Chapter Text
the du mai, also called the "governing vessel" is one of the eight extraordinary meridian systems, and stores and nourishes all the yang energy in the body as well as nourishing all yang meridians. as the liver is the root of yang energy in the body it has particular control over the liver. due to its pathway through the spine, it is used to strenghen the spine, back, and brain.
Amon told me to sleep in. I would have anyway, and when I woke the sun was already high in the sky outside the windows. Asami shifted against me, warm, her sleep shirt rucked up above her ribs, her fingers sliding under my shorts. “Hi,” she whispered into my mouth, and let me push her shirt the rest of the way up, feel the soft shape of her breasts against my hands. Asami wrapped her other arm around my neck, pulled me closer.
“Hi,” I replied, and rolled her over, smiling as I burrowed my face into the crook of her neck, kissing the soft skin over the hollow of her throat, let her pull down my shorts. “Miss me?”
When we finally got up, neither Lieu nor Amon were anywhere in the house. Asami went to take a morning bath while I headed down to the river to start Long Form again. Wherever the two men were, I couldn’t see them, but could hear their voices, muffled and distant.
By the time I finished Long Form, Asami was dressed, her hair pulled back in a headband. She hadn’t put on lipstick, wearing what she liked to call her greasemonkey gear: a pair of shorts that had at some point been mine, kneepads, sensible workboots, a flannel shirt tied around her waist and a sports bra, one leg of her glasses tucked down her cleavage.
Since there was nobody around to see me do it, I pressed a kiss there, too. Asami groaned as she rolled her eyes, but slung one arm over my shoulder as we went together to find our hosts.
They were in the barn, Amon wearing grey and brown instead of red and black today, sitting on a low stool next to the body of their old-style tractor. Lieu’s legs were visible only from the knee down sticking out from under the chassis. “Gimme an eight,” he said, putting one hand out, waggling it until Amon handed him the requested wrench. When we came in the door, Heng squawked and leapt down off of the tractor cab, bounced off of Amon’s good shoulder, making him oof, flapped her wings twice, and landing on Asami’s head.
“Prrt,” she said. “Yang.”
Asami produced some bonito flakes from somewhere. Heng licked them off of her fingers, purring like a freight train.
“How are you feeling?” Amon asked, his voice almost too light. I stretched, shrugged, cracking my back and shoulders. I didn’t look at him, although I could feel him watching me. Asami crouched down, pulled the second creeper out, and slid underneath the tractor next to Lieu.
“Tired,” I settled on eventually. “I’m too old to stay up all night.”
“Ha,” Amon’s voice was bone-dry. I rolled my eyes. “How lucky you are that today is your day off.” He hadn’t mentioned that previously. “We need all the hands we can get for market day.”
“They’re having a sprinkler exhibition!” Lieu said, excitedly, voice muffled by the tractor. “I’ve been looking forward to stealing schematic ideas for months!”
“I’m sitting right next to you,” Asami replied. Lieu jostled like she’d elbowed him. “I’m literally right here. I can get you sprinklers.”
“Future Industries irrigation systems are shit.” The sniff Lieu gave was imperious and disdainful. “No offense, Asami.”
“None taken.”
“Ping’s been sending me some schematics, she has this idea about using water pressure and a multi-valve system to set up independent heads that can imitate Waterbending to better support root intake, and she wants me to compare what they’re selling out here to what’s going in Ba Sing Se. She thinks that we could make it work with rotating heads but I’m almost certain we’d need it to be a laid ground line to get proper pressure.” I lost track of the dialogue after that, Lieu and Asami running down a line of discussion I couldn’t follow even if I tried.
“Are you sure I don’t need to go water everything?” I asked Amon when he stood, limping carefully past me and out of the barn. I followed him back toward the house, since I still had to get dressed.
“I did everything that has to be done today.” He waved a hand at me. “If you don’t want a day off, consider your task to be listening to heartbeats at the market. You kept getting tripped up by my chi lines last night, you need more practice isolating blood first.”
He was right. I needed the practice.
I sighed and went to change.
By the time I was done, Lieu and Asami had pushed the old tractor out of the barn and Asami was hooking up a trailer while Lieu was trying to get the engine to start. “You know we brought a car, right?” I asked. Lieu waved dismissively at me.
“I need to get these harvester blades sharpened.”
“I can Metalbend.”
