The first thing I saw was his eyes.
They were a chilly blue-white, and they hurt to look at, shining so bright from behind the mask. I couldn't focus my vision. There weren't any shapes around me, just blobs of color that blurred together and forced me to look straight ahead at the one thing with definition: the mask and the eerie glowing blotches where his eyes should have been. They seemed to be coming closer.
I instinctively knew I was back on the stage from the anti-bending rally. I couldn't see the Equalist crowd, but I could hear them. They were chanting in unison, using a language I couldn't understand.
I couldn't breathe right. The air was heavy and my terrified gasps were painful. Amon was getting closer. I brought my arm forward and discovered that I could move it with surprising ease, like it didn't have any weight at all. I punched the air wildly in my desperation. Spurts of fire inexplicably burst from my hands.
He moved through the flames as if they weren't there. All at once, his hands covered my face and the back of my neck. Breathing was impossible. My lungs struggled to find the thick, uncomfortable air from a minute ago. I was desperate for any oxygen at all.
I looked up at Amon. The glow in his eyes was pulsating now, slowly intensifying. His hands felt unnatural, like they were made of metal. They were scalding. His fingers grew hotter against my face, blistering the skin before destroying it completely. His thumb sunk into my forehead, burning its way down through my head while I remained paralyzed.
I awoke to the sound of someone's violent yelling. It took me a minute to recognize my own voice, strangled as I was.
"Bo, are you alright?" Mako whispered urgently from across the room. I could see his silhouette in the window. He was sitting up, one hand holding the blanket, ready to spring out of his bed if I needed him.
"Yeah," I tried to say, but my voice came out quiet and hoarse. I cleared my throat. "Yeah, I'm fine."
"Are you sure?"
I nodded, trusting he could see me in the dim light.
He didn't lie down immediately. I couldn't see his face, but I knew he was watching me, so I sunk down onto my sweat-drenched pillow, slowly stroking a whimpering Pabu and squinting at the newspaper clippings I had taped above my bed. I eventually heard the ruffling of Mako's blankets and assumed he'd finally taken eyes of me.
Mako knew I was still awake. My shallow breaths were nothing like the snoring he complained about most mornings. I knew he probably wasn't asleep, either. Mako had never been able to sleep well.
He said it was from years of being constantly on guard when we were sleeping on the streets, but I knew my older brother had his fair share of nightmares.
We were brothers; we just knew these things about each other, but we never seemed to bring them up during daylight hours.
Which is why Mako and I never discussed how he held me like a child the night after the Revelation, when I awoke screaming for the first time, and couldn't stop.
And why I never mentioned that I sometimes heard him talking to Mom and Dad late at night.
I picked up the tiny rock that I kept next to my bed for the nights when I lost my earthbending in my dreams, and I molded it into different shapes, trying to focus on anything besides the shadows lurking in the edges of my vision.