There is something about falling in love, they say, that makes a man crazy. And you know, I kind of have to believe it. You start out high as a kite, and generally by the end of whatever it is that you fell in love with, you end up broken. That's just how it goes.

Once, a seventeen year old kid asked me what it was to be in love. He'd just had his leg broken in a motorcycle accident, and was sitting in our infirmary, staring at his hands. I had been there, I had carried him back to base.

Lieutenant, he asked me, looking up, with haunted eyes. Have you ever fallen in love? And for a long time, I just stared at him. It had to have made him pretty damn uncomfortable to just have me watching him, uniform and all, behind my goggles, and I guess it was because I was trying to figure out how to answer.

Yes. I said at last. He looked a bit surprised. Why?

Mei Yi. The kid mumbled. The name of the other Equalist who had been on the other bike. She had been killed in the crash—killed when the Avatar had thrown up a wall of stone. We had salvaged her body but nothing else. It would be buried in the morning. She—we went to school together. I joined because of her. He swallowed around a lump in his throat. Her family was killed by the Triad a couple of years ago—she—my parents always treated her like another kid. She moved in with us. He set his hands down and leaned his head back on the pillow, looked over at me. I was going to ask her to marry me.

You're a bit young to get married, I pointed out, and he shrugged minutely.

I figured we could die any day now. I could see the sadness in his eyes, the emptiness, like part of his soul had been scooped out and left to fry on the rocks. The words seemed like venom as they dripped from his lips. I guess I was right. It was quiet for another long moment, and then I leaned back in the chair next to his bed, reaching up and pulling off my mask, turning it over in my hands, looking at the glinting goggles, the tight cloth, and I rubbed at my chin. I needed a shower and a shave.

I have, actually. I looked up at him. Just once. When I was twenty years old, this kid—not a day older than you—got hit by a Satomobile. He crashed into me while I was buying a kebab at a stand. Broke his ankle and three ribs, and one of mine. He looked a bit surprised. But we were Equalists—everybody was equal, even if some of us still looked askance at that sort of thing.

What happened to him? The kid said at last.

I was in love at first sight, I replied. And then I stood. I still am. Standing in the doorway, leaning on one post, was the kid who, twenty-three years before, had gotten hit by a car. His grey eyes watched me from within the slits of his mask, beneath the shadow of his hood.

I couldn't see it, but I knew. He was smiling.

— Chapter One : —

Was ever book containing such vile matter

So fairly bound? O that deceit should dwell

In such a gorgeous palace!

[ Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene ii ]

There is something about heartbreak. It's physically painful, yes, but only in the aftermath. At the moment it happens itself, it isn't painful to your body. Instead it's like this yawning, gaping hole in your soul. Especially when it's someone you have known for more than half their life. Someone you trust with your back, and they trust you with theirs. Especially when you have seen them through every emotion, every end of the spectrum. After twenty-three years, I had seen Amon elated and soaring on clouds, in the darkest of moods, so angry that he could have lit you on fire with his eyes, defeated, exhausted, vindicated, helpless, broken, and strong. And I thought I knew everything about him that there was to know.

I had never questioned some things—I didn't want to. I never questioned where he came from. What his past was. And in return, he never questioned mine. For all intents and purposes, we were brand new people from day one, healer's office, Watertribe seventeen year old getting lectured by a healer to avoid cars and streets from now on, all right?

I don't think it ever occurred to him that I would have loved him no matter what, if he had just told me. Avatar Korra accusing him of being a Bloodbender, that I could handle—we would talk about it later, intensely, in private, and he would either substantiate or refute her claims, and either way, I knew he would give me a good explanation. He had never failed at that. Besides, that's what trust is about. Even when in the face of all sorts of hell, when it's an established thing, you trust. Sometimes it's the only thing between you and the sharks.

I could handle him actually being a Bloodbender, too. Hell, it made a lot of sense. And in all the years I had known him, Amon had never once used it to do something as evil as the stories of Yakone or Hama made it out to be. He had used it, as far as I knew, only to bring equality. And I trusted him to, at the end, let his own bending go as well. Because he didn't need it.

What I couldn't handle was the lying. When you love somebody, you don't lie. You don't gloss over the truth, or never even talk about it. You say it, even when it hurts, and then you let hindsight take the hindmost. You plough right on through anyway. Burn your bridges, build new ones. And I could have handled the truth just fine, if it had been given to me. I couldn't handle the lying.

