He woke up, and within a breath found himself wishing he hadn't. It was not a good sign when just the simple act of inhaling left him with the feeling of a knife sliding between his ribs.
Even opening his eyes hurt. It didn't even do him a lot of good, as the only light seemed to be a dim, silvery-blue glow positioned somewhere around his stomach, which didn't help much when he was flat on his back on a slab of rock. Trying to raise his head to see the source of the glow proved both impossible and hell on his neck, and he quickly gave up the endeavor with a sigh that he instantly regretted as it sent another stabbing pain piercing through his chest, his breath ending on a shuddering gasp.
He had meant to die. How had he managed to mess that up?
It was only with the shuffle of cloth that he realized someone else was there, the sound of someone else's breathing barely audible over the pounding in his ears.
"Ghazan."
Ming-Hua. Ming-Hua was alive? How? Hadn't Mako killed her? He'd been so sure- firebending did not lend itself to nonlethal takedowns, and then with his collapse of the cavern, how had she-
"Ghazan!" She was above him now, looking harried and ragged in the dim light, but definitely still kicking, and seemingly in much better shape than he was. Good. If he had seriously hurt her, he wasn't sure he would have been able to forgive himself.
He grinned up at her, which also hurt, but he was beginning to accept that literally everything would for at least the foreseeable future. "Hey, Ming-Hua. How's it going?"
The pain was also worth it, to see the tightness around her mouth and eyes ease just a little bit. "Terribly. Don't move. You're just going to make it worse."
He breathed in again carefully, the act making him acutely aware of every rib and the fact that he currently had about twice as many as was usually advised. "What's 'it'?"
"Everything."
He took a minute to think on this, during which time she disappeared from his field of vision and the glow near his stomach slightly brightened.
"How are we alive?"
Down by his stomach he heard an exasperated groan. "If I tell you, will you stop talking? Which also isn't doing you any favors, by the way."
"… Sure."
Another minute passed, though only the sound of dripping water gave him any way to tell. The glow by his stomach remained steady.
"That Mako kid and I during our fight ended up in the underground pond below the caverns. I thought I had him dead to rights, but it turned out he's a lightning bender. Little jerk took me out with one shot. I woke up an hour ago, still half submerged in the water and with most of the ceiling caved in, or melted. Your handiwork, I assume.
"Don't answer that.
"Anyway, the collapse had blocked my exit, so I looked around for a while trying to find another way out. I didn't find one, but I found you, half trapped under a boulder and surrounded by crusted over lava just inches away. You got lucky there. Well, except for the hair.
"The boulder wasn't too big and it wasn't holding up anything, so I rolled it off you and dragged you over here where it's a little flatter and drier.
"I've been waiting for you to wake up for a while now."
Lucky was right. Damn. He was surprised he'd ever woken up at all. Except… maybe not so lucky. "Sorry, Ming-Hua, but I don't think I'll be bending us out of here anytime soon." If ever. "I can't feel my legs."
"That's because they've been mostly crushed. I'll start on them after I've made sure all of your major organs are in one piece and you have a working ribcage. And stop talking!"
That… what? Ming-Hua didn't know how to heal. She, like the rest of them, had been self-taught, and she'd mentioned a while ago that learning to heal had never become a priority. "You don't-"
"I'm figuring it out as I go. And if you don't shut up right now, I'll break your jaw and save healing it until last."
Ming-Hua was not one to make idle threats, so he stilled his tongue and concentrated on his breathing. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Hold. Repeat ad nauseam and try not to black out. Focusing on the pain, perversely, made it slightly less awful. Made him feel like he was more in control, like he was just engaging in some masochistic meditative exercise to give himself a heightened awareness of his body. Zaheer would have approved.
Zaheer.
He nearly risked the broken jaw to ask Ming-Hua if she knew what had happened, but she'd been taken out even before he'd brought down the cavern. She wouldn't know. The last either of them had seen of Zaheer was him flying out through the hole in the cavern's ceiling, Avatar Korra in raging, fiery pursuit.
The poison had been doing its work, but no one could stand a chance against an Avatar in the Avatar State. The only question was whether Zaheer had managed to evade her long enough for the mercury to take full effect, and no matter how impressive Zaheer's new abilities, Ghazan was terrifying uncertain about the answer.
