Chapter Text
the dai mai, also called the "girdle vessel" is one of the eight extraordinary meridian systems, and runs around the waist, girdling the centre of the body. it is used to treat gastrointestinal issues and to balance the chi between the upper and lower halves of the body.
None of us knew what to say. We just sat there, stunned, unmoving, staring at the shut door. Asami’s grip on my hand had gone slack; I knew my mouth was hanging open. Lieu half stood, and then sat down again, and leaned his hand on the table. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I thought he might do this,” he said, half under his breath. “Sura asked him once and he yelled for probably two hours straight and then walked out just like this.” After a moment, he pushed himself up from the table, looked back at us. “Leave the dishes, I’ll clean up later.”
“Are you sure?” Asami stood, copying him. “I know where everything goes, Lieu, I don’t mind.”
He shook his head. “No, let me. It’ll help me center myself. You two go and do whatever; I’m going to talk to him. It might take a while.”
“Hurry up and wait,” I sighed, slumping in my chair a little. Lieu left, limping some, shutting the door behind him properly. In the ensuing silence, I rubbed at my eyes with the heels of my palms. “I’m gonna go take a bath, I guess. Since there’s not much else to do.”
“I’ll join you,” Asami sighed. We usually bathed or showered together; it was just easier, especially for her. Being married to the Avatar did have its perks, like endlessly hot (or cold) water, rapid drying hair, and not getting out of the water and being freezing fucking cold immediately. It was nice, too, just taking our time and soaking together, talking over things. It helped in a lot of ways, to have a ritual most nights where I would just stop and think with her looking in from the outside and helping me see where pieces I couldn’t fit together fell.
The bathroom that we were supposed to use had two smaller basins, so we bathed side by side rather than in a shared claw-foot tub like in Republic City, sitting on the edges to comb out one another’s hair. We had dried off, gotten into our pyjamas, and set up the futon by the time a knock came at the guest bedroom door.
I knew before it even opened that it was Amon. He had an extremely businesslike knock: brusque, abrupt, no-nonsense. There was no finesse to it. It was the knock of someone who was impatient and had too much to get done in any one given day. He pushed the door open before I could answer, and stood, silhouetted against the low light from the main room. Lieu had to have put out the overhead and left the firepit coals glowing.
“Why?” He said, staring down at me. He held up a hand. “One sentence. No more than ten words. Succinct. Mean it. You get one chance at this, and only because Lieu pled your case.” I could read the glare he shot at Asami even through his mask. “And because Asami told me that the two of them put you up to it. If I like your answer, I’ll consider it.”
“Healing can do a lot,” I began, and then hesitated, counting the first five words out. I cursed under my breath. “But bleeding out still kills.”
I fistpumped, quietly. Exactly ten words. Then I looked back up at him, and found his hooded eyes watching me.
“You want to use Bloodbending to heal.”
“I mean, that’s kinda the idea. Or, at least find ways to integrate it into healing techniques. Kya and Katara made so many strides in their studies of it—we can keep bodies alive during comas or when their spirits have fled, and Spiritbending combined with healing can essentially heal any wound. But if someone’s bleeding out, or they have internal injuries, nothing can really be done. They’ve been developing techniques for blood transfusion, but they’re imprecise, and the technology hasn’t really caught up yet. If healers could stop blood instantly, rather than using a tourniquet, or siphon blood from an injured area to vital organs, it could reduce so many casualties from industrial and farm accidents.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “A lot of the statistics show that internal bleeding from car accidents, factory mishaps, and misused Bending are the number one killers that healing can’t stop.
“If we had ways of utilizing Bloodbending, even just at full moons, we could reduce those casualties. By a lot. And I know you and Tarrlok don’t need a full moon, and if we could just—“ I sighed, looked back up at him. “Think of how many people wouldn’t have to die because some jackass punched them with a rock, or hit them with a big block of ice.”
“You’re not afraid it will be misused?”
