Eternal Return
Disclaimer: I do not own Legend of Korra. If I did, you can be sure that Amon would be tapping that mighty fine Avatar's behind (once she's of age of course) come the epic one-hour finale.
'Like Amon who came before him, Mon Te-hi left for the land where she was born, the South Pole. He treaded the frozen seas with a broken heart but with eternal hope that one day, as Katara found Aang, he would find his very own Avatar, trapped in her circle of ice.'
He was born to loving parents, non-benders, whose parent's parents and further beyond were all non-benders, and was named Mon Te-hi, after their lord, the visionary revolutionist who had freed them from tyrannical rule of the benders and ushered in a new age, an age of equality.
Amon.
He reckoned a thousand boys across the land now bear the name in its various forms and variety, all in honors of their lord, gone for years now.
He did not remember much of his childhood. He was a farm boy in a sceneric but far-away, far enough to called backwater by some, farmland. His parents were laborers, tilling the earth and watering the plants in return for daily bread and rice. There was nothing special about them, the lowest of the low, who benefitted little from the New Republic projects. But at the time, it was well-known that lord Amon himself was once a farm boy and his parents once farmers.
So it was for the sake of image and propaganda that the year Mon Te-hi was born, thousands and thousands of ex-equalist visionaries swarmed the farmlands in their mission to bring the light of knowledge to the place that once birthed their lord.
When Mon Te-hi turned four, the only thing he could remember were flashes of the river near his house, so blue, so pure, so alive, and an image, uncomprehended by his young mind at the time, of a brown-haired girl rising from its blue depth like an ancient and primal spirit of water.
When Mon Te-hi turned five, his parents enrolled him in the New Republic (some people were petitioning to change the name to Equalist Republic at the time) free education system. When he turned fifteen, much to his parent's joy and pride, he took part in the national scholarly test and came out as the highest scorer not only of that year but in the whole annals of the test itself.
The top scorer. The brightest of the New Republic future generation, far surpassing not only those who had come from an Equalist New Republic but also those who had come far earlier, in the era of the Bender Tyranny. A mere farm boy.
Many held him up as proof of the evil and unfairness of the old system, as proof that talents can spring and indeed sprung from anywhere, from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high. But Mon Te-hi, being fifteen at the time, paid the political circus no heed. He was a genius, yes, but it would be yet many years until the day he was mature enough to truly comprehend the million vicious undercurrents of the political world.
He arrived at the New Republic City on the eve of his sixteenth birthday, all bright-eyed and naïve excitement. Not in awe though. For this New Republic City was a far-cry from the New Republic City of his imagination.
It was nothing like the dream utopia lord Amon had envisioned. He could see the beggars on the street, and the thugs that trailed after them like human flies after the scent of rotten blood. They must be the benders of old, he reasoned to himself, now no longer capable of bending, of perverting nature to their wishes.
He saw the island where the Memorial of Avatar Aang once stood, now a barren wasteland; the pro-bending arena, for a time the hotspot of the elites of Old Republic City, now in ruins. It would take many years to rebuild and refashion them. The benders of old had perverted nature and created these giants of architecture in mere months, and the ordinary workers that now covered those lands like ants covering anthills cursed their names daily, for it would take decades to return the land to what it once was.
There were many more thoughts to come, comparisons, contrasts, analysis of what he was seeing and what it should have been, almost rebellious thoughts some would say, in Mon Te-hi's mind, but those thoughts were wiped out on the day of his sixteenth birthday.
Mon Te-hi arrived in the halls of learning and it was here that he flourished. There was so much to learn, so much to see. He was the regime's poster boy of the day, the farmer child of wonder, and the world and its troves of knowledge were opened wide for him.
He learned. He grew. He was a solemn child, he was told, possessing of a quiet dignity that intimidated even adults. He was quick to learn and years beyond his classmates. In the blink of an eye, he was a strapping man of eighteen and ready to choose his calling of knowledge.
Sages opened their temples for him. Scientists threw wide the gates of their labs. Yet it was in the hall of the Memorial of Evil that he found her. The water spirit of his childhood river. She was called avatar Korra here, and she was not the terrible she-woman told in the old wives tales he'd heard.