They had already lost P'Li, and Ghazan knew they would never truly recover from that, her absence an open wound he had felt keenly and with unexpected sharpness even in the few hours between her death and his latest fight against Bolin. Losing Zaheer as well was… unthinkable.
So he didn't think on it—no point, Zaheer was strong, if they'd managed to survive there was no way he wouldn't—and went back to concentrating on his breathing.
The idea of being Ming-Hua's guinea pig mouse for 'figuring out' healing was not a comforting one—the art was not known to respond well to brute-force experimentation—but it wasn't like they had many options. Ming-Hua was unlikely to be able to escape by herself without causing another collapse, and even if she did, the Avatar's allies had tracked them down. It was doubtful they would have access to the airship they had commandeered, and they were over a hundred miles and several mountain ranges away from the closest town. That was not a distance Ming-Hua would be able to cover on her own without supplies, which they did not have access to without their airship. And in this scenario he was dead anyway, which was not as appealing a thought now that he had seen before him the possibility of a future that didn't involve going back to prison.
So gambling on Ming-Hua teaching herself healing well enough in the next few days to get him on his feet was pretty much all they had.
Fortunately, Ming-Hua was a prodigy in addition to being as stubborn as hell, and it could not have been more than a few hours before the pain of breathing through knives faded to a dull, manageable ache. Which was good, because it was at that point that Ming-Hua fell over, the faint glow of her bending fading away and plunging them into darkness.
"Ming-Hua!" Even in light (ha) of Ming-Hua's recent efforts, leveraging himself up onto his elbows still proved a mistake when the attempt revealed to him that his left arm was broken, the feeling of bone twisting unnaturally enough to cause bile to rise in his throat. His body made an aborted attempt at curling around the injury before it caught on to the fact that he still couldn't feel his legs. "Son of a-!"
"Told you… not to move. Or talk. Idiot."
The relief nearly punched the air out of him. "You alright?"
Even her sigh dripped with exhaustion. "Sort of. Tired."
"Yeah, of course you are. You should sleep."
"Trying."
Except it quickly became evident that in addition to providing light, the act of healing him had also produced most of the ambient heat in the cave, and that was rapidly being leeched away by the walls. They weren't wet, thanks to Ming-Hua, but they were still stuck in a damp mountain cave in the northernmost part of the Earth Kingdom at the tail end of autumn. He was already starting to shiver, and even with a waterbender's resistance to cold taken into account, Ming-Hua weighed perhaps half of what he did and had no body fat to spare.
It took a bit of work to drag Ming-Hua on top of him when he only had one working arm, but she had fortunately collapsed on his right side and didn't fight him when he wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled. Her skin was cold to the touch at first, but she quickly warmed, and she was careful not to jolt his left arm when she shifted into a more comfortable position.
"You are… the lumpiest bed… I've ever slept on."
He grinned against the fall of her hair. "Shh. Blankets don't talk."
By some miracle, they both did manage to get some sleep, and in the morning (evening? He didn't know how much time they'd spent unconscious), after bending both of them some clean water to drink, Ming-Hua resumed her healing efforts.
If he had thought his chest hurt, getting his legs fixed was excruciating. Feeling returned to them before Ming-Hua was even half done setting the bones, so it was something of a mercy when he fainted and didn't regain consciousness until Ming-Hua was done for the day. His legs ached, but it felt much like his chest had when Ming-Hua had finished healing up his ribs; that soreness had faded sometime while they slept, so he considered it a good sign, or at least not a bad one.
Ming-Hua slept across him again that... he was going to stick with night. The previous day he had been too tired himself to notice, but she was bony enough that she really did make a terrible blanket. But she was still warm, and if it weren't for the broken arm, and his worries about Zaheer, and his still-raw and cutting grief whenever his thoughts drifted to P'Li, and the fact that neither he nor Ming-Hua had eaten in two days- okay, he didn't have enough imagination to twist this into something actually pleasant, but they weren't dead, they weren't going back to prison, and they were together. He had not run out of hope quite yet.