“All Bending can be misused. Airbenders can rip the breath out of someone’s lungs and strangle them to death with it. You yourself know how badly Firebending and Waterbending can be used. Metal and Earthbending aren’t any better. The way I figure it is, eventually, someone is going to figure out how to do it again.” I sighed, felt my shoulders slump. “Someone is going to rediscover how to Bloodbend, and it will be just as hard to deal with it being misused as it was before. I don’t want to be responsible for a world that only has it as violence in it. I want to be able to use it for good. To make it not about killing, but about saving lives. Maybe if we can change the way it’s thought of, we can change the way it’s used, too.”
Amon kept staring at me. After a moment, he turned away. “Come with me,” he said shortly, and I scrambled out of bed, tripping over my feet as he led me back across the main room to the back doors. He took the one on the right, opening it into the master bedroom. There was another door, to the left, from which I could hear humming and splashing, steam rising out the doorway—the master bath, then. He bypassed that completely and went to a second door, out the back of the master bedroom, and opened it, walking down a few steps and flicking a lightswitch to bring up the lights.
I stared.
It was the tiniest room I’d seen in the house so far; probably no more than ten square feet of floorspace. The only things in the room were a small fountain in the northwest corner, facing towards the North Pole, a meditation mat of seal-fur atop a heavily cushioned area of the floor, and books. The walls were stacked floor to ceiling with shelving, and each of those was crammed to sagging with books and scrolls. They were a jumbled mess in some places, falling over one another. In others, they were perfectly rigid and organized.
I scanned the titles, still reeling from the reveal. Amon gestured for me to sit down and began to move about the shelves, pulling a few books off here and there and passing them to me as he went.
There were books on everything. Chi-blocking took up a good portion of it, as did chi theory in general. There were books on political theory and economics, books on history, books on warfare. There was fiction and nonfiction, biographies and yearly summation books from major companies and cities, guidebooks to the world, engineering handbooks, instruction manuals. Probably a hundred different books on farming, crop-keeping, animal husbandry, shipment styles, and the other necessary knowledge for farming. There were even numerous books on parenting and psychology. There were books on Bending science—for all four types, not just for Waterbending—and more healing texts I had seen outside of anywhere but the North Pole. Many of the texts were ancient, crumbling, or looked like they had been painstakingly transcribed by hand.
It was a genuinely boggling amount of information.
When Amon had finished, he set his cane aside and very carefully sank down next to me on the floor, taking the books and piling them before me.
“How much do you know of healing?” He asked, pulling a fountain pen from a shelf, along with a pile of page-markers. These particular ones were of owlcat wings, and I decided not to comment.
“I passed the mastery tests,” I said, and he nodded.
“I assumed as much.” He set two texts aside, and pulled two other ones closer. “Healing is an imperfect art in many ways. The chi paths of the body, following the meridians, require a good bit of finesse to work to their best effect. Even then, certain water works better than others, and some people are more open to the healing process depending on their bodies.
“Essentially any Waterbender can figure out healing if they fuck about long enough,” he continued, opening the first book. It was a book entirely on anatomy, and he flipped through it until he came to sections that showed muscle and vein groups, and marked the page with a tab before passing it over to me. “The chi paths aren’t hard to find. Many Waterbending children heal themselves just by instinct; it’s how my father discovered that my brother and I were Waterbenders. It’s a much larger scale.” He handed me another text—this one was on chi and meridian points, and also showed the vascular system. “Bloodbending is an art of precision.” The next book was on animal anatomy. “A single air bubble in a vein can kill someone. You can break bones, explode the brain, twist the intestines until you cause sepsis.”
He looked up at me, and placed the last text onto my lap. It was called, The Sea of Blood, and as I flipped through it, was all about the veins, the vein placement. I swallowed.
“Korra, if you burn someone alive they will die. If you crush someone beneath a ton of stone, they will die. If you drown someone, drop someone from three hundred feet in the air, they will die. But with Bloodbending you can freeze or boil a person’s body from the inside out. The simplest, most thoughtless of gestures can cut off all the blood to their heart and brain.
