Chapter Three: Hama the Bloodbender
Huo Shui Maximum Security Prison, Duzi Island
The child is tossed unceremoniously into the room, and Hama only sits and watches dispassionately down the long slope of her nose as things unfold. Another one of their tricks, she thinks, and crosses her unbound hands over her chest. She knows that there is a reason that she is not chained, a reason that the little window in the interrogation room is open, a reason she has been brought out of her waterless prison cell and deposited here and she is waiting until said reason is disclosed to her to make her move.
Everything about this reeks of a trap, and she will not be so easily fooled as she had been before.
Katara pushes herself up off the floor with her forearms, her mouth straight and unwavering. Her knees are scuffed and bleeding, but she barely pays them any attention, and instead casts her eyes over to the room's only other occupant.
An old woman is watching her without sympathy. Even at such a tender age, Katara thinks that she can read the woman's story in the lines of her face. They are etched thick and deep and she can see heartbreak and anguish and unendurable rage.
The two of them eye each other like nervous ostrich horses, and despite Katara's red and gold attire, the old woman's attention is grabbed by her dark skin and her round, cerulean blue eyes. Hama's entire body stiffens, and her spine is ramrod straight.
A trap, it's a trap, a trap, goes her inner mantra, but her resolve is unsteadily wavering.
The child's eyes wobble in the daylight, and she is still sprawled out on the floor, her skin bruised and bleeding and despite the frost she had breathed into her own soul, Hama's heart skips in her chest.
It's a trap, she reminds herself. This whole thing has that new Fire Lord's slimy little paw prints all over it.
And then, the trap, it speaks.
"Are you alright?" it says, and Hama stiffens her upper lip and ignores it, "I hope they didn't throw you in here like they did me."
Hama wants to laugh, then. Oh, she has been through so much more than this little girl with the bright blue eyes could ever imagine. Think of your worst nightmares, child, she wants to say, and multiply them tenfold. She doesn't, though, she stays silent, and tilts her head away from her.
"I'm Katara," the trap continues. Hama can tell that she is trying to keep her voice strong, and stoic, but she does not manage well.
"It is a full moon soon," Hama comments, and even without looking at the little water tribe girl (who is stumbling clumsily up to her feet) she can tell that the words she speaks sound like nothing more than madness from a crazy old lady's mouth.
Nonetheless, Katara presses for further conversation: "is it? I haven't been keeping track of the time."
"Why are you here?" the question is so abrupt, and put forth so spitefully that Katara has to stop to collect herself. She chews carefully on her bottom lip and then sits down opposite Hama, considering the question and what her reply should be.
"I – I'm not sure," she answers, honestly, but Hama is not satisfied with that.
"Where do you come from? How did you get here?"
The answers to these questions are straightforward enough, and Katara replies to them readily with no hesitation.
"I'm from the Southern Water Tribe. I was brought here by the Fire Lord's personal guard… on a ship. Unless you mean how did I get from the South Pole to the Fire Nation, and then the answer is a whole lot more complicated."
The old lady has gone so still that for a minute Katara wonders if she is all right or not, and she reaches out hesitantly for her shoulder. It is only when Hama jerks backwards wildly as though she had been stung by something that Katara understands, and she sits in her chair with her hands curled neatly in her lap, modest apologies spilling carefully from her lips.
Hama herself is in turmoil, though she does not show it so vividly on the outside. Trap, trap, trap, she tells herself over and over again, but then she looks at the child and it seems so implausible… they, the two of them, are the sole survivors of what remained of their home and they must stick together.
"Will you tell me?" she finds herself asking the little one, more kindly than she has heard from herself for years (exactly how many she can't remember – but it has been a long, long time).
Katara's hands curl to fists in her lap, and it does not go unnoticed.
Hama does not offer her any way out (no polite 'if it's too painful, dear, you don't have to' but what else could be expected from so cold a woman?) and so Katara complies. She is tentative at first, and her eyes are cast down to her feet.
"I was eight years old when the Fire Nation attacked my village," it's my village too, Hama thinks, and the words scratch at her closed lips, desperate to escape, "the raiders were looking for someone important," a waterbender, Hama thinks, and oh so slowly her blood rises in her veins, "my mother tried to protect me, but she couldn't. She died trying," Katara lifts her eyes purposefully and she and Hama stare at each other across the table, "it was my fault. I – I caused my mother's death."
"How?" Hama probes, increasingly desperate, for something, a sign, a clue, "how did you cause it?"
The child does not answer, but tips her chin down and Hama can see silvery tears pooling on her skin.
"You're a waterbender," Hama whispers, and reaches out across the table.
