Winter, ASC 170
Despite the fever and exhaustion, the name 'Noatak' still clings to him.
Sometimes, whenever he wakes up, there are a blissful few seconds where he can't remember who he is. Then his identity intrudes, and he's unable to fight it off.
Years ago, he came to the conclusion that an identity was just a story you told yourself: I am so-and-so. My relatives are blah blah blah. I was born wherever, in the year of whatever. Certain things have happened to me, and because of these things, I have adopted certain beliefs and habits, and so on. People would repeat their stories to themselves over and over, and that was how they maintained the idea of a continuous personality.
Change the story, change the person.
But he remembers (or rather, he tells yet another story to himself) when he was small, and his mother once caught him trying to convince Tarrlok that the old lady who ran the storehouse was actually a Fire Nation spy. His mother mother had delivered a small lecture about untruths: "Some stories have legs," she'd said. "Once they're out there, you don't have any control over them."
Being small, he'd taken that literally, and imagined all the stories roaming around the countryside (on their legs), causing trouble.
Noatak's story dogs him. It stalks him across grasslands, through salt marshes, along the coastline. It's a pity he can't leave it at a temple so someone else can take care of it. He suspects that his neglect is warping it into something vicious.
There are moments where feels like his short-term memory is being devoured by his long-term memory. Thoughts keep slipping from his grasp: one moment he's thinking about something, and the next moment, it's just gone, leaving behind a vague sense of absence. Sometimes the entire world seems to come out of nowhere, too loud and bright, and he realizes that he can't recall what he was doing previously. Yet his long-term memory is fine. He spends a lot of time looking backwards. Or he spends a lot of time looking over his shoulder, anyway.
He could blame a lot of things on his poor health. The burns on his back itch constantly, and he doesn't dare scratch them. He's always too hot or too cold. He recognises the symptoms of an infection. He's not entirely stupid. Yet he's in no rush to find a healer. Finding a healer seems like more effort than it's worth.
He must be bored. The days blur into each other.
He has no idea how long it's been since he left Tarrlok.
He wanders east. It's only the landscape that changes.
In some respects, it's like being a youth again: no job, no home, no commitments. He gives some thought as to how he managed to say sane back then, and concludes must've been sustained purely by hope. His father had convinced him that he was destined for great things and, even though the old man was crazier than a sack of wet cats, a lot of his lessons had still kept Noatak alive.
It's a dangerous weapon, hope. You know how you get stories about people who discover wondrous artifacts and are corrupted by their power? Hope's a little like that. When you lose it, you wish you'd never had it in the first place.
His mind keeps returning to something Tarrlok said once: I suppose it's like being put in a cell and watching the door close.
Something wants him to think about Tarrlok a lot.
For a while, his mind keeps repeating: Tarrlok tried to kill me. His brain gets stuck on that thought like a needle in a grove, until it becomes so irritating that he tries to push it away. Then the thought changes. It becomes: Tarrlok tried to kill you.
Tarrlok tried to kill you.
Tarrlok tried to kill you.
Tarrlok tried to kill you.
"Yes, I'm aware," he says out loud, on a day when he's particularly tired of wallowing in his own misery.
Tarrlok tried to kill you.
"I know. Thank you. Shut up." His voice sounds more like Noatak's now. Not someone else's. He sounds gruff and peevish. Apparently Noatak is becoming a grumpy old fart.
He hopes that he doesn't get into a habit of talking to himself. That seems like a bit of a cliché.
"What's next?" he asks one evening, while he's struggling to clean a fish without breaking its spine. He sits at the side of a river with a simple ice knife in his right hand, though he has to concentrate in order to make the blade hold its edge. "Am I going to start hallucinating? Because you could stand to be more original."
Ah, but madness is, by and large, extremely predictable. Whenever a character goes mad, it always follows a tidy arc: there's the event that instigates the madness (beginning), then the descent into unreality (middle), culminating in a loss of self-control that leads to self-destruction (end).
"You know what might make a nice change?" Noatak muses. "A story where the afflicted character makes a complete recovery."
Can you think of many stories where that happens, though?
Thought not.
"That's a little harsh," says Noatak, then swears as the tip of the ice knife snaps off.
Well, whenever a character ends up in a self-destructive spiral, they only break free from it when another character intervenes and rescues them. A story like that would be a romance, not a tragedy. A meditation on the redemptive power of love and whatnot. Assuming that the afflicted character is actually deserving of love.
"...Ah," says Noatak.
Yeah, sorry son. You're screwed.
"Though isn't it strange how the majority of stories frame love as being an inherently positive force?" Noatak says. "In the real world, people do a lot of silly things for the sake of love. I wouldn't put too much stock in it."