“You believe you can heal with this. I myself have done so—so I know it is a possibility. But if you want to save lives, you’re going to make sure that you don’t murder anyone, either.”
Amon stood up, done with his tirade, and wobbled as he got back to his feet. He regained his balance, leaning on his cane, and crossed back in front of me to the door out of the room. “What...” I finally found my voice. “What is all this?”
“Your homework,” he replied, shortly. “This isn’t healing. If you want to do anything as simple as cut off blood flowing, you’ll need to know which veins it is flowing from. You cannot do it by instinct. Consider this an apprenticeship.” He turned and looked back at me. “We harvest the corn and the rice in the fall. Between now and then, there are approximately four full moons, the first in two weeks.”
“So I can probably only do it four times,” I finished. I looked down at the papers. “So I have to learn all of this, so that when those full moons come, you can actually teach me.” He didn’t agree or disagree, but I knew I was correct. “So...what first, then, master?”
“Don’t call me that,” he snapped, but it wasn’t particularly heated, just ill-tempered. “Amon is enough. The first thing that you have to do is learn all of that,” he gestured at my texts. “And then, we’re going to practice your finesse.”
“In what way?” I asked as I gathered the texts and followed him back into his bedroom. He gestured airily with his right hand, kept close to his hip, and condensation coming out of the bathroom thickened in the palm of his hand as he sat down on the side of the raised bed. I stood next to him as it became a small ball of water, no larger than a marble. It was the kind of thing you practiced early on when you were training Bending, and he offered it up, passing it to me.
I set down the texts on the bed next to him, and took it in my hands. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“Break it into the smallest parts that you can hold without dropping them.” Amon held his hands apart. “Make a lattice.”
Furrowing my brow, I spread my hands, let the water peel into a sheet between them. Then I spread then wider, the sheet thinning until it began to wobble. Then, I started to siphon the water apart into smaller and smaller segments, until something like an owlcat’s cradle was hanging suspended between my hands, each join of the chain no wider than a toothpick.
I could feel sweat starting to bead at my temples. “I’m not really great at the precision stuff,” I admitted. I’d managed that mercury, years ago—with help. “Much better at larger scales.”
Amon reached up and set his hands atop mine. He wore gloves, to protect the damaged skin of his hands, but his touch through them was still unnaturally hot, and I shuddered slightly. “Thinner,” he murmured, and the lattice began to break down even more, his touch holding my own work steady.
It glittered like the finest lace gauze in the low light from the oil lamp in the corner. I swallowed—if I got distracted at all, it was going to drop. “Now?” I asked, still not sure what he was trying to show me.
“Almost,” he tugged my hands wider, and the net stretched, warped, and thinned again, Amon’s control over my own wavering strength exerting an almost iron-grip of exactitude on the water we were both holding. “Thinner still,” he added, even though the water net was now probably as wide as an eyelash, maybe.
Between my hands, it was twisting and drooping, and drops of water struck the ground. “Human capillaries are smaller still than this,” Amon said, easing off first his left hand, then his right.
The minute he let it go, the net hovered, for a moment, suspended as I grit my teeth and clenched my jaw and held on. And then it dropped, splashing down from between my hands and onto the floor below us. Amon swept it up and without even looking shot it back into the bathroom—I heard the distinct sound of a separate splash into tile.
My heart was racing, and my head hurt. I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Okay,” I said, when I sensed him still staring at me. “Point taken, mister bloodbending man. I might be able to literally split a continent or stop a volcano, but that’s going to do me literally no good at all when it comes to stopping bleeding in someone’s brain.”
“Precisely.” He almost sounded proud of me. “So the first step will be to improve your precision and your stamina. There’s no freezing this water to keep it in place; that will rely entirely upon your own energy.” I nodded. “We’ll start with plantbending—have you done it before?”
