The one downside to this is that we can't go to healers anymore, Amon said, tossing off his muffler and helping me to sit down on our bed, expression closed off, and I groaned through my grit teeth in pain. How did you manage to fall off the building anyway?

He pushed me while you were down, I grunted, grimacing as he straightened my broken leg out on the bed, careful hands making it lay flat. Amon quickly unbuttoned his coat and shrugged it off, set it aside on the foot of the bed, knocked back the hood of the undershirt he wore, and helped me get my boots off, and then carefully helped me out of my pants. Breathing through my teeth, I leaned back against the headboard and stared at the ceiling and tried not to think. His footsteps were quiet, muffled on the carpet, as he returned to the bed with the solid wood we used for splints (a preemptive buy, yes, but it would probably come in handy plenty before things were done) and grabbed my ankle.

Can you get it any straighter?

Yeah, hold on. I groaned and grabbed my knee and pressed it more onto the bed, biting my lip and clenching my jaw until my lip bled and my teeth ground loudly together. But I had to. Amon reached out with steady hands and made sure my leg was straighter, and then he said a quiet,

This is going to hurt, and then he snapped my awkwardly bent broken bone back into place.

I screamed until someone banged on the floor above us and Amon put his hand over my mouth, leaned forward, and took my hand. I squeezed his fingers back until he made a quiet noise of pain and I finally began to calm down, shaking, tears in my eyes. Gasping for breath, he let my mouth go, cupped my cheek in one hand, and watched me with his eyes, clear in the light from the moon through the half-closed shutters.

That hurt more than breaking it in the first place did. My voice came out half an octave higher than I was used to, and sounded oddly strained.

I'm going to get a lamp and bandage you up. Standing, moving away, I clenched my jaw and watched the wall while his footsteps moved around the room, and then when he came back and sat down on the bed, I closed my eyes. He worked quietly and quickly, being careful not to budge my newly-straightened leg, and soon enough I hissed as he wrapped the splint tight around my shin and finished bandaging it up to keep my leg still. No more Triad fights for a while, I think. I nodded blindly and turned into his hand when he ran his fingers through my hair. Let me get you some willow bark tea and then you should sleep.

I kissed the bottom of his palm. Later, in the coming days and weeks, he helped me figure out how to get around on a broken leg. How to make sure it healed. We figured it out together, and I returned the same favour of being a crutch plenty of times over the years. First aid was one of those things we picked up early. We would use it plenty of times, for scratches, for lightning, for gushing abdomen wounds. A broken leg would turn out, by the end of our revolution, to be the least of my worries.

— Chapter Six : —

to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature:

to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image,

and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

[ Hamlet, Act III, Scene ii ]

It had been like starting all over again. Even though Amon had tried to stay awake—explaining it as he had slept too long and too much, he never wanted to sleep again—he was back out again within half an hour of waking up. Deeply asleep, but not unconscious like he had been. I took the time to change his bandages and eat, watching him while he slept, fingers still curled like they were holding onto me. Eventually I went and finished setting up the things for when he woke up. He slept for over a day, but when he woke up again, eyes clear and watching me, I knew, deep in my heart, that this was the last time the darkness would take him like that. He was right—he had slept too much.

It had been two months, and he gave me the look of someone determined, no matter what, to get himself back to humanity. And, after twenty years, if I knew anything about Amon, it was this—there was probably nobody as stubborn as he was when he put his mind to it. There was a reason he had built a revolution from the ground up, and it had a hell of a lot to do with determination, an obsessive work ethic, and his refusal to give up.

"What did you get in the city," he asked me after I had helped him eat and drink and he was once again flat on his back, curling and uncurling the fingers of his left hand, trying to figure out how to use the muscles again.

