Title: I Get By
Author: andromeda3116/cupid-painted-blind
Rating: T
Characters/Pairings: Tahno, several OCs, cameo from Korra. One-sided Tahno/Korra.
Summary: It's Amon's fault that he lost his bending, but it's Tahno's fault that it crippled him to lose it. It isn't until the chance comes up to get it back that he starts to think he shouldn't need it so much.
A/N: Song lyrics are from "I Get By" by Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives. I took a leaf out of Firefly's book when it comes to insults and curses here, because it kind of makes sense. I think most of them are explained pretty well in-context, at least the gist of them. I'm not sure I like this. :/
.
.
I say William Shakespeare had the right idea: put your passion in a poem she won't hear.
.
.
He's pretty sure that she doesn't remember him anymore, but he can't escape her. She's everywhere, she's in every newspaper headline and in every radio station and in every thought in his head. The world won't shut up about her and all she's doing and how she's — she's got some sort of — some kind of way to undo what's been done and — it's — she hasn't —
She watched it happen to him, but she hasn't made any motion to find him and fix him like she's doing for everyone else and it's wrong.
He can't banish her from his mind and she can't even remember his name.
.
"I don't understand," his brother says. "She's gone public and said that anyone who comes to her will get their bending back. Why don't you go?"
It's a matter of pride, he wants to say, and it's also a matter of learning his own worth; but neither of those really mean anything to the people who haven't lived without like he has in the past few months. He learned the hard way that he was nothing without his bending, losing it turned him into a shell of a person, and the thought of turning around and going right back into that life makes him uncomfortable.
He was lost when he lost his bending, and he's only just now starting to learn how to live without it — what if he gets it back and starts relying on it again and then loses it again and gets helpless again? He can't just go to the Avatar and ask her to hand it back to him now. It's betrayed him now, he can't trust it.
It's Amon's fault that he lost his bending, but it's Tahno's fault that it crippled him to lose it.
But he can't explain that to anyone else, which leaves him with the other reason he can't go and get his bending back (because it would mean re-introducing himself to the woman he can't stop thinking about and that would mean facing her and her perfect life that's so much more perfect because he isn't in it and that would hurt because he thinks his life would be perfect if she were in it and he hates feeling like this), which really leaves him with no reason at all.
"I can't take that time off this job, to find her and get her to fit me into her schedule," he says instead. "I just got it, I'll lose it if I just disappear."
Unsurprisingly, his brother isn't fooled, but surprisingly, he doesn't force it. "Whatever," he dismisses, shrugging, "it's your decision. If you wanna cripple yourself, that's your problem."
It shouldn't be a problem. It shouldn't be crippling.
That's the whole point.
.
There aren't many jobs for unskilled non-benders outside of the service fàng pì that he couldn't do for fear of being forced to serve people he used to lord over. It's nothing but pride, but pride is all he really has that's his.
But then, pride doesn't pay bills or put food on the table. And while he'd thought himself wealthy and had plenty of cash saved, he's been constantly surprised at how fast money runs out when it's not coming back in. By the time his first rent check after came up, he was scraping pennies together to pay it, and by the second, he was begging for an extension, and he never made it to a third at all. His family hasn't been much help, because he treated them the way he treated everyone else, and it turns out that a lot of other things run out when the money stops coming in, like hospitality and generosity and the willingness of others to put up with fàng pì in the first place.
His brother has stuck by him, but he's pretty sure it's less out of fraternity than it is out of pity. Arsuk is one of those people whose hearts bleed endlessly but it's turned them bitter, and while it only takes a few weeks for Tahno to get sick of Arsuk's lectures and put-downs, Tahno would be begging on the street without him and Arsuk would be killing himself with guilt if he let Tahno get there.
So they deal with each other while Tahno tries to learn how to live without bending, and none of it's made better by Arsuk's attitude or especially Arsuk's attempts to improve at waterbending in the hopes of taking over Tahno's place on one of the pro-bending teams so that one of them will be making decent money.
He means well, sort of, but bending has always been a nasty thing between them — Tahno was always so much better than Arsuk and always had the personality to rub it in, and now the tables are turned but Arsuk is too nice to feel good about rubbing in his ability to bend but still too raw to not rub it in and —
— it all just really sets in how much he's screwed up his own life. The only person who cares enough to stick by him is also someone who mostly hates him, and the worst part is, Tahno can't even blame his brother for it.
He resolves to find a job and make things be better, but it's harder than he'd thought it would be. The thing about the city, and maybe about the world as a whole is: even an unskilled, uneducated, naive, and otherwise useless bender is still considered more useful than an inexperienced non-bender, no matter how much education and skill he has in other fields, those fields that non-benders don't get work in.
