Present day (Bumi age 113), early summer.
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Bumi sighed and opened his eyes. His heart quickly resumed its steady throp-throp-throp, pushing much-needed blood to his tingling joints. He clenched his fists as hard as he could, trying to knead the sleepy weakness out of them. The fierce crick in his neck (acquired during his brief stint as a toboggan during Aang's most recent visit to Omashu) was only growing worse, due in no small part to weeks of living within the stockade-like headlock of his restraints. Bumi twisted his neck as far as it would go, grimacing at the series of gruesome pops. He was getting too old for this.
Yes, far too old. Bumi had made a livelihood of chasing after the world, but with every year that slipped by his knees creaked just a little louder, he lost just a little more hair, he heard just a little less. And yet he'd given it his all for decades, fighting for every inch of it. And look where he ended up. A century old, and rather than sitting in a rocker where he belonged, surrounded by respectful young people he could send away at any time by claiming to be tired, instead he was up to his neck in a steel box, chained inside of another steel box, and rotting away in the bowels of his own city. The young people who should be listening to him ramble were instead fighting and dying. Indeed, the demon girl who'd chased him and Aang down the mail slides couldn't have been more than fifteen or sixteen, and yet she was leading armies. It was a sad thing when the mantle of war had to be passed to children so young.
For Bumi, it had taken growing old to understand how important being young was. In truth, he saw a frightening amount of himself in Princess Azula. She was intelligent and talented beyond her years, aggressive and focused. A fine bender, sure, but more importantly, dangerously clever. Had he still lived, Rehn would have had a field day with her, and Bumi was certain she would have fought and tried her hardest to escape, just as he had, not knowing how irritatingly right Rehn had been. There had been times when Bumi would have killed the old man on the spot, had he not been chained to the wall, and yet now he knew what a gift he'd been given.
He'd given up his childhood fighting some war or another. He'd pushed himself further and further away from a normal life, and he was sure, if Rehn hadn't reigned him in, he would have ended up dead. Killed on a battlefield he was really only fighting within himself. One of the grand secrets that growing old had taught him was that inner conflicts weren't nearly as impassable as they were cracked up to be. When a man's argument is with himself, he already knows exactly how it will end, already knows the answer, and strength of character was the ability to admit that answer and act on it. For Bumi, the answer had been acceptance, had been moving on, and it was only Rehn that forced him to admit it.
Still, even after a hundred years, Bumi had never mastered some of Rehn's lessons. No matter how he looked at it and no matter how optimistic, how damnably forgiving of the slowness of the world he forced himself to be, deep down some part of Bumi was a weapon, and always would be. Bumi struggled with Rehn's lessons every day of his life – he was a mad genius, after all, and that made so-called 'spiritual' things (lies and placebo, basically) just a bit harder to swallow. How does one maintain hope in the world when one can see and feel just how fractured it was. Much of the world still believed peace was right around the corner, that all it would take was Ozai's defeat to fix everything back to the way it was. The mad genii of the world knew the truth – there was no going back. The air nomads were lost, and the fact that Aang still lived would not change that, even if he fathered fifty children. The balance, the old way of living would never return. The very Age of Enlightenment that Kuzon had told him about so many years ago would come to pass, for better or worse. New technologies and ideas were surfacing at an unprecedented rate, and their ripples would tear the previously stagnant world to pieces, reorganizing it in their wake. The old world was gone.
How, then, could a man, even a member of the Order of the White Lotus, truly claim to seek balance when he knew the balance was forever gone? The Order had shown up with too little, too late. It, too, was doomed. The national boundaries would fade on their own, and the Order would be obsolete. Bumi had not heard from the Order in a decade, and some part of him wondered if he ever would again.
There was a great clang from outside the darkness, and Bumi lifted his head to watch the great steel door swing open, revealing a firebender guard with a sour expression on his face. In his hand was a bowl of some unidentifiable paste.
"So, crawlin' back to hear some more of-" Bumi started with his well-practiced obnoxiousness.
"Shut up," the firebender immediately grunted. "Meal time." He lifted the bowl up to Bumi's face.
"You sure?" Bumi asked, staring warily at the proffered meal. "You sure you didn't mix it up with bathroom time?"
"Listen, if you don't want it, fine," the firebender growled.