"Not all that much there." I leaned on the back of the kitchen table chair, arms folded over it. "Some cloth, a few changes of clothes for me, and a tape measure—there's a tailor in town and I'm going to get him to make you some new clothes. Something that will cover all your burns well enough, while still being light enough to wear outside in the summer. A few pairs of shoes—they're sandals, your size, don't worry—and a few other things. In town I picked up a bunch of building material and an actual plough. Soon enough I'm going to start rebuilding this place. It's a mess. Once it's built we can get some furniture too. I got seeds and a rake and some other things to plant with—we won't have a big harvest this year since most of the fields are still fallow and full of rocks, but we'll have enough to get through the winter and sell the rest for some profit. I got a second ostritchhorse and a few goosehens—I'm keeping them in a makeshift coop until I can finish rebuilding the old one."

"You always were good with your hands." His mangled lips flashed, momentarily, into a smile. I found myself smiling back.

"But I did get you something else. Let me get your new measurements to give to the tailor and then I'll show you."

"I've lost a good bit of muscle mass and some weight—I'm probably a lot skinnier than I used to be." I went to the bags from the city and pulled out the tape measure, a lead pencil, and a pad of paper to come back over to the bed, and he was limp, dead weight as I sat him up, took the basic measurements that would be needed. We had been poor revolutionaries. We knew how to do all this stuff. "The slacks you brought are too loose on me now, and I think this pair used to be tight.."

"You've been in a bed for two months, unmoving. Muscle mass tends to vanish when you do that. You're probably lucky you haven't gotten sores on your legs—most likely the bandages helping with that." He slid in my arms, lighter and yet heavier than I was used to. "But we've both lost weight." The strong muscles that had used to be in his thighs were all-but-gone, no longer strong enough to let him jump and flip straight from standing, his arms weren't nearly as hard as they used to be. Especially his right one.

"What kind of cloth is it?" Even if his arms only twitched when he put his full concentration into it, he was still able to talk just fine. Which was definitely very good news.

"Linen—it's all dark reds and blacks." His favourite colours. I preferred earthy tones, greys and greens and browns. It had shown in the uniforms we had designed. "You'll like it." It took a little bit longer to get the measurements around his legs, and I had to be careful at his head, neck, and chest, but soon enough he was laying back down and I left the stuff on the table.

"So, that other thing—is it a surprise present?"

"Yes." I smiled at him, and he smiled back. I hadn't needed to get him a gift, but I had wanted to. It was odd, seeing his half-mouth smile, but the fact that he still could was really enough for me. Amon watched me as I went to get the box and pulled over the other kitchen chair to prop it by his bed, and unpacked the box to set what was inside on the chair.

It was a brand new radio. There wasn't any electricity in the farmhouse, so I had needed to look pretty hard to find a radio that ran on something else, but here it was. It had to be wound by hand every hour or so, but it would pick up signals from Republic City—news, music, sports. I pulled out the antenna and turned to look at him.

When Amon had come to Republic City, he had been a teenager from the North Pole. He'd had almost no idea about what you were supposed to do with technology—as shown by his getting hit by a Satomobile within his first week. After we had been cleaned up by the healer, he had told me he'd been sleeping in an alleyway. No money, nowhere to go.

So, I offered him the extra bed in my apartment and he had taken me up on the offer. He'd been fascinated by the electric lighting, the tram to and from work. Once I got hired again, he was amazed by what I could do with engineering. The running water, the telephone and telegraph lines.

And, most of all, the radio. I'd had one in my apartment and from day one he'd been amazed by it, spending all his free time listening to it. At first he worked as an apothecary assistant to the woman that had patched us up, but once he'd gotten an innate understanding of the radio (I took the one we had apart a few times to show him how it worked) and figured out how to use a microphone, he had gone looking for something else. Very few Equalists knew this, and even less outside of our comrades, but once upon a time in his early twenties Amon had been a radio commentator. He'd done news, deep voice filling the radiowaves, and he'd been in love with the radio since then. More recently he'd gotten pretty hooked on romance serials thanks to some of the younger (female) recruits, but anything and everything was good enough for him.

