Asami Sato is the pinnacle of purity. She has a good heart, forgives easily. Allows for others to mistreat her with utmost patience and graciousness.
After all, it's to be expected that a girl with the world below her isn't bothered by a few mishaps. As the world wails below her lavish boots.
Amon snarls in contempt. He'll have to change that. In truth, he wants to take that haughty virtue and make her as lowly as him.
The newspapers that were once snugly in his little brother's influential pocket weren't wrong. The ones he burned slowly with candle flames.
Amon is a monster. A filthy, heartless monester. He's deceived hundreds for his own pursuit for power, smelted and erected an iron foundation for his cause on the backs of fleas, several lies meant to turn him into a noble figure.
He gives Asami Sato an ultimatum after he captures the airbending family, including the wife and her newborn child: Asami submits to the Equalist cause accordingly, or he kills them. She calls his bluff, and an Equalist glove is applied to her back. She falls and is taken to a cell unfit for such a proud creature.
Asami doesn't know what she expected from her archenemies. They don't torture her, but she is eaten alive slowly by the isolation.
She'll learn nothing this way.
Amon wants her in every possible aspect of her being. Emotionally, so he can see her entire world break before her eyes. Like his old self when he arrived to Republic City with nothing but hopeless idealism. Spiritually, so he can watch the foolish faith die from her heart, her green eyes bleached of their intricacies. Physically, so he can feel every shudder, every movement that reminds him that he's alive.
He asks again. Back straight and chin tilted upward, Asami complies, not giving him the satisfaction of her tears. Either that, or she's merely too dehydrated to cry. Asami Sato is nothing if not loyal to her half-witted values, Amon thinks. Bravery flaunting its gaudy plumes in front of a coward.
When he decides to hole her up in his chambers, telling her that any insolence will result in the deaths of children, she calls him a hypocrite. His lieutenant won't meet his eyes.
Asami is the first person to ever see his face and know that he's Amon. She glares and attempts to give him a concussion.
She then becomes the first person to know how Amon really takes people's bending away.
His eyes are emptier than the gaps in his ghostly mask. He's hollow, so he fills the abyss with the consequences of her obstinate loyalty.
Despite his regal words, his unyielding composure, Amon's just a boy with daddy issues playing dress-up. Asami originally expected righteous indignation to be his reason for what he does, but now he truly is like water falling between her fingertips.
Amon forgets that he threatened to murder the airbenders, so sometimes he believes her caresses are a signal of willful resignation. Her back against the sheets, Asami rakes her nails across his cheeks until he bleeds, and she's disappointed when it crusts into an ugly red-brown on her fingers. He's not chosen by the spirits. He's cruel, disgusting, human.
She's not a girl, not a girl. Hair tousled, skin bruised and muscles sore, Asami always says yes to him, her eyes shielded, even when her body is tired and tells her to deny him. Amon smells of smoke.
When he compliments her hair, she takes a knife and butchers it. She tells him snidely that, if she had her make-up kit, she'd be more than happy to help him in painting on his fake scar.
His kisses are dismissive at times; sometimes they are fierce. Once, though he doesn't start weeping, there are tears on his face, his eyes reddened around his watery irises.
The tears stick to her cheeks like war paint. Right there, she has the ability, the power to destroy him. Asami's not a girl, and Amon's not the monster hiding under her bed.
She'll always be above him. No matter how far she falls, it's Asami Sato's skin she crawls in. He's a parasite, latching onto another host every few years. A beetle-leech. He consumes her. Asami smiles shakily. In Amon's grasp, he can flatten her insides like a bug, have them splatter onto the dark wood. Like he did to the wolf pups at his father's behest.
But he's not even a bug. He's not even anything. It makes Asami laugh herself to sleep, staving off the swollen ache behind and under her eyes.