Subduction

by Kit Chan76

After an explosion rips through Ba Sing Se, Mako is presumed dead. Bolin begins searching to find those responsible, but the very people for whom he is searching attack. Their failed attempt on Bolin's life leaves him broken and changed. Now Bolin must lead Team Avatar toward the answers while working to escape a spiral of self-destruction that threatens to tear them all apart.

39. Brothers

Mako left Su's office in a haze of disbelief edged with anger. Though Su had done her very best to explain all that had happened in his absence, there were still questions left unanswered. In fact, there were more questions now than there'd been when he'd started.

His primary concern had always been Bolin, and Su had been exhaustive in her explanation of his situation. She'd discussed everything from his bending block to his relentless quest to find who'd blown up Ba Sing Se's upper ring to the collapse that stopped him dead in his tracks. Mako understood very clearly the circumstances surrounding the accident, how Bolin had been caught in the midst of the building's collapse and crushed and wounded. That much seemed obvious, and it seemed understandable that it would take some time to recover, too.

But it didn't explain a lot of other things. It didn't explain the starving. It didn't explain the isolation. It didn't explain the complete shift in his personality, a shift that Mako hadn't yet seen in full but had inferred enough about to be alarmed. The way Su had explained things, the Bolin that Mako had seen in the tunnels-the Bolin that had been hard and angry and cold-was the new normal. He'd been so hard and angry and cold that he'd even hit Suyin, and he'd done it closed-fisted and without much warning. She told him without fanfare. Then she told him that Bolin simply wasn't the same person he'd been when Mako had left except for a few sporadic moments of vulnerability that came when he broke down.

That had been another of the questions Su hadn't been able to answer: What caused the breakdowns? According to Su, one second he'd be yelling at someone over the stupidest little thing, and the next he'd be sitting on the ground stunned and sad and as full of self-loathing as it was possible to be. Korra had tried to explain it on the journey home, too: Bolin panicked. He got angry, then he got scared, then he panicked, but Mako didn't understand what made Bolin angry or what Bolin could've been afraid of, particularly not when he was in a safe place like Zaofu or Air Temple Island. He didn't understand how Bolin could be afraid of anything when he was surrounded by such capable people as Korra the Avatar, and Asami the genius, and Opal the most supportive and understanding girlfriend a guy could ask for. He didn't understand how Bolin could be afraid of anyone as a lavabender.

On the whole, Su had been gentle about it all. She'd broached the topic as carefully as Mako would ever have expected out of either of the Beifongs, and she'd been direct but tactful. With that, there were a great many details that she couldn't account for, and Mako the detective was dissatisfied with the holes in her story.

He reasoned there hadn't been time to cover everything. Mako had done almost as much talking as Su had, trying to fill her in on the Society while also answering the questions she had about where he'd been and what he'd been doing. It was a preliminary briefing, Mako knew, because immediately after he'd explained the generalities, Su had informed him that he'd be needed in Republic City for a personal meeting with Lin, President Raiko, Firelord Izumi, and a collection of Earth Nation representatives, and that once the arrangements had been made he'd have very little notice before he would have to leave Zaofu.

That had Mako nervous. There was a lot to take care of and not a lot of time to take care of it.

Mako left Su's office very late but with every intention of going to speak to his brother, but Asami met him halfway there and diverted him with a proposition he couldn't fight against. She and Opal wanted to speak with him about Bolin much the same way as Su had, except they wanted to be straight about it. They wanted to explain the things that Su wouldn't because she cared too much about maintaining what relationship Mako and Bolin still shared. They wanted to explain what Su couldn't because she didn't know about the truly awful things Bolin had done. They wanted to answer all of Mako's questions head on and without any sugar-coating at all, and Mako couldn't say no to anything that might help him understand the whole picture.

They met in Opal's room, where Opal invited Asami and Mako to sit on the bed with her to speak more comfortably, and once the two of them had situated, Opal locked the door before joining them. Mako found this a little strange, but decided that she must have done it as a matter of privacy. If Asami's introduction to this conversation had been any indication, some sensitive things would be discussed here.

Asami began by offering Mako a gentle half smile, a soft smile that reminded him oddly of the smile Su had offered him before she'd begun to speak. Except Asami didn't begin by asking Mako what questions he had. She shot much straighter than that.

"Your brother is insane."

"What?"

"There's no better word for it," Asami continued firmly. "It sounds mean, but it's accurate."

Mako stammered for a few moments, but he couldn't figure out exactly what he wanted to say. All at once he wanted to argue with her that Bolin couldn't be insane if he was injured, and that Su had explained Bolin's behavior as an unfortunate byproduct of the head trauma.

Asami silenced him by holding up her hand, and he watched as she and Opal exchanged a look of mutual understanding. Then Asami nodded, and she turned back to Mako.

"I'm assuming Su told you the basics," she said, gentler now, "that Bo was upset because he thought you'd died and that he lost his bending and all that stuff."

Mako nodded. He was suddenly too worried to say anything.

"I also assume she talked to you about the collapse and his injury."

"She told me that a building fell on him and that he spent a solid week in the hospital."

"That about sums it up," Asami said with another nod. "First couple days he was pretty much brain-dead and after that he came back slowly. Didn't remember how to play Pai Sho. Couldn't walk to the bathroom. Got confused about where he was and who was around him. Couldn't remember how to add or count or anything like that. I'm still not convinced he can read."

"What?"

Asami shook her head. "It's not important. What's important is that he came back and by now most of his injuries have healed."

Mako wasn't pleased with Asami's dodge, but there wasn't much he could argue, either. He assumed that he'd find out the whole truth eventually, anyway.

"So I guess it's time for the hard stuff."

"The hard stuff," Mako repeated stupidly. He'd assumed everything thus far had been the hard stuff already. "What do you mean by that?"

"I mean all the terrible things that have happened since he came home."

"Oh."

Opal shifted very uncomfortably and shot a glance to Asami before saying, "You know where to start, right?"

"Yeah," Asami said, then turned back to Mako. "There was a day when Lin, Korra, Bo, and I went to question the combustion bender who attacked him. Bolin was in a bad mood anyway-I guess Korra upset him somehow-but he agreed to do the dirty work regardless. Lin thought it'd be good for him to get some of the anger out of his system, but I wondered otherwise. Long story short, he questioned the guy pretty effectively. Bolin threatened in no uncertain terms to drop him into a pool of lava, and he had the pool ready to go and all. It was unnerving, to say the least, because that was really the first time I'd seen him act so..." Asami paused and looked to Opal for help finding an appropriate descriptor.

"Crazy?" Opal offered hopefully.

"It was the first time I'd seen him so hostile." It seemed Asami had decided on the word with hesitation. "Well, when Bolin was done, the combustion bender threatened him and obviously Bo didn't like it. Walked back to the guy and decked him so hard in the head that he didn't just knock him out in one hit, he split his hand wide open on the metal plate Lin had used to block the combustion bending. Then he walked straight out of the room. He looked awful. I followed him and within about five minutes he passed out on me."

"Because he hurt his hand?" Mako asked, confused. "He passed out from the blood?"

"See, that's what I thought it was at first, too, but it didn't make sense. He's seen blood before without a problem. He kept trying to talk but he wasn't saying any words. He was just making sounds. He seemed really confused, like he didn't recognize me and didn't know where he was. He didn't understand anything I was saying to him, either. Then he dropped right on top of me and faded in and out for the next couple hours while we got him back to my office. Turns out he'd stopped eating and had apparently been thinking about killing himself."

"What?"

"I told you this was the hard stuff," Asami replied, unfazed by Mako's sharp reaction. "That night we found out he hadn't eaten anything for... What was it?"

"Four days," Opal said quietly. "At least."