“A little?” I started massaging my temples, cooling and rerouting my chi to stop it from pulsing hot behind my eyes. “I wasn’t ever much good at it. I tried to learn when I was staying in Foggy Bottom, but I never really got anywhere with it.”
“Then tomorrow will be a day full of revelations.” His voice, dry and tight with humor, made me glare at him.
“Are you laughing at me?”
The porcelain mask, expressionless, hid his face, but I could still see the slight, subtle shift of the way it sat on his forehead as he raised his eyebrows.
“Me? Take some small pleasure in your frustration? Never.”
“Asshole,” I muttered, grabbing the books.
“Korra,” Amon called, stopping me just before I left the room. I turned back to him; he was unlacing the ties of his gloves, revealing pink, inflamed skin along the back of his fingers. “Farm day starts at sunrise. I’ll be waking you up at dawn.”
I mashed my face into the doorframe.
“What time is sunrise here?” I asked, dreading the answer all the way down to the soles of my feet.
“Five thirty, give or take.”
I groaned with the strength of a conviction that denied wanting to have to do anything earlier than noon that I thought had left me when I’d finished puberty.
I woke when the door slid open and Amon’s voice said: “Get up. It’s dawn.” He shut the door again, and I lay there in a fugue state, staring at the ceiling and listening to Asami breathe. For about five minutes I considered the pros and cons of forcing her to get up with me, and subjecting her to the torture of five thirty in the morning. I considered it long enough that Amon opened the door again, and leaned over me, his mask unreadable. “If you don’t get up, I will throw water on you.”
I groaned, and got out of bed.
Within ten minutes I’d crawled out of the house and stood blinking blearily in the last light of false dawn as the sun burned the clouds off at the horizon, rubbing my eyes as I got water from the well to wash my face, hissing between my teeth at the groundwater cold. I tied my hair back out of my face, into a single thick tail, and mumbled my thanks as Lieu shoved a bowl of rice porridge into my hands.
I ate it, not even really tasting it, because it wasn’t yet six in the morning and my mouth didn’t work right.
Amon and Lieu, used to rising with the sun, were already chatting as they finished breakfast and began to go about the day. Lieu wandered off towards the barn to let out the animals, but Amon sat patiently on the bench next to the well, waiting for me to finish eating. When I was done, he gestured for me to follow him, and I wandered in his wake down to the stream that ran beside the house, near the rice paddy. He kicked off his sandals and walked into the river, and I followed.
He hadn’t dressed yet for the day, and he was still in only a loose silk undershirt with a hood, no gloves, and sweatpants. It did give me some relief that he actually wore some modern clothes, and didn’t look like he had totally walked out of the Hundred Years War. “Long Form,” he told me, “Both sides.” I groaned.
It had been a long time since I’d done Yang Long Form. “Seriously?” I settled into Yùbèi, copying his motions, the water from the stream cool as I pulled it to my hands, let it flow with my heartbeat. “You know I’m like, good, at this, right?”
“Yes,” he agreed, mirroring me. “But you’re here to learn, are you not? I told you last night, Avatar. Bloodbending is precision. You must be in utter control of yourself and your emotions.” Together, we moved into Qǐ shì.
I couldn’t help but notice his right arm, hovering a foot below his left, shaking with each motion. His water never wavered.
“A single wrong shift of your finger could kill the person you’re healing. This isn’t chi. This is their blood. You can’t just change the direction over the meridians. If you struggle with precision, then the first thing you must train is precision.”
I still groaned at him.
When we finished, the sun had finally risen over the horizon all the way, and it glared into my eyes as we trudged back up to the house. Amon vanished, probably to get dressed, but before he left he handed me a tomato.
“To eat?” I asked, staring blankly at it. He tapped it on the stem.
“Suck the water out of it, but do it without puncturing the skin. I want it done before I’m back.”
I was having uncomfortable flashbacks to being seventeen and getting my ass kicked by Tenzin’s wind machine slat party slap fest. “Great,” I muttered. “Be the leaf. I guess.”
