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Svetlana grunted as she made a final push forward with her fist, forcing herself to hold the pose. Her muscles vehemently pushed back, burning and shaking as they fought against a combination of gravity and willpower. She clenched her eyes shut and forced her lungs to inhale, silently ticking off the seconds which passed. She would hold this until she couldn't. She felt her arm begin to sag; were she in combat, her pose would have been effectively broken, and she'd be effectively dead.

Damn...

She dropped her arms to her side and shook them out, reaching for a towel to wipe sweat from her forhead. Damndamndamn. She couldn't hold it. There was a flaw in her technique. A fatal flaw.

She rested her forehead against the wood of the wall, replaying her actions in her mind's eye. She couldn't think... she had no idea where she had gone wrong. Her triceps weren't supposed to fail so quickly. The position she was supposed to be holding was supposed to be a strong defensive vanguard, not a tiring display of foolishness.

She would have to do it again.

What she needed was another set of eyes. She needed to watch herself act. She needed to dissect her own body to see where the fault(s?) lay.

She had none, of course. Two eyes did nothing for her. A mental replay did even less. She could tell herself that this was why she was here-- training was all-important. Training was what would keep her from dying. Training was her current reason to exist. (Svetlana herself had never believed in an afterlife, and figured second chances were second chances. She'd train to 'live' if that was what was asked of her.)

She slammed the pad of her fist onto the wall. It was frustrating.

No. It was beyond frustrating. It was mortifying. Something was intrinsically wrong with how she held herself. There was an incorrect movement, a wrong step, somewhere in that web of technique. Svetlana did not spend increasingly-compounding hours a day only to fail; she would have to weed out her steps, hold her positions longer.

Or simply drop the motions and start from scratch again.

She paused at the thought. Part of it was enticing: a clean slate, a promise of perfection. She felt rage boil up within her again. Why didn't her movements work? Her opposite hand slammed into the wall on the other side of her head, as if swatting away a pesky fly. Why?

That, Svetlana Yegorovichna, is the single most important question. Why. Normally, she would have left it to the philosophers-- questions on existence, questions on the workings of the universe-- those were all things she did not busy herself with. Those were all things beyond her control. She could not touch the answer. She could not grasp it in her hand. She could not crush it beneath her sandal.

But her own movements-- they were her own creation. They were part of her. She designed them, she rehearsed them. Her time was precious. Her movements were precious. If the flaw did not reveal itself, her movements would be useless, and her time wasted. She would not accept this. No, she had better things to waste her time on than the trash of the martial worlds.

Her hands lowered, resting themselves on her hips. She would have to start all over. She would take it slower this time, examine every action, every feeling, with a proverbial magnifying glass. Never would she allow her own time to be wasted; she could not allow her own creation to be anything less than perfect. She spun on her heel and walked to the center of the room. Her breath, by now, had slowed to normal. She shook her hair back and flexed her fingers. A jab... a hook... a left jab...

In the silence of the dojo, it was easy for Sveta to measure her steps. Left. Right. A pause as she slowed to accomodate the tautness of her left leg. Right again. And... here. The young woman knelt slowly, using a towel to blot sweat from her face and neck. She ran a tenative hand through her hair, feeling the wispy locks damp and droopy with prespiration. Her hand trailed down to her neck, where she pressed to feel her pulse. It had slowed considerably, but still felt quicker than a frightened rabbit's. She closed her eyes and inhaled deepy, allowing sweet oxygen to fill her lungs, large with years of an active life, even now healthy in death. She held her arms out to her side, feeling her muscles stretch, enjoying the way they silently screamed. They would thank her for her kindness in the morning, for if she didn't bother with a cool-down stretch, she doubted she would be able to move, much less turn her head to ask for morning tea. She moved on to rotate her shoulders, to stretch her back, to lean forward to touch her toes, wondering if today had been worthwhile.

Of course it had; she had, at the very least, managed to make her body that much stronger.

She stood, bent over, neatly folded herself in half. Her legs would be hardest hit; it had been a while since she worked herself to such exhaustion she could barely stand. Even with her finishing stretches, she doubted tomorrow would be anything close to pain-free. She would be forced to accomodate aching muscles no matter how she diced this... and everyone knew the best way to make sore muscles feel better is to work them harder. (It would be a vicious cycle for a little while, each hard workout tearing the muscles more, forcing protiens to work triple-shifts to fix them, which would call for more days of worthless soreness.) It would be worth it in the end, that much Sveta was certain of.

Aa. But was there an end? She stood up straight, shaking out her arms. She could not see it; her future here was still foggy. She tossed her hair, inadvertantly whipping her opposite cheek. A sigh. She always had this empty pit in her stomach when she did not accomplish what she wished to. And worse-- the day was still young. The sun wasn't close to completing its ethreal journey, which meant she would need to occupy herself some other way today. She would not be able to go through with much in the way of physical activity, which meant more training was out of the question. (This was to say, more physical training was out of the question.) Perhaps now would be a time to work on the mental part of her duties. Clearly, focus was an issue. Focus and pride. She could not rely on nothing but her own skills; she had been an idiot to think she could. One, like herself, so untrained and yet so burdened with knowledge, could hardly be expected to know how to sort the information out, much less in a precise manner.

Practice would make near-perfection, however. She drew a slow breath, licking her lips and tasting the salty air of the wooden building. It tasted like... cedar and pine. Sweat. Blood. These bodily fluids could only mean that this was a place of hard work. This was a place to succeed, and she bowed her head in a wordless apology to the building. "It will not happen again," she mumbled, more to the building than to herself. If she were to integrate herself into Sereitei, she needed to integrate herself into its buildings.

Her hand touched the wall of the dojo, the wood hard and smooth, cut and polished by a master of the trade. Svetlana was the exact opposite of this wall; she was a tree which had been selected, cut down, and assigned for a building project, but had yet to be stripped of its bark or carved into anything but a log. She wanted to be cut, polished, carved, made into an instrument of the Sereitei, a weapon to serve her captain, just as this dojo served her training purposes. It was probably her most selfish thought all day, but self-interest was what kept her alive in death. Her thumb idly stroked the grain of the wood for a moment until she shook herself out of her reverie.

What thoughts came to her mind when she was exhausted!

She leaned down gather her clothing articles, throwing her loose shirt over her shoulders, slipping into her equally flowing trousers. If there was one thing these Japanese-style clothing articles were good for, it was allowing air flow. Even with the extra layers now covering her body, she did not feel any more weighed down. In fact, the fabric absorbed her sweat, perhaps made her feel a bit less warm. She rolled her neck, her hair now curling into the familiar wisps which came from the unmolded drying from dampness. It did not matter; she was not here to look pretty. Nevertheless, she tied her belt neatly, tucked in her weapon, and walked out of the dojo.

Behind her, her sweatdrops mingled with the floorboards, bearing silent witness to her agony until they evaporated or were absorbed into the woodwork.