You're so self-absorbed that you would say that.
"My point still stands," Noatak says. "Anyway. Shush."
Would you like to go back to thinking about how Tarrlok tried to kill you?
"You know, I could really do with a good book right now," Noatak says. "Or one of those puzzles you get in newspapers. Something to pass the time."
You don't understand the full implications yet.
"Not the math puzzles, though," Noatak says.
Your Lieutenant always completed the math puzzles before you could. After Sato explained to him how they worked. Sato rather enjoyed explaining things to people.
"Trying to influence your audience with a crude appeal to sentiment is lazy storytelling," Noatak says, as he wipes water and fish grease off his hands and onto his clothes.
Noatak waits for his fever to subside, but it persists.
A day comes when the heaviness in his limbs forces him to stop and sit by the side of a road. He manages to find some shelter behind a hedge, and rests awhile.
He dreams about a man standing over him. The man has a burned face, sad and accusing.
"Really?" Noatak says, staring back even though he's no longer sure if his eyes are open or closed. "I don't think so. No. We're not doing this."
Even when Noatak is relatively lucid, he's still hounded by the sense that he's not alone. As he walks, he sees things at the edge of his vision. He thinks of ijirait, and listens out for whistling.
"If it's you who's after me, then... Well. You're a shockingly unoriginal folk hero who I invented while drunk," Noatak says, when the silence threatens to suffocate him. "And if you think you can get to me, then you're wrong."
He then feels traitorous for saying that.
But it's also a little freeing.
Talking is difficult, but he keeps at it. (And besides, it doesn't matter if his speech is slurred - he knows what he means.) "And I mean, what, you want to be... a personification of my conscience? I'm not sure that I have a conscience, and if I did, it wouldn't look like someone's ridiculous idea of a shaman with a two-bit tragic back story. You were like a protagonist out of the worst sort of pulp novel. You were juvenile."
That's unfair. There was never anything wrong with the idea of Amon. Amon had some humility. Noatak didn't.
Noatak stops, feeling ridiculous, and laughs. "Everyone liked you more than me."
Well, come on. What else would you expect? Maladjusted bloodbender assassin versus ordinary man who fights for justice with the help of the spirits? The latter was a MUCH more sympathetic character. Far more nuanced. And if Amon was ruthless, then that ruthlessness just gave him an extra dimension of moral ambiguity; it made him interesting. He was a good man who used questionable means. He wasn't a pathological criminal.
"I have no idea why I'm talking to you," Noatak says.
You're talking because you're weak-minded and you can't tolerate isolation. There's no one left for you to attack, so you're compelled to attack yourself. One might say that attacking things is all you're good for.
You should be put down.
"Go away," Noatak says. "I'm tired of you. You're... Actually very boring."
Not you, we. We're boring. Who do you think you're talking to? You should say: I'm boring. I bore myself.
Noatak decides to just stop thinking entirely.
He stumbles upon a town, and the presence of human beings jolts him back into personhood. He still has enough money to buy a train ticket east. Travelling by train seems safer. The other passengers serve as a good distraction from everything. If he lets his mind wander, they look like tangles of liquid. He imagines picking them apart.
He catches his reflection in the window of the carriage. He looks sickly, though hopefully not so sickly that he'll attract unwanted attention. It's a balancing act: you need to look sufficiently disgusting in a way that repels people instead of drawing their curiosity.
It's a good thing he's had the sense to buy a hat that covers the bandages on his head, though he doesn't actually remember buying the hat. It's a terrible hat, however. He chose wisely. Apparently there's still a part of him that's thinking clearly, although it doesn't seem to be talking to him at the moment, just operating in the background like a stagehand.
He blinks awake when the train pulls into a station, and follows all the other bodies out to the platform. The station is small, filthy, quiet. A lot of the people have light brown skin and rounded Earth Kingdom features. He assumes he's in one of the former Fire Nation colonies, and he runs through the names of all the old towns in the central Earth Kingdom that were invaded during the war, then it occurs to him to actually look at a sign that should tell him where he is.
The sign on the station wall says Ruyi.
That's somewhere in the Fei Cui Province, if he remembers correctly. Hopefully the United Forces will encounter some resistance if they try to follow him from this point. The powers of the Fei Cui Province have never been very amenable to outside interference.
Ruyi looks like a town that's as good as any.
Right, he thinks, I'm done.
The Ruyi Peninsula is a long stretch of land that juts from out the southern Earth Kingdom coast, shaped like... well, shaped like a ruyi. It bears a small mining town that shares its name.
