Disclaimer: I do not own Legend of Korra and its characters.
Book Air
Premise: To regain her bending, Korra must make a choice, go back to the past and either kill a teenage Noatak, or save him. But things are never as simple as they appear to be.
Chapter 2:The Fall
'Airbend!' That was the only thought in Korra's head, the only coherent thought amidst a string of curses and the virulent flare of commingled shock, panic, and indignation from being given the boot by one's past self. 'Airbend! Or you will die!'
She was dropping like a rock, racing vertically through puffs of cloud, spiraling wildly downward. And the fact that two minutes in, she had yet to see the ground was something she would be worrying about if she still had the appropriate brain capacity to do so, but as it was, her mind was wholly dedicated to the task of deliriously panicking at the time.
With herculean effort, she pressed down on the paralyzing terror racing through her veins and tried to summon the basic kata of Airbending from her head, twisting her body to the appropriate form and holding her hand just so, desperately trying to envision the famed Air Scooter. The panic and the impending doom of ending as a big splatter on the ground combined put a mental force the size of Aang's air temple island on her mind. She flexed her hands, expecting waves of typhoons to appear.
A small, pathetic-looking puff of air escaped from between her fingers.
"… you've gotta be kidding me."
She whipped her arms angrily, chopping the wind with her hands. Nothing came out this time. She opened her mouth, a volley of curses on the tip of her tongue, then she saw it. The ground, the vast expanse of the Northern tundra, a blanket of white in an even vaster canvas of deep blue sea, all quickly approaching like a giant ice-capped bullet.
'Not good.' zipped through her head with the speed of lightning before she abandoned all semblance of the graceful Airbending forms and took to beating her arms violently, hoping to force something from her sheer desperation alone, anything.
She was going fast, faster, plummeting with a dizzying speed, the air in her lung pressed to a tiny pulp under the pressure of her fall. From this height she could see that she was going to hit the sea, but even that meant next to nothing. Having been dropkicked from that kind of height, even a water landing would render into broken pieces.
'Great plan, Kyoshi! Let's just drop the Avatar from fifty thousand feet up the air and see if she's worthy.' She screamed in her mind, kicking her legs and thrashing her arms. The canvas of blue below was coming closer, closer, then came a breathless moment when she finally lost the last semblance of control and her terror, now free from her mental grip, let loose in a blood-curling scream.
She hit water, her scream stopped in its infancy, ruthlessly cut off mid-syllable.
The world simultaneously exploded and imploded. A miniature Super nova flashed right into her eyes, unbearably, blindingly bright, before being swallowed whole by an all-encompassing darkness. She heard the cracks of bubbles in her ears and dimly realized she was bleeding. The abrupt change of atmospheric pressure must have busted a vein somewhere inside. The shock and pain momentarily suppressed the freezing cold.
Korra spent the next few seconds floating dazedly in limbo, her body not yet caught up, not yet registering where it was. Then they passed and she felt the weight of a very different force, that of several billion metric tons of water, all pressing down on her. Her last puff of air slipped out from her lungs and the next sensation she felt was the burn of seawater in her throat.
'Move.' The tiny part of her mind that had survived the fall roared through a layer of thick gauze. 'Swim.' Miraculously, her body obeyed, moving sluggishly. The moves they performed, though, were not the motion of swimming, but of waterbending. Reduced to its most vulnerable state, her body could only remember the most familiar of movements. So instead of moving up, Korra spun lazily in an underwater pantomime of waterbending, helplessly held in the blue depth of the Northern Sea, not really moving anywhere. Her mind struggled to command her body in a different direction, but it only took a few seconds more for the lack of air to get to her. In no time at all, black spots appeared in her vision and overtook everything.
On the evening when the son of Kyneoa and Inanna trudged back to Emeq from his hunt, a small ruckus happened in which nearly all the inhabitants of the village, the children and women, gathered at the village entrance to watch the boy wrestle with the cloud of water trailing slowly behind him.
