Signing is very much like bending, Chaitanya had written at the top of the first page of many. He had prepared a presentation for me in a notebook, which was much higher than the standards I held of him. I actually felt guilty that this was how he spent his free time. I didn't want to be a burden.
He flipped to the next page and set it on the table in the private meeting room between them.
Feeling, objects, places - anything can be categorized into these four categories:
Carefree and wild like the air.
Calm and flowing like the water.
Stubborn, strong, and willful like the earth.
Passionate and energetic like fire.
I smiled at his understanding of sign language. He had little drawings -- poor that they might be -- of how to sign each of the elements next to each of his short sentences.
It was charming.
I began to turn the page, but Chaitanya put his hand on over my own, stopping me. I watched him as he signed each of the elements, one flowing into the next.
Then he nodded at me to try them and learn them. When I made a mistake, he stepped around the table and bent my arms in just the right fashion. I knew sign language did not have to be so exacting, but this was an art to Chaitanya - it was his voice.
It took me a good thirty minutes to sign them to his liking. It reminded me of how benders might teach each other. It seemed intimate somehow... a dance with my hands.
Chaitanya turned the page and pointed at his writing at the top.
As a historian, you might know that benders created sign language. That is why it's important to master it's roots.
I stopped reading and looked up Chaitanya. He seemed like a magician, teaching me the root of the magic he knew. "Do you think there are any nomad benders out there?" I asked just out of a vague fascination with his knowledge.
He seemed suddenly very somber, and it surprised me. No.
I was slight taken aback by his blunt answer. "Why not? Even if they were murderers, I don't think they have to be. The government could regulate them -- make sure they don't get out of control. They could be beautiful, teaching bending as an art form and not a fighting style."
Chaitanya shook his head, turning away from me and looking at the door. His head shaking was insistent enough that he was ready to quit teaching. As he turned to the door, he signed rapidly a few words I could understand from a combination of my own memorization and his lip movements. I can't. I can't discuss the war with you.
"I'm sorry," I said, reaching out to his arm to stop him then quickly releasing him. "I won't bring it up again. Just sign language and whatever you want. I just…" Thought that by the way he spoke that he would be enchanted like I was. That he felt some level of sympathy for them, and I wouldn't be the one crazy person in this world-
He might have felt the same. He sympathized for them, and he felt that he shouldn't. And the way he spoke of the war like it was a painful memory for him - like he was there.
He could have been an equalist. The benders vanished but not the equalists that fought alongside them. Many of them were freed.
Was that book possibly Chaitanya's autobiography…?
He surrendered after I promised only to discuss signing and give up being a historian around him.
But while I was at school, taking classes and in my dorm, I had purchased a personal copy of the book he recommended, dissecting it as non-fiction rather than fantasy.
My theory about Chaitanya being the traitor to the Republic was half-baked, but how he spoke of the book and his relationship to it... I just got this funny feeling that the librarian was involved somehow.
If the things that were said were true about people and events in the book, it was remarkable that the Republic even won.
Harsul, the equalist spy, became close to a very unknown bender general - General Kei. Even with my background on war generals from both the Republic and bender armies, I didn't know much about him, which made it easy for an assumed fiction writer to create stories about him.
But I was operating on the assumption that this book was real. And I was taking notes for my thesis.
Harsul was a descendant of the former earth kingdom. He grew up in a modest house outside of Kyoshi where legends were shared of the last known earth avatar. She was considered a legend among all warriors, skillfully weaving each element together as she fought.
Harsul admired her quite a bit even though he was born without the ability to bend himself. He and the rest of his village considered her memory to be the light of his little island.
But new technologies encroached, and many left to do bigger and better things. Harsul was included in those ranks, leaving for the university here in Ba Seng Sei where he and most other students were recruited for the war.
Harsul still pursued his studies, a historian like myself searching for the truth. His focus was on the avatars though, and he continued pretending to be a soldier in hopes of finding the new earth avatar who even today has yet to be found.
At first he left camps at night to get books from nearby villages, collecting any information on Korra, Aang, Roku, and even Kyoshi. He studied them quite a bit when he caught the attention of a bender that belonged to a community that the Republic -- his army -- was supposed to attack at daybreak.
Harsul felt like a hero when he successfully warned them. The bender he spoke with showed him kindness, and as the sacrilegious story described, he began to realize that people were people -- benders and non benders were both evil and good.
But the benders were not too eager to simply accept him. Both sides of this coin were wary of the other. It's the reason why tensions were so wound up to cause a war in the first place.
Harsul went begging for an audience with several bender generals, more on a pursuit of knowledge than the progression of the war, but none trusted him. He was lucky to get word to a couple lieutenants until General Kei took notice of him. After that, he had received recognition from several more bender generals, including the great fire bender commander, General Katsu.
Through clever plots and new technologies lended to him from the benders, he began work as a double agent. He would leak information to the Republic that the benders allowed him to leak, giving them victories that gained him favor within the equalist army. He was quickly promoted, gathering more and more information, leaking back to Katsu and Kei.
General Katsu would coordinate with Kei and Harsul on which of their squads they would sacrifice so Harsul could make enough rank in the Republic army just the same. And the benders they sacrificed willing gave up their lives, but not without taking a ton of Republic lives in the process. Meanwhile, Katsu himself would take the larger victories in the cities Harsul leaked information on.
This pattern was however short lived. The Republic discovered that they had a mole, and before they could find him, General Kei recruited Harsul into his ranks. Harsul would later learn that this was against General Katsu's wishes, but the generals had equal power when it came to these decisions. The commander cared little about a single equalist.
Over the course of the story, it became apparent through subtle hints and analogies that Harsul had slept with General Kei, which is why the bender leader had favored him so much.
But General Kei had many favorites. Harsul described how he slept around quite a bit, mostly with his first lieutenant general and multiple trainees. Harsul himself had begun developing very subtle feeling for him -- subtle feelings that even the text barely conveyed.
Just like Chaitanya. Harsul had timidness to him and withheld jealousy that made him respectable despite his horrible betrayal.
Then I felt sorry for Chaitanya. I had been studying the story as if Harsul were the studious librarian, but this all hinged on one very important detail: Chaitanya could talk.
Could talk. I looked online, and it was more difficult than most would assume to fake being a mute. So if there was even there was the slight possibility that he'd be Harsul, he either had a newly developed physical disability or a mental one. Maybe PTSD?
The thoughts and theories plagued me. Okay, yes, I had a very creative imagination, but that didn't mean I didn't want to know the real answers.
But I couldn't pursue this any further. It was an invasion of his privacy. He made it clear he didn't want to speak of it, and if there was one failure I had as a historian, it was that I was too nice. If I approached him again, I wouldn't be able to help myself. I would find some indirect way to discuss it, and he didn't deserve that. Regardless of the war, he was a different person now, keeping quiet and out of the way. He was Chaitanya, the mute librarian, and he wasn't doing any harm to anyone. He was smarter than that.