Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

 the yamen point, called the "mutism gate of the governing vessel", is located at the top of the spine just below the C1 (atlas) vertebrae. this point loosens the tongue, relaxes the spine, and reawakens the unconscious.

The sound of hail woke me.

Or, rather, the conspicuous lack of the sound of hail woke me. I lay on the futon, Asami snoring softly next to my shoulder, her hair stuck in her mouth, and stared up at the ceiling above my head. I could hear the wind screaming and roaring, and the distant plinking of hail. I could feel the pressure system coalesced overhead, raging and battering between the skies and the earth, the wind that whipped around the farmhouse. The distant hail, pounding out of the sky, was against the reach of my consciousness almost like cool dew on my skin.

I lay, hands folded on my stomach, the blankets a little knotted around my knees and ankles, and tried to figure out what it was that had woken me. Idly, I picked my nose, eyes closed as I dozed. The hail wasn’t nearby, but it was nearby, just strangely distant. Separate. The pressure system was directly overhead, the cloudburst of the summer storm pounding down from above, but it wasn’t touching us. There was no hail crashing into the roof.

My body, accustomed as it was, as it had always been, to the drives and pull of the tides and precipitation, expected the hail to be nearby. My Bending reached for it, had woken me trying to grasp it, but the ice wasn’t close enough to get an easy hand on. I flicked whatever I’d dug out of my nose onto the floor and rolled to my feet, tugging myself out of my blankets.

Asami made a questioning noise, not really waking, and I shushed her, pulling away. It was chilly in the way of intense summer storms, when the barometer dropped hard and fast, temporarily cutting to the bone until the storm went overhead, and I tugged on a sweater from where I’d tossed it haphazardly over the back of the deskchair the night before and pulled my hair out after it, sliding the door to our room open.

The main room was silent and empty, except for the coals glowing in the firepit and the steaming kettle hanging above it, but the front door was open, and I went that way, leaning against the doorframe and looking out into the storm.

He was sitting in his large basket chair stuffed with pillows, his feet up on a small stool. He looked a lot smaller like that, even though he was half a head taller than me even in his dotage, dwarfed and thin and blue-veined in the cool night air. His shirt was old, worn cotton, dark red and faded with age, and not fully belted, just hanging around his chest. He’d wrapped himself in a flannel blanket, and over his legs he’d draped one of Lieu’s leather jackets, this one probably older than I was, the leather cracked and blistered and tearing in places along seams. His hood wasn’t up and his mask was left off, so I could see the scarring that twisted his entire head and chest, pale in the light from the open door.

He had a little hair left, but not much. A few grey, coarse strands in a hunk no wider than my finger fell over his face, still thick. He was holding a cup of tea in his hands, the clay cup tucked between his thighs, steaming.

He was probably keeping it hot.

We sat in silence for some time as the hail pounded above and I stared up into the sky and the darkness, trying to make out the edges of the bubble he’d placed above the farm. I couldn’t really see it, although I could feel it, sort of, there in the distance, maybe twenty feet above our heads, clearing the house and the radio antennae and everything on the farm but the trees. “Did I wake you?” He asked after a time, his voice hoarse and quiet.

“The not-hail did,” I admitted. “How far do you have it held off?”

“Over the fields,” he said. He closed his eyes as we spoke, gently rocked his wicker chair back and forth, the body creaking slightly on its coasters. “It’s starting to give me a headache. I really thought this hail was going to be a quick thing.” It never usually lasted. “But it’s shown no signs of petering off.”

I grunted, and we kept standing there. “Want me to take over?” I offered, after a while, and he made a quiet noise that sounded sort of like a denial, so I didn’t press it. “Don’t burn yourself out,” I added, and he laughed.

“You’re not here to teach me, Avatar. I know what I’m doing. Luckily, I can sleep as long and late as I want tomorrow.” He turned to look at me then, a half-smile touching the remaining side of his mouth, his teeth and gums visible through the hole in his cheek on the right. He cocked what would once have been an eyebrow at me. He had to crane his neck a bit from his angle to see me properly, the cataracts in his right eye making him mostly blind on the side I was standing on. I was also talking toward his deaf ear, which was probably part of why he was craning so far. “I have an apprentice to water the fields for me.”

“Don’t get used to it, old man.”

Amon laughed, brief and quiet. “If you’re going to be awake, do you want to sit until it’s done? Feel free to reheat the kettle and bring out a bench.” I hesitated, and then went back inside and did as he’d suggested, pouring a cup of tea from the kettle, dropping in some leaves from the bowl beside the firepit, and I got the bench that sat next to the water pump outside the front door to sit beside him.

It was strangely quiet, in this pocket he’d made in the storm. Outside it the hail and wind were screaming, a gale trying to tear the world up by its roots. Inside it, we could hear that noise and we were still buffeted by the wind, but the storm proper was distant, held at arm’s length by the pressure he was exerting to keep the crops from being destroyed by the hail. Neither of us spoke, we just drank our tea and sat and watched the storm at the bottom of the front walk.

He’d extended the bubble just enough to keep our car from getting hailed on. I found myself smiling a little.

“So,” I started, gauging him to see if he’d talk. Amon, the way I remembered him, wasn’t taciturn—when he’d been leader of the Equalists, he’d used words as weapons. Now, as an old and sick man, he rarely spoke more than he had to. Lieu, who had once only talked in his shadow and was silent otherwise, did most of the talking for them now. He made a quiet noise of acquiescence, and I continued, “You just…boiling that water?”

“For the tea?” He laughed again. “Yes, I’m keeping it hot. Are you just warming the cup?” I looked down at the clay, which I was, actually, keeping hot with my hands. I flushed slightly. “Shortcuts are sometimes the best way, when you can find them.”

“I guess I forget a lot, that not everyone can.”

“It always has been your greatest weakness.” The way he said it, it wasn’t really a judgment. It was more like gentle chiding, reminding me that I’d forgotten to put my turn signal on or that I’d left a window open overnight. He wasn’t disappointed in me; he just knew I could do better.

“Have I gotten better?” I asked, after a few minutes.

“Yes.” I looked over at him, and found him staring straight ahead, into the storm. His eyes, one grey with cataracts that had overcome his ability to heal them back, and one still the pale ice-blue of a glacial core, were seeing something that was beyond both of us. “Korra, you don’t have to live that role. You never have, and you never truly could, even if you never Bent again in your life. The experiences of Non-Benders are not ones that can be replicated by even the most fervent attempts at belief.” He took a long sip of his tea, and looked at me. “I would know. Be yourself, and give them voices. If they can’t speak, give them a platform to talk. If they can’t stand there, only then can you put yourself in their shoes and say their words.

“Were you not one to think with all the elements first, and without them later, you would not be the Avatar.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled, looking down at the cup in my hands. “I know. But you still make me feel like a kid.”

“We’re all children, really, in the grand scheme of the cosmos. I’ve just got more practice at it than you.” He paused, and then shrugged his left shoulder slightly, the whole one. “When I was your age, I thought I had it all figured out.”

I laughed at him. “Yeah. Trust me. I remember.”

“Then let me be a lesson to you, young Avatar.” Amon shook his finger at me. “Don’t go trying to start any cults, religious sects, or terrorist organizations. These are poorly planned diversions, and will end with you exploding.”

“Do you regret it?” I asked. It slipped out without my meaning it to, and we stared at each other for a moment. Amon made a strange, unreadable face at me, and looked back over his farm into the storm. He didn’t say anything, and I was almost getting ready to apologize for being insensitive and brash when he said:

“Yes.”

Amon’s face was as dark and impenetrable as the storm was, and he did not look at me as he spoke. He didn’t really look at anything, even though his gaze was turned towards the storm. He seemed to be looking inside, deep into himself. “Not for the reasons you think,” he added, lifting his right hand, haltingly, to touch the side of his face, where his skin was marbled, twisted, and ruined by scars and the inelastic whorls of decades-old burns. “Pain and deformity get easier with time. They start to become a part of the world around us, and while they do not ease, it does become easier to find yourself in that agony, and carve from it peace. No.”

Amon shook his head, lowered his hand. “I regret it because I should have always told the truth, from the beginning. I did not have the voice to speak for the voiceless, not without them knowing who and what I was. I am, and always will be, a Waterbender. It is a fundamental part of my very base self. I should have given the stage to those who could not make a stage for themselves. I should never have allowed mob mentality to rule myself and others; I should never have attacked children; I should never have tried to break those who were already themselves broken.”

Overhead, thunder rumbled, low and basso profondo. It made the hair on the back of my neck rise, static, and the window shutters of the farmhouse rattle.

“I once told Lieu I would do it again, because it brought us to happiness in the end. But I was younger, then, and foolish. I couldn’t see outside my own front door. No, Korra, I would not do it again. If I could go back and restart this life, I would lift them up on my shoulders and let my brothers and sisters use me as their weapon, rather than demand they become mine.

“There is nothing I regret more in this life than that I used the movement for equality as one for revenge.”

It was quiet, then, and after a moment, I felt the pressure abate, the bubble over our heads open. The rain came down, cold and heavy and drenching, and it crashed into both of us like a wave, like birthing blood, and I closed my eyes, felt it fold around my body as a friend.

I could hear Amon crying next to me, lost in the storm, and I reached out, set my hand on top of his without looking. I could feel his blood, pounding in his veins, hotter than it should be because of his constant fever, unable to sweat. He’d taught me, now, and I felt him turn his hand over beneath mine. I squeezed his fingers, and he squeezed back, and neither one of us said anything, in that enormous cacophony of sound, in that storm that felt like the end of the world.

Chapter Text

 the yang qiao mai, also called the "yang heel vessel" is one of the eight extraordinary meridian systems, and runs from the left ankle to the top of the skull, along the left side of the body. it is used to treat pain in the eyes and eye-related headaches, regulate the yang systems within the body, and can strengthen the lower limbs when afflicted with weakness.

I stared out the window of the car at the passing scenery, trees all lush and bright green with summer, until Asami jerked the parking brake upright and turned off the car engine. The Satomobile we’d driven out here was a newer model, not Asami’s old vintage from Hiroshi, specifically brought along because of the dirt cart-track roads, and it practically purred to silence.

“We’re here,” she said, eventually. “Do you want to get out of the car?”

