AUTHOR'S NOTE: So I don't like putting chapter notes at the start of things like this, but I'd be remiss if I didn't address my absence for the last month (and a half?). Recently some pretty scary medical issues have come up, and I'm currently in the process of trying to figure out what's going on and how to resolve it. Part of the problem resides with concentration, memory loss, and other things that have made working on this story really exceptionally difficult, and that goes without dealing with the stress. What I'm trying to say is that I'm still here, Subduction is still going on, and I have every intent of finishing it. I just might not be able to be as quick about updating as I used to be.
Again, I'm so sorry for the delay. Hopefully this chapter makes it better. Thanks to everyone for sticking with it and for your incredible support of this story.
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The strangest thing was that Bolin didn't panic, that there didn't exist a single shred of it anywhere inside of him even after his brief and perhaps too brusque interaction with Asami. He thought there would be. A pang of something hit him deep in the stomach when he first saw her approaching, but it hadn't developed beyond that. It lingered there in the few moments before Asami sat down, and it swelled when she asked if she could hug him. But then there was the contact, and at that moment the feeling died away and left a kind of weirdness in its wake, what Bolin might have called emptiness but for the tiny echoes of feeling there. Perhaps he was numb.
As he walked back to his sandstone yurt, he felt a little guilty about how quickly he'd brushed Asami aside. Her interest in him had been genuine, and he knew it because he could feel it in her. The vibrations had been familiar and, in a weird way, a little bit comforting. Or they'd been comforting until he realized what Asami was going to ask, until he realized that the whole reason the three of them were there in the first place was to make him come home.
He felt a great many things: cruel, stupid, guilty, hasty to dismiss. But he didn't feel panicked.
Bolin spent a few hours lying atop his bed without ever changing out of his celebratory attire. His mind was too full of other thoughts for the idea of changing to pass through. He couldn't shake the feeling that he'd done something wrong by being so up front with Asami, but staying with the sand benders had been his plan since well before he'd arrived in the desert. He'd never meant to go home. He made that decision almost immediately after setting out from Zaofu because the things he'd done to everyone else capped by the terrible thing he'd done to Korra made it impossible for him to go back. He was too embarrassed. He'd been an idiot.
But part of his decision to stay away had been made based on the idea that no one would want him to come home, that he'd pushed them away so far and so effectively that no one would ever want him back. The fact that Opal, Asami, and Korra were there rattled enormous cracks into that foundation. The look that Opal had been wearing all night, a dreamy and slightly lustful look, rattled it. That Asami had sought him out to speak privately about the matter of his homecoming rattled it, too. Just about the only thing that hadn't-the only thing that supported his idea-was that Korra had spent the whole night looking like she was ready to explode with angry energy. She'd felt ready to explode. He could feel it a mile away, so clearly that it eclipsed both Opal and Asami's joy and any sense of accomplishment he'd felt in the wake of his successful hunt.
That was the part that didn't make sense, Bolin thought, because if Korra was angry-and she had every right to be angry-why would she come along?
It wasn't until the moon began creeping across the open air vent in Bolin's roof that he thought to get ready for bed. He hadn't realized it was getting so late. Thus, he climbed down from his loft and dug about in the wicker box that held all of his clothes, and he changed and sat in the middle of his rug to drink a cup of hot tea that he hoped would calm him enough to sleep. It usually did. It was the same thick green blend that he'd discovered while staying with Hokki and Mei, and ever since then it had served as some strange part of his nightly routine.
"You should've let her stay to talk."
Bolin looked up. Sun's voice hadn't startled him, but the posture she assumed while standing in his doorway did. The fact that he hadn't felt her coming had, too. She looked almost angry, and it wasn't the same anger that usually graced her features. This wasn't the same anger that she'd leveled on him when he first arrived, before they'd become friends and exchanged secrets and relied on each other for advice. It was a cold, judgmental anger. It simmered.
"You want some tea?"
"No."
Sun invited herself in the same way she always did, and she flopped down on the rug opposite Bolin. She folded her hands in her lap and stared very hard at him while he sipped at his drink. Bolin tried to act natural.
"I talked to her for a while," Sun explained. "After you left, she and I talked."
"What did you talk about?"
"You, stupid."
Bolin remembered a time when the very thought of someone calling him stupid would have set him into a rage, yet this time the insult made a strange half-smile tug at his mouth. Sun had called him stupid so many times since he'd arrived in the commune that it may as well have been his given name. She'd called him stupid so many times that it didn't even faze him anymore.
"I figured as much," Bolin said dryly. "What did you actually talk about?'
"They want you to go home."
He sighed again. A bit of frustration was beginning to mount. Sun knew perfectly well what he meant when he asked what she and Asami had talked about; she was just being obtuse. "What did you talk about that I didn't already know?" Bolin didn't try to hide his budding animosity.
"She told me about you," Sun said casually, apparently unaffected by his shift in attitude. "Well, she told me about you before you came here. It was pretty much the same thing you told me as far as your injury and how stupid you were to everyone. But she told me about how you were before then, even. She talked to me about how you were before all the bad stuff happened to you."
Bolin looked up at her, and the sad look on Sun's face dulled his anger to a blunt, painful heartache. He didn't know what to say to her. He remembered how he was before all the bad things happened to him, too. He'd been genuinely happy back then. He'd been able to engage in reckless optimism. His heart had been full of love and selflessness and understanding that radiated.
He missed that feeling.
"She told me how funny you were. She said that you were really, genuinely funny, not all sarcastic and cynical like you are now. Don't get me wrong, Bo, I like your sense of humor because it's a lot like mine, but I think I'd liked to have met you back then. Asami made it sound like you were a lot happier."
The next sip of tea tasted bland. Maybe it was because Bolin took it to bide himself some time to think of a response that would relieve the tension building in him. But he couldn't think of anything to say, so he settled on the truth. "I was."
"So, why don't you go home?" Sun asked, a strange desperation in her voice. "If you were happy back then-happier than you can be here-why wouldn't you want to go back?"
"Because I screwed up, Sun," Bolin snapped weakly. "Because I burned them."
"That doesn't seem to matter. It seems to me like they want to help you be happy again."