"For four days," Asami continued, "and he said that it was because he couldn't keep any food down. Nobody knew because he hadn't been speaking to anyone and barely ever came out of his room. I don't know that I believe him on it, but he did puke after he ate the noodles Su brought, so I don't really know. Either way, he woke up for a couple hours, got into a screaming match with Korra, had a total breakdown, admitted he wanted to die, then passed out again. That's when we decided he needed to come here. Well, Lin and Tenzin and Su decided that. We didn't really have much to do with it. Either way, there was no question about it: Bo needs supervision all the time because without it, there's no telling what he'll do to himself."

"But..." Mako stammered, a little overwhelmed. "But he..."

Asami watched Mako with her brow raised, and she waited for a generous time for him to stitch together his thinking. But Mako didn't know what to ask first, nor how to ask it, and eventually he just shook his head in disbelief and looked at his hands.

"So we lied to him about you," Asami continued. "We kept it from him that we thought you might be alive on Lin's orders. She thought it would do more harm than good for us to tell him, just in case it turned out you were actually dead. She didn't want to get his hopes up because he was unstable enough as it was, and I completely understand her point of view. We had no idea what he'd do. So while he came here with Su, we three girls went to check out the Boiling Rock. Whatever, that's not important right now. When we came back, Su verified that you'd visited Lin in Republic City, and we had to come clean to Bolin."

"But not before Korra came clean to you," Opal muttered, and Asami nodded.

"Came clean to you about what?"

Asami shook her head. "I don't want to talk about it. It doesn't matter anymore. The point is that there was some drama and at some point Bo threatened to jump off a roof and was actually walking out the door to do it, or so Korra told me after the fact. Then he didn't say a word to anyone for most of a day." She took a deep breath and sighed it back out. "In the end we came clean to Bolin about you and he wigged. Lavabent twenty or thirty thousand yuans worth of damage into the metalbending arena. You have to have seen it. We all figured he'd be upset about the matter, but he was well beyond upset, obviously. When Opal tried to apologize, he..."

Mako looked up when Asami paused, and he watched her watching Opal. Asami wore an expression of sympathy and regret, and Opal's eyes had rimmed with tears again.

"He grabbed me," Opal finished, and Mako couldn't break his gaze away from her. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. "He grabbed me by the wrist and yelled straight in my face. He called me a bitch, told me never to speak to him again, then threw me across the room. I've still got the bruise where I fell."

All Mako could do was blink stupidly at her. There was no way she was lying about it because the look on her face and the tears in her eyes were too real. The pain in her voice was real. And then Opal stood and presented Mako with her hip. She pulled her shirt up a few inches, pulled the waist of her trousers down, and looked down at herself.

"It actually looks a lot better today," she remarked absently, but it didn't look good to Mako at all. Opal must have read the disgust and disbelief on his face, because when she noticed Mako gaping, she pulled her clothes back into place and sat back down on the bed. When she spoke again the waver in her voice had gone away completely. Her tone had turned very clinical. "Those aren't the only bruises he gave me."

Over the next few minutes, Opal pulled at her clothes to show Mako the evidence. She tugged at the collar of her shirt to show him the bruise running from the nape of her neck to her shoulder. Then she pulled at her sleeves to show the ugly marks on her wrists. In afterthought, she rolled her left sleeve up as far as she could to reveal a nasty cut on her forearm. He'd caught glimpses of these things on their return trip but had assumed that they'd come as a result of the fighting in Fire Fountain City. He could never have imagined that they'd come from Bolin.

"Let... Let me see that..." Mako asked, and he motioned toward Opal's wrist. She sat on the bed and obliged, placing her hand in his, and Mako pulled her sleeve back up to examine the bruise as thoroughly as he dared.

He could see finger marks. It was an old bruise that was well on the better side of healing, but he could see the marks as clear as day.

When Mako let go of Opal's wrist, he looked at her apologetically, but when he opened his mouth to say so, she shook her head.

"It's not your fault," she said. "Don't worry about it."

"But why?" Mako asked. "Why did he..."

"Well, this wrist was from when he threw me, and so was the hip. The other wrist and my shoulder..." Opal trailed off, and Mako noticed that the quivering had come back to her voice with the last few words.

"He threatened her," Asami finished for Opal. "When we decided that we were coming to Fire Fountain City to get you. I guess Bolin didn't like the idea of Opal going with because he came in here, slammed her against the wall, and threatened to..." Asami trailed off, too, and she looked down and shook her head. Mako knew better than to press the matter: He could make the assumption easily enough from the girls' body language alone. "I don't really want to say it," Asami finished at last. "You can use your imagination. Not much else a guy can threaten a girl with when he's got her pinned on the floor."

"And my arm was from when we were in the tunnels, when we rescued you," Opal finished timidly, and she touched her hand to the wound. "I don't think it was on purpose. I don't think he meant to hurt me, at least not that time. He was trying to get me out of the way and didn't have enough time to be gentle about it. He kicked a rock up underneath me and I landed wrong."

There were a few seconds of silence after Opal finished her statement, seconds that Mako contemplated asking more questions. There were so many to ask now, and he didn't know where to begin. Was that why she had locked the door? To keep Bolin out?

Instead, Mako settled on saying, "It's the same way he did with your mom, when he hit her."

"He what?"

"He... You didn't know? She didn't tell you?"

Opal shook her head and glanced at Asami for support, but Asami looked just as shocked. Neither one of the girls seemed able to say anything, and Mako genuinely felt sorry for them. He felt guilty that Su hadn't told them, but Su had made no mention of it being a secret.

"I don't know why she didn't tell you, but he hit her. He knocked her down, but she knocked him down right back. Doesn't seem like he did any real damage except for shaking her up a little bit. She wasn't hurt, and the way she talked about it she'd kind of been expecting it. I guess he flat out told her that he'd been feeling like hitting her whenever she tried to help him. He warned her. I guess it was inevitable."

"When?" Opal asked.

"Before you left to come get me, I guess. She was pretty vague."

Opal looked mutinous, and Mako wasn't sure how to feel about it. If Bolin and Opal's relationship was already on the rocks, her knowing about Su certainly wouldn't make things any better. He didn't want to be the reason they called it quits for good, if they hadn't already done so.

For a few seconds, Mako worked hard to find words that might lessen the blow, but Asami didn't give him the chance before she changed the subject.

"Korra and I talked," Asami said. "While you were in with Su, she and I talked to make sure that we had our stories straight. We needed to make sure that everyone was on the same page, and I'm doing the same for you right now, okay?"

Mako nodded.

"I want you to keep quiet for this. Can you do that?"

He nodded again, except now he was very, very nervous. Asami hadn't requested him to be quiet before, not ever, and if she hadn't asked him to do so for something as serious as Bolin hitting and threatening Opal, he couldn't imagine what would prompt her to do it now.

"Bolin killed people."

The sentence didn't catch Mako as far off guard as he'd have thought it might. Mako had seen the commander fall before they'd lifted off from Baihe Island. He'd heard the anguished screaming of people still in the city when he and the girls had been running away. He'd seen the blood-soaked rock in the corridor outside his cell. He'd seen Bolin covered from head to toe in flesh and mud. The assumption had to be made that Bolin had killed at least a few people because he was the only one who could earthbend.

It was the way Asami had made the statement that caught Mako off guard. She'd sounded afraid, but the tone had been subtle. Asami had always been good at holding back her feelings in favor of sounding objective, especially in circumstances such as these: She'd always been good at making sure important information was conveyed as objectively as possible. This situation seemed no different, except that she was having noticeable difficulty keeping the emotion in check.

"Korra and I counted something like fifty people after it was all said and done, but it could be more. I guess that after he ditched us in the tunnels he was chucking lava at anything that moved."