No one batted an eyelash when he announced his choice of study. After all, the lord Amon had mysteriously disappeared and left many benders yet to vanquish. In those days, no longer held back by frightened bender rulers, the study of benders and how to bring them to their knees was in its peak, so Mon Te-hi was welcomed with open arms and fanfare.
Here was an echo of their lord Amon, a bright young man who had found his calling in life, to bring to light the dark secrets of the Avatar spirit and bring it to its knees.
He accepted the congratulations with a dignity rare for his age, and kept his secret to himself.
It was not the study of Avatar biology or weaponries that interested him. It was their history, their stories. But if that was what the New Republic wanted, then he would give it to them. Secrets, and weapons, and more to wage their wars with the dying benders. It did not matter. None of that did. Mon Te-hi had no love for the benders, child of the Equalist Empire that he was, but this water spirit, this Korra of the Southern Water Tribe, belonged to him, and him alone.
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Avatar Korra was a fascinating creature. Mon Te-hi concluded.
In the land of her birth, she was called the winter-born child. The cycle of Avatar reincarnation coincided with the turning of seasons, water and winter, earth and spring, fire and summer, air and autumn. The children born in each corresponding season held special statuses in the kingdoms of old. Mon Te-hi thought it was a particularly harmonic habit of birth time for such agents of chaos.
Korra was, perhaps, the strongest Avatar in history. The ultimate bender who went toe-to-toe with lord Amon, she was a mere eighteen year old girl when he was a man of thirty-five years prime. But she was also a broken Avatar. Incapable of producing even a puff of air, she entered the Avatar State possessing only three elements in the battle of Amon Peak, and possibly, very nearly brought the great lord to the brink of defeat.
It was fitting, he thought, for the last Avatar to also be a broken Avatar.
Beautiful, even.
He found more of her stories, separated the myths and propaganda from the truths. But to understand avatar Korra, he needed to understand the man they called lord Amon, for there was no Korra without Amon.
No Avatar without Equallist Leader.
Solution and Anti-Solution. They were entwined in the annals of history, made great by each other.
Mon Te-hi dug deeper and all of a sudden he was encircled by bureaucratic red tapes and an army of stories the likes of which they fed to the unlearned public. He was offended, slightly alarmed, but also intrigued. Greatly intrigued. This was the first time knowledge was denied him and the implications of that denial spelled out secrets whose glimpses he was only beginning to see.
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He dated a girl from a highborn family, a comely marine scientist who he met the first time wearing a blue sundress and walking a white snow dog. They had good conversations, and the sex was adequate.
But Mon Te-hi can't help it, that sometimes in the night when he awoke to her sleeping form and these questions suddenly flooded his mind.
'Why isn't your hair brown? Why aren't your eyes blue?'
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It took five more years for him to reach a rank where he can tear through the limits and truly touch on the knowledge of the life of lord Amon. He created weapons for the New Republic. He accepted their assignments. He was great at oratory and he used his skill for all its worth in front of the public stadiums and in the backroom conferences both. He charmed. He seduced. He cajoled. And when needed, he put fear in people.
He had leadership qualities, they told him, qualities so rarely found (and appreciated) in researchers and scientists. But all Mon Te-hi could feel was a permeating sense of déjà vu. He had done this before, he thought. In some lifetime before this, he had stood in front of a crowd and had them eaten out of his hands.
He didn't know why he felt such need for what he did, but he told himself no true intellectual would ever accept this thinly weaved lie when the truth was mere steps away.
The archives were opened for him, and for the first time in his life, he learned the story of the masked revolutionist they called Amon.
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One day, Mon Te-hi stood in front of a mirror and stared at his own reflection as if he was looking at a stranger. Somehow, his face seemed too smooth, too whole. He touched his cheek and he fancied he could feel the phantoms of flame kissing his skin.
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Amon was a fascinating man, a walking conglomerate of contradictions. Mon Te-hi decided. There were two periods of his life shed under the public light: one of a commoner and farmer boy, the other the mysterious and charismatic leader of the Equalist Revolution. Two ends of a spectrum, the middle part which transcended one to the other missing.
Here was a boy with a background to seed hatred against benders. A fair motivation. But what happened between to turn a burned farmer to the leader of a revolution? Which spirit, if it was the truth, bestowed upon this non-bender the ability to unbend? No one knew the truth… or perhaps, no one dared write down the truth.