There are no tourist brochures about it. Wei has checked.
The town hasn't featured too much in any of the region's newspapers, either. Apparently nothing interesting ever happens there. In some ways, this might be a good thing (Wei has heard rumors about the sort of stuff that goes on in the area, and he figures that the locals should be good at minding their own business), yet it does nothing to assuage his suspicion that he's been utterly removed from the world of Important Stuff, and demoted to the land of Irrelevant Shit.
This is not the life he envisioned a few months ago.
The only thing that makes him feel a little better is Jing's weird enthusiasm about the train journey to the peninsula. Jing purchases a note pad and some charcoal before they leave Kosen, and the two of them spend the journey discussing how steam engines, writing and drawing instead of talking out loud. It quickly becomes apparent that Jing already knows how an internal combustion engine works, but he's curious about improvements in boiler design. Wei writes 'you're a fucking nerd', then begins to explain that steam is pretty much obsolete anyway. And, as Wei writes, a strange feeling of irritation itches deep within his bones.
It takes Wei a moment to figure out who the feeling actually belongs to. Jing stops responding.
Hello? Wei scrawls.
There's so much to learn. We're so out of touch, Jing writes back. He has the nicest handwriting Wei has ever seen.
Wei writes: What do you mean?
Jing shakes his head, and doesn't write anything else for the rest of the journey.
When Wei reaches Ruyi and disembarks, Jing takes one step out of the carriage, then sneezes so hard that Wei tastes blood. Things don't improve when they leave the cramped little station and exit onto the street; Jing rubs his nose and sniffs, and Wei is struck by the stink of fuel, oil, rotten fish, limestone, soap, sweat, sewage, fried food, laundry powder, coal smoke, chemicals, so many different chemicals, and...
Just for a second, the world is full of ghosts. Ghosts of objects, ghosts of people, blurred outlines cutting swathes through time. It's awful: the past has already been written and can't be changed, and the past determines the present.
Everything is mapped out in trails of information. The trails make patterns. The patterns burn.
Wei blinks. A jab of white hot pain stabs behind his temples.
Wei holds a handkerchief over the lower half of his face, and marches through forgettable streets until he finds an alleyway where he can talk to himself like a nutcase in private.
"Okay, I think I just hallucinated," Wei says. "Was that because of you? It was you, wasn't it?"
"Huh," Jing says. "You alright?"
"No."
"I... I'm not sure what happened, but I think you might've just picked up some of my, what do you call it, perceptions?"
"What do you mean?"
"I work differently to you, so uh, maybe sometimes I'll pick up on things that would normally be outside your, um, scope of comprehension. And as I'm borrowing your body right now, there might be some..."
"Crosstalk?"
"I'm not sure what crosstalk actually is, but it sounds right."
"Yeah, well, it hurt."
"Sorry!"
Wei thinks about overcurrents, although they don't really fit with the 'crosstalk' analogy he just used. "Kinda felt like a bit of my brain just melted."
"Oh dear," Jing murmurs, and blows his nose on the handkerchief. "I'll be more careful in future, okay?"
Wei swallows back the taste of metal. "I need a drink."
"You can have tea," Jing says, very gently.
Once they find a tea house (albeit one with tobacco brown walls and sticky tables), they perch on the edge of a splintery bench and they take out the note pad again. Wei sets the bow - hidden in its suitcase - on the floor between his feet, and keeps a close eye on it.
Wei can't help leaning over the note pad to shield it from view, although the tea house is almost empty and no one's sitting nearby.
Is our guy really in this town? Wei writes. He can't quite believe it. Then again, he can't quite believe a lot of things, like the fact that he's currently talking to a brain-eating fox-dog-whatever that's living inside his head. (He's still not sure if he should just book himself into the nearest asylum before Jing starts telling him to randomly murder people.)
Yes. I still need to pinpoint his exact location, though, Jing replies. The charcoal hovers over the paper for a few seconds, then writes, I tried to pick up his scent after we left the train station, but you reacted badly.
Wei takes a moment to drink his tea. It doesn't do much to shift the metallic taste from his mouth.
Is that what gave me the headache? Wei writes. You just tried to smell the guy? That's all you did?
Yes.
That is your schtick? Wei writes. You got - he doodles a little circle on the paper as he thinks, then almost writes 'smellography', then puts, super-smell?
Jing shrugs. I'm a hunter. I suppose so.
Wei sits there for a moment and mulls over that.
What? Jing writes.
Wei struggles to think of a good way to explain the patterns he saw, though perhaps 'saw' is the wrong verb.
Smell is the best sense, Jing writes. Not only can you tell where something is, but where it was previously, and when it was, and what it was.
