sunshine and puppies all around!
Nov. 1st, 2019 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghrainetitle: the edge of darkness (2/6)
verse: the edge of darkness (bloodbending backstory+f!Tarrlok)
characters: Noatak, Tarrlok; Yakone, Yakone's wife (Sura)
stuff that happens: the bloodbending siblings hit adolescence, and Noatak realizes that Yakone has found a different way for Taraka to serve his revenge, if she doesn't make a satisfactory bloodbender.
previous sections: one
CHAPTER TWO
Another year came and went. The usual travails of that age would have been the least of their problems, but in this, fortune tossed a few table scraps their way. Adolescence was kind to them.
By fifteen and twelve, the siblings were decidedly good-looking: tall for their ages, with clear brown skin, high cheekbones, and striking, fine-boned features. Oddly enough, they did not look much alike. Oh, there was colouring—their eyes the same icy blue, their hair the same brown-black, their complexions within a shade of each other. On a second glance, too, they shared many of the same features, but the baby fat still hanging about Taraka’s face weakened them almost beyond recognition. She was soft, a pretty girl with round, dimpled cheeks and a gentle voice, as soft as Noatak was sharp. Few saw anything but the most passing resemblance between them.
Their father certainly did not. More the fool him, Noatak would think many years later, looking down at a sister grown harder and sharper than he had ever been. At the time, though, he knew only that his instincts were clamouring at him: something was wrong. Even the way their father had mentioned the dissimilarity between them was wrong—casually, in front of their mother, an easy smile on his face. He’d stopped hitting Taraka altogether.
On one occasion, when her bloodbending was even more unenthusiastic than usual, he seemed on the point of striking her across the face. Noatak tensed, ready to spring to his sister’s defense, but then Yakone stopped himself, turning the aborted blow into a light tap of her cheek.
“Let's keep your face the way it is, hm?” he said, tipping her chin up.
Taraka stared at the ground, while Noatak regarded Yakone with still amorphous, but considerably greater, alarm.
“Noatak, it’s your turn.”
A few weeks afterwards, Noatak returned to find his mother outside the main tent, hanging clothes up to dry and humming to herself. She cheerfully informed him that his father and sister were in the tent; Noatak, not even pretending at normalcy, rushed inside and found Taraka standing with her arms outstretched. Yakone’s hands rested on her shoulders and he was slowly turning her around, looking her up and down.
“Yes—you’ll do,” Yakone said, more to himself than Taraka, who just seemed bewildered.
Noatak cleared his throat loudly.
“Ah, there you are, my boy,” said their father, turning to face him with perfect unconcern. After a few brief inquiries, Yakone left, and Taraka all but collapsed onto a bench.
“What was that?” Noatak demanded.
“I don’t know!” She crossed her arms over her chest, shoulders bowed. “He said something about how I’m all grown-up now—I’m not, Mom just had to let out my tunic again—and told me to turn around so he could look at me properly. Then you came in.” She bit her lip. “He’s been strange every since—”
“Ever since the last hunting trip.” He gave her a cold look. “Since you haven’t even pretended to be interested in improving.”
Her manner shifted from defensive to sulky, shoulders straightening and mouth twitching towards a pout. “Well, I’m not. I’ll never be you.”
“Not if you barely drag yourself through it, you won’t.”
She rested one foot on the bench and wrapped her arms about her knee, leaning her cheek on her leg. It was almost exactly the same posture Noatak fell into when he slipped away to brood over the future.
“There’s no point,” she said sullenly. “I can … hunt down anything he tells me to. As many as he wants. Any time of day, any time in the month. It doesn’t matter. Nothing’s ever good enough for him. So why should I care about getting better, anyway?”
Noatak glared at her. “Because it’s Dad. He can always get worse! He’s going to do something, I can tell.”
They didn’t have long to wait. A few weeks later, at dinner, Yakone chatted lightly with his wife, ranging from an entirely fictitious account of their latest hunting trip, to news from the village, to the doings of a friend who had just returned from a three-year-long journey around the Earth Kingdom.
“He must be very glad to be home,” said Sura. “Though I imagine he’ll find it rather dull, after Ba Sing Se. Does he find it very different from before?”
“No, but he was shocked to see how much Noatak and Taraka had grown,” Yakone said.
Their mother smiled at them. “They have, haven’t they? Though they’re very well-grown for their age. Nika’s boys are shorter than both of them, and—”
“In fact,” said Yakone, “I think you should see about arranging a marriage for Taraka.”
There was a moment of utter silence, broken only by Taraka’s chopsticks clattering to the floor. Noatak’s jaw dropped.