That was the thing, though. Amon had lied to me. Pretty badly, actually. And when I walked in on him, Bloodbending the Avatar and (her boyfriend?) her sidekick, that was where the heartbreak started. It started like this burning behind my eyes of fresh-brewing tears.

Because I had. I had dedicated my life to him. My life, my soul, my body, my mind. And he, in turn, had done the same. Or so I thought. Not as completely as I did for him, oh no. That's the thing about being the Lieutenant. You were always secondary. But the Leader always gave something in return, and outside of the Equalists, we were still on even ground. Nobody is the leader in a relationship, even if for the past fifteen years I had been giving the mile and he had been giving the inch. I hadn't minded. I loved him.

We fought for the same causes. He put his mile into that. It was a trade off. And there was no doubt, not in anybody's mind, without Amon to rally behind, we never would have gotten anywhere. The Equalists would have died in a shitty apartment in a crappy slum in the worst neighbourhood in Republic City if it weren't for a twenty-three year old from the Water tribe who was as stubborn as a brick wall sometimes.

And I knew even in that moment, he didn't stop loving me. When I caught him, after he attacked the Avatar and Friend, the look Amon gave me was one I had seen in his eyes maybe twice before—absolute, unbridled terror. Fear. Anxiety. And he reacted with whatever was at hand.

Honestly. I had told him fifteen years before—I would never attack him. Never. I wouldn't betray him, I wouldn't leave him, I wouldn't break his heart. I would never attack him. No matter how far down he fell or how high he climbed, I would never fight him. I would put my hand on his shoulder and bring him back to earth and be his voice of reason and caution and sanity. Like any good lover is supposed to do.

And in the end, he paid that back by crushing me half to hell, his fingers shaking as he said the words that broke my soul.

You have served me well, Lieutenant.

Not Lieu. I know why he didn't say it—nobody knew my name, I wasn't traceable. Not even Hiroshi knew my real name—the Lieutenant moniker had picked up so fast that nobody had ever taken the time to figure out that it was really just a pretty flimsy cover for my real name. But it still felt like he had just torn everything we had in two.

And when he tossed me into that pile of beams, I didn't feel the need to get up. Or the want. Ever. I almost shouted his name when Firebender Brat threw him, hard, into the wall—Amon had never been as resilient as I was, he took injuries a lot harder, unlike I did, just walking them off—but he was back up before I could call his name.

He looked toward me for a moment. I saw that. Half-buried under beams as I was, I couldn't move, couldn't speak. But I heard his words, they carried.

I'm sorry.

And so we came to this. The glass shattering—Spirits, I hoped he had landed in the water, that concrete wouldn't make for a good place to stop, and besides, as much as I hated the idea that he had lied to me, I had never been happier to know that my lover was a Waterbender—and I was still laying there.

Nobody came back to check if I was alive. Psh. Typical.

Twenty three years since Amon of the Water Tribe had been hit by a Satomobile, flew twenty feet, knocked over a kebab stand and crashed into me hard. Twenty years to the day since we made love slow and sweet by the light of the full moon in a dingy apartment, his fingers curled white-knuckled in the sheets and his voice hoarse as he called my name. Fifteen since we had tried to save a couple in a back alley, burned to hell by a Firebender, their squalling sons gone running just in time, and we had made a pact that this would never happen again, not under our watch. Thirteen since Amon had donned that mask, because a man corrupts a revolution, an idea strengthens it. Ten since Hiroshi Sato had shown up at our apartment in the middle of the night. Eight since we went to war. One since we had left the Underground behind and begun this whole bloody battle.

And never once had he mentioned it. Had it never occurred to Amon, the idiot, that I was going to love him no matter what. That I would have believed him if he had just told me.

That I loved him, even now, and without any reservations, in the face of everything.

Honestly, I probably would have just laid there, collapsed and in excruciating pain on the ground forever if I hadn't started coughing blood. Before that, the only pain I had noticed was the broken heart that was beating in my chest, held together by two decades of unconditional love and sheer force of will and nothing else, but coughing brought everything else to the forefront. My broken ribs from when the Avatar's dog had knocked me off a cliff. My neck—probably bad whiplash. It felt like someone had punched my sternum in, and not to mention on top of all of that, I could feel the internal bleeding. My organs, twisted painfully out of shape.