Yeah, about that, Wei replies. When you did your weird smell thing outside the train station, it felt like I was getting stabbed in the head.
Jing twirls the charcoal stick between his fingers. Then he writes: But when you were unconscious and I was controlling your body, I was able to do things like that without causing you any distress. I don't see why it would be a problem now unless- Jing doesn't finish the sentence.
Unless? Wei writes.
Jing fidgets, then takes his glasses out his pocket and polishes the lenses on his sleeve, clearly taking time to formulate a reply.
Wei doesn't bother waiting, but puts the glasses down and writes, You're saying I have to be out cold in order for you to do spirit stuff without fucking me up?
Possibly. I don't know, Jing writes. It's strange. Or maybe it's not strange at all. Maybe human minds just can't tolerate some things. Maybe that's why the Avatar has to shift to a different level of consciousness when using the Avatar State.
What do you know about the Avatar? Wei scrawls.
I know I don't want to fight her right now, Jing replies, pressing the charcoal hard against the paper. And I know that you already have enough to worry about.
Well, that's true, but...
Jing resumes writing: Anyway, I'd hypothesize that ordinary human consciousness can only process a certain amount of energy? information? at any given time, and that once a certain limit has been surpassed, it triggers a stress reaction.
Overcurrent, Wei thinks again. Although maybe that's not the best metaphor.
You're saying the signal exceeds my threshold so it gets clipped and distorted and that screws things up, Wei says, then re-reads it and thinks, what the fuck did I just write?
You've lost me, Jing replies.
Never mind, Wei writes, since he's now managed to confuse the both of them.
So, Jing continues, will it be okay for me to try picking up his scent again? Or would you prefer to search for him using- there's a small pause, normal means?
Wei sighs. You do spirit magic smell thing. Leave me awake. Will cope if get headache.
So I have your permission? Jing writes.
You need my permission for anything? Wei scowls at the paper. He suspects that Jing is being disingenuous.
Yes! Jing writes. If I force you to do stuff, then we won't function very well as a team, and we'll be inefficient. And you will also think I'm a jerk.
Do what's necessary, Wei writes.
Jing draws a little stick figure of a man saluting.
Wei waits for Jing to finish wolfing down a side order of sin zuk gyun (which tastes suspiciously like cigarette ash), and then they head back outside. It's mid-morning. Ruyi is all green and grey, with cobbled streets and squat buildings speckled with moss and soot.
Wei wants to stand by the tea house's gateway and stare at everything, but Jing starts walking, and Wei doesn't resist. Wei remembers what the spirit said when they first met - You'll still be in control of yourself - but in some ways, it's kind of nice to let someone else handle things.
Jing seeks out another alleyway, one with boarded-up windows and walls that are covered in a stinky dusting of algae. A twisted old bicycle rusts in one corner. Wei assesses it. He always rates alleyways on a scale of 1 to 10: 10 being 'excellent for sleeping in', 5 being 'a place where people might engage in a very depressing sexual activity', and 1 being 'good hiding place for a corpse'. This alleyway rates somewhere between a 5 and a 6.
"Why did you take me here?" Wei asks.
"Uh. For privacy?" Jing says.
"Can't we just get another hotel room?" Wei asks, then wants to kick himself. Hotels are a bad idea. The more places you check into, the more of a trail you leave behind.
Jing raises his eyebrows. "You like staying in hotel rooms?"
"They're alright," Wei mutters, while he pointedly avoids thinking about warm floors, high ceilings, and thick blankets. "You gonna do your tracking thing, then?"
"You ready?"
"Yeah, sure." Wei braces himself. This situation reminds him of the last time he told one of the chi blockers to zap him with a shock glove. It didn't hurt. Much.
Jing cracks his knuckles, and breathes in.
The entire world unfolds. It's like putting on glasses: he realizes that there's so much he's always failed to notice, layers upon layers of information, infinitely complex, and yet ordinary: the din of soap and cooking and effluence from the surrounding houses, the greenish miasma of stagnant water and exhaust fumes from the docks, the bright little specks of rats in unseen places, the iridescent stink of humans and their bodies. Someone, in an apartment a few storeys above, is currently eating an over-ripe peach, and a house few blocks away contains an elderly owl cat that's fond of licking the furniture, and just two days ago, someone dropped their jian bing on the street twenty paces away and a dog ran off with it, and yesterday some kind of large weird carnivore took a crap on the south dock after disembarking from an Fire Nation steam ship that had a hold full of rugs. But there are other things, too: the land is ancient, and the smell of humanity is just a sand mandala on time's surface, mutable and bright. Wei tries to keep his mind fixed on the patterns that he recognizes, because there are other, older patterns that are utterly alien, and he doesn't want them to notice that he's aware of them.
