Title: Late Returns
Author: overlithe
Fandom: Avatar: the Last Airbender
Summary: In the Fire Nation, a scholar from the Earth Kingdom finds out the past is a relentless hunter.
Characters/Pairings: OFC, references to Azulon and other canon characters; gen
Prompt: Written for the atlaland 100 Years of War OC-centric writing challenge and fanfic100 prompt 080. Why?
Word Count: 1498
Rating: T
Warnings: There's nothing graphic in the fic, but there are references to disturbing concepts and events. Reader discretion is advised. For more detailed warnings, paste the following text into an rot13 unscrambler, which you should easily find by googling "rot13" (spoilers!): Ersreraprf gb aba-pbafrafhny uhzna rkcrevzragngvba vaibyivat pbreprq ercebqhpgvba
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and concepts created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, and owned by Nickelodeon and various other corporations/people. I'm not one of those people, and I'm not making any money and do not intend any copyright or trademark infringement.
Author's Note: This takes place roughly 30 years before Katara and Sokka find Aang in the iceberg. The title of the story comes from the Cold Case episode of the same name. This tied for third place in the atlaland 100 Years of War OC-centric writing challenge.
Late Returns
Last night she'd dreamt of Ba Sing Se again.
In the dream there had been no rows of cabbage-peas, no litters of elephant rats. Instead there had only been the University's koi ponds, simmering like a pot of soup instead of glassy and still. She'd kneeled by the water, dunked her hands in.
Under the surface, black and white fish swirled, and their scales had shone like the sun.
Now the dream clung to her like smoke as she made her way through the market. They had baskets of lobster-crabs today, still lively enough to scrabble on the ice and straw as she prodded them. The man at the stall glanced at her pale green eyes for a second as he wrapped up her purchase. She would have to wipe the—
pond water
—sea water and mud off the basket when she got home, she thought with customary fastidiousness.
When did you leave Ba Sing Se?
The thought was unwelcome, and her hand pulled her collar tighter, as though it were the only thing stopping the words from spreading across the stalls, bouncing off the sea of red roofs surrounding her. Why had she been thinking of the University anyway? It was an ocean and thirty-five—no, thirty-eight—years away.
She sat by a fire fountain and rubbed her complaining knees. A few children splashed water around. She closed her eyes and the scent of sandalwood oil and clean smoke rising from the fountain's fire plumes faded. She saw shafts of dusty sunlight, smelled fresh ink on thick mulberry paper. On the Basis of Heredity.
Chun's eyes snapped open. Why was she thinking of all this anyway? Why should it matter? She got to her feet with a jab of pain in her rusted joints, and trudged back across the market, little clouds of dust lifting under each laborious step. Someone was hawking news-sheets by a stall laden with ash bananas and cherry-plums. She bought one of the papers, studied the first headline as she resumed her walk. Troops had just advanced into the Guan Xin Provinces.
She stuffed the news-sheet in the basket. Something about it, this—the roil of sound and smell in the market, the crowd, the city, the ache in her joints, the tendrils of dream—made her feel vaguely angry, like the sting of a mosquito-wasp. The rows of cabbage-peas swam into sight again, green, yellow, short, tall. Clay tablets packed with notes, back when she had been younger, and eager, and hungry, and everything had been…
… simple? She adjusted the basket on her arm. The crowd had thinned to a trickle of traffic, and with the sun in her face, she was sure for a second that there was someone waving at her. She turned around, shielded her eyes. There was only a bearded cat ambling out of an empty alleyway. Foolish, she thought, and resumed her walk. You're being foolish. Things were still simple. She had her money and her house in a quiet city not far from the Fire Nation capital, because Fire Lord Azulon had been generous even in failure. She was burdened with nothing more than tending to her garden. A drop of anger again, sharper, bitterer. She reached into the basket and crumpled up the news-sheet, hand tightening until her bones ached.
Why should she care if Fire Nation troops occupied this or that region? Or about the place where she had, purely by chance, been born, and where there had been no garden, no pretty house with carved eaves, no books, no purse plump with money? What business or responsibility was it of hers who ruled what, or who went to what war? Should she feel guilty about Chin the Great? Or the Second Omashu Rebellion? Or—
'You know who I am.'
It had been a statement, not a question, and a younger Doctor Chun, bone-weary and still dusty from the long trip from Ba Sing Se, had merely nodded, and only some seldom-exercised instinct had kept her from shrugging. He was the Fire Lord, which was supposed to make them enemies. But one ruler was much like any other, and the world was the height and width of her notes, the breadth and depth of its mysteries. First the cabbage-peas, generation after generation, cross-breeding after cross-breeding. Laws that controlled the inheritance of traits from parent to offspring. Then the elephant rats, and still the laws held. Only there was so much to be understood still: where were the factors of inheritance located? Why were they indivisible from generation to generation? Why were some stronger and others were weaker and often hidden? Why did some traits appear to be controlled by a single factor, whereas others—
She'd blinked, her eyes focusing back on the guards and the steely reality of their weapons, on the golden-eyed man with a face as still as carved marble. The steam of ginseng tea rose inside the tent. He pushed a cup towards her. Outside, a komodo rhino grunted. 'Do you know why I invited you here?' the Fire Lord had said.