“A—a marriage?” said Sura, looking very nearly as stunned as her children. “An arranged marriage? It’s not usually done, this far from the capital.”
“But I know how much you care about tradition, dear,” Yakone said.
Noatak’s eyes darted between his parents. Yakone was still smiling, paying no attention to either him or Taraka; Sura just seemed bemused. At Noatak’s side, Taraka was frozen in horror. For once, he couldn’t blame her.
“—perfectly capable,” Yakone was saying. “And I’m not getting any younger. I’d like to see my grandchildren grow up.”
Grandchildren.
Finally, Noatak understood. Taraka had the power of a bloodbender, but not the spirit, the will to dominate. If she wouldn’t bloodbend without being forced into it, she was no good for revenge. But she still had Yakone’s blood in her veins. Her children would probably be bloodbenders, especially if she managed to attract a strong waterbender to father them. Let's keep your face the way it is— If she started young enough, Yakone could train her children up, like Noatak and Taraka before them.
Noatak swallowed. Though it would be many years before he objected to any bending, much less his own, he knew even then that the way Yakone had taught them, the way Yakone had done everything, wasn’t right. It wasn’t—no, not again. Not Taraka’s children, his nieces and nephews, his nieces and nephews who had no business existing for years and years, because Taraka was twelve. Twelve, and that’s why their father had looked at her like that. It wasn’t the vague fear that Noatak hadn’t dared even name, he’d been appraising her as—as breeding stock. Taraka!
Noatak felt sick. He pushed his food away.
Sura, breaking off her discussion with Yakone, looked worriedly at him. “Are you feeling all right, sweetheart?”
He mumbled an excuse in her general direction, then seized Taraka’s wrist and marched out, dragging her after him. Taraka, unusually enough, didn’t utter a word of complaint; her arm was limp and nerveless under his hand. He had no doubt where her sudden docility had come from.
Noatak didn’t stop until they were almost out of sight of the tents, snow falling more and more thickly through the air. The moon shone down on them, three-quarters full and waxing; it was a small, unnecessary comfort.
He dropped his sister’s arm as though it burned him, and whirled to face her.
“Now do you see?” he demanded.
Taraka nodded, even the gesture small and frightened. She hadn’t bothered to put her hood up; snow clung to her hair and eyelashes, and melted down her face. Impatiently, Noatak tugged the hood over her head.
“What am I going to do?” she said, very quietly.
For once, he saw little hope in her gaze. It was the first time he could remember her ever looking at him without conviction that he would protect her. This was not at all how he’d wanted it to happen.
Noatak grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “You’re going to bloodbend!”
“But I do already,” Taraka protested. “I told you, it’s never good enough. How’s that—”
“Shut up and listen to me.” He paced a few feet away, locking his hands behind his back. “Power isn’t the problem, all right? It’s not enough just to be able to bloodbend.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “You have to want control. You have to want something else to obey you.”
“But I don’t,” she said despairingly.
“Oh, come on.” He turned the rest of the way around, looking straight down at her. “You’ve never wished you could just make Dad stop? Not even when he hurts you?” Noatak paused. “Not even when he hurts me?”
She caught her breath.
“You do it in your own way, you know,” he pressed on. “You lie all the time to try and make him do what you want.”
“That’s not the same! I don’t force him!”
“Exactly. It’s not about force,” said Noatak. He straightened and held out his hands, pulling a narrow stream of water out of the ice, twirling it between his fingers, then holding his left hand palm-down, the right palm-up and spreading them further apart, heating the water into steam. He dropped his hands. “That’s fire—our opposite. We’re waterbenders. You act like bloodbending is something completely separate, but it’s not. It’s waterbending. And water’s the element of change, not power.”
She managed to look both blank and stubborn. He sighed, and snagged some water out of the air, suspending it just above his fingers.
“Come here.”
Taraka approached unhesitatingly; despite everything, Noatak felt a flicker of relief that she wasn’t afraid of him. He passed the little globe of water to her, and Taraka twitched her fingers, turning it into a lazily looping circle.
“We’re waterbenders,” he said again, staring at the loop. “We have to flow with whatever comes our way, to be ready to adapt at a moment’s notice. We use the power that’s already there and influence the course it takes. We control the moment of change. It’s not just in bending. Look at Dad. When he needs to be someone different, he is. No matter what happens, he finds some way to make it work for him. He couldn’t beat either of us in a real fight, he can’t even bend, but he still controls us, with our power.” Noatak’s mouth twisted into a distant approximation of a smile. “He must have been a great waterbender.”
“You sound like—” She darted a quick glance up.