"Well, I can't be." The words came out with finality. "I can't go back to being the way I was back then because-"
"Because why?" Sun interrupted hotly. "Because you don't want to? Because you've got this weird martyr complex?"
"What are you even talking about?"
"You just suffer. You suffer all the time, even when you shouldn't be suffering because nothing all that bad has actually happened to you, not since you've been here, anyway. You keep punishing yourself and punishing yourself and withholding any happiness, you put up this wall and you refuse to let anything at all through because somehow you think you deserve it."
"That's not true."
"Yes, it is! What, you think that because every once in a while you smile or laugh it makes what I'm saying any less true? Sad people laugh all the time, Bolin. They laugh to cover up the fact that they're sad. They laugh to make everyone else think they're okay."
Silence.
Sun looked at her hands and fidgeted. It seemed like the sudden anger was spent. "What I'm trying to say is that you keep insisting that you can't be happy, like you never could be happy, but Asami proved that wrong. You were happy once, and there's no reason you shouldn't be that way again."
"There's a lot of reason."
"Tell me."
The demand caught Bolin off guard. He'd had countless conversations with Sun about the horrible things he'd done. He even told her about Korra, and he'd never so much as hinted at that night to anyone else. Sure, Yan knew something happened and she knew that it was bad, but Bolin had never mentioned the details. How, knowing everything that she did, could Sun even think to disbelieve him?
"Because I cared about them more than anything in the world," Bolin reasoned. His voice was just more than a whisper. If he spoke any louder he felt like he'd break. "I cared about all of them more than I ever cared about myself, and I hurt them all. You know everything I did."
"And why should what you did in the past keep you from being happy in the future?"
"Because I'm not a good person."
"No," Sun said, her tone all motherly and short, "you weren't a good person. You were a jerk. But that's in the past."
"Is it, though?"
"You're not going to find out by sitting here with me." Sun stood up and rubbed at her eyes, though when Bolin looked to her he couldn't understand why. There could be no mistaking the sad expression on her face, but there were no tears. There wasn't a hint of that at all. "Go talk to them. Or if you won't go talk to them, let me invite them to come here."
"Sun..."
She started toward the exit, and as she stood in the way she turned around and watched the ground. "Look, Bo, I'm not saying that I want you to leave. Honestly, I don't want you to leave because you're about the only person who's ever actually been friendly to me. But it would be selfish of me to try and keep you here because of that. If nothing else, go figure out what your options are. At least that way you can make a well-reasoned decision instead of knee-jerking like you want to do all the time. If you go and talk to them and decide that you should stay, that's great, but I don't want you to miss out on a chance to be happy because you're being stubborn."
Bolin opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He didn't know what was supposed to come out, and before he could consider it, Sun was gone.
All the air in the yurt seemed to have grown very heavy, and the weight of it sat atop Bolin like an uncomfortable shroud. He tried to finish his tea but it didn't taste all that good anymore. Incredible how a shift in mood could cause a shift in taste, too.
Bolin retired to his bed, and he didn't sleep at all. He tossed and turned for a while, unable to get comfortable. Eventually he settled on his back and stared out through the open circle in his roof, watching the clouds and the stars until a sliver of moon began creeping in and a shaft of silvery light fell on his face.
Sun had been right.
As he lay there, Bolin decided that he would talk to Asami tomorrow, that he would invite her to discuss the way things were and allow her the chance to convince him to go home. It was only fair, after all. And after she finished explaining why he should go back to Republic City, he would take the time to explain to her why he wanted so desperately to stay so that maybe the two of them could come to an understanding even if they wouldn't agree.
The morning came before he was ready, and it took Bolin a long time to force himself out of bed. An intense nervousness had taken root in his stomach. Whenever he thought about seeing Asami and talking to her genuinely, the nervousness got worse so that by the time he made his way outside and cast his eyes on the airship he felt ill. So he walked about for a while, trying to work up his courage, until he found himself outside of Sun's yurt debating on whether or not he should go in and ask her for help.
"What is it you want me to do, exactly?" Sun asked after Bolin mustered his courage, went inside, and explained himself. "Go over there and invite the girls to come see you?"
"No," Bolin said, "just Asami."
"Why?"
"Because I'm not ready for the other two."
"And what is your plan?"
Bolin shrugged and dropped his chin onto his hand. "I'm going to talk to her, just like you said last night." He paused, tired of the explaining and a little bit frustrated at his floundering. "Look, you were the one that suggested I 'weigh my options' or whatever it was, weren't you? Just go get her and meet me at your mom's."
"Why?"
"Because I need to talk to her, too."
Sun heaved a sigh and got to her feet, tossing her embroidery lazily aside. "Fine," she chided, "but don't expect me to be your babysitter this time."
"I don't need a babysitter."
She was gone before he could finish arguing.
After a time, Bolin got up and strode purposefully toward Yan's enormous yurt, where he found her in the back room poking at what looked like a sand shark bone with a small metal utensil. She was so engrossed that she didn't hear him knock against the wall, and when Bolin uttered a sheepish, "Hello?" she seemed to startle.
Bolin didn't let her get a word out. "I need to talk to you," he said at once, "and I need you to be straight about it."
Yan put down her things and shifted in her chair, casting an interested look on Bolin that might at one time have made him squirm. It was the look she gave someone when she was preparing to read them. It was the look she gave when she was prepared for lies.
"I know that you know why the girls came here from Republic City," Bolin started, slower now that he had Yan's undivided attention. He shuffled into the room and dropped heavily on one of the sitting pillows, but he didn't look up. "They want me to go home with them, but I'm not so sure I want to. I'm not so sure I'm ready to."
"And you're looking for me to tell you one way or another what you should do."
The statement flustered Bolin more than he thought it would. It was strange. Yan's straightforward way of discussing delicate matters had long since stopped bothering him. "No, not exactly," Bolin said. "I'm looking for advice. See, Asami came to talk to me last night after the ceremony and I was... Well, I was really rude to her, and I spent all night lying awake thinking about it and feeling all guilty. So, I sent Sun to go get her so that I could give her a second chance and talk like adults."
"That seems like a reasonable thing to do."
"But I have to decide what I want to do," Bolin argued. "No, that's not right. I know what I want to do, and what I want to do is stay here. I don't want to go back to Republic City."
"Why?"
Bolin did look up now, and it was in confusion. "What?"