He picks out details that sort of make sense. His awareness gravitates to the familiar. There's a spiral that gives him a shock of recognition. Male. Healthy once, but now exhausted and sickly. Cut off from its herd. Easy to corner. Still dangerous, but the risk is negligible. And it's well within a day's walking distance. Convenient and worthwhile.
Then Wei remembers that this spiral represents a human being, not prey, and he loses his focus. There's something horribly intimate about how he can recognize the bloodbender's scent.
The sand mandala is scattered by the wind, revealing a maze of curves, endlessly repeating on itself, infinite beyond his comprehension, and he gets the distinct impression that he's not meant to be seeing this stuff, and then his brain just kind of holds its hands up and says, 'You know what, fuck this, it's giving me motion sickness.'
Wei blinks back into reality, which comes rushing in on a wave of grey. Everything looks like it's made from damp cardboard.
The first thing he's aware of is Jing's voice (which is technically his voice, but smoother somehow): "Hey, I found our guy! He's sleeping in a train tunnel a mile north from here, and I know the route he'll take to find food!"
"Okay. Great," Wei says, then falls to his knees and is violently ill.
The alleyway goes dark, as if someone has drawn a shutter down over the sun.
Wei is back in the courtyard with the high walls. He's sitting at a table. The red theater is still there, glistening wetly in the light from the lanterns, but the stage is empty.
On the table in front of Wei is a block of wood and a set of whittling tools.
He picks up the wood and examines the grain. It's a little too pale to see it properly, but it seems dense and straight; the wood is probably cypress. He runs his fingers over it, and finds it pleasantly warm.
He reaches for a chisel, and begins to gouge into the perfect surface. The wood yields to him.
Wei wakes up in what is - presumably - another hotel room. It's not as fancy as the last one. There's a crack in the ceiling.
He's already sitting on the edge of a bed, drinking a cup of water, which is a novel experience. You're usually lying down when you wake up. But no, Wei is already bolt upright and holding a cup against his bottom lip. Or Jing's holding the cup against his bottom lip, whatever. Wei rolls his shoulders, just to assure himself that he's in control.
He takes a moment to figure out where he's meant to be. Ruyi. Last he knew, he was in Ruyi.
He can remember what happened, and he's still wearing the same clothes, which is usually a good sign.
Right. Words. He has to use words.
He gulps down the water, then says, "Did... did what I uh..." No, let's start again. "...Did I pass out or did you make me pass out?"
"I made you pass out," Jing says. He sounds just as rough as Wei.
"Okay, thanks," Wei says. He has no strong feelings about this. He saw some weird shit. He was sick. He passed out. It's cool. 'See weird shit, throw up, pass out' describes a typical night on the town for some people.
"Are you feeling better now?" Jing asks.
"Mmhm." Wei feels kind of floaty. He puts the cup down, concentrating so he doesn't spill it. Out the corner of his eye, he glimpses a whirl in the plaster on the room's walls. It seems to move. He glances away.
Jing sighs. "You're not going to fall over and start, uh..." He makes a very evocative hand gesture from his stomach to his mouth. "Um, you know... Again?"
Wei still feels so fucked up that he half-expects spiders to start coming out of the ceiling at any moment, but he answers with, "Don't rightly think so."
"Good. Because that was horrible. That has to be the single worst thing your body has ever done. It was disgusting. I didn't know bodies could DO things like that. I didn't want to know that bodies could do things like that. It was uncivilized. I mean, the... The heaving... With the... Stomach cramp that felt like you were trying to turn yourself inside-out... That was just... No."
"All I did was puke, kiddo," Wei says.
"Well, I didn't like it."
Wei grunts, and lies back down on the bed.
He gets to lie down for a whole three seconds, and then Jing says, "No. Up. Walk it off. You need fresh air," and hauls him to his feet.
They grab their suitcase that contains the bow, then stagger back outside.
They wander around the town for a while, squinting against the daylight. Wei lets Jing lead, as he doesn't feel too great, and he's not sure if he dares to look at the cobblestones underfoot in case they start re-arranging themselves. Sometimes he sees after-images of patterns when he blinks.
Jing limbers up as he walks, recovering quickly, although he still scowls the entire time.
Jing wanders through winding streets, passing housewives and old people and small children, until he comes to a crumbling building in a quiet area. Jing pauses, and looks up at the building's roof. He stands there and scratches his chin. Then he moves to a side of the building that's more sheltered from the street, attaches a strap to the suitcase's handle, and slings the strap crosswise over his torso. (Or Wei's torso. Whatever.)