“I don’t like him. I don’t respect him hardly at all. But I admire people being good at things.” The not-smile faded, but his eyes crinkled a little at the corners. “Like how you’re a good liar.”
She flushed.
“I’ve seen you do it. You change your story to make it work for whatever’s going on right now, change your voice and your expression and how you’re standing. You don’t do it all the time and it doesn’t always work, but”—Noatak gave her a knowing look—“it feels great when it does, doesn’t it? When you get the better of him just by being smarter and faster? When you make him do what you want and he thinks it was all his own idea?”
“Ye-es,” she admitted, only half-guiltily, shifting the looping water back into a perfect sphere. “That’s—he, he’s … you know what he’s like. It’s all I have! Besides, he’s scared me so much, of course it’s nice to win for once.”
“And wolves have never scared you?”
Taraka winced.
“Right, I bet I’d do great against a whole pack of them without my bending.”
She looked uncomfortable, but repeated, “It’s not the same.”
Noatak shrugged. “Maybe. But in the end, it’s still waterbending. You’re not taking over their minds, you’re controlling the way they move—the way they change. You’re using their momentum against them, guiding the flow of water in them the same way you’d do it with other waterbending. And if you don’t really want control, it won’t go any better than it would with other waterbending.” He poked at the water globe, which shivered. Taraka scowled and the water reformed its shape. “See? That’s what you need, not more power.”
She frowned, thinking it over.
“It hurts them.”
“Not as much as having a baby would hurt you,” he said brutally. “It’s worse when you’re just a kid yourself, you know. You might die.”
Taraka’s eyes widened.
“Don’t you see? You have to get this. There’s no other way.” He took a deep breath. “You have to remember how it feels when you get someone to do what you want just by talking to them, how much you like feeling that clever and that in control, how much you like winning. Hang on to it when you’re bloodbending. And remember that if you give up, he’ll win.”
“But I don’t have time! I have to convince him I’m worth training right away—maybe if I just talk to—”
“No! Listen,” Noatak said. “This is what’s going to happen. I’m going to find you targets and we’re going to practice until you’ve got some smidgen of the proper spirit, five times a day if we have to.” Taraka, seeming torn between horror and gratitude, opened her mouth to speak. He jabbed a finger at her shoulder. “And you just better have it by the next hunting trip.”
He was true to his word. Though they didn’t practice five times a day, it was usually more than once, Noatak excusing them to their parents. Initially, Taraka was almost as dismayed as before. Noatak did his best to bully her out of it, liberally mixing lurid (and almost entirely inaccurate) descriptions of her likely fate with cool praise of her abilities. Taraka, to her credit, seemed to be trying to express something other than distaste. To help, he tracked down the least sympathetic animals he could find. Several days later, after a few reminders of how unpleasant it would be to bring triplet bloodbenders into the world, and various misdeeds of their father’s, and that’s firebender talk, Taraka, she managed to fling away a group of elephantrats with a distinct air of satisfaction.
“But it’s rats,” she said. “Mangy rats. I think they might be diseased.”
In general, indifference was the most she could handle. It was, nevertheless, an improvement over disgust or horror. Every time she looked as if she might relapse into her old habits, he grabbed her arm and snapped, “It’s them or you.”
Even Noatak hated what he was doing. Whatever his other failings as a brother, browbeating Taraka had always been Yakone’s domain. Sure, Noatak was doing it to protect her from Yakone, as he’d always tried to protect her, but he was still deliberately terrorizing her. Worse, she didn’t even blame him; she understood what he was doing, and however frightened she got, she never seemed afraid of him. When it came time for her to bloodbend before their father again, she even looked to him for reassurance. She hadn’t done that in years.
Just like talking, he mouthed.
Taraka set her jaw and held herself loose, but ready. She still didn’t stand with the easy confidence of a bloodbender, but nobody could say she wasn’t a proper waterbender. There was a look of fierce determination on her face. As soon as the day’s catch—some outraged beardogs—began to gallop towards her, she darted a quick glance at Yakone. Her eyes narrowed and she lifted her hands, seizing the beardogs and floating their whimpering bodies this way and that, before forcing them to fall down before her. She didn’t look like she was enjoying it, but she didn’t look sulky, either; she just looked angry.
Yakone, for his part, was hardly impressed—neither sibling had expected that—but he did seem surprised. That night, when he and Noatak were stirring the fire while Taraka prepared the meat, Yakone looked thoughtfully at his son.
“You been talking sense into your sister?”
At that moment, Noatak’s ambivalent feelings towards his father settled into painful clarity. I hate you, he thought. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.
“I’ve been trying,” Noatak said, not daring to lift his eyes from the fire, and despised himself for even pretending that he was on Yakone’s side.