A baffling thought.
He found more, inconsistencies, cracks in a well made façade.
He learned that Amon had held the life of avatar Korra in his hand twice, and twice he had chosen to let her go. A clear tactical mistake as far as Mon Te-hi was concerned. He traced their first interaction back to a rally in the old United Republic City. Amon on the stadium, Korra down below. No words exchanged but a look, a meeting of eyes and minds, loaded with underlying meanings. She challenged him to a duel at Aang Memorial Island. He accepted and brought her to her knees. He held her life in one hand… then let go, whispering promises of future.
They danced an intricate dance. Dodge. Weave. Taunt. Chase. Free and wild and as unpredictable as a dance of wind and water. He learned that the Avatar sometimes woke up in the night gasping Amon's name.
Mon Te-hi thought it laughable, the whole thing. At the time, Amon was a general among his men, a man in his prime, tested, experienced, well-worn against worldly harshness. At the time, the Avatar was a mere slip of a girl, wide-eyed and innocent of the world, and wore her Avatar skin with the comfort of one unused to fine clothing.
Amon was clearly playing with her (why?), and then suddenly, he was not.
And at last, the greatest mystery of all, the battle of Amon Peak. Avatar Korra against lord Amon, one-on-one. He took her bending… and her life, the only bender's life he had ever taken, then disappeared, leaving behind an empire he had made with his own two hands, never to be seen again.
Mon Te-hi slam the archive shut, frustrated and confused. He thought he had found the truth at last, but what he found turned out to be more questions, more secrets.
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Mon Te-hi was learning the art of martial defense. An unnecessary skill for a scientist of his caliber, some said, protected as he was under the New Republic regime. But Mon Te-hi begged to differ. The global war against the benders was reaching its conclusion and all animals, regardless of capability, were most dangerous when cornered. He had no wish to be caught unprepared.
And besides, he liked it. He liked the freedom it offered him, to flow, to glide so effortlessly as the air itself.
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Somehow, he doubted the New Republic was what Amon wanted when he preached his cause years ago.
The streets of New Republic City were covered in propaganda posters now, proclaiming all benders evil and worthy only of death.
Mon Te-hi thought that was a load of crap. Amon never said all benders were evil. He believed the art of bending was inherently unfair and ultimately corrupted its wielder, yes. But he knew to distinguish the good benders from the truly bad ones. He didn't kill. He unbent. And whereas his followers had employed the aids of gadgets and gimmicks, Amon walked into his duel (duel, not fight, because Amon didn't do something as low as fight like a simple thug.) with only his body and his will as weapons.
He treated his enemies with respect and honor, allowing even the most heinous of them a chance of true battle and would only strip them off their bending once they lost. He fancied himself a bringer of justice, not a petty agent of vengeance.
There was a simplicity and elegance to his leadership that drew people to him like moths to candlelight.
If Amon were still alive today, he would probably think this circus act of indiscriminate hatred and bigotry a dishonorable thing unworthy of his name. Mon Te-hi secretly thought. But the Mon Te-hi now was no longer the fifteen year old boy untried in the subterranean sea of politics, so he kept this thought to himself and would only look at the new rank of rulers of New Republic with disgust when he was with his own company.
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He created a weapon for the New Republic, one of such power never seen before, and most effective on benders. He had studied Korra for a long time. He knew her. He knew the minutes of her. He knew her secrets. He knew of whom she thought of at night. He knew the shadow who haunted her dreams. It was so easy to take the next step to create something that could cripple even her, and what was Korra but the ultimate bender of all.
The ranks of the enemies fell to his mechanical child, battles after battles so easily fought and won. He demanded just reward and the New Republic acquiesced.
That was how he gained entrance to the old Air Temple.
The moment he stepped foot on the house of Tenzin, something cried out in him. Something recognized this place. Something mourned. Something rejoiced. He was disturbed, but he was also stubborn, so he kept on and never looked back.
He spent six months there in the bowels of the old temple and it was here that he found Tenzin's secret note in between the childish writing of his young son.