Amon stared back at me, blue eyes wide, mouth part-way open. "You got me…"

"You'll have to wind it, but it should be good practice getting to use your arms again." He just kept staring at me, and the radio, and then back at me again. "It should pick up signals from the city even out here, so you can keep up to date with the news, with your romances, the sports…everything."

Amon kept watching me, and then he gave me an expression I hadn't seen in years—at a certain point after he had donned the mask and me the goggles, we had started to grow apart. Even then. He had stopped being the young man I had known, and became the stoic, cool leader that had headed a revolution. I became his right hand man, quiet and competent. And our expressions and body language, even with each other and in private, became more subdued.

The smile he gave me then was an expression of utter exuberant joy, his eyes bright, lips stretched so wide I was worried about his healing burns, bandages wrinkling, and he stretched out his left hand, arm moving sluggish and jerkily, to curl his fingers around the leg of my pants.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome," I whispered. I was smiling just as hard right back.

Life settled into a routine. I still slept in the bedroll on the floor, he slept on the bed, and at dawn I would get up and go outside and start building. That first week after he woke up I got his clothes made, and some for myself, and built the goosehencoop. I finished ploughing the other front field and planted the garden as well as both fields, and would water them every morning. At noon he would get up, I would eat lunch and talk to him while he ate breakfast, and then he'd turn on the radio to one station or another. Those first few days it took him three or four tries just to clench his fingers the right way to actually turn it on, and it took him until the fifth day to be able to change the stations away from the news, but it was a start. After lunch, I would build.

We passed the time like that. At the end of the second week I had cleared out all the remaining mess from the rooms that were still part-way standing and removed the growth that had reappeared inside the walls, as well as gotten the first of the buds growing in the front garden bed. He was able to talk with his hands again, even if he significantly favoured his left arm, and could turn his head back and forth on the pillow, and ate more than plain noodles and crackers.

The third week I had completely rebuilt the pasture area for the ostritchhorses, connected to their already-standing stable, and laid the groundwork for the bedroom that had once been my parents, and now would be ours, as well as updated the outhouse and fixed the roof patch with the summer on the way, wanting to be certain that the shingles would hold in any storms. Amon kept the radio loud enough for me to hear as I worked, and at night we ate dinner together, him feeding himself, propped on the pillows. We rediscovered what it was like to have conversations. I described the outside of the house to him, he talked about the dreams he had, and how moving was coming. By the end of that week he had enough fine motor skill in his hands that he could clench a pencil in his hand, and could jerk his legs even if he couldn't do it so well.

The fourth week and I had the base laid for what had once been my bedroom, what would now be a workroom. The plants were growing well, and the third month was gone. He could easily change the radio channels, and I was finally able to change his bandages only once every two or three days. His burns were as close to healed as they would ever get. No more salve to make them close—now lotion to keep them loose.

The fifth week, I lay down to go to sleep, and he stopped me, one hand on my shoulder.

"You're hurting your back enough working all day," he said quietly, eyes calm, lips half-pursed, brow lowered. He didn't have eyebrows anymore, but I could see his forehead move under the bandages. "This bed is…"

I stared at him, and then sighed.

He was right.

That was the first night we had shared a bed in three months. We didn't touch, not once that entire night, but I could feel the heat of his body, the way he lay in the bed, pressed against the wall, me at the edge of the mattress.

That night, I slept dreamlessly, and when I woke up in the morning, for the first time in months, I felt right. More right than I had since Korra had shown up at that rally.

The fourth month came with a heat wave and chirping, angry, loud cicadas. It was finally summer. Outside the plants were growing, plenty of food to keep us stable through the winter, and some to sell as well. The goosehens gave us our first egg, and the ostritchhorses started to respond to their names (I was jokingly calling them after two of our dumber recruits, Rentu and Vaya) and to chirp at me. I finally managed to get the back bedroom built up enough that I had to order a window to set into it.

Amon stood up for the first time. Not just teetering it, but actually stood, well enough to take a few steps. He looked at me when I came in for lunch, balanced against the table in the middle of the room, legs shaking with the effort, but there he was.

