Written for the Pro-bending Circuit | Round 4
Team: Laogai Lion Vultures
Position: Earthbender
Task: The worst fear of any character coming to life. [Fear for a child getting injured]
Prompt:
Easy (object) chair
Medium (character) Teo
Bonus: Use of element
Word Count: 2000
AN: Slight AU, just for that extra angst. It deviated from the title a bit, but the parallels between Teo and the Mechanist with Icarus and Daedalus was great brain food. Hope everyone had a spooky Halloween!
It was raining. It was raining too hard.
"Hello, little one! How are you doing today?" He took the boy from the crib as delicately and lovingly as he would the most painstakingly made machine in his workshop. Unlike a machine, his son giggled and squirmed and reached his chubby hands in front of his face.
"Ready to try those legs out today, Teo?"
The water kept rising.
"Come on, Teo! Come to me, you can do it! Just one step at a time." He held his hands out to his son, whose legs shook as he stood. "Don't be scared. I'll be here to catch you if you fall."
Teo waddled forward. Took one step. Took two. Then stumbled and fell, where his father was already there to catch him. He held his son close.
"Well done, Teo. Well done."
The toddler laughed.
He forced his way into their bedroom, water sloshing up to his stomach, brown, murky currents fighting his every step. The crib was smashed against the wall; splintered wood floated in the wreckage. A baby was crying.
His wife walked in from behind and wrapped them both in a hug. Her voice fluttered into his ear, "You're amazing. Both of you."
He couldn't find his wife.
"Still a little wobbly he is, but we'll get there."
He smiled back at her, light filling his eyes as if he were showing her one of his most marvelous inventions, but brighter and prouder than they'd ever been before. In them, there was no doubt that they would get there, and they would do it. Together.
"There's no better invention than the human body."
Teo spluttered, bobbed back up to his feet, and tried to walk once more.
The water kept rising.
They called him the Mechanist for obvious reasons. He created inventions out of nothing, toiled in his workshop from dusk till dawn, and tinkered scrap metal into mechanical marvels. After the flood, it was no wonder they turned to him, expecting him to fix their lives like he'd done for so many other broken contraptions in the past.
Fixing lives was much harder than fixing machines, especially with so many broken shards cutting into his hands. His people were hungry and tired and flood-soaked. His son shivered in his bandages. His world was more broken than even the greatest machinist could hope to fix.
They needed him, nonetheless — Teo needed him. So he led them up and up and up, picking a path to a place once unreachable, where rainwater would never crash down on them again. Rebuilding their lives in the husk of an abandoned air temple terrified him, but he thought of his son, and nothing could terrify him worse than what they'd already lived through.
When the Fire Nation came and demanded his services, he was thinking of Teo, too.
"Come here, Teo! One step at a time — well, metaphorically speaking. You can do it!"
Teo rolled the wheels of his chair daintily, as if he were afraid of his hands getting stuck in the spokes.
"Don't be scared! I'll be right here," the Mechanist shouted, standing by the cliffside, beckoning his son forward with open arms.
His son's new wheelchair was longer, and let him stretch out his legs in front of him. It was lighter, faster and easier on the turns than any the Mechanist had made for him before, but its true test wouldn't be how well it did on the ground.
The cloth wings cast a shadow over Teo's face. He took a deep, warming breath, before releasing the brake. His son sailed past him, rattling and picking up speed until the wheels ran out of ground, and Teo shot off the cliffside. He spiralled down, down, until the wind caught him and carried him up, and up, and up.
The wings on the wheelchair were nothing special, made of light wood and thick canvas, but the Mechanist stared up at them with amazement, as if they were made of pure gold and silver. The sun smiled down on his son's back while the clouds churned beneath him like a white sea. Teo flew low with the mist and high with the sunbeams, and the Mechanist's heart dipped and rose each time he did.
When his wheels touched down on Earth once more, Teo's face was bright and windswept.
"That was amazing."
"Yes, yes! The maneuverability holds up to the test runs and it just needs a slight counter-balance to stop that incessant wobble." The Mechanist paced back and forth, the gears already churning in his mind.
"Are you going to come up, too?" Teo asked.
"Heavens, no! I'm not a fan of heights." It was true; he'd never had a love for the sky like his son had. High up places meant falling, and falling meant plummeting towards the face of the Earth, with wind shrieking past his ears and nothing, not even the greatest invention, able to stop the fall. No, the Mechanist had no love for flying.
But he beat down that fear, if only to see the smile that lit up his son's face.
"Can I go again?"
Teo became a master of the skies. He flew proud like a lion vulture, happy as a sparrowkeet, and with a heart as light as air. His people, once so lost and downtrodden, filled the skies with wings of green and brown, like a swarm of happy craneflies flitting around the temple.
The Mechanist kept inventing, to help those he most loved and those he most hated. They lived like that for years; not in the most innocent position, but one that was safe.
