After hastily changing and stuffing the rest of his posessions into a small navy bag, he closed his locker and hurried down the hallway out onto the pier.
He walked back and forth along the metal handrails for what seemed like an eternity, looking out at the sun slowly setting over Yue Bay. When exhaustion and boredom had taken their toll, Hasook swung his legs down over the edge of the pier and sat back silently, sitting on his hands. As a gull glided sliently on a thermal in front of his face, he slowly raised his right hand and stared intently at its palm.
"Why can I never do anything right?", he thought to himself, "I've trained and trained, but even the simplest moves take forever. I'm a sitting turtle-duck in the arena. Figures that I'm like the only waterbender guy that can't do those grandiose moves."
Sighing slightly, he got up and brushed himself off before collecting his things and walking back to the trolley station.
He paid his fare and boards the train word, taking his spot on the window and watching the storefronts pass by in a slow blur.
Before long, he was home. He walked through the maze of dark alleys typical of the slums, greeting passerbys with an emotionless glance and a nod of acknowledgment. Finally he came to the small shack wedged between tenaments, wiped his feet and trudged through the door.
"Hasook honey, where have you been? You never take this long to get back from the arena. I was ready to go platypus bear on someone if something happened to you." His mother rushed to greet him and tried to mask her look of concern with feigned happiness. Her clothes were worn and faded. Her hands were marked with the evidence of hard labor, but she somehow maintained a mien of beauty. A few stray hairs fell from her bun as she brushed the dust off of Hasook's shoulders. He tried to avoid making eye contact, but she clearly sensed something was bothering him. "Hasook, is everything alright?" She placed a hand on his cheek as the tea kettle whistled loudly from the next room. "Oh, hold on, I'll be right back."
As his mother dashed off into the kitchen nook to take the tea off of the fire, Hasook dropped his sack next to the door, kicked his shoes off and kneeled at the low table to await her return. All of a sudden he heard a loud crash and the whirr of steam. Rushing into the next room as fast as he possibly could he saw his mother kneeling on the floor cradling her arm next to the broken tea cups.
"Mom! Are you okay? What happened?"
"I'm..fine. I just slipped is all." She removed her hand from the injured arm, revealing the seared flesh underneath. She winced slightly, but then attempted to crawl over to the shattered teacups to clean up the mess.
"Mom, you're burnt, you're not fine. Don't move, I'll be right back, I just have to get some water." Bursting through the front door her rushed to the small water gauge outside and turned the nozzle to allow water to flow into the house. Rushing to the kitchen, he quickly filled the sink basin with water. "Hold on, ma." He carefully raised a sphere of water from the basin and used it to coat his hands. Placing both hands on the burn he focused as much as he could until the warm blue glow of healing began.
Hasook certainly didn't have the raw waterbending talent he'd seen in the other pro-bending teams, but healing was the one aspect of waterbending at which he acceled. Being healed by a medic's waterbending as a child was the earliest memory of bending he could recall and one of the few from before his father's death.
Both of his parents were non-bender immigrants to Republic City from the Waterbending tribes of the Western Earth Kingdom, the tribe jokinly referred to as the Foggy Swamp tribe. They realized he was a waterbender when as a toddler during a temper tantrum he involuntarily flung water from his bath all over his them. Hasook grew up without a teacher as his mother had no extra money to pay for an instructor and there were no waterbenders in their neighborhood from whom he could learn. Saddened by the fact that she could not provide what her son wanted, Sepay tried to show him what she remembered from seeing benders back home in the swamp.
The faint blue glow pulsated in the dimly-lit room and Hasook could feel the warm flow of chi in the water. After almost an hour of remaining static, Hasook removed his hands from the burn revealing a radically improved appearance. He unraveled the strip of cloth covering his forearm and bound the wound loosely. "There," he said smirking, "that should heal much quicker now. Still, I think you probably shouldn't go to the laundromat tomorrow." He cradled the bandaged arm and looked his mother in the eye.
She averted her gaze and said solemnly, "Dear, if I don't go, they'll just get one of the hundreds of others in line for work to take my spot. I can't afford that." Hasook couldn't see clearly in the dimly lit room, but his mother's eyes appeared reddened with forming tears.
"Mom, when you asked me earlier if everything was all right, I meant to say it wasn't. I'm not cut out for pro-bending, I just can't get the hang of it and my teammates just aren't supportive. I'm going to sell my uniform back and tell the laundromat owner that I'll cover your shift for the next couple days."
"Hasook, I..."
"Mom, you're not going to convince me otherwise so just sit back and let me do something for you for once." He helped her up off the floor and led her to her small bed on the wall. He hurried back to the kitchen nook to clean up the broken tea cups.
While sweeping, his mind drifted to scenes from earlier in the day: the match, the strange blue-eyed girl, the train ride back... and out of nowhere, Bolin. The mental image of this green-eyed boy snapped him out of his daydreaming. "what am I even doing? Pro-bending is ancient history, I need to do what's best for me and mom right now. I can't be lingering in the past." Despite this little self-scolding session, Hasook just couldn't get Bolin's face out of his mind. Why was this mysterious girl so fascinating, so much so that he barely took notice of Hasook leaving? He'd always been on far better terms with the earthbender than his brother Mako. Maybe it was his sense of humor or that dopey look on his face, but Hasook felt like Bolin was more of a friend than just a teammate and it hurt that he hadn't even really taken notice of his departure.