"Show me the farm," he said as I came over to him. "I want to see it."

"You shouldn't overwork yourself, you just now—"

"No." Amon reached out, clasped my forearm, and took a step closer, leaning heavily on one of my shoulders. "Lieu, I want to see it. You built this place. Show it to me." He was still wearing the now-somewhat-ragged pants we had brought from Republic city and nothing else aside from his bandages, but I helped him to the front door anyway, one arm around his waist to balance him, and for the first time in months, he stepped outside, into the sunlight.

He stared out past my shoulder, looking over the fields in front of our house. The plants growing, the stream running. The ostritchhorses, who squawked at me. The goosehens clucking in their pen, and the cicadas screaming. He took his time, looking over it all. Not with the strategist's eyes, but the expression that I had seen on his face those first few weeks living in the city twenty years prior—a child in a whole new world for the first time.

That afternoon, making our slow way around, I took Amon between all the fields, pointed out the different areas with different crops growing, introduced him to our small menagerie of animals, showed him the different rooms of the house now slowly being built back up, what would eventually be our bedroom (even if we were just now sharing a bed and still awkwardly at that, I couldn't think of any other way we would sleep—even before we had been lovers we had shared a bedroom. We might not be lovers right now, but he was still my oldest, closest friend. Companion. Comrade. I couldn't begin to think about sleeping without him beside me.) and the large back field, waiting to be ploughed to grow crops.

We stopped by the stream after what had to have been almost an hour of slow walking, and he leaned on me, stared down into the water. I could see his eyes staring at his reflection, the bandages sweaty and starting to peel away from his skin.

"Do I want to see what I look like," he asked me, voice quiet. I stared down at his reflection as well, and our eyes met.

"It could be worse," I told him, honestly. Amon closed his eyes. He had lied for so many years about being permanently scarred, but never thought about what it would be like to truly be that way. "When you're ready." I still had the mask I had picked up out of the water. I kept it folded in with my generator, in one of the kitchen cabinets, and hadn't touched it since we had arrived. Honestly, I was almost afraid to.

"I don't know if I ever will be." He was heavy on my shoulder, but his legs supported him. "I suppose I'll have to eventually." I didn't say anything, just stared out over the river, and then looked back over the rice paddy, still laying fallow.

"Amon," he looked toward me, and I pointed at it. "Do you think you could get that paddy back to the state that we could grow rice? Otherwise I'd have to re-dam the river and…"

"Are you…" he was quiet, "Lieu, do you want me to use my Bending?" I half-shrugged in response. I wasn't entirely certain yet how I felt about his skills, but I could see an opportunity to make our lives easier when it was handed to me, and I wasn't going to ignore that.

"It would save us a lot of trouble, and give us enough rice to eat through the winter. If you could make it wet enough, planting would be fairly easy." He was quiet, leaning on me, and then looked at the river, clenching his hand. "We need to divert the river, too. If it storms, it could flood not only the rice paddy but also our other fields as well. I can build a dam, but that would take a lot of work. I'd have to dig a trench and everything." My sister had built the original one, dug a furrow with Earthbending, to keep the river from flooding. That was long since gone. "But you could just do it with your Bending." Amon was a strong enough Bender. I had heard his own descriptions of his skills when he had saved his own life from the boat explosion with his brother, and seen (and experienced) some of his powers firsthand. He might not be able to dig a furrow, but he could easily divert the stream entirely to avoid the floodplain beyond what we would need for the rice paddy.

"I…" he turned toward me and nodded. "I could. When I'm more healed. I think I definitely could."

We went back to the house, and for the next few days, he just worked on walking around the house, stepping out and coming around to me, brining me water to drink, and he moved slowly. But he wasn't paralysed, just weak. He was getting better.

Five months and Amon could stand and walk. He could easily move on his own, well enough that he had fixed the rice paddy. That evening, eating an early dinner because he was exhausted from that, Amon looked up at me. I had finally finished building up the walls of the bedroom and now I was putting in the floor—it was going a lot faster now that he was using his Waterbending to water our fields. I could spend more time building.