Taraka kept it up through the entire trip, though her resolve was clearly breaking by the end. Yakone didn’t seem to notice anything, and Noatak had a strong suspicion that he and Taraka both were imagining that each animal they bloodbent was their father. For the first time in his life, he seriously considered doing it. They could bloodbend Yakone, run away together, live their lives however they wanted. Would Taraka—? Probably not, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t need her to help, anyway. Yakone couldn’t bend: what could he do to stop them? Nothing. Only they were stopping themselves. For all Noatak’s power, he’d never dared confront his father. But if he even looked like he might hurt Taraka again—
Well.
When they returned home, Taraka sat stiffly beside Noatak at dinner, her eyes unfocused, speaking only in monosyllables. She seemed hardly to notice what she put in her mouth. After her chores were finished and their parents had retreated to their tent, she all but staggered away. With a distinct sense of déjà vu, Noatak sighed and followed her tracks.
He found her below his favourite cliff, kneeling on the snow and gagging.
“Taraka!” He ran over to her, but she hadn’t been sick. She didn’t move, just glanced up through the strands of hair falling over her face, one hand over her mouth. Her light blue eyes weren’t cold, but—faded, somehow. She looked as if the stiff winds might blow her over.
“I …” Noatak couldn’t think of anything to say. He wasn’t sorry for what he’d done, not if it had saved her. Just sorry that he’d had to do it. He thought of all the times he’d wished something would make her grow up, force her to carry her share, and was just glad now that he’d never said so.
She sat back and wiped her mouth, still looking exhausted, almost wrecked. Like a puppet with its strings cut.
“Yes?” she said flatly.
“Four years,” Noatak told her.
Finally, a flicker of emotion crossed her face: confusion. Her brows drew together.
“Four years and you’ll be sixteen,” said Noatak, and though he kept his voice even, something hungry and desperate ran under it. “Of age. Then we can leave. We can go to Republic City and—”
“—avenge Dad?”
Noatak swallowed. He should be able to tell if anybody else were there, but he looked nervously over his shoulder anyway. He couldn’t help dropping his voice. “No. Not if we don’t want to.”
Taraka caught her breath. “What?”
“Dad won’t be there. Once we leave, we don’t have to do what he wants. We’ll still be together, but we’ll be free.” He absently bent some snow into spikes, then back again. “We’re smart and we’re fast and we’re probably the greatest waterbenders in the world. There’s nothing we won’t be able to do and there’s nothing he’ll be able to do about it.”
Taraka’s eyes went wide and hopeful, her lips parting. It was the first time in a week that she’d looked like herself. Then she frowned. “But we can’t leave without Mom.”
“Well, you can stay if you want,” Noatak snapped. She flinched. “Besides,” he added, gentling his voice, “d’you think Dad’s going to let us stay here until she dies? He’ll send us away. We just have to wait and be ready.”
“Like waterbending,” said Taraka, a smile trembling on her lips.
“Just like waterbending,” he agreed.
She hesitated, then reached forward to touch his wrist. “I’m sorry. It’s just—sometimes it feels like we’re never going to get out. We’ll just be here, forever.”
Noatak looked down at her slim hand, dark and fragile against the vibrant blue of his sleeve. The hand shook a little; she hadn’t bothered to put on any mittens. Taraka didn’t think things through, either, when she got carried away.
Normally, he’d have shaken the hand off, impatient and uncomfortable with that sort of affection. He loved her, but in a half-sacrificing, half-angry way, where he protected her and resented her and worried about her and terrified her into proving her worth. He’d have easily died for her if she’d needed him to; he hadn’t hugged her in years. But her touch was very light, and apologetic rather than pitying, and he had a bizarre urge to turn his wrist and let her slip her hand into his, like she had when they were little.
He did nothing of the kind, of course, but he did tolerate the affectionate brush of her fingers.
“It’s a long time,” he said. “A lot can happen in four years. But it’s not forever.”
Note: There are two explanations for the ages here.
The Watsonian reason: Yakone’s expectations of an unsatisfactory daughter are lower and the pace of their training slowed down slightly, while Noatak is even more intensely protective of a younger sister (rearing in Northern Water Tribe traditions + genuinely vulnerable, woobie baby sister).