"Why don't you want to go home?"
"I just had this conversation with Sun."
"Well, I'm not Sun. Tell me why you don't want to go back. What reservations do you have that would prevent you from going?"
"Well, for starters, this is my home now." When Bolin paused, he heard a humoring hmmm noise come out of Yan. It irritated him. "And I messed up a lot of things before I left them, besides. I left without any intent to go back there. I burned every bridge there was to burn. You know that. I can't go back."
"Why?"
Bolin floundered. He stammered and spluttered his indignation. "Because I hurt them!"
"And yet, they're here to take you home."
Frustrated all over again, Bolin dropped his face into his hands. He didn't know what to say at all.
"Listen," Yan said, a gentle command, "you've got to get it out of your head that the world is black and white. Nothing is absolute, and you know that. You've done such a good job of accepting that and learning to cope with your problems, but I don't understand why you won't budge on this one thing. The choice is yours to make, Bolin, and you do have a choice. We've discussed this whole issue of control before. Don't you remember? That's half your problem. Let me lay it out for you plainly, then: You're in control of this decision. You can stay here, I won't exile you from our commune. You've been too good a member of the community for me to do that. But you can go, too, if you want. There's nothing stopping you from leaving this place and traveling back home with those girls. There are no walls around you, nothing holding you to the ground. You're free to roam as you please regardless of what you did to anyone else or what anyone else did to you. You're in complete control of this situation, you just have to be willing to make the choice that's best for you. And you and I both know that you can't make that kind of decision with such a closed mind."
Silence.
"You wanted advice. Here's my advice: Allow yourself to consider your options without these silly self-imposed boundaries you keep putting down."
Bolin laughed gently.
"What?"
He shook his head. "That's almost exactly what Sun said."
Again, Yan made that irritating hmmm sound, and that seemed to be the end of the talking. There wasn't much else that Bolin could think to say, anyway.
It seemed for the best, because when he finally got the nerve to stand and exit her sitting room, Sun and Asami stood waiting in the larger chamber. They didn't notice him at first. Asami stood admiring a piece of stretched sand shark skin that Yan had put up for decoration, citing the oddness in its coloring. It looked like Sun was explaining something. She was gesturing at the hanging with one finger, drawing a line down its length. But then Sun must have caught a glimpse of him, because she turned on him very suddenly.
"It's about time," Sun said dryly, "we've been out here for almost ten minutes."
Bolin tried to shoot a distinct look at Sun, a look that said he didn't need her attitude, but it didn't seem like he hit the mark. She crossed her arms and looked smug instead, and by this time Asami had turned around, too. She wore a decidedly not smug expression.
"I'm glad you reconsidered," Asami said.
Bolin wanted to tell her not to get ahead of herself, but he kept his mouth shut and nodded instead, his eyes on the ground. Then he drew a deep breath and looked to Sun again, an idea in his mind. "I think I can take it from here," he said gently. "You mind if I take Shibu for a while?"
"Don't care," said Sun with a wave of her hand. "You take her enough anyway without asking me permission. Besides, I'm in charge of the water tonight so I've got to go get ready. It's not like I'm going to miss her."
"Thanks."
Sun nodded a quick good-bye to Asami, and as she walked past Bolin she said in an undertone, "You know where I'll be if you need me." Then she was gone.
Bolin met Asami's eyes for only a second, just long enough to say, "Come on," and nod his head toward the exit, and when he started off he hoped she would get the idea.
Asami followed Bolin silently all the way back to Sun's yurt, to the small covered sandstone enclosure where Shibu spent her days off, lounging amongst a carpet of straw that Sun brought in every third week from somewhere east of Chameleon Bay for a pretty hefty price.
Beside him, Asami made a noise full of awe, and when he glanced over to her, she looked a little thunderstruck, too. "What is it?" she gaped.
"This is Shibu," Bolin said, gesturing to the antelope. In the same motion he swung open the gate and entered her enclosure. Shibu perked up at the sound of his voice and cast an eager look on him. "She's a fox antelope. She comes out with me when I head into the desert."
"Oh. Why?"
It was an innocent enough question, Bolin realized, but it made the conversation hit home sooner than he'd hoped. He waited until Shibu was up and had stretched and exited her enclosure to respond. "She makes sure I stay safe," he said.
"Safe from what? The sand sharks?"
"Not exactly. Come on." Bolin gestured for Asami to follow, and he headed back toward his yurt with Shibu on his left and Asami on his right. He figured it would be best to talk and walk. "See, being in the desert is hard on me sometimes. I always bring her out with me so that if something happens she can make sure I get back home."
"If something happens?"
"If I get hurt, get in trouble, pass out."
"Pass out?"
Bolin waved the question off. He could explain later.
The stop at his yurt was much faster than the stop at Yan's or Sun's. He ducked inside just long enough to grab the travel bag he used on his hunting trips, which contained water and food and the now beat-up and somewhat dingy tent he'd purchased in the Misty Palms Oasis what felt like eons ago. Asami got to poke her head inside, but she made no mention of it. She didn't ask questions and didn't protest when Bolin ushered her back out.
It took until this point for Bolin to gain his courage. He'd known all along what needed to be said, but he hadn't known how to say it. As the three of them breached the commune's border, he put his hand between Shibu's horns as some weird kind of reassurance, and he spoke as firmly as he could. "Look, I was a jerk to you last night. I had no right to treat you the way I did. You came a long way to talk to me and I blew you off without letting you get in a word. That was wrong of me, and I'm sorry I did it."
"Well, it was kind of wrong for me to back you into a corner like that," Asami replied. The ease with which she conceded the point felt irksome. She hadn't even accepted his apology. "I shouldn't have caught you off guard like that."
"You didn't catch me off guard. I saw your airship the day I got back from the field. It was just a matter of time before you found me."
"I suppose so."
The quiet set in for a while, until the commune disappeared behind rolling dunes and the sand began kicking up in the wind. By now, Bolin was used to this sort of weather, was used to the hardships of desert travel, but he didn't consider Asami's discomfort with the situation until he felt a subtle shift in the cadence of her stride. She slowed, and Bolin worried that she might stop altogether, but she kept pressing on in the quiet until a modestly sized sandstone structure appeared between the dunes, and Bolin pointed at it.