The next morning it became evident that Ming-Hua had in fact gone straight past 'figuring out' healing into the realm near-mastery, as when she maneuvered the bones of his left arm back into place and mended the break, he didn't even feel a twinge. He did stagger a little when he pushed himself to his feet, but stretching quickly proved that the result of stiff muscles and not any damage they had both overlooked.
"Good?"
He turned to Ming-Hua with a grin. "Better than ever. Thanks, Ming-Hua." In the abating light of Ming-Hua's healing, he carefully checked his footing before widening his stance. "Now it's my turn."
He could hear the smirk in Ming-Hua's voice as she said, "Yeah, yeah. Just remember to take us out the back. Quietly, if you can. It's been at least a few days; the mountain might already be swarming with White Lotus."
She couldn't see it, but he nodded sharply; he knew what they were up against as well as she. Then he reached out his arms, slowly exhaled as he turned his focus outward, and pulled.
-*O*-
Their caution proved unnecessary; the Avatar's friends had already left, and the White Lotus was nowhere in sight. Neither was their airship, or the Avatar. Or Zaheer. All that remained to give any clue as to what had transpired was an impressively battered landscape, and-
"Shit."
Ghazan jogged over to where Ming-Hua stood near the collapsed entrance to the caverns, her eyes wide in startling rage, riveted on the ground. "What? What is it?" Then he followed her gaze down. For a moment he didn't comprehend what he was looking at; then the full force of it dropped him to his knees. "No."
They had worked so hard. They had given up so much. Endless training. Countless injuries. Thirteen years spent in their own individual hells. P'Li's life.
They had sacrificed everything.
And the puddle of mercury in front of them was almost certain proof that it had all come to nothing. That the Avatar yet lived.
Ming-Hua's voice broke him out of his daze. "It had to be one of the Beifongs. Only a skilled metalbender could have removed the poison."
"Yeah."
"If Zaheer is alive, either he thinks we're dead and made a run for it, or they have him. We need to get to a working radio; there is no way they wouldn't announce the death or capture of the Earth Queen's killer even if the White Lotus doesn't want to acknowledge our existence. We can make further plans when we know which it is." He heard her turn and start to walk away; when he did not immediately follow, her steps faltered, then stopped. "Ghazan?"
"It was all pointless, wasn't it." His hands had started shaking the moment he had seen the puddle and known what it meant, and now they wouldn't stop. "All we've done. All we've been through. P'Li is dead-"
Ming-Hua jerked him to his feet with an icy grip on the back of his robe and snarled in his face, "And we will not follow. We're going to get off this mountain. We're going to find Zaheer. And we're going to live our lives, free. To do anything else would be insulting, to P'Li most of all."
Ghazan could only shake his head. "We can't go back to the Red Lotus. We failed."
Ming-Hua grinned with all her teeth, looking wild and more than a little unhinged. It still managed to be one of the most comforting sights he had ever seen, to know that she could still manage to stand tall and force him to stand beside her. "So we'll make our own way."
-*O*-
Their own way began with finding some food. Ming-Hua remembered her father's teachings on hunting from her days in the Northern Water Tribe, and it did not take long before she tracked down and took out a fox antelope about a mile down the mountain. It was then that they encountered their latest roadblock, because neither of them knew how to start a fire. They had both been raised in cities, the Red Lotus when had they trained with them had always provided food, and when they had been on the lam, they had survived off of a combination of dried goods, a still-working gas stove they'd found in an abandoned apartment in Republic City, and P'Li (who was also the only one of them who knew how to cook beyond 'don't burn it').
It turned out fox antelope skewered on a stick and roasted over a bubbling pool of lava did not taste too bad as long as you hadn't eaten in three days and didn't mind the smell of rotten eggs.
Finding their way to civilization proved a little more problematic; Ghazan could theoretically earthbend the both of them the distance to the nearest town in a couple of days if he didn't mind exhausting himself, but all of their maps had been on the airship. Ming-Hua's best recollection of where the closest town was located was no better than 'about a hundred miles south-ish of what remains of the Northern Air Temple,' and Ghazan had nothing better besides also suggesting they stop at the top of each mountain in their path to try and get a view of where they were going.