"Thank you for the reassurance of your love and apology," I grunted to nobody in particular, since Amon was long gone at that point, slowly crawling my way out of the beams and then laying propped there on the ground, leaning on one elbow, feeling the kali sticks in the palms of my hands. I wasn't down for the count yet.

Well, I probably was. Broken bones and dislocations I could handle. Bruises, sprains, twists, concussions. That was all commonplace. But internal bleeding would kill me one way or another, whether I liked it or not.

I wondered, quietly to myself, if Amon had known what it was he was doing to me when he did it. Probably not. As stoic and controlled as he was, I was the part of the relationship that worked well under pressure. When things got too heated he lost it, he acted on instinct, did what came to mind. And this had been particularly bad—he had gone the way his stress told him to.

Rolling to my side, coughing into the sleeve of my uniform, I dragged myself to my feet, clawing my way up the pole I had been leaning on until I was upright again, and I took a few hazy steps, almost dropping to the ground again before I regained my balanced and leaned there, doubled over, hacking until I coughed up a handful of blood, watched it drip to the floor, crimson on the tile.

What a hell of a way to go, organs crushed by the person that you loved most in the world. There was probably a metaphor in there somewhere, but I couldn't figure it out right now. Right now I needed to go, get out of here before everybody remembered what was going on, got the city back into shape, the boats arrived, the cops showed up. Metalbenders or not, I was going to get arrested if I stuck around. They had lost their chance at Amon, but I was the Lieutenant. I was still standing there, sticking around, looking like an idiot. I needed to get going.

Sheathing the kali sticks on my back, groaning as I straightened, one hand pressed to my abdomen, and bit back a grimace of pain and started walking. My mask, goggles crushed, lay on the ground—it was broken, no point going back for it—and I just kept going, out to the hallway.

At one end, the window was smashed. I stared out the glass, the shatter shaped like someone had gone flying through it. I felt a pang in my heart.

But there was nothing left there to salvage. As much as I loved Amon, or whatever his real name actually was, he had tried to kill me. In the long run, he probably had. I couldn't love him through that.

There was no point in loving something that had so tremendously hurt you.

In the time that it took me, limping, coughing every few steps, to drag myself out of the Pro-Bending Arena, the crowd had dispersed and the sun was just dipping past noon—I had never been happier to have scheduled a rally before noon did hit. Still in my uniform, there was no way I could get out of the city quickly. Fortunately, there was a safe house, a bolt hole, set up about five blocks away from the Arena.

We had used it the night before the Championship match. It was well stocked, since we hadn't used anything there the night that we stayed, and it was one of those reserved just for Amon. And me.

Avoiding crowds and the open streets as much as possible, my ribs aching, all my joints screaming with the way Amon had twisted them, a few most likely dislocated and relocated somewhere along the line, it took a lot longer than I would have liked to make my way to the safe house, unlocking it with the keys in my uniform pocket, stepping inside and bolting it closed behind me.

It was a dingy apartment, like most of our other safe houses were. Two changes of clothes in the closet, both plain and civilian, a cloth bag to carry anything we needed in. Plus some provisions, all canned, and medical supplies. Just the bare minimum of all. Stripping off my uniform as soon as I was in the door, hissing every time I had to bend or turn, wincing at the persistent pain in my chest, I tossed the uniform in a heap on the end of the futon and pulled open the closet.

Two changes of clothes looked back at me. One was meant to fit me, taken from our closet at home. Vest, shirt, slacks, and a pair of shoes that were old but I could walk in. They probably didn't fit as well now as they had ten years ago, but I could deal with any foot pain. They would let me walk.

But first, bandaging. I couldn't put any pressure on any of my internal injuries, but I could replace the ripped up bandages on my ribs and the splints, which would hopefully keep the pressure at least partially under control.

Taking the first aid kit from the closet and sitting down on the futon to change my bandages—which was very awkward to do one handed, last time it had happened I had sat there on the bed while we had discussed an update to the uniform design, sketching it on my lap while Amon finished up changing the bandages and splints, offering advice over my shoulder—I glanced over at the length of it, my crumpled uniform on the other side. Last time I had been on this futon we had crammed on here, two fully grown men shoved into enough room for one, legs tangled, Amon half on top of me, one arm thrown over my chest, shoved as close as he could get to keep either one of us from sliding off the edge, and when we awoke early the morning of the Championship match, we had made love in the soft morning light through the still-parted blinds.