"I... I don't understand..."

"He was panicked from the start," Asami said, and Mako saw Opal nodding sagely in agreement before she dropped her forehead onto her hands. "Straight from the outset. We weren't even in the city yet when he started to freak out. When the first combustion bender fired at us he froze completely. In all the time I've known Bolin I've never seen him look so afraid, and we've been through a lot. But, see, when he panics he loses control. I can't say for sure because I wasn't there, but I'd wager a guess that when he found Korra and the two of them were making their way to the bison they were probably under pretty heavy fire from combustion benders and firebenders and lightning benders, and maybe the firebending and lightning bending didn't impact him that much, but the combustion bending had to. If I had to judge by the way he reacted the first time around, the combustion bending triggers something in Bolin's head that makes him... Panic..."

"He was probably remembering when he was attacked," Opal said wisely, her face still in her hands. "I mean, he was attacked twice by the same combustion bender, and that was the last time he'd dealt with combustion before we went to Fire Fountain City. It only makes sense that hearing and seeing combustion bending reminded him of the collapse."

Asami shrugged haplessly. "Makes sense to me, too."

"So," Mako interjected, a bit tentatively himself, "it's like how Korra was. After she was poisoned."

Asami and Opal both looked to him with faces screwed up in confusion, as if he'd said something ridiculous.

"It is," Mako insisted, "or at least it sounds like it is, kind of. Their situations aren't exactly the same. But if you remember, Korra couldn't go into the spirit world and she couldn't use the Avatar State because every time she tried she had these weird flashback things that freaked her out. It sounds like Bolin is having some similar issue, except he gets freaked out by combustion bending."

Opal and Asami looked at each other, surprised now, and Mako shrugged at them when they looked back at him.

"It makes sense," Mako said. "A person gets traumatized by something bad enough, they're going to freak out when they see that thing again. And if you add in to that, you know, whatever..." he paused as the phrase stuck in his throat. "Add in whatever damage there was to his brain and you can't really blame him for being afraid."

"You're right," Asami said. "But how do you fix it?"

Mako shook his head sadly. "I don't know."

"I guess the take away from all of this is that you need to be prepared," said Asami after a few seconds silence. "Whatever your expectations were coming home, you need to lower the bar. If my guess is correct, Bo won't talk to you the same way he won't talk to either of us. He won't come out of his room if he doesn't have to. He won't eat unless someone forces him to. And if you get too close," Asami paused and then she punched her right hand into her left palm. "Bam. Just like that."

"He'll hit me?"

"He'll hit anything that walks, apparently. Which is to say, if he's not taking whatever issues he's got out on himself, he's taking it out on the rest of us."

With an enormous sigh, Mako nodded and he stood. "I'm going to go see him. Where's he staying?"

Opal perked up at this for the first time in a while, and the motion stopped Mako dead, curious. She looked concerned.

"He's not going to be awake," Opal said, "and if he is awake he's not going to be able to talk to you."

"What? Why?"

"The healers put him under."

At that, Mako bristled a bit. Here he'd been rescued and had been within twenty feet of his brother for something like three or four days now, and the two of them hadn't exchanged a single word. Here he'd spent the last how many weeks convinced that Bolin was dead only to find him very much alive but gravely injured, and now the slap in the face was that Bolin wouldn't or couldn't speak to him.

"I'll take my chances," Mako said. He tempered the budding anger carefully. He didn't want to upset anyone any more than they already were, but he didn't want to leave any room for argument. "Where is he?"

"If you go outside this building, he's three down that way," Opal said, and she pointed vaguely. "He's got almost the whole building to himself, but his bedroom is the first door once you're inside."

Mako nodded his thanks. "You guys ought to go talk to Su and make sure everyone knows everything that's happened. If she's been keeping things from you and you've been keeping things from her, it's probably good to make sure everyone's caught up." He said the words thoughtfully, and then left the room without any argument from the girls.

He didn't know why he expected there to be someone in Bolin's room besides Bolin at such a ridiculously late hour. Maybe it was because all anyone talked about was how he needed supervision and how the healers had been at his side for virtually every second since they'd landed. But he was very much alone except for Pabu, and just as Opal had suggested he'd be, he was asleep. Or unconscious. Or both.

Since his rescue, every time Mako had looked at Bolin his stomach dropped out and a deep sadness swelled in his chest. Now he was so close, Mako's legs felt like they'd go out from underneath him.

Bolin looked pitiful. He was pitiful, and it seemed there was nothing that Mako could do about it because if Asami, Opal, and Su were to be believed, they had already tried everything they knew to do, and still they couldn't reach him.

For a while, Mako leaned against the wall beside the bed and watched Bolin sleep the same way he'd watched Bolin sleep when they were children, and he thought about Bolin the same way that he'd thought about Bolin back then, too. Until such a point as Bolin was capable of caring for himself, everything Mako did would be geared toward making sure he was okay. Everything Mako did would focus on helping him to recover and get back to the way he was before.

Even though nothing was there, Mako rubbed at his eyes and drew a very long breath. Now wasn't the time to feel bad. It wasn't the time to feel guilty that he hadn't been there when Bolin needed him. Now was the time to prepare himself the same way he'd prepared himself when their parents had died. Now was the time to focus on making himself the most capable person he could be so that no matter what happened, he could drag Bolin through it even if Bolin didn't want to go.

Mako had done it before, and though the prospect of becoming the Mako he'd once been was less than ideal, it was what had to be done. Yes, Asami and Opal and Korra and Su and everyone else who had become a part of their lives had tried to help Bolin through whatever funk he'd fallen into, but they hadn't helped him through the original funk. Their relationship with Bolin wasn't the same as Mako's; they couldn't be the same.

It didn't matter how much time the brothers spent apart because so much of their early lives had been spent together, and there was no discounting that. Mako had seen Bolin at his lowest, stupidest, most vulnerable points, and Bolin had seen the same of Mako. They had lived through the worst case possible in virtually every way, because not only were they forced to keep themselves alive without the benefit of a home or money or parental guidance, they'd had to do it while figuring out such frightening things as grieving and child exploitation and puberty and triad hierarchy, and it hadn't always been pretty.

Mako couldn't help a grin because whenever he considered all the problems they'd endured, he couldn't help thinking about all the stupid things he'd seen Bolin do and all the times he'd shamelessly laughed at Bolin's ineptitude. Even now, Mako truly believed that no person had ever been less suited to life on the streets than his brother, but that was partly Mako's fault because Mako had done everything he could do to shelter Bolin from the truth.

There was no hiding from it now. The truth was unavoidable, and it was big and scary and apparently a little bit violent. And it was sleeping soundly right in front of him.

The strangest part was that Bolin didn't look insane. He looked like Bolin, albeit sick and pale and thin. If he hadn't heard from Asami and Su that Bolin wasn't himself, Mako might've just thought he'd come down with something and been slow to get over it. He might've thought the injuries were what had caused it because there were so many little bruises and cuts all over him, and because there were a few alarmingly large wounds, too, and no matter how much they were covered by wrapping and clothes, Mako remembered how awful they had looked.

Mako sighed, and then he nodded. Priority number one was to get Bolin back in shape as soon as possible. Priority number two was to prepare himself for the meeting with Beifong, Raiko, and the Firelord. Beyond that, he'd have to play it by ear, and since Bolin was clearly in no position to be reasoned with right now, Mako left.

He needed some sleep and he needed some food, and he needed to get his own head straight before he'd ever have a chance to get through to Bolin.

---

It was weird how much Bolin remembered, because usually the panic made him forget. Usually the cycle left him with nothing but regret, but now there was just the void.