Theactual Doylist reason: I habitually ignore everything that isn’t onscreen, and I had the distinct impression that each of the backstory moments took place at a different age. So I assumed that Noatak mastering psychic bloodbending happened at least a year or two before he ran away, and he was ~16, Tarrlok ~13, in the final scene. That’s when I wrote this part, back in 2012.
verse: the edge of darkness (bloodbending backstory+f!Tarrlok)
characters: Noatak, Tarrlok; Yakone, Yakone's wife (Sura)
stuff that happens: the bloodbending siblings hit adolescence, and Noatak realizes that Yakone has found a different way for Taraka to serve his revenge, if she doesn't make a satisfactory bloodbender.
previous sections: one
“There’s no point,” she said sullenly. “I can … hunt down anything he tells me to. As many as he wants. Any time of day, any time in the month. It doesn’t matter. Nothing’s ever good enough for him. So why should I care about getting better, anyway?”
Noatak glared at her. “Because it’s Dad. He can always get worse! He’s going to do something, I can tell.”
They didn’t have long to wait.
Noatak glared at her. “Because it’s Dad. He can always get worse! He’s going to do something, I can tell.”
They didn’t have long to wait.
CHAPTER TWO
Another year came and went. The usual travails of that age would have been the least of their problems, but in this, fortune tossed a few table scraps their way. Adolescence was kind to them.
By fifteen and twelve, the siblings were decidedly good-looking: tall for their ages, with clear brown skin, high cheekbones, and striking, fine-boned features. Oddly enough, they did not look much alike. Oh, there was colouring—their eyes the same icy blue, their hair the same brown-black, their complexions within a shade of each other. On a second glance, too, they shared many of the same features, but the baby fat still hanging about Taraka’s face weakened them almost beyond recognition. She was soft, a pretty girl with round, dimpled cheeks and a gentle voice, as soft as Noatak was sharp. Few saw anything but the most passing resemblance between them.
Their father certainly did not. More the fool him, Noatak would think many years later, looking down at a sister grown harder and sharper than he had ever been. At the time, though, he knew only that his instincts were clamouring at him: something was wrong. Even the way their father had mentioned the dissimilarity between them was wrong—casually, in front of their mother, an easy smile on his face. He’d stopped hitting Taraka altogether.
On one occasion, when her bloodbending was even more unenthusiastic than usual, he seemed on the point of striking her across the face. Noatak tensed, ready to spring to his sister’s defense, but then Yakone stopped himself, turning the aborted blow into a light tap of her cheek.
“Let's keep your face the way it is, hm?” he said, tipping her chin up.
Taraka stared at the ground, while Noatak regarded Yakone with still amorphous, but considerably greater, alarm.
“Noatak, it’s your turn.”
A few weeks afterwards, Noatak returned to find his mother outside the main tent, hanging clothes up to dry and humming to herself. She cheerfully informed him that his father and sister were in the tent; Noatak, not even pretending at normalcy, rushed inside and found Taraka standing with her arms outstretched. Yakone’s hands rested on her shoulders and he was slowly turning her around, looking her up and down.
“Yes—you’ll do,” Yakone said, more to himself than Taraka, who just seemed bewildered.
Noatak cleared his throat loudly.
“Ah, there you are, my boy,” said their father, turning to face him with perfect unconcern. After a few brief inquiries, Yakone left, and Taraka all but collapsed onto a bench.
“What was that?” Noatak demanded.
“I don’t know!” She crossed her arms over her chest, shoulders bowed. “He said something about how I’m all grown-up now—I’m not, Mom just had to let out my tunic again—and told me to turn around so he could look at me properly. Then you came in.” She bit her lip. “He’s been strange every since—”
“Ever since the last hunting trip.” He gave her a cold look. “Since you haven’t even pretended to be interested in improving.”
Her manner shifted from defensive to sulky, shoulders straightening and mouth twitching towards a pout. “Well, I’m not. I’ll never be you.”
“Not if you barely drag yourself through it, you won’t.”
She rested one foot on the bench and wrapped her arms about her knee, leaning her cheek on her leg. It was almost exactly the same posture Noatak fell into when he slipped away to brood over the future.
“There’s no point,” she said sullenly. “I can … hunt down anything he tells me to. As many as he wants. Any time of day, any time in the month. It doesn’t matter. Nothing’s ever good enough for him. So why should I care about getting better, anyway?”
Noatak glared at her. “Because it’s Dad. He can always get worse! He’s going to do something, I can tell.”
They didn’t have long to wait. A few weeks later, at dinner, Yakone chatted lightly with his wife, ranging from an entirely fictitious account of their latest hunting trip, to news from the village, to the doings of a friend who had just returned from a three-year-long journey around the Earth Kingdom.
“He must be very glad to be home,” said Sura. “Though I imagine he’ll find it rather dull, after Ba Sing Se. Does he find it very different from before?”
“No, but he was shocked to see how much Noatak and Taraka had grown,” Yakone said.
