Blood of the North (Avatar: TLA Fanfic)

Chapter 1: A Ratty Technique

The elephant rat pushes past my bare foot, sniffing with a probing snout. I don't recoil from its oily, matted fur. I've felt the scratches of claws on my cheeks and thrash of bony legs in my mouth. I don't gasp when they fall from overhead and they don't flinch when we scream or strike at them.

The rat passes through the even metal bars, placed just too narrowly to fit more than the crown of my head through. It strolls along the lip of the cage where I am suspended by four thick chains. The rats use those chains to reach every cage, to lick the sweat and sores of prisoners too weak to knock them away.

To be one of these wretched rats. I would crawl between the bars of my cage, scrabble up the rough steel, pull myself up the chain links, and drop myself onto one of the long walkways, or slip through a vent high up in the ceiling. Wherever these rats go whenever guards blast them, I would go there. Past the guards and their heat, I'd claw my way out into whatever steaming Fire Nation landscape awaits beyond these walls and gates. They couldn't do more than singe my tail.

I press my forehead against the bars, as if I could squeeze through. I hardly have the strength to push, and the exertion makes my eyes droop. We've reached the sorry end of our feeding schedule.

A screech stirs me and I flinch in spite of myself. It's not the worst I've heard, but what fresh device of hurt could produce that short, torn-up cry. Now it sounds as if fingers are popping. I scan the cells for a sadistic guard or a new prisoner. There are so few of us left here that days pass with no human shape in sight.

I spot shadowed, concealed motion: a hollow, dark-haired girl, back hunched away from me, but muscles at work with the unmistakable precision of bending. She found water!

A reserve of strength presses me to the bars nearest her, my dull vision unable to detect any trace of liquid. But of course she wouldn't overdo it. There is something moving—beneath her thin white legs, a shape twisted and rising onto his hind legs. I strain my eyes through the dim and rows of cages. A pink tail, flash of teeth—an elephant rat! Between us, nobody stirs. The rat rises from the floor, stiff—she's bending it. Starved and senseless, I can't believe it. I blink in the dry air of the prison; still the little beast twists like a puppet at the girl's fingertips.

The elephant rat falls, releasing a screeching gasp, squeaks in a panic, and rushes for the edge of the cage. The girl turns, only slightly, but I see her fingers stiffen and the rat rises again, bending in different positions. It freezes in midair, nose pointed upward as—I spot it suddenly in the corridor—another rat is dragged toward the cell. Halfway there, it slips from the invisible grip, vanishing into the black beneath our cages. When I was first brought here, I thought we would be dropped down there: disappeared into the earth.

Except it didn't disappear. The rat emerged again from the dark, looking dead. I can see the muscles burning in the girl's outstretched arm, thrust down over the side of her cage, as the tops of her fingers are long threads tied to the rat's joints.

After all this time in Fire Nation prison, I've not lost my mind. I thought I was lucky, but now I wonder if I'm not worse off with my mind intact. Laughing for hours or crying endless tears of blind joy, inside their heads were they somewhere better? Sometimes they seemed to come out of it, screaming as if finding themselves trapped here for the first time. Which torment is worse? Wherever in their consciousness their soul flees, maybe this prison is only a nightmare they wake up from, just as I wake from the terror of my own memories. I cling to the cerulean of my mother's wedding necklace against her throat, my father's big hand on the pommel of the hunting knife that will belong to me, my sister's face as—but I can't see every part of them. I cling to those shining bits, but not the blood-spattered blades and smoldering remains. Perhaps if I lost my mind, I could go to the back of my mind and live out the rest of my days like those grinning escapees whose eyes have rolled back. Maybe then I could see their faces again.

I close my eyes, picturing my life before—the necklace, the hunting knife, my sister's nimble hands bending water. I only want to remember good dreams, things still living, so I have forgotten their faces, the fear and violence burnt into them. I press the safest images against my mind's eye as I go to sleep. Bone pommel, cerulean neck piece, seal fur lining, red nose poking out, warm skin layers, leather-sealed canoe...

Fishing with my family, six miles from the gates of the Northern Water Tribe. At home among the drifting shifts of ice. My youngest sister practices her waterbending, splashing with her hands, round and rosy-cheeked in the layers of fur. She is five and all she can bend is by instinct, her tiny fingers warm in spite of the frigid ocean. Above her, my seven year old sister parades terrified fish through a tube of water, a couple feet above the water's surface, trying not to let them fall out. My mother lounges, recently pregnant, on a chair. She watches my father direct the boat with a paddle. He does not need to bend to have control of the current.

I am ten or fifteen paces ahead, on the solid shelf of ice right of the canoe. My mother calls out to be careful. My father shouts for me to head to where the water is still, to find a fishing spot. He usually chooses the fishing spot. He's only shown me before. I run ahead, reciting his advice under my breath.

I have found a still, dark pool when a crunch cracks above the highest glaciers, a great force breaking a field of ice. Burning, angry red, and hard, rough steel shatters the blue and white. Billowing black smoke, and an unnatural greasy heat wafts over my face, clinging to the hairs of my parka.

I twitch awake from the dream, because I know what comes next. It always comes next, again and again and again, unless I stay awake.

Filtered, dry air burns my lungs and parched throat, rousing me, at least, from the half-sleep where spirits seem to filter into the edges of my vision. Something taps my head, hard, and when I don't respond for some time, the gate of the cage comes open. Someone grabs my arms and legs so that they can strap me down, my limbs pulled to their full length. It is in this way that they grant me water from a tiny sponge dripped in such tiny quantities I can hardly feel it. Still, I relish its wetness, its connection to the marrow of my bones, the memory of its power, its moon-enchanted power. Once I am returned to the cage, they toss a rind of meat, and move to the next prisoner. I chew the meat, as dry as the puffy bulbs of sea lion grass.

Days and days passed that way, countable only by windows high up in the walls. I stopped pretending I could keep track because it made me paranoid, overly conscious of time passing, or not passing, passing without me. I am never entirely sure I haven't lost it. The rats kept moving around. But it became something consistent in a way that distracted me from the stifling heat, the stifling nothing.