his reply as her vision went from swimming, to blurry to darkening. She tipped sideways, laying her mildly burnt face down on the cool grass, too tired to stay up any longer.

Jonathon smiled at Tamura as she acted frantically.  When she passed out he just sighed.  "You've earned the rest Miss Tamura."  He said, moving the crates to be out of the way.  Overly the next couple hours he managed to carry the crates back to where he'd left Tamura.  Realizing he had no way of getting them all back to the employer.  Sitting on one of the boxes he begins a sort of vigil, waiting for her to wake up.

Her rest was peaceful at first, as she was too exhausted to be disturbed, but halfway through she began to shiver and break out in cold sweats, muttering unintelligible words in her sleep, and her arms kept twitching up, as if she were protecting her face from an unseen blow.

The various nightmares that haunted her rest all revolved around the same thing, her home. She saw the air temple in flames, screams of pain and sorrow drifting from it as everything she'd grown up with was destroyed. She saw it in ruins, nothing but broken stone, shattered wood and decaying corpses slowly being buried by the winter snows. Most painful of all she saw it at peace, the people she had known thriving and happy without her, glad of her departure, relieved by her absence. It hurt not because of their happiness, it hurt because of how true that last vision rang. The visions of destruction she had strong reasons to doubt, the third nightmare though, that she had a feeling was far too close to the truth to be ignored.

When she did wake up it was with a start and a scream, eye wide, with one hand groping for her weapons, she was so shaken she couldn't even find them. It took her a few seconds to calm down and realise that her dreams were just that. Dreams, fictitious lies spun by her subconscious. Still, she couldn't shake the visions she'd seen in her slumber from her mind, they all screamed the same thing, they told her to do the one thing she had promised and convinced herself never to do. She wanted to go home. At least to see it with her own two eyes once. Just to be sure.

She eventually sat up, noticing Jonathon holding his vigil and out of habit she patted herself down, making sure she was not missing any of her possessions and that she wasn't suffering from any more wounds than those she'd suffered at the hands of her opponents, but she found that everything was as she remembered. The various cuts, burns and bruises over her body still stung, throbbed and ached, but at least now she wasn't feeling exhausted. Out of the side of her one good eye she could see various crates of items, which she assumed to be the stolen goods they'd set out to retrieve.

"How long have I been out?" she asked groggily and a little more sharply than she'd intended, wiping a thing veil of cold sweat from her face and readjusting her eye patch. The sky was pitch black and while she knew it was night time (pretty obvious) she couldn't tell what time it was. "Sorry for passing out on you like that by the way. It won't happen again, I promise," she added, softening her tone with a smile that was weak not from physical exhaustion but from emotional strain. "Good job by the way," she gestured at the crates.

((OOC: Sorry I'm kinda shamelessly and selfishly using this to initiate a bit of character development for Tamura))

(No worries, character development has to happen sometimes)

Jonathon was concerned when Tamura started flailing. He didn't want to get too close, but he still kept a hand on the hilt of his sword the whole time. Jumping up when she screamed he ran over to her. "Miss Tamura, are you alright?" He asked her, putting his hands on her shoulder. "You've been out for a couple of hours. You started sweating and flailing...and I didn't know what to do. Then you woke up. I guess you were having a night mare..." Standing back up and walking over the crates he admired his handiwork. Turning back to face her and grinning like an idiot, he gave her a thumbs up. "Yeah, I did do a good job, didn't I. Just one question though, how are we supposed to get these things back?"

((OOC: If this post sucks I blame the fact that I was not listening to any music at the time of writing.))

"Miss Tamura, are you alright? You've been out for a couple of hours. You started sweating and flailing...and I didn't know what to do. Then you woke up. I guess you were having a night mare..." She was surprised by his concern which, from the tone of his voice and the look on his face she could only assume was genuine. This kid was too nice for this line of work...

"I'm fine," she replied calmly, steadying her breath and her thoughts, trying to push the visions from her tormented sleep to the back of her mind, with little success. "Just a bad dream form the exhaustion. Just a dream," the words were as much meant to convince herself of the unimportance of these nightmares as they were meant to reassure the boy. In the former they failed, but the kid was apparently satisfied because he went on.