Jing takes one quick look around before pressing himself against a section of wall that's not covered by plaster.
"Can I climb this wall?" Jing asks.
"I don't know," Wei replies. "Can you?"
Jing just says, "Hm," and runs his palms over the exposed brickwork. His (or rather, Wei's) fingers somehow find handholds.
Wei starts to say, "Wait, you're not gonna-" and then boom, Jing is several feet up the wall already. He practically runs up it. Wei just lets him scramble up onto the roof. The building is a few storeys high, so Wei doesn't want to distract him, though it's pretty galling when someone else has better control of your body than you do.
Jing hops onto the tiles and remains crouched, as there's not a lot of cover. He takes a moment to brush some lichen off his clothes.
"I just climbed a wall in, like, two seconds," says Wei. That's like the sort of shit Amon would do. "What the fuck."
"You know what?" Jing says, and flexes his fingers. "You actually have really good hands. And arms. And legs."
Wei would give him a sideways look, if he could. "Don't get too attached to them."
"Just paying you a compliment," Jing says, before skulking over to the other side of the roof. Wei becomes more aware of his surroundings. His heartbeat quickens. He flexes his fingers just to make himself stay present.
There's an alley directly below, although it's empty. Jing sits down on the roof.
"What now?" Wei says.
"We wait. Our target should pass beneath us shortly."
A breeze cuts across the rooftops. Wei pulls his (their) coat tighter around himself. The coat is prone to flapping in the wind, which probably looks kind of bad ass but isn't very practical. He's not dressed real sensible for a revenge mission. He could do with some goggles to stop his eyes watering from the cold.
Jing sets the suitcase down, opens it up, and begins to assemble the bow. And here's where things get weirder: as Jing handles the bow, it starts to look... Almost pretty. Not the slipshod thing Wei remembers seeing back in Kosen. The limbs bolt together until they make one sinuous arc, and the cams for the pulley system slide neatly onto their axles, and Jing pins them in place with tiny screws, and Wei catches himself thinking: this guy is good at everything he does. Everything. What a fucking asshole. What a colossal prick.
While Wei's (Jing's) fingers make a final few adjustments to the weapon, Wei thinks about the weapon's purpose.
The weapon will be used to attack a bloodbender, using some sketchy-looking arrows loaded with tranq darts.
Wei hasn't had any say in this plan.
And now he's had time to reflect on everything, it occurs to him that the past day or day has gone really quickly. He woke up this morning in Kosen. He's now in Ruyi, to kill a man. He found out that he was possessed by a spirit before breakfast, and if he does what the spirit wants, he'll have murdered a guy, oh... By just around noon. (He'll assume that the bloodbender is meant to be Jing's lunch.)
Jing sits bolt upright, and looks down into the alley below. He takes his glasses from his pocket and puts them on, and blinks until Wei's eyes reluctantly adjust.
Below them, an old vagrant walks past.
It's impossible to determine the man's ethnicity or age, though Wei guesses he's in his sixties. The vagrant is in ragged Earth Kingdom clothes, his head covered by a greasy-looking fur hat.
"Wow," says Jing, "That is a terrible hat."
Wei's hands grip the bow.
"Why are you looking at that guy?" Wei asks, although he probably knows the answer already.
"That's him," Jing says.
Wei stares at the sad figure below for a few seconds, then says, "Yeah, right."
"Um, what?" Jing says, a little confused. "It's him."
"That can't be him," Wei says. Like things are ever this easy. Besides, even though the bloodbender is meant to be a master of disguise, Wei was still expecting him to look a bit more... suave.
"It's him."
Wei starts to get pissed off. "And what, I'm just meant to believe you? I can't even see his face."
"You can check his identity after you've shot him," Jing says. He licks his index finger and holds it up to the wind, then appears to make a few quick calculations using his hands.
Well, that makes sense. Shoot first, ask questions later. It's not like shooting a vagrant would be the worst thing Wei's ever done in his life.
Wei waits for Jing to stop counting on his fingers, then raises the bow so he can take a quick peek down the sight. He quickly positions the vagrant between the pins. He's never shot a bow before in his life, but he actually feels like he knows what he's doing. It's a muscle memory thing, though he's not sure whose muscle memory it is.
The prospect of shooting some random civilian shouldn't bother him. If there's even the slightest chance that the guy is the bloodbender, then it should be worth it.
And yet...
Wei reaches out for one of the arrows, and tests the weight of it in his hand.
He lowers the bow so he can nock the arrow; there's, like, a little doodad that he can hook on the string so he doesn't have to pull it with his fingers. It's all so easy.