It was thus five days later—long since sick of bugs, getting hopelessly lost, and the taste of rotten egg-flavored fox antelope—that they finally staggered into the valley community of Kei Zan, which turned out to be unfortunately prosperous. Even standing at the edge of what appeared to be a poorer district, Ghazan was made painfully aware that from the state of their clothes and hair, they looked like they had been through a war, then forced to sleep on the ground for a week. Both of these things were true, but that didn't mean they wanted everyone to notice.
At least they didn't smell; traveling with a waterbender meant never having to go without a bath. But they still wouldn't be able to go into Kei Zan without attracting a lot of unwanted attention.
He turned to Ming-Hua. "Any ideas?"
"Find an inn on the outskirts of town, tell them we were robbed on the road, buy a room for the next three days to give us time to regroup and listen to the radio, and pay the innkeeper to track us down a few sets of new clothes."
He stared at her incredulously. "With what money?"
Wordlessly, Ming-Hua pulled a knotted-closed pouch out from under one of her sashes and tossed it to him. It landed heavily in his hand with an audible clink. Without even opening it, he could tell it was full of solid gold coins. Gold had a very… particular feel.
"Where did you get these?"
Ming-Hua shrugged. "Turns out there was a lot of cash in the Earth Queen's treasury. Who knew?"
Zaheer wouldn't approve, was his first thought. Except that wasn't quite right. Zaheer had been vocal about his disgust for the evils committed in pursuit of wealth, but he had also shown himself on more than one occasion to be a pragmatist. The money in the pouch didn't amount to one-thousandth of what Ming-Hua could have taken; this had obviously been just a precaution, and recent events proved it a sensible one.
So instead Ghazan said, "Good thinking. So what are we going to be this time? Newlyweds on our honeymoon?"
"Oh shut up."
-*O*-
They ended up going with cousins on a trip to see family to the east—which was close enough to justify the shared room without raising any eyebrows as to the separate beds—even though it meant Ming-Hua would have to hide her bending while they were in town to avoid arousing anyone's interest. There had been enough problems with bandits in the area recently that their story of being robbed was accepted without question, and within the hour Ghazan found himself wrapped in a new robe, happily inhaling a bowl of leek and turkey duck stew. Sitting across from him at the tiny table in their room, Ming-Hua followed suit, though she skipped the spoon entirely and just poured the stew directly into her mouth.
A few minutes later, the bowls lay empty before them, and Ghazan leaned back in his chair with a sigh. "That is the second best thing I have ever eaten."'
"Best thing was the first thing you ate after Zaheer broke you out?"
He winked at her. "You know it. Those pau buns will live in my memories forever."
Ming-Hua nodded in assent. "I can still taste that glass of mango juice. It might as well have been Spirit World nectar, I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference."
For a moment, they grinned at each other, but the good mood was quickly broken as they both remembered why they were able to make those kinds of jokes at all. "Shit. We need to find Zaheer."
Ming-Hua nodded again, this time more gravely. "Yeah. We have enough cash that you can buy a radio and we'll still be good for a while." She eyed him critically. "Some of it should probably be spent on a haircut. I did what I could with the burnt ends, but it still looks like you had your hair chopped off at the shoulder with a blunt knife."
Ghazan grinned again. "Will do, but I have an idea that I think will save us some time, at least when it comes to learning what happened to Zaheer."
-*O*-
"So you left your hometown right after learning about the Earth Queen's death?"
Ghazan nodded and tried to look somber. "Yeah. Meng and I thought it a good time to go see our grandmother. We didn't know if we'd get another chance."
The innkeeper's wife nodded sympathetically. "I understand. In times of tragedy, that is when we most desire to be close to the ones we love."
"Exactly. But that means we haven't heard any news since then. This town has to have radios; do you know if they ever caught the revolutionaries who did it?"
The innkeeper's wife looked thoughtful. "Supposedly most of them are dead. They arrested the leader though. A rogue airbender; imagine it! Avatar Aang must be rolling in his grave."
"Horrible," Ghazan agreed, not letting his terrible relief make itself known on his face. So Zaheer was alive. Captured again, but that could be fixed. He had freed them; they owed it to him to return the favor. "How do you even hold someone like that?"
