Ночная жизнь

Electric green eyes flash a fleeting sideways glance over a glistening shoulder. Long, slender fingers pull a compliant chin forward to meet halfway in between. Said fingers urgently grip a forearm, almost too roughly, but release again the very next moment. She can see Lin reclining on her back-chest still heaving propped up halfway on her elbows. Behind closed lids she watches Lin tilt her head to the side and shoot her the signature half smile. Moonlight slips through wooden shutters and splatters shadows across the pale dips and valleys. Even in the half-light of night Lin is breathtakingly lovely, effortlessly sublime. Sound from another world breaks into the hazy cloud of her thoughts. "Are you even listening, Korra?" Tenzin asked softly but firmly as he looked up at her from his scrolls. Korra's eyes sharply refocused in an instant. She snapped her head to look at him and a loud crack rips through the still air. Korra offered a sheepish grin as she massaged the sore joints in her neck. "Y-yes of course. Yes I am." Korra sputtered a little too quickly. "As you were saying, the Avatar State is best achieved when…erm…something about mental clarity…" Tenzin furrowed his brows as he studied Korra in silence for a few moments. He then sighed and placed his hands upon his desk in resignation. "Korra I know that the last few months' events have weighed heavily on your mind. I admit that it is unfair for you, at such a tender stage in life, to have weathered such…events. But you know as well as I do that Avatar Aang had the onus of ending a century long war thrust upon him long before, well how should we put it, he was conventionally ready. If anything you have just proven to the world that you are a fully capable and in my mind a nearly realized avatar." Tenzin scanned Korra's face for a reaction to his thinly veiled praise. He had been truly impressed by Korra's spiritual development throughout the Equalist Revolution. When she first arrived at Air Temple Island nearly a year ago he had been mildly appalled by her unwillingness to embrace the spiritual facets of her title. He was more than a little proud of the young woman who stood before him now on the verge of the next chapter of her spiritual enlightenment. Korra rubbed her eyes and just barely stifled a yawn. She had never been the most rapt listener to such lectures but now that her nights were for the most part fully booked her concentration abilities had only slipped further. She was exhausted during the days now. It was serendipitous that the bulk of her training as of late involved meditation and solitary reflection in attempts to strengthen the bonds to her past lives. Korra was unsure if she could still have handled the rigorous physical training she had underwent in preparation for her fire-bending test. Those days seemed like the stuff of former lives nowadays-and Korra knew what it was like to have former lives. She was getting enough physical exercise when the sun set and the moon rose, anyways, with a certain cat-eyed metalbender.