The answer was simple, her tone flat. 'You read my book.'
And why not? Chun thought, over thirty years too late. Why shouldn't the Fire Lord have read her book? Knowledge was owned by no one and belonged to everyone, even if few were interested in it. She quickened her pace and turned into her street. The sun hung low, bleached the ground, gilded walls and roofs.
What was her name? Number 823?
The thought was foreign, startling. She had never spoken to the waterbender whose escape had ended the Project, wasn't even sure she had ever laid eyes on her. She had visited the—
prison
—holding facility only once, and after a few minutes on the catwalk above the—
So many!
—cages, her throat had begun to close up and she had rushed past her escort, out of the walls, and swallowed a great gulp of fresh and slightly damp air.
She hadn't thought of that for a long time, either, but now the memories were coming like a pulled thread in a skein. Fire Lord Azulon, his voice never wavering as he spoke, asking her question after question. Did her laws of heredity apply to humans? Did they apply to bending? Could you breed for a certain kind of bender? Someone who could bend more than one element? The cup of ginseng tea in her hand, cold, forgotten. I've wondered about too! she'd almost said, as if to a kindred spirit. Instead, You'd need plenty of people had tripped out of her mouth. Her voice had been unwittingly high, her tone almost jokey. Her heart had beaten a frightened tattoo against her breastbone. He hadn't laughed. That had suited her. I can supply the people, Doctor Chun.
Ledgers. She climbed onto her porch, opened her front door. Inside it was wonderfully cool and dark. Barring that one time, she hadn't seen them, only the ledgers. Code number, age, sex, characteristics, bending skills, parents' bending skills, if known.
Name.
What was her name? She unfastened her cloak, slid it off with a little groan of effort. Mikka? Nini? The anger sloshed inside her stomach again. What had been so wrong with the deal, anyway? A waterbender breeding with a chosen firebender. Do it and get out of that cell. Get a life no less comfortable than her own. What is so bad about that? she thought as she slipped off her shoes, stretched aching toes. Another thought, older: a bowl of thin rice porridge, her sister shaking with fever, walls that let in wind and frost. There were all sorts of freedoms in life, weren't there? Freedom from want. Freedom from war.
Smilla?
The blow struck her so fast the pain was a while in arriving, and for a moment all her senses could register was the angled corridor, the spill of dirty ice from the upturned basket. Lobster-crabs dashed out madly, filled the air with the tang of salt. She was sure she was supposed to be afraid, but instead only names bubbled in her throat.
Naja? Arnaak? Kara?
A creak of floorboards. Footsteps. Chun tried to struggle, realised that her hands were bound to the wall with ice manacles. Another blow, and ice pinned her ankles to the floor. Now she did feel pain, white and numbing. 'Oh,' she hiccuped, and looked up.
Even in the gloom, Chun could see the woman. Her hair was streaked with grey and hung loosely from a bun. Ice spiked on her fingers. Two golden hoops shone incongruously on her earlobes.
'I know your name,' Chun croaked, then a chuckle burned her tongue and she coughed.
A smile tore through the woman's face, and in that moment Chun knew she was terribly, dreadfully sane. When she spoke, her voice was raspy.
'Hello, doctor.'
++The End++
Notes: I am a scientist IRL, so naturally the issues of scientific ethics and scientific responsibility are Relevant To My Interests. (Though the truly disturbing part here is that the experiments in the fic are not nearly as creeptastic as other non-consensual human experiments that actually happened, and I'm not even talking about the Nazis or Unit 731 here. I'm talking about stuff that went on into the 60s and 70s, like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, or the Willowbrook State School experiments.) On the Basis of Heredity and its underlying experiments are of course based on Gregor Mendel's experiments with pea plants and his 1865 paper Experiments on Plant Hybridisation. Chun's factors of heredity, like Mendel's factors of heredity, are what we nowadays call genes, the "stronger" and "weaker" factors are dominant and recessive genes, and traits controlled by a single factor vs more complex traits refer to binary Mendelian inheritance traits vs, well, everything else, such as multifactorial traits, non-Mendelian inheritance, etc. Also, while the idea of the captured Southern Water Tribe benders being used for creepy genetic experiments is obviously my own invention, I do think it's a viable interpretation. Especially if you like Nightmare Fuel. ;) The fic's first line is ~coughs~a rip-off~coughs~ an homage to the first line of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.