A/N: Wow, I'm on a roll! Hope to keep this updating frenzy up as long as possible but we'll see :DD

Disclaimer: I do not own Avatar the Last Airbender or LoK.

Chapter Eleven: Secrets and Barley Hardtack

Darkness surrounded the house by the time Bolin reached it, out of breath and clutching a stitch in his side. He had run from the circus straight back home without stopping. By the looks of it, everyone else was asleep. Half torn between the desire to find Mako to tell him about his theory, and making absolutely certain that said theory was accurate, Bolin decided on the latter, creeping past the house and towards the fields.

When their father, Kenji, had been around, he had spent a lot of his time working on manuscripts he'd sometimes send to faraway newspapers and magazines in hopes of getting published. These manuscripts were usually written with an ancient type-writer Kenji had brought along when moving from his native Fire Nation to the tiny Earth Kingdom village. After his departure two years previously, their mother had gathered up all the manuscripts Kenji had been unable to stuff into his bag, and stored the whole lot in a shed near the fields with all the farming equipment.

The shed was in need of a good repair but miraculously still standing after years of wind and rain. It was larger than was strictly needed to hold seeds and tools because it used to be a barn for the animals before the family had decided to sell them all to pay for more land. Careful not to trip in the dark, Bolin approached the shed, something he wouldn't have done on a regular basis five months ago because they had run out of seeds ages ago and the farming tools had only ever been touched by his father. Things had changed since then and Bolin had frequented the shed more often than strictly necessary for someone who'd never needed so much as a tea spoon to plow the earth.

A creaking noise interrupted the silent darkness when Bolin wrenched the door open. Due to the severely rusted hinges, he only managed to get the door halfway opened before it jammed. Bolin slipped inside, leaving the door open to let the moonlight in.

After a moment of groping around in the dark, Bolin found an old kerosene lamp to light the shed. The air inside the confined space was musty, a faintly sour stench causing Bolin to gag. Against one wall, farming tools hung from nails, a layer of dust marking its neglect. In one corner, a cabinet which used to be stocked with bags of seed was standing with its doors open, completely empty except for a single burlap sack lying flat and dejected like a popped balloon.

Picking his way over the hay-strewn floor, Bolin reached the far end of the shed where a small pile of old boxes and crates was stacked against the wall. Setting his lamp on the floor, Bolin moved some of the boxes around until at last, under a mess of torn burlap sacks, he found a bundle of paper tied with string, his father's slanted handwriting visible in the light of the kerosene lamp.

The Next Day...

"So let me get this straight. We don't know Dad's whereabouts or why he's not contacting us or if he's ever coming back because he's possibly in mortal danger but… he's alive?"

It was early morning and the two brothers, Mako and Bolin, were both shoveling hay into individual cages of the various creatures in the circus animal tent. Because Mako had done such a superb job on making all the repairs for the circus in a remarkably timely fashion, he had offered to help out Bolin fill in all his "volunteer hours" taking care of the animals.

Inside the animal tent, the very air they breathed stank profusely of animal feces mingled with the sour smell of human sweat. Because so many diverse creatures were crammed into one space, the racket was nearly intolerable; monkeys howled, birds squawked, large mammals roared and clawed at the bars of their cages, and Bolin nearly lost his thumb trying to mend the broken bones of a three-eyed cobra-mule.

Despite all this, their aged supervising caretaker – a former zookeeper by the name of Mr. Koi –did not stop to give the brothers a break, even though he himself did not work. So they worked on through what was meant to be their lunch hour, moving clean hay into cages while trying not to get too close to the animals. Undercover of all the noise, Bolin was filling Mako in on all he had learned the previous night.

"Look, Iriah showed me the list that assassin had –"

"You mean the assassin she tracked down and –?" Mako's last words were drowned out by a particularly loud cawing noise from a nearby cage.

Bolin thought for a minute. "Umm… yeah, sure, I suppose. Anyways, Dad was on that list, right?"