I got it, eventually. It took me almost as long as it took Amon to get dressed, and when he came back he took the tomato skin from me and eyed it closely, before he peeled it open and showed me the weirdly desiccated inside. “You forgot the water in the seeds,” he told me.
I was starting, for the first time, to realize maybe I was not totally sure what I was up against.
After lunch, my wife vanished into the barn with Lieu to go look at some machinery or other, and I was relieved to find that Amon didn’t start harping on about plants. Instead, he took me to the river again, and took a small orb of water, turning it in his hands. It was no larger than an orange, and he passed it over to me. “Break it into drops in hundreds. See what’s easy, and set that as a baseline. Your goal is going to be no less than a thousand drops that you can ice back and forth individually.”
I stared at him like he’d grown a second head. “What the hell,” I said, and dropped the orb. “What are you gonna do, spend the entire summer treating me like I’m a child? You’re talking to me like I’ve never bent in my life!” He stared at me, his mask blank and unreadable. “What am I supposed to learn from this, precision? To be able to not burst someone’s capillary?” Frustrated, I dragged my fingers back through my hair. “Amon, I’m not eight! I’m forty! I’m the Avatar. You could at least tailor the lessons to my level!”
He continued to stare at me in silence, and then he crossed his arms, held his cane shoved under his left arm. “Emotions control bending.”
“Yeah? I knew that when I was four.” I stared at him. “Are you going to lecture me about how I have to be calm while I’m healing? Look, just because you knew me when I was seventeen and I was so hotheaded I was probably about to set my own hair on fire doesn’t mean I’m still like that.” Amon kept looking at me, his mask unreadable, and then he sighed and lowered his head.
“Walk with me,” he said, and turned to go up the river. He kept walking, not waiting for me to join him, and I hesitated for a few fraught seconds before I started to move, following in his wake and joining him, grinding my teeth in frustration.
The water parted for us just enough to make walking on the streambed easy. He clearly needed it, his steps slower and more faltering than mine. He didn’t look at me as we walked, his eyes set somewhere far ahead, his right hand held out just in front of him to Bend a path forward. I just walked alongside him, slowing my footsteps.
The stream led around the side of the house and along the back field, and I looked at it as we walked past, stalks of corn and wheat waving in the breeze. We weren’t that far from the ocean, I realized, looking out towards the east as we hit the top of the rise. It was a clear day, and in the far distance I could see a glimmer of silver on the horizon, just glowing along the edge of the curvature of the planet. If it was windy, you could probably smell it—the salt tang against the roof of your open mouth.
Still Amon walked, until we’d passed what was the edge of their property, out past the back field, and the cultivated land turned to nature, shrubs and grasses and wildflowers peppering the fields. There wasn’t any kind of forest here, just thick banks of verdure on either side of the stream. It began to deepen the further up we went, until it was up to our shins, and then our knees, our trousers getting soaked.
“So...” I tried, as Amon made a waterspout to lift him up a small waterfall, about two feet, and I followed, scrambling after him. “Are you going to...talk? Drop some wisdom on me, or whatever?”
“I’m not one for wisdom,” he replied, still not looking at me. “I’m not a particularly wise person. For example, I probably shouldn’t be doing this.” I paused, my foot hovering above the ground.
“Wh—“
Finally, he looked at me. “I assume you know I’m dying,” he said. The way you say something like I assume you know the sky is blue. There was very little inflection to his voice; nothing of fear or agony. He was stating a fact. Without fear. “Lieu prefers that I remain as carefully sedate as possible, so I avoid dying any sooner.” I could hear the humor in his voice this time, a gentle amusement on the part of his husband. Like Amon avoiding expending needless energy would give him extra time.
“Yeah,” I said, finally, rejoining his pace again. “Asami kind of...let that on.” We kept walking as I chewed over my words. “Do you know how long?”
