Author's Note :

WARNING ! this chapter deals with the war, so don't be surprised if it doesn't turn out to be all candy and bishonen. (now where does that word come from ??)
allusions - rather clear but not 'show off' style - to the bad sides of it. It's still veeeery readable, just remember this story is rated T (not M, but not K either)

usual pointless note:

YAY for quick updates, and historical/cultural researches. YAY for bitching, which got me a free concert ticket (for Azia, that I had never heard of before, but still OK. the drummer was kickass. and the guitar player was fun to watch.) Friends are cool. YAY for resident evil 4, which helped my explain to my brother how romeo transfiguring as Luuvv in the balcony scene. Did YOU know there's a parallel between romeo becoming Luuuvv because of Juliet and the spanish peasants becoming parasite-aliens because of Lord Saddler ?

THANKS to TheOriginalSnakeEyes for favoriting my story
and to the AWESOME NewGuy22 and his heart-warming reviews !

KEEP IT COMING !

My first affectation had nothing exotic or thrilling

My first affectation had nothing exotic or thrilling. The boat I was enrolled on patrolled on the eastern coast of the earth kingdom, where the Fire Nation had the more colonies. The official goal was to protect the shores from pirates or rebels' blind raids, but in truth we were there to remind the locals they were not under occupation for show.

Every now and then we would dock and roam down the shores and market places. We searched random people in the street. The ones who looked nervous, or too proud. Man in age to fight. Green-eyed strong guys, who could be earth benders.
And some soldiers were so good willed as to perform a full search even on the most buxom women. Just to be sure, you know.

The captain of the warship was like a deep pit. Nothing would ever come out of it, just a dull echo if you shout loud enough, and you never knew how long it would take before anything thrown at him hit him and sank in.

He had read my records – somehow – and he had decided it was safer to put some other guy in charge of the maps, since it was my 'first mission'. He appointed a friend of him to the job. A very close friend, if you know what I mean. And I spent my time on the ship as toilet scrubber, deck cleaner, and steam engines feeder.

The part in the hold with the engines I didn't mind. The mechanist was a buff forty-something years old man, with a short beard, a square jaw line and dark patches of hairs down to his forearms. He had the most impressive repertoire of dirty jokes I've ever known in my whole life. His name was Kuzma… uh, I think… Anyway. The crew just called him Sweetie. That gave me loads of good laughs, even when I got used to living on board.

Sweetie was a cool man. He was easy-talking, rather patient, and he explained to me a lot of things about the engines. He had seen I was interested, and he was very proud to share his knowledge with someone.

I had been eyeing the machinery a couple of times when carrying coal to the hold. He saw me and called : "now you must one of the new guys, come here". Now I've got to tell you I had a little shiver running down my spine : so far there had not been major hazing for us new recruits – just a couple harmless tricks - but at the same time more than half the crew was fresh boys out of their barracks. But then that was just that hefty man and me, stuck below deck with the steam and pipes noises all around.
And in the end, he just asked me if I had ever seen a steam engine, and I cared to know how it worked.
Obviously, not many people spent their free time in the engines' room, as the heat was oppressing and the noises tiring, and Sweetie was bored to death on his duty hours. He was glad he had someone to talk I guess.

He showed the searing boiler, the pumps bringing sea water through little pipes into it. He shove a piece of coal in my hand, and show me how the boiler burned it, how the heat turned the sea water into steam. how the steam was 'condensed' inside the pipes, how it forced its way to release some pressure through other pipes and valves. How the steam pushed the piston in its way to get out. He showed me the back and forth motion of the piston rod and how it connected to gears, which towed belts attached to other bigger gears. How it bond to a turbine and a propeller in the back end of the ship; and how in the end it all made the hundreds tonnes warship push its way through heavy endless seawater.

He didn't hide how proud he was of his country. The machinery's precision and complexity was his favourite talking point. Besides from women. Not too much bragging, but still, I learnt a few things along the way… not as much as I had about steam engines, though. You know, some things run in with experience. And at that moment I mostly had a ship full of metal devices to get some.

In truth those were good times.

I had a couple bad hangovers from when we were docking to resupply, and I developed my musical range with a few shanties and many drinking songs.
Most of the grown men were spending their nights out in ill reputes, but at that time I was a bit reticent about the whole thing.
Before we were given night permission the captain always said we shouldn't forget we bore our nation's colours on ourselves, and we should behave in consequence, but he never insisted too much nor looked after what his men were doing. He couldn't care less, but he didn't want someone to say he hadn't taken his responsibilities if anything went wrong.
He was so busy checking on the price of our rice, seeing that the locals' taxes had been paid, counting them up again, making sure nobody had a bigger rant than they should have while counting up over and over his own… Sometimes I wondered if the guy hadn't lost all clue to what was going on outside of his head.
He was lucky his crew was made of honourable men who paid what they drank and knew what 'no' means.

