In any other world Daichi would have been a waterbender.
He would have been able to provide an essential good and service to the people of his family, his town and the world. He would have trained as to be able to let the flow of the water be as natural to him and soft to his touch as his own blood. He would have given anything to learn the restorative and curative properties of water bending and he would have used them to treat and help the wounded or sick people that he would rescue in his attempts to make this unjust world a better and more balanced place.
And he would be a firefighter. For he would have learned that though every discipline takes from the other three as to be more complete, water and fire were at opposite ends. And water froze and brought calm where fire thrived and destroyed.
In this world Daichi was not a waterbender. He was a firefighter though. A fire bending firefighter. Because even though he hadn't been borned from water benders and he would loathe that fact for all of his life, he took the conditions of his own birth and did with them as much as he could.
He could loathe, but he wouldn't do it a lot. After all he did love his parents. He loved most people. And the ones he didn't get to love, he satisfied himself with just trying to understand.
The Si Wong tribes were such people. He had been working with them in the Si Wong Desert for some months now. He had been of use and as such he was treated gentler than most strangers. For starters they had decided to let him alive and with all his possessions, which was not common.
He had been in the desert before and his encounter with the tribes hadn't ended unscathed. Fortunately for him that had been a long time ago and they appeared not to remember it or decided to not care about it if they did.
When he had come back a better, older and more rounded up man they had put him to the test in front of their gods. He was not a very religious man himself but his objective here was to help as only he knew how and he wasn't going to antagonize over it. If they considered him worthy he would do his duty in this territory. If they didn't, he would have to find out a way of doing it anyway without them noticing.
They had sent him to survive a day and a night in the shadow of the Si Wong Rock. When he had appeared the next morning without any wounds or limbs missing they had glared at him with incredulous eyes but had led him to one of their camps where he was given food and water and a place to spend the night.
From that day he had been performing his duty as a firefighter along the desert. He had heard that for some reason a lot of fires were occurring in the towns of the region. Which was not uncommon considering the extreme conditions in which these people lived, but numbers had risen spectacularly over the last few weeks leading him to believe that these couldn't be just bad luck.
Daichi had his own theories as to what could be the cause. Since the last Harmonic Convergence spirits roamed the lands of the humans free and without limits. A lot of them had taken residence in the sands and dunes that populated the desert. As of his own experience he knew most of them were not very friendly and were violently territorial. And some of them were also fire spirits, so that could be a cause.
But he wasn't keen on this line of thinking. For one, it didn't explain why now out of every other period in time. It had been a long time since the death of Korra, the previous avatar, and they could have caused chaos as soon as they got to the place. Which they did but not on such a huge scale and the trouble had stopped after a few confrontations. The desert had been in a strange and rustic coexistence between humans and spirits ever since. It didn't make sense for them to start causing trouble now, once again. Or at least Daichi didn't have enough info to believe so.
No, his second theory had much more weight in his mind. The Triad of the Fire Bloods. Daichi despised the name and the members of the criminal group. They were a group of firebending criminals that upheld the ideal that the fire nation as the conquering force that had once been should come back with full force and they would undo all the wrongs that the last century and the last three avatars had brought. As if somehow they had taken the exact wrong lesson from the very short lived earth empire that had left the whole earth kingdom in disarray after the attempt to transition to democracy.
It wasn't a failure but Daichi didn't consider it a success either. Proof of it was that Ba Sing Se still had a queen, even if she was just a relic representing past times that the people admired and nothing more. If Dylia heard him call her that she would punch him straight in the face, but it wasn't like she also didn't think it true.
The Triad of the Fire Bloods had started to expand along almost every territory save for the north and south pole, and they had caused a whole bunch of trouble in every chance they got. But they usually worked in the cities, taking advantage of the sewers systems and the overpopulation to escape when the security forces arrived at the scene of their latest crimes.
It was weird if they suddenly operated in the desert where almost no one lived and there were few people worth robing or intimidating. He had heard strange rumours about weird stuff happening over in Ba Sing Se. Something about the city itself, but he didn't know anything about that and he wasn't worried about it, Dylia could take care of whatever could happen.
Apart from that news travelled far with the sudden mass production of the radio devices, but in the desert that wasn't as true. The Si Wong tribes prefered to isolate themselves from external influences which meant he hadn't heard from the world in a bit. He could have bought a radio from the beetle-headed merchants they encountered from time to time, but he didn't want to tempt his luck and push too much at the welcomeness of the tribes.
Either way this smelled of Fire Bloods through and true so when a signal from a messenger directed them to the area of the Misty Palms Oasis Daichi knew that he hadn't to look for the city in the horizon but for the smoke over in the sky. Just a few days of travel later he saw it as clear as a mountain in the middle of nowhere.
Big plumbs of black smoke billowed over what had once been a merchant town for the passing traveler. Now in its place fire trudged its way from roof to roof and building to building, consuming as an over encompassing force everything it was allowed to touch.
People had fled, though not all in due time and some shouts and cries of help still could be heard from inside the town streets. Or maybe it was the shadows of the spirits that had installed themselves here, cooperating with the humans and making life more interesting for them. Daichi's spiritual sense was stronger and more open than most other people, this was usually good and it had helped him in the past with his job, but now it only brought him more pain as he advanced into the town ready for work.
The sand sailers gave him room, they had seen what he was capable of. He did not consider himself specially talented in his bending or remarkable in any way from other benders. But he was hard working and he had trained all his life to overcome the limits of his own power. So they knew that he was more than capable, but they hadn't seen him angy. And oh boy, was he angry.