He knew in part that its opening had been helped along by the healers, whether they had meant to or not. He remembered how they'd sedated him: He'd waked to find these strange people crowded around him, pressing against his ribs so hard that his vision went blurry and his throat closed up. Even through the collapse and the aftermath, he'd never felt a pain so excruciating as the one they were inflicting on him at that moment, and Bolin knew that he'd have died if he hadn't gotten away.

He didn't know where the strength had come from-probably the panic, if he was honest-but he did remember punching out at the healers and kicking at them until they retreated, and then he'd jumped onto the bed, pressed his back into the corner, and torn a hunk of lava from he didn't even know where. He'd chucked it at them blindly before half a dozen metal clan guards barreled in and restrained him. Bolin hadn't even known where they'd come from. He hadn't remembered them being in the room. But they'd grabbed his arms and his legs, and one of them had grabbed him around the chest and held him so tightly that it stole his breath away. Before Bolin had had the chance to fight back someone had stabbed him in the thigh. He remembered the frenzy that came over him then and how he'd strained to pull away from the guards, and then someone stabbed him again, and between the pain in his ribs and the strange, sudden heaviness in his limbs, he couldn't fight back anymore.

When the guards let him go he'd crumpled in a heap atop the bedclothes, still conscious but utterly incapable of moving, and just when he thought that things couldn't be more terrifying he saw Opal staring at him from across the room. He remembered the anxiety washing over him as the healers blocked her from his view, a thousand thoughts of what she must think of him rushing through his head like a flood. Even through the sedation his body had responded to the panic-his breathing quickened and the cold sweat came and his eyes darted about all uncontrolled-but he couldn't move.

He heard them talking about him, and he heard them reassuring Opal that everything was all right, and that was the last thing he remembered before the third and final prick covered his consciousness in a blanket of hazy warmth and calm quiet, and he slept without dreaming.

Bolin woke occasionally to Opal's voice, and though she sounded very far away he could understand her clearly enough. Once she asked him if he could hear her and once she asked him if he was all right, and when he didn't respond to either of the questions she sighed sadly and spoke about things that Bolin didn't want to hear and couldn't have helped with anyway.

Opal talked about what had happened on Baihe Island and how afraid it had made her, and how when she was watching it all happen she was certain that they were all going to die. She said that it made her realize how stupid all the fighting and all the drama had been.

Then she told him that she forgave him for everything he'd done and that she hoped from the bottom of her heart that someday he'd be able to forgive her, too. Then she talked about the future she wanted to have once this whole mess had sorted out, and how she wanted him to be part of it.

Even in the weird, cold-but-hot haze he'd fallen into, Bolin wasn't sure that he could ever be a part of it. He wasn't sure that he wanted to.

Through it all, he kept trying to make words but they seldom came out and were never coherent. He kept trying to tell her to stop talking and to leave him alone and to find something else to do with her life, but all that came out of him was indistinct mumbling because no matter how much he concentrated on speaking, there wasn't enough strength in his body to fight through the sedation. Every bit of energy in him seemed to be spent on shivering and sweating and fighting to keep his mind from giving in to the panic. But eventually there wasn't enough strength to stay awake, and he fell asleep again.

This time he did dream. He dreamed about the future Opal had discussed and he dreamed about how whole he'd felt when she was close to him. It was altogether pleasant, but when he next woke and remembered reality the void opened wider and all the happiness he'd imagined disappeared.

Korra was there that time, and he overheard what must have been the tail end of her and Opal's conversation, and when he heard Korra suggest that Opal should go join Asami in a conversation with Mako, he wanted desperately to intervene. He knew exactly what would be discussed, and even if Bolin hated Mako and even if he tried to hate Opal and Asami, he didn't want Mako to know any more than he had to. He didn't want Opal and Asami to tell Mako the terrible things he'd done and said to them all, how he'd hit them and screamed at them and bent at them. He didn't want them to tell Mako about how he'd been acting all depressed and ridiculous. He didn't want them to tell, because Bolin understood without a doubt that if Mako found out about any of it he'd be relentless in his efforts to set things right. That was simply how Mako operated.

He couldn't make the noises he wanted to before Opal left the room. He'd been too caught up in worrying about it all to realize that she'd even stood. It wasn't until she touched his shoulder with her freezing cold hand that the feverish fog eased up around his mind, but then she was gone, and then he was alone and things were quiet, and there was little left to do but give in to the haze and hope that the next time he woke the unnatural exhaustion would be gone.

The morning came without his ever knowing it, and the next time Bolin opened his eyes the room was bright with sunlight and alive with people. It took a few deliberate, hard blinks for his vision to clear up, and when he looked about, he understood that the healers had come back and so had some of the guards. For a second he contemplated an apology, but when he opened his mouth to say so, the words wouldn't come out.

It didn't take long for them to notice he was awake, and this time the younger of the two healers approached with a degree of caution. Bolin didn't even look at him. There was no point in engaging.

The healer clearly didn't agree.

In a much-needed and much-appreciated gesture, they explained what had happened the day prior and even apologized for being rough. They proceeded to explain everything they did whenever they did it, whether it was applying healing spirit waters to his arm and leg or checking his ribs for any additional damage he might've inflicted in his flailing. They told him before they touched him, they told him when it would hurt, and they were almost always right.

Bolin was genuinely surprised when they told him the extent of the damages, that he'd come down with some kind of minor infection from the wound on his arm and that he'd somehow managed to crack three of his ribs in the disaster on Baihe Island, but over time what weird delusional fog remained on his brain dissipated, and he put the pieces together easily enough. Opal had done his ribs, not Baihe Island, and he felt stupid for not seeing that clearly from the get go. And without the benefit of healing water on the return trip from Fire Fountain City, Korra had helped him clean the wound on his arm and leg in some stupid backwoods creek. There was no telling what kind of garbage had been floating around in it, and in the end Bolin felt very, very surprised that an infection and a fever had been the only issues he'd had as a result.

After they had finished explaining the details, Bolin felt a little bit of self-respect come back to him. When he'd lashed out at the healers he'd been afraid, sick, and in a place he hadn't recognized at first, and the tiniest bit of relief rose in his chest when he thought about how much better today was over yesterday.

But then the healers had bathed him, and the only thing that kept him from losing all of his dignity was that he swore at them fiercely and threatened to start lavabending at them again if they touched him anywhere below the armpits, though in the end he did cave in and allow them to clean his feet. And just when Bolin thought it couldn't get any worse, they'd forced him to eat.

Though Bolin resisted at first out of sheer inflexible habit, they'd threatened him with all manner of generally awful things to get him to relent. He hadn't cared so much when they said they'd sedate him again because even though it had scared the life out of him at first, he'd gotten a decent amount of dreamless sleep out of it and it had numbed his ability to reflect on the horrible things he'd done. When they realized sedation was futile, they threatened to lock him in a sanitarium, but Bolin had laughed derisively in their faces and asked them how being confined to his room was any different, and he very sarcastically and very crudely invited them to carry him away on the spot if being in a psychiatric facility meant he wouldn't have old ugly men threatening to handle his private parts in the name of cleanliness. He'd only relented when they threatened to waterbend the stuff into him, and even then he hadn't given in until the elder of the two actually pulled the disgusting-looking slop out of the bowl and prepared to water whip it straight down his throat.

It had been so chunky and putrid that Bolin had gagged three times before it was gone, and even after the healers verified he'd drank it all and left him alone in the silence, he found himself contemplating a few fingers down his throat if only to make the nausea go away. But he sat there stubbornly, his back propped against his pillows and his arms crossed over his chest, and he clenched his jaw and stared holes into the blanket until his stomach settled and the desire to puke turned into a weird and general discomfort.

