and then I went and wrote a new chapter
Nov. 6th, 2019 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghrainetitle: one more tomorrow (1/?)
verse: the edge of darkness (Amon backstory + f!Tarrlok)
characters: Noatak
stuff that happens: Noatak becomes Amon.
previous sections: one, two, three, four, five, six (of the edge of darkness)
CHAPTER ONE
In the first few years after his escape from Yakone, Noatak drifted: from place to place, from name to name. He did his best to subsume himself in each identity he pulled over himself, burying stray thoughts of where he had come from and what—who—what he had left behind. There was no going back; those thoughts belonged to someone else, a boy who could only trip him up now.
He had to scrape by on his wits and bending, as he had always expected; and he had to do it alone, which he’d never expected.
Sometimes, despite himself, he thought of Taraka. She would be alone, too: alone with nothing but their unseeing mother between her and Yakone’s wrath. She was weak, and that made it worse. He didn’t know how she’d break, but he knew she would. He’d left her there (with Yakone, with—)
But he’d given her the chance to come with him, to be free. It was Taraka who chose subjection.
He told himself that over and over, squelching the guilt and fear that touched him whenever he thought of her now. Instead he focused his thoughts on scraping by from one village to the next, learning whatever he could; you never knew what might be useful someday. And though the memory of shaking hands and anguished blue eyes flickered into his mind whenever the fragile and helpless crossed his path, he helped these ones, protected them, saved them.
It happened frequently enough, and happened more and more often over the years. Perhaps he hadn’t been able to save Taraka, but breaking away from her had freed him to save so many others. Non-benders, too, where she had her formidable waterbending to protect her, if she would only use it.
She wouldn’t, but at least she had the choice.
For himself, at first he felt the same enjoyment in bending that he always had. He even felt a touch of gratitude; he knew that he owed his survival to it. He was pleased when he encountered other waterbenders as he travelled, and could either teach or learn from them, though he had the sense to keep everything he knew about bloodbending to himself.
From stray waterbenders in the Earth Kingdom, he picked up healing; that far from home, tradition held less sway, and the masters he found were both skilled and eager to teach so interested a pupil. Taking bending away didn’t occur to him then, but at twenty, influencing chi paths struck him as a far more remarkable power than it had seemed as a boy. His mother must have been stronger than he’d imagined—a stronger bender, anyway.
He was Sura’s son as well as Yakone’s, and he soon mastered healing as he had mastered everything else. More complex problems required a careful, precise hand, but he’d learned that with bloodbending. It was more of the same; it just didn’t hurt them, most of the time, and he didn’t feel so distant from everything afterwards.
For some time after he finished his training, he worked as a healer. By then, he lived a good distance from either Water Tribe, and found that people were willing to pay good money for a waterbender—much better than they paid non-bending doctors. And if they couldn’t, he didn’t mind doing it for free.
For awhile, this much satisfied him. He was helping people, and quietly adding to his savings as he did. But increasingly he felt that something was missing, that he could be doing more—that he should be doing more. And while he had to make his way somehow, he found that he didn’t care for driving non-benders out of business. They knew as much as he did, and often more; they should be his equals.
Without warning, the past jolted him: Taraka’s high clear voice crying, It’s not fair! He’d meant to make the world fairer, more equal, and what was he doing? Only deepening the gap between benders and non-benders, one of the greatest inequalities of them all. They had to work for what came so easily to him, and they would still never be what he was.
What would he be, without his bending? What would any of them be? He could hardly imagine a life without water at his call. But for a moment, he let himself recall his childhood, before everything went wrong. Before bending. He’d been a good son, a good brother—in fact, he might not not have made any worse a man as a non-bender than he was as a waterbender.
He might have made a better one.
But it was pointless to wonder. He couldn’t change his power or anyone else’s. Still, the thought lingered, recurring at odd moments. He imagined himself as a non-bender, imagined the sort of life he could lead. And eventually, it occurred to him that he could do more than imagine it. He was under no obligation to tell anyone he was a waterbender. He could keep quiet about it, let people draw their own conclusions, and see how he got by.
With or without his bending, he was strong and fast and flexible. He got by with only slight, motionless forays into waterbending, inventing names and histories for himself as he continued on. It became nearly as much a habit as bending itself. He felt more sympathetic to the non-benders he met than any bender, felt—aligned with them, in an odd way, even as he saw them intimidated and exploited by benders.