It is so quiet it is almost unintelligible: "the last one," but Hama hears it and clasps her old, wrinkled hand around the girl's wrist.
"No," she says, and a slow, steady grin appears on her terrifying face, "no, you are not," and she stands up so quickly that the chair legs screech against the wooden floor. Her fingers cut sharp through the air and just like that she is holding tiny tendrils of water – Katara gasps and her mouth drops open as wide as her eyes.
"You're a waterbender!" she says (gaping, not even trying to feign nonchalance).
"From the South Pole," says Hama, and she tells the child her story: of Fire Nation raids and intrepid warriors who would finally succumb, of elephant rats and guards who bent to her will when the moon was fullest in the sky.
"I was the last waterbender to be taken (or so I thought, until today) from the South Pole, and the only one to survive the prisons they kept us in. They have learned from their mistakes, since then," she chokes back the bitterness, "I was recaptured only a few months ago, and here I am."
Katara's eyes are watering (impossibly blue) and her breath comes short and quick in her throat.
"I don't want to stay here forever," and then as if a dam somewhere inside of her has burst, she cries. Hama stares unabashed and then moves to comfort her, one hand on the girl's shoulder, squeezing softly.
And then: "you don't have to," the moon is slung low in the sky but already she can feel it's power filtering through her, "we can escape together. But you will have to do exactly what I say, with no questions asked. Do you know how to bend, at all?"
Katara nods, but she looks uncertain.
"A little," she says, "but I'm only ten, and I haven't been allowed to bend for two years, almost. I don't… I know a bit."
"I'll teach you," Hama is confident enough for the both of them, "I'll teach you. We have until the full moon."
(A small part of her still screams a trap, it's a trap, but her blood is up and she is rolling with the adrenaline, never stopping to think that surely they would have been interrupted by now, surely her bending would not have been so easily allowed… perhaps it is her vanity, that disallows cleverness.)
"Okay," the girl says lowly, and Hama leans across the table, and presses her mouth close to her ear.
Katara ignores the shivers that threaten to run down her spine with the woman's proximity.
"Water can be pulled from almost anywhere around you," the old woman croons, "from the air, from plants, trees, and it is not the only thing that we can control. The blood in your veins, Katara, it is malleable," she hisses and Katara cannot help it then: she shivers and rolls her shoulders so that they crack in their sockets.
"Let me show you," Hama continues, and the moisture in the air is enough for her to make a small dagger that she uses to make a nick in the palm of her hand. It is small enough so that it hardly stings, but she draws a steady flow of blood from it, and manoeuvres the crimson liquid between her fingers. "Hold it," she tells the girl, "feel the weight of it," and when Katara takes it she is struck with how alien it feels.
It is resistant – it is alive and humming and it doesn't want to bend to her will. Luckily, her resolve is of steel rather than the water she controls, and within minutes she can feed it between her fingers and spin it in circles above her palm.
"It is possible," Hama tells the girl, "to bend the blood within the body – to bend a body to your will. The human body is a skin filled with water, but it is a difficult skill to control, and the power of the full moon is what empowers us, what gives us this mastery."
She is a powerful speaker, and her callous words and easy mannerisms send shivers down Katara's spine. She had not imagined power like this – this was power that belonged to the spirits, not an ordinary girl like her.
But then there is a shuffle of feet from outside the room, a groan of a metal bolt and Hama springs back from the girl (who disposes of the blood out of that tiny open window and bows her head) and sits quietly in her chair. She can barely stop herself from smirking – two bloodbenders in a full moon? Nothing can stop her now. Her heart is racing, her mind is full of visions from the future: herself and her new prodigy, little Katara, who will take vengeance on the Fire Nation and revel in its destruction.
Hama the bloodbender is good at biding her time however, and she lets the guards take her back to her dark cell with the parched dry air with little complaint.
She sits with her back against the cold wall, her hands chained in front of her, and contemplates her aching bones. Soon these four walls that have forever haunted her dreams will be a thing of the past (banished to nightmares forever) but for now they are stark reality – cemented by the slow, deliberate sobbing she can hear from somewhere far off.
Lesson number one, she thinks, bloodbenders do not cry.
Emotions are nothing but compromising.
(Little does she know just how well her prodigy knows that exact fact.)
The days pass with much of the same tedium as they always do – the sun rises, and in the heat of the day she is allowed small perks for her good behaviour. Once or twice she meets the young water tribe girl in that same room, and she looks worse for wear, thinner and paler and noticeably less hopeful.