Without the healers to distract him, Bolin's mind began turning back to Baihe Island. He did everything he could think of to keep it from going there: He struggled unsuccessfully to remember the stupidest, catchiest song he'd ever heard on the radio. He tried to imagine life without brain injury. He tried to remember what Opal looked like without clothes. But in the end, everything he thought about made him feel guilty for being such a failure, and his mind went anyway. And then he felt worse.

He'd known the whole time that he'd killed the firebenders. There was no running from the truth. No matter how hard Bolin wanted to deny what he'd done he couldn't, and even if he somehow managed to convince himself that it hadn't happened, there were witnesses who could very easily contradict him. Opal and Asami had seen him crush the people in the hallway. Korra had seen him slinging tendrils of lava at anything that moved. She'd seen him using his earthbending to punt three or four of them into the air at once, and she'd seen them land and not move again the same way Bolin had seen them. And even if he gave in to the denial completely and forced himself to believe otherwise, she'd been less than five feet away from him when he'd crushed that kid firebender in the tunnels, slammed his head into the ground, promised him mercy, then buried him alive with a wave of molten rock.

The nausea came back.

There had been so many, and he'd dispatched them in so many ways he'd never imagined possible. It seemed that everything he'd done on Baihe Island had been lethal in one way or another, even when he'd not expected it. He'd never truly believed the lava would respond to his call in the end when he'd slung the shards of obsidian at the enemies who'd been tailing Korra so closely, because it had been a move of blind desperation. He certainly hadn't expected the shards to rip holes through the flesh and lodge in the rocks beyond. He hadn't expected there to be so much blood.

When Bolin thought about that, the soles of his feet tingled the same way as they had on the way home. It was the same tingle that had overwhelmed every part of him that had been touched by the fluids from other bodies, and it came on so intensely that Bolin panicked and threw the covers off of his legs and scoured every inch of his body for remnants of blood. There was nothing there, of course, not even between his toes and not caked beneath his nails. There was nothing except his own pale, crawling skin and the memory of what it had felt like to have his outsides covered with other people's insides.

There was so little warning before he vomited that all Bolin could do was lean over the side of the bed and hope that Pabu wasn't laying on the floor, and in the seconds between his sudden motion and the initial bout of retching, he knew it was going to hurt.

There was no way he could have known how badly it was going to hurt.

Just the motion of bending over set his ribs to searing again, but the first heave made him certain that he would either pass out and drop off the bed face first into a pile of his own sick or that his whole ribcage would come flying out of his mouth along with the contents of his stomach. Neither happened, but a dull pain wrapped around his back and stabbed him in the spine so fiercely that it made him retch again, until in the end there was nothing more he could do but lay there, profoundly dizzy, with his very sweaty forehead pressed into the crook of his very sweaty elbow and pray that there was nothing left in his stomach to come out.

As he lay there staring at the gray-orange sludge on the floor and wishing desperately that the room would stop spinning, the fear came on. It wasn't panic as he had experienced it before. It wasn't so intense and it didn't make his body do strange, psychotic things without his ever meaning to. This was the same fear he'd had the night he'd collapsed, when he'd been staring at the results of Su's noodles half-digested in Asami's office trash can and understood that solid foods were officially out of the question. But now it was liquid foods. Now it was any food at all.

Bolin shook his head at himself. It couldn't be that way. He'd been living on liquids for weeks. It must have been the fever or the infection that had done it to him, or the fact that he'd not eaten in so long and his stomach didn't know how to process the sudden influx. It was the pain in his ribs. That had to be what it was.

But the nausea had hit him well before his ribs had started hurting so badly again. Yes, they'd never really stopped aching, but the pain had never been so intense that it'd made him sick, not until he'd already been sick. The sick came first, then the pain, then the sick because of the pain. His stomach had rejected the food. There was no other explanation.

Weak and afraid, Bolin pushed himself back onto the bed and collapsed against his pillows before he draped his arm over his eyes. As he waited for the spinning to stop, Bolin came to the same conclusion he'd always come to: Somehow, he was going to die. Whether it was from the injuries, the pain, his inability to eat, or some horrible thing he did to himself, if something very drastic didn't change very quickly, he wasn't going to make it out of Zaofu alive. Whether he wanted to or not, it seemed his body had made the decision for him.

Bolin didn't know what time it was when he finally mustered the nerve to try and move. He wasn't sure why it would matter anyway. It didn't matter how long ago he'd stopped being sick because he still felt awful, and no matter how much time passed by it didn't seem he'd ever see improvement. There was no sense lying around waiting for things to change, because it was just as likely he'd be sick and miserable in the bed as it was that he'd be sick and miserable on his feet.

Besides, he needed to talk to Su.

It was with deliberate caution that he planted his feet on the floor and pushed himself up, and he spent some time standing there over his pile of sick with his hands on the bed, waiting for the spinning to stop again and hoping he didn't fall over. But he didn't fall over and the spinning lessened with time, and Bolin set out tentatively for the door.

Bolin made his way across what remained of the courtyard he'd liquefied and toward Su's office, and as he walked he admired the speed at which the repairs were being completed. Already the cooled lava rock had been removed and the ground underneath had been turned. It seemed that they were marking out areas for decoration and walkways and general landscaping, because when Bolin strode past, workers were outlining sections of ground in colored paints and cordoning off others.

Looking at it made him feel guilty all over again.

It never occurred to Bolin that Su might not be alone until he'd already knocked and entered the room without a reply, but in the two seconds between pushing on the door and seeing Su busy with something at her desk, notably alone, Bolin felt the anxiety bubbling. He stood in the doorway for a few seconds, not because he expected Su to say something, but because he suddenly recognized that his fear of interacting with Korra, Mako, Asami, and Opal had gotten out of hand.

"Just a second, I'll be right-"

Su froze in the middle of her very clerical greeting, and when Bolin glanced sheepishly up at her he noticed how surprised she looked. Then he dropped his eyes back to the floor, closed the door quietly, and made his way to her couches. He sat down heavily, folded his hands between his knees, and stared at the ground.

Bolin wasn't surprised to hear Su scrambling to get out from behind her desk-it sounded like she smashed her knee into the wood in her haste-and as she clambered over to him he heard the concern in her voice.

"Bolin! What are you doing out of bed? Why... Are you okay?"

She didn't sit on the couch opposite as Bolin might've expected her to have done, and she didn't take a seat beside him, either. Instead, Su plopped down on the edge of the table in between. He'd not expected to be so close to someone so soon, at least not in a physical capacity, and the moment she took her seat he wanted to pull away.

He didn't know why he wanted to recoil from her. He forced himself to stay still.

"How are you feeling?" Su kept going. It seemed she'd never stop with the concerned mother routine and already it was grating on him. She pressed her wrist against his forehead and drew it back quickly. "Still not over it, I guess."

As he stared at his hands, Bolin suddenly regretted ever coming here. Su didn't know what he'd done, not unless Korra, Asami, or Opal had told her, and there was no way they'd had enough time to discuss everything. There was no way Su would keep treating him so kindly if she knew how many people he'd slaughtered. It didn't matter, though, not really. Bolin knew how many people he'd slaughtered, and even if the first time he'd done it had been something of an accident, he'd been very deliberate thereafter. He'd meant to do everything he'd done. It didn't matter that he'd done it in order to survive.

More than anything, he regretted that he'd come home. Seeing Su there all furrow-browed and interested in his well-being made his insides hurt more than the puking had, because Bolin knew that he was going to be the first thing on her mind until such a time as he'd recovered. But he wouldn't recover. He knew he wouldn't. He wouldn't let himself. He'd killed people. He didn't deserve to recover.

For a second, Bolin contemplated rising and walking from the room without saying a word. He was so conflicted now that he wasn't sure he could follow through, but then Su put her hand gently on his arm and thumbed at his hand and waited with an air of expectancy for him to say something.