The woman shrugged. "Last I heard he was being detained at Zaofu by the Metal Clan. But he wouldn't be there anymore; Suyin Beifong has always been very adamant about her city having no prisons. Beyond that, I have no idea. No one has ever had to imprison an airbender before."
Ghazan nodded thoughtfully before bowing to her. "Thank you. It is good to know our queen's murderers have been brought to justice."
She gave a shallow bow in return, obviously pleased with his manners. "I am always happy to help. Should you need anything, just ask."
"That is most gracious." A thought occurred. "Do you know a good barber?"
-*O*-
Even when focusing most of her attention on their new radio, Ming-Hua took the time to smirk at him every few minutes.
"Shut up. The guy said short hair and clean shaven are fashionable right now, and I thought it'd better for us if I look like everyone else. We don't want the White Lotus to get word of people fitting our exact descriptions wandering around the Earth Kingdom, even if we are supposed to be dead.
"In fact, maybe you should-"
"Not a chance."
Ghazan shrugged. "Can I at least comb your hair and put it up? It's starting to resemble an elephant rat's nest, and you would at least look a little different with-"
"No." Seeing his startled expression at the harshness of her tone, Ming-Hua made a visible effort to soften her words as she said, "P'Li… always did that for me."
"Well, as fond as she was of the bald look on Zaheer, I don't think you could quite pull it off, which is really your only option if you never want your hair to be brushed again."
Ming-Hua didn't look at him, determinedly focusing her stare on the radio.
"Ming-Hua, please don't make me pull the 'P'Li thought your hair was beautiful and wouldn't want it to look like an elephant rat's nest' card."
That at least made the corner of her mouth quirk up, though she still didn't look at him. "I think you just did."
"Well, is it working?"
She sighed and finally glanced at him from the corner of her eye. "Just go get the damn comb. And don't think having short hair now means you can pretend that you've forgotten how to deal with knots."
-*O*-
The radio confirmed what the innkeeper's wife had told him; unfortunately it didn't give them anything else.
"So now we just have to find him."
Braiding was harder than P'Li had made it look; Ghazan was already on his third attempt, and Ming-Hua distracting him with talking wasn't helping. "How? We can't sneak into Zaofu again; they found out about Aiwei, so the tunnel must be blocked off by now. And everyone I can think of who would know where Zaheer is are public figures and decent in a fight; I'm not sure there is anyone we could capture, question, and then take out without it being noticed."
"The White Lotus has no reason to hide from its members where they've taken him," Ming-Hua pointed out. "They think we're dead, and they'd be aware from talking to Korra how the Red Lotus deals with its failures. We- they wouldn't rescue him even if they did know his location. So…"
Ghazan quickly caught on to her line of thinking. "So we know of the location of several White Lotus bases. We wait a few weeks to make sure the information has spread, grab a guard on patrol at one of the smaller strongholds, interrogate him, then disappear him with no sign of our involvement. With any luck, they'll think a platypus bear got him, or bandits."
Ming-Hua turned her head to smirk at him. "Exactly." Unfortunately this had the unintended side effect of pulling her hair from his grip, ruining his braiding attempt.
Ghazan sighed. "Face forward again, will you? I've got to get this down eventually."
-*O*-
It took two guards, at two separate White Lotus locations. The first had been a new recruit who didn't know anything, and they didn't want to risk drawing attention by taking out two White Lotus at the same location.
They had managed to purchase a used Satomobile in Kei Zan along with supplies, but it still took several weeks to get to the first White Lotus base. They decided to lie low for a while after that in order to prevent the White Lotus from noticing a pattern in recent guard disappearances, and it still took another week of driving to get from the first White Lotus stronghold to the second.
All told, nearly three months had passed since their defeat in the caverns near the Northern Air Temple by the time they managed to pummel the location of Zaheer's new prison out of a guard. That taken care of, Ming-Hua slit his throat and they dumped the body—tied to a heavy rock and stripped of all White Lotus regalia—in a fast moving river twenty miles downstream from the base.
The news wasn't good.