If you're not a bender, he learns, you have to come up with a hard, marketable skill. Can you build a house, or a satomobilie? Can you work with your hands? Can you operate machinery? Can you wire a building for electricity? Can you catch or grow food? Can you do anything that doesn't involve splashing water around?
No, no, no, no, no… no.
So talk to the vendors, the nicer ones tell him over and over again. Talk to the stores. Everyone's looking for someone to plaster on a smile and sell a plate of gyoza, that's all you'll find if you can't bend and you can't do any real work.
Meanwhile, Arsuk practices his waterbending and Tahno can't even show him how to do it right anymore. Arsuk shouldn't be a bender. He's a bender in the way that Tahno is a writer — he can do it, technically, he can hold a pen and write words on paper when he needs to, but he has no skill or flair to actually create writing. It's an ability, not a skill.
Arsuk shouldn't be a bender, and it makes Tahno sick with jealousy when he has to watch it. So he does the thing that hurts his pride less, and goes around getting rejected in interviews until having his lack of bending shoved down his throat is the lesser evil, and then he'll go home.
He'd drink it away, but he's out of money, and besides, the only thing an employer wants less than a useless lump they have to train is a useless drunken lump they have to train, so he stays bitterly sober.
He hates who he is without his bending. It isn't until the chance comes up to get it back that he starts to think he shouldn't need it so much.
It's like a drug, he realizes, when he hears Korra talking about how it felt to lose it, passionate and intense and emotional and reaching out to all the poor saps like him who need her help but who mostly need to feel like they're not the only ones who need her help.
Korra's talking in all the dialects he's learned in the past few months, and it hits him hard and hollow because she lost her bending for a few days and never really had to pay for it like he has — she's talking like a dragon-rider who hasn't hit the den in a week, all helpless and empty and needing her bending back, to a person who's on the way up out of withdrawal. It gets so much worse before it gets better, so much worse than she ever experienced, and she means well but she just doesn't get it.
He's sympathetic. He understands. He just wants her to.
.
.
and I've been in my head too long to know when what I think is wrong
.
.
But then, he thinks, listening to a new broadcast, maybe he doesn't want her to understand. She shouldn't be tarnished like this.
He's building a temple to her in his head, framing a picture of her in his eyes: the beautiful, powerful, terrible, wonderful Avatar, who doesn't know how to live without her bending and who needs someone to save her from the outside world and maybe from herself, a woman who needs someone to teach her what life on the other side is really like, a woman who needs him now that no one else in the world does.
It's kind of pathetic.
But he knows it, at least, so he doesn't say anything about it to anyone and just lets it fester in the dark parts of his skull until it grows up into something that threatens to drown him if it gets the chance to touch her.
It's called obsession; Korra isn't the only addict in the city.
.
He sees her at a gathering and looks her straight in the eye and there's no recognition there. He's changed his clothes, and his hair, and his attitude, and at any rate, they're in a huge crowd of people, which probably makes it all right that she doesn't see him. It's not like he stands out anymore.
The worst part about it, though, is that it just makes him want her more. Just — just to remind her, just to tell her this is what happened to me and this is what could happen to you and I can help you keep yourself Korra, I can help you not be like me. But he's pathetic now, and he's a nobody now, and he still hasn't gone to her to get his bending back because it's kind of like he's sober now and doesn't know if he could take another hit without falling back into it.
It's called addiction displacement; he's replaced his need to bend with the need to see her and hear her and hurt himself by both. It's not really self-harm — or it is, but it's a different self that he's hurting when he does this — he doesn't cut his skin, he cuts into his emotions, into his vices, into his pride and his heart and his ambitions and his dreams. By denying himself the return to bending, he's causing himself untold suffering, but hell — he deserves it, and worse.
And it's all for a greater good. He'll be better for it.
But he'll never be hers, and right now, looking at her and looking at that pìyǎn Mako hovering behind her looking at her the way Tahno wishes he was allowed to look at her, that's all that matters.
It's irrational.
He's not really thinking straight. His past and his present keep getting all tangled up, and he's half Wolf Bat and half day laborer, and all he can see when he closes his eyes is the woman who could make it all better again but who doesn't even remember his name because he's not the person she fought in the arena and it's driving him mad.
It's about bending, and addiction, and self-reliance, true. But it's mostly about Korra, because it's always about Korra. Because ever since she exploded into the city, everything has been about Korra.
Talking to her is like taking a hit, one of those amazing highs that you hear about sometimes, the ones that turn you into addict right away because it's so good that you can't get it out of your head. Being in her presence is like living in an opium den, intoxicating, as it slowly kills you in the happiest way you can think of.
He's such a wreck.
.
He shouldn't be a wreck.
