Two Years Ago
.
They were so good.
Asami's eyes glittered as she watched the Wolfbats take the Lion Vultures from the box seat she finally, finally convinced her father to buy for the season. They were so damn good. They were playing with everything they had. Tahno knocked out one and Shaozu took the other two in the second round, and that was that. Back-to-back champions, second year running. She couldn't believe it. She screamed with excitement for them. She could see Tahno scanning as he smirked and waved to the crowd.
(Searching, searching)
His eyes passed right over her, and her heart did a funny little flop of relief
(and disappointment.)
She ducked out of the box before she could think too hard, and into the VIP powder room without anyone noticing. Because, actually, Asami had gotten damn good at sneaking around the pro-bending arena over the last year. She had a system. She changed her clothes and then stood in front of the mirror, carefully pulling her hair up and fixing it with her combs. Then she put on the hat, and freshened her perfume.
She knew it really was a weak disguise at best, but sometimes people purposefully didn't see the obvious.
Because they didn't want to,
or they needed not to.
Sometimes the illusion was preferable to what really was.
She swallowed painfully, trying not to think too hard. Then she left the VIP washroom, picked the lock on the nearby service door, and snuck into Tahno's locker room. She waited for him in the alcove while Ming and Shaozu came and left quickly (laughing and swearing the whole time).
Then she quietly opened the alcove door, stepped out of it, and she slowly closed it with a quiet click. She waited (not long) in the dark for him.
He stormed in like a force of nature and slammed and locked the door before crashing into her and pinning her against the wall
with his body
and his hungry mouth.
But Asami Sato
could be a force of nature too.
She pivoted
just so
and she dug herself
into his sweaty, dirty, scorched uniform,
and told him he was amazing,
because he was.
And he must have liked what she was doing because he growled, and gripped the front of her hat,
like it was prey.
She stiffened up and prayed to the spirits that her hair combs wouldn't come flying out with the hat.
"You promised," he faintly snarled, misinterpreting her response.
Shivers of pleasure went up her spine the way he said that.
"Hat only," she murmured.
That was the deal. They won the championship, she let him take off her hat. It was a game now, for him to unravel. And Tahno was a surprisingly patient man, when he had something to unravel. He flipped it off, so quickly and so precisely, that she inhaled sharply and waited for his response while the rebellious strands of hair that had clung the hat settled around her face.
"You cheated..." he said flatly.
It took Asami by surprise, and her heart sank for a moment with disappointment and hurt, thinking he didn't like what he saw.
"...I want to see your hair."
She blinked as what he said sunk in.
Oh.
Oh my goodness.
This was too good to be true.
She had something much better planned.
But she decided to unravel him a little first.
"My hair has been like this every single time I've seen you," she said evenly, "you didn't say anything about my hair."
And now that she knew that her hair was a thing for him, she was going to play that. She could feel him tense and he ran an angry hand through his own hair. It stuck up, and she forced herself not to giggle.
"I said I wanted to see what was under that hat!" he snapped, frustrated.
Oh, he was so upset.
(She was positively gleeful at this.)
"What about the rest?" she asked carefully, lacing her voice with mischief.
His reaction was so much better than she could have ever hoped for.
He froze.
He tipped his head.
And gave her a look that she could sense, even in the dark.
"What?" he scowled incredulously.
Her fingers slid up the front of her light silk blouse and she began undoing the buttons slowly. The way his hungry eyes followed the movement made pleasure coil through her like a clock spring coming loose.
"What abou..." she started breathily.
He descended on her, yes, like a wolfbat. They tore each other's clothes off as they made their way to the tank used for post-match waterbending healing in one of the adjoining rooms.
And then
Tahno showed her
exactly
what he could really do
with water.
When her father slapped a newspaper on the table two mornings later, opened to a spread entitled Tahno's Mystery Muse? with her in a column along with several other of Republic City's most high-profile "Eligible Bachelorettes",
she panicked.
Then she laughed incredulously (nervously).
Then her father grilled her upside down and sideways.
He was not convinced.
She caught a tail (the ones she recognized were her father's men) on more than one occasion.
And she did not see Tahno (except from a distance during the matches she normally attended, now with her father) for five months.
And the Wolfbats tanked.
