After my mother died, I didn't speak for a year. It was like I was scared backwards in time, becoming almost a toddler again. I jumped at shadows, I wet the bed, I couldn't dress or look after myself. I was plagued by horrific thoughts and visions that would strike without warning- memories of my mother's ruined face- that would leave me paralysed, blind to the real word, locked in a past so vivid it was as though she was still burning before me.
I developed odd habits and ticks. I screamed if people opened one door before first shutting another, counted seconds, heartbeats, tiles on the ceiling, buttons on the servants shirts. Looking for meaning, making it where I couldn't find it. My rules were endless and all encompassing and I hated them, but truly believed if I broke them father would die, and if I kept them mother would come back. I also blamed myself for any catastrophe I heard of- cars crashed, factory machines malfunctioned, ships sank, all because of me. I think I had so much anxiety and guilt over what had happened to mom that it spilled over and coloured my view of everything.
Dad put his own grief on hold to help. He learned my rules, and kept them, but slowly and surely worked with me to show that there was no relationship between my fears and reality, taught me how to break the cycles of thought and fear that constricted me. When I was panicking he would sit with me, for hours if necessary, joking or telling me silly fables and stories that I'm sure he made up- I never heard them anywhere else.
What would I be now, without him? He saved me.
He was the centre of my world. I was never more than a few feet from his side, terrified he might disappear too if I let him out of my sight. I became his shadow in the boardroom, a large pair of eyes in a small, pale face peering into whatever machine he had his head in. I became a mascot of sorts in the Future Industries factory floor. Father kindly explained his blueprints to me and the other workers would tell me the names of the different tools, explain mechanisms if they saw me looking curiously. None of them actually believed I understood any of it, but an expert loves nothing more than to explain their own cleverness.
Unbeknownst to them, every day, with every impromptu lesson, a new piece would slide into place. Sometimes there was no lesson, but I would see a spring stretch or a gear tick over and something would just.. click. By the time a year was out my nonsense rules and numbers had been replaced by the rules of the factory floor, of steam gauges and hydraulic pistons, rules of heat and pressure and of the world itself.
It was swapping one form of obsession and control for another, but this outlet was far more productive; and the enironment I worked in was supportive and caring. Over the years my fears didn't so much abate as I learned to ignore them, or use them- my quality control process is punishingly rigorous. They receded little by little, and I made small victories- the first time I walked down a dark corridor by myself, the first time I walked through a door without having to jump backwards and forwards across the threshold fourteen times. Most of them passed without me noticing, but that is how it is with compulsions and fears; the only way to beat them is to distract yourself until they are forgotten.
With gentle pressure my dad showed me that the world is not a terrifying and cruel place, and I began to recover. Kindness and time can heal any wound; I still believe that.
At the end of a year, once I'd found my feet and my calling I finally found my voice again. My first words after my long silence have become a legend at Future Industries, and have given me a mythos that probably carried the company through the Equalist disaster that should have utterly destroyed it.
Dad was discussing plans for a transcontinental steam engine on the warehouse floor with the floor manager and a team of his most trusted employees. I was studying the blueprints idly, listening with half an ear and eating a sandwich that Itzu, the foreman, had made me. The prototype chuffed quietly in the background. They were just about to climb aboard for its first test run, when I suddenly began to scream. Assuming that some private rule had been violated father came over and tried to calm me, till I started shouting that we had to run because the engine was about to explode.
I remember my terror, trying to pull him to the door as he held me in place and tried to calmly talk me through my breathing excercises, when his head foreman, Itzu, an enormous man, seized both of us by the scruff of our necks and carried us bodily from the shop floor seconds before the whole thing was blown clean from the face of the earth. He realised what I had heard- or rather, hadn't heard- the comforting whistle of a steam valve relieving pressure.
(I still have nightmares about this moment, sometimes, babbling a warning to my father he cannot understand; but instead of the engine in the background now I see Amon, slowly walking towards us, hand outstretched.)
Well, anyway. Having found my voice, it became difficult to shut me up. Out came all the advice, questions and snotty remarks I had held back for the last year. I thought I was quite the prodigy, and perhaps unfortunately, my father and his colleagues were inclined to agree. I cringe to remember standing behind these grown captains of industry, telling them how to do their jobs. They were kind, but I must have been terribly annoying.
It seemed the beginning of my recovery signalled the start of my father's decline. Perhaps he had only been able to be strong for me, and now that I had found happiness in textiles and aerodynamics the only thing propping him up was taken away. He became withdrawn, tired, sad. He would sleep in, avoid work, ignore guests and even me. Rapidly, our dynamic reversed as I put all the lessons in kindness and caring he had taught me in the last year to work. I would sit by him with a pai-sho board, read the newspaper to him, ask engineering questions to which I already knew the answers.
I suppose that's when I learned how to be gentle, too. Learned when to push and how hard, when to leave well enough alone. Learned that sometimes talking about the problem is the worst thing you can do; learned to fill deathly silence with the comfort of idle chatter, to interrupt dad's dark reveries even if doing so annoyed him. I guess it was something I did with both my parents.
The next few years passed this way, me thinking rather well of myself and becoming a bit of a company brat in the factory, and caring for my dad at home. Fathers mood rose and fell with a gentle trend towards improvement. I have many dark memories from that time
(at twelve, walking past the garage door on my way to get a glass of water and just knowing, the way I had known the engine would explode. Finding my drowsy father sitting alone at the drivers seat of a running satomobile, in the dark garage, windows and doors taped shut. Him promising, "never again." Lying.)
and many wonderful ones, too. The first time an engine I had designed and put together by myself actually worked, he had thrown me in the air, had a massive banquet to which all the shop workers were invited- my extended family at that time, men and women who saw me more often than their own children; I had a hundred uncles and aunts who were almost as excited and proud as my father.
We took holidays sometimes, to distant parts of the fire nation; places my father had heard of but had never seen. We sneaked onto the grounds of the property that had once been the seat of the noble Sato family, before my brutal great grandfather's assets were seized after the end of the hundred year war. My father had laughed- his own father had spoken with such anger and reverence about the estate that had been 'stolen' from them by the Avatar, but it would have fit inside one of our dusty, disused ballrooms. Father was seeing it for the first time as well, and he told me he was terribly disappointed- from the way his father had described it, he had thought it would be be more imposing than the Fire Nation Palace itself. In truth, it was barely grand enough to escape the epithet 'middle class'.
I developed a passion for architecture and design; at the age of eleven I developed the tuned mass dampers and pendulum friction bearings that make modern super- skyscrapers possible in a land often wracked by earthquakes. Father built Future Industries tower that year. There is a garden on the top only we could access and we would sit and play pai sho in a glass shelter as the winds whipped harmlessly past us and Republic City grew far beneath our feet.
Under his care, and in caring for him, I grew from an anxious shadow into a precocious brat who thought the world began and ended under the hood of a Satomobile. Together, alone, we were happy. We were a unit. Or at least, I thought we were. I thought we knew each other as well as we knew ourselves.
How could I be so wrong? But I knew so little of people, then.