"It's the night for my bandages to change." He said it matter-of-factly. I looked up from my noodles, and his grey-blue eyes were watching me from within the bandages on his face.

"Yeah?"

"I'm ready." Amon didn't have to say for what. I hesitated, looked down at my noodles. "After you eat." His appetite was still fairly small, although he had been hungry when he was healing from his burns. He was still recovering from whatever he had done to himself, although I caught him every once in a while with his hands glowing, pressing them to different joints, and at one point, to his temples, eyes closed. He was getting better at healing, which was probably good. There wasn't a healer in the village, and we were farmers now. We'd probably get ourselves injured plenty. Not as much as we had when we had been revolutionaries, but we were both older now. I couldn't bounce back from a few hits the way I had been able to when I was thirty. He probably couldn't take injuries at all.

And, if he was ever comfortable enough, he could make some money healing people.

I ate the rest of my dinner in silence, and when it was done, he took the mirror and set it down on the table and sat still while I unwound the bandages. He had seen most of his burns already—the ones on his hands and arms, his thigh, his ankle—but not the ones where they were worst. His upper right shoulder, which was more than burned, almost his entire deltoid musclewas missing there, making it hard for him to move his right arm, let alone ever fight with it again. And he hadn't seen his face, except the edges of his eyes and his lips.

He stared at his hands and ankle and thigh as I did it, and I finished stripping the bandages from around his upper arms, where he couldn't get it. He did his chest and face himself and then he sat there in the chair, naked.

I'd seen him like this plenty of times. But, as I took the mirror and stepped back and angled it at him, I wondered what it was like to see it for the first time. Let alone on yourself. Amon's eyes locked onto the mirror, and I watched his expression change.

Here was a man that, when I had met him, had been breathtakingly handsome. Now, not so much. The figure that stared back at me out of the chair was almost unrecognisable if I hadn't known who he was.

The explosion in the boat had broken him. His right ankle, more shrapnel than anything else, with the spiderweb of burns across the back of the heel. His hands, with lines like cracks in china, thin overhis fingers and palms and wrists. The burns ended there on his left hand, but continued on his right, up over his elbow to his shoulder, and his back. He reached out shaking fingers to touch his right shoulder—where the muscle was gone. Just burned away, ripped out, almost like he was a statue that someone had cracked the marble too hard on and ruined, chiselled away where a muscle should have been. There was little muscle there, and he shifted his arm, watched it tremble to do motions it used to.

He had been right handed. He wasn't anymore. He might be able to write with it, but he would never be able to lift anything or use his right arm for hard work again.

Amon carefully stood and turned around in front of me, eyes never leaving his reflection, stretching his head to look over his back in the mirror. That was honestly where it was worst—the skin looked like cracked lava or cooling metal when it hadn't been carefully done, cracked and distorted and bubbled, charred utterly black in some places, cauterised completely in others, and it pulled as he shifted, stretching over his musculature, tugging tight. If he had tried to fight in the shape he was in, let alone Chi Block, he probably would have torn them open irreparably. Finally, he stepped closer to me, peered at himself in the mirror, and reached up to press his hands to his face, to feel the damage there.

That was what was the most different, out of everything. If not as life-threatening as the burns on his back, it was the disfiguration of his face that had changed him the most. I studied each feature on his face as he learned the new map of his appearance, followed his reactions with my eyes. He started with his ears, the left one mostly intact around the inside, just the back of the shell and the lobe melted and curled in like old metal made too hot, but the inner ridges still solid, and the centre dip was fine. His right ear was worse—totally burned off except for the centre itself, the shell gone. I could remember kissing that ear, nipping at the lobe. I never would again. There was pain in Amon's eyes as he reached to touch the thick hank of hair that was all he had remaining, just about where his hairline had been, a thick stripe of his bangs, and it had grown back pretty well to its old length, hanging down about to his jawline. He touched the spots that had been his sideburns and his eyebrows, stared at the melted, twisted stub of his nose, just the nostril hole with a few strips of stretched skin over it and the bone, his mangled lips, and his eyes sunken deep in black, charred sockets.