And it utterly broke her heart to see them like this. He was so distracted, and angry with himself for being so distracted. Ming and Shaozu were interviewed and they spoke indirectly (and resentfully) about Tahno's mystery muse inexplicably ditching him.
And the media loved it.
And Tahno wouldn't give an interview.
And the media loved that more.
Then, finally, there was that event that they both attended, and her father saw them together. She blushed and stammered as she talked to him, and he was perfectly charming and respectful... And he did not recognize her.
And her father was finally convinced.
He told her that people like Tahno used up women and tossed them aside when they were done. He said that she was too good to allow herself to be treated like that. He said that she should let this crush pass. She smiled, then bit her lip and hugged her father, and said she was embarrassed for admiring from afar, but that she really appreciated the skill and teamwork of pro-bending and Tahno of the Wolfbats was one of the best.
Like a well-tuned machine.
Well her father could get that, at least.
The tails disappeared after another week.
She waited another two weeks before going to see him again.
Tahno was furious.
He was so angry that a pipe in the locker room burst and she heard the water spraying on the tile floor in the next room. She explained what had happened. She explained all the tactics of her powerful guardian (father!), and Tahno got this look in his eye, like he knew about these kinds of tactics.
Intimately.
He stopped yelling and pacing. He was still furious, but he sat down beside her with his hands laced behind his head for a long time. Then he put his arm around her and pulled her snug beside him, and said he had a plan, and to trust him.
He had a girl on each arm whenever he was in the paper from then on.
The media loved it.
Asami hated it.
She didn't know what kind of trust this was supposed to be.
But it worked.
And really,
what could she say about trust?
He didn't even know her face.
.
Now
.
"You smell like a Satomobile engine," he said, wrinkling his nose.
She laughed sadly, thinking that was appropriate.
She'd been working on the one in the Avatar's car earlier, trying to figure out what to say.
Trying to screw up enough courage to come here.
He reached his hand from behind her on the couch and ran his fingers lightly over her carefully coiffed hair, his fingers lingered on the tortoise-seal combs. He'd always wanted to pull them out, but she never let him.
She'd never let him see who she really was.
.
One year ago
.
She'd escaped back home after the awful game because the other fans were acting on the betrayal she felt. She listened to interview after interview of non-committal statements from all three of them while she waited to be able to sneak back.
She was so disappointed.
It was like he'd betrayed her personally.
"You cheated," she accused, crossing her arms in front of her chest and glaring at him from the backlit entrance. He sat on the bench in his locker room, resting his elbows on his knees. He looked down at his at his hands. He was wearing a black shirt and black pants. He wasn't hiding in the shadows, but it was like he was trying to give the appearance of doing so.
He'd waited though.
Championship win night and he'd waited for her.
For hours.
"Yep," he sighed quietly.
It struck her then that if he'd denied it to her, she would have believed him, even though she knew what she saw in the arena. Upon that realization, she was overcome by such a wave of anger (at herself) and jealousy (she had no right, though) that she couldn't do anything but walk away.
Her father took her on a business trip to Gaoling for a couple of weeks, and she thought about a lot of things as they soared in their airship over the hills and mountains. The question of why they cheated was predominant in her mind.
They didn't have to, to win.
She sought him out a few days after they got back. She waited on the bench, back to the door.
"Why did you cheat?" she asked him quietly when he came into the locker room after his practice.
He sighed and slowly closed the door. It shut heavily and the latch clicked softly.
"Gimme a minute," he mumbled tiredly. She heard him set his heavy duffle bag down and he got cleaned up and changed slowly. Then he sat beside her on the bench for a while before speaking.
"There's more to it than skill, Sweetheart," he sighed finally. "It's about showmanship too. We're... we're a product, with a persona that we need to feed the public to get them to keep coming out to games. And... we can't keep feeding them the same stuff or they get bored and don't want to come out any more. I've taken some pretty bad hits... Chang wrecked my knee last season..."
She remembered the way his cry echoed above the cheers of the fans as he hit the ground after that hit. The specialist waterbending healer they had on retainer was especially grim as she looked Tahno over. He had been limping and white-faced, supported by Ming and Shaozu on either side when Asami peeked out from behind the alcove door after the locker door slammed open. He'd spent a good two hours in the healing tank hissing curses and trying not to thrash as the healer worked. Asami had seen the pain he was in and had to fight herself to keep in the alcove and from his side. She'd been flat out shocked when he was back in action a mere two weeks later.