I looked over at her and found her watching me, her expression unreadable. Asami had Hiroshi’s hair; it had gone grey about ten years ago, and now, just into our forties, she had a few streaks of proper white starting to grow out of her part, the waves of her hair falling to frame her narrow chin. She raised her eyebrows at me over the slim silver frames of her glasses. Stylish, always. “You could always go home.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But then I’d feel like a coward.”

She squeezed my knee, trying to be reassuring. “So, if it doesn’t work out, you go. But you can’t just sit in the car for the entire visit.” Asami took off her seatbelt, unlocked the driver’s side door, and pushed it open. She ducked back down to look at me. “Get out of the car, Korra.”

I groaned.

When I finally did get out of the car, Asami had already unloaded our bags out of the trunk and had heaved them up to the bottom of the front walkway and gone to meet one of our two hosts, who had come down the front path to greet her. Asami was leaning comfortably into his shoulder, her arm around his waist, laughing at something.

I looked down at my hands and closed my eyes. “Okay, Korra,” I said, hoping I would listen to myself. “Literally does not even rank on a top ten list of crazy terrifying things that you’ve done.”

It didn’t make me feel any better about this.

Eventually, I rounded the car, rubbing the back of my neck, and came up the front path to join them, Asami waiting for me with a patient, almost indulgent, look on her face.

“There she is, in the flesh.” The Lieutenant, whose name I still didn’t actually know, looked at me like he was appraising some ailing plant that was struggling in his garden. My memories of him young were sketchy, fleeting things, but I could see the man I’d first met by seeing him kick the ass of everyone I knew in the old man in front of me. He had a narrow, sharp face, with high, pronounced cheekbones and jowls, the skin hanging loose around the bottom of his neck and throat. His black hair had greyed and thinned—unsurprising, considering he had to be almost seventy—but his mustache, in all its absurd catfish glory, was still quite robust. Albeit almost entirely white.

He had the skin of a farmer, now, not a soldier; sun-beaten and leathered, peppered with liver spots and scars both old and new. Around his neck hung a betrothal necklace, well-cared for and clean, despite the amount of dust, dirt, mud, and general farm-mess that clung to the rest of his body. He was wearing a pair of canvas overalls, sandals, and an undershirt that sagged slightly off of his rickety frame despite the amount of muscle I could see under his thinning skin—he’d lost weight recently.

Right. Asami had mentioned he’d had a surgery.

“So,” The Lieutenant said, still appraising me. “Spirits, I always expect you to be taller. We’ve never been properly introduced.”

“No,” I agreed. Even three years before, at the unveiling ceremony, he and Amon had practically disappeared into thin air the minute they’d been able to. Asami had known exactly where to track them down, of course, but it had been a little unnerving. I bowed briefly, and he returned it, and then stuck out my hand to him. “Avatar Korra Sato. Just Korra is fine.”

He took my hand in his, and his grip was bone-crushing. He shook my hand like he meant to snap it off at the wrist, in one brief, brusque jerk. Businesslike. He didn’t even seem to intend to do it. His palms were scarred, his nails cracked and dirt-stained, but his hands were square all over with muscle. “Lieu Te Nan. Pretty much everyone just calls me Lieu.”

I stared at him. “Was that really,” I started. “Are you telling me that you. Is your name,” I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth, struggling with disbelief. “Was that a pun?”

He gave me a wry smile. “Got it in one, Avatar Korra. Let’s get your stuff up to the house, and then I can give you two the tour of the place.”

“Are you sure you should be carrying anything heavy?” Asami asked, and he waved a hand at her.

“Just don’t make me bend down to pick it up. I’m old, Asami. Not decrepit. It was my knees that got replaced, not my heart. Sure, give me something to carry.” I still gave him the lightest bag, but he took it without any complaint, leaning on a rake as he climbed the path back up to the house, warning us off of a loose paving stone as we went.

I had seen the farmhouse out the window of the car as we had driven up the road. It was on top of a small rise, the fields not visible from the road below, with a stream running along the edge of the property, turning a waterwheel as it passed by. It was an old house, in good repair, but rambling—it had been added onto numerous times in its life. There were all the buildings I expected to see at a farmhouse: goosehen coop, a small barn, a grain tower. No outhouses; yes a well.

There was plenty I wasn’t expecting, either. The working waterwheel, the solar panels on the roof, the electric wiring that arced overhead from telephone poles, plugging the farm into the grid.

The fact that it existed at all.

“My father built it, when he married my mother,” Lieu explained, as he led us up to the house. “It fell into disrepair between when my sister died and when we came back after the Revolution, but the majority of the structure is original. We just rebuilt it after the roof collapsed in, added some more rooms, the usual.” The outside was distinctly Earth Kingdom, but when we stepped inside the front door and into the main room, I could see a lot more Fire Nation inside, the colors of the wood more red than brown. Decoratively, it looked almost exactly like the way Asami and I had our house decorated back home. Mixed, just like most families were now.

The floor was raised up a few steps, probably for flooding, and Lieu kicked off his sandals at the door. I copied suit, and Asami knelt down to undo the zip up the backs of her boots, setting them carefully inside, away from excess dirt.

“I’ll spare you the history lesson,” Lieu continued, waving us after him, across the wide-open floor of the main room. It was enormous, with a traditional style fire pit and cushions in the center, a modern kitchen in one corner, and a standing table with chairs as well as floor cushions. The windows were papered over, letting in light but not bugs, and there were no less than six doors, two off of every side but the front. “You guys will stay in the guest bedroom. There’s not an attached bathroom, but it’s across the main room, between the kids’ rooms on the east side of the house. Asami can show you where it is, Korra.” He opened the door—paper, bamboo and wood, it slid along a track in the ground, and stepped into a small bedroom.

There was a dresser (three drawers) an open window, this one not papered, and against the long wall were several large desks side by side running the length of the room all the way to the outside window.

Asami immediately dumped one of her bags on it.

There wasn’t a bed, but instead a large open space and a futon inside a closet. “It’s the workroom when we don’t have guests,” Lieu explained. “Feel free to unpack, wash, piss, whatever. I need to go finish with the front garden, and then I can give you a tour.”

I hesitated, following his lead as I set down the several heavy bags I’d been carrying at the corner of the wall. He was wiping the back of his neck with a handkerchief that had been tied through his belt. “Is Amon...” I began, worried for the first time maybe we’d come too late, or something.

“He’s fine,” Lieu replied. “He’s just busy. He doesn’t like to be interrupted when he’s working.”

“He has a patient here?”

“No, no.” Lieu waved a hand. “Not right now, anyway. No, he’s watering the back field. We can go check on him in a bit, but he probably won’t be done until dinner. So feel free to take your time.” I glanced toward Asami, who was already unpacking. She didn’t seem in any rush—but she’d been here, had found it normal.

I was the only one standing on the outside.

I hesitated. “Where’s the restroom?” I asked.

Lieu jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Across the main room. There’s the two doors to the kids bedrooms, just go in the one on your right and its the door to the left.”

“Okay, thanks.” Just make it normal. Don’t push.

We washed and unpacked, and I tried really hard to not become more impatient. We’d come all this way; driven out of the city, away from the world, Asami and I had put all of our responsibilities on an indefinite hold. I hadn’t even told anyone where we were going, a kind of secret visit that Tenzin had been practically climbing the walls to know more about. And now we were here.

And I was shoving my underwear into dresser drawers.

“I can feel your stress,” Asami said, from where she was piling wrenches and screwdrivers on the desks. “They’re not going anywhere. Just relax.”

“Easy for you to say,” I grumbled back. “They’re practically your foster parents. They tried to kill me.”

“And now they’re old men who live on a farm and curse at goosehens; the more relaxed you are the easier it’ll be.” She turned away from the desk and came over, set her hands on my shoulders, squeezed them. “Stop worrying. Stop freaking out. If it gets to be too much, you can always leave. You get along fine with Kuvira, you can handle this, too.”

Her hands, warm and strong on my shoulders, pressed the stress back, and I leaned into her touch until my head bumped into her shoulder, closed my eyes. “Yeah,” I sighed. “Okay. Let’s go find Lieu.”

He was standing in front of the house, cajoling a goosehen he had tucked under one arm and holding a basket full of cornmeal under the other. He stopped, midway through a tirade, and looked up to see us. “Let me go put this in the silo,” he said, gently dropping the hen back to the ground. It wandered off, squawking at him, ruffled. There was a story there, but I could guess, given by the bits of cornmeal on the bird’s beak and forehead, what had happened. “Let me show you around a little.”

The tour he gave to us of the front of the farm was brief and succinct. He pointed out the least- and most-friendly of the goosehens and the ostritchhorses, dumped the grain into the silo, and explained the way the house was organized a bit. He talked about the front gardens—home-crops, mostly, for subsistence only unless they had a significant excess, and their rice plot which just grew for themselves. He rambled about some of the more recent renovations done to the house with the help of their kids, and then, when we’d seen the majority of the property, Lieu took us around the side and paused.

“Just be as quiet as you can,” he said. “Amon doesn’t like interruptions when he’s doing this.” His warning given, Lieu went the rest of the way around the back, Asami and I following.

The first glimpse I got of the back of the farm revealed it to be essentially the same as the front, but I barely noticed the back field, because what I noticed was above it. Far, far across the field, well over the halfway point, there was the glimmer of what looked like a thin sheet of water, and I squinted, trying to make it out clearly. It was water; not possibly more than a finger thick, hanging suspended some foot or so above the top of the highest banks of corn. As we watched, I could see the sunlight hit where it dripped down.

“Does he do the entire field like this?” I asked, my voice low enough to not carry. Lieu leaned closer.

“Again?” He asked. “My hearing’s not great. Don’t worry about raising your voice more; he’s deaf on one side.”

I tried again. “Does he water the entire field like this?” Lieu nodded.

“In sections.” He gestured forward towards the open field. “He starts just after lunch and does it a half at a time, usually. It takes about four hours. It’s better for the plants, too, to get segmented watering rather than just kind of a maximum at random. He also checks for wilt, rot, weeds, sickness, rodents—he can tell you more of the details.”

I looked away from the sight in front of me, still reeling, to stare at Amon.