Their mother smiled at them. “They have, haven’t they? Though they’re very well-grown for their age. Nika’s boys are shorter than both of them, and—”
“In fact,” said Yakone, “I think you should see about arranging a marriage for Taraka.”
There was a moment of utter silence, broken only by Taraka’s chopsticks clattering to the floor. Noatak’s jaw dropped.
“A—a marriage?” said Sura, looking very nearly as stunned as her children. “An arranged marriage? It’s not usually done, this far from the capital.”
“But I know how much you care about tradition, dear,” Yakone said.
Noatak’s eyes darted between his parents. Yakone was still smiling, paying no attention to either him or Taraka; Sura just seemed bemused. At Noatak’s side, Taraka was frozen in horror. For once, he couldn’t blame her.
“—perfectly capable,” Yakone was saying. “And I’m not getting any younger. I’d like to see my grandchildren grow up.”
Grandchildren.
Finally, Noatak understood. Taraka had the power of a bloodbender, but not the spirit, the will to dominate. If she wouldn’t bloodbend without being forced into it, she was no good for revenge. But she still had Yakone’s blood in her veins. Her children would probably be bloodbenders, especially if she managed to attract a strong waterbender to father them. Let's keep your face the way it is— If she started young enough, Yakone could train her children up, like Noatak and Taraka before them.
Noatak swallowed. Though it would be many years before he objected to any bending, much less his own, he knew even then that the way Yakone had taught them, the way Yakone had done everything, wasn’t right. It wasn’t—no, not again. Not Taraka’s children, his nieces and nephews, his nieces and nephews who had no business existing for years and years, because Taraka was twelve. Twelve, and that’s why their father had looked at her like that. It wasn’t the vague fear that Noatak hadn’t dared even name, he’d been appraising her as—as breeding stock. Taraka!
Noatak felt sick. He pushed his food away.
Sura, breaking off her discussion with Yakone, looked worriedly at him. “Are you feeling all right, sweetheart?”
He mumbled an excuse in her general direction, then seized Taraka’s wrist and marched out, dragging her after him. Taraka, unusually enough, didn’t utter a word of complaint; her arm was limp and nerveless under his hand. He had no doubt where her sudden docility had come from.
Noatak didn’t stop until they were almost out of sight of the tents, snow falling more and more thickly through the air. The moon shone down on them, three-quarters full and waxing; it was a small, unnecessary comfort.
He dropped his sister’s arm as though it burned him, and whirled to face her.
“Now do you see?” he demanded.
Taraka nodded, even the gesture small and frightened. She hadn’t bothered to put her hood up; snow clung to her hair and eyelashes, and melted down her face. Impatiently, Noatak tugged the hood over her head.
“What am I going to do?” she said, very quietly.
For once, he saw little hope in her gaze. It was the first time he could remember her ever looking at him without conviction that he would protect her. This was not at all how he’d wanted it to happen.
Noatak grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “You’re going to bloodbend!”
“But I do already,” Taraka protested. “I told you, it’s never good enough. How’s that—”
“Shut up and listen to me.” He paced a few feet away, locking his hands behind his back. “Power isn’t the problem, all right? It’s not enough just to be able to bloodbend.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “You have to want control. You have to want something else to obey you.”
“But I don’t,” she said despairingly.
“Oh, come on.” He turned the rest of the way around, looking straight down at her. “You’ve never wished you could just make Dad stop? Not even when he hurts you?” Noatak paused. “Not even when he hurts me?”
She caught her breath.
“You do it in your own way, you know,” he pressed on. “You lie all the time to try and make him do what you want.”
“That’s not the same! I don’t force him!”
“Exactly. It’s not about force,” said Noatak. He straightened and held out his hands, pulling a narrow stream of water out of the ice, twirling it between his fingers, then holding his left hand palm-down, the right palm-up and spreading them further apart, heating the water into steam. He dropped his hands. “That’s fire—our opposite. We’re waterbenders. You act like bloodbending is something completely separate, but it’s not. It’s waterbending. And water’s the element of change, not power.”
She managed to look both blank and stubborn. He sighed, and snagged some water out of the air, suspending it just above his fingers.
“Come here.”
Taraka approached unhesitatingly; despite everything, Noatak felt a flicker of relief that she wasn’t afraid of him. He passed the little globe of water to her, and Taraka twitched her fingers, turning it into a lazily looping circle.