The bubble of water, about the size of a full-grown Buffalo Yak, floated lazily after the boy, an almost perfect oval shape if not for the minute ripples along its edges. Inside it lay the prone body of an unconscious girl. Water covered her from her neck to her toe, leaving only part of her face bobbing on the surface.
When the boy reached the square that served as the village center, the chief of Emeq broke through the throngs of gawking and whispering women and children, panting slightly from the brief run he'd had to make from the hunter's hut to the square.
"Noatak? What is this? Who is this? Where did you…" He paused for a breath, and with one flick of his hand, brought the tail edge of his coat up to dab at the sweat gathering at his brow. His age clearly disagreed with free sprinting through three slopes of snow hill in between the hut and the square.
The boy looked up at him, then spoke in a tone and surety that could easily have belonged to someone ten years his senior. "I don't know. I found her off the North Coast, in the water. I don't know who she is, but we won't find out if we don't get her the healer's tent fast." He gestured to the water bubble, which was slowly but steadily deepening into a dark purple. Blood, the chief realized as he eyed the tendrils and clouds of purple spreading quickly like the marks of disease inside the water bubble. The girl was bleeding, and not in any small amount either.
"Get Kaya." He barked to the line of women behind him. That turned out to be unnecessary as a mere second after his command, the throng broke again and out walked Kaya, the village's healer for forty-five years running. Without even a glance at the chief, the old woman bent down for a closer look at the girl. The water bubble covered everything except for the girl's face, but for a healer of Kaya's experience, sight was unneeded to ascertain the physical state of her patient.
It took a split second for her to assess everything and made a decision. She glanced at the boy, straightening herself. "We won't get anything done standing here. Quick, child! Get her to my tent." And only then did she turn to the chief with a pointed look. "And you…" She said, looking from between the chief and the gawking crowd behind him. Emeq was only one among the thousands of the Northern Water Tribe Capital City satellites, and one of the smaller one at that. Though it had, in the past, been a popular through-town preferred by religious pilgrims, its position, being too far off the current trade routes, guaranteed a slim through traffic these days.
In other words, nothing much ever happened in Emeq, and when something did happen, the whole village knew, and at least half of them would like their noses buried deep in that particular happening… which was definitely not a good thing now. Not for Kaya, and definitely not for this girl who just happened to be the hot news of the month.
"You… you do what you're supposed to do chief, and give me my physician's space."
"What? You want me to stand between you and ten dozens curious women?" He gestured between Kaya and the villagers behind him, eyes wide.
"I want you to get your spine out of your purse and be the village chief for real if only for ten minutes… and to not have my windows filled with peeping faces as I tend to this girl. A few housewives can't be that intimidating, can they? Or have the old wolf of Emeq coast grew old and feeble after all?" She said archly before turning on her heels and running after Inanna's eldest son, leaving a sputtering village chief behind her.
A quick walk and some shuffling through the snow later, Kaya was back in her healer's tent. She turned with one swift move, closed, then locked the door behind her, before moving to do the same with the flap-skin windows of her tent.
When she finally turned back, Noatak was standing in the middle of the room, alternating between watching her and the unconscious girl.
Without saying a word, she went to the back and pulled out make-shift stretcher usually reserved for the worst of patients. "Put her here, gently." Then she watched the boy moved in that eternal and graceful dance taught to all the male waterbenders of the Northern Land.
The water shifted under the slightest turn of the boy's hand, settling the girl onto Kaya's stretcher. Her back was the first thing to land, followed by her head, settled with such care that Kaya could see not even the tiniest unwilled disturbance in the water, then her hands, neatly to her side, and lastly, her legs.
Then the water withdrew entirely and Kaya moved in for the kill.
Broken bones. She noted at once without even touching anything. Forty-five years in service had granted her the ability to rattle off her patient's injuries from first look, an ability which Kaya didn't always appreciate. Too many bad things to see, sometimes it felt like all the world had to offer was people hurting, people dying. However, upon her second look, she revised her opinion. Shattered. The bones weren't broken, they were shattered. No ordinary broken scaphoid could turn up that kind of bruises. A badly damaged pelvis. Fractures along the arms and legs. The degree of visible damage alone had Kaya cringing in sympathetic pain. No wonder Noatak had taken her back in a water pocket, anything else and she would have died from having fragments of her bones going everywhere and tearing her internal organs to shreds. A painful death, if there ever was one.