And something in him says: wait a fucking minute, am I really sniping at homeless guys from rooftops just because a voice in my head is telling me to? Something has gone extremely wrong somewhere.
Wei tries to raise the bow, but-
"...What?" says Jing.
"These arrows seem pretty heavy," Wei murmurs. "What if we shoot him and accidentally kill him outright?"
"At this range, that won't happen. They won't hit him hard enough. I did the math, and I adjusted the draw weight to make sure."
The vagrant wanders onwards.
"How do you know these tranq darts will even work?" Wei mutters. "What the fuck do you know about medicine?"
"The darts are loaded with diluted shirshu venom. It's one of the safest substances available!" Jing pauses. "...Speaking of shirshu, I think I smelled one in town earlier, but-"
"What if we shoot him in the head?"
"We won't shoot him in the head." Jing now sounds incredulous, though this doesn't phase Wei any. Wei is quite used to hearing incredulity from people, although he usually hears it when they're asking questions. ('You did WHAT?' 'You drank HOW MUCH?' 'You got into a fight with WHO?')
"What if he moves at the last second?" Wei asks.
"People don't die immediately because you've shot them in the head! They twitch and gurgle a lot first!"
"Yeah? What about if we accidentally shot him in the neck?"
"Look at a human neck! Look at how small it is compared to the rest of the body! It's tiny! It's amazing that you people manage to carry your own heads around!"
"I could still hit an artery."
Jing's voice is a mix of anger and disbelief. "I thought you WANTED to kill him."
"I do, but..." This seems too easy, too straightforward, and anything that seems straightforward is probably a lie. Amon holds the solution. The United Forces can be defeated by means of superior technology. Once Republic City is liberated, other cities will rise up and follow our example. Your faith will see you through. You just need to be patient.
Perversely, Wei really wishes there was someone who could tell him what to think right now.
"If you take his mind," Wei says, "he'll suffer, right?"
"I could make him suffer," Jing says quickly. "I could make a moment of pain seem like forever. And I can let him know that you brought it upon him."
Wei itches to raise the bow and draw it.
Just shoot the bloodbender and it'll all be over.
'Just' is a word that can get you into a lot of trouble.
And then Wei thinks: shit, I'm gullible. It's the sort of thought that hurts like it's been delivered with a slap.
"Wei?" Jing prods.
And when, exactly, did Jing start referring to him as 'Wei'? He called him Lieutenant when they first met. Wei remembers that clearly.
Right, time to test a few things.
Wei tries to put the bow down on the ground.
He's stopped by a sudden tension in his arms, which doesn't surprise him, so he pushes against the resistance until his hands shake from pain. If Jing thinks he's unwilling to rupture a muscle, then he's dead wrong. Wei's done shit like pop his own dislocated arm back into its sockets before. Wei's not bothered by a bit of discomfort. Wei doesn't give a fuck. Wei's not going to take orders anymore. Especially not from some spirit. Wei would headbutt a dragon if it looked at him funny.
Just as Wei starts to feel nauseated by the pain, the tension abruptly vanishes. Wei is able to put the bow down.
Jing lets out a huge sigh, and it's as if a furnace door has been opened in Wei's mind; there's an immense wave of something like heat, and Jing's frustration burns for a second before the door is slammed shut again.
Wei still braces for some sort of backlash. Jing's words - I could make a moment of pain seem like forever - are going to stay with him for a very long time.
But Jing just says, "Fine. I don't understand you at all and I'm really mad! But fine!"
Wei looks down at the bow on the roof tiles, and rubs his hands together to stop them from trembling. He takes a moment to compose himself.
"You knocked me out, decided on this plan all by yourself, woke me up when it was convenient, then drip-fed me just enough info to get me to shoot a guy. There isn't a single thing about this situation that isn't fucked up." Wei says. "You can't just, uh, expect me to do stuff while you got some weird agenda you're not telling me about. I've had enough of shit like that."
"I-" Jing starts, but then takes a deep breath and falls silent.
The vagrant is almost out of the alleyway by now.
Wei ignores the vagrant, and starts to disassemble the bow. He also ignores the little voice (and no, it's not Jing's, because in no way is Jing's voice 'little' by this point) that's telling him he's a complete idiot because he's just passed up a perfect opportunity to settle things. There's another voice, too, and it says that Jing is being extremely patient under the circumstances and that Wei now owes the spirit in a big way.
Jing takes a while to find the will to speak again. "So you just had an ideal chance to deal with the bloodbender and you're just going to... You're not..."
