Warning: Mentions of abuse, sexual assault, very strong language, and sex references.
Your body, your muscles, will remember an action and resulting injury. Even after the muscle tendons themselves have actually healed, the spindle cells in the rotator cuff tendons will automatically contract anytime your muscles approach the position they were in when the initial injury occurred. This is "muscle memory." The body does not like pain, it remembers, and it triggers that automatic.
i.
Suki knows what's ahead of her and vows not to scream.
On the first day, it starts off slow. They force her into lying down on a steel table as a water droplet hits her head every few seconds. And to be honest, it isn't really that bad at first.
Drip.
"Tell us where the Avatar is. We know you were travelling with him in the Earth Kingdom this spring."
Drip.
The water droplet is separating itself from the bucket now, gravity being its partner.
Drip.
Kyoshi Warriors do not fear things, you see. It's not programmed within them.
Drip.
Kyoshi Warriors march on and defend villages and are compassionate young women who love and protect their people.
Drip.
Kyoshi Warriors are not part of the war.
Drip.
ii.
Suki does not break after nine hours. The hands that grip her forearms are not kind.
"The bitch won't talk. Throw her in the cooler."
Even the warmest memories can't melt the ice frozen in her bones.
They take her out minutes later, although it feels like hours.
Her body is numb and she can't feel her arms being pinned against the wall or her shirt being torn, can't see the blurry figure in front of her until she lands a kick square in his jaw.
She begins stumbling away, with her body feeling on fire, electrified by the cold radiating inside of her.
She turns a corner, panting and sweating from the distance she just ran.
Her arm is pulled suddenly so hard she think it may leave its socket and she's against the wall with a rough hand covering her mouth and muffling her scream.
"Shut up, they're just outside the door!" She glares at the figure in the dark, and wrapping her fingers around his wrist, she pulls his arm away.
"What the Spirits do you think you're doing?" she spits out through chattering teeth.
"Trying to save your ungrateful ass!" a deep voice replies.
The boy removes his Fire Nation helmet and she can only glare at his shaggy brown hair and—green eyes?
"A common thank you would be nice at this point, prisoner three-two-five." he tells her, placing his helmet below his armpit.
"I was fine. I was way ahead of them." she spits back, crossing her arms.
He scoffs.
Just thank him, she thinks to herself. They would've raped you, beat you. Swallow your pride.
But she doesn't.
iii.
His name is Lee and he's from the Fire Nation colonies. His father was a rebel who was taken by the Fire Nation as a prisoner, leaving Lee's mother and her four children behind. He took the job as a Fire Nation soldier at the Boiling Rock in exchange for his father's freedom.
His favourite colour is earth green, like the forest he left behind.
He is ordinary. To everyone but Suki.
She sleeps with him as a mistake when he brings her extra food for the eightieth time in a row. He talks to her and makes her laugh and more often than not, keeps her sanity while she stays in a two-by-four cell.
"When you're free and out of here," he tells her, half an hour after they'd just finished. "And this war is over...you write to me, okay?"
She smiles and kisses him but says nothing.
iv.
They're found out a month later by a Fire Nation spy and Suki is beaten in front of him.
"Stop it!" he's yelling and sobbing now, his voice bouncing off the concrete walls. "Please, stop, take me instead-"
But the kicks and punches and blows don't stop and her face is purple from the bruises and her eyes are closing by themselves and Spirits, just let her die already.
v.
Sokka arrives like a warrior from battle four months later and she falls into his arms and allows herself to cry, just this once. She sobs into the Fire Nation armour until her bruised ribs feel crushed into dust beneath his fingers.
vi.
She doesn't tell him about Lee or the cooler or the soldiers. She doesn't speak to him when Katara heals (to the best of her abilities) her wounds, or when Toph cracks jokes. But when he finds her skin later that night, in a far off room in the Western Air Temple, she grips him and moans at the best times, pretending not to wince at each of his thrusts.
"Suki," he breathes as she curls her fingers into his chest, breathing heavy and low underneath him, and they move the way only two broken people can move—seemless, arrhythmic, frustratingly close to perfect but knowing they will never be. Suki's back drags along the ground and Sokka grips her hips, yanking them close to his, and fuck, there is no going back from this.
She's Suki and her world is fractured into a black hole of devastation and memories that pull on her every day, and try to break her strength.
She's Suki and she's still a warrior, but she's alone, she's so alone.
Author's Note: I've been writing this for a while now, in bits and pieces and I finally felt like publishing it. Probably one of my most feminist works out there and I love it. Suki is my hero.
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