"What happened to you, child?" She couldn't help but whisper. Not even in war times had she encountered patients like this, and she had had people falling off of cliffs before, falling off of cliffs and onto ice landing. None of them even came close to this girl. The fact that she was somehow still alive was a miracle in and of itself.
"She fell… from the skies." Noatak interjected, his young voice showing a rare moment of hesitation. His face was reflected in the many mirrors she kept on the wall of her tent, gaze lingering with childish wonder on the unconscious girl, as if he couldn't quite believe it himself. The moment didn't last long, because in the next second, Noatak snapped back to his usual polite but detached demeanor.
"If I hadn't waterbent the patch of sea she fell into, there probably wouldn't have been a lot of her left to collect now." He spoke with a stiff voice, as if embarrassed by his earlier hesitation.
Kaya stifled a laugh despite herself. 'Have we grown fond of the new girl now, Noatak?' Came the thought in her head, full of old woman's humor 'And here I thought all the young girls of the village were right, that you are as much an ice block as your waterbending.' But Kaya shook herself. No time. Humor later. She had a girl to save now.
"Fell from the skies you said. That would explain her bleeding ears." Velocity shock, coupled with barotraumas. Usually found in deep-sea divers who had foregone safety rules and resurfaced too fast for their bodies to adapt. This would be the first time Kaya found it from the opposite direction. Falling too fast through too many atmospheric levels that the body just can't keep up…. Which begged the question of just exactly how far up did she fall? Judging from the aftermaths the dive left on her body, Kaya overruled all the cliffs around the North Coast area. This girl definitely did not slip off from anywhere inland.
Could it… Kaya paused momentarily, recalling the Fire Nation airships menacing the border of North Water Tribe many years ago, when Kaya herself was a little girl. Yes, a fall from one of those ships could surely leave such injuries, but the war had ended many years ago and the subsequent truce had required the dismantling of all Fire Nation airships…. and this girl was obviously a Water Tribe member. Everything from her clothing to her appearance bore the touches of the people of the sea and the moon. A Water Tribe girl falling from a Fire Nation ship that wasn't supposed to exist anymore. The thought sounded impossible in her head, yet it was the only logical explanation thus far available to Kaya.
A Water Tribe girl on a Fire Nation war ship. What could that possibly mean?
Kaya wiped the thought from her head with a ruthlessness born of decades of tending to the sick and the dying. Heal now. Questions later. She redirected her full focus on the nameless girl, inspecting the damages in deeper levels.
The light from Kaya's oil lamp flickered on the girl's body, reflecting pinpricks of red ice.
"You stemmed her blood? With ice?" She asked without looking, a hint of amazement leaking into her voice. That was some ingenious use of waterbending.
"She would have bled to death if I didn't. It's a long way from the North Coast."
Kaya laid a hand on the girl's head, touching her for the first time. She expected to feel the burn and rigidity of frostbitten skin based on the girl's pale face, a sure sign of the early stages of hypothermia setting in. The skin under her fingers, however, was soft and warm to the touch.
"I kept the water warm around the ice." Inanna's son explained before she could even think to phrase her question. She arched one eyebrow, a mixture of amazement and pride peeking from her face. So that was why Noatak was struggling as he walked into the village. He'd had to maintain a relatively still bubble of water around the girl to preserve her delicate bones, freeze bits of ice around her bleeding wounds and still keep the water surrounding warm to offset her earlier dip in the arctic sea. Ah, Noatak, ever the waterbending prodigy of Emeq. Let it never be said that a child from two non-benders can't be a hell of a one, and let it never be said that true mastery of waterbending can't be taught to said child by his own non-bender father.