"That's where we're going."
He'd meant to bring her here all along, to the only truly private place he could think of where the two of them could talk without fear of interruption. It was the only place he could think of where he wouldn't be afraid that Korra or Opal-or Korra and Opal-would sneak up and catch him unprepared. The idea of speaking candidly with Asami was nerve-wracking enough on its own, the idea of speaking to all three of the girls seemed impossible.
The structure was simple, as far as communal structures were concerned, was little more than a hollow pillar raised from the earth and solidified. From its open, unprotected doorway a person could see an enormous expanse of the Si Wong Desert rippling along in the gentle wind. On a clear enough day when the winds were still, a person could spot in the distance the sand shark hunting grounds and, if they were very lucky, could watch the animals breaching the sand. The hunters came here for scouting. Bolin had come here to talk.
As the three entered, Bolin motioned Asami toward the room's only furnishing, a small round sandstone table with two smaller sandstone stools, and while she situated herself there, Bolin situated Shibu out of the way with enough water to last the rest of the night, and the antelope curled up as she was wont to do and closed her eyes lazily. Then Bolin flopped onto the stool opposite Asami, and the swarm of butterflies that had laid dormant in his stomach for so long suddenly sprang back to life.
"What is this place?"
"Scouting hut."
"Why'd you bring me all the way out here?"
"Privacy."
When Bolin looked to Asami, she seemed a little distraught. It must have been his shortness in answering. But he didn't know exactly where to start the conversation, and that meant that he needed to wait for Asami to take the initiative instead.
She didn't wait long.
"So, why the change of heart?" she asked plainly after a few moments. "Why'd you decide to talk to me again? After last night I figured that you'd be done."
"Like I said, I figured out that I was being a jerk and decided that I needed to fix it."
"Oh."
Bolin felt Asami's spirits drop. Clearly, she'd been hoping for something more, so he added in afterthought, "And I decided that maybe instead of being a stubborn idiot I should listen to what you had to say before I made a decision."
Asami relaxed.
"How did you find me?" The question had nagged at Bolin since he'd first laid eyes on the airship, and it came out of his mouth without his thinking about it. He hoped the question had come out conversationally enough. "I kind of figured that after such a long time you guys weren't looking for me anymore."
Asami shook her head. "No. We'd been looking for you the whole time. Su had three quarters of Zaofu out in the mountains the day we found out you'd gone, and she spent the next two weeks sending out parties to look. After that we organized searches of our own out of Republic City, but we never found anything. We offered up a reward for anyone who could tell us where you were, but that just forced us to wade through a bunch of false reports and bad leads. Mako was furious about it. Either way, we never stopped."
The mention of Mako made Bolin's stomach twist. It wasn't that Bolin never thought about Mako, but that he avoided it when he could because the thought of Mako all alone in Republic City made him keenly regretful. The idea that he'd forced their separation so shortly after their reunion made Bolin feel sick.
"Well, you did a heck of a good job of hiding, wherever you were. A couple weeks ago we got a letter from-"
"Hokki."
"Yeah, how'd you know?"
"Because he warned me that someday he'd probably take you guys up on your five-hundred-yuan reward."
The look Asami gave to him made her confusion very, very clear.
"I don't remember which of you it was that went to Lanxi, but he was down there selling off some supplies and someone gave him a flyer. He brought it back to me, and a couple weeks after that, I left. We knew you would find me up there. It was a really, really tiny town in the mountains, a village full of nonbenders and, if I'm honest, the people were pretty poor. A lot of them did trading in Lanxi. It was only a matter of time before one of them got a flyer and contacted you, so I got out."
"You didn't want us to find you?"
"No. I wasn't ready to be found."
"That's what the letter said. It said that you weren't ready to come home yet, but it made it out less like you didn't want to come home and more like you just... Like you weren't fit to come home yet."
"That's because I wasn't fit to come home yet. I'm still not sure I am."
There lingered a few moments of uncomfortable silence before Asami asked, "How'd you end up there?"
"It's a long, kind of boring story."
Asami looked downcast again.
"I headed south straight out of Zaofu into the forest, and I skirted the mountains for a while until I ended up in Gaoling. Stayed there for a few weeks until... Until the firebenders attacked it... I ran away in a panic and left all my good clothes and money behind."
"You were there when Gaoling was attacked?"
"Yeah," Bolin said, surprised by Asami's surprise. "I'd been making money fighting as a nonbender in the Earth Rumble Arena."
"But we checked Gaoling."
"You wouldn't have found me. I didn't use my real name and nobody knew I was an earthbender."
"But you used your real name in Lanxi, or at least when you were staying around there. Otherwise Hokki wouldn't have known who you were."
Bolin nodded his agreement. "When I left Zaofu I was having some problems. Wow, that's an understatement. I was having a lot of problems, and one of them was that I didn't like the person I was. I didn't know who I was. I used a fake name and a fake story in Gaoling and a little way beyond, but I used my real name with Hokki and Mei. They didn't find out I was an earthbender until Hokki got that flyer from you all."
"And after that?"
"After that I came down here."
"But how'd you get the idea to come here? Who thinks to go to the desert?"
"Hokki thought of it. He and Mei were really good to me. They gave me a place to stay and helped me start figuring out how to function again. They got me back on my feet and got me moving around, put me to some really hard work that started forcing me back into shape. Mei taught me how to read again, or she started to, anyway. I've been working on that ever since. But I told Hokki the whole story, everything I did including all the stuff in Fire Fountain City, and he said he knew of this sand bender commune whose people might be able to help me come to grips with my earthbending. I didn't have anything else to lose, so I set out."
"And you've been here ever since."
"Yeah. I've been here since a few weeks into winter, but I haven't had a calendar so I couldn't tell you how long it's actually been."
"A little over ten months since you left Zaofu."
It was Bolin's turn to say, "Oh."
The quiet set in again, and for a time it seemed that Asami was content to sit in it. She joined Bolin in looking out at the desert, and even though little could be seen beyond the blowing sands, she commented a few times on how pretty it all was. She wasn't lying, either. Bolin could feel her honesty.