"Buried half a mile beneath an inactive volcano on the southern edge of the Earth Kingdom, chained up and locked in a metal cell, surrounded by a legion of metalbenders and firebenders." Standing by the riverbed a further ten miles away from the White Lotus base, Ghazan shook his head in disbelief. "We are so fucked."
Ming-Hua frowned thoughtfully. "We know where the plans for the prison's construction are located. We should start by stealing them, making a copy, then returning them before their absence is noticed. If we know his cell's exact location within the volcano-"
"We can't do shit. I'm not a metalbender, and lavabending is about as subtle as a rock thrown at your head. Or, you know, less, because then at least there is more than one person who could have done it who isn't a close, personal friend of the Avatar.
"If I just melt Zaheer out of his cell, the White Lotus will know it was us. Lavabending is just too distinctive, and if I survived, they'll assume you did too. We can't afford to let them find out we're alive. Zaheer will be hard enough to hide on his own, but releasing a bulletin with a description of the three of us would have every bounty hunter in the world breathing down our necks. We can't live like that, and I'm tired of running." He did not raise the possibility of them splitting up to more easily evade pursuit. That was nearly as unimaginable as not attempting to break Zaheer out at all.
Ming-Hua did not seem fazed by his rant. If anything, she seemed rather amused. "You know there is an obvious solution to that particular problem."
Ghazan blinked. She couldn't possibly think-
"Did you not hear me? I'm not a metalbender."
Her expression remained placid. "Have you ever tried?"
"No, but only one in a hundred earthbenders can metalbend. Even if by some miracle I turned out to be one of them, the only practitioners who could teach me are in Republic City or Zaofu. We are not returning to either of those places; we'd be arrested on sight."
"I wasn't suggesting that we do. You should just teach yourself."
"Metalbending went undiscovered by earthbenders for thousands of years. I barely know the basic idea behind it. How would I even start to 'teach myself'?"
Ming-Hua shrugged. "The same way we've taught ourselves everything we know. When it becomes necessary, we figure it out. Sometimes in three days, buried alive in a dark cave while the self-destructive jerk who got you stuck there is dying at your feet."
He stared at her. "That… wasn't subtle."
She shrugged again. "No point using a stiletto when you have a sledgehammer. At least you have longer than I did; for some reason, the White Lotus really likes keeping their enemies alive. Probably a holdover from that whole deal with Fire Lord Ozai. You can take some time.
"Just… don't take too long."
Ghazan nodded grimly, knowing that both of them were thinking of Zaheer in chains, half a mile beneath the earth, with no expectation of ever being rescued. Hope and their purpose had been what kept them going in prison; Zaheer no longer had either. "I'll… try. Even if I do figure it out, though, it might take a while before I'm comfortable enough with it to attempt staging a rescue. What are you going to be doing with all that time?"
"Well…" Ming-Hua gazed off into the distance. "If we don't want to run forever, then we need somewhere to go. I was thinking a farm."
He raised an eyebrow at her. "Really?"
She shrugged. "Why not?"
"I don't know how to farm. You weren't raised within a thousand miles of a farm. If Zaheer knows anything about farming, it's from a book and is actually a metaphor for enlightenment."
She grinned that slightly mad grin that he loved so much about her. "Exactly. What was it Zaheer used to say? 'The best place to hide is in plain sight, because that is where no one thinks to look.'"
Ghazan thought about it. "That… makes a surprising amount of sense."
"I thought so."
"I am still one-hundred percent sure that you are misquoting him."
"Well, I never understood half of what he said anyway."
-*O*-
It turned out he was naturally sensitive to impurities in metals—"Told you." "Shut up, Ming-Hua."—which at least explained why he had always been able to sense gold so clearly, but the actual process of using those impurities to bend the metal proved more elusive. Meanwhile, Ming-Hua investigated a large, isolated village on the eastern edge of the Earth Kingdom, and through some radio communiques managed to confirm that there were a few dozen untended acres of fertile land up for sale that sounded appealingly remote from the village itself (and surprisingly well within their budget; it turned out that even a couple pounds of the Earth Queen's gold went a long way).