Hama knows that if she is to make her move, she must do it soon. The girl will be of no worth if she continues down the slippery slope into depression and on the fourth day, when they are together for a moment in the prison yard (the air thin and dry and wretched) Hama clutches at the girl's thin wrist and pulls her around to face her, "do you want to get out of here?" The girl's eyes widen and she glances around from side to side wildly. She could not be any more obvious, and Hama's grip on her arm tightens. "Stop drawing attention to yourself."
Katara's blue eyes are watering for reasons she can hardly process. Yes, she nods her head and bites down hard on her bottom lip, yes.
"Oi, you two!" a lazy voice drawls from the fence line, "break it up, will ya," and the two females draw apart, but they eye each other cautiously until the guards come to return them to their cells.
The next day, Hama is taken back to the interrogation room in which she had first seen the little water tribe girl. This time, however, no child is waiting for her – just a man with a smirking mouth and fire dancing on his fingertips.
When he is done with her, her breath hitches in her throat and her bones don't ache anymore – they burn. With every rise and fall of her chest she wants to scream, but she remains silent. Stoic, she sits in her chair and the only weakness she allows herself is those dreadful slumped shoulders.
The girl looks terrified when she is thrust into the room with two armoured guards holding each one of her shoulders. Her hands tremble when one of them says, "go on then, we know what you can do," and then Hama breathes a contented sigh because there is water on her skin and it feels like freedom, like home and joy and she's impressed somewhere in the back of her head where there is still lucidity and in that moment she decides that she will help this girl – that this girl will help her.
And then there is white in front of her eyes, glowing, and she lets it overcome her.
When Hama comes around, the girl is wringing her hands nervously in her lap. She watches her own fingers and pays little heed to anything else – not the shuffles of the guards feet just outside the door, or Hama's heavier breathing – until the old woman clears her throat.
"Are you okay?" Katara asks, her eyes darting to the locked door and back again.
"I am now," Hama can barely keep the gratitude out of her voice, and so she decides quite spontaneously to roll with it, "thanks to you. I owe you my life, child. And I have something to offer in return."
She waits for the girl's curiosity to take hold, but it does not, and so Hama continues:
"your movements are jerky, uncontrolled. Water is the element of change… you must adapt to your surroundings. When you are bending the water, your body must let go of the past. Your mind should let go of the present and cease churning; as gentle as the push and pull of the tides."
Hama's voice is a hushed whisper, but it seems to fill the room to the brim, pressing at the corners of it, and Katara watches the woman, dumbstruck.
"You must entice your opponent toward you," she continues, rolling the water that Katara had used for healing between the palms of her hands like dough, "by allowing him to advance, follow the movements of his force without resisting. Their force will reach an extent where it will become empty, and then you can counter them at will. Keep this in mind, child, and your opponent cannot gain the advantage."
Her description continues, with slow, gentle demonstrations.
The substantial is concealed in the insubstantial.
When the flow is swift it is difficult to resist.
Coming to a high place, it swells and fills the place up;
meeting a hollow it dives downward.
The waves rise and fall,
finding a hole they will surely surge in.
Hama passes the water to Katara, and then it has begun.
When the moon is almost full in the sky (Hama cannot see it form her cell but she can feel it, in her bones and in her blood) she knows that this is it, and as it happens chance is on her side.
Without paying attention to the time of the month, the guards have arranged for a double interrogation ('there are important people you do not want to cross,' they'd told her, and she'd believed them) and she and the girl are sitting close together with hunched soldiers and resigned mouths, their hands chained in their laps. As of yet the room is empty but for the two of them, and Hama uses a wad of spit to steadily slice through her bindings. Katara is easier to free – now that both her hands are loose to bend – and for a minute they stand facing each other with their chests heaving.
Hama stares down at the child (her last and only hope) and sees herself in the child's wide eyes.
"This is our chance," she whispers then as two helmeted guards enter the room, and Katara's nod of compliance is barely noticeable (but there all the same) and she moves quickly to stand behind Hama, who smirks and whips water daggers from the air as easily as she breathes.
There is a moment of pandemonium (the guards shrieking as Hama's daggers pierce vulnerable, exposed skin, then as Katara does the same, dragging water in from the grass of the prison yard outside the window) and it is the chance they need to storm the soldiers keeping watch.
Hama does not stop to think that the guard are far too unorganised for Fire Nation troops. Hama does not notice the way the girl moves behind her, dark and svelte like liquid fire, not a simple girl from the Southern Water Tribe but something else entirely. Katara follows the out woman like a shadow, and before long they are in the compound. The water in the air is easier to bring to hand here, and Katara gathers the largest amount she can source around her arms to serve as whips, deadly extensions of herself.