“Do you know how sharp the blades have to be?” Lieu cocked both his eyebrows at me. No. No I didn’t. “Besides, we need a bunch of shit anyway. Hay. Pipes. Like a dozen pipes. Food. Cloth. First aid supplies. Market day is an undertaking for which you bring the big guns.” He looked at the tractor, patted the roof of the cab like he was patting one of the ostritchhorses. “Now we’ve fixed her oil we won’t have any problems.” His pale eyes were soft with affection, and I shook my head—no wonder he and Asami got along so well. They were both such…engineers.
Asami was cleaning herself off by the utility sink. I leaned against the barn door, watching her as she pulled her headband off, finger-combed water through her hair, pulled it back on. She looked beautiful like this, her wavy grey hair damp and sticking to the back of her neck, the arc of one sharp hipbone just barely visible, bits of engine grease stuck black under her nails. She hadn’t repainted them since we had gotten to the farm, so there was chipping red lacquer here and there, perfect in its imperfections. She had to wear a belt to keep my shorts on, the waistband from my three-sizes-too-big clothes bunching around the buckle, and sweat kissed the top of her kneepads.
Asami caught me looking and raised her eyebrows, two perfect arches, as she pulled lipstick from her pocket. She kept eye contact as she puckered her lips and—just as she always had, two smooth, perfect flicks of her wrist—put her lipstick on. Blew me a kiss. Winked.
Amon ruined the moment by smacking me on the back of the calf with his cane. I yelped, jumping out of his reach as he walked past me, rubbing the offended spot. “Flirting!” He shook his cane. “On my lawn!”
Asami laughed when I made a rude gesture at his back. Lieu, who was half into the cab of the tractor already, slid down to meet Amon, slung one arm around his waist. “Hello, handsome.” His deep voice was husky, his eyes half-lidded, “Can I offer you a ride?”
Amon smacked him on the calf, too.
Rather than sit on the trailer for every rattly bump down the road into town, Asami and I walked hand-in-hand along the side of the road, taking our time long after Lieu and Amon had disappeared, the tractor wheezing and thunking all the way. It was a beautiful day, clear and warm, and it was nice to just be there, as us, together. There was never enough time in the day for us to be together.
When we reached the market, I waved Asami off, promising I’d find her. It was a big, but nothing like Republic City—I couldn’t lose her, not really. People had come in from all over the countryside to see new inventions, greet old friends, buy food, cloth, seeds, and all the other requirements of country life that didn’t just sit in stock at small family stalls and stores. There was everything from an open-air food vendor stall (where I spied Lieu, midway through haggling over fried eel) to wholesale sellers; there was even a large tent set up for livestock.
It was easy to do what Amon had told me to—there were plenty of heartbeats; more than I could ever possibly have needed. It was easy to get lost in the festival atmosphere, wandering around incognito under my big sunhat and with my hands tucked into my sleeves.
It was always nice, to simply be someone, another face in the crowd.
Eventually, though, as it started to get later into the afternoon, licking salt from my fingers from a vendor-snack lunch, I turned my feet toward my own errand.
Amon’s words from the river had been weighing on me. He’d spoken so flippantly—“I assume you know I’m dying,”—without any inflection. Like he wasn’t thinking about it. I was the Avatar, not a mind reader. I couldn’t know what he was thinking.
But I could guess.
And it seemed like…he wasn’t as into the idea of dying as he made himself out to be.
It had been sitting in the back of my head all day, ever since we had woken up. I’d willingly done Long Form because I needed to take time while the thoughts rattled around my head. When I had first come to Republic City to learn Airbending with Tenzin, I had hated meditation because I’d somehow gotten the idea that you had to not think about anything while you did it. Once I’d tried thinking at the same time it had all gotten so much easier, and all through Long Form I had been considering Amon’s lungs, his time limit, and what I could do for him.
I’d concentrated so hard that by the time I stopped, I’d been Bending air, not water.
The town center was large enough that there were some permanent, small-town, farm-friendly shops. One of them was exactly what I was looking for, and I stepped in under the awning, shading my eyes as they adjusted. Inside the shop it was sweltering, and as I blinked my watering eyes to clear my vision a woman approached from inside. “Can I help you?” She called, her voice pitched to carry over the sounds of fire and the banging of hammering tongs.
“Any chance you’re looking for an apprentice?”
As my eyes finally adjusted I saw a woman about my age staring back at me. She was Fire Nation through and through, her dark hair cut very short, in simple cotton work clothes and a smock, soot peppering her face. She raised her eyebrows, staring at me like she didn’t know what to make of me.