He had ridden me. I could still see his face, dark hair falling over his skin, grey-blue eyes half closed, a dark flush on his cheeks, lips parted, watching me from under lowered lids, whispering my name every time I filled him. Something inside me twisted, and I looked away, finished with the bandages.

Now was not the time to think about that. I dumped the kit into the bag for whenever I would need to patch myself up again and went back to the closet for the clothes.

Changing, and then hesitating once I was dressed—the other pair of clothes was meant for Amon, but I grabbed it anyway, wrapped my generator up in it, tucked it into the travelling bag, and then went through the kitchen—a few packets of tightly wrapped noodles, a couple of cans, one box of tea, a small container of coffee, and two sets of silverware. I took only one. That was enough. It would last me a few days at the very least. There was some emergency money stashed in the kitchen drawers—it wasn't much, but it was enough. Enough to pay for a ferry, for example, or an ostritchhorse and wagon. It would run out fast, but it was something. Coupled with what I had carried with me in my wallet, it would hold up for a while, until the city had died down enough that I could come back and try to salvage my bank account.

Everything now jammed into the travelling bag, I went to the door, paused one last time to look over the room.

My uniform, fifteen years of memories. The bed where I had held the love of my life. The kitchen where he had spilled coffee on himself, laughing, at half-past seven.

My throat was tight when I stepped out and closed the door behind me. They would probably find it in a few days or longer if nobody checked until the rent went unpaid. And that meant I had to be long gone.

The sun was sitting high in the sky, bright, and the city was silent. Walking down the streets, almost entirely devoid of life, one hand on the strap of the travelling bag and the other in my pocket, teeth grit against the steady, unstopping pressure and pain in my chest, I watched the clouds scud along the horizon of the bay. It was calm. Quiet.

It's ironic, isn't it, how beautiful the world can be on the same day it breaks your heart and soul.

I got out of the city limits at about sunset, and the yellow-orange painted everything in a diffusing glow. As much pain as I was in, I had a long night of walking ahead of me, and so I stopped, finding a smaller cove with a short beach, dropping to the ground, taking the weight off of my aching feet, pulling over the bag and digging out the knife I had brought and a can of beans, cracking it open the hard way, grimacing until I managed to break the top, starting to saw through the metal, wincing at the noise. But it worked, and soon enough, I had gotten the can far enough open to be able to spoon out the beans within. Pulling out the spoon and setting into it, not a nice meal but an edible one, I looked out at the half-set sun and saw something floating on the water.

There are those moments that make you, against all forethought or logic, do things. Like twenty-three years ago, when I had stopped with my last five yuan of what I thought was going to be my last paycheck ever and bought a kebab at a roadside stand, only to be standing in the exact position to break the fall of a small-town kid getting hit by a car. Or that had made us decide to go out to dinner late one night, only to find a family getting mugged just as we were leaving the restaurant.

Those are the moments where, regardless of whether or not you want to, you do something. I set down the beans, wedged them into the sand so that the can wouldn't fall over, and kicked off my shoes, tugged down my socks, rolling up the hems of my pants until they were tight around my thighs, and pushed myself to my feet, coughing into the cuff of one sleeve, approaching the edge of the water lapping at the shore. It was floating a good ten feet out, bobbing along on the current, currently stuck in one place. The sunlight glinted off of it a bit, although dully. It wasn't reflective, just white, and I winced as I stepped into the water—it was icy cold, something I had discovered when Avatar Korra had knocked me off the top of the Bending Arena and into it, but I waded a bit deeper, down to my ankles and then to my knees, just about to the edge of where my pants were before I reached it, letting go of one leg to slip just a bit into the water as I stretched out to grab what it was. I didn't right away, just backtracked far enough that my pants wouldn't get any wetter, back until the surf hit just at my ankles.

And then I looked at what I held in my hand and I almost threw it back in the surf.

