The Black Butterfly


Forty-seven years earlier, in the Great City of Ba Sing Se...


He had been dying for three days.

He couldn't remember much. What little he did remember was blurred and psychotic. A result of the fever, he was told later. Fever often did strange things to a man's mind, he knew that. He might not quite understand the words the doctors used: delirium, convulsions. Spasms. What in the nine hells were they? But he did understand fevers.

His mother had died from one, after all.

Not that that mattered.

He woke up once throughout the fever. It was a cold-as-ice splash of reality, shaking him awake. He'd sat up, gasping. For a moment he'd thought he was still dreaming (hallucinating). After all, the prisons of the Earth King don't have green curtains, gauzy and muted, catching the cool air. It doesn't have wide spaces, clean smells or… or silence.

Then there was sweat on his skin, sticky, clogging. Like blood, someone else's blood, when it clung to your skin after a fight and you can't get it off, can never get it off, even though you scrub and scrub and stand in the stream for hours until your feet and lower body are numb. He hated it. He hated it and the scream bubbling up in his throat was about to break free, like bile, like blood, when a cool hand had brushed across his shoulder.

Cool. River water, sweet syrup after a long day, his mother's hand in his own…

He'd nearly taken the hand off. Ripped it off, torn bone from bone and flesh from flesh. He would have too if someone (who was it? He can't remember, can't even remember leaving his cell) hadn't taken his knives away along with all his clothes. He was butt-ass naked and scared to hell. The knives had been his constant companion since... since when the… since forever. What was he without them? It was like taking air from your lungs. He couldn't breathe, survive without the knives. They kept him safe. They kept him alive.

He stared at the mute figure behind the gauze. Tiredness made his head swim. For a moment it looked like a woman – a girl. He thought he was dreaming. No, maybe he was dead. Maybe this was the divide Smells kept on talking about. The Great Divide.

There was a scent of jasmine in the air. Honeysuckle, jasmine and something darker. Richer. He wasn't rich enough to identify it. He knew it was a rich smell though. Maybe that was what sandalwood smelled like. Like the princess in the story his mother used to tell. What was it again? In the beginning was the cowherd Altar who was in love with the daughter of the King of Heaven, Vega, who was beautiful, so beautiful the clouds would weep to see her...

Slowly the hand came through again. It was white, the whitest skin he had ever seen. It drifted, like a pearl in the sea of soothing green, just for a moment. Then gentle, it brushed across his skin, on his shoulder. "You're awake."

The skin was cold. It sent shivers across his body. Her other hand came in. Drifted too. Like the first one. Graceful, white and long fingered. Rough palms. They pressed down on his shoulders and still he couldn't see her face.

He struggled. He tried to stay up, stay fighting, even if he could barely move for the thrumming pain in his head and the ache in every bone. Fighting had kept him alive. It still could, if he gritted his teeth and held on long enough.

"Relax."

A quiet monotone. No emotion, no attempt at impassioned pleas. But there was a line of steel around the words, a threat and he tried to grin, the same old cocky grin that had earned him more black eyes and kisses than he'd care to count.

He recommended something not entirely proper. Her hands paused with shock. Then the shove came and he was flat on his back. The sheets were cold then, the pillows too, and he rolled into them like a child.

The statue behind the gauze withdrew her hands. For a moment, it seemed like she was staring at them as if they had become something new and not entirely comfortable. Then they were folded. Precise and mechanical. Through the muslin he can see her tilt her chin and shake out her dark hair.

Definitely a Vega, he thought, before oblivion and exhaustion claimed him again.


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