Then the Avatar came. The boy told him he had no right to innovate the temple, no right to mimic the airbenders' creation, and no right to collude with the Fire Nation.
For that last offence, he felt most guilty. It gave him no joy to hand his creations to those who would use it for destruction, but he'd done it so he'd never have to fear the broken shards of life cutting into his hands again. So his son wouldn't have to lose more than he already had.
But as with most fears, it was only a matter of time before he was forced to face it.
The Fire Nation came to take the temple, their home. The Mechanist swore that they wouldn't take an inch without fighting for it. No matter how much he might have feared this day, that was one thing he was sure of.
The craneflies flew, now more like buzzard-wasps ready to defend their hive, and rained havoc upon the mountainside. Fireballs clawed into the air, and his heart leaped whenever one got too close to a glider's wing, but bombs fell down in recompense. It was land against sky, fire against air, creator against creations. With a little ingenuity, and a rotten smelling gas leak, the tides turned to their favor.
The battle was almost finished, the life they'd made still intact, and then...
Fire caught on a cloth wing. It smoldered and smoked and belched a black trail as it streaked across the sky. The glider shivered in the air. It hung still for a moment, like a stone thrown into the sky at the peak of its arc, before gravity chained onto it, and it fell.
Falling. His son was falling. He was plummeting towards the face of the Earth with wind shrieking past his ears and nothing, not even the greatest invention, able to stop his fall.
It was pure horror rising in the Mechanist's stomach, like floodwaters rising through a village, impossibly, devastatingly fast.
The earth was even less merciful than the pull of rising water. The earth was stubborn and uncaring; it crushed buildings and objects and bones alike, no matter how much he might plead and yell.
He was too far away. He was too high up. Why had he let his son go so high up?
Falling. His son was falling.
"Don't be scared. I'll be here to catch you if you fall."
Teo lived.
The Avatar was there, with a blast of wind just enough to keep the fall from being fatal, and Katara there with water to heal what was broken.
It had been a quiet few days since the battle and the Mechanist had all but locked himself into his workshop. The space was emptier now after the Avatar left, with all the horrible machines he'd made for the Fire Nation boiled down to scrap metal and blueprints.
The door opened and kicked up dust. Teo wheeled into his workshop. Seeing his son was worse for his heart than seeing a ghost, for it ate him with guilt as well as horror. With his arm in a sling, the sheer amount of his son's body in bandages was almost comical.
He could hear Teo rolling behind him. The Mechanist pretended to tinker with the metal at his workbench.
"Did you… did you fix the glider on my chair?" he asked.
The wreckage of his son's wheelchair was hidden under a tarp behind them, untouched.
"I… I don't think you should go up there again so soon after…" The Mechanist's words stuck in his throat.
"Just for now? Or forever?" Teo looked up at him with accusing eyes. When he didn't answer, his son's gaze turned sad. "Why?"
"I'm only doing this to protect you."
"Are you doing this to protect me? Or so you don't have to be scared?"
The Mechanist didn't answer that either.
Teo wheeled slowly to his side. "It's okay, Dad. You don't have to worry so much."
He let the metal fall out of his hands. "I don't think I can stop. With your mother gone, I have to take on double the worry. How much more can I take?"
Looking at his son just out of the corner of his eye, bandaged and bruised and frown etched on his face, was already too much to bear.
Teo answered quietly, "You don't have to be afraid."
This time, the Mechanist whirled to face his son. "I will never stop being afraid for you. The greatest fear of any parent is something horrible happening to their child."
Even just thinking it, the memories streaked past his eyes: Teo, half-sunk in freezing brown floodwater, wooden wreckage pinning his chest. His son, a still mound amid the burning wings of a crashed glider.
"I let you fall." His voice seemed to echo in the empty room.
"No. You didn't." It was Teo's turn to whirl on him, eyes intense and unshakeable. "You let me fly even when you were scared of me falling. You led all of us here and made a new life even though you were scared of losing more than you already did. You let me be free even after I lost my legs. You did all that even though you were still scared. And that's why I want to go back up there. I'm scared too, but that's never stopped you, and that won't stop me either."
The Mechanist's eyes were hazed with tears, but through them he saw his son clearly for the first time in so long. He was no drowning toddler in a sunken crib, no fragile child crumpled underneath smouldering wings. Teo was a fighter. He fought his circumstance as much as he fought the Fire Nation, and the Mechanist couldn't be prouder. What right did he have to chain his son down, just because he feared Teo would fall?
He kneeled down in front of his son, and wrapped him in an embrace.
The Mechanist's worst fears had come true, and they'd broken his heart a hundred times over. Rainstorms made him shudder. The view of the ground from the high towers of the air temple set his heart aflutter. But he had his son, and they would brave it all, together.
Teo flew, again.