Blood of the North (Avatar: TLA Fanfic)

Chapter 1b: Escape

I saw her mouth, the firm set of her lips and chin. Matted hair covered her eyes as she used her hands, the basic motions of waterbending, though stiff and tense like I had never seen. In front of her, the rats danced together. They moved back and forth, side to side. And no matter how well she kept control, the movements never became natural. Her concentration is powerful and intense, as if she would lose control if she let one thought stray.

I caught an angle of her eyes as she bent the rats. They pierced me and I was glad she could not see me. What she could do to me is untold but infinite, ferocious, torturous. Watching her, I understand I am weak, soft. I am a little kid who gets dragged onto a ship while his father, mother and sisters take the heat of the fight. I need to be as strong as even one of them. The girl's dagger eyes, I realize, are edged with a power I could hone for myself.

I studied her, trying to figure out the secret of bending rats—how are they, such earthbound, scavenging creatures, connected to the crystal majesty of water? Why can't I feel it in my own blood? I watched raptly for days and days, counting by our feedings and waterings. My newfound determination awakened a new hope. I knew that on the other side of this technique was some return to being something real and alive and in the world.

I no longer ignored the rats that crawl over me. I recalled the most basic bending I ever learned and tried to bend the rats. I imagined my father teaching me, and me teaching my sisters when they begged. Memories began to replay in my mind in place of—the nightmare. I even thought of my youngest sister, splashing... always just on the edge of making the water her own. That was where I was—splashing—because inside me I had the potential, just as she did... But I could not remember being so young.

Unable to grip the rats—or whatever was inside them—I decide I would try to speak with the girl. I do not know how. She slept whenever she did not eat or drink or bend. There are always guards listening, and those who speak get burnt. But if I could just manage to get a word in—a simple gesture—perhaps she could show me something.

One day, I notice she was not sleeping. She was staring straight ahead into the red darkness, and not looking for a rat either. I am about to call out to her, in the faintest whisper, when a guard comes walking down the hall. His keys dangle at his side, their jangle a taunt of the simplicity of freedom. As he nears the girl's cage, his hand leaps into the air, catching him by surprise. His hand wrenched down and snatched his keys from his side. Then he stumbled forward and shoved the key into the lock of the rat girl's cage. The gate swings wide and she hops out.

My wish to call out to her, my wish to learn her secret, was a frozen muscle in my mouth. As she crept away from her cage, our cage, the man tried to get up from the ground, but she shoved him down, knocking him unconscious. Then she was gone. Without a word to anyone, she vanished. She left—I struggle for words, the feelings, the inability to understand what was happening then, as if now I could come to my senses and call out to her, stop her, beg her to save us all. But the air was so dry: I didn't cry out, my voice caught in my throat. I am a coward, I knew then, a weak, useless coward.