"I'm from the Northern Water Tribe."
"Really?" the Avatar says uncertainly.
"Is that so hard to believe?"
She blushes and laughs, her hands on her knees and squeezing the fabric of her trousers idly. "Oh, sorry. I don't mean to assume, but, er, you're really, um. Yeah, um."
"Well," he says with a broad, forced grin, "I've never been one for keeping secrets. My mother was from the Northern Water Tribe, but my father wasn't. It seems that I resemble him more year after year."
He listens. He listens to her.
"Please, he's just some smug ol' windbag. Like he'd really go up against the Avatar."
"I would not underestimate him. Men like Tarrlok, they always grow more dangerous when their resources dwindle. They grow desperate."
"Is he older?"
"Pema, ha, no. What would make you think that?"
She's flying. Toward him, toward his escaping Equalists as they are elevated out of the arena. A furious hotness slashes through his veins.
He told her to be careful. She never listens. No matter the instructions, the wisdom, the importance, she's the same insolent brat who trotted into the city with her head high and her fists ready.
Focusing on the water she's rising up with, he pictures it crashing. It's not his intention to kill her, and he almost has a begrudging admiration toward her ignorance. What must the world be like through her eyes? Simple, not a daily struggle to look into the mirror and apply lie after lie to survive.
"It just makes me feel so stupid." She sniffs, rubbing her cheek with the back of her hand. "I always mess everything up. Everybody, everybody wants me to be like Aang. But I can't be."
The Avatar plunges as her waterbending is disrupted. If she screams, he cannot hear it over the roaring in his ears.
"Naga—whoa, easy girl." Sometimes she brings her beast of a pet to the park, and the polar bear-dog is not receptive toward his attempts at amicability.
He warned her, Amon tells himself. It's not like he didn't attempt to give her a fair chance.
"Just because I'm young doesn't mean I can't amount to anything, but all of the Avatars before me were so-great."
"True," Amon replies as they sit together in the park, a tree filtering out most of the sunlight that dwells upon their backs, "but you shouldn't be so self-effacing."
Seconds after she falls, heat flares around him, but with his mask and years of enforced restraint, he mimics nonchalance. Whether it is his followers or the Avatar, he knows how to look as if he feels nothing.
He isn't certain if his times with her were a fallen barrier or yet another identity. It doesn't matter though. It meant nothing. It won't change a thing.
It never will.