A/N: I own very few things. Avatar is not one of them. My love for side characters with dark pasts is criminal. Especially for criminals.
Of Dragons and Mountains
1.
Long Feng is seventeen years old when he enters the Earth King's civil service. It will be four years until he is inducted into the Dai Li, and twelve before he becomes its captain. This ascension to the captaincy will coincide with exactly three things: the defeat of the Dragon of the West, the death of Queen Yue Fen, and the coronation of a new king. The king will see fit to create a new position to fortify the city's culture against the reverberations of so much change. To fill it, he will naturally turn to his most trusted advisor.
This morning, however, he is twelve years away from his appointment to the Grand Secretariat of Ba Sing Se. He only knows that he cannot identify his own shadows in the morning light, that he promised to tell his sleeping father goodbye the night before, and that he will be late for the entrance exam if he does not leave his house within the next three minutes.
A hand resting briefly on the wall of his house will have to suffice. Long Feng is sure his father understands.
2.
Joo Dee looks at him with something like betrayal when they remove the cloth from her eyes. "If you think for a moment that I'll go along with this pathetic excuse for a coup—"
"Are you sure, Joo Dee? Think before you answer."
She glares at him, then the men around him, at least those she can see with her head and arms set in stone. "I don't dream of power when soldiers are fighting a war."
"We are of one mind then. Only, it seems, you are having some difficulty seeing things from our perspective."
He imagines that she would smash her fists against the walls of the cavern if she could move. "Do you honestly think that the Guard will let you get away with this?"
"Certainly, once you explain things to them."
Her eyes widen at that, and he wonders if, too late, she glimpses a truth obscured by her empty ideals. They must erase war from the city in order to save it, and tomorrow, he will kill a queen that thrives in bloodshed. Joo Dee's loyalty to that sort of symbol was problematic, but not irreparable.
He walks out as one of his men begins, "Welcome to Lake Laogai..."
Besides, they always had complemented each other brilliantly.
3.
He is a Middle Ring child born to a family of excellent standing. His father is a merchant, one of the honest few renowned for his ability to sift through courts and slums without a trace of jade or soot. He speaks in backorders and merchandise and teaches his son numbers and catalogues and bazaars. Long Feng learns it all without complaint. This will be his work too one day, and he is nothing if not a good son.
His mother, a blacksmith's daughter, colors the walls of their home with her father's gilded swords before a poorly constructed roof gives out above her. Long Feng remembers her as the soft glint of blades across his bed.
4.
His predecessor is a frowning aristocrat named Guowei who looks every bit the harmless old man.
The first time Long Feng is taken to meet him it is not, as he expected, bound and gagged, but in his work clothes with scrolls still in his hands. His escort even sets a leisurely pace as they sieve through the bustle and chatter of the Upper Ring. The house they enter is expensive, but otherwise nondescript.
Guowei looks him over as he would the mud on the trim of his robes before heaving a gruff sigh and offering him a position in the force. Over the next few years, he will beat Long Feng's flair for calming the dust kicked up at the market into something lethal and precise: he will teach him how to carve blades from a cliffside, how to twist the weight of a boulder back at the man who thrust it, how to listen to the rhythms of the earth and the people that walk it. Most importantly, he will show him that a human life is infinitely more brittle than the ground to which it returns.
But those lessons are still years away, and Guowei is currently outlining the perils that fill a Dai Li member's day-to-day (thwarting assassination attempts on the royal family is, apparently, part of the routine). Those that survive their tenure, he assures Long Feng, go on to well-received positions in the government and military; he simply wants to make clear the costs.
"Well, boy, what do you say?"
Long Feng bows as much as the scrolls clutched to his chest will allow. "I accept."
5.
There are no women in the Dai Li. Most members of the force (of the city too) treat it as a simple matter of fact. If asked by a visiting dignitary or diplomat, they simply shrug. Kyoshi Island has its Warriors; Ba Sing Se has its Dai Li. No one ever asks about their history, and they certainly don't advertise that the original force trained by Avatar Kyoshi consisted of both men and women, or that the decline in female membership correlates almost exactly with the number of years since her demise.
Long Feng fights a Kyoshi Warrior once-a plain brown-haired girl with a mind to revolutionize their management of the Lower Ring. He wonders at the way she coils in and out of her strikes, threading through openings he can never see, whittling even the dust in the air till it too bites his skin. He's losing when reinforcements finally arrive (they have to bind her hands and feet before they can consider the remote possibility of imprisoning her).
He keeps looking for that grace, that ferocity, in his own men long after they take her away.
6.
His father is killed on the three-hundred and forty-fifth day of the Dragon of the West's siege of Ba Sing Se.