“We’re waterbenders,” he said again, staring at the loop. “We have to flow with whatever comes our way, to be ready to adapt at a moment’s notice. We use the power that’s already there and influence the course it takes. We control the moment of change. It’s not just in bending. Look at Dad. When he needs to be someone different, he is. No matter what happens, he finds some way to make it work for him. He couldn’t beat either of us in a real fight, he can’t even bend, but he still controls us, with our power.” Noatak’s mouth twisted into a distant approximation of a smile. “He must have been a great waterbender.”
“You sound like—” She darted a quick glance up.
“I don’t like him. I don’t respect him hardly at all. But I admire people being good at things.” The not-smile faded, but his eyes crinkled a little at the corners. “Like how you’re a good liar.”
She flushed.
“I’ve seen you do it. You change your story to make it work for whatever’s going on right now, change your voice and your expression and how you’re standing. You don’t do it all the time and it doesn’t always work, but”—Noatak gave her a knowing look—“it feels great when it does, doesn’t it? When you get the better of him just by being smarter and faster? When you make him do what you want and he thinks it was all his own idea?”
“Ye-es,” she admitted, only half-guiltily, shifting the looping water back into a perfect sphere. “That’s—he, he’s … you know what he’s like. It’s all I have! Besides, he’s scared me so much, of course it’s nice to win for once.”
“And wolves have never scared you?”
Taraka winced.
“Right, I bet I’d do great against a whole pack of them without my bending.”
She looked uncomfortable, but repeated, “It’s not the same.”
Noatak shrugged. “Maybe. But in the end, it’s still waterbending. You’re not taking over their minds, you’re controlling the way they move—the way they change. You’re using their momentum against them, guiding the flow of water in them the same way you’d do it with other waterbending. And if you don’t really want control, it won’t go any better than it would with other waterbending.” He poked at the water globe, which shivered. Taraka scowled and the water reformed its shape. “See? That’s what you need, not more power.”
She frowned, thinking it over.
“It hurts them.”
“Not as much as having a baby would hurt you,” he said brutally. “It’s worse when you’re just a kid yourself, you know. You might die.”
Taraka’s eyes widened.
“Don’t you see? You have to get this. There’s no other way.” He took a deep breath. “You have to remember how it feels when you get someone to do what you want just by talking to them, how much you like feeling that clever and that in control, how much you like winning. Hang on to it when you’re bloodbending. And remember that if you give up, he’ll win.”
“But I don’t have time! I have to convince him I’m worth training right away—maybe if I just talk to—”
“No! Listen,” Noatak said. “This is what’s going to happen. I’m going to find you targets and we’re going to practice until you’ve got some smidgen of the proper spirit, five times a day if we have to.” Taraka, seeming torn between horror and gratitude, opened her mouth to speak. He jabbed a finger at her shoulder. “And you just better have it by the next hunting trip.”
He was true to his word. Though they didn’t practice five times a day, it was usually more than once, Noatak excusing them to their parents. Initially, Taraka was almost as dismayed as before. Noatak did his best to bully her out of it, liberally mixing lurid (and almost entirely inaccurate) descriptions of her likely fate with cool praise of her abilities. Taraka, to her credit, seemed to be trying to express something other than distaste. To help, he tracked down the least sympathetic animals he could find. Several days later, after a few reminders of how unpleasant it would be to bring triplet bloodbenders into the world, and various misdeeds of their father’s, and that’s firebender talk, Taraka, she managed to fling away a group of elephantrats with a distinct air of satisfaction.
“But it’s rats,” she said. “Mangy rats. I think they might be diseased.”
In general, indifference was the most she could handle. It was, nevertheless, an improvement over disgust or horror. Every time she looked as if she might relapse into her old habits, he grabbed her arm and snapped, “It’s them or you.”
Even Noatak hated what he was doing. Whatever his other failings as a brother, browbeating Taraka had always been Yakone’s domain. Sure, Noatak was doing it to protect her from Yakone, as he’d always tried to protect her, but he was still deliberately terrorizing her. Worse, she didn’t even blame him; she understood what he was doing, and however frightened she got, she never seemed afraid of him. When it came time for her to bloodbend before their father again, she even looked to him for reassurance. She hadn’t done that in years.
Just like talking, he mouthed.
Taraka set her jaw and held herself loose, but ready. She still didn’t stand with the easy confidence of a bloodbender, but nobody could say she wasn’t a proper waterbender. There was a look of fierce determination on her face. As soon as the day’s catch—some outraged beardogs—began to gallop towards her, she darted a quick glance at Yakone. Her eyes narrowed and she lifted her hands, seizing the beardogs and floating their whimpering bodies this way and that, before forcing them to fall down before her. She didn’t look like she was enjoying it, but she didn’t look sulky, either; she just looked angry.