Mako nodded as the hairy-bodied crossbreed of two species he couldn't remember lashed out at him behind the cage bars, evidently offended that an intruder had the gall to replace his dirty matted bed with fresh hay. The hairy creature snapped its beak, shrieking and thrashing its scaly tails.

"Yeah, well, there were addresses on those and get this –" Bolin paused to heave more hay into the cage while the animal was busy trying to scare Mako off with its poisonous glare, "– next to Dad's name was the address of that apartment he –"

With a loud CLANG of razor-sharp talons on metal, the boys jumped back as the creature roared in disgust, attacking the freshly placed hay with its beak as though wishing to destroy every last shred of it.

"Can't you make it shut up?" Mako asked his brother, yelling over the increasingly high-pitched shrieks of the hairy animal. As though in answer, the animal threw all four of its powerful scaly tails at the metal bars with the force of a cannonball. The reverberating clang was enough to make Mako's bones shake in unison.

When Bolin finally managed to tranquilize the agitated beast (an exhausting feat that took nearly twenty minutes) the two brothers decided to take a well-deserved break outside in the surrounding woods. After working all morning in a tent full of ear-splitting cries and a terrible stench, both boys found the scent of pine trees and the soft twittering of small birds to be exceptionally relaxing. Unfortunately for them, the subject of their father was still left to be discussed.

"So what were you saying about Dad?" Mako asked, sitting down a fallen log. He had brought with him a bag of barley hardtack and began doling out handfuls to his brother.

"I was saying that the address next to Dad's name was the old apartment and not the new one he moved into," said Bolin, drawing the hit list from his breast pocket and laying it flat against a flat rock imbedded in the forest floor. He accepted a handful of hardtack from his brother, immediately popping them into his mouth.

Propping the open bag of hardtack at his feet, Mako saw that the address was indeed the one their father had lived in prior to his relocation mentioned in the final letter. This news did not cheer up Mako, however, as he looked up at Bolin's childishly happy face.

Mako sighed. "Look, Bolin," Mako said, trying to ignore the ringing sensation that seemed stubbornly rooted in his eardrums from the cacophony of the animal tent. "I'm not trying to be pessimistic or anything but that list really doesn't prove much other than the fact that the assassin had the wrong address the first time around. He could easily have found out that Dad moved but forgot to correct it on here."

"Yeah, well that's what I thought at first. But the thing is, I've found something else," said Bolin and he unfolded a second piece of paper that looked like some kind of registration form which was already filled out in blue ink. "I got this from Iriah first thing in morning when we came here. Take a look at the date the kidnapping report was filed."

A bird chirped on a branch not far above the two brothers' heads as Mako read over the form. It was not much of a report. Judging by the way the ink had blurred in places, he guessed it had been written in a great hurry. The report had been filed by someone whose name was hurriedly scribbled. Mako looked at the date it had been filed and a brief summary of the crime. Explained in sparse detail, a witness who had seen a man matching Kenji's description being taken away in a vehicle wearing masks. What caught Mako's attention, however, was the date the crime had been reported.

"This… can't be right," said Mako slowly, scrutinizing the form. "It says here that Dad was kidnapped –"

" – three days before he moved into his new apartment," Bolin finished for him. Popping another hardtack in his mouth he said through intervals of crunching, "And we know for a fact that he did move because he mentions it in his last letter and, according to the reply we got from Chief Bei Fong, the landlady threw out all his stuff when he didn't to pay his rent."

"But if he wasn't kidnapped, then why hasn't he been seen since the second of February? Why didn't he pay his rent or write to us?"

"There's another thing I didn't understand," Bolin said, speaking quickly now that Mako was catching on. He had also run out of hardtack. "Iriah said that the Equalists most likely targeted Dad because he had written things that could possibly deter their movement. According to those newspaper clippings she had stashed in her room, the movement wasn't as violent and well-known just a year ago. Apparently it escalated in the last few months and that's when all the full-blown riots cropped up. But the shady disappearances and murders started much earlier since Iriah's Dad was killed last year. She also said that all the offender's families were targeted too."

"So he knew we'd all be in trouble if he wrote the article and he did it anyways?" Mako looked both appalled and disbelieving.