"Yeah, I did do a good job, didn't I. Just one question though, how are we supposed to get these things back?" Her previously weak smiled strengthened somewhat at his show of bravado. But he raised a valid point how indeed would they move the goods? She had been so preoccupied with getting them that she hadn't thought of planning how to bring them back to town without losing any of them. She could practically hear her father's various lectures on fore-planning ringing in her ears.

"You did a very good job kid, keep this up and you might even claim my heart with your impressive weight lifting," she replied, flashing him a seductive wink, before bursting out in laughter. A simple joke, meant to mess with his head. Handsome as he was, Jonathon was too young for her taste by several years.

"I didn't expect there'd be this much," she admitted after her mirth died down (in part due to the fact that every burst of laughter was causing stabs of pain to erupt all over her chest), taking a look at the half-a-dozen or so crates neatly piled together. "These guys had a cart in which they carried the good didn't they? We could go back to their camp and check to see if it survived your little fire," she pointed out. "The draft animals they had attached to it are probably far away by now, but then again they might not be. Worse comes to worse we can pull the cart ourselves. With only six crates we should be able to handle it without breaking our backs too much."

As she spoke she pushed herself to her feet, feeling a sudden rush of blood to her head which momentarily dizzied her, but she managed to steady herself. Her sleep had been restorative, if not refreshing. At least now she could actually stand without collapsing, which, all things considered was a pretty nifty thing to be capable of. She was still shaken inside, but as is often the case with nightmares and sleep visitations the memories of her dreams and the scars they'd inflicted on her were starting to fade. It was becoming easier to convince herself that it was just a dream. In time they'd fade away completely. Or would they?

"C'mon kid, let's hustle," she told Jonathon, stretching her back and her arms as she began to walk back towards the destroyed camp.

Despite the fact that Tamura was joking around with him, Jonathon still blushed at her comment. "Uh..Yeah..." He tried to brush it off and regain his composure. Looking at the crates he realized something. "Wait, before we go get the crates, give me a minute." He said, before proceeding to systematically hide all of the crates to the point where someone would have to work to find them and if someone was trying to find them, it'd take some work to do so. "There. Now we're set. Come on." The young fire bender began to take off back towards the bandit's camp.

She stopped to look at him working. She attempted to load a pipe full of tabacco, but she found her pouch was empty, only fine dust remaining, which did nothing to improve her mood.

"I'm pretty sure no one's going to be coming this way kid," she commented glumly, but she didn't stop him. He was probably right to take precautions.

"There. Now we're set. Come on."

"Right behind you mister boss man. Your loyal lady servant is ready to do all your bidding," she left a moment of silent settle in uncomfortably before adding: "Except that. You think about your mother with that imagination?" she clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth a couple of times in fake disappointment. "Kids these days. No respect for their elders."

In all honesty this kid had shown more respect for her than most other men she'd met in her travels. She'd fully expected to have to have broken at least one of his bones by now in order to make him realize he wasn't to bother her. Instead she was developing a morbid curiosity as to how far she could push before he started to push back.

"So, yesterday wasn't exactly the best of times to gush over life stories, but seeing as we've got some walking to do together we might as well talk about something. So, what's a little babby with nary a hair on his chinny chin chin like you doing all the way out here in the middle of nowhere trying to catch bandits?" her tone was as level as it got with her being in a less than happy mood. The faked seductiveness and teasing were gone from its timber, now her voice was just hoarse from thirst and just a bit colder than it had any logical reason to be. She addressed the former of the two with a swig from her water skin hoping to also wash away the sickening taste her dream had left in her mouth. The undeserved coldness of her tone was going to be an issue for as long as her mood stayed in the dumps.

From memory she'd say they were still about five to ten minutes away from the camp. She could already start to see splintered trees and deep footsteps in the mud where the draft animals had stampeded. Those weren't good signs. Animals weren't known to go back to where they'd stampeded fro in a hurry.