He was sitting on a wicker chair that was underneath a canopy off of the back of the house, his feet up on a stool. He was sunk deep into meditation, his hood hiding most of his mask, his body almost totally still. His chi was under such tight control it stunned me; mine never stayed that taut when I Bent. If I hadn’t known he was Bending, I would have thought he was asleep, he seemed so relaxed. He wasn’t moving his arms at all, not even twitching his fingers. His breathing was even, and asleep in the dip between his calves was a black-feathered owlcat, rolled with its belly up in the air.

“He’ll be done about dinnertime,” Lieu concluded. “Let’s not bother him.”

I followed him and Asami, already talking about some project or another she wanted his insight on, back around the front of the house. He asked me to fix a hole in their front path, and I Earthbent it back into shape, returning the paving stone to the dirt, entirely without thinking. I was too stunned, really, by seeing what Amon could do. What I had come here to learn to do. The point of this whole trip.

It had been one thing to hear about it. It was another entirely in action.

It had started three years ago, after the dedication ceremony. In the chaos of the kidnapping, the attempted riot, and the arrests, Amon and Lieu had slipped away into the crowd and vanished before I’d ever even had an opportunity to speak to either one of them. And, in the days that followed, I’d not really had a chane to talk about it.

It wasn’t until about a week later that I was able to bring it up to Asami, who admitted she had invited them in the first place. I had always sort of assumed that the Lieutenant at least was still alive, but I’d never expected to learn the story I had from her about them. Their changed lives; Amon’s saving Mako’s life, years before. That they had been living out a totally anonymous existence as farmers for twenty years after Amon’s miraculous survival of the accident that killed his brother, and had come to see this small final tombstone on the labor they’d given their lives for.

Twenty years was a long enough time for me to learn how to, as Mako likes to say, nut up and shut up, and they hadn’t caused any trouble and had been doing a great deal of good for their community, so I had no reason to do anything about it, except feel uncomfortable. Not frightened, not any more—not of two old men who had no problems with me existing out there in the world. Just strange.

Asami came to visit fairly often, stopping by the farm and staying for a few days, and it had been a year ago she’d told me about Amon being so ill with pneumonia that his son had thought he might not make it. And it was Asami who suggested this visit, although the reason had been all mine.

When Amon died, there would be no more Bloodbenders, anywhere in the world. For good reason; it was outlawed sensibly. But there was something else, too—something that had always sat oddly with me. No matter how many advances we made to healing, no matter how many different ways were found to use Spiritbending and Waterbending to change and improve lives, there was one thing we couldn’t do.

Stop bleeding.

When Amon died, the last secrets, the way to use Bloodbending to potentially save lives, would be gone. And so I had come, to learn from him, if he would teach me, and lock it into the Avatar cycle for good, so that someday, if someone needed it—at least. At least we’d have it.

I’d known, sort of in a distant, disconnected way, that Amon was the strongest living Waterbender. Even Kya, who was still more Master to me than ever, wasn’t quite at his level, and my own strengths have always been toward combat and volume, not precision. But I’d seen him raise half of Yue bay, and now I’d watched him control a sheet of water so fine and thin I probably couldn’t have done one even half the size.

A long time ago, I’d seen him take people’s Bending, too.

Surely there had to be something good that could come out of it.

True to Lieu’s word, at dinnertime Amon came in the front door, leaning heavily on his cane in his left hand at the owlcat at his feet, twining around his ankles in a way that looked like she’d make him fall and break his neck. “Heng, you’re being a nuisance,” he told her, gently shooing her with his foot, kicking off his sandals beside the door.

Despite the fact that the firepit had places laid around it for a more traditional-style meal, dinner was served at the full table—mostly, if I’d had to hazard a guess, so Amon could sit in a chair without putting extra stress on his body to get up and down from the floor. He greeted Asami warmly, asked her how our drive was, and remained chilly to me as Lieu served dinner, a proper stone-bowl bibimbap.

Amon’s was half the size of ours, and served with a spoon, his servings cut into smaller chunks.

I tried to ignore the way my heart fell into my stomach, through my pelvis, and out onto the floor.

The man I saw in my nightmares when I thought of Amon was a robust Waterbender in the prime of his life, his body strong and hard and quick, decades of chiblocker training lending him speed, agility, and martial prowess that far outstripped mine. He still had dark hair in my memories, thick and wavy, with an unbroken voice.

The Amon that sat across from me at the dinner table was not that.

I’d seen him three years before, but he’d faded more since then. He’d lost weight significantly; his clothes hung off his frame in swathes, fabric dripping from his shoulders and wrists. He ate without a care for who saw him, his hood down from his head and his weatherbeaten porcelain mask set aside, revealing the scarred and ravaged face of a burn victim—a real one, this time. No makeup to be seen there.

When he spoke, his voice was raspy, like that of a smoker, ragged and worn with years of disuse and, as Asami had explained some time before, smoke inhalation from the accident that had killed his brother. His right arm moved with difficulty, stiff with disuse and muscle damage, and he tilted his head toward the table to put his left ear towards us, would turn to Asami on his right side whenever she spoke to hear what she was saying. His right eye, too, was grey with cataracts; a recent issue, he’d not had that a few years ago when I’d last seen him.

I’d long ago become used to people growing older and dying—the first time I’d really felt like An Adult was when Katara had died, and I’d sort of had to rethink and remake my entire life around that loss. But it was different with someone who had once been a murderous threat. It was hard to reconcile this old, wizened man with a single silver forelock of hair, a twisted body, who fed scraps of beef over the side of the table to his cat, with the same man who’d once lashed me to the ground and scared me so hard I’d fainted.

I could still hear it in his voice, if I listened carefully. But even the tone, the timbre, had changed with age and damage and disuse. So I sat there, all through dinner, trying to find a ghost of the figure in my nightmares inside the man at the table, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t make one fit inside the other. All I got was a sort of magic eye picture, where I had to unfocus and refocus my gaze just right, and even then, all I could see was the outline of the hood and the once-proud shoulders, now bent and twisted.

“You’ve been staring at me for quite some time, Avatar.” I jumped, halfway out of my seat, and found Amon had met my eyes. He’d set aside his empty bowl, and Lieu had replaced it with a smaller bowl of mung bean soup. I resisted the urge to flinch.

Amon emoted differently from most people; he had worn a mask for the better party of the last thirty years, so it made sense. Instead of lifting his eyebrows, he tilted his head slightly to the right, as if questioning me. “Trying to get a sense for the scars? I hope I’m not putting you off your supper.”

“No, it’s—not that at all.” Asami and Lieu, on either side of us, had somehow managed to go totally silent in some sort of circumspect avoidance. “I just...I guess I’m trying to find the Amon I remember in you.”

“There’s not much of him left, but be my guest to keep looking for him.” Amon set down his spoon. “I’m pleased to see you accompanying Asami to visit us, but don’t think I didn’t notice the amount of luggage spilling out of the guest bedroom. You two are here less, it seems, for an impromptu drop-in and more to stay for weeks, if not months. Even our children don’t holiday here for that long.

“Korra, I’m an old man, not a stupid one. What are you here for?”

His gaze was piercing. Without the mask to modulate it, create a layer of shadow and resistance between his eyes and my own, I felt like he could cut through me with a look. He sat there in patient, expectant silence across from me, waiting for an answer. As if he wouldn’t let me get up from the table without one.

I wet my lips, glanced down at my hands, and back up at him. Took a deep breath, and dove in headfirst. “I want you to teach me.”

Now he did raise his eyebrows—or, at least, seemed to. The skin above his eyes lifted upwards, the scars wrinkling slightly, the elastic tissue shifting over his skull. “You’re the Avatar. What could I possibly have that I could teach you that you, or one of your previous lives, does not already know?” He knew. He knew, and he was going to bait me into telling him; make me put words to it.

I swallowed, and reached for Asami under the table. She took my hand in hers and squeezed, as if to say, just do it.

“I want you to teach me how to Bloodbend.”

Amon stared at me, unmoving. He didn’t do or say anything. Didn’t so much as blink. Then, slowly, he put his mask back on, pushed his chair back from the table, stood, picked up his cane, and without a single word he walked out the front door of the house and kicked it shut behind him.

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.”

Chapter Text

the yin wei mai, also called the "yin linking vessel" is one of the eight extraordinary meridian systems, and links all the yin channels to control the interior of the body. as it governs the essences of blood, it is used to nourish the heart, lungs, and the mind, particularly mental illnesses.

“Korra,” Amon’s voice, hoarse and low. “Whether you’re ready or not, it’s time.”

I breathed out. Counted to ten.

Relaxed.

I opened my eyes to look up at him. Amon stood, leaning with both hands on the top of his cane at the side of the pond. Yue’s light was filtering down onto the canopy, his hood and mask glowing silver, his eyes shadowed. In the distance, I heard a hoot as one of the ostritchhorses called into the night.

“Would it be easier if we sparred?” There’d been an edge of fear to his voice all day—but now, listening again, after meditating for hours, it felt gentle instead. Almost kind.

“I’m good, I think.” Let out a slow breath. “I should just.” My voice cracked. I cleared my throat. “Get...this over with, huh?” He didn’t respond. I stood, sinking my feet down into the mud beneath me, grounding me to the earth as much as to the water. Okay. “Uh.” I paused, looked at the log by the pond. “It’d probably be easier if you sat.”

I waited until he sat down before I closed my eyes.

Okay. Okay, cool. Totally. Ready for this. For sure.

“Whenever you’re ready, Korra.”

Breathed in a deep four count, out five. Felt the water below me, up to my ankles, cool and reassuring, the earth beneath that. The air, all around me, holding me like a friend.

And, in front of me, Amon.

I didn’t need my eyes closed to see his chi, but it was different, visualizing it like this. His chi was lashed tight like it was being corded for firewood, trying to fit too much into too-small a space. It was too damn bright to sense anything past it.

“Start small,” he reminded me, his voice far away. In four, out five. Focus. Open my mind, feel my feet in the water and my toes in the earth, the air all around me.

I found his chi lines first and traced them as I sank deeper, tightening my control. Focused. His shape clarified in my mind’s eye with every breath. It was like looking at an anatomical model on the pages of a textbook—first, there was the outside, the skin level of the model. Turn the page, muscles. Turn the page, organs. Turn the page, bones.

The last page was nerves and blood vessels. Pulmonary arteries. Pulmonary veins. Circulatory system from the chest to the torso, to the abdomen, to the legs. Veins arteries capillaries. Down, past his shoulder, to his elbows, through brachial arteries, cephalic, radial, ulnar, digital.