I couldn’t blame her. In Republic City I hardly turned heads, but out here it was hard to guess whether it was me being obviously the Avatar that did it or if it was the fact that I was a fat middle aged Water Tribe woman with a short wolf-tail covered in tattoos wearing only cut-off jorts and a happi over a bra. I hadn’t even worn shoes today, wanting my feet in the dirt. Republic City through and through, that was me—you could take the girl out of the metropolis but you couldn’t take the metropolis out of the girl.
After a moment longer spent studying me, like she was trying to put two and two together but was missing half the integers, the woman at last said, “No. We aren’t. We offer classes.” She pointed at a sign on the wall. “Non-Firebenders or Earthbenders sign up there.”
I stared at her. I almost opened my mouth—and then froze, hesitated, glanced down at myself.
Yeah, okay. I could give her that one. The Avatar was an illustrious title that usually required I wear shoes, and also a shirt. I looked back up at her, shrugged.
“I am a Firebender. Lightning, energy redirection, and breathing fire, too. I mostly do exhibition combat and a little piece-meal welding here and there, but my wife and I are here visiting her uncles, so I thought if you need an extra pair of hands…” She continued studying me for a moment, shutting one eye and squinting as if to bring me clearly into focus, and then shrugged.
“You look pretty Water Tribe to me.”
“I get that a lot.” Apparently assuaged for the moment, she lifted the counter up and gestured me through.
“Let’s see what you can do, then.”
I knew the process of glassblowing, albeit only in theory. The actual process and creation of the glass was not what I was interested in, although never say no to a new skill—even if it never comes in handy for me, some far-future Avatar may one day be in a tight spot and be like hey, I think Avatar Korra knew how to blow glass! (Probably not. Whatever. It’s fine.) Glassblowers were like Water Tribe swimmers, the really good ones where Bending didn’t matter, who could hold their breath for like ten minutes. That kind of fine breath control, the power over the lungs, was what I wanted.
Who understood the lungs better than the people who used them for a living? Amon’s problem was his lungs. It had to be some form of chemical pneumonia—his bronchioles were probably, to use the technical term, super fucked. Listening to him move around, he was always out of breath, always tiring, gasping, wheezing, or coughing.
As I stood there trying to form a bubble on the end of the blowing pipe, I thought about all the people who I had seen in Republic City over the last twenty years presenting with similar symptoms. It was common, particularly in people who had worked in waste management or any job that required exposure to chemicals—plenty of Future Industries employees from before the Occupational Safety Standards Act was passed presented similarly. In simple or basic cases caught early, healers could slow or even halt the damage, re-routing the chi to prioritize the remaining function of the lungs, but it required regular treatments and was never a sure bet. Later stages, like what Amon was dealing with, were a death sentence.
One way or another, it ended in total respiratory failure.
I still remembered the year before: Asami calling me from the village phone, her voice crackly and broken up down the shitty line, frantic because when she’d gotten there she’d found Amon all but on his death bed, drowning in the fluid in his lungs as his son desperately fought to keep him alive.
How they’d managed it, I still didn’t know.
Next time, he wouldn’t be so lucky.
“Korra!” Asami jumped halfway out of her own skin when I blew over the shell of her ear, elbowing me in the diaphragm so hard I had to double over wheezing in the middle of my laughter. In the end, I had to crouch down next to the trailer beside where she was sitting on top of a pile of cloth. “Where the hell did you come from? I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”
“Sorry,” I managed, when I’d gotten my breath back. “I got distracted. Lost track of time.” Asami gave me a look, but it was a I don’t know why I married you look not a I thought you had died and been eaten by wolfbears look.
“I told you she’d show up,” Lieu was reclining on the driver’s seat of his tractor, chewing on a piece of straw, his feet stuck up on the wheel. “We’re in the middle of nowhere, she wasn’t going to run off to cavort naked in someone’s collard greens.” He paused and lifted up the brim of his hat to stare down at me, eyes narrowed. “Never mind. I forgot who I’m talking about. You would do that.”
“Give me some credit.” I tilted back the brim of my own hat so he could see me wink. “I’d never cavort naked in collard greens. I’d pick something classier, like carrots.”
“How are carrots—“ Lieu squeezed his eyes shut and sighed. “How old are you.”
I did not dignify that with an answer.