They headed eastwards towards the village in their Satomobile, Ming-Hua driving while he practiced his metalbending with a piece of ore they had bought as a souvenir in one of the weirder Earth Kingdom towns on their way. By the time they arrived several weeks later—having only taken a brief detour to sneak into one of the White Lotus's libraries and make a copy of the layout of Zaheer's prison—he had managed to crush it into a small brick and was feeling quite pleased with himself; Ming-Hua herself had spent the time thinking up their new, likely permanent identities.
"If we're not going to set ourselves up as hermits—which I think would attract the bad kind of attention in of itself—they're going to notice my waterbending eventually, and we have no reason to hide your earthbending. Zaheer will have to avoid airbending in front of people, but I doubt he'll be spending that much time in town anyway. If we combine that with the fact that there is no way to disguise some of Zaheer's scars or how built both of you are, I was thinking that you could both be conscripted soldiers from Ba Sing Se. You deserted immediately after the Earth Queen was killed. Zaheer can be your older, non-bending brother who stayed to try and help keep order but now wishes to leave in the wake of… let's say his wife's death."
Ghazan looked at her skeptically from the passenger seat. "That seems a bit too close to home."
"We might be living with these identities for years, Ghazan. The closer to the truth they are, the better. We don't have a better shield against questions than having answers no one wants to hear."
"Alright," Ghazan ceded, "They might buy it. But where do you fit into all this?"
"Long distance girlfriend from the Northern Water Tribe. After you left Ba Sing Se, we met up and married in a private ceremony and now wish to settle down, far away from war and the chaos of a city."
For a long moment, Ghazan couldn't think of anything to say. Ming-Hua hadn't quite managed to keep a straight face for the last bit, her voice gaining a distinctly sarcastic lilt on 'chaos' as her mouth twisted in a sardonic smirk, but as for the rest of it… "You… want that to be your long term cover identity?"
She didn't look at him, keeping her eyes on the road. "I came up with it, didn't I?"
Well. Okay then.
"Ming-Hua."
She still didn't look at him. "Yeah?"
"Could you pull over? Please?"
She didn't immediately reply, but then shrugged easily and complied before finally turning to him. "Yeah? What…"
She trailed off as he leaned over slowly, deliberately, and raised a hand to her cheek. He let it hover about a hair's breadth away, looking into her eyes in a silent request for permission. Her gaze flickered to the side for just a brief second; then she nodded.
Thirty seconds later, he was not entirely clear how Ming-Hua had ended up in his lap with her tongue shoved down his throat and his hands knotted in her hair, but neither did he care. What was it Zaheer had once quoted Guru Jonang as saying? "Don't look at the teeth of an ostrich horse given as a gift?"
That wasn't it, but whatever.
-*O*-
"This," Ghazan pronounced two months later, "is the worst honeymoon ever."
Ming-Hua had stopped the Satomobile two miles away from the volcano, far behind the tree line of the closest patch of woods to the White Lotus prison, since most of it was surrounded by a barren, inhospitable desert. The plan was as simple as they could make it; based on the prison plans, Zaheer was buried exactly two thousand feet below the base of the volcano, closer to the north-east side than anywhere else. He was fed only once a day around noon, and otherwise the guards avoided his cell. Orders, apparently, to limit his chances of influencing them.
Ming-Hua was going to stay with the Satomobile as their getaway driver. If the alarm was raised, she would not be much help against the battalions of benders stationed in the tightly carved corridors of the volcano, and as long as she was free, that would mean they would have another shot.
The only metal Ghazan expected to encounter was the occasional iron ore deposit, Zaheer's chains, and the cell itself, all of which were well within his abilities to bend. He was going to dig his way there from underground, aiming to arrive about an hour after noon in order to give them the longest lag time before the guards noticed Zaheer's absence while still allowing them a margin of error. He was to free Zaheer, bend the cell as back into shape as possible to mask their escape route, then collapse the tunnel in their wake once he was sure he was far enough away it wouldn't be overheard. If things went according to plan, they would have nearly twenty-four hours before the White Lotus noticed anything was amiss, more than long enough to get out of the state of Ho.
There were a lot of assumptions in their plan. Some, like the fact that Zaheer would be able to walk, could be worked around if they proved incorrect.
("I can carry him, if it comes to that. I only really need one arm to bend."