I breathed, and slowly opened my palms at my side.

Before me, Amon’s palm opened, just as slow. It made the hair prickle all along the back of my neck and my arms. I’d thought that, maybe, the act of actually Bloodbending would disgust me. That my body or my mind or my Bending or something would refuse to use his blood as water.

But it was just Bending.

Amon was quiet, probably so I could concentrate. Yue’s light, pink against the backs of my eyelids, soothed me. She was watching over us, I was sure of it. “I’m pricking my finger,” Amon’s distant voice said, and he brought his left hand to meet his right, holding a fine-bladed knife. “Turn my hand,” he told me, hissing when I tried to do it too quickly. “Gently,” he murmured, and my hold almost broke.

He wasn’t water or stone: he was a man. If I squeezed too tight, I’d break his bones. That was the risk he was taking by letting me use him as a practice dummy. Asami and Lieu had both tried to volunteer, and then we’d all gotten into a giant argument and started yelling over each other until Lieu had started coughing and Amon had said, in his low, deep voice, “Not over my dead body.”

Animals were off the table. Plants could only do so much. I could hardly Bloodbend myself.

Amon was the only person who could throw me off if he needed to, the only one of us who had the strength and force required to break the hold my Bending had on him. It had to be him. That was why I manipulated his right hand—he’d pointed out that his right arm was already crippled. I couldn’t make it much worse even if I tried.

Gentler this time, I turned his hand. Once his palm was upright, Amon brought down the knife and scored a shallow cut over the inner side of his middle finger, one of the few places without significant scarring. Blood welled immediately.

My heart pounded in my ears.

It’s just water. Water but red. And...also not anything like water. First, I stopped the bleeding. I cleaned the wound, my right hand his right hand. I’d already started healing it before he could tell me to. Finally, I released the blood I’d held back from the wound, my Bending a makeshift tourniquet. Blood pumped back into his system, and his hand immediately felt healthier. I frantically felt for air bubbles that could kill him, but there were none.

Amon raised the knife. “Again.”

I did it until I was too tired to do it again. Each time Amon cut in a different spot, cut deeper. His hand never shook, even as I felt him tense in preparation for the pain.

When I finally opened my eyes, the moon had disappeared into the trees. I groaned, bent over, splashed water over my face, and then ducked into the pond. When I came up, shaking water out of my eyes, Amon was watching me, mask unreadable. He didn’t speak as I started doing Yang Long Form, trying to soothe my nerves. My whole body was trembling. I felt sick, like I’d eaten undercooked sea prunes.

I had to do half the form before I was ready to say anything. When I turned back to face him, the words I wanted to say died in my mouth.

I took a deep breath, tried again.

“Amon?” He inclined his head. “I—I need. I need to remember it.” My whole body was shaking. “H. How it feels. What’s too strong. What’s...not strong enough.” My heartbeat was so loud I could taste it in the back of my throat. This was stupid. “I. Can you. Can you—sh. Show—“

Amon ducked his head.

I knew, instinctively, that he was praying. Fervently. He was whispering, desperate for guidance, to Yue far overhead. His hands atop his cane shook. I curled my own into fists at my sides. I wanted to wrap my arms around my chest and pummel myself until I forced myself to unsay it.

“No,” he whispered. “I cannot—I can’t do what you’re asking, Korra. I begged Yue—“ His throat closed, his voice choked off. “It’s been twenty years. I’m a healer, Korra. That’s all.” My heart fell in my chest.

How odd, that now, when I was asking him to torture me, he couldn’t. When I wanted him to—when I needed him to. “Oh,” I whispered, looked down at the water.

There was the shift of feet in underbrush, the soft tack of Amon’s cane set against the log. His sandals, whispering as he kicked them off, then a pained grunt as he bent, awkwardly, to pull free both his socks and compression stockings he wore on his calves, put his arm warmers down beside them.

From the corner of my eye, I watched as Amon set his mask face-up on the ground.

The water at the edge of the pond rippled as he waded in. Under the moonlight his burns looked glossy and smooth, like obsidian. His good eye was steady, his mouth a firm line. Amon stopped when he was in up to his knees, took a shaking breath.

“But,” His voice shook like he was crying, although his eyes were dry. “I’ve lived this long for a reason.” His eyes were closed. He raised both his hands. His stance was one I’d never been able to forget: I saw it in my nightmares. His fingers spread, his palms stilled, his arms frozen like a statue.

“For the Avatar’s sake, I will try.”

I faced down an old man: worn, ill, dying. Terribly injured, disfigured, struggling to stand even with the water holding him up. He was pale in the moonlight. He wore no mask, he was only himself. Noatak stood in the water with me, and at that moment, I found that I no longer hated him. I hadn’t asked him to torture me; I had asked him to torture himself.

Chances were, those were his nightmares, too.

“Okay,” I whispered. I braced myself, heels dug into the silt of the pond. “I’m ready.”

For a moment, nothing happened. His eyes narrowed. He grimaced. His fingers curled. Nothing happened. I could feel the water moving around me, dragged by the sheer force of his Bending. The temperature of the pond grew, going from chilly to tepid, then warm. Nothing happened.

I looked at Amon’s face, searching his eyes. Searching for Noatak, perhaps, or Tarrlok or Yakone, the ghosts that haunted both of us.

Try as I might, all I saw was Amon.

“I’m not fighting,” I whispered, more to hear myself say it than to tell him. He tensed, and then, in one quick movement, curled all his fingers toward his palms, jerked his hands backwards until the fine bones stood out in his wrists, turned his arms outward, and brought his elbows to his chest.

My scream stopped in my throat. My heartbeat thundered but I couldn’t move. Amon’s grip wavered for a moment, but then he clamped back down, his teeth grit so tight I could see them grinding through the hole in his cheek. Once more he took iron-clad control, fighting himself more than he fought me. “Push me off, Korra,” Amon’s voice shook as he hissed it between his teeth.

Panic. I couldn’t remember how to breathe. The water around me, the earth beneath me, the air around me. I couldn’t touch any of it. I couldn’t feel any of it.

“Korra,” Amon said again, his tight voice almost pleading. “Push me off.” I grabbed for something, anything: the water, myself, him. I looked straight up, seeking the white curve of the moon, looking for Yue. I needed to know she saw, that she was protecting me—that she was protecting him—

“Korra! Do not underestimate yourself!”

I was seventeen. I was seventeen and locked in a metal box in a freezing basement, hungry, exhausted, sore, terrified. I was seventeen and there was a naked lightbulb overhead, watching me. There were footsteps and fighting and people overhead. I couldn’t move.

“Do not,” said that same deep, even voice, mellow and cold and dead, “Underestimate her.” An empty face, a porcelain mask, grey-blue eyes as empty and heartless as any polar cyclone except for hate.

“Korra!” Amon barked. His grip tightened. I felt his Bending now. He could have cut off the blood flow to my limbs and killed them or forced my muscles to move until my bones snapped. He was visibly shaking, his balance wavering without his cane, his right arm faltering. My muscled corded and bunched like I was in the midst of combat, my heartbeat raced, my joints ached and twinged in a way they never had when I was seventeen. I felt my body locking up, my arms trapped to my sides, my head tilting back on my neck.

I had been here so many times. Chained. In irons. Suffocated. Bloodbent. Poisoned. Tortured. Trapped.

I was seventeen, and I couldn’t—

“Korra,” Amon begged, “Please.”

I didn’t need the Avatar State any more. I could fight by myself just fine. With a raw scream of effort I threw his hold on me off and collapsed into the water, gasping for breath.

I knew the difference all the way down to my bones.

I staggered out of the pond, past Amon, and doubled over to throw up. I’d been too nervous to eat a proper dinner, so there wasn’t much. Then I turned around to catch Amon as he collapsed, just before he hit the water.

He was a big man, still taller than me even though his back had started to bow with age, but in my arms he weighed nothing. He was trembling all over, hyperventilating, and I staggered, carrying both of us the four steps back to the log, where he collapsed, his face pressed into his shaking left hand. I crouched beside him, too scared of both of us to touch him, and put my head between my knees to keep from fainting. We were both quiet.

“Never,” Amon whispered, his voice broken, “Never again. Never again.” I couldn’t look at him, staring at the ground between my feet.

After a few minutes, Amon made a hoarse noise, rough. I looked up—but he wasn’t crying. Instead, he had his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. It took me a moment to realize he was laughing. I stared at him, too stunned to come up with anything to say, and he just kept laughing. When he pulled his hands from his face to look at me, he gave me a self-deprecating smile. “Can you even imagine?” He waved between us, then pitched his voice lower. “’I am the voice in the night.’”

Amon raised his hands, in a mock-Bloodbending gesture, wiggled his fingers. “I am coming to take your Bending, Avatar Korra.”

I stared at him like he had grown a second head. He started laughing even harder. I sank down onto my heels, completely speechless. This wasn’t...the man I had seen over the past few weeks. I wasn’t sure who this man was, doubled over breathless with laughter, dragging one hand down his face. “I tried to take my own Bending, you know,” Amon said, when he’d regained his breath, staring out over the pond. He picked up a stick from the forest floor, started to roll it between his fingers. “After everything. When I was recovering from the boat accident. I nearly killed myself.”

I sat down the rest of the way. “Why?”

“Why do you think, Avatar?”

I looked at my hands, half-smiled. “Because you were the voice in the night.”

“I thought it would be easier,” he murmured. “I’d wake up without Bending, or I’d die. Either way Lieu wouldn’t have to worry any more.” As I listened to him talk, I realized the tone of his voice had changed, just slightly. He was less stiff, less formal—even his body language was different, his shoulders relaxed, his arms held easy at his sides, not tight to his chest.

He didn’t even seem to be bothered that he wasn’t wearing his mask.

“I couldn’t Bloodbend again after that. Not even when I tried.” Amon didn’t look at me as he said it. His face wasn’t any easier to read without the mask, but it was gentler. The mask gave him a cool, distant expression, almost sneering—without it, he seemed to look thoughtful more often than not. “Not until tonight.”

He turned towards me, and before I could do anything, he lifted his left hand. His expression hardened, eyes narrowed and focused, and I tensed all over.

But, try as he might, nothing ever happened. Amon twisted, tugged, pulled, and the water in the pond did his bidding, but I didn’t so much as twitch. He shook his head, snorting, dropped his hand and tossed the stick into the pond. “Just once,” he whispered, staring at nothing, eyes hooded. “Just once more. Why you? Why now?”