Kyneoa should be proud of his eldest son, proud instead of haranguing the poor child and his little brother for every perceived imperfection in their daily waterbending practices. Kaya would like to give the man a piece of her mind one day, but other people's child rearing practices weren't strictly a healer's business, so once again, she wiped her mind clean of thoughts and concentrate on the task at hand.
"We begin now. I will have to cut off her clothes. You know what to do." She started, not moving an inch from her sitting position in front of the girl. She wouldn't need to. The things that followed were a secret kept between Kaya and this child.
Noatak stood up, pried the prize of his hunt off his belt, a couple of fresh-caught Blue Koi, quickly encased them in ice cubes and set them beside the door. Next, he pulled out a wood-framed seal-skin screen from the wall of her tent and positioned it so that he was on one side while Kaya and the girl were on the other. Then he sat down and waited for her direction.
On her side of the screen and away from the boy's eyes, Kaya picked up a physician's knife and set to slicing the girl's shirt open. The blue cloth came apart easily under the cast steel of her knife, slick with blood in some spots. Next came the traditional Sarashi binding the girl's chest. She cut the Sarashi to shreds before pulling them off one by one, taking great care to be as gentle as possible. In this kind of case, the torso always required the most delicate of touch. Too many important organs, too fragile. And with the nameless girl's outside condition, Kaya wouldn't be surprised to reach inside with her bender's sense only find her internal organs already smashed to bits and drowned in internal hemorrhage. In fact, she expected it, which made it even harder work.
In two minutes, Kaya made quick works of the girl's pants and arm-wraps before pulling her soaking wet underwear off in one quick move.
"We will first mend her bone frame."
Noatak's shadow on the screen moved, holding out his hands in a classic healer's position. Kaya watched the absolute poise and grace of his movements with something like awe. It was moments like these and prodigies like Noatak that made her curse the age-old tradition of male warriors and female healers only. The hundred year war was now a thing of the past. The age of constant warring was no more, and now that the tribe was focusing on rebuilding their past glories, they needed healers more than warriors. Or at least, Emeq needed one more healer and one less boomerang-chucking, sword-swinging brute of a brat… in Kaya's opinion. If it weren't for that long outdated rule, Noatak would have made a fine healer, one with the potential of far surpassing master Katara of the South.
With the force of more than four decades of experience, Kaya spread her senses wide, covering the room with her water consciousness. She closed her eyes, and another vision opened up in her head. She was aware of all water in the room. The water in her basin, the soup in her cauldron, already growing overcooked (blasted! There went her dinner, all that fine otto-seal, wasted!), the ice cubes in which Noatak kept his fishes, the water inside her own body, the water in the nameless girl's body, a jagged river full of violent waterfalls and rock bed, roaring ferociously in some places and mewling pathetically in others, an acute representation of her severe injuries; the water in Noatak's body, so calm, so still, yet hiding whirlpools he'd hidden, secrets of the domestic kind which Kaya knew about but was merciful enough to pretend not to.
Kaya did nothing, only watched over the distinct tendrils of Noatak's waterbending curling around the girl, pooling into the cracks of her bones to begin the process of healing. As always, the feel of another waterbender's bending drew her in, taunted her, and Kaya wanted nothing more than to throw in her own bending, once touted as the best of the North forty years ago … but she resisted, gripping her hands together to keep them from assuming the forms she'd used so many times it became second-nature, to the point that Kaya could do them even in her sleep. Ah, what would it feel like to finally be allowed to bend again? To feel the cool water twisting like fine silk beneath her hands… but no.
Years ago, she had made a vow and foreswore her bending altogether. With the help of Noatak, she had kept this vow a secret from her whole village, with him doing the real bending and her as the teacher and the guide. They'd done this a hundred times before, for various people of the village. And this girl, no matter her circumstance or the degree of her injuries, would not change the one fact that Kaya would not bend, from here to the end of her life.