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His fiancée told him he should smile more often, that he had a handsome smile. He laughed at her. He had become the face of the new frontier of science now. He had become the new revolution himself. He was its leader. Millions looked to him for miracles that would replace the vacuum left behind by bending arts. His was the face of the new revolution. And what need did the face of the revolution have for a smile?
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"I have a theory." Tenzin's note declared. "It was said that my father, avatar Aang, nearly ended the Avatar cycle himself when he went up against the Fire princess Azula in his Avatar State. She struck him down with lightning. My mother believed she had brought back my father in full… but… what if not all of the avatar spirit was brought back at that time? My father… he was gone, for a moment. And in the light of the ability to unbend this Amon has, an ability supposedly only the Avatars posses, and Korra's failure to airbend, it makes me think. Korra was born in the year my father died and Amon is obviously many years her elders. But… my father was gone, years ago. It is becoming increasingly clear that this Amon is not who we thought he was. What if my mother hadn't succeeded as much as she imagined? What if not all of the avatar spirit was brought back inside his body… what if… what if a piece of that spirit had left? And if it had indeed gone astray from my father, then it should do what all spirits do, which is to reincarnate into a new body. The most important question then would be… who did it reincarnate into?"
Mon Te-hi discarded the note. What a load of made-up conjectures.
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Mon Te-hi dreamed of ghosts. He walked the underground halls of a strange place, passing by masked people who looked at him with reverence.
There was a girl with brown hair and blue eyes, who they called the Avatar but he called Korra, just between the two of them and he enjoyed the way she shivered as he spoke her name.
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"If I then further this theory." Tenzin's note continued. "That the avatar spirit is now split in two, one in Korra, and one in this Amon. Does this mean that if Amon were to die, this soul, which is only half of a soul but a soul nonetheless, would continue on with the reincarnation cycle? Shall we then have a cycle of Amons in parallel with the cycle of Avatars? An Amon and a Korra for every generation? A broken Avatar who cannot bend all four elements and a non-bender who can unbend? A never ending circle that spins with the changing of seasons and time?"
Mon Te-hi wanted to cast the note into the fire and be done with it, but he couldn't. There was truth in here that called to something in him.
"Somehow I doubt this will be the case. No. The circle of Avatar was perfection, is perfection. It is harmony and growth, chaos and order all in one. But the cycle is broken, its two halves spinning wildly to inevitable collision. And what after such a collision happen? A battle between master benders is always a thing to reckon… but a battle between Avatar spirits?"
The note ended there, as if its writer were too fearful to write down the full of its conclusion. But Mon Te-hi was always quick of mind, and he easily caught Tenzin's train of thought.
A battle between avatar spirits cannot… would not… simply end with the defeat of one and triumph of the other. Bending was the essence of the Avatar soul itself. There was no such thing as a non-bender Avatar. A battle between avatar spirits can only end with the spiritual death of one, and the other, the surviving half would go on, never whole, forever locked in a cycle of reincarnation, lifetime after lifetime until the end of all things.
Mon Te-hi ended up burning Tenzin's note after all.
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Mon Te-hi was jittery for weeks. The dreams had a bad effect on him. When the chairman of the newly renamed Equalist United Republic called him out on it, he simply snapped.
"Lieutenant, I know what I'm doing."
He blinked as the chairman stared at him open-mouth.
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He was a man possessed.
That much was true in the months that followed. His fiancée tried, and failed, to plead a return to normalcy, but what did she even know of normalcy in the first place? His adoring public spiraled into confusion. The Equalist United Republic tolerated him, as it did other eccentric geniuses before him.
For Mon Te-hi, everything was changed. His world was coming apart by the seams.
On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he packed up his bag and called in his personal Satoplane. He needed answers to his questions, and there was only one place where he knew he would get them.
He found his marine scientist fiancée waiting for him in front of his Satoplane. She screamed and cried at him but Mon Te-hi saw no reason why he should stay. The war was over. There was no bender alive on this land. The Equalist United Republic had no more need of him. He owed his adoring public nothing.
It was only a matter of time.
He had to congratulate her though. For all the years she had trailed him as shadows trailed after light, the woman knew how to get his attention. She wore blue today, and in the whipping wind of winter, her white fluffy scarf flew wildly in the air.