“Beats the fuck out of me,” I replied at last. “Maybe Yue has a weird sense of humor. Or the universe wanted to clown on me. Again.” It was my turn to pick up a stick and fidget with it, breaking it into little tiny pieces between my thumb and forefinger.

A warm hand settled on my shoulder. I jumped, already pulling the earth around me, and looked at Amon. He was watching me with the strangest expression, a half-smile tucked into the ruined part of his mouth. It was almost impossible to place his age just from looking at him, although I knew it had to be somewhere in his mid-sixties. Young, really, by Water Tribe standards—Katara had lived well past a hundred. He wasn’t all that much older than my parents.

He looked at me like an old man, with the kind of expression all old Benders got, when they grew closer to the Spirit World. Like he was looking through me and at me at the same time. “It never clowns on you more than you can handle.”

Hearing Amon say ‘clown’, when he probably didn’t even know what it meant, in his deep, serious voice and old-fashioned Northern accent, broke me. I wheezed, trying not to break into laughter, looked back at him. “Do you even know what clowning means, old man?”

Amon patted my shoulder again, gave me a wry smile. “Not in the slightest.” He grunted, bent over to pull his stockings back on. “Help this old man up.”

“I’m starving,” I admitted once he was dressed, giving him a hand upright.

“I’m sure when we get back, we’ll find Lieu and Asami suspiciously wide awake,” Amon replied, leading the way back to the house. “They just woke up, of course, a coincidence.” Amon yawned behind his mask. “I think I have everything to make my mother’s bannock, if the Avatar will deign to start the oven.”

Despite everything, exhausted, bone-tired, still shaken, I jumped in the air, pumped both my fists. “Fuck yes!”

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.”

Chapter Text

the ren mai, also called the "conception 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. it runs up the anterior of the body, from the pubic area to the mouth, and nourishes the reproductive system, as well as related organs.

After a month of wearing myself out watering farm plots, learning to blow glass, reading theoretical texts curled around the fire pit at all hours, and constantly practicing, the full moon rose on the pond in the forest, I stripped below the waist, waded into the water, and let my Bending grow strong under the light of the full moon.

This time was easier. I knew what to look for, how to find the blood beneath Amon’s chi, and how to be gentle. I counted arteries and veins, practiced internal tourniquets, starving his right arm of blood to make his lungs pump, momentarily full, carrying fresh oxygen.

Afterward, we bathed together in the waters, silent and lost in our own thoughts. Lieu and Asami were awake and waiting for us when we returned, fresh grilled fish they’d caught in the stream laid out on the coals around the fire, sea prune stew bubbling up, ready to be served. It was so much like coming home as a child that I barely spoke as we ate, leaning into Asami’s side and thinking instead about how much time had passed and how much I’d changed without ever really changing.

That was the nature of the Avatar, after all. Endlessly cycling, changing, becoming new and different but always, always, fundamentally the same. The same spirit, the same soul, in new and myriad forms.

Amon’s hand on my shoulder roused me as he stood from the table. He’d left his mask off from eating and his face drooped a little, soft with exhaustion. “You did a good job tonight. I’m impressed.” He didn’t wait for me to reply—didn’t even seem to expect it, really, just limped off to his bedroom, the door shutting with a solid sort of finality.

“Night,” Lieu added, waved, and followed.

Eventually, Asami took me to bed.

It felt like maybe twenty minutes later that a knock on the door woke me. “Korra?” Lieu’s voice was even rougher than usual, almost wrecked. “I’m sorry, I know it’s early.”

Unrolling from where my face was buried in Asami’s hair was harder than it deserved to be, and I groaned something hopefully resembling a response. Cracking one eye revealed there was light in through the papered-over window, but not much, and when Lieu slid the door open, he had gotten half-dressed for a day of work on the farm, his face puffy with lack of sleep.

Under his tan, he was startlingly pale. Almost grey.

“’swrong?” I mumbled, yawning into the back of my hand and sitting up, righting my undershirt so my tits didn’t spill out everywhere.

Lieu swallowed, a loud sound. He glanced back towards the door to his room. “There’s...” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “There’s something wrong with Amon’s arm.” He didn’t need to say which arm. I knew which arm, with sudden and awful certainty.

“The moon?” I asked, scrambling out of bed, wide awake and not bothering with my shorts, thrown somewhere off to the side. Whatever, they could see the Avatar in her boxers, who cared. “Is she still up?”

Lieu nodded. I didn’t hesitate, and followed.

Amon was sat up in their bed, leaning back on a small pile of pillows, his right arm held out straight at his side, his eyes closed, breathing shallowly between his teeth. There was a basin of fresh water at his side, and I scooped some up with my hands to wash my face, wincing at the chill.

“Korra.” His mouth barely moved around my name. “I’ll be fine. It will pass.”

“I don’t care,” I replied, not even trying to temper the anger in my voice. He could deal with my lack of bedside manners. “Why didn’t you say something? We were out there, if there was a problem—“

“There wasn’t.” He winced as the cool water touched his skin.

“He was fine when we went to bed.” Lieu had approached nearly silently, which was impressive for an old man with replaced knees. He stood at the head of the bed, and when I closed my eyes, he was a warm font of chi in the corner of my focused vision as I bent over Amon, lifting his right arm into my lap. “Fine all night. Woke up like this maybe half an hour ago, we tried to fix it ourselves but...”

The water wrapped around Amon’s forearm, and I sunk in with it, below the skin, into the chi beneath. After spending most of last night Bending his arm, it was familiar to me, in chi and structure and the blood, the whole system all interlinked. As I followed the blood, I came to his elbow, and hissed.

“Bent a vein,” Amon guessed.

“Yeah.” I swallowed, let the water drop away, and came back with my hands this time, cradling his elbow between my palms. It was bent, trapped somehow between the head of his ulna and the base of his humerus. Blood was moving, but barely; the blockage left it sluggish, restricted the flow to his lower arm. Damaged as it already was by so many burns, restricted blood flow had to hurt. Well. Like a bitch.

My hands cradling his elbow shook.

“Korra,” Amon said. His voice was steady despite being tight with pain. When I looked up, I found him watching me, teeth grit and visible through the hole in the side of his cheek. “This is the danger you’re facing.” He held my eyes. “You knew this could happen. It has. Now, you have to fix it.”

“Not going to ease me into it?” My voice came out shakier than I wanted it to, something like hysteria choking and thick in my throat. “Tell me that it’s okay?”

His expression didn’t soften. “You know what Bloodbending can do. This is what you’re learning. This is your risk.” His old voice, worn and hoarse, was still the voice in the night. Not the same voice in the night, maybe, calling for me to submit, but he was still demanding a surrender. “You’ve hurt people before.” Now he sounded impatient, almost angry. “What makes this different?”

“You know what makes this different,” I snapped. “You know—“

“You asked me, Korra.” I wished he would get mad at me. I wished he would yell, fight back, demand something, not just sit there, nearly undone, exhausted, in pain. In pain because of me. I’d hurt him before, of course, during the Revolution. He had hurt me—but those had been injuries from fights, not injures from healing. Or trying to heal. This was something else entirely.

Amon hadn’t wanted to teach me how to Bloodbend in the first place, and now here he was, reaping the fruits of his efforts.

“You asked me,” he said again, just as unrelenting as the first time. “You asked to learn. I can’t fix this, Korra. You’re the only one who can.”

“I know,” I croaked, hunching over his hand. “I know, but—“

“You can do this,” he promised. “You aren’t alone.”

I laughed once wetly. “When the fuck did you get so—so. Why do I want to listen to you?”

“Age and wisdom,” he replied, slumping back into the pillows. Lieu moved around behind him, adjusting another behind Amon’s neck, curling one hand around his throat, long fingers slotting into the curves of his collarbones. “I’m ready when you are.” I could feel Asami even if I couldn’t see her, and she came up behind me, sinking onto the edge of the bed at my back, her hands strong on my waist. She leaned against me, like a retaining wall trying to shore up my soul.

“Okay.” I took two deep breaths, crossed my legs, and bent over his arm, shifting my grip so that his hand was curled against the bend of my elbows, my fingers cupping his elbow. “Okay. I’m ready.” I couldn’t fall back on the Avatar state—the power was too much. I couldn’t let my Bending take me. I had to be totally, entirely, completely present in the moment.

I closed my eyes and breathed.

Beneath Amon’s skin, his chi was a tightly-lashed map of power and pain, old injuries disrupting the flow all across his entire body. His circulatory system, too, was disrupted, inflammation girdling all his old scars, his organs, his lungs and heart.

“Talk me through it,” Amon’s voice said, patient and far away. “Tell me what you need to do.”

“There’s too much swelling.” My mouth moved without my conscious intervention, years of talking through healings with other Waterbenders making it come like muscle memory. I lifted my right hand and ran it up his arm, over his chest, following the chi there to his heart and then lingering. Asami moved slightly, and the water basin was in my lap. I murmured my thanks, lifting it to my hand and spreading it over his chest, coaxing this sluggish chi trapped in his arm into moving. “How’s that?”

Amon sighed. “That’s good.” His fingers twitched against my biceps. “I can move a bit.”

It had been impossible to ignore the extent of damage to his chi and his body when I’d been practicing Bloodbending on him before, but I’d not had to be too careful of it. Now, feeling my way through his body, the weakness in his chi paths, reinforced by his own Bending, was potentially a serious problem. He was dying right beneath my hands, before my eyes, and I had to somehow balance all of it while fixing the mess I’d made.

On anyone with chronic medical conditions, anyone who had frequent healings, the chi paths of their body eventually began to suffer. Energy supply reduced, organs began to struggle, the system collapsing under strain. Amon’s body was like that, his failing lungs damaging his over-working heart, his gastrointestinal system slowing down as peristalsis took more and more effort. His muscles had started to atrophy, his kidneys no longer filtering his blood so well as they had.

All of his chi paths were bent, just slightly. Twisted, from years and years of healing and rerouting to support his failing body.

“How much can you take?” I asked, my hand hovering just over his chest, water pooling over his skin and the whorls of scar tissue marked there. “I don’t want to drop you into shock.”

“This is fine, for now. Keep going.”