The paint had never been sealed on, and it wasn't by any means a piece of pottery—no, the mask had just started out white, and here it was now, back as it started, sitting in the palm of my hand, the paint washed off by the surf, leaving only faint pinkish marks where the red lines and circle had once been, the rest off-white, pockmarked and scratched from years of being worn. It felt incredibly heavy in my hand.

"You gave it all away, didn't you," I whispered, as if the mask could give me answers that the man that wore it never did. When there was the sound of a motorboat running by I didn't even look up, just continued looking at the mask, its empty eyes staring back at me.

I stepped out of the water, shook down my pants, and crammed it back into my bag. I didn't want to look at it. Maybe not ever again.

When I started off again, it was just starting to turn toward twilight. It was quiet, except for the lapping of waves on the shore, and the very hem of one leg of my pants was damp, smacking against my ankle. It took my mind off the pain in my chest and abdomen, the annoyance of having one damp pants leg and one damp sock, while the other was perfectly dry. The sun finally finished setting, leaving everything in that half-light, the last rays reflecting off the clouds, the horizon purple.

As terrible as the day had been, in so many ways, the further I walked the better it seemed to feel. Like I was leaving everything behind. Honestly, I wasn't even certain where I was going yet, just wandering. Just going until I stopped. Hazily at the back of my mind I thought about returning to the farmhouse that my family had lived in, about a two day journey from Republic City on foot, one on an ostrichhorse, but nothing solid yet.

I kept walking, and the twilight finally slid on into early darkness, the half-dim kind where everything is just blurred, fireflies lighting the path, the moon starting to rise. It was full tonight, and it reflected off the water, illuminating the waves.

My younger sister, when we were kids, always liked to give personality to the things around us. To the grass, and the animals, and the sun, and the moon. She had said that the moon was kind and benevolent, and wanted only the very best for all of us, and smiled on the people that walked the earth. I had always ignored her, but in that moment—that moment.

It was almost like the moon was guiding me to see the debris, floating in the water. The wood spars, tossed against the rocky coast, the rudder floating by, the glove hanging half-off one of the larger pieces.

An Equalist glove. One of the ones Hiroshi had designed. Stepping closer, approaching slowly with caution, I continued, following the trail of remains, to a half-bown-apart generator, the clone of mine—a backup.

I knew just before I took a step further that rounded a large outcrop of rock what I was going to see, but that didn't make it any better. They were laying there on the sand, together. I only knew it was Tarrlok by pure guessing—his body was half blown to hell, most of the hair gone, one entire arm and most of a leg missing, burned almost beyond recognition, long past saving.

And next to him, laying on his stomach for obvious reasons when I saw his back, was Amon. The entirety of both his uniform coat and the fire-retardant undershirt cloth that Hiroshi designed, what had probably saved his life, had been scorched away and replaced by burns that had blackened his skin, white bone peeking out in a few places and all over his arms. His legs were unharmed, but the back of his head was completely cauterised, oozing slightly, most of the hair gone except more towards the front, and slowly, he turned toward me, with a superhuman feat of effort.

It's an irony of life that his brother blowing up a boat gave him scars worse than he could have ever faked himself with makeup. It was probably a miracle he had kept both his eyes, with the rest of the damage that had been done.

But it didn't matter that his nose was gone, that the one ear I could see with the way his head was turned was practically melted off, half his lips burned, eyebrows vanished, teeth visible where his mouth was—none of that mattered. I would have known his eyes anywhere. Grey-blue, and like the eye of a storm. He coughed, a bit of seawater sliding out of his mouth, and tried to sit up, but none of his muscles would move. He just coughed again.

I don't know what it was that made me approach. At the moment, certainly not love. But I did approach, sliding down the rocky outcropping, pausing to step around Tarrlok's body, the other wood spars washed onto land, to kneel beside him, reaching out to touch his cheek.

"Lieu?" He whispered. His voice was hoarse, shot, and he sounded as bad as he looked. And in that moment, damn me to hell, I had never loved him more, never been happier to see him. I couldn't stand the sight of him, I felt sick with how he had lied but—I loved him. Completely. Irrefutably. And I had, for half my life. "Why?"

"Because you aren't dead yet," I replied, putting my bag down next to him, digging until I came up with the first aid kit, which had enough bandages I could cover the worst of his burns. "And on my watch, you aren't going to be."

His eyes just closed, in exhaustion, or relief, or acceptance. But he was still breathing. So, it was a start