It was strange how comfortable it all felt, Bolin thought, because he'd imagined that this whole interaction would be rife with awkwardness and difficulty. But then, Asami had never been all that difficult to talk to, at least not before he'd alienated her. She'd always been the one to whom he took his problems when he couldn't work them out on his own, and he'd lost count of the number of truly meaningful conversations he'd shared with her about life and love and so many other intimate issues. He supposed it was only natural that this would go the same way.
When Asami spoke again she seemed hesitant in every way from the tone of her voice to the vibrations she pushed through the earth. Bolin didn't notice the change in her until she uttered a very uncertain, "So," but when he clued in to it, the change was unmistakable. She seemed on the edge of frightened, and that made Bolin curious.
"So?" Bolin prompted.
"Are... Are you better?"
"That depends on what you mean when you say better."
"Well, you seem less..." Asami stopped and pulled a face of frustration. Clearly, she was trying to be tactful about whatever it was she was thinking, but it seemed she was failing. She sighed and started again. "You seem more stable."
She was trying to address the issue of craziness. He should've guessed.
"Just say what you're trying to say and stop worrying so much about offending me," Bolin said, and though his voice had taken on a stern tone, Asami didn't shy away. "You're not going to scare me off."
"Well, you were kind of insane when you left," Asami explained, "and you were all weak and sad and... Crazy."
Bolin held up his hands, and Asami stopped. "I don't know if you'd still call me crazy," he conceded, "but I'm not all square yet, either."
"How so?"
"I still panic. It's not as often now, and I've learned how to deal with it, kind of, but there are still times when I can't control it. I have nightmares three or four times a week."
"About Baihe Island?"
"Yeah, about that. And I have nightmares about the collapse, about Ko-" Bolin stopped himself before he finished the word and cleared his throat before beginning again. "I have nightmares about the awful things I did to you all. I don't sleep well."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry, it's not like you dropped the building on my face or made me a jerk."
"But you're better, too," Asami prompted. "Besides that stuff."
"I wouldn't get too far ahead of yourself there, either."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm assuming that you mean I'm closer to how I was before I woke up, right? You mean that I'm the same dumb goof you met like five years ago and grew up with. If that's the case, you're dead wrong, and I'm really sorry to say it, but that guy's never coming back. All the stuff that happened after the collapse broke me. And I don't mean it broke me down. It literally broke my brain. I've got panic problems, but we've talked about that. I have nightmares, and we talked about that, too. I have problems empathizing with people. Sometimes I can't think and it makes me do stupid things. I've got problems with anger. It used to hit me so hard that I couldn't stop it and I'd lash out at people and hit them and bend at them and yell, but I figured out a part of what makes it happen and most of the time that lets me head it off before it gets too bad."
"What triggers it?"
"Control. If I feel like I don't have any control over a situation I either panic about it or I get angry about it. It depends. I guess to put it as plainly as I can, I've still got all the problems I had before I left Zaofu. None of that stuff has changed. The only difference is that I've started learning how to deal with it so that I can function like a regular person again."
"Then if you're better, or getting better, then why don't you want to come home?"
Bolin couldn't help a resigned grin and a shake of his head. He knew the conversation would come to this, he just didn't know how long it would take or whether Asami would go at it straight on or take some weird oblique angle. It was for the best that she asked straightforwardly, and it was for the best that he answered in kind.
"I don't want to go back because I hurt you all too badly. I was a bad person when I was with you all, before I left you, that is. Maybe it's me being cowardly, but I don't want to have to face everyone after all the awful things I did."
"Well, for my part, I'm ready to move on. I'm ready to have you back with the team again."
"And how does everyone else feel about that?"
Bolin asked the question deliberately because there was an enormous, rabid elephant-rhino in the room that needed to be addressed. Sure, Asami might be ready for him to come home, and maybe Opal was ready for him to come home, too, but what about Korra? She'd seemed so full of pent up anger when Bolin caught glimpses of her that he couldn't imagine how she'd be ready to interact with him again.
Suddenly, Bolin realized: Korra hadn't told. She couldn't have. It just didn't add up. If Korra had mentioned something, one of two things would have happened: Either Asami would currently share in Korra's animosity because no one could get past what he'd done, or Korra wouldn't have been so angry because Asami had helped her to cope. If Korra had said something, then she and Asami would more than likely share the same feelings toward him. That they were so opposite in their reception told Bolin everything he needed to know, and that complicated things.
"Opal is ready," Asami mused while Bolin thought, apparently oblivious to his sudden realization, "and Mako is definitely ready. He's been a little bit lost without you around, you know. You always kept him afloat when work got to be too much, and without you there he doesn't take very good care of himself. Korra and I are around to help him, yeah, but we're not as good as you are at getting him to focus on what's really important. He's buried in his work."
"What about Korra?"
Asami furrowed her brow. "She's been weird lately. She was really torn up when you left and stayed in Zaofu for a couple weeks helping to look for you. I didn't think she'd ever stop crying the morning she figured out you'd gone."
Bolin propped his chin on his fist and watched Asami as closely as he dared, focused on her tone and her expression, on the way she felt. Her explanation was utterly innocent. She wasn't trying to cover anything up. Her contemplation was genuine.
"But she got better," Asami continued, her eyes on the table. "After a little while I think she started getting over it, but any time we mentioned you she got all uptight and quiet. Then the letter came, and she's been sort of angry ever since. I think she's resentful."
"I guarantee she's resentful."
Asami looked up. "What?"
"Why do you think that?" Bolin asked coolly. "Why do you think she's resentful?"
"Just the way she's been acting. She finally got over the fact that you left without a word and then you come back in at the drop of a hat. We spent so much time and effort searching for you only for it to come to nothing, and then suddenly here you are again. If I spent as much energy as Korra did on being sad about you and getting over the fact that you left, I'd be angry, too."
With a nod of understanding, Bolin dropped his hands to the table and his eyes followed. Once upon a time he might've started fidgeting, but not now. Once upon a time he might've panicked at the very idea of confessing what he'd done to anyone at all, but not now. He felt surprisingly calm about the whole thing, because in the strangest way, no bad could come from speaking up. In the worst case-or maybe the best case-Asami would change her mind about wanting Bolin to come home and he'd end up staying with the commune, no worse for the wear and with arguably the biggest conflict of his life resolved. Otherwise, Asami wouldn't change her mind and would continue to insist Bolin come home, and if she wanted him in her life even after finding out the awful thing he'd done, maybe it was best to go back home with them after all. If someone could forgive him or at least understand his perspective, maybe there was hope.