"I need to leave," Bolin said at last and in a voice so quiet that Su leaned forward and tilted her ear toward him, confused.

"I can help you back to your room if you need," she said once it had registered. "Did you just want to walk around a little bit?"

"No," Bolin said, more forcefully this time, "you don't get it. I need to leave. I can't stay here anymore."

There. It was out. He'd said what he'd been contemplating saying since before he'd left for Baihe Island. He'd made up his mind back then that he'd either die on the journey or leave when he returned home, and since he'd been too stupid to let himself keel over or be struck with a random bolt of combustion or lightning, he had to leave. He had to spare everyone the trouble of dealing with him, especially now that fatalities were involved.

He grimaced at the thought. Once news got out and spread around the city, he'd be a pariah. He already was one.

"Sweetheart, what are you talking about?" Su said. Though her voice had softened, the pressure of her thumb on the back of his hand increased. It was nerves and Bolin knew it. He'd been too blunt. "You're fine here."

Bolin shook his head despite himself. To keep himself from the temptation of looking up, he closed his eyes. "I need to get out of the city."

"But why?"

Suddenly Bolin found his jaw clenching hard, and he pulled his hands out of Su's to rub nervously about his forehead and eyes. His face felt unreasonably warm and his hands had gone all frigid. They felt good.

"I just need to leave."

Bolin felt stupid that it was all he could say, but there was no way for him to explain his reasoning without spilling his secret to Su. He couldn't come out straight and tell her that he didn't want to stay in a place where he might someday be confronted with the fact that he'd murdered a few dozen people in cold blood while trying to save his brother who apparently had fallen into such good graces with his captors that he'd opted to return to captivity over coming home. He couldn't admit that he'd lost his mind so completely in his panicking that he'd pitched lava at real, living people with abandon. He couldn't come out and tell Su that he hated himself more than he'd ever hated himself before and that he didn't feel like he deserved the roof she'd put over his head or the food she was trying to put in him. He couldn't tell her that he thought he was a waste of skin and that his being in the city was stealing precious oxygen from people who deserved it more than he could ever hope to do.

Su didn't say anything for the whole time that Bolin thought. She must have been watching his face twisting around between looks of regret and fear and hate. It was weird how the emotions fought against one another, and how there was no chance that any one of them would come out over the others. It was weird how the void let those emotions through at the most inconvenient times, only to suck them back in when they might actually be welcome.

"If you're not happy here, I can see about sending you back to Republic City," Su said at last, just as quietly as Bolin had. He credited her for the neutrality in her voice. If she'd sounded startled when he'd arrived, she'd masterfully covered it up now. She put her hands on the outsides of his knees and went quiet for a time that she must have been thinking. "You'll have to stay here until you're healed up, though. I'm not letting you go anywhere with broken bones."

"I don't want to go back to Republic City," Bolin replied.

Su was quiet again, and Bolin could feel the confusion fighting against the concern inside of her. "Then where do you want to go?"

Bolin grasped at his forehead, a little bit desperately. He hadn't thought this conversation out thoroughly enough, and now that he was in the thick of it he felt enormously stupid for ever considering speaking to Su. Of course she was going to ask him questions. There was no way she'd let him waltz into her office and agree to let him leave Zaofu without any other information. He was surprised she'd let him leave his room after everything she'd seen him do since he'd arrived, never mind the things she hadn't seen.

"I want to go away. I want to disappear."

It was the wrong thing to say. There was nothing subtle about the shift in Su's emotions. The moment the words had come out of Bolin's mouth he felt her hands tense up around his knees, he felt her grip tighten and the slightest quickening in her breathing. She must have misunderstood him. She must have thought that going away was code. She must have thought that to disappear meant dying, and while Bolin certainly wouldn't have argued if he was suddenly struck by a meteor out of the blue, it wasn't what he'd meant in this case. All the same, he wasn't going to clarify. It didn't really matter either way. She wasn't entirely wrong.

Within a few moments, Su calmed again and resumed brushing her thumbs over his legs. She must have thought it to be more comforting than it actually was, but again, Bolin wasn't going to argue. If this kind of contact made Su feel better about the whole situation, he'd let her touch him.

"I can't let you go anywhere," Su said. "I don't know why you want to leave or why you're uncomfortable here, but I can't let you go anywhere. You belong here. You need to be here with your friends and your family. You're injured."

"I've been injured for like, two months, Su," Bolin snapped. "You'd think if I was going to get better while I was here, I'd have done it by now."

"Not if you keep running all over the world before you're ready. Not if you get into fights. Definitely not if you're not taking care of yourself," Su replied, just as sharply. "Korra told me everything."

Bolin's stomach lurched violently and he felt very much like he'd throw up all over again. He bristled and waited for Su to scold him or tell him how horrible of a person he was. He waited for her to make him feel justified in his self-loathing. He waited for her to admit that she hated him the same way that he hated himself.

"She told me you weren't eating again," Su continued. "She told me you hadn't eaten since you left."

"What else did she tell you?" Bolin said, his voice low and hoarse now. His whole body tensed. He waited.

"She told me that you took the night watch so you could keep what you were doing a secret, and she told me that you would panic when you woke up yesterday. Apparently she was right on both counts."

Bolin looked up suddenly, his brow knit with a deep confusion. His hands fell limp back into his lap. Korra hadn't told her? Clearly if Korra had said something about the killing, Su would have made it clear that she knew. There was no way Su wouldn't make the connection between Bolin murdering people and his need to run away.

"Did you eat today?"

Bolin nodded stupidly.

Su smiled at him, and it was a genuine and gentle smile, a proud smile, and she took his hands in hers again. "I'm glad to hear that."

"It didn't stay down."

The smile went away at once. "What do you mean?"

"I mean I puked about ten minutes after I ate it. Okay, maybe it was twenty, I don't know. Point is that it didn't stay down so if you want to get really technical about it I still haven't-"

"Why?"

Bolin shook his head again except this time the motion came a bit more manically. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again his vision darted about the room in complete confusion and incredulity. He felt the anxiety welling up again.

"That has nothing to do with any of this!" The words exploded out of him before he could stop them. "Who cares if I don't eat? That has nothing to do with why I'm even in here!" He tried to pull his hands away from Su, but she held them firmly. "I want to leave! I want to get out of this stupid place and away from all of you and-"

"Calm down."

"No!"

Su sighed very deeply, and at that sound Bolin dropped his head down in submission. He'd snapped again and he couldn't even pinpoint the trigger, but now he recognized the explosiveness in his emotions for what it was, he breathed slowly and carefully. He worked hard to force it all back in.

When Su touched his face Bolin thought he'd burst into tears, but he didn't.

"Listen to me, okay?" Su said. She didn't pause long enough for Bolin to argue. "I hear what you're saying and I understand that you might not be happy here right now. There's nothing I want more than for you to be happy, but I can't let you leave here until you're healthy. I can't let you leave here until I know you're going to be safe, and right now I'm really not convinced. You need to stay here and heal. Now, I don't know what happened while you were gone that's made you so... Afraid... Of being here, but I want to help you."

"You can't."

"Then who can?"

"No one." Bolin said the words with as much finality as he could muster, and once again he wrenched his hands away from Su's. This time he didn't use them to hide his face, though, he just didn't want her touching him anymore. He didn't want to be in this room with her any more.

He stood up, and when the room started spinning again he tensed.

"Sweetie, when are you going to talk to someone?" Su said in a begging way. "When are you going to let someone try to-"

"Quit calling me that!" Bolin hadn't been able to stop the words coming out of him, but he did manage to keep himself from screaming them. "Stop calling me sweetie and honey and all those stupid... Stupid names!"