“Perhaps midwinter of next year.” He glanced at me again. “Korra, don’t turn this into an agony. I’m dying because of what I and my brother did. I breathed a great deal of gasoline fumes and chemical smoke the day he killed himself. That I lasted as long as I have is a miracle.” He kept walking, the rise the house was on turned into a proper hill now, until we came to a waterfall.
All told, we’d probably been walking about an hour.
Amon pulled up a seat of ice, and I followed suit, sitting down directly in the water, since I didn’t need to worry about a fragile body the way that he did. The water here at the edges of the falls came up about to my breasts once I was sitting in it, and I could feel it relaxing me.
“You’re not a child,” Amon said.
We both stared into the waterfall.
“Bloodbending isn’t meant for precision,” he continued. “At least, not our present iteration. Perhaps some lost practitioners used it as such, but the version Hama developed was meant to kill. She wanted revenge on her captors and the world, and she made sure she had the weapon for it.”
“Katara told me about her,” I said. “How they met, and how she had to fight Hama with it. She—Katara told me she’d never felt ashamed of her Bending the way she did that night.”
“I never met her, but my father told stories of his grandmother.” I’d always suspected, but— “Hama taught my grandmother Bloodbending from as soon as she could Bend. It was meant to be a protection. To make sure she could hurt anyone who came anywhere near her, but it was done with cruelty. She taught my father. And my father taught me.” He held up his right hand, held it out in front of him, and clenched his fist. “Four generations, Korra, of rage. Four generations of children who grew up knowing that the one thing the world cared about was pain.
“Hama thought of Bloodbending as a tool for torture, and that’s all it’s been used for in my life.” He lowered his hand, sighed. “I’m not treating you like a child, I’m trying to find a way to put a sheathe on a naked sword. You want me to give you a weapon that could kill everyone you ever meet without you even trying. Every Bender, even the best, occasionally let their control slip.”
“The Avatar state,” I whispered, as it all came together in my head. “If I Bloodbent in the Avatar state, not using it intentionally, if my life was in danger...” I trailed off as a cold realization settled into the pit of my stomach. All the times I’d had to use the Avatar state without my own control, when it had taken over to protect me.
In the Avatar state, I could divert a typhoon; I could redirect a volcano.
“Oh, Spirits,” I whispered.
“You are very much not a child,” Amon said softly. “If you want to be able to use Bloodbending to heal, we have to turn it from a sword to a scalpel, and make it as precise as it can be. You cannot learn to Bloodbend the way that I did.” I pressed my face into my hands, and let out a shaking breath. I could see it in my mind’s eye—if not me, someone else. Some other Avatar. What if Aang had been able to Bloodbend? What if he’d done it during the War? Cities were growing all around the world; what if someone tried to assassinate me or a future Avatar?
I could kill literally thousands of people in a single block in the right part of Republic City.
“Okay,” I said, staring into the swirling water of the falls. “Maybe you’ve got a point.”
Amon laughed. “I probably went about it wrong. You’re not the sort of person who can just be told to do something and have it work.” He was right about that. “I had thought that if I broke Bloodbending down to the fundaments, there might be a way to prevent it from being as easily accessible a weapon. When using chi for healing it’s systemic, but, reversing and turning it to precision rather than total competence—“
“If I only used Bloodbending in localized areas, responding to the stimuli of the situation, I wouldn’t have the skill to control an entire body. That wouldn’t be learned. So even if I did somehow use it during the Avatar state, all I’d do is like, break an arm or something.” I paused, added, “Hopefully.” I finally lifted my head from my arms and looked back at him.
I found that he was watching me, his chin on his hand, his eyes unreadable behind his mask.
I wondered what he saw.
“Yeah, okay.” I pushed up off of the riverbed and pulled the water that had gotten into my clothes off my body and back into the river. “So. I need to be able to pinch shut individual veins and activate single muscles first. Think small. Then stuff like how to make organs function, or how hard to squeeze a heart, and all that other stuff only once I can do the real tiny things.”
“It’s astonishing to me,” Amon said, his voice frank, “How greatly you have changed for the better.”