"If you're sure.")
Others, not so much. The White Lotus not knowing those two guards' disappearances for what they were, for example, and acting accordingly by increasing how closely Zaheer was monitored; or worse, moving Zaheer and making sure to keep his new location so classified that he and Ming-Hua would never be able to find someone who knew it.
Another thing they were banking on with no real proof was Zaheer still being alive, nearly six months after the White Lotus had captured him. There was no way to compensate for that if they were wrong.
"I am serious, you know. You never take me anywhere nice."
Sitting in the driver's seat of their Satomobile and looking far more relaxed than he felt, Ming-Hua just smirked at him. "And yet you can think of nowhere else you would rather be."
"Well, yeah, but since when does that mean I can't complain?"
They had done all they could. The moment had come. Ghazan allowed himself one last, brief moment of weakness, and leaned back into the Satomobile to kiss Ming-Hua softly, only dragging himself away when he realized that if he lingered any longer, he might not be able to force himself to stop.
He loved her. She should know.
"I'll come back."
"You'd better."
Eh, close enough.
-*O*-
It turned out that bending a tunnel well over two miles long at a decently steep, constant incline was really, really difficult. They had, however, estimated the time it would take about right, so it was just past one o'clock (thank the ancestors for the invention of watches) when he found himself staring up at a solid plate of steel that, according to the prison plans, made up the floor of Zaheer's cell. Moment of truth.
It was both better and worse than they had hoped. Zaheer was alive. Zaheer recognized him. Zaheer could walk, even if he moved like he was in pain.
That was probably because he was. A metal blindfold had been bended over his eyes shortly after he had been captured, and apparently the White Lotus had just… never gotten around to removing it. So Zaheer had been living blinded since his capture. Nearly half a year, in total darkness. The light of Ghazan's lamp was so dim he could barely make out more than ten feet in front of him, yet Zaheer flinched from it like he was staring into the heart of the sun. Ghazan hadn't known that Zaheer flinched away from anything. Instinctively, his free hand clenched tighter around Zaheer's. At this point, he wasn't sure he could let go if he tried.
Briefly, madly, Ghazan wondered if Ming-Hua would be angry at him if he decided to reignite the dormant volcano on his way out.
The harsh crack of Zaheer's voice brought him out of it. "Ghazan."
"…Yeah?"
"I did not know you could metalbend."
Ghazan shrugged before remembering that Zaheer still had his eyes buried in the crook of his other arm and couldn't see him do it. He wasn't actually sure that Zaheer's sight had recovered enough to have as of yet seen him at all. "It's a new skill. We've had to pick up a few of those in the past few months."
They walked on for a few more seconds.
"You said 'we' before as well. Does that mean- Ming-Hua-"
And for the first time in all the years he had known him, Ghazan watched Zaheer's words fail him. Well, he couldn't hold it against him. They were not, any of them, unchanged by what they had gone through in the past six months.
Make that thirteen years. Man their lives had sucked recently.
"Yeah, she's fine. She's waiting at the end of the tunnel, ready to drive us far away from here.
"We bought a farm on the far eastern side of the Earth Kingdom. No one will ever be able to find us, if we don't let 'em."
The tunnel's mouth was in sight, but Zaheer had stopped. Ghazan looked at him in concern; he could feel him trembling. "Zaheer? We have to go."
"I did not dream."
Ghazan wasn't sure where Zaheer was going with this, and he didn't have the time to try and puzzle it out. "Of escape?"
"At all."
Well, that was ominous. "Well, you're not dreaming now."
"I know. I haven't been able to imagine this in a long time."
"Yeah, well, if you did, it probably wouldn't hurt quite so much. That's how you know it's real." He pulled at Zaheer's hand. "Come on. Let's get you to where you can feel the wind on your face again."
Zaheer hesitated, which was enough on its own to nearly make Ghazan's heart stop in his chest. But then, with movements so slow and careful they almost seemed to hurt him, Zaheer lowered the arm covering his eyes, turned to Ghazan, and nodded. It was obvious he still couldn't see worth shit, but it lightened Ghazan's spirits more than a little to recognize the determined cast of Zaheer's face. "Gladly."