"But I've always called you-"

"I don't care!" This time he couldn't keep his voice from rising. "I don't care what you used to call me! I don't care how you used to treat me! Nothing is the same as it used to be! You can't treat me the same way as you used to anymore because I'm not the same guy I used to be anymore! I'm not even the same guy I was last week! All I want is to leave this stupid city and all you can do is say that you can't let me go!"

"Do you see how you're acting right now?" Su asked gently. She didn't stand up. She didn't move at all. She just watched him. "The way you're acting right now is why I can't let you leave."

"You don't even want me to leave my own room! You don't want me to leave my bed! You won't let me make my own decisions!"

"I let you make your own decisions when you can."

"You drugged me!"

Su looked very skeptical now, her brow raised sharply and her lips pursed tightly together. She thought on this for a second before she spoke again, and the gentle tone had a shade more deliberateness to it. "I had nothing to do with that decision. That was the decision of the healers who were caring for you, and they only chose to do it because you lavabent at them and they couldn't get you to calm down. They were worried you were going to hurt yourself. Don't blame me because you had to deal with the consequences of what you did."

And there it was. No matter what happened he would always have to deal with the consequences for what he'd done, and that was what frightened Bolin the most. He'd killed people. What were the consequences for killing people? Were the consequences worse for killing many, many people? Were the consequences different because he'd done it deliberately? Did it matter that he'd done it to protect the people he loved? Worse, if they'd tranquilized him because his panic had gotten out of control, what would they do to him if they found out he was a murderer?

"Bolin?"

"I have to get out of here."

He wished he hadn't said it. He heard the panic in his voice very clearly, the meaningful quivering that came to his throat with every noise he made. Su must have heard the mania, too, because she stood up as if preparing to grab him.

"I'm sorry I ever came in here," Bolin said sharply. "I'm sorry I bothered you trying to tell you what I wanted." He marched toward the door. "I won't make that mistake again."

"Bolin," Su cried desperately, "you can't keep running away from your problems like this!"

"Watch me."

He slammed the door behind him when he left.

Bolin didn't know where to go but he knew he couldn't just stand idly outside of Su's office door. The workers in the courtyard were staring at him and there was no doubt in his mind that Su would follow him as soon as she got over her shock. He couldn't go back to his own room: People would know to find him there and plus there was the puke he'd neglected, and he didn't want to smell that until he got the motivation to clean it up. By that logic he couldn't go to Korra's room, either. She had to have told people that he found some peace in there when there was nowhere else for him to go.

He went to his quiet place, or the ruins that had once been his quiet place. Su, Opal, and Korra were the only people who knew it existed, and Bolin knew that Opal wouldn't come looking for him unless she knew something horrible had happened. It would take Su a while to cycle through all the places he could be hiding, and the odds of her choosing this place to search first were low considering he'd completely destroyed it. Korra wouldn't bother him because she had no idea there was even a problem.

Well, she knew there was a problem. She knew that better than anyone else. But she didn't know about his spat with Su, and as long as Korra didn't know, Su would be the only one who might set about looking for him.

The clearing was just as he'd left it, and he'd left it ugly. Though some sprouts of grass had started growing through the upturned dirt, the tree he'd uprooted remained lying where he'd thrown it and the patches of charred rock he'd lavabent into the ground rose up in ugly clumps of black. The first obsidian shards he'd thrown were still lodged in the bark of the tree at which he'd thrown them.

His quiet place had been ruined but it was still quiet, and that was good for something.

Bolin sat against the fallen tree and fidgeted, his eyes locked on the grass at his feet, and he tried hard to force his mind into thinking of solutions to the very many problems he'd caused. It wouldn't cooperate. All he could think about was how he managed to ruin every good thing that presented itself to him, how he managed to squander every opportunity he'd been given because he was too bullheaded to accept the help that he so desperately needed or too blind to understand that problems existed beyond the scope of what he could handle.

What was worse was that now there was no way to escape the fact that he'd failed. The evidence of his own stupidity seemed to stick out wherever he went regardless of where he turned. He'd ruined Republic City for himself before Su had taken him away: He'd collapsed in Asami's office and rendered Air Temple Island as a whole a place of somber isolation where everyone kept to themselves and nobody laughed. He'd threatened to melt police headquarters. He'd freaked out in his own apartment and that was where the nightmares had started. Even the idea of the city's broken skyline reminded Bolin of the worst, because he'd stood atop one of those broken buildings when his whole world had crumbled and fallen on top of him. No matter what, if he went back to Republic City, he'd have nowhere to go where there weren't constant reminders of how badly he'd screwed up.

Now Zaofu was the same way. He'd once had this clearing to sit in, and he'd ruined it in a fit of anger that he'd been completely unable to control. He'd had his own room, a lavish, gigantic room that afforded him all the personal space he could ever have asked for, and now the chunk of lava he'd thrown at the healers had melded with the floor. Beyond the physical, the memories of what had happened in that room were strong, too. Opal had backhanded him in that room. He'd punched Su to the ground in that room. He'd laid there for two days when he'd first arrived, spending every waking moment that he wasn't occupied with one of Su's attendants hating his life and wishing he'd never shown up. He'd ruined Su's office three or four times now, between the hitting and the yelling and the arguments that had taken place there. He'd certainly ruined Opal's room when he'd threatened her and straddled her and scared her so seriously that she'd never let him touch her again.

Just about the only place that remained safe in Zaofu was Korra's room, and Bolin dared not go in there because even she was a reminder of his failure in the weirdest ways possible. Of all the people he knew and loved, Korra seemed to be the only person to whom he'd grown closer since the collapse, and though Bolin wanted to tell himself that he couldn't guess why, deep in the back of his mind, he knew. When he'd screwed up in his delirium and kissed her he'd roused something in her that hadn't been there before, and regardless of whether she had been acting on it consciously, it had made Korra somehow less afraid of him. Maybe her desire to help him was genuine, but it was tainted because if he'd never kissed her then she wouldn't be getting so close to him.

She'd gotten too close, if Bolin was honest with himself. He'd known that for a while now, but he'd not yet had the strength of will to begin distancing himself from her. He'd told himself that he was going to, he'd made up his mind on that matter before they'd left for Fire Fountain City and he decided that he didn't want to come home. But he hadn't followed through on it. Korra kept putting herself close to him, physically and emotionally, and he'd been too weak and stupid to push her away. He'd been complacent when she acted, and his complacency had allowed her to break through the walls he'd so carefully put up.

Korra was, in effect, the only thing keeping him in Zaofu. He could walk straight out of city limits uncontested if he waited until the right time and found the right place to cross the border into the mountains. Without the domes, Zaofu was open for him to come and go as he pleased, but he hadn't done it because of Korra, because she would be devastated if he left, and for some stupid reason he didn't want her to be sad that he was gone.

It was funny how the logic went so backward in Bolin's head and how little he could recognize the insanity in his reasoning.

Korra was the only reason he was still there. She was the only reason he was still alive. She was the only one who had cared enough to check in on him, and so she was the only one who might realize it if he left, and she was probably the only one who would care enough to be truly upset by the matter. No one else cared like Korra cared, because Bolin had screwed up and made her love him.

He'd hurt Opal. He'd hurt her badly enough that she'd been keeping her distance. And he'd hurt Asami, too, though in a different way. He'd disappointed her so thoroughly that she'd begun to keep her distance, too. Neither of them had tried to talk to him in days, and they'd made no effort to visit him since arriving home. Su was sending too many mixed signals for Bolin to really understand how she felt. One second she seemed to be absolutely furious with him and the next second it seemed that all she wanted to do was help him. She hadn't come to visit him yesterday. She must have been too caught up with her business as an Earth Nation governor to devote too much time and effort to monitoring his well-being. She kept claiming to care so much, but she'd been delegating his healing to complete strangers since he arrived. If he slipped off in the night it would probably be half a day or more before she realized that he was gone.