"What did she tell you?" Bolin asked, quiet but steady.
"About what?"
"About me. You said she wouldn't stop crying when she figured out I was gone, so what did she tell you about me?"
"Nothing. She just said that you were gone, that she went to your room, you weren't there, and she couldn't find you anywhere. That was all we got out of her."
Another understanding nod, and Bolin got to his feet. It wasn't that he felt like pacing, but there was some nervousness beginning to build inside him that demanded he move around. Maybe it was habit. This was what he did to stave off the panic.
"Well, I'm going to tell you, then," he said once he got to the open entryway. He leaned against the jamb and crossed his arms, but didn't look back at the table. He looked out at the desert, the wind in a lull, and then he closed his eyes. "I can tell you exactly why Korra couldn't stop crying, and why she was so upset, and why she's angry now."
"Bolin?" He felt Asami stand up, suddenly very, very nervous.
"Sit down," Bolin said gently, and Asami's nervousness snapped to surprise, but she eventually sat back down and relaxed. With a very deep breath, Bolin began. "See, I did some awful things before I left Zaofu, and I know that. I did awful things to Opal, I said awful things to you. We all know how I killed those people when we went to rescue Mako. I was totally out of my mind. I'm not saying that as an excuse, either, I'm saying it because it's the truth. I did horrible, horrible things and we all know that." He stopped and sighed, but it was a sigh of sadness instead of nerves.
"Bo?"
"All those horrible things are nothing compared to what I did to Korra. She was about the only person who actually tolerated me toward the end of things, or at least that's the way I saw it. She wanted to stay close to me and I couldn't tell you why. She had some weird crush on me or something stupid, or maybe it was because she genuinely wanted to help me. It doesn't really matter why she was that way, it just matters that she was. She insisted on staying close. I decided to leave... Well, I got it in my head that I was going to go pretty soon after we got home from Baihe Island. It's the first thought I can remember having after that. I was so out of my mind and afraid of myself after what I did out there that I was convinced that I was going to hurt all of you in the best case, or kill all of you in the worst. Everything I did after that thought latched onto my mind was designed to drive all of you farther away from me to make leaving that much easier for everyone. I figured that if you all hated me, you wouldn't follow me. If you all hated me, you wouldn't be upset that I left, and I believed that that if I got out of Zaofu I could save all of you from me, or what I thought I was.
"Like I said, the problem was Korra. She wasn't like the rest of you. I figured out pretty quick that if I got aggressive and angry with the rest of you that you would back off and leave me alone. If I got physical with the rest of you then it made you afraid of me, so that's what I did. That's how I distanced myself from you. But it didn't matter how aggressive I got with Korra because she didn't seem to care. There was literally no evil that I could do that would make her abandon me. So, I went the other way."
"Went the other way?"
"Yeah. I went the other way." Bolin heaved a huge breath and slumped against the doorframe, his eyes on his shoes. The shame he'd harbored over what he'd done was cropping up again. He shook his head against it. "I told you, she had some kind of crush on me. I think you know that. I think she told you that. I used that against her. The night before I left I went to her room with... I don't really know what I meant to do. The goal was to turn those feelings against her. I wanted to ruin all those good feelings she had about me but I wasn't sure how exactly to do it. And I wanted to kiss her. Everyone got so mad because I apparently did it when I was all brain-dead but I didn't remember it, and I was angry about it. I wanted to know what I was missing out on. So, I did it."
When Bolin glanced at Asami, she was watching him raptly, a look of mixed confusion and fear and anger on her face. But she didn't move when her eyes met his. Her hands stayed clasped in her lap. Her eyebrow gave the slightest anticipatory twitch.
"I slept with her. Then I left."
As soon as the words came out, Bolin's face dropped toward the floor. He couldn't maintain the eye contact. He was too ashamed, too afraid of how Asami's expression would change. He was too afraid of what she would say.
But Asami didn't say anything. She sat there quietly and he stood there quietly, and all Bolin could hear was the gentle desert breeze picking back up and Shibu's gentle snoring from the corner somewhere behind him. He wondered if the quiet was supposed to hurt, if the hurt now was better or worse than the hurt would be when Asami finally came to grips with what he'd said, when she finally reacted.
Her reaction wasn't anything like what he expected.
"Tell me more," she said.
Bolin couldn't help but snap to mortified attention when he heard the phrase. There was no anger anywhere on Asami's face, no anger in the vibrations she sent through the earth. It was so much more complicated than that. "What?"
"You're right. You did a lot of horrible things to us. You said a lot of horrible things. But there isn't a single time that I can remember where you said or did something that you weren't absolutely crippled by it. When you threw Opal and you spent the next three or four days starving yourself and not talking and not sleeping? It seemed to me like you turned every bad thing you did to other people back on yourself ten times worse. You might've acted like a bad person, but you never were a bad person. You were never the kind of person who would do something so evil to someone he loved for no good reason other than hurting them. You literally just told me that: You wanted to leave to protect us from whatever danger you thought you were posing to us. So, what were you thinking with Korra?"
Bolin gaped.
"While you were with her were you thinking about how horrible you were going to make her feel?"
"No."
"Then what were you thinking about?"
"I... I don't know."
"Yes, you do." Asami snapped the words, but then she paused, the heat going out of her. She was understandably upset, Bolin thought, but she was doing a remarkable job of restraining it. "I want you to tell me what you were thinking, because that's what's going to determine how angry I get here. I'm not happy about it, if what you just told me is true. Well, it has to be true. It makes everything make so much sense. It explains it all. Honestly, I'm really unhappy about it. But I need you to tell me your side of this. What were you thinking?"