"Blue…" He cupped her teary face with one hand. "You always look so beautiful in blue." But he wasn't speaking to her. Mon Te-hi's body moved without conscious thoughts. He was a human vessel of power and deadly grace. His finger graced the center of her forehead. His fiancée fell to the ground without a sound, unconscious.
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He booted out the pilot and personally rode the Satoplane all the way to the derelict Air Temple he'd read about in avatar Aang's archives.
There were other avatar temples out there, just as derelict. But he wanted this one. Here was the place that Aang connected for the first time with his past life whereas Korra had connected not at all, broken as she was.
It was lucky that this place had been abandoned for so long. The door no longer worked the way they were supposed to or Mon Te-hi wouldn't be able to gain entrance in the first place. Despite the suspicions he had, he knew for a fact that he wasn't an airbender.
He found the statues of past avatars in the temple sanctuary. They stood quiet, still, lifeless, and looked at him with their eerie stone eyes. The stale air clung to him like the cold touch of a thousand invisible hands.
For a moment he didn't know what would happen? What did he expect? That the statues would flare to life and announce him the Avatar of this cycle?
He wasn't delusional.
He sat down in front of Roku, and waited… and whist he waited, he dreamed.
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He named himself Amon.
Since he was young, he was taught that there was power in a name, and such was true. Before he was Amon, he was someone else, an ordinary man who toiled his life away on menial and petty tasks for daily bread and rice. No one cast him a glance before he was Amon. He was just another benderless flesh sack among the hundreds of millions of his ilk that populated this earth. Harmless, powerless, helpless, castrated.
Then he was Amon and his name itself forced the world to stir in its axis to behold him.
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Mon Te-hi flailed in the grip of his dreams. Outside, the world changed as the statues of past avatars looked down at him.
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The Avatar was a girl, and her name was Korra.
He remembered hearing her for the first time from a radio, and she sounded so young, so naïve. The first time he saw her, he was taken aback by the blue of her eyes and the child in her face.
He saw his farm boy self in her, an innocent thrown to the wolves, full of potential but so… so… fragile. He could reach out a hand and break her where she stood.
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He picked up a game of cat and mouse with her. And what a fetching little mouse the Avatar made, so responsive, so easily manipulated. Poked here and she went this way, said this and she jumped that way.
She threw him such fiery looks, loaded with fear, and frustration, and anger. She amused him, enthralled him. She was as wet clay in his hands and he was molding her, bending her into the ultimate shape he wanted.
In hindsight, that was the beginning of the end.
Somewhere along the road, the mouse grew, and all of a sudden Amon found himself in a deadly dance with a partner not yet his equal but the promise in her defiant eyes and the slow but sure blossoming of her womanhood tantalized him so.
He supposed it was only a matter of time, for they were all bended by a divinity so far above them. He might protest it now, but the shape of things had already been decided seventeen years ago when she was born a girl and the Avatar, and he was a benderless boy on the verge of becoming a man.
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They said even the humans had the power of spirit in them. They said that humans once inhabited the same world as spirits did, but were cast out for sins aggrieved. They said the spirits within humans remembered still, a time when they were more, and those of strong spirits called out to their kindred from within their flesh prisons.
If that were true, Amon wondered what that made him and the Avatar?
The mass speculated. It had not escaped their notice that Amon wielded a power supposedly reserved for avatars alone, and the Avatar of this cycle just happened to be a broken avatar, an incomplete avatar.
Amon did not deny the links between them. Man and woman, the experienced and the naïve, bender and benderless, they were made to be perfect foils for each other. That and he enjoyed the look on her face when someone finally told her. The girl flickered into a woman, then to a girl, then to a woman, like plays of shadow and light.
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When it finally happened (because he knew it would happen), it was a frenzy of desperation and frustration and confusion.
The spirits did call for each other, but spirits were intangible, genderless things, and their joining was an unclear and sporadic affair. The bodies had a union of their own, a dance as old and ancient as time.
When they found each other in the night, he did not know who it was, he or she, that breathed a sigh of relief and whispered "finally…", and for one moment, they were whole, joined, one. The bliss of the bodies and the joy of the spirits.