"That's it," she hears Hama murmur, and then there is a row of soldiers upright and stock still in front of them, but this is not an ordinary company, but a royal guard and perhaps she is foolish but her wizened mouth twists in joyful apprehension – her defining moment come at last. Hama takes control of them and the points of her fingers dance as skilfully as a puppet master's. Katara cannot help but be entranced with the ease Hama holds these lives in her fingers, how she twists them like their will means nothing. "Now is your chance," Hama's face splits and kinks, "take the smallest one, on the left," and she drops him.
Katara is not quick enough to pick him up – he scrambles free of that unearthly control and ashen-faced and tight-lipped he runs without shame from his comrades.
"Get him!" Hama screams, spit flying from her mouth, "take control!"
It comes, a rush of blood to the head that nearly knocks Katara off of her feet. She can feel the blood in his veins pulsing erratically, yearning for freedom and she understands and she hates it all at once. Freedom is not something that she can deal with easily. The soldier's whole body screams out – she is not nearly as adept as Hama, who is skilled enough to make her victims look as though they are walking of their own accord – and she can feel water everywhere in him. It is in his blood, his muscle, his fat, his bones. It is in every single part of him. She could stop his brain from functioning, she could rip out his eyeballs, she could drown him in his own saliva.
"Well done, child," she hears Hama saying from somewhere far off, and as if she had been floating around outside her body she snaps back down and the effort of the bloodbending hits her like a ton of bricks. "In the back of his head," Hama is saying, "you must stop the flow of blood," and Katara feels around, and then she understands. The man crumples and drops and the two bloodbenders make their way towards the prison's final exit.
It is a long, dark, metal corridor. The air is dry enough to choke on and with the sudden loss of her water supply Katara can feel her power slowly depleting. Hama, however, shows no signs of flagging and presses on faster and faster.
"They always said you were a tricky one," says a voice in the darkness, and the figure that melts out of the shadows is tall and imposing, adorned in crimson and gold and opulence, "but your many talents were worth keeping you all this time," he says, and Hama realises who stands before her.
"You," she spits, and her fingers clench at her sides.
The Fire Lord does nothing but look vaguely amused, one side of his mouth twitching slowly upwards.
"You cannot stop us," she says as sure as the moon that sits high in the sky outside, but the Fire Lord's sardonic laughter throws her off, and it is then that she turns to face her little would-be prodigy. The girl stands humbly, with her eyes lowered and cowed.
"I believe that you will find there is no 'us'. Isn't that right, Katara?" And the girl bows low in the style of the Fire Nation nobility and when she rises, her face might have been etched out of stone.
"Yes, your Highness," she says precisely, avoiding looking at the old woman who stares at her so scandalised, so indignant.
Hama howls, surrounded by enemies and so foolish, so jaded, she lifts her hands as if to jerk the Fire Lord into submission, but no power comes. Instead, she finds that her hands are pinned awkwardly to her side. The girl has no grand illusions of mastering the fluidity of Hama's style, and with that raw abandon comes control. She lowers Hama's old body to the floor carefully, until it bows before the Fire Lord in the same way any peasant on the streets of Caldera City might have done.
It is the ultimate humiliation, but Katara does it all with that same face carved into stone. She is immovable and emotionless. The Fire Lord congratulates her with more enthusiasm than she has ever seen, grinning from ear to ear and clapping his hands together.
"You have come farther than I ever expected of you in so little time, my child," he says, and Katara feels something swell in her chest before she quickly moves to squash it, "show me what else you have learned."
It is an indirect command that Katara understands immediately. She feels for that space in the back of the old woman's head, and then she changes her mind. A traitor of this proportion does not deserve such mercy. Katara imagines how many innocents Hama had killed; she had heard the stories of this infamous villain from Yori and they had haunted her nightmares for days on end. She yanks the woman upright onto her knees, feeling her blood coiled tightly in her veins, and then she reaches for her heart, throbbing and pulsing frantically, and she closes her eyes and feels her fingertips tighten around it.
Ozai's impatience is escalating (his aura in the dark, narrow corridor pulses a nasty shade of muddied red) but nonetheless Katara chances a look up at him before she continues. His mouth is a sharp, unwavering line, and he raises an eyebrow. Speculation, she thinks, about whether or not she is faithful. She can be trusted (she wants to scream it at him) but there is only one way to prove it and without further hesitation she stops the blood flow to Hama's heart. The old woman writhes and gasps for breath. She grapples with clawed fingers at her chest (Katara's grasp of the technique is clumsy and she falters for a minute before regaining the upper hand) and the two of them are so close that the girl swears she heard the old woman's last words – sardonic and cruel and knowing.
"You're in a lionsnake pit, my girl," Hama's words rung in her ears, no matter how hard she tried to believe that it wasn't possible, that she was dead, "you better watch yourself."