The city has been transformed by the war at its gates: the peripheries of the Lower Ring have been evacuated and refugees choke the streets, storehouses run dry, hierarchies crumble until they all but give out completely (he sees a noble jostling alongside a street urchin for rations and somehow fights down the urge to laugh hysterically).
The Dai Li have been dispatched as a form of crowd control. They weave the network of communications that binds their army into a united front; they plaster the insides of the city into something resembling its old way of life. Even then, what little sleep Long Feng manages to steal is cut short by wails that reach out to touch the first light of dawn.
"The city needs food," his father had said when he saw him last. The royal family had gone so far as to promise the old man soldiers to guard his way. They hadn't been enough.
As Long Feng reports their failure to the Queen, he catches sight of the crown prince clapping his hands in delight at the bear his mother has gifted him. With that, the light through the windows washes out everything else. He will tell himself later that this is why he misses the rustle of cloth that betrays the Queen rising from her seat. She buries the rise and fall of his now audible breathing in the folds of her robes, pressing him into something like an embrace. "We mourn for your loss."
He inhales against the murmur of her words along his temple. She smells of orchids worth the artillery that would have saved his father's life.
7.
"Spirits, boy," Guowei all but whispers when Long Feng relays him the news. "You did all that?"
"And more," he says. Then he slams his earthen gloves into the aristocrat's stomach. "Although this," he continues, watching the old man crumple to the floor, "is entirely personal."
8.
He notices a few things during his time in the civil service. The first is the delicacy of his contacts to the outside world.
All the new recruits are required to dorm in the Imperial Palace. News of the war filters in through his visits with his father, then the visits turn to letters, and then the letters stop completely. His superiors smile and assure him that his father is alive and well, that he's as successful as ever, that they just passed his store the other day. He does not let himself believe them until he catches a glimpse of his father through the iron workings of the palace gates. Even then, he cannot help but think of glossed threads cut quietly in the night.
The second is the way his room is never quite as he leaves it.
His father had always impressed upon him the importance of living simply; naturally, the belongings he takes with him to his new home are few. A change of clothes, a quill and ink, his mother's old books—sometimes stacked neatly and folded on his desk, sometimes thrown in a jumbled mix on the floor. Yet without fail he returns to his little flat and moves his copy of the Tale of Omashu from his bed and back to the shelf where he left it the night before. After his first year, he considers it something of a ritual.
The last is the whisper of cloth that follows him as he makes his way through the palace halls.
(When an agent of the Dai Li finally peels away from the walls and introduces himself, Long Feng is entirely unsurprised.)
9.
Guowei acquaints Long Feng with the Royal Family as a matter of course.
The widower queen, Yue Fen, smiles at him from behind an embroidered sleeve in a manner that she seems to think gentle and maternal. (Rumor has it that she may or may not have been responsible for the death of her husband. "Naturally," Guowei shrugs, "the matter closed with her assumption of his duties.") The sound of the crown prince Kuei reciting ancient verse adorns the background. She folds her hands and says, "We are indebted to your service."
"And this," Guowei says with a wave to an armored woman lounging in the far side of the room, "is Joo Dee, the head of the palace guard. We Dai Li, it seems, are a tad inadequate."
Yue Fen laughs like wind chimes in the rain. "Not at all! I'm simply ensuring that you are best able to carry out your duties. Avatar Kyoshi tasked you with serving our citizens. I wouldn't have you waste your time on me."
"I assure you, Queen Yue Fen, that we are more than capable—"
"You protect the people, Guowei," she says, and suddenly, Long Feng remembers the tulle his mother wrapped her blades in. "They protect me."
Somewhere along the conversation, Joo Dee has managed to drift from her corner to lean over the prince's shoulder. Her fingers hover over the hilt of her sword as she corrects his pronunciation.
"Of course." Guowei lowers his gaze. "I'm certain we shall complement each other brilliantly."
10.
Though neither of them ever admit it, Joo Dee and Long Feng do. The few missions they are assigned together are completed in what both Guowei and the queen declare smashing success. She gives his elaborate stratagems teeth; he refines her edge.
"What a patchwork we have here," Yue Fen remarks. "Two cuts of cloth fit together seamlessly."
Joo Dee never tells him that she grew up in the Lower Ring, that Yue Fen plucked her out of her parents' ashes and fashioned her into the snarl of frayed decorum and raw power she is now. They aren't friends after all. (Long Feng discovers it on his own anyway.)
11.
It is between the death of his father and a conversation with the queen following the retreat of the Fire Nation army that he comes to understand precisely what is needed to preserve Ba Sing Se in the time of war.