"No no, I'm sure it's delicious. Gotto figure if anybody knows how to fix up a good batch of prison gruel, it would be the firebenders. Spirits know they have enough practice." The firebender's scowl deepened, but he said nothing as he held the bowl to Bumi's lips. Bumi drank deeply, suppressing the urge to shudder as the glop slithered down his throat. It was terribly messy, not to mention undignified, but Bumi bore it all in good humor.
"So," he asked conversationally, "Haven't seen you before. What happened to Khzai, he finally crack?"
"Shut up," the firebender repeated.
"Be nice." The firebender said nothing, and Bumi frowned. His new guard was no fun – hopefully Khzai would return soon, or the rest of his imprisonment might be very dull indeed. Ahh well, there was nothing he could do about it. Bumi mentally shrugged and pursed his lips to drink the rest of the foul-smelling paste. The firebender, apparently in a rush to finish, tipped the bowl higher and higher.
Bumi's eyes widened as he felt a small, hard object fall onto his tongue. Its presence surprised him, and he very nearly swallowed it. He coughed raucously, spattering the guard with flecks of his meal.
There was a commotion outside, and in a flash the captain of the guard (Bumi's personal security had been upped to what looked like a full garrison of troops since Aang had nearly set him free) poked his head into the cell.
"Something wrong?" he demanded. Bumi, blinking away tears, locked eyes with the gruel-speckled guard before him for a moment, and was shocked at what he found there. Instead of the rage he had expected, the man was fixing him with an intense, purposeful stare. A stare that meant something. Bumi tucked the object that had nearly choked him under his tongue, faced the captain, who was staring at him with rage filled eyes, and smiled.
"No no," he said, "just forgot how to eat again. Wrong hole. You know us earthbenders, dumb as the rocks we throw, eh?" The captain scowled at him for a moment more but, apparently satisfied by this answer, turned to go.
"Finish up and get out of there," he grunted to the guard as he left. The guard, the empty gruel bowl still in his hands, inclined his head respectfully. He sent another hard glance Bumi's way and departed, closing the great iron door behind him.
Old or not, Bumi was as sharp as ever, and it didn't take a mad genius to tell he'd been given a message. He frowned as he summoned the object that had nearly choked him from his mouth, holding it up between his pursed lips. The world never missed a chance to prove him wrong (luckily he so rarely was) – almost as soon as his thoughts had turned bitter again, it had sent him a grumpy firebender, just to screw with him.
When, no matter how he strained, he could not wiggle the object high enough between his lips to see it over his cracked nose, Bumi took aim and spat it on the ground before him. He heard it clatter against the floor with a distinctive clack recognized to old men the world over, and craned his neck down to see it. It blinked up at him, its rich red hue noble and strong even beneath a thin layer of saliva, the white lotus at its center curling up as if calling to him. Bumi frowned at it.
"Think I'm wrong, eh?" he asked the tile. "Think old Bumi's gone crazy?" The tile said nothing. "Listen, Tile," Bumi cackled, his voice sing-songy, "I'm a hundred and thirteen years old. A powerful earthbending king. What are you? A lonely, lost little Pai Sho piece, a long way from your gameboard!"
"But much more," the tile seemed to say in the wise rumble of the former General Iroh of the Fire Nation (or at least what Bumi suspected the wise rumble of the former General Iroh of the Fire Nation would sound like – he knew the man only through word and deed). Bumi stared long and hard at the little object, pondering its meaning. The silence in his cell was absolute.
Some time later (hours), Bumi smiled and let out a chortle, which quickly dissolved into a snorting fit of giggles.
"Fine!" he told the piece, his trademarked insane grin quickly plastering itself across his face. "Fine, I'm wrong! The piece commands, and the king shall go!"
His laughter kept the guards up all night.
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A/N: A quick little interlude, at ardy1's suggestion.
Note that I have just reuploaded chapter 19, with some major revisions. I was unsatisfied with it before (and, frankly, I still am), but I do think it's much improved. Thanks to ardy1 and Rasputin Zero for their help in that regard. As for whether you actually need to reread it if you read it before, I'd say no, not really. The plot is hardly changed, if at all, merely elaborated upon. On the other hand, it is roughly 4000 words longer than it was, so who knows? If you're a big Bumi fan, it might be a worthwhile reread.
Chapter 20 is done and beta'd. I just need to work through it a bit more and post it. That means it should be up as early as tonight (unlikely) or as late as next week (also unlikely).