((OOC: Fun fact, babby is an actual word. It's a dialect term for baby and it usually has a mildly pejorative connotation. The more you know kids, the more you know. Also Three Little Pigs reference because reasons.))

Jonathon just sighed as she continued to try and get him bothered. He figured not saying anything would make her stop sooner then if he reacted. Looking around at the destruction from the draft animals he was impressed. "Why am I out here? It's how I make my living mam. I'm all alone. Never had parents that I can much remember. I was raised by a wandering mercenary. He taught me everything I knew, well, asides from fire bending. That was self taught..." He emphasized that point by summoning a small flame in his hand. "The empire took him from me...murdered them. That's why I stick to the colonies, they seem to be less patrolled, and if there are soldiers around, I've gotten good at sneaking away." Jonathon stopped and looked at the wrecked camp. "So...what's your story?"

A part of her wanted to put a hand on his shoulder, give him a pat on the head, tell him that it's be alright, to go home and get out of this line of work before he ended up dead way before his time and then to go off to kill as many Vermillion Empire soldiers as she could. At the same time all the other parts of her battered it into silence. She was a tough woman and she didn't care for no damned pipsqueak. If he wanted to go around swinging his sword willy-nilly that was his business and his alone.

Having gotten past that moment of sentimentalism she turned to thinking about how to present her own epic tale to him, where to begin and where to end, when it struck her that she'd really had it easy. She wasn't much for lingering on her past, she didn't like to look back and analyse what she had or had not done, and this was one of the first times she really got to look back on all she'd accomplished with a fresh eye, and that inevitably led her to realise that compared to this kid she'd had it easy.

She'd had parents, a loving mother who she might not have gotten along with but who'd loved her. She'd even had the chance to meet her father and to be around him for years, and what had he done? He'd led her down a path that turned her into a hired killer. She'd been about to tell this kid that she thought the mercenary tutor who'd taken him under his wing was a right bastard for forcing combat on a kid, but her own father, a man she practically idolised, had been exactly the same.

Her tale wasn't epic at all, she realised, it was pathetic. She had chosen this, the man she had respected most had simply been the enabler while any responsible parent would have steered their child firmly away from that path. The mother she'd run away form had tried to keep her far from such a fate. She might have been oppressive and overbearing at times, certainly, but had she really deserved what had happened to her? No, she hadn't.

Her unfavourable mood  worsened considerably as she made a mental note to never again go prodding into her own head and promised to drink herself into oblivion at the next bar she came across. As her anger grew it slammed her trail of thought a full one hundred and eighty degrees around, firmly back on its usual path, blaming the Air Nomads for their obsessive need to turn her into one of them and glorifying her father as the one who freed her from that peaceful fate. You could say it was a defense mechanism, one that allowed her mind to prevent itself from imploding as she realised that her life was essentially a sequence of one bad decision after another and that she'd been nothing but horrible to everyone who'd had her best interest at heart.

Through all of this introspection she'd been silent, and that silence had spanned longer than was either necessary or comfortable, but she didn't even realise that.

"My story's close enough to yours. I abandoned home, I met a someone willing to teach a kid to fight and then I decided to put that skill, the only marketable one I have, to good use," she replied at last. She'd strayed far away from the self-analysing path she'd been straying down before and her mood had improved, but her voice still came out sounding moodier than it had any rights to be.

Jonathon stopped and looked over his shoulder at her. A quizzical look on his face. He turned his whole body to face her. Looking into her eyes he tried to see deeper. "You're lying. There's more to you then that. Just from what I've seen of you so far, there's something more complex about you then just a runaway. I won't ask for more, you clearly don't want to go into it." The young fire bender turned and kept walking, staring at the ground as he went, watching his feet as he tried to stay within the tracks leading into what was left of the camp. Walking around the trampled camp he looked at it all. Everything was burnt and crushed. It would be impressive to salvage much of anything. Thankfully the cart was safe and tucked away. "Here it is." He says, grabbing it and starting to pull it along. "Let's get back to the goods."