In the end, short of borrowing the car (which would have given the whole game up) I had to resort to Earth-skating to get to and from town. It was like being back in Water and Firebending training again, only instead of sitting in the middle of the White Lotus compound and waiting for my teachers to come to me, I was running back and forth between caring for an entire farm and constant Bloodbending theoretical practice and apprenticing at a glassblowers.
Everyone knew something was up almost immediately.
I told Asami that night, of course, as soon as we’d gotten back to the house. I’d explained my plan as we were bathing, using the humidity and a little Airbending to keep anyone from overhearing.
Lieu confronted me at the end of the first week.
“You’ve been busy.”
He stood in the middle of the path, looking down at me like I was some ailing plant struggling in his garden. He leaned on his rake and picked at his teeth as he watched me, and I settled back on my heels, trying to catch my breath after racing back from town before Amon was finished watering the back field.
“You gonna…?” I gestured toward him, still gasping for breath.
“I’ll wait,” he swapped to digging the dirt out from under his nails. “You know what I want to talk to you about. No point in rushing you.” I nodded, head down, wiped sweat from my eyes, and finally pushed myself to my feet. “Come on,” Lieu said, jerking his head to the side. “We’re gonna go down and take a look at the foundations around the road at the river.”
“We are?”
“We are.”
Lieu led the way, as always planting his feet carefully as we climbed down the hill to the river. He didn’t walk in the water but alongside, on the shore, keeping himself on steady ground, his rake acting like a cane. When we reached the far end of the property up by the road, he sat down atop the earthworks that held up the bridge over the rake and patted the spot next to him.
When I hesitated, he snorted. “I don’t bite, Korra. Well. Not you, at least.”
“Gross.” I hopped up beside him and watched as he reached into the pocket of his overalls and pulled out a bamboo-leaf wrapped package, unfolding it to reveal a small stack of senbei. He offered me one and I took it gratefully, still worn out from Earth-skating.
We ate through the whole stack in silence until the leaves were empty and he shook the crumbs out into the river for the fish, folded it up, tucked it back into his pocket again. Lieu crossed his arms and took a deep breath. “So, Avatar Korra Sato, what dumbass idea have you got rattling around in your brain now?”
“I think you’ll like it?”
“That you feel the need to start this way sure doesn’t make me think that I’ll like it.”
I rubbed the back of my neck and sighed. “Lieu, Amon’s dying.”
“Yep.” He didn’t sound any more afraid of this turn of events than Amon had. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. “In case you’d missed the memo, most people die when they get old and sick and injured. Amon is all three of those things.”
“He’s not old,” I snapped. Lieu looked at me, sharp eyebrows raised. “He’s not. He’s sixty! He could live another forty years!”
Lieu snorted, shook his head. “Yeah, maybe if he hadn’t been blown up twenty years ago. Korra, I was there. I’m the one that pulled him out of the ocean.” I blinked at him, not really sure what to say. “Tarrlok blew up the damn gas tank. He was basically charred meat and bone spars, and Amon wasn’t in much better shape. That he survived, even with a healer? Fucking miracle.” He gestured up at where the moon was visible at the horizon. “Yue really likes that man, but just because she likes a man doesn’t mean he’ll live forever. Everyone dies, Korra.”
“But he doesn’t have to. Look, the damage to his lungs? That’s chemical pneumonia. We’ve got treatments for it in Republic City—Waterbenders have been researching it for twenty years. If I combine Bloodbending with Healing, I can probably start the process of restoring functionality to his lungs a little bit at a time. If he can breathe—“
Lieu sighed and rubbed a hand over his eyes. “Amon…” he sighed again. “Spirits, that idiot. I told him this was a bad idea.”
“I thought you told him this was a good idea.” Amon had said, when we had arrived, that the only reason he was going to teach me to Bloodbend was that Lieu had pled my case. If Lieu thought this was a bad idea…had that just been an excuse?
“Not Bloodbending. I’m not sure I think it’s a good idea, either, for the record.” Lieu dropped his hand, looking up into the sky as a cloud went overhead, casting the farm into shade. “Bloodbending is nine-tenths murder and one-tenth useful, but Amon’s lived his entire life terrified of the first set, and now he’s dying and—Korra, I don’t want him to die and go to the Spirit World believing that the only thing he’s ever been good for is causing harm to others. I want him to die hoping that he’s started the process of undoing the poison his family made so that he can go in peace.
“I’m not seeing my husband turn into a hungry ghost, all right?”