Yet, deep in the night, as Amon licked the sweat off Korra's naked body, he realized one single truth. He had spent all his life being only half of what he could be, he had learned to live as only fragments of a greater spirit, and the feeling of wholeness terrified him.
When the morning came, he left her alone in her bed, and never looked back.
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Mon Te-hi awoke in the Air Temple Sanctuary, and wept, shaking like a child, newly born and seeing the world with his own eyes for the first time.
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He was Mon Te-hi. He was Amon. He was a farmer boy who traded in his birth-name for an idea and wore a revolution on his face like a mask. He walked the peak where he killed the Avatar in his past life and wondered where he went from there.
Amon Peak.
It was once a great mountain by the side of the ocean. It was now only a boulder of rock jutting up from beneath the waves.
'Where did you go, Amon?' Mon Te-hi thought to himself. 'Where did you go once you killed her? What after?'
He tried to bend the currents of his thoughts in the same trajectory as the man he was once before. It was a hard thing to do. He was no more Amon than Korra was Aang. But bit by bit, he found the parts in him that reflected Amon.
He imagined if he were forced to stop his study of Avatar-ology, of avatar Korra. And after that? What would he do after that? He did not know. Perhaps resume his normal life, perhaps pick up a different discipline (he surely could), perhaps get married (he had a fiancée), perhaps father a son (he was a man and he was healthy), perhaps do nothing at all, perhaps die. It made no difference whatever to him. To think about it seemed to him as pointless as to think about what he could do after his own death: nothing, of course. Nothing that he could know at this point.
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He spent another six weeks on Amon Peak, alone, surviving on a diet of raw fishes and rain water.
When the last day of the sixth week passed, he finally discovered the answer to the greatest mystery of the time. Where did Amon go?
He knew now, and he went about preparing to do the same again. He bathed himself in the sea, baptized himself in the salty kisses of the wind. He shed the last of the Equalist United Republic on him. And then…
… like Amon who came before him, Mon Te-hi left for the land where she was born, the South Pole. He treaded the frozen seas with a broken heart but with eternal hope that one day, as Katara found Aang, he would find his very own Avatar, trapped in her circle of ice.
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She was born Iina to loving parents. She grew up in the leafy jungles of the land once called Earth Kingdom but was now a dominion of the Equalist Empire. She grew up listening to the stories of the benders of old, of magic and miracles and beauties that came before the steel industrialization of the Equalist States. Perhaps it was the wistful note in her parent's voice, perhaps the welcoming blue of the river near her house, but as she grew and grew, Iina felt herself drawn to the study of Avatars and their special brand of magic, to one Avatar in particular.
Her parents neither encouraged nor discouraged her, but they did frown when she mentioned a name. To study the genealogy of benders was a fine thing, but the Curse of Korra was well-known even in this part of the land.
Everyone knew that every once in a while, some scientists, military leaders, researchers, politicians, the brightest and most ambitious of men and women, would become enthralled with the story of avatar Korra, and within a decade or two, they would disappear, or suicide, or die in horrible experiments. Those cursed by Korra died mysterious deaths, it was said.
Many had speculated on the Curse but not many dared study it for fear of being cursed themselves.
It was with this reason that Iina's parents forbade her stories of avatar Korra. But Iina was a clever child years beyond her age-mates.
She found ways.
The End ?
Un-betaed, so sorry for the typos.
Anyway, somebody bit me with an Amorra bug. I do sort of have a sequel planned, in which one of the reincarnations of Amon finally get smart and try to transfer his knowledge to the original Amon. Cue Peggy-Sue plot in which Amon now sees what the future will be if he does not change. Amon then sets about changing the timeline and seducing a hapless Korra.
I planned for one the climatic scenes to be in the Pro-bending Arena where Amon invaded and proceeded to persuaded Korra to his side… then proposed to her (with the Water Tribe betrothal necklace) in front of Live Television… thereby gaining the support of the peace between benders and non-benders faction.
And blahblahblah…. More political plot point and denial of underage sex.
I'm not sure if I will have the time for it though. I'm on a busy schedule writing articles for several publications, and I plan to unveil my new Harry Potter/Avengers crossover fic within this week (somebody bit me with an Avengers bug. Damn).
Anyway, let's see how this one-shot is received first. Review and tell me what you think, pretty please!