Stones For Your Passage
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Author's Note: Don't own Avatar, don't want to really, don't sue. Much love for uncommunicative dysfunctional Smellershot.
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There was a bender that they hadn't quite killed still lying out in the open.
She could tell that it was a bender from the pocked ground all around, as if every available rock had been hauled out of the earth's heart and hurled to the winds. He lay in the center of an enormous circle of disturbed ground, dust still caked in his eyelashes as his ribs hitched in and out, feebly trying to suck air into scorched lungs. He'd gone to fight without his shirt- skinny ribs and knobs of vertebrae, with the skin slipping off like a rotten caul, so badly burned that the scorch of the bone showed through.
His eyes slid over her like water on grease, unseeing and uncomprehending, and she heard the rattle-wheeze of a dying animal that hasn't got long.
Behind him, the air smelled like rhino sweat and burned flesh and smoke was still rising
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Years before she was a stripe-faced, raspy-voiced freedom fighter with a chip on her shoulder the size of Omashu, a girl was walking to Bah Sing Se.
That's what her neighbors had done six months ago- just packed up their things, hitched an ostrich-horse to their cart, and left quietly in the night. Her dad had snorted, called them a bunch of idiots who spent too much time listening to the wounded coming in from the front. Said that there was no way that the fight would reach all the way here, to a village nobody outside of fifty miles even knew about. She hadn't known what to think, really, other than that the idea of someone picking up their things and leaving because of a rumor made her stomach curl. You didn't do things like that, not in a country where farms stayed in the same family for as long as anybody could remember, from avatar to avatar through hundreds of years.
But that's what her neighbors had done, and they'd still had a farm when they'd left. Now she didn't, so that's where she was going. She'd never been to the city, and neither had anyone she knew. Half the coins that she'd ever seen had had Bumi's seal on them as often as not. But that's what people did these days. They stayed somewhere until it wasn't safe anymore, and then they moved on, heading always towards the big wall on the horizon. The Fire Nation hemmed them all in, nipping at their flanks like bloody-toothed sheepdogs the entire way.
This pack had hit her village first. They were well-fed, highly trained, and above all, fast, so by the time she made it to the closest settlement, they'd already eaten their fill and moved on.
It had taken her three days to make it this far. When she finally made it to the gate of the next town, the bender still trying as hard as he could not to die in the dust, Bah Sing Se really did seem like it would be the only safe place left in the entire world.
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It took a couple of seconds before she realized that the piles of leaves and garbage by the base of the tree was actually a boy.
She was three miles outside of the village. Scavenging had revealed nothing. The well in the center of town might have still had water in it, but any rope that might have hauled a bucket back from its depths had long ago been charred to ash. The dead ostrich-horse in the middle of the wreckage might have yielded some meat, but the flies were so thick she hadn't wanted to risk it.
Now she was hungry, and wished she had.
She was in a patch of scrub and forest at the moment, abandoning the road in hopes of finding something to eat.
Instead, she'd found another dead body, and her vision had suddenly gone blurry-hot because she was so sick of coming across sad, charred bundles of dead flesh everywhere she went.
Transfixed, she reached a hand out to turn him over. To see his face, and remember him.
When he twitched and turned over, with a long, doglike slab of a face with tiny confused pig eyes and a nose that could punch through sheet metal, she shrieked.
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"Stop following me," she snapped.
He didn't look like he'd heard her, and if he had, he didn't look like he'd understood. It was hard to imagine anyone ever looking so vacant, so hollowed out and abandoned that they looked more like a fair-day puppet than a human being. But he was following her, and she hated it.
He was ugly, and that annoyed her. He was too tall, too badly grown into his tallness, and he shuffled like some old grandma when he walked, like he hurt too bad to take a full step. He didn't even have any visible hurts, and that irritated her even more.
She tried yelling at him, but it didn't register. She tried pushing him, hard, in the shoulder, to get the message through, but he didn't look like he noticed.
She whirled on him finally, her eyes red-rimmed and irritated from all the smoke in the air, and shouted, "Stomp off" and punched him in the face.
His head snapped to the side. He staggered where he stood, and when he finally got his footing again, he looked at her.
Messily, she started to cry.
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"Was that your village?" she asked, washing her feet in a stream so icy it hurts.
He slumped over a few yards down, in the shade of a blackened stump. The raiding party hadn't struck here, but the fires they'd started had spread. The stream was cold, but grey with ash.
He appeared to ignore the question.
"When did they hit?" she demanded instead, her voice raspy as a file, but he remained staring dully at the stump's charred roots. Singed arrows jutted out at odd intervals, as if some unfortunate had tried to use it for cover. There was a smear of something pathetic and burnt on the other side, so it must not have worked.
She got sucked into watching him, his face so dull and devoid of grief that she haunted her- then jerked herself out of it.
"It's stupid not to talk," she grumbled, running dirty hands through singed, sweat-soaked hair.
She dunked her head under the water to escape the heat, and barely missed the slow suffusion of something running across his face.
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He wouldn't stop following her.
She couldn't bring herself to hit him again, but the sight of that slow, gangly figure stumbling dumbly behind her made her teeth itch. She couldn't be needed. Not now. Not when she was heading to Bah Sing Se.
She tried yelling, like before. Tried whirling on him and mock-charging, like she was going to hit him again. His head would jerk up, and he'd just look at her, shocked and gutted and mute, and it ripped her to pieces.
In the end, she just walked faster, and left him grimly shuffling onward behind her, a crooked, lonely line on the horizon.
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She went to bed hungry. Tried hurling rocks at the monkeys in the trees, with little success. Tried tickling for fish the way that her brother had taught her, but only ended up with a wet arm and some very un-amused fish.
She slept fire-less and slightly cold, wedged under the roots of an enormous tree that the Fire Nation hadn't touched. Her feet hurt and the burns on her arms had blistered painfully over. She'd tried to haul the burning roof off of her mother- ten years old, and her arms were stronger than any man's, or so said her dad, but nothing had come of it.
She dreamed about ghosts and dead earthbenders. She dreamed about dog-faced boys with their heads snapped to the side from the force of her blow. She dreamed about long, winding roads leading to snail-shell cities with a thousand different layers.
When she woke up, it took her a few moments to register the dozing figure across the clearing.
He'd caught up.
The sound of her raspy, ostrich-horse voice woke him. "Did you find anything to eat?" she asked peevishly.
He paused, looking sleepy and unkempt and about as debonair as an old mutt that's been kicked in the head too many times.
Almost bashful, he shook his head.
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