“Don’t lie,” Lieu said, quiet but steady. He didn’t sound angry—only tired.

“I’m not.” I could hear Amon’s smile, feel the slight loosening of the muscles of his chest and throat and abdomen with affection.

He’d lie to me, but he wouldn’t lie to Lieu. Reassured, I dove deeper, reducing inflammation until the muscles locked around his elbow relaxed and his arm went limp in mine as the swelling receded.

“Keep the blood flowing,” Amon said, and so I did, Bending what was trapped slowly through the narrowed channel of the bent vein and then pulling fresh blood in, re-oxygenating his arm. This was easier—this was like trying to cut the bleeding to one finger or a single cut, redirecting blood flow and maintaining systemic equilibrium. With each beat of his heart, I let the strength of his blood pressure start working on the vein, coaxing it to slide free of where it was trapped and back into place.

“Korra,” Asami said, at some point. “You’re too tense. Relax.”

I breathed out the strain in my shoulders, leaned back into her chest, and let her keep my weight. The sun was up now, I could feel it, my control wavering as the full moon set.

“I can’t get it out,” I finally said, after I’d sweat through my clothes and my head had started to ache with focus, my feet both asleep and my hands aching with muscle tension. “There’s not enough room between the bones in the joint. If I pull too hard, I might break the vein.” And, if I kept trying to ease it free, the last of the full moon’s light would disappear entirely beneath the horizon, and Yue wouldn’t be able to help me any longer. I’d be on my own.

I couldn’t do this on my own. I didn’t have the strength, not without the Avatar State.

I opened my eyes and sat up slightly. Asami held the basin for me to drink, and I did. Amon had his eyes closed, breathing shallowly between his teeth, face twisted with pain.

Lieu bent over him, covered his husband’s eyes with his other hand. “Are you okay?” he asked, their foreheads pressed together.

“I’m in pain,” Amon replied, and the healer in me wanted to cry. Not once had he made a single noise of pain, not once had he even murmured for me to stop. He’d suffered in utter, stoic silence, accepting his agony as if it was his due, and I’d not made it any better. Maybe I’d even made it worse. As I watched, a single tear welled up at his left eye and dripped down his cheek, although his right remained dry, most of his tear ducts probably burned away. “What do you want me to say?” he added, not much above a whisper. “It fucking hurts, Lieu.”

Lieu kissed him, and I turned away when Amon began to sob, unable to watch.

When his breathing evened again, Lieu cleared his throat. “I have an idea, but I don’t know how good it is.” He shifted slightly, not letting Amon go. “Korra, if you had more space in the joint, could you rearrange everything?”

“Probably?” I hadn’t let Amon’s elbow go, since I was the only reason he was getting much blood flow to his arm at all. I felt over it again, focusing on the actual articulation of bone and blood this time. The problem was definitely how tight his whole arm was—his muscles had atrophied over the hears, his skin shrunken with scars, and there wasn’t enough room for me to move the bones easily beneath the skin. On someone with more fat, I probably could have done it already. “Yes. I think so.”

Lieu was looking at me, so I looked back at him. “What will happen if we don’t get this fixed?” He glanced down at Amon, thumb gliding over the curve of his brow. “Can his system handle it?” I shook my head. “Okay,” he breathed. “Okay.” He straightened slightly, squared his jaw. “What if I subluxate his elbow?”

“No,” I said, at the exact same time Asami gasped with horror and Amon, almost relieved, said, “Please, Lieu.”

“No!” I repeated, louder this time. “No, his system is already on the verge of shock. That amount of pain, and the swelling—“

“You can put him under, can’t you?” Lieu was still watching me with his pale, pale eyes. “We’ve both had dislocations before, Korra. We can handle it.”

“No,” I said, again. “Lieu, this isn’t—I’m worried he’s going to have a stroke! I can’t put him under, he’s dying!”

Amon said, “I’m right here.” He didn’t lift his head or open his eyes. From the angle he was laying at, all I could see was the ruined side of his face. Pain was writ right there, burned onto his skin, his old lies branded into him as inescapable truths. He’d survived awful, awful things, pain I could barely even imagine, and I’d had to live through mercury poisoning. “It’s my choice.” His mouth barely moved around the words, air whistling between his teeth and out the tear in his cheek.

He had to stop, then, his words lost as he tried to catch his breath.

“I can take it.” Amon said at last. “Lower my body temperature as much as you can and it should keep my system stable.” The weak fingers of his right hand curled around my forearm. It was barely a grip at all. “I trust you, Avatar Korra. Prove this is the right thing to teach you. Prove you can use it.”

“And if you die?” I asked, when I found my voice.

He smiled. “I won’t feel a thing.”

It rained the whole week after; a steady, unbroken rain. It never got heavy enough to be a danger, like when that summer storm had swept through and Amon had kept the hail off of the plants all night, just heavy enough that nobody needed to water any of the plants.

Which was a good thing, because Amon had slipped into the Spirit World, and I couldn’t leave him. He wasn’t in a coma, which was a relief, but even when I’d brought his temperature back up, he remained asleep. Lieu and I had moved him to the front room, the one that was usually their son’s or for patients Amon was working on, and there he slept, steady and unbroken.

After four days passed without any sign of Amon waking, Lieu sat down at the table after dinner, folded his hands, and sighed. “If he doesn’t wake up by the end of the week, I’m calling Sura back from Republic City.” He gave me an apologetic look. “No offense, Avatar, but I trust him more than you.”

I shook my head. “None taken.” I had passed my healing mastery tests, sure, but I wasn’t a professional. “He knows Amon’s body better than I do, anyway.”

“Do you think it would be worth trying to find him in the Spirit World?” Asami looked worried even as she said it.

I hesitated, staring down at the table, but before I could speak, Lieu sighed. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” He was staring at the table, too. One of his hands was clenched into a fist there—the other was curled around his betrothal necklace, holding tightly enough his knuckles had turned white. The tendons of his jaw bit and jumped beneath his skin like he was searching for the words. “He’s been... having dreams. Nearly every full moon for the last year.” He didn’t need to say what Amon had been having dreams of for me to guess; judging from the way Asami had looked askance, she knew, too. “I’m worried if we try to pull him out, he... can’t. Won’t.”

Asami reached out to take Lieu’s hand off of the table. “Uncle Lieu, you can’t just let him—“

“Of course I don’t want him to die,” Lieu choked out. He let go of his necklace to wipe at his face with the heel of his palm, smearing away tears. “Fuck, Asami, I’ve barely lived without him. If he doesn’t come back—he promised me midwinter.” He took a deep, shaking breath. “He promised me fucking midwinter, but if he’s in the Spirit World still, there’s something keeping him there, and he might not...” Lieu swallowed. “Want to come back. Not that I could blame him.”

It was quiet in the kitchen. None of us spoke.

I took a deep breath. “Of course he wants to come back.” I clenched my fists tight enough my nails dug into my palms. “He doesn’t want to die! But if I go there, if I try to bring him back, there might be something stopping him, and if I get in the way...” I pressed my knuckles against my temples. “He could still die there. If I get in the way, he could die there. If he’s trying to get back, we have to just let him.”

I wished any of us had been young and angry enough to push our chairs back and spit that we hated this.

We just sat in silence instead, and when Asami reached over to pull me closer, I let her. I buried my face in her neck, and breathed in the scent of her skin, and tried, desperately, not to think about how I would feel, if she was going somewhere I couldn’t follow, and it was all my fault.

The morning after, Amon woke. I wasn’t with him, but Lieu came to get me almost immediately. He wasn’t coherent, mumbling to himself in a Northern Water Tribe dialect that I only understood a few words of, but he recognized Lieu when his husband spoke to him, and he was able to eat a little under his own power before falling back asleep again.

A fever came next, burning scalding through him. Lieu’s guess, which which I concurred, was that it was caused by systemic exhaustion. Amon had been under stress and pain and the resulting shock of his too-low temperature meant that he’d slipped partway out of the physical world, only to wear himself out even further in the Spirit World. Overwhelmed, his body crashed, and the result had been a fever, an illness that wasn’t one we could just heal out of him.

The rain finally let up that night, so I had to go back to farm chores, but between waterings I studied at Amon’s bedside, keeping his fever down because he couldn’t sweat it out. When he woke, it was always brief, but he knew Lieu and he knew Asami and me well enough.

Lieu called their son, and Sura showed up two days later. He was in his mid twenties, tall and mixed Water Tribe, pale skinned with thick dark hair and very blue eyes. There were several healers in Republic City named Sura, so I hadn’t been sure until we met again, but we had met—he was one of the senior healers at the Mercy of La Free Clinic, and we had crossed paths a few times, including when there had been a sinkhole a few years before and all the healers from across the city had been called in to help the wounded while I oversaw stabilizing and getting people back out.

He was soft-spoken, easygoing with a steady intensity about him, and he didn’t seem upset to learn of what Amon had been teaching me, or jealous. If anything, he seemed relieved, telling me that he’d been most afraid Amon would take the secret of Bloodbending to his grave and leave no way to protect against it being used in the future.

It was what Katara had done, after all, and I still wasn’t sure if she’d been right to do it.

Together, we took turns with Amon or keeping an eye on the crops. Ping showed up shortly thereafter, covered in road dust and looking exhausted, and joined with Asami to take over most of the other farm chores so Lieu could stay with Amon. After word got around, townsfolk came by with food for all of us, paying back what Amon had paid forward by working as a healer for so many years. Some of Lieu and Amon’s friends, a couple from up the coast, came with their daughter and her partner, which gave us another healer.

That night, Amon’s fever finally broke.

When Lieu and Sura helped him into the living room and he saw all of us waiting for him, he groaned. “Why are all you people here?” He looked around, at where Ping was perched on top of the table, Asami with Xian and Toloak in the other chairs, Yue sitting with me and Aya at the fire pit. “Can’t you let an old man die in peace?”

He was smiling, though.

As he said it, he was smiling.

Chapter Text

the ren mai, also called the "yin heel vessel" is one of the eight extraordinary meridian systems, and runs from the right ankle to the eyes, along the right side of the body. It can be used to treat menstrual issues, leg pain, and issues arising with the eyes.

Everyone stayed for a few more days, the farm overflowing with people. Amon, still exhausted, did his best to thank everyone for coming, as if it hadn’t been his deathbed they’d been sitting beside. If it bothered him that we’d all thought he was dying, he didn’t say anything about it.

