Blue Spirit
By Saber Girl Jaina/Hyperion Rising
This is the story of a rebel, a traitor, a patriot. This is the story of the Blue Spirit.
-
He bought the mask at a fire festival, a week before his one of his best friends disappeared, and well before the Fire Lord revealed that he was fucking batshit insane by attacking the airbenders.
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He met Hakora the same night he bought the mask. She wasn't wearing a mask, for which he was grateful right up to his dying day, because if she'd been wearing one, he would never have recognized her the second time he saw her. She was the daughter of an aide to the Northern Water Tribe ambassador and she was beautiful. He asked her her name, and she told him. He asked her to dance. She said she didn't know any Fire Nation dances. He offered to teach her. She agreed.
-
The second time he saw Hakora was a year after the war started. He'd left the Fire Nation, unwilling to be a part of the slaughter, helpless to stop it. He was headed to Omashu, where he had a friend. Maybe he could join the army, do some little bit of good.
Hakora appeared to have left her people as well, because he found her traveling with a company of Earth Kingdom soldiers, acting as their medic. To be specific, he found her in what he had been assured was a good town to buy an ostrich-horse, but was a burnt out skeleton of a settlement, a barely abandoned battlefield when he got there.
Their were no ostrich-horses to be had – the Fire Nation had burnt the stables – so he bought supplies, more supplies than he could really afford or carry, because there was nothing he could do except maybe inject a little money into whatever was left of the town's economy.
He was walking down the body lined street, staggering under the weight of his food bag, when he nearly tripped over her. She fixed him with a glare, but didn't take her water encased hands away from the Earth Kingdom soldier she was healing.
"Hakora?"
A spike of ice was in her hand, fear in her eyes. "How do you know my name?"
He dropped his bag and thrust out an instinctive shield of fire.
Hakora led the mob that chased him out of town.
-
He didn't go to Omashu. It was plain to him after being chased out of that town that no one who hadn't known him before the war – in other words, the entire population of the Earth Kingdom minus maybe twelve – would want anything to do with him.
He couldn't do nothing, though. He had to do something, anything, to fix the war that had put that fear into Hakora's eyes.
-
He went back to the Fire Nation. Slowly, cautiously, he gathered to him those who opposed Fire Lord Sozin's madness. He became the Blue Spirit. They became his soldiers. Together, they became rebels.
-
For a while, for a brief, wonderful blink of the world's eyes, they seemed to have a chance. The Earth Kingdom sent envoys to the Blue Spirit, and one of them was a blue eyed, dark haired healer who had eschewed her country's isolationism to join them.
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He sat on a rough wooden chair in a ratty inn on the outskirts of a decrepit city in his mask and his cloak and he received, one by one, the Earth Kingdom representatives. And when he came to the blue eyed girl, he asked her: "Will you dance with me?"
"I don't know any Fire Nation dances."
"I can teach you."
And he took off his mask.
-
A week later the military stumbled upon one of their bases and took it. They tortured the location of another out of their soldiers, and the Rebellion was lost. The head of the Earth Kingdom delegation decided it wasn't worth the risk of staying, and the Blue Spirit didn't blame him.
Hakora stayed.
-
She was his lieutenant, always by his side as their hope and their army fell apart around them. She was his friend and his confidant, and he'd been in love with her since he was thirteen, and he knew before he died, just before he died, that she loved him too.
It was their last base, their last stand, and as the soldiers came crashing through the gate into the earthen fort and he lay dying from an arrow wound, she pulled his mask off his face and she kissed him.
"I love you, Kuzon."
And then she pulled the mask back into place and turned to face the soldiers. He would die the Blue Spirit. As for herself, Hakora would die fighting.