"...Even the best healers can only do so much for so long," he said seriously, "I've only got a couple more seasons tops in me. If we can't give them the show we used to in the arena, we have to give them a good show out of it."
She didn't say anything, trying to process what he'd said.
A persona...
that turned her lungs to knots.
(How much of this is fake?)
"It's so much better if we can go out with a bang at the top," he said quietly, putting his hands in his pockets. "We've done pretty well with the championship pots and endorsement deals, but that'll start drying up pretty quick once we start falling off the bottom like the Boar-q-pines did. We've got to think long term and try to build up as much capital as we can while the going's good."
She breathed quickly and quietly, upset and trying to see things from his perspective.
...She hated it.
There was something pure about pro-bending that just sang to her. The raw elemental, beautiful physicality of it that was so different to the precision engineering that she immersed herself in every day.
And to discover that Tahno was deliberately manipulating that for more money, of all things.
She couldn't understand it.
"I-can't watch you cheat like that," she whispered disappointment and jealousy strangling her, "especially when you're good enough not to."
He froze beside her, seizing up like a glacier. Even though his posture didn't change, she could sense it.
"Here," he said, pulling something out of his pocket and holding it out for her. Asami could barely see it in the low light, but the chain glimmered, and she knew that it was gold.
And when waterbenders gave necklaces, it meant something, didn't it?
She froze and she felt prickles of (realization? hope?)... something start in the centre of her chest and through her face and ears. She was blushing and wide-eyed, and he couldn't see any of it.
"I bought it last year," he drawled tightly, and it was like she could hear him crack inside. Like he was breaking under her accusation and judgement.
She touched the necklace gently, trying to make out the details in the faint light from around the doorframe. She felt symmetrical waves around a central stone and a drop hanging off the bottom of the pendant.
"It's not an original," he slapped her with his words, "so you wont have to worry about me finding you or anything. The designer is also popular enough with rich girls like you that nobody should question where you got it."
Oh.
It didn't mean anything, then.
It was just a pretty necklace, that lots of other girls had.
She inhaled sharply a couple of times and turned her head quickly to the side to hide her tears.
But he was a waterbender, right? He'd know if she was crying.
(really, though, what could she possibly expect from a man who didn't even know her name...
who'd known her more intimately than anyone else...
who had only ever dedicated matches to her...
who'd won and lost games because of her.)
She choked back a sob and steadied herself on his hand for a moment.
You know, he was actually surprisingly (disappointingly) steady, given the circumstances.
The pretty chain swayed between them for a moment.
She slowly took the necklace from him and turned it over in her hands, running her thumbs anxiously across the face of it.
"Thank you," she managed to get out politely, "it's lovely."
He laughed tightly.
"You know," he drawled in a low voice, leaning back on the bench with his hands, "I actually started to think you were from one of the crime families in town. But since my extended family is connected in one way or another to most of them... I figured out that you aren't... so..."
She could hear something between them snap and break there.
A threat that maybe... maybe he'd just go and find out who she was... regardless of the consequences for both of them. She kinda liked that she could instigate him to recklessness.
"You hunting me, Wolfbat?" she said softly with a grin.
"Ever since you showed up, Sweetheart," he sighed, voice hungry in a way that made her pause.
She knew that tone
from his interviews.
Hungry for victory.
Hungry for a win.
He wanted to win.
And the persona, and the cheating, and the 'trust me', and the money...
and the other girls he had his arms wrapped around in all his photos.
It all clicked in a very clear, painful way for her.
She put the necklace in her pocket.
"Goodbye, Tahno," she whispered.
And she left.
For good.
.
Now
.
She felt stupid now.
Stupid and selfish, because she knew now what it was like when you had to worry about things like money, and reputation, and the futures of the people you worked with.
She knew what it was to put yourself physically on the line as a calculated risk. She knew what it was when things, good and bad, were not what they seemed. She knew what it was when you saw someone every day, and you knew them, and trusted them, and depended on them, and loved them, and then were utterly, utterly betrayed by them.
She knew what a gift it was when someone (who didn't even know you) took a leap of faith and trusted you, even though you didn't really give them a reason to.
She knew now what was just a game...
and what wasn't.