"I was confused," Bolin said, and it was the honest truth. "There was a part of me that needed..." He stopped and shook his head. He didn't know what he was trying to say. "I wanted to... I did all that terrible stuff to you all. I pushed you all away so I was completely alone, or I felt completely alone, and there was part of me that wanted to feel like someone didn't completely despise me. I wanted to feel like a real person, not whatever busted up, brain-damaged psychopath I was at the time. Korra kept extending all this love toward me and she kept being so nice no matter what awful things I did. I don't know. I was looking for something in her, but I didn't find it, so in the end it didn't matter. I don't know that it would've mattered if I had found what I was looking for, either, because then I would still have used her. I don't know if that makes what I did any better or if it makes it worse. I went to her room with every intent of hurting her, but that got lost until after everything was all said and done, and by then I was too afraid to face up to what I did, so the old stand-by of get out of Zaofu kicked back in and I went."
"And?"
"And I've never regretted anything more in my life. I told you earlier that when I left Zaofu, I didn't like who I was. That wasn't exactly right. I hated myself more than any person has any right to hate himself. I hated myself so much that I couldn't even think about killing myself because that would be too easy, because killing myself would've been too kind a punishment for the things I'd done, for the thing I did to Korra. I knew what I'd done would hurt her and I had done so much wrong to all of you that I didn't want to be Bolin anymore. I couldn't live with myself, so I detached. I pretended to be someone else. I called myself Ping and I told anyone who asked that I was a nonbender coming off a short stay in Zaofu so that no one would think to trace me back there. And I didn't just say I was a nonbender. I didn't earthbend for... For months. I stayed with Hokki for what, three or four months? Not a single pebble that whole time, and the only time I earthbent before that was when I fled from the attack in Gaoling, because if I hadn't done it I'd have died and I was too panicked to think any better."
"Are you sorry?"
All Bolin could do was nod. He couldn't even bring himself to open his eyes. He didn't know when he'd closed them, didn't know when his face had turned back to the floor yet again.
"Then we can make it work."
He didn't know if it was a laugh that came out of him, but there was some short, clipped kind of noise that drew Asami to her feet, and the lump in Bolin's throat made it impossible to tell her to sit back down again. And then she was beside him, her arms around him in what might've been the first genuinely compassionate gesture he'd encountered since leaving Lanxi, because as much as Sun tried, her hugs couldn't hold a candle to Asami's.
They stood together for a long time that Bolin spent working to hold back emotions he'd not expected to come forth. It was hard, with Asami so near, with her generosity and compassion. She should hate him. She should despise him as much as Korra despised him, but somehow, even through her obvious anger at his admission, she'd found the capacity somewhere inside her to forgive him. And maybe she hadn't even forgiven him-he could never know that-but perhaps she would try to understand.
Bolin and Asami sat largely in quiet for the rest of the afternoon, and it was after sundown when Bolin roused Shibu from her nap and the three of them headed back to the commune. Even after so long, the butterflies still fluttered about in Bolin's stomach because no matter how many times he tried to think about it, he couldn't imagine where things might go from here.
"So earlier when I asked you why you bring this animal out with you, you kind of dodged my question," Asami said as they neared the commune's border. "You want to elaborate?"
"You remember when we were coming home from Baihe Island, when I collapsed and you and Korra kept feeling around on me."
"And your heartbeat was all messed up."
"Yeah. That didn't really go away."
"What? Are you okay? What's wrong?"
"No, no, it's not happening right now. But if I strain myself too hard it can kick in and... Well it's not good when it happens. Shibu comes out with me so that if I feel it coming on, I can get back home."
Asami looked troubled.
"It's better now than it was when I got here, I'll put it that way. It happens less frequently now, and for the most part I know what makes it happen. I can't run real long distances anymore. I'm good on the sprint, but not much else, and if I panic it makes me more prone to it."
"Oh."
Bolin stopped outside of the chieftain's yurt in the center of the commune and glanced out toward the airship. "Do you want a cup of tea?"
"I should probably head back."
Bolin nodded. He couldn't blame Asami for not wanting to stick around for too much longer. She'd already been gone all day. "What are you going to tell them? Opal and Korra, I mean."
"What do you want me to tell them?"
He shrugged. "I'd rather be the one to tell Opal. And as for Korra, I guess that's your call. You can tell her that you know what happened, that I explained everything to you, but..." He paused and dug his toes nervously into the sand. "But don't apologize to her for me, okay? I want to apologize to her myself, if I can figure out how to do it."
"Well, you walk up to her and say-"
"No," Bolin interrupted Asami a little more sharply than he intended. "I can't just tell her. Words don't mean a thing coming from a guy that did the things I did. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'll have to show her I'm sorry some other way. I'll have to prove it through what I do, not through what I say, and even then, I don't know that she'll let me. I wouldn't blame her if she didn't."
"Does that mean you're going to come home with us?"
"It means I'm going to weigh my options."
Asami nodded, and after that she pecked him gently on the cheek and walked off without looking back. He watched her go until she disappeared between the yurts, and then he headed back to Sun's. At the very least, he needed to drop Shibu off. At the best, he might get in a few words.
Sun was there, as he expected, but instead of working on her embroidery she was just sitting, reclined against the support of her loft looking contemplative and perhaps a little troubled. Still, Bolin knocked, and when Sun looked toward the entrance, he poked his head in.
"I put Shibu back in her pen and gave her some extra-"
"Get in here, you idiot."
He went in.
"Well?"
Bolin practically crumpled onto the floor opposite Sun, and he folded his hands in his lap and now he did fidget. It didn't matter if he fidgeted in front of Sun. There was nothing he could do in front of her that would embarrass him anymore.
"I told her everything."
"Everything?"
"Everything."
"And how'd she take it?"
"It seems like she still wants me to go home with them."
"Are you going to?"
He didn't know. He really, truly didn't know. Bolin shook his head and kept at his fidgeting.
"You're considering it now, though, aren't you?"
He nodded.
"Well, let's iron it out, then. Why do you want to stay here?"
"I can be successful here. I can live a good, happy life here and make something of myself."
"You can do that in Republic City, too."
Bolin looked up. Though her face stayed firm and blank, tears rimmed Sun's eyes. He didn't like to see her cry.
"What's the matter?" Bolin asked.
"I knew it was going to happen sooner or later," Sun said sadly. "I knew you weren't going to stay forever."
Wasn't he, though?
"Bo, let's be honest with each other here: You've been here half a year, right? And how many friends outside of me and your hunting party do you have?"
Bolin opened his mouth to answer, but Sun cut him off.