"Steaaady." She directed. On the other side of the screen, Noatak slowed the movements of his hands. "Hold her, Noatak. Gently, but firmly. You don't want to squeeze anything too delicate. Girls are delicate, so be gentle. We wouldn't want her to wake up because of your rough waterbending on her body and slap you for it now, would we?" A smile kicked up the corner of her mouth when she saw Noatak's shadow stiffened momentarily on the seal-skin screen.
Ah, boys will be boys after all.
Emeq was an aging village, with too many old and middle-age, and not nearly enough young. Noatak and his brother were among the precious few children left in her village. The older, in their seventeen or eighteen, had gone to the South, gone after the call of Republic City, chasing their fancy dreams of a life of riches and free opportunities, leaving villages like Emeq a bit emptier, a bit hollower, a bit older. So, despite the fact that they had done this a hundred times before, this would be the first Noatak applied his bending on a girl his age… and a pretty one to boot.
"Now, we will normalize the pressure in her head. Delicate touches, Noatak, delicate touches." She said the moment the girl's bone frames were corrected and all the bone fragments pulled out of her internal organs. A metal tray Kaya had set aside was filling up with pieces of bone too small to mend back without taking up too much of their time. Gradually, the girl's breathing, which was a weak and unsteady hiss before, regained a normal pace, and her ears and nose stopped bleeding. Good. Kaya observed. Very good. With many long, smooth strokes of his hands, Noatak unblock and calmed the flow of blood in her head, until they regained their normal rhythm.
"Hemorrhage in her chest cavity. We will drain out the blood and mend her internal organs. Are you up for it?" She asked, wiping a bead of sweat from her brow. Here was the hardest part, long and requiring utmost concentration from the healer. While the brain was much more critical, healing the chest cavity and its internal organs were far more drawn-out, with some cases taking hours just to stabilize the patient. Without good pacing, a healer may find herself running dry on stamina and forced to end the healing process, leaving the patient hanging in an extremely dangerous condition, and this girl's condition was looking more and more like it would be among those special cases. Despite the fact that Noatak was the acknowledged best waterbender of Emeq, Kaya needed to know if he was prepared for this one. The process of healing, once began, should not be stopped.
"I'm good." He replied.
"Then let's do it." Said Kaya, without thinking of questioning the boy a second time. At fourteen years old, Noatak had proved himself far more reliable than a good deal of adults in the village. Kaya knew without a doubt that he wouldn't say yes if he wasn't up to it.
The process did take up a good two hours, during which she directed Noatak in cleaning out the blood, which was in the process of rotting and contaminating the girl's insides, mending the busted veins and arteries, and soothing tissue trauma left from the fall. Noatak was in the middle of mending a hepatic tear along the girl's ligamentum teres when a loud knock on Kaya's door jolted through the silence of her tent.
"Brother!" A voice came in through the door. "Dad says it's late and you have to go back for training. And mom says everyone's eaten without you so come home before dinner is cold. And Hassuq says Kaya should hurry up because he's not gonna be her guard all night."
"Tarrlok." Noatak muttered through the screen, not stopping the motions of his hands. "What should we do?"
Kaya stood up, went to one of her windows, then opened the flap. It was dark outside. The vistas of Emeq through her window was a blanket of deep blue and purple, dotted with blurs of orange and yellow fire. Up above, she saw a veil of night mist thickening into milky white. The whole village was going to bed.
"Noatak, it's cold out here. Come on. I wanna go home." Tarrlok called again from outside the door, on the verge of whining.
"Just a minute. I'm coming." Noatak yelled at the door before looking back at Kaya, eyes imploring.
"It's late. He's right. You should go. We can continue tomorrow."
"But…" Kaya's new position offered her full view on both sides of the screen, and from this new perspective, she watched Noatak glance at the other side where the girl lay unconscious, an uncharacteristic hint of worry on his face.
"She's stable. The critical state has passed. You did good. I'll take care of the rest."
"… She doesn't feel good." Said Noatak, a frown marring his face.
Kaya smiled at his remark. Fourteen years old and the child had already developed a fine waterbender sense. Ah, if only… She stopped the thought right there.
