title: multiple designs
Summary: Amon has a different story for every rally.
A/N: Crossposted from my fannishcodex tumblr. Despite what's seen, I'm still struck by the idea that all the posters and show flair aren't quite Amon per se, so I gave him a PR Equalist assistant, who also essentially narrates this quickfic. Hope you enjoy. Feedback always appreciated.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything related to "Avatar the Legend of Korra."
Rui was a nonbender whom Amon helped out of a tight situation with benders. A lot of her fellow Equalists had similar stories, and she was part of the early crowd—in fact, rather high ranking, for all the Lieutenant would sometimes just call her 'set decorator' when he was irritated by her sunny disposition.
But Rui had convinced Amon that word-of-mouth was not enough, he needed posters and those needed designs for the communication he wanted (though it was he who had suggested to try to make the location a puzzle on the back of the parchment). And it was Rui who convinced Amon that the rallys needed to have more of a show element to amplify the message like he wanted, so she planned the lighting and organized sets that even had rising floor mechanisms that she frankly geeked out over. And that was when the Lieutenant would be annoyed, and begin to wonder aloud if Rui planned to draft Amon's speeches next.
Rui knew other public speakers might do such a thing, but it was unthinkable for Amon. She only wanted to help amplify the revolutionary leader's words.
And so Rui was just as puzzled as everyone else at the earliest rallies where Amon had a different personal story for each one.
His rallies hadn't always had those. Before Amon would speak on the issue and the concept and everyone else but himself. But surely he heard the whispers—
everyone wanted to know who he was. In their own way, everyone wanted a piece of him. To define, pin him down, see what was behind that mask.
Some people even began talking about Rui, mistaking her working relationship with the revolutionary leader for something more and erroneously thinking she may know more than they. Look at how fondly and lovingly she draws his image, they'd say, before she was ready to have the art mass printed for the posters.
She was not the only one targeted for answers, other women Amon worked with were too, but especially the Lieutenant, second-in-command to Amon as he was.
But then at one rally Amon shared a story that had made Rui actually cry. She was not the only one. Rui had trouble looking at Amon for days afterward, couldn't even draft a new design for a new poster, just reused the old one. Amon didn't mind. Rui knew he still didn't quite understand why she needed multiple designs—oh, he understood multiple drafts in the process of finding one, but not really the merit in having different final versions to switch out. But Amon trusted her judgment in that area. That's all it ever was, Amon knowing Rui knew and had skill in something he did not, and trusting her to handle that.
At the next rally, Amon told a completely different story; there was no lost child in this one, but a lost brother. Rui was baffled, those who'd been at the last rally were confused, but the newcomers swallowed every word.
And the next and the next rally Amon gave a different story, the sum total filling entire graveyards with lost families, a parada of trauma that could wrap around the world twice over. At first people dismissed Amon as a liar and a cheat. Rui did not know what to think. Even so, many stayed, mostly out of curiosity when realizing that Amon continued this pattern and never broke character, never responded to questions about his story or accusations of lying.
And Rui watched people begin to talk. Again about Amon, but it was different this time. Something like that happened to my sister, they'd say, or to my neighbor or my father or me...
There was only ever one rally more where Amon did not share a personal story. Instead he said this:
"Ever since I put on this mask, there have been questions. And I tell you this: they do not matter. For there is nothing behind this mask. Nothing but stories. Some that happened to me; some that happened to people I knew; some that happened to you; some that happened to people you knew; and all to do with bending. Bending that hurts. Defiles. Traumatizes. Bending is all that has ever mattered in this world—not you or I, but bending, and those who have it. And it will stay that way unless we stop it, right here and now."
The rally after that and the rally after that Amon continued to share his stories, all different and blurring into a painful haze in Rui's mind, but she would always remember that one rally. The one where Amon spoke the truth of the matter.
(She did not cry that night, but pitied Amon all the more: the man with no face, no identity, who wasn't even a man anymore. Just an idea. The idea that bending was to blame for everything...)