"He probably had doubts about it because his acquaintances kept telling him it was okay," Bolin hurried on. "But he must've changed his mind after he sent his letter. So he went into hiding after he reported himself kidnapped by the Equalists."

"That doesn't make any sense," Mako argued, sitting up straighter on his log. The ringing in his ears was no longer the reverberating cage bars but hot blood pounding in his head. "The Equalists would know whether he'd been kidnapped or not. In fact, it would've made a lot more sense to ask the police for help!"

There was a short pause where a bird dropping landed two inches from where Mako was sitting on the log. Then, in a conspiratorial tone, Bolin said, "What if there was a mole within the police?"

There was a moment of silence as Mako let this information sink in. His brain, already a soggy sponge from the overload of conspiracy theory, tried desperately to suck the last bit of information in, but failed. Had there really been a spy within the ranks of public authority, it surely would've been easy for the Equalists to get their hands on the right kind of information needed to create a hit list. As half-baked theories of political spies and contract killers swam around in his confused brain, Mako almost missed what Bolin said next.

"Look, Mako, this is just my theory and I might be completely off. But this is what I think happened to Dad." Bolin cleared his throat before continuing, "Dad finds out he's in trouble so he makes arrangements. He goes to police in disguise or asks his friend to pose as a witness for his own kidnapping to fool the mole. Then, he disappears. So you could be right about the killer not having the first address. That was probably because he hadn't moved yet. But the important thing is, it wouldn't have mattered even if the assassin got the new apartment address because, by the second of February, Dad had gone into hiding. In order to stop the Equalists from targeting our family and to sell his lie sufficiently, he stopped contacting us. Also, by complete coincidence, Iriah killed Dad's would-be killer before he got a chance to find Dad. Mr. Koi mentioned the other day that Iriah joined the circus around the same time he did – which was around the same time Dad went missing. So the Equalists probably think he's dead but Dad's being careful."

Mako mulled this over as he subconsciously picked at the loose bark of the log, the cogs of his mind straining to function properly. Even by fantasy standards, the whole thing was highly far-fetched. Living in the country did nothing to improve one's imagination but this situation – as much as Mako hated to admit – was very real and one that concerned his own father's wellbeing. Bolin's theory made sense in the constraints of what little they knew in a haphazard sort of way but the young firebender was having trouble wrapping his brain around one detail.

"Maybe you are right, Bolin," Mako began, his chest pounding in his chest. "But… we don't have any proof." He held up the crime report form in his right hand. "It's possible that the date on this form is mistaken. I'm not saying I doubt the efficiency of the police down there but –"

Bolin walked over to Mako and sat beside him, avoiding the side with the bird dropping running down the bark. After surreptitiously pocketing the bag of barley hardtack, Bolin said reassuringly, "That's why I saved the best for last."

Bolin slipped slid a single sheet of paper in his brother's lap. Mako stared down at the title page of an old manuscript their father had penned years and years ago. It read "Adventures of Pabu and Norbu: The Hunt for the Missing Button" followed by the their father's name. As one of Kenji's earlier works, it was a running joke in the family that anyone who ever misplaced anything, especially buttons, should kindly ask Pabu and Norbu for their services. Mako raised his eyebrows at Bolin who was looking expectantly at him.

"Bolin, is this some kind of jo –"

In a flash of realization, Mako held up the police form back up to his eyes, staring in utter incredulity at the words inked in blue. Stunned, Mako looked back at his brother who was nodding slowly.

"No way…" said Mako, trailing off.

In hastily scrawled blue ink, the blank space for the witness's name under the form heading, albeit slightly difficult to read, was signed "Mr. Pabu Norbu" and next to that, something that was a circular scribble which, upon closer inspection, strangely resembled a black button.

A/N: I'm really hungry for some barley hardtack right now -_-;; And goldfish crackers...

Ahem. So anyways, please tell me what you thought in your review and in the next chapter I'll hopefully have some action sequences thrown in there instead of all talk. Hope you enjoyed this chapter ^^