Mako was the wild card, but Bolin really didn't care about what Mako thought. Mako was a traitor and a horrible brother who chose the people who'd kidnapped him over his own family, and that offense was unforgivable. Bolin had risked life and limb to get him away from the crazy firebenders who'd taken him, and Mako hadn't even uttered a thank you. Bolin wasn't sure he'd accept the thanks even if Mako offered it. In fact, he knew he wouldn't. Whenever he thought about Mako, Bolin became so angry that he couldn't think straight, so it didn't really matter to him if his disappearing upset Mako. Who cared about upsetting Mako? Mako had no room to talk about upsetting people.

The solution hit him like a brick to the side of the head. Except for Mako and Korra, he'd managed to alienate everyone without ever meaning to by frightening them. He'd acted out in front of them in ways that were so contrary to their idea of what he should be that they couldn't reconcile it, and their inability to predict what he would do had left their heads spinning. He didn't care about Mako, and that left only Korra standing in his way. Korra was too fluid to be bothered by his outbursts. Korra expected everything, or maybe she expected nothing. Maybe her bar had been set so low that there was no use trying to slip beneath it. Her expectations were so low that Bolin literally couldn't disappoint her. As long as Bolin kept breathing and as long as his eyes kept opening, she'd stay there beside him because she was happy that he was alive.

There had to be some other way to push her out that didn't involve frightening her. There had to be some other way that didn't involve violence. There had to be some way to use her feelings against her, to turn her caring about him into hating him. He just had to figure out what it was.

Bolin was surprised when no one came looking for him. He sat in his quiet place for most of the afternoon, until the sun had begun dipping low in the west and his body began growing unbelievably heavy. There would be no use sitting there trying to plot his escape if his body was giving out on him, so Bolin stood with a great effort and began his shuffling way back to his room to sleep.

Everything was quiet as he walked through the outskirts of the city back to the Beifong estate. The construction crews had left in the middle of their work on the courtyard, and the only people milling about outside were the metal clan guards on their patrols, and none of them gave Bolin a second glance when he walked by. None of them even said hello.

"Where have you been?"

Mako's words had come out an angry snap as soon as Bolin pushed his bedroom door open, and Bolin felt his heartbeat quicken at the sound. He stopped in the doorway, an automatic reaction to the unexpected noise, and he stared hard at Mako with an expression that made Mako's own stern face soften up in shock.

Bolin felt as much surprise as he did indignation at his brother's presence. He didn't know how he hadn't felt Mako standing there. He'd not been wearing any shoes. Maybe it was because Mako had been away for so long and because Bolin had been off his feet for the better part of four days. Now he focused on it, though, Bolin felt him. He felt Mako's heartbeat quicken in nervous anticipation. It wasn't a negative emotion by any means, but there was a tentativeness about Mako that Bolin hadn't expected to be there.

"Where were you?" Mako asked, gentler now, more concerned than angry. "I've been waiting here all afternoon. Nobody knew-"

"Get out."

Mako's mouth flapped but no words came out of it for a comical moment until at last he managed to stammer a, "What?" that sounded more reflex than inquiry. The nervous anticipation turned to a distinct unease.

"Get out of my room."

Bolin stepped to the side of the door and gestured Mako on his way, but Mako didn't go anywhere. He made no move to leave at all. Mako kept standing beside the bed with a concerned look on his face that served only to set Bolin farther on edge. There was little Bolin wanted to do less than speak to his brother right now. He'd had a bad enough day as it was.

"I don't even get a hello?" Mako asked. Bolin couldn't tell if the unusually high pitch in his voice had come from sadness or anger. "I don't even get an I love you? I haven't seen you in months and all I get out of you is get out?"

"Be glad you got that much. Now leave."

"What's your problem?"

"You're my problem."

Mako looked blindsided, like Bolin had grown a second head or something. "I don't understand," Mako stammered. "Why are you being so..."

"So what, Mako?" Bolin prompted venomously.

"Why are you being so hateful?"

"Leave," Bolin said again, more sternly than he had before. "Get out. I don't want to talk to you right now, and I would appreciate it if you would just get out of my room and leave me alone."

"I'm not going anywhere!" Mako replied, a heat in his voice that hadn't been there before. It was like the stupor had worn off. "I want to talk to my little brother."

Bolin tossed the door closed, too tired to fight, and as he strode purposefully to his bed, Mako stepped respectfully aside. Bolin kept his eyes down as he walked, and he laid atop the blankets without saying a word or acknowledging that Mako had moved to accommodate him. He curled on his side with a grimace, turned his back toward his brother, and closed his eyes.

"What's going on with you?" Mako persisted. "Why won't you talk to me?"

"I've got nothing to say to you," Bolin said coldly. "Now I asked you to leave."

"I'm not leaving."

"Then shut up and let me sleep."

Mako definitely shut up, but that was the only thing that seemed to change. Bolin couldn't know for sure exactly what Mako was thinking or how Mako was feeling now his feet weren't grounded, but if he knew his brother as well as he thought he did, Mako would probably be fuming. There was little Mako had ever enjoyed less than Bolin's attitude when it came on him.

"You're going to have to talk to me eventually," Mako said hotly after a few moments in silence.

Bolin didn't respond. He would be stubborn to the end on this. He owed Mako absolutely no favors here, and if the truth was known, Mako owed him a favor for coming to Fire Fountain City and dragging his useless behind out of his cell. Mako owed Bolin everything, because Bolin had compromised his own integrity to get Mako out alive. Bolin had killed people to get Mako out alive.

"Bo, come on."

Bolin just laid there, obstinate, and he thought for a moment about whether there was anything Mako could ever say that would assuage his hate. He'd long since decided that a simple apology wouldn't cut it, and Bolin knew without ever contemplating it that any explanation Mako could offer for his treachery wouldn't do the trick, either. There was no excuse that Mako could contrive that would outweigh his decision to leave Republic City the night he'd met with Lin. There was nothing Mako could do or say that would eclipse the fact that he'd abandoned Bolin and everyone else that had once cared about him.

"Are you seriously just going to lay there and ignore me?"

Bolin clenched his jaw but kept his eyes resolutely closed.

"I get it," Mako said after a long minute with an enormous, sad sigh. He sounded very suddenly close to tears and Bolin knew it because he'd heard that voice before. It wasn't one that came over Mako often, but when it did, it was genuine, and it tugged persistently at Bolin's heart. "I get that you want your space. I just wanted to come in here and say that... I missed you, I guess. I guess I just wanted to say that I'm glad I'm home and I'm glad you're here, too. I'll leave you alone, but I'm going to come back tomorrow. Think about talking to me then, okay? Till then, I'm sorry you were sick, and I hope you feel better. I love you."

One more enormous sigh, and Bolin listened to Mako's footsteps heading toward the door. It didn't occur to Bolin until after Mako left that the puke he'd left on the floor earlier that day was gone and that Mako just said that he regretted Bolin had been sick. Bolin put it together pretty quick that Mako had cleaned up after him the same way Mako had cleaned up after him when they were kids. The memory tugged at Bolin in the same way as the quivering in Mako's voice had done, and it took every ounce of Bolin's resolve to keep himself from breaking down again.

He had to get out of Zaofu to protect the people he cared about from himself. He had to leave to save the girls their fear, to save Su the disappointment of having a murderous failure for what should have been a son-in-law, and he had to leave to keep Mako from understanding the truth. He had to leave and he had to do it fast, before all his resolve left him and he caved in to more pandering and coddling and ineffective attempts at healing that hadn't worked and would continue not working until he died.

He had to get out, and he had to do it now.