"I know you're stronger than me, but I'm not your puppet," Wei says, and removes Jing's glasses, "And I'm going get down from here, and then I'm going to find a wine shop, and then I'm going back to the hotel. Then I'm gonna think about things. And then we'll see."
Jing heaves another sigh, and stays quiet while Wei clumsily packs the bow back in the suitcase.
Wei then heads back to the other edge of the roof. He's midway through lowering himself onto a window ledge before Jing says, "Alright," and helps him down.
Noatak pauses once he's out of the alleyway. He almost rubs the back of his neck, but hesitates when his fingers brush against bandages.
He can't sense anything unusual. The only living things within bloodbending range are a few rats hidden in a drain somewhere to his left.
He turns around and looks back at the alleyway itself. There are no shadows. The day is overcast. The sun is directly above. A slight breeze stirs a few dead leaves that have fallen onto the cobblestones.
The alleyway runs between two brick walls that run parallel to each other. It has no corners, no stairs, no windows, no hiding places. Noatak can see straight down it. He can see the street at the other end. There's no one there.
He looks up at the rooftops. There's nothing unusual about them.
He pays close attention to his own heartbeat, willing it to slow down. He's fine. Fear seems a little pointless by now. He's not even sure what he's scared of losing.
It crosses his mind that someone, or something, wouldn't even need to hurt him to do him harm. All they'd need to do is observe. He's in poor health already. All they'd need was a moment of weakness on his part.
He walks back through the alleyway, though he's not sure what he's trying to prove by doing so. They likely want him to know that they're watching him. They'd be satisfied by his unease.
He pauses, resting one hand against a wall, and he considers doing something that would force them to act, something that would demonstrate he's still a high-profile threat. But he remembers what he told Tarrlok: I intend to live a very quiet life.
That was an absurd promise, all things considered.
No wonder Tarrlok thought you were an idiot.
"Don't start," Noatak mutters. The acoustics of the alleyway make his words sound dead, but it doesn't matter what he says if there's no one around to hear him. The alleyway is empty. The alleyway is empty. The alleyway is empty. No one's watching.
His burns itch.
How long has it taken you to realize that you're beyond help?
Noatak sighs and leans against the alley wall. "Look, as I'm apparently stuck with you, and you seem to think that you're smarter than me, you could at least offer some constructive advice."
Kill yourself.
"That's... not constructive at all."
It's a permanent solution to every problem.
"I'm mortal. I'm going to die at some point anyway. Suicide is redundant."
Suicide would be a final act of self-determination.
"If I only did it because I thought I didn't have any other options, then it wouldn't really be an act of self-determination, you shitwit. In order to exercise self-determination, you need to make an actual choice."
You have choices. Prison or death.
"Those aren't choices. They're equivalent to each other. To have a choice, you need to be presented with two or more options that will result in different outcomes. And... I really have no idea why I'm talking to myself again."
Well, no one else will willingly speak to you at this point.
"True. I haven't washed or changed my clothes for well over a month. It's a wonder that my underwear isn't grafted to my skin."
You're completely bereft of dignity.
"Not quite. I'll be completely bereft of dignity when I'm finally forced to use a hammer and chisel to remove my pants. Give me another month or so."
Humor will not be an adequate coping mechanism.
"No, I'm a reprehensible human being who is doomed to spend the rest of his life in misery, I've made an enemy of everyone I've ever known, I deserve to die, I can't have nice things because I only spoil them, and so on and so on," Noatak says. "What do you want from me? Guilt? Because if you're right about me and I am some sort of amoral monster, then I'm probably incapable of genuine remorse anyway." It occurs to him that he sounds a little like Tarrlok. He wonders if he might be a little like Tarrlok. He definitely shares Tarrlok's knack for self-sabotage, at least.
Glibness has never protected you.
"Whenever I was on stage, I always had a terrible desire to start singing show tunes, just to see the audience's reaction," Noatak says, then rubs his face and smiles. "You can judge me all you want, but... Shit, you're a joyless windbag." And he's gone back to using second-person pronouns again. He's not sure if that makes things better or worse, but it definitely makes things easier. "And you've got no right to judge anyone, not really. You were simple and inhuman. You were a string of appealing clichés. After I was done with you, I was going to..."
Kill you off.
Noatak blinks a few times, and rubs his eyes to make them focus.
Faking your own death won't give you what you want. Even if you succeeded, you'd just be delaying the inevitable.
"Delaying the inevitable sounds good to me," Noatak says.
It won't give you what you want, because you don't know what you want.
"I want to be left alone."
You know that's not possible.
"Well, I'll have to prove you wrong then, won't I?," Noatak says, and straightens his shoulders, and heads back out to the street.