Because you should know that was not always the case. A war is something very special, you can't see what it's doing to you until it's too late. And if you're just the littlest angry or scared when it gets to you, it bites you on that tiny weakness and its dribble crawls under your skin, and you become a puppet.

I've seen the sweetest guys, brothers, fathers, husbands or sons of women they loved back in the Fire Nation do the most horrible things, of my own eyes. The disciplined Fire Nation army was just made out of young men who had seen their friends dying and ripped apart in horrible fights. As soon as they would get out of the frontline, they would shut their thoughts off so they wouldn't live this over and over again. But it also left them vulnerable, and if a single man in their unit was born wicked – no human community is spared its lot of born-deviants – and that wicked man told them they would do nothing more than punishing the women raising up their friends' murderers, the troops wouldn't have their mental strength back soon enough to think themselves out of more atrocities.

They had lived most horrible things while on the battlefield. After you've seen this, it's hard to work out straight. You always have the images running before your eyes. They practised vengeance, with just as much barbarity as the war had put in their brains.

Of course, that does not excuse everything. I myself have been on the front line, and even if I did things I'm not proud of, I kept myself out of the abysmal.

Now, some guys had it rougher than me, or were fragile to begin with, and they went downhill from there… Yes, they were still to blame.

But the older officers, the powerful rulers, who claim to be so clairvoyant, should have seen this coming. Most didn't give a damn as long as little red dots were spawning all over the earth kingdom maps in their headquarters.

A few even dared encourage that kind of behaviour. It was supposed to teach the locals not to stand in our way, to teach them they should keep their men with them, far from the fights, if they didn't want our men to come take their place.
The government couldn't let such sector of barbarism taint its glory, so it took drastic action : the over-zealous ranking officers received a reminder from the royal palace that the occupied population shouldn't be treated with unnecessary disrespect.

Agni bless the firelord for his benefaction… Too bad it wasn't aimed at the earth kingdom's people.

Hopefully, not all fire nation officers were rotten like those cowards were.

For example, when I was appointed to my second mission, and found myself under the orders of an honest Commander.
I had served for 13 months on board in my previous affectation, and the army needed more people to occupy a newly taken town.
The place was a mess. Wide bands of smoke were still rising from piles of rubbles that used to be houses. The town had been showered in fire balls and rocks for a brief period of time, and it had fallen within a week after the few surviving earth kingdom soldiers had been pushed back behind its fortifications.
The fire nation needed soldiers to prevent any rebellion and put the locals under control. So I had been placed in Commander Wei's battalion to 'pacify' the town of Yuan He Ping.

The civilian had been freaked out by the fights, and had tried to flee from them. Now they were timidly going back to their homes – if they still had one. We had to cope with the huge masses moving around the rather sizeable city and check if no spy or resistant was hidden among them. The air was stick with noise and stench from death and dirty hungry people walking restless. But the fire soldiers were happy. It was the biggest storming in months, for the whole fire nation army.

For the troops at Yuan He Ping, months in which the troops had lazed in their positions in petty battles, between the coast they had easily conquered for long and the enemy, with men dying and falling ill. And then, the last defences of the earth benders had fallen. Nothing could stop them from taking over the town, and in a week's siege it was over.

And now, the soldiers finally had taken over the city, it was theirs : they had their reward. And what a sizeable one !

Yuan He Ping was large and well located – and its taking had formed a deep dent in the earth kingdom's map.
It would be a perfect location for an inland rooted base, protected by its towering above the plains, with yet not too badly damaged arable lands around its walls, and a couple hours only from the coastline, where the fire nation was already established.
It would be a good supplying point, and since it was rich, would bring a few extra money to the fire nation.
That was, if the soldiers hadn't plundered it all.

You see, the soldiers were so happy they had finally gotten in, they naturally celebrated. They ate, they drank, and they felt hugely relieved they were still alive. Some said they deserved to have a good time – which was probably true – and forget a little while about the war that would soon come back to them. So they drank more, started to pick random things in abandoned houses and claimed those were theirs, then did this with the refugees' belongings, and a handful of them started to wonder if they shouldn't do it with the women refugees while they were at it.

Of course, in a hundred years, stories had come to this city before, and the people there already hated us. Tensions were building up.