Yakone, for his part, was hardly impressed—neither sibling had expected that—but he did seem surprised. That night, when he and Noatak were stirring the fire while Taraka prepared the meat, Yakone looked thoughtfully at his son.
“You been talking sense into your sister?”
At that moment, Noatak’s ambivalent feelings towards his father settled into painful clarity. I hate you, he thought. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.
“I’ve been trying,” Noatak said, not daring to lift his eyes from the fire, and despised himself for even pretending that he was on Yakone’s side.
Taraka kept it up through the entire trip, though her resolve was clearly breaking by the end. Yakone didn’t seem to notice anything, and Noatak had a strong suspicion that he and Taraka both were imagining that each animal they bloodbent was their father. For the first time in his life, he seriously considered doing it. They could bloodbend Yakone, run away together, live their lives however they wanted. Would Taraka—? Probably not, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t need her to help, anyway. Yakone couldn’t bend: what could he do to stop them? Nothing. Only they were stopping themselves. For all Noatak’s power, he’d never dared confront his father. But if he even looked like he might hurt Taraka again—
Well.
When they returned home, Taraka sat stiffly beside Noatak at dinner, her eyes unfocused, speaking only in monosyllables. She seemed hardly to notice what she put in her mouth. After her chores were finished and their parents had retreated to their tent, she all but staggered away. With a distinct sense of déjà vu, Noatak sighed and followed her tracks.
He found her below his favourite cliff, kneeling on the snow and gagging.
“Taraka!” He ran over to her, but she hadn’t been sick. She didn’t move, just glanced up through the strands of hair falling over her face, one hand over her mouth. Her light blue eyes weren’t cold, but—faded, somehow. She looked as if the stiff winds might blow her over.
“I …” Noatak couldn’t think of anything to say. He wasn’t sorry for what he’d done, not if it had saved her. Just sorry that he’d had to do it. He thought of all the times he’d wished something would make her grow up, force her to carry her share, and was just glad now that he’d never said so.
She sat back and wiped her mouth, still looking exhausted, almost wrecked. Like a puppet with its strings cut.
“Yes?” she said flatly.
“Four years,” Noatak told her.
Finally, a flicker of emotion crossed her face: confusion. Her brows drew together.
“Four years and you’ll be sixteen,” said Noatak, and though he kept his voice even, something hungry and desperate ran under it. “Of age. Then we can leave. We can go to Republic City and—”
“—avenge Dad?”
Noatak swallowed. He should be able to tell if anybody else were there, but he looked nervously over his shoulder anyway. He couldn’t help dropping his voice. “No. Not if we don’t want to.”
Taraka caught her breath. “What?”
“Dad won’t be there. Once we leave, we don’t have to do what he wants. We’ll still be together, but we’ll be free.” He absently bent some snow into spikes, then back again. “We’re smart and we’re fast and we’re probably the greatest waterbenders in the world. There’s nothing we won’t be able to do and there’s nothing he’ll be able to do about it.”
Taraka’s eyes went wide and hopeful, her lips parting. It was the first time in a week that she’d looked like herself. Then she frowned. “But we can’t leave without Mom.”
“Well, you can stay if you want,” Noatak snapped. She flinched. “Besides,” he added, gentling his voice, “d’you think Dad’s going to let us stay here until she dies? He’ll send us away. We just have to wait and be ready.”
“Like waterbending,” said Taraka, a smile trembling on her lips.
“Just like waterbending,” he agreed.
She hesitated, then reached forward to touch his wrist. “I’m sorry. It’s just—sometimes it feels like we’re never going to get out. We’ll just be here, forever.”
Noatak looked down at her slim hand, dark and fragile against the vibrant blue of his sleeve. The hand shook a little; she hadn’t bothered to put on any mittens. Taraka didn’t think things through, either, when she got carried away.
Normally, he’d have shaken the hand off, impatient and uncomfortable with that sort of affection. He loved her, but in a half-sacrificing, half-angry way, where he protected her and resented her and worried about her and terrified her into proving her worth. He’d have easily died for her if she’d needed him to; he hadn’t hugged her in years. But her touch was very light, and apologetic rather than pitying, and he had a bizarre urge to turn his wrist and let her slip her hand into his, like she had when they were little.
He did nothing of the kind, of course, but he did tolerate the affectionate brush of her fingers.
“It’s a long time,” he said. “A lot can happen in four years. But it’s not forever.”
Note: There are two explanations for the ages here.
The Watsonian reason: Yakone’s expectations of an unsatisfactory daughter are lower and the pace of their training slowed down slightly, while Noatak is even more intensely protective of a younger sister (rearing in Northern Water Tribe traditions + genuinely vulnerable, woobie baby sister).
The