"None, that's how many. And I don't even know that I'd call the hunting party your friends as much as I'd call them some stupid fraternity that accepts you because of your lavabending. Don't get me wrong, they like you, but if you were just some generic earthbending bozo they wouldn't give you the time of day."
"Ouch."
"You know I'm right."
He did.
"And since you got here, how often have you talked about the life you left behind? How many times have you mentioned those girls?"
Now he thought on it, he'd talked about them all the time. It hadn't always been pleasant conversation, to be fair, but he couldn't recall a serious discussion where he hadn't referenced something that had happened back home or in Zaofu, even if it was something that happened years and years ago.
Sun deflated a bit in Bolin's silence, and he felt it. He wasn't surprised to see her eyes on the floor. He wasn't surprised to hear a well-concealed quiver in her voice when she said, "This has never been your home, Bolin. This is just another stop on your way back to where you belong. You and I both know that. We've always known that, no matter how much we played pretend like you were going to stay here."
"Sun," Bolin pleaded, "listen..."
"I've listened to you a lot," she said in interruption. "I've listened to you two or three or four times a week for the last several months when you showed up in the middle of the night all riddled with panic. I think it's time you shut up for a few minutes and listened to me."
Bolin shut up.
"I wasn't kidding when I said that I didn't want you to leave. I'll miss you. But it would be selfish of me to make you stay when there are people-a lot of people-who are waiting for you back in the city. You told me when you first got here that you showed up so that we could help you get back on your feet again. You came here so that we could help you strengthen your earthbending and get back into shape, and all the emotional stuff was just an extra benefit. My mom can't stand to see people suffering like you were, so she was bound to help you there. But let's be honest here, Bo, we can't help you anymore. We've done everything there is to do for a guy in your situation, and any progress you make from here on out won't be the result of our coaching. Anything you do from now on will be totally on you, and it doesn't matter where you're at. You can make progress anywhere. It just seems to me like the last thing you might need help with is repairing your old relationships, and who better to help you with that than the people you left behind?"
There was nothing to be said in argument, and Bolin knew it. Sun was absolutely right, but she usually was when it came to matters like this.
"You've been thinking about this all day, haven't you?" Bolin asked.
Sun just nodded. Then she sniffled. She rubbed at her nose with the back of her hand. "Go home, you jerk."
The rest of that night Bolin racked his brain over the circumstance, over all the things that Sun had said. He thought about his progress, because in the past whenever he reached a plateau in his recovery, he moved to a new place that would force him to progress even more, but he'd hit a plateau months ago and hadn't forced himself away. Sure, he'd gotten better at managing his panics and working through the aftermath of horrific nightmares, but he could do that anywhere. It was just like Sun said: He didn't have to be in the desert to work on internal issues like that.
He thought on the relationships he'd built in the commune and how, apart from Sun and Yan, every one of those relationships still felt somehow superficial even after so long. Certainly he'd learned to blend in with the crowd, to laugh at the jokes and take a jab here or there for the benefit of the others. He'd learned how to engage with some kind of sense of humor, even if it wasn't on par with the sense of humor he used to have. But he didn't lie awake at night thinking about those people or their well-being. He didn't worry about them the same way that he worried about Mako, Korra, Asami, and Opal.
And even then, now he'd talked to them both it hit Bolin why he'd been able to get along so well with Sun in the first place: She was like a weird sand bending version of Asami. They thought the same way. They were open to speaking with him in the same way. Stranger still, both of them had said virtually the exact same thing to him: Doing bad things doesn't make someone a bad person, not if they try to fix it.
When it came down to it, Bolin realized that there was very little keeping him there. Fear was the primary factor. He was afraid to go back, but nothing was going to alleviate that fear except for going back, and that reality rendered it a moot point. There was Shibu, but she didn't need him. She'd bonded with Sun more in the last few months than she'd ever done before, so Bolin felt confident that Sun could keep Shibu happy and that Shibu could keep Sun happy. The hunting party would get on perfectly well without him: They'd gotten along perfectly well before he'd arrived. His absence wouldn't hurt them in the slightest.
All signs pointed back to Republic City, and they were signs that Bolin simply couldn't ignore. There was nothing left for him to do in the commune except grow old and waste away, but there was plenty to do in Republic City. There was a brother to support and friends with whom he needed to rekindle a bond. There were people he'd betrayed and hurt, and he needed to make it up to them somehow. He needed to make amends, and the only way he was going to do that was if he could access them in person.
It was like the decision had been made for him.
The next morning Bolin spoke to Yan, and everything after that happened far too fast for his liking. Sun cried her eyes out when he told her that he was going, but she helped him clean out his yurt and store his things away for transport to the airship, and she barely said a word the whole time. Asami and Opal helped, too, and their talking more than made up for Sun's quiet.
The day after that, Bolin dragged his wicker trunk to the airship and took careful inventory to make certain he'd not forgotten anything he might need. That night an dinner was held in his honor, a dinner attended by Sun and Yan and the hunting party to which none of Opal, Asami, or Korra were invited. It was his farewell dinner, and Bolin was contented by it.
The third morning he returned his sandstone yurt to the earth, went to Sun's hut to say his farewells to Shibu, and he received one last tearful hug from Sun. He departed on the airship with the girls before noon. Too exhausted to feel sad, he made his way back to the airship's bunks, and on the way there, for the first time since he'd decided to go home, he came face to face with Korra.
It struck him then that she hadn't been out of the airship in three or four days. She looked awful, and the look she gave him was awful, and the way that look made his stomach turn to water was awful, too.
"Hi," Bolin said dumbly, unsure what else to say. He regretted it at once when Korra's eyes narrowed, when she went all rigid.
"It's good to see you."
Korra had said the words all flat and impersonal. She said the words as a formality only, not because she truly meant them. The tone of her voice said that clearly enough. Bolin couldn't feel her through the airship's metal floor panels, but he didn't need his earthbending to know she was lying. There was no way in the world that she'd ever find it good to see him.
"I'm happy you decided to come home."
Again, with the tone. Again, with the detachment. It was enough to make Bolin feel sick. It was enough to shoot a jolt of panic into his middle, but Bolin didn't act on it. He let it warm his stomach and spread into his chest so that when he finally said, "Don't lie," it came out with uncharacteristic evenness, and then he forced himself to walk on by.
And Korra just stared.