Fire was born from within. Most firebenders understood somewhat instinctually that fire came from the stomach like it had for the dragons, if they had really existed which Daichi didn't doubt. But he thought and felt his fire as coming from his lungs. More exactly from the air in them. Fire needed air to be born and grow and so Daichi worked it as an extension of his own breathing and the air around him and as such he felt in complete control of it as long as he was in complete control of his own breathing.
Maybe in another life he wouldn't have been a water bender but an air bender. Such were the twists of fate.
Daichi centered himself between two buildings and he let his spirit and body resonate with his ire between them. A small bead of red and orange started to grow in the middle as he added more and more of his own fire and the surrounding ones, always forcing it to remain the same size even though it roared to expand.
After some few moments of tension and build up he let his control go and it exploded with incredible force just on top of the structures slightly shaking them.
The sudden explosion sucked the air in a bubble around itself with such force that the two buildings stopped illuminating their surroundings in an instant. Their fires dying off but the smoking continuing regardless.
This was not very practical and it took a lot of power out of him. But in this region water benders were lacking and they would be slower nonetheless. He had been exercising taking control of big patches of fire that weren't his own and making them bow to him, or at least the oxygen in them, but he was not there yet and if he tried it the process would be even slower.
As such he was content with exerting himself to his limit and saving as much of the town as he could.
Every time he repeated the process, two or three people of the tribes entered the building in search for survivors and to quell the areas that were likely to catch on fire once more if left unattended. They were distant and sometimes even violent, but he knew they also cared and protected their neighbours when they faced the same enemy.
After hours of working and just as Daichi was about to reach his limits, only a quarter of the town having survived the destruction during the rest of the day, was when two sand sailers brought a tied down man in a red silk suit that didn't belong in the desert.. In his back an emblem was sewn. A man with arms extended at his side and his mouth open to the sky as if roaring, three streams of fire being expelled from his hand and mouth. The emblem of the Fire Bloods.
The man was beaten up and swollen and part of his own clothes were drenched in smoke and what appeared to be blood leaving Daichi to wonder what the tribe people had done to him before bringing him here.
They didn't say anything to him and he wasn't their leader, not by a mile, but he recognized this as an act of gratitude and maybe to quell his own anger that had slipped before. If he wanted to know something of this man now was the time to ask for who knew what would become of him later at the hands of his captors.
Daichi opened his mouth to talk and just then realized how tired he was. It wasn't just his body that had been screaming at him to stop for a couple of hours now. It was also his spiritual awareness that had sensed the essence of hundreds of spirits having died without escape and not being able to go back even to their own realm.
Every word Daichi spoke felt as if it came out through all the smoke that the town had generated.
"Why?" He asked.
The man tried to laugh maybe to be dramatic but it instead came out as a wounded cough.
"You would be one to ask." He replied with a thick accent from somewhere Daichi had been but he couldn't put the effort in trying to remember.
What had he meant by that? Was this something that had something to do with him? Or was it just a taunt, a way of saying "go stick your questions where the sun doesn't shine"?
"Why are you not in Ba Sing Se?" He asked instead while still turning over the words on his brain.
The man dedicated him a crazy look, like he had just asked him why he hadn't decided to go conquer the moon instead. He looked at him like that for a moment and then realization dawned on him, his face contorting into a pathetic frown.
"You don't know." He said.
"Know what?"
"I…" He started and shook his head as if his mind was haunted by what he had just thought or remembered. "No, if you want to know you should go. Go and see."
Daichi hadn't any more questions, at least not to this man. In the past he would have argued with him long past the point where it was obvious he wouldn't listen to reason and abandon the triad. He wasn't that boy anymore and so he knew it wasn't worth it.
He was not a vengative man. Any other person would have maybe taken the chance to kill him themselves but Daichi found no pleasure or release in taking lives. His own wrath dissolved as he saved lives and foiled the destruction that others brought to the world. So he let the tribes people take him and do with him what they wished. He wouldn't kill him but he was not going to let him go either. Other people would decide his fate, or maybe their gods would.
Over the next days he let those thoughts and the conversation ponder in his brain while he worked on the town. He didn't need to do it, every fire he put out only left ruins behind that wouldn't even work as the foundation of a new building, but he kept at it anyway in the hopes of maybe finding someone else that was trapped or in need of help, which didn't happen. At least it kept his body occupied.
During that time and the time he took to travel to Ba Sing Se a thought had entered and taken shelter in his mind and he couldn't answer it no matter what. It bothered him to a point that some nights it wouldn't even let him sleep.
There was one person that could have prevented this before it happened or as it was happening. A person whose sole job and duty was to take care of matters like this where the lives of innocent people and spirits were in danger.
Where had Cyrus been? Where had the avatar, his best friend, been? He should have taken care of the Triad in an instant. He was as powerful as people came and in his avatar state he appeared to be a monster born from the spirit realm. Daichi knew him as a gentle giant and a caring and calm man but he tended to scare strangers just by his presence. He wouldn't stand for an atrocity like this. A fact which bothered him a lot.
Daichi had seen him deal with situations like this on a couple of occasions when he had travelled with him and the whole group. And even though those times were past and most of them had moved on to their own duties and desires, Cyrus still had to take care of the world. So what had happened?
That question haunted his mind as he stoked the fire in his custom motorized sand sailer to push itself up a strainously high dune and he came face to face with where Ba Sing Se should have been.
In his place a crater the size of the city consumed his view with a deafening and threatening silence coming from the darkness inside.