"Of course she doesn't. Her injuries aren't like the ones we have treated so far. We will need to tend to her for many days until she's back on her feet."
"… if you say so." Noatak said after a full minute of silence during which he looked between Kaya and the screen, making up his mind. He stood up, bid her goodnight and headed for the door. His little brother greeted him on the other side with a whine and a grimace before promptly launching into a mini rant. "Do you know how late it is? Everyone was waiting for you to come home for dinner. And do you know how mom looked when Hassuq told her you'd gone to Kaya and left him in the middle of the village. She thought you fell down the ice in the hunting ground or the otter-fishes swallowed you on accidents. And did you even bring anything back from your hunt. I don't want to have turtle seal for dinner tomorrow, and tomorrow's morrow, and tomorrow's morrow's morrow. Oh and dad is so going to chew you out for this. You just missed training."
Noatak promptly shoved the ice-cubed fishes into his younger brother's arm to stop his ranting and together they walked home, bantering back and forth all the way.
Kaya watched the boy with a half-smile on her face, then she closed the door, tied up her window flaps and went back to the girl. The wood was nearly gone in her fireplace and her tent was getting colder by the minute. She'd have to go out for a refill in a moment or so. But now though…
Kaya kneeled before the nameless girl, brushed the stray lock of hair from her pale face and took a good long look. Dark hair, honey-colored skin, a Water Tribe girl through and through, she couldn't be a day over seventeen. She had the look of a child from a well-off family. Kaya had seen the egg-sized stone sewn into her parka. Real precious stone instead of the ice balls and bird feathers favored by more middle-class Water Tribe families. The kind of stone that would fetch a good amount from merchants. And the threads of her under-clothes and her arm-wraps were all silk, not cotton or wool as usual but silk, even the underlining of her shirt. In the North Pole, only particularly well-off families could afford to flaunt their wealth so openly like that, families with well-known names and long history to do with the tribe. With the Water People's just-enough philosophy, such families were few and far in between, and very rarely did they allow a child of theirs to wander to backwater places like Emeq.
So what was a girl like her doing in a place like this? Out in the ice, alone, in one of the harshest place of the North Pole, with nothing on her but her clothes, and very ill-fitting clothes for the local weather at that. Why, that parka of her would barely serve an Emeq winter, maybe a normal central North Pole winter, but definitely not Emeq with its famous ice storms that could last for months and burry everything in miles of snow.
Kaya pressed a finger on the girl's forehead and willed her water sense deeper, deeper through the layers of hurt and panic and injuries, down to a level where Kaya could read directly from her chi. The girl was a bender, Kaya found, an extremely powerful one at that. She blinked as the next second she felt the burn of fire, the rumble of earth, and the cool flow of water all at once, and something else, something that she had never felt before, something blowing, and howling, and so absolutely intangible it left her spinning in its wake. She blinked, confused at what she was feeling. That was supposed to tell her what type of bender the girl was, but that couldn't be right. This girl was a waterbender.
Kaya tilted her head, considering. Perhaps she had gotten into a fight. Sometimes, bending battles between powerful benders could leave an imprint of their spirits in each other's bodies, as she had heard from the tales of old. Benders so powerful spiritually that parts of them leaked out to the outside world. Perhaps this was what happened to this girl. Perhaps she was such a bender. But even that didn't answer much and only put more questions in Kaya's head. She needed something more so once again, she willed herself in deeper, even deeper than before.
A sensation like going into a dark tunnel passed over her, and finally she found what was in the end of the tunnel. Nothing. A deep terrible abyss of nothingness that swallowed her whole. Kaya jerked back with a gasp, her finger where she had touched the girl numb and cold.
"Oh spirits. Oh, my poor child." Kaya panted, shivering violently as she scooted away from the girl for a second. She had felt that terrifying sense of nothingness before, a long time ago, in a memory she didn't want to revisit. To see it again in this girl was not something she expected. "Whatever happened… that took away your bending like that?"
End Chapter 2
Noatak made his first appearance. Also, baby Tarrlok. And plots!