Maybe Amon was on to something. Bending makes you crazy, makes you kind of weak, makes you see the rest of the world in a different way. And you get so used to thinking of it like that that you never even realize how bad you make it for people who can't bend — it strikes him when he's watching another one of Arsuk's useless practice sessions, that the only real sport in the city can't be played by people who can't bend.
What, he wonders, do non-benders do for fun?
Maybe that's why he's so messed up. He hasn't done anything fun in months, hasn't played a game or gone to a bar or a club, let alone been in any kind of mood to find a girl or at least do some wǔdǎyī. Part of that might be sharing a room with his brother, but mostly it's just depression. Maybe that's why he's gotten obsessed with Korra lately.
He gives it a try, works out a fantasy in his head about her, but it doesn't sit right with him, imagining her like that. He's always been a little rough — not that kind of rough, not like some of the worse pro-benders, he's always gone out of his way to make sure she's just as into it as he is because that kind of slimy doesn't wash out (and he wonders if Korra realizes just how lucky she is that it's Mako and Bolin she fell in with instead of some of the guys he knows, who would have taken advantage of all that naivete and all that skin) — but it feels off when it's applied to her.
Korra's not the kind of girl to let someone get rough with her. She's the one who gets rough, but he's not the kind of guy to let someone get rough with him.
He tries to come up with someone else, but Korra's the only girl who's really a girl to him anymore.
.
He hasn't been himself at all lately, and Arsuk is starting to notice, and more importantly, he's starting to get worried, which means more to him than it should.
"I think you should get your bending back," he says seriously one day. "You're not yourself without it."
"I thought you'd be happy about that," he replies. "You never liked me anyway."
"Come on," Arsuk snaps irritably, and it surprises Tahno. "If I didn't like you, why would I be here? Yeah, you were a complete festering hòu tíng, but you were our complete festering hòu tíng. And you were happy, at least."
"You would show affection with an insult," he mutters, setting up a game of mah jong because he's got nothing to do for entertainment except board games, which is boring but it's better than sitting around looking sad.
"See, that's not my big brother," Arsuk says sharply, coming over and knocking over his nearly-finished and carefully-perfect turtle formation. "Oh, stop sulking, mah jong sucks and my brother would never choose to play it anyway. Besides, you've called me way worse than hòu tíng, you idiotic chòubī."
He's trying to get a rise, and it's starting to work. Calling Tahno vulgar words for ladies' nether regions has always been crossing a line, but right now, he's more angry about the mah jong because he and Arsuk insult each other all the time, to the point that it's almost a sign of affection.
Which is when it hits him — Arsuk misses him. Tahno has always thought that his brother hates him, but his brother is trying to get him to engage in one of their oldest games because he misses their relationship. It's humbling, and a little heartwarming.
"Just because you're having a long visit from dà yí mā," Arsuk continues, "doesn't mean you can get away with playing old women's games in my house."
"Jiào nǐ shēng háizi méi pìgu yǎn," Tahno rattles off, because he used to be friends with some people who were native speakers in the low-class Fire Nation language that's become Republic City's go-to for insults, and because he knows it will confuse the hell out of Arsuk.
"What was that?" his brother answers, but starts laughing. "Something about butts?"
"May your child be born with an imperforate anus," he explains, smirking. "Cheapside has the best insults, you should learn a few things from them. Your insults have gotten weak."
"I haven't had the chance to practice lately," Arsuk accuses.
His brother has missed him.
It helps.
.
.
and everybody tells me that the world was made for me to play in but I don't believe them
.
.
He's starting to learn how to cope. Settling into his job has been a surprisingly good turn, because it makes him feel useful, and his coworkers mostly don't care that he used to be a bender but now is disgraced. In fact, some of them actually admire him for holding off on getting his bending back so that he'll understand how they've always lived.
(Some find it insulting, but he doesn't know what else he can do to make them happy, because they'd hate him outright if he was a bender. He guesses he'd never be able to win with those people, the ones who've been burned by benders so many times that it's made them hate all benders equally and immediately. It kind of hurts, and it kind of makes him sad.)
"Still," one of his coworkers says, a pretty slip of a girl that he never would have pegged as someone capable of hard labor but who trained him and does her job much better than he does, "it is a part of you, and you shouldn't be ashamed of that, I don't think. Haven't you suffered enough already? You know you can live without it now," she adds sympathetically. "I don't think it would hurt you to get it back."
Her name is Latika, and she understands. She talks about it the same way he does, refers to it like it's the drug that few people know it is.
He's pretty sure that she used to be a bender, too, but she hides it better. Her golden eyes suggest fire and her skin tone suggests water, but she doesn't make a spark or a splash, for one reason or another. He wonders if she knows that he's figured her out.
