Life


I never knew I could feel this way.

This emptiness was crushing and real and inevitable. There was nothing left but the dark. His eyes were cold as mine, the same shade of blue.

There was no contrast as there had once been.

"This is him?" I asked. But I knew from the way his mouth curled into a smirk of greed and the bile that rose in the back of my throat.

I knew.

The days passed and I was told he was called Chin. I was saddened by this knowledge. The name that would fall from my lips from now until the end of my days as a bead of dew from a blade of grass, was uneventful, lacking the poetry and gracefulness of his name.

Chin.

I wanted to die.


It rained on my wedding day, hard enough to bruise my skin. So the northern chieftain called it off, for now. Chin pulled me behind one of the ice pillars in the confusion of the crowd and kissed me pressing his lips against mine holding my wrists in a vice grip.

Later my lips would swell and my wrists would bruise.

My wedding never was postponed.

The first time Chin raped me was the last. I wouldn't sleep with him. So he forced me.

Married women weren't allowed to waterbend for fighting.

My wedding was never completed.

I was not married.

I committed a deed that night that fit Chin's crimes.

I made sure he'd never rape again.

And so, I had to leave the northern tribe.

I had nowhere to go.

But I had him.


I took the first boat to the fire nation while Chin cried like a baby and bled onto the floor. I suppose I should have helped him.

Oops.

I didn't really care what happened to him. I limped and held myself as I made my way to the ship out.

I was a half-mile away away when I heard the woman scream.

She'd found his body, of course.

I was gone.


I reached the fire nation as the Fire Lord's honored guest. I'd traveled there as a stowaway.

He greeted me at the docks and I fell into his embrace.

"You look like shit." He complemented placing a kiss on my matted hair.

And in those four words, so playful so us, I wad life again.