“Okay?” I shrugged. “So what’s the bad idea, then?”
“He’s dying,” Lieu reiterated, leaning into the second word. “Korra, Amon is dying. And I don’t mean the oh, someday we’re all going to die, way—I mean—“ he cut himself off and bent his head to rub at his temples. “Spirits, I’m trying not to sound either flippant or furious about this. Look.” He dropped his hands again and stared down into the water below rather than look at me. “You know who his father was.”
“Yeah?”
“Think about what kind of a childhood he had.”
“Tarrlok told me about some of it, back during the Revolution.”
“Then let me fill the rest of it in for you, in brief.” Lieu shut his eyes as he spoke, like he was trying to pretend he wasn’t conjuring up the ghosts of Tarrlok and Yakone and Hama, even though we both knew he was. “His father was a bastard. He tortured his children every single day, in every single way, from the day he realized they could Bend until the day Amon left. Teaching you how to Bloodbend, even in theory? He’s reliving that.”
“Okay?” I looked down into the water, staring at our reflections. I looked tired, overworked from balancing too many things at once, but Lieu looked exhausted. In the water, his face was even more drawn, his skin looser, his eyes hollow in his narrow face. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because his lungs are fucked, Korra. I know what you’re doing—this is a small town. Tana knows you’re staying here and she reached out to ask me about what your deal was.” I cursed under my breath; of course the glassblowers had a relationship with the farmers. I always forgot that everyone knew everyone out in rural communities like this. This wasn’t Republic City. “I can do the math. You’re trying to figure out how to save Amon’s lungs. I’m going to save you a lot of time and trouble: you can’t.”
Lieu sounded so dead and flat, so resigned, that I had to cover my face when tears burned at the backs of my eyes.
“He’s done everything, Korra. Healing, Spiritbending, realigning the chi, Breathbending, even, Asami connected us with Ikki a few years back. We’ve been to Ba Sing Se for herbal medicine. Amon nearly went to the North Pole to try to connect with some of the Masters, but he’s too weak. There’s nothing anyone can do, Korra. His lungs are done. Maybe he could get a transplant if he was stronger, but he’s not, because the rest of his body is…you’ve seen his arm.” I had. His right shoulder was a ruin.
“How long does he have left, then? He said midwinter of next year, maybe—“
“Frankly, I’d be surprised if he made it through to the new year. After you leave, our kids are coming home to stay. Asami might stay too. How long it ends up being really depends on how long he’s willing to keep up palliative care—he said if he has to start Bending the fluid out of his lungs more often than once a night, he’s done.”
“What!?” I sat up straight, boggling at Lieu. “What do you mean he’s Bending the fluid out of his lungs?”
“Korra, you know what late-stage respiratory failure looks like.” Lieu straightened, tugging on his mustache. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do. I really do. It means—it means a lot, that you care enough to try to help him.” His smile was sad as he set his other hand on my shoulder. “You’re a good kid, and you’re not half-bad as Avatars go, either. But you’re not a Spirit. You’re just a person.”
Lieu caught my eyes, and I realized, for the first time, that the only person who hadn’t come to terms with reality was me.
“You can’t save everyone. Maybe you could do some good for Amon; I don’t know. But you need to know this is palliative care. He’s going to die, Korra. Sooner than later. You’ll be able to do more for him if you stop thinking about this as saving his life and start thinking about giving him the best of the time he’s got left. There’s nothing wrong with dying in your bed surrounded by the people you love, but Amon’s been there too many times, Korra. He wants to die on his own two feet, doing what he loves, in control of his own life and his own destiny. If you can give him a chance at that, it’d be priceless.
“Don’t try to make him live, Korra. Try to make him thrive for however long he has left.”
“This sucks,” I said, as he wrapped his arm the rest of the way around my shoulders and pulled me over into a hug. I buried my tears in the side of his overalls. “This fucking sucks.”
“Life sucks sometimes,” Lieu agreed. “You make the best of what you’ve got. That’s all you can do, and you’re doing that for him. You don’t have to, but you are.”
“It’s not his fault!” My voice cracked as I said it. “It’s—none of this was ever his stupid fault! Society failed Non-Benders! Me! I failed! Not him—him too, but not. Not like Republic City did, not like I did, not like the world did. Why is the punishment for doing the right thing the wrong way this?”
Lieu sighed into my hair as he leaned his sharp chin atop my head. “Because life isn’t fair, Avatar Korra. Anybody who tells you different is selling something.”