I caught him, though, looking at people from where Ping had brought his rocking chair in to the main room so he could stay near to the fire. He would watch us from beneath his mask and hood, silent, tired, and distant.

There was a bit of vitality that had been there before, a vitality that was missing now. Whatever he’d seen in the Spirit World, it had changed him. He was on borrowed time, and every single one of us knew it.

Yue and Aya left first, then Xian and Toloak, although they swore they’d be back soon enough. They were the same age as Lieu and Amon, and had explained when we’d been sitting around waiting for Amon to wake that Toloak’s mother had been the one to save Amon’s life after the Revolution. They knew what he had been through. They knew, the way you only could after you’d seen someone die, what dying looked like.

Ping didn’t go back to Ba Sing Se. When Sura left for Republic City at Amon’s insistence at the end of the week, she went with him, claiming something about wanting to check out how they were handling industrial sprinkler systems, although it went unspoken that she was really staying close because her father was dying. That final morning as Ping finished scrabbling around on the roof while Lieu and Asami yelled up at her about cords and wires, Sura stopped me at the end of the walk.

“You’ll be here through the end of the summer?”

I slid my hands into my pockets. “That’s still the plan. If Amon decides differently, I’ll follow his lead.” He hadn’t said anything to me about further Bloodbending practice since he’d woken, and I hadn’t had the heart to ask.

Sura adjusted the strap of his bag over his shoulder. He looked back up the small hill towards the house, the grain silo casting a shadow over his face. “I’m sorry,” he said, awkwardly. “For not telling you when we met before. I knew you knew they were alive, but...”

I shrugged. “It’s none of my business who your parents are or aren’t.” He made a noncommittal noise. “I’m not... happy, exactly. Or I wasn’t, at least, for a while. Knowing they were alive and out here like this. Just doing whatever they wanted.”

Sura laughed. “Neither were they, I think. Not for a long while. My father most of all. He’s never forgiven himself for living when his brother died.”

Now, I sighed. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

To my surprise, Sura replied, “He’s happy.” He still didn’t look at me, watching Ping as she balanced on the central beam of the low roof, taking the wire that Lieu was feeding up to her. “I don’t mean that abstractly. I mean, he told me, yesterday. He’s happy he lived through this, even if it’s not...” Sura made a face, a little tense, a little sour. “You know,” he finished, a little lamely. “Whatever.”

“Yeah.”

“He feels like this is... something, you know.” Sura’s jaw clenched. “Like he’s doing the right thing. Like, if you can make this work, that will wipe the last of his family’s sins clean, so they can all move on.”

“I’m sorry,” I blurted, before I could stop myself. “I’m sorry he’s teaching me, and not you.” I’d said it already, but it felt profoundly unfair to have Amon teaching me, the Avatar, his oldest enemy, the weapon of his ascendancy, turning it from a sword to a scalpel in my hand and not letting that legacy go to his son. His son, who had asked before, and been denied.

Sura was quiet, then, watching as Ping scrambled down off the roof.

“If you can make it work,” he finally said, “Amon said he’ll teach me.” Finally, Sura turned back to face me. He smiled. “So, if you’ll forgive me for being selfish, please learn to Bloodbend.”

A weight I hadn’t even known I was holding fell from my shoulders, and I smiled back. “Weird thing for me to want to do, but I promise. I’ll learn to Bloodbend.”

Sura bowed, just slightly. “Thank you, Avatar Korra.” He straightened and nodded. “I’ll see you at the end of the summer.”

“We’ll take care of the watering,” Asami told us that night over dinner. “Uncle Amon, you can’t push yourself too hard. You’re not well. Korra, you’re exhausted. Let us handle it.”

“Fine by me.” I set down my chopsticks, looked over at Amon where he was bundled up in his blankets beside the fire pit.

Amon didn’t lift his head. “I’m in no fit state to argue.” His voice was quiet, murmur lost in the porcelain of his mask. “If that’s the consensus—“

“Stay in bed,” Lieu growled, and Asami put one hand over her mouth to smother her laugh. “Don’t do anything. Just sit there.”

“Your wish is my command,” Amon agreed, magnanimous.

What Amon did with his time the next few days, I had no idea. I slept for most of the first two, getting up mostly to eat or bathe or meditate. I needed time of my own to myself, even if I didn’t risk going fully into the Spirit World. It was still hard for me and probably always would be—Jinora had told me, on more than one occasion, that I was too grounded to the physical world for passing over to be natural. My feet were too securely planted on the earth, my body in the water, my heart in the fire, my face in the wind.

So I stood in the stream, did Yang Long Form, and thought about what next.

Amon stayed in bed almost entirely those two days, only emerging to eat dinner and let me check him over to make sure he was still recovering. Both times, when I told him he was fine, he would wait for Lieu to finish eating and then return to his bedroom, the door firmly shut behind him.

I could have knocked, could have asked Lieu what Amon was doing in there, could have listened or spied with Bending or any of a dozen different things. I didn’t, though.

There was something about that closed door that had a distinct sense of finality. The door was closed, and I was not to come in, and Amon was not to come out. When he was ready, the door would open, and we would meet in the middle.

The third day, I went in to town.

I went in the front door to the glassblower, rather than using the back door, for employees. Tana came to the front to meet me, nodded a greeting. She wasn’t much of a smiler, but she seemed pleased to see me despite her stony expression. By way of greeting, she said, “He’s doing better, then?”

I’d worn denim overalls and sandals and nothing else but a breastband, trying to stay cool under the midsummer sun. I slid my hands into my pockets, relaxing slightly now it was clear she wasn’t angry with me for disappearing after having asked to work as an apprentice. “He’s stable enough, for now.”

“The spirits grant small mercies.”

“So they do.” I sighed. “Sorry I disappeared on you like that. I hope it wasn’t an issue.”

She waved a hand. “I never had any delusions about the Avatar staying here forever. There’s still a spot for you if you want to keep studying, for however long it is you and your wife end up staying.”

Not sure what else to say, I went with “Thanks. I’d like that.” Even aside from research, glassblowing was meditative the way Long Form was meditative, the way whittling was. You could get lost inside your own head blowing glass, in the filling of the lungs and the turning of the pipe, the shaping of the sand, banking your Bending to only embers, only enough to keep the heat steady.

Tana stared at me over the counter, searching for something. Whatever it was, as I stood there, it seemed like she found it, because she said, “Give me a minute,” and then disappeared into the back of the shop. I could hear her saying something to her junior partner, a Non-Bender maybe ten years younger than us who wore his sun-bleached hair cut very short and I had never seen wear a shirt, even working in a glassblowing studio.

When Tana reemerged, she’d taken off her apron, and she stepped out from behind the counter, gesturing to me to follow. “Let’s get tea.”

There was a little tea stand across the street, the cart set up so it just always happened to be partway into the road. There were wicker stools, and we got cups, settling down on two stools that Tana tugged over beneath the awning of her shop so that we were in the shade.

For a time we didn’t speak, just drinking our tea, watching the passersby.

“Do you ever feel like you just... got older?” I said, after we’d sat in silence long enough I’d drunk half my cup, when we’d seen a trio of teenagers go whooping past, tearing their shirts off and yelling as they ran about jumping in the river. “You didn’t intend to? It just happened? Sometimes I think I’m still nineteen and then I see kids doing that shit, and I suddenly feel ancient.” Never mind that I would still tear my shirt off and go hollering off to jump in a river, I’d probably not do it through the center of a village in the middle of the afternoon.

Ten or fifteen years before, I would have seen someone like Tana and immediately assumed she was ancient, that she’d never had fun in her life, that she’d been born forty-something and stone-faced. These days, now that middle age had snuck up on me, it was increasingly hard to forget that I myself was forty.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tana deadpanned back. “I’m a sprightly youth, myself.”

Our eyes met and we both laughed.

In the way of grown women everywhere in the world, Tana turned to me then over her tea and began the age-old art of gossiping. “You don’t have to tell me why the Avatar is out here, but people are talking, and I’m curious.”

I stared down at my tea. It was served in a clay mug, old fashioned Earth Kingdom style, crafted by hand that kept its heat all the way through, not the kind mass-produced in Republic City. It tasted a little of grass and a little of grit, made with local water, probably not particularly heavily filtered, with local leaves. It was a luxury that I could never have imagined growing up at the South Pole, if only because I hadn’t known it was a luxury. Sitting outside to gossip over tea wasn’t exactly a popular pastime at the South Pole. We spent most of our time indoors.

“Noa’s dying,” I said, eventually. “Everyone knows that.”

Tana sighed. “Hard not to, now.”

“He and Te are my wife’s uncles, so we’re here to spend some time with them, mostly.”

Tana sighed again. “Avatar Korra.” She’d almost exclusively called me by my name alone, no title, since we’d met. To hear her use that title now, like this, made me look up. “Everyone knows they have secrets.” She stared me in the eye as she said it, unblinking, daring me to tell her what they might be. “Twenty years ago maybe nobody in town knew what was happening in the city, but not now.”

I took a long drink of my tea. “So, what, you’re all just... pretending you don’t know?”

Tana shrugged. “Noa saved my wife when she nearly died giving birth to our son and Te is the reason half these buildings even have electricity. I can’t speak for everyone in town, but so far as I’m concerned, they can be and do whatever they want.”

I couldn’t tell her the truth. It wasn’t safe or sensible, not with the dangers of Bloodbending well known to most people just by basic logic. More than that, even if people had guessed who Lieu and Amon were, they had a right to tell people on their own terms, not have me tell it for them. It wasn’t my story. I was barely even a major player, for all I’d been there for the beginning and end of the worst of it.

So. A version of the truth, then.

“Noa knows some healing techniques nobody else really knows,” I said, staring down into my tea. “It shouldn’t die with him. Asami is here to spend time with him, and I’m here to learn... and, I guess, to keep him healthy as long as I can.” I hadn’t planned on palliative care being a part of my time here, but life never went exactly how you thought it would. If the trade-off for my learning how to use Bloodbend to save lives was going to have to be practicing using it on a dying man, so be it.

He would make it to the winter solstice. He had to. Even if it took me, and then Sura, to make it happen, he would.