She's smart; he thinks she has. It's a mark of mutual respect that they don't talk about it.
He tries to replace Korra's image with hers, and it only sort of works. She's pretty, and sweet, and stronger than she looks, but she's not vibrant like Korra is vibrant, she doesn't infect the air like Korra does. Latika's bright, but she's not brilliant, and once you've been as close to the fire as he has, nothing else will warm you up.
And besides, he thinks, she isn't interested in him anyway.
No one is, anymore.
.
But then Latika shows up at his door one morning with a determined look on his face like she's about to tackle him and ravish him and it kind of turns him on, but instead she just catches him by the arm and pulls him into the street, dragging him along with her without explaining where they're going.
"Am I missing something?" he asks, trying to keep up. She sighs.
"I made an appointment for both of us," she replies, and his heart drops. "You don't have to do it if you don't want to, but I want to and I — I don't want to go alone," she explains in a low voice. "I'm like you," she says. "I'm scared of what will happen. But I need it."
He tries to be proud of himself for catching on about her bending, but that transparency goes both ways. The look in her eyes says and you need to see her because he's talked about Korra more than once before, and although he's thought he'd hidden it well, it's hard to hide things from girls like Latika.
He just isn't ready to see Korra up-close again.
This time, Korra does recognize him, and it sends his heart pounding into his stomach when she grins and comes forward to hug him. "Tahno! You look so much better," she cries, and it's so genuine that it really hurts. "I was starting to get worried when you never came by."
He just wasn't ready to see Korra up-close again.
"I wanted to see how the other half lives," he replies, and she keeps smiling but it's so even that it looks confused, and he remembers that she doesn't get it, has never gotten it, probably never will get it. Korra doesn't know what it's like not to bend, and she doesn't understand that life is different for people who don't. But he can't sit here and tell her that he doesn't want it back, because he's still an addict and the desire never really goes away. "This is Latika," he says, indicating to his star-struck coworker.
(He suddenly realizes why Latika isn't interested in him. It kind of stings.)
Korra doesn't catch on, looking between them cheerfully. "I'm Korra," she says, shaking Latika's hand firmly and happily and it aches in his heart, the way she shines. He just wasn't ready to see her up-close again.
"It's wonderful to meet you," Latika replies. "You got the letter I sent?"
"Of course," Korra says warmly. "Like I said, anyone who comes to me."
.
He was more ready for this than he thought he was.
"I can help you," he tells Korra before he leaves, water in his blood all over again and so much more intoxicating because he's been so deprived. "There's a lot that needs to be done for the non-benders," he explains seriously. "Amon might be gone, but everything that caused him isn't."
"I'll keep in touch," she says in a way that suggests she doesn't believe him, but the offer has been extended and at some point, she'll recognize why he's right and maybe then she'll come to him like he's given up and come to her.
Maybe he can matter more to her than he thought he did.
Or maybe not. It's hard to tell where Korra's facade ends and Korra begins, or if there even is a facade or if there even is a Korra underneath all the publicity. She looks so tired, so bound to her rash promises. He thinks she still needs someone to save her from herself.
.
It turns out that Latika wasn't really a bender before, but Korra's trick works either way. He gets the story from her a few weeks later, over a round of too-strong drinks.
"My brother was a firebender," she says, leaning heavy on the table and making sparks in her fingers. "He wasn't one of the lucky ones like you," she explains, and he almost asks what she means before it hits him. "He was in the Triple Threat Triad, he had to support me because — well — you saw, you see how hard it is for people who can't bend. Some of us got angry, but I just wanted to be one because my life would be so much easier if I was, you know?"
He knows.
He also wonders how many other Latikas are out there, the ones who got burned and got sympathy for their attackers instead of anger, the ones who saw Korra's kindness as an opportunity to have the chances that no one had ever given them before. He can't fault her.
"Yeah, I understand," he says, because he's probably the only bender who does.
.
"Is your life so much easier now?" he asks her three drinks later, wanting to reach out to her but knowing she'll always pull away for the same reason he'll always pull away. Neither of them are women like Korra.
"No. Yours?" she replies, half-falling into a sleepy drunken haze.
"No."
.
It should be easier, but he isn't surprised that it isn't.
He guess it means he's kicked the addiction.
It's not enough. He'll pretend it is anyway, for people like Latika. He thinks that if she believes it will be better, then maybe it actually will be soon enough. She's made a choice that she can't turn away from now, and he's grown enough that he wants to help her not regret it later — even though he won't get anything from her for it.
He guess it means he's grown up.
.
Korra will always be someone he can't touch, and he'll always be someone who can't get over the urge.
But he can kick that addiction, too.
Maybe.
.
.
I get by, I get by.