The queen's smiles exude shades of sincerity now. She talks of offensives, of the old Fire Lord cowering in fear. "Mountains give birth to dragons, after all," she says. Of mountains stripped bare, she offers no word.
The celebrations that splashed across the city have been replaced by a clawing hunger. It sinks deep into the earth: beneath the army barracks, along the market roads. It is not, contrary to the queen's beliefs, the sort that can be allayed by war.
When he is older, he will be surprised by how simple the solution is. A few well-placed words among the other agents, half-truths across the army generals, power plays for the relevant nobles—and, overnight, a not insubstantial portion of the city's government is quietly clamoring for the coronation of little Kuei.
His revolution is effortless. He finds Yue Fen in the royal garden, and she speaks without facing him. "So, Long Feng, this is how it will end."
He smiles at that. The queen has always been a perceptive woman, if nothing else. She has picked as her burial grounds an aged bench under the palace's finest cherry blossoms. He bends his knees and curls his fingers. Her hair swallows the moonlight as she falls.
12.
One day, he shows his father the way stones follow his hands. His father knows the answer to all his questions (to everything he still believes), surely he will know this too. Instead, he watches Long Feng trace a plume of earth in a shaky arc across their kitchen and sighs. "Very well," is all he seems inclined to say at first, but Long Feng stares and stares, and finally he adds, "Your grandfather could do the same thing—earthbending, I mean. It must have passed on to you. "
Long Feng nods as solemnly as any nine-year-old can manage. "Is it bad?"
His father's eyes widen briefly, but then he breaks into a laugh almost as warm as the embrace that follows. "Of course not! I was only thinking it's a shame we can't get you a teacher. A merchant has little use for that sort of thing, after all." He pats Long Feng on the head and draws the curtains over the windows of their house. "Now come, off to bed with you."
It is only much later, when he tells his father of his decision to become a city official, that he will understand the uneasy feeling settling in his stomach that night. He will say simply, "A merchant's eye will still be good for me."
"Very well," his father will respond—only this time Long Feng will not stare, and they will return to their meal.
He will tell himself his family is one of few words.
13.
It is not misplaced affection that puts General Iroh's son in charge of the siege's western flank. Lu Ten is a fierce leader; Long Feng watches him bark orders and burn through men and tries to stop thinking of sandstorms whipping across the desert. By the time he makes his routine walk into the inner chambers of the palace, he has a very clear idea of just why the Fire Nation will be around for a very long time.
"He has something of his father's brilliance," Guowei sighs when he testifies to the boy's skill. "It's no wonder they've lasted so long. The Dragon of the West is a formidable enemy."
"Lord Iroh knows very well how to break our spirit," Yue Fen responds, and here, she pauses to nod in the direction of the Dai Li agents darkening the walls of the room, "but I believe your men have just shown us a way to break his. Our soldiers are not the only ones who tire of this war."
"Your Highness?"
Her gaze droops down, lashes hooding her eyes, and she cradles the crown prince to her. "If my husband was no exception, most fathers love their sons."
Kuei, pillowed against his mother's shoulder, blinks back at her blearily.
14.
There are stories of the Dai Li he knows long before he enters its ranks—stories he knows better than the wares crowding the shelves of his father's store, stories that everyone knows though no one ever tells. He finds them buried in the folds of sleeves, in the shadows of open doors: courtesans vanished in the night, wide-eyed slum brats drowned in the gutter grime.
When he is twelve, finally able to match his father's brisk stride, he follows the merchant everywhere. He picks up the stories scattered in their wake and learns to hear the murmurs trapped in the city's walls. None of them touch the Middle Ring, or so he believes.
He has his fingers on the door to his father's shop when he hears it—the tale of a blacksmith who turned down bureaucrats and nobles and welcomed Fire Nation castaways and Lower Ring revolutionaries. He presses his ear to the wood and wills himself to catch the details of his roaring laugh, his notorious stubbornness. He was of another age, it says, drawn from a time when the Avatar still walked the earth.
He stops listening as it lingers on a collapsed roof and a blind old man clutching at what remains of his daughter.
When he sees the man in the broad-rimmed hat who exits moments later, it is only because of the earth beneath his feet that he can meet his father's eyes.
15.
"Avatar Aang, if I may," Long Feng says to the angry little boy before him, "I implore you to avoid involving yourself in matters that are beyond your comprehension."
A/N.2: It always seemed to me like Ba Sing Se was a city at least partially inspired by Chinese culture and history; hence, Guowei and Yue Fen are both Chinese names. Yue Fen means "dust." Guowei means "may the country be preserved." Thanks for reading!