He stared at himself a moment longer, and then glanced up at me and half-smiled, mouth twisting.

"Well, at least my cheekbones look pretty good." I had never said it, but Amon hadn't needed me to to know that it was bad. He had seemed pretty resigned to it, and although there was pain in his eyes over what he had lost, he didn't seem too let down.

There were more important things than how you looked, after all. I was just glad he had survived, where his brother had not. "Do you think we need to bandage it all anymore?" I asked him, and he leaned on the table, ran his scarred fingers over his left thigh and his stomach, unburned.

"My hands, yes. To keep from abrading the skin and the burns. And probably my upper back for a while, my right shoulder. But not my face. It gets uncomfortable anyway—I can't sweat as well as I used to, and I need to keep myself cooled down. The bandages don't help with that. Where are the clothes?"

"Let me get them." I handed him the mirror and he turned it over, set it aside, clearly never going to look into it again, and I went over to the cabinets that were acting as our catch all, bending over to tug out the clothing there. My fingers brushed against the wrapped edge of his mask. I hesitated, grabbed that too, and came back over, handed the clothes to him. He got dressed with the slow movements of someone returning to a routine that they had forgotten completely, pulled on the loose drawstring pants, tightened the hems just below his knees, tugged on the socks, thick black cotton, settled his toes into the split space for them, knotted up the drawstring of the pants. He slid on the shirt, which was plenty loose and soft enough to not bother his skin (with a high collar to cover the burns on his throat) and tucked the top into the waistband of his pants, shrugged on the loose coat, tied the sash to hold it on, and then took ahold of the thick muffler that could act as a hood. He had been wearing one for years, after all.

He tugged it up and set it low over his head. Left aside the bracers for his wrists and looked back at me. The thick bottom of the hood covered what his shirt didn't, and I stared back at him. He looked different from how he had before we had come, but at the same time, he looked like himself.

He looked like Amon. The man I had lived with for half my life.

"The hood doesn't cover my face. The sun shouldn't touch these burns." He reached up to press hesitant fingers against his skin. "Finally need that mask." Amon lowered his hand and sighed, curled his fingers against the top of the chair. "It's gone though. That's for the best, I think. I'm not that person anymore."

"Uh, actually…" I hesitated, and he looked back at me. I was holding the mask in my hands, knotted up in the shirt that it was hidden in as it was, and I unwrapped it, and held it out. The porcelain was cool and smooth in my fingers. The paint was all washed away, except for the very faint splotch of washed-out off-white red on the face.

Amon took it and held it in his hands like it would bite him, held the gaze of the empty sockets, and his body language changed to something subdued.

"Where did you find it?" His voice was very quiet.

"It washed onto shore just before you did. I don't really know what made me grab that, either." At the time, I had been in too much pain. I had just acted on instinct, and instinct had said to grab the mask out of the water.

Amon turned it over in his hands, ran the tips of his fingers over the contours. It had been his face for so long, what he had hidden behind, until I think both of us had forgotten the man that hid behind it, the man who was the idea. And, hesitantly, he raised it to his face, lifted up the two strings on the sides, and pressed it to his cheeks, knotted it up with the ease of long practice, and looked back toward me.

Like he was almost afraid to ask for my approval.

"That's the man I know," I didn't even mean to say it and it came out like a whisper between my lips. Amon's eyes smiled back at me from behind the mask, and I reached out, took his hand. He took mine back.

He wasn't though, really. Here was a man that was better than the one I had known—less confident, perhaps, but all the stronger for it. Less sure, more scattered, but solider in his footing. He had come through fire and from the edge of death to stand before me now. He had very nearly broken. He had very nearly shattered.

But now he was whole, and in the end, that was really what mattered the most. It had taken half a year, but he was back with me. And nobody else could change that. Nobody