The full moon was rapidly approaching. Before it arrived, it brought my period, which also brought the worst cramps I’d had in at least a couple of years, bad enough that I spent two days mostly curled up in bed, clutching a hot water bottle to the small of my back and getting virtually nothing done except groaning and cursing. Asami sat with me when she wasn’t busy with anything else, although I wasn’t much of one for conversation in that state.

The morning of the full moon, when I rose to eat breakfast and go do the watering, I found Amon waiting for me at the dining table. He moved carefully, favoring his right arm even more than he had before I’d fucked up his circulation, keeping it tucked close and doing almost everything one-handed.

I’d come out just as he was setting the table for a more proper breakfast, and I watched as he placed a spoon at his plate and chopsticks for me and Lieu, Bending fresh tea into our cups with only a passing flick of the fingers of his left hand. He didn’t look up as he asked, “Will Asami be joining us?”

I glanced back into our room, where Asami had pulled my pillow over her head and, despite the already-humid morning, yanked the quilt up on top of her and balled her entire body up into it like a tigerdillo. I closed the door to keep from bothering her. “No.”

Amon simply nodded. “Serve the porridge, then.”

He’d gotten the bowls out already, so I served up our breakfast. Lieu limped out of their bedroom soon after, bleary-eyed and grumbling, and we all ate breakfast without conversation going beyond monosyllables. Lieu was done first, scrubbing his face as he headed out of the house.

Once we were alone, Amon sighed, set down his spoon. He’d just been picking at his porridge, and I had to fight the healer’s desire to admonish him to eat a proper meal. “I must admit that I’m quite tired. Perhaps we ought not to practice Bloodbending tonight. We can both get to bed at an early hour, and have more time for theory in the morning.” He turned towards me. “Does that sound good?”

Stunned, I stared at my mostly-empty bowl, the rice grains clinging to the sides, my hand limp on the placemat, fingers half-curled around my chopsticks. I tried to think of something to say and, unable to do so, remained astonished and silent.

Was he... trying to protect me? Running away? Was this his way of letting me down gently?

I didn’t need to be let down gently. I was the mother fucking Avatar.

“What the hell,” I said, finally looking up at Amon. He wasn’t wearing his mask while he ate, and even with how little he emoted beneath his extensive scars, his astonishment was writ plain on his face. “What? Why?” I clenched my fist around my chopsticks, the bamboo biting into my palm. “Is that it? Am I not worthy?”

Amon blinked. He frowned. “I had thought... you might not wish to try again.” Given I was staring at him slack-jawed and also increasingly furious, he seemed to finally realize he ought to reconsider. “You’ve not asked since anyone left. I was unsure if you were—“

“Amon,” I snapped, “I didn’t ask because you almost died.”

“It is of no consequence.”

“No conse—!” I remembered Asami was asleep, sank down the couple of inches I’d risen from my chair, and hissed, “No consequence? What the fuck makes you think—“

“I knew what I was getting into.” Amon looked down at the table, brow furrowed, the wrinkles disrupted by his scars. “I’m a dying man anyway, Korra. I’m not suicidal, just reasonable. I recognize the danger, and I’m it’s a risk I’m still willing to take. You were afraid of the practical aspect to begin with, and I’m not strong enough now to fight you off.” He shrugged his good shoulder. “Guess I was wrong.”

“I’m not practicing on you. Not again.” I blew my hair out of my face. “Not gonna do anybody any good if I kill my teacher.” He looked like he wanted to say something, probably about the good it would do plenty of people if he died, so I stepped on his foot to cut him off. “I was going to ask Asami. I figured I could practice on her, and you can watch, and guide, like you did when I was working on your arm, but from the outside this time.” He opened his mouth, I barreled on. “And I’m not just saying this because you’re old and frail and dying and the last thing you need is me blundering around inside your circulatory system like an ostritchhorse in a lightbulb factory.”

I was trying to learn Bloodbending so I could heal. Healing meant learning all kinds of settings, all different circulatory systems. I had to get comfortable with blood, in general, not in Amon in particular.

“Lieu also offered,” he said, after he’d sat there and thought about it. “I’m worried,” he admitted. “About how this may effect you, or them. The ramifications. But—“ And now he finally looked at me, ruined mouth twisted into a wry smile. “We can never grow if we don’t try, so we may as well try.”

“So,” Asami asked Lieu where they were sitting together on the log in the clearing by the pond, waiting to get started as I finished meditating, “does it hurt?”

“It can hurt.” It was later than Lieu almost ever stayed up, and his voice was wrung out with exhaustion, hoarse and low. “If it hurts, in my experience, that’s a bad sign. If it hurts, you’ve got a problem. If it just feels weird as hell, you’re probably fine. Even healing Bloodbending feels weird as hell, like your bones are about to get up and walk off.”

“It’s Bending blood, not bones.”

“Fine, then. Your veins are about to get up and walk off.”

Amon’s unsteady footsteps shifted amidst the undergrowth as he moved from where he’d been touching the pond to rejoin them on the log. “My touch and Korra’s touch are very different. I’m heavy-handed—I was trained to grasp the entire circulatory system as one individual flow. Korra is working on a more minute scale.” I opened my eyes and found him watching me, eyes barely visible beneath the shadow of his mask. “If she does it correctly, you’ll probably feel almost nothing at all.”

I spat water at him. “Way to hype me up. I don’t think I’m that good.”

He considered me, leaning into the arm that Lieu had put around his shoulders. “You’re getting there,” he finally said, and I tried not to preen. “We need to practice for internal bleeding, Avatar. Come look at these arteries.”

As the sky turned first grey, then pink, as the sun began to rise, Asami and I headed back up to the farmhouse. Amon and Lieu had stayed behind at the pond, the former needing help into and out of the water, so Asami and I were alone, holding hands as we came out of the trees and reached the side of the road. We stopped for a Satomobile to drive by, then crossed, waving as one of Amon and Lieu’s neighbors cycled past.

“It didn’t feel nearly as weird as I’d expected it to,” Asami admitted, leading the way up the front path to the house. “You were really gentle.” She had worn a plain knee-length skirt and button-up short sleeved shirt for me to practice on her, so there wasn’t anything to get in my way and she wouldn’t be uncomfortable while I did it. Now, the wind caught at her skirt, making the cotton flap, tugged at her blouse, pulling it tight around her waist.

I stopped her, wrapping my free hand around her waist, and pulled her close. She was up on the rise, which put her boobs at perfect face-pillow height, and I leaned gratefully into their warmth, sighing with exhaustion. Not just tired-exhaustion, but emotional exhaustion. She and Lieu both seemed fine, but so had Amon.

The what-ifs would drown me, if I let them.

“I don’t want to know what it’s like to do it any other way,” I admitted, leaning into my wife’s chest. She rubbed my back, her fingers cool between my shoulder blades, tucked under the collar of my shirt. “Am I ever going to stop being afraid of this?”

Asami made a thoughtful noise. “Probably not, but I don’t think you necessarily should be. Bending is dangerous. It kills people all the time, but nobody distrusts Benders as a whole. Being afraid of the potential of Bloodbending isn’t any different than being afraid of lightning or floods or earthquakes or fires, or the Benders who can cause them.” She pressed a kiss to the top of my head. “Just don’t let your fear make it too big for you. You control it, Korra. Not the other way around.

I groaned into her boobs. “How come you’re so sensible.” She laughed. “I mean it! How come your brain is always in the right place. We’re almost the same age and I’m not nearly this mature.”

“You are.” Asami kissed me again, nosing into my part and snorting there to make me giggle. “You’re just mature in a different way.” I groaned, leaning more against her. “Will it help if Lieu and I are both fine tomorrow?”

“Probably?” Every time I thought I had this Bloodbending thing under control and I wasn’t scared of it like I used to be, some other little niggling anxiety would rear its head. “Honestly, I think I’m just tired.”

“So,” said Asami Sato, arbiter of all things sensible and smart, “stop listening to after midnight thoughts. You can never trust them. Time to eat and sleep.”

I yawned, which proved how right she was. “Eat and sleep,” I agreed, and followed her into the house.

Amon was waiting for me after I watered the front garden plots the next day, and he pushed, slowly, up from his bench with a groan as I came back up to the water pump to drink. It was at least cloudy, and not sunny, which was a relief. It had been too hot by far the last few days. Made me miss the South Pole.

After I’d cleared my throat, I splashed some water on my face. “What’s up?”

He groaned, levering himself awkwardly to his feet. When I went to grab his good arm to give him a boost, he waved me off. “I’m dying, Korra. Not ancient.”

“Sounds like something someone who was ancient and also dying would say.” He hit me on the shin with his cane. “Old man.”

“Terrible youth.” I could hear his smile in his voice, even if his mask was covering his face. “Don’t wear me out before I can teach you to the ratios for watering the back field.”

He started walking around the back of the field before I caught up with what he’d said, and I had to hasten my steps to catch him, falling in to step on the side where he could hear me. “Are you not strong enough? Is it your arm?”

“My arm?” Amon shook his head. “No, not that. That’s not impacted my Bending, thank the spirits. I need time, and as much as I don’t want to give it up, that takes most of my day and my energy.” I’d thought we were going to stop by his usual chair behind the house where he sat in the shade while he watered, but instead he continued out, along the side of the field, down a well-trodden dirt path. “You and Sura have convinced me that I need to do my due diligence as a Master Waterbender. I’m going to write an instructional text.”

“For your farming techniques?”

He stopped to look back at me. “Korra. What do you think I’m going to write it for.”

“You’re—“ I spluttered for a moment. “You’re serious?” My voice came out high and squeaky, even inside my own head. “After all you’ve gone to in making sure nobody ever learns how—“

“I’ll write two texts, one for the most rudimentary of techniques, focused on theory, only for how to stop major internal bleeding, not how to reverse it, by using the chi meridians. It won’t be written as Bloodbending, but in a way that it can be used by trusted healers.” He folded his hands atop his cane and looked out, over the mostly-grown field of crops before us. They’d be ripe soon. The summer was almost over. “The other will be everything—all my father taught me, all I refined myself, all I’ve taught you. The theory, the practice, all of it.”

I wanted to ask why, but didn’t. Mostly because I didn’t know what why I wanted to ask.

“I trust you,” Amon finally said, still not looking at me. “You’ve earned that much.”

Not sure what else to do, I asked, “Can I hug you?”

“No,” Amon replied.

“Good,” I agreed. “I was starting to get worried you might have finally snapped.”

He hit me with his cane again.