It wasn’t just a bad apple here and there. He saw it happen over and over again. And hadn’t benders been the ones to bring war after war? Didn’t they bring suffering everywhere? He could only imagine what his father had gotten up to in Republic City, before Avatar Aang took his bending away. But he knew only too well what bending could do to a family. It was families, cities, nations.
Something should be done. If he were the Avatar, he’d strip the world of bending altogether, even his own. He had reason to know that de-bended people would still produce bending children, but if they could just stop it for a generation—if they could make people understand what it was like to be vulnerable and afraid, put everyone on the same level—then—
He couldn’t change the world. But there had to be a way to help.
Nobody had talked of chi-blocking in his village. Even in the Earth Kingdom, years passed before he heard a word of it. Once he did, however, he knew he’d found the answer.
An answer, at least.
He’d been wandering from the day he fled the north, patching up small problems, absorbing knowledge as he came across it. Now, he went looking for it. There was a way to even the odds, equalize benders and non-benders, if he could only learn how. He spent a good year searching for chi-blockers, then—with some effort—swallowed his pride and begged them to teach him. He didn’t even recall all that he promised in exchange for lessons; he’d have said anything.
He dared not bend while he was learning, but the fluid maneuvers he’d learned from childhood on, defense sliding into attack and back again, served him well. Effective chi-blocking required speed, agility, instant adaptation to attacks that could easily kill him (well, not him). He had all that, and in short order, he made a skilled chi-blocker. But he had to be more than skilled; even after he left his latest set of masters, he practiced constantly, looking for bending criminals and oppressors and launching himself at them without bending at all.
It worked better than he’d dreamed. They crumpled like paper. When he combined it with slight amounts of bloodbending, enough to slow down his opponents a little, he found himself unstoppable.
He couldn’t and wouldn’t teach bloodbending (he thought of Taraka, and his blood chilled). But he taught chi-blocking wherever he could.
The problem was that people, even vulnerable people, had only so much time and willingness to learn from a traveller out of nowhere. He needed to settle down. Set up a school, maybe. But that would still limit his reach, especially out in the Earth Kingdom countryside. On top of that, he was a young man, and looked younger than he was; people often doubted that he could have anything of value to teach.
Yet he’d been teaching since he was a child, since he shoved their father’s lessons down Taraka’s throat. Cautiously, he dared think of it: himself, the waterbending prodigy; Taraka, small and scared. She’d been right to hate their bending, more right than she knew. If he’d only listened, things might be different. She might be fighting at his side even now, and instead, he would never see her again.
He jerked his thoughts away from futile what-might-have-beens. All that mattered was that he did know how to teach, but she’d been right, and their father, horrifically wrong. Yakone would have had them waterbending their way south and terrorizing a whole city as he had done.
A city. Wasn’t that what he needed? A place to start, a place to reach people and help. A way to practice, too, but that was all right; criminals flourished in cities.
They had certainly flourished in Republic City. Probably even without Yakone. He could go there—the very place he’d dreamed of all those years ago, but as a liberator instead of the oppressor he’d been trained to be. It suited his sense of the appropriate; he’d long ago turned on Yakone in person, and now he could turn on his plans, grind his dreams into dust.
It felt like destiny. Without further hesitation, he headed south.
He never did start a school—not formally. But Republic City turned out to be more fruitful than he’d imagined. Bending gangs ran rampant on the streets, sprouting up again every time they were quashed by the bending police. The council that governed the city was comprised entirely of benders. Benders were preferred for every office, high and low. They even dominated the world of entertainment as pro-benders; he watched a few games, unimpressed by the waterbenders’ performances, and repelled by the sport.
It took very little time to find people who dreamed of standing up to benders, and sometimes more. Earning their trust was a more difficult matter, all the more as an outsider.
It didn’t help that he was instantly recognizable as a member of the Water Tribe. The bulk of non-benders in Republic City, like the bulk of everyone in Republic City, had origins in the Fire Nation or Earth Kingdom. Most of those from the Water Tribes were waterbenders looking to find their fortunes, or their descendants. At first glance, people almost always assumed he was a waterbender himself. They were right, of course, but it didn’t help.
On top of that, he’d realized that he needed to reach people who didn’t know him personally to have any hope of changing the city. He had to be a leader.
After years of passing himself off as various non-benders, the idea of Amon coalesced quickly. He needed to conceal his origins in the Water Tribe to avoid any association with waterbending, which meant a mask to hide his features and blue eyes. Judicious use of make-up did the rest. He needed to attract sympathy without pity, which meant yet another invented history. A firebender attack—the sort of story he’d heard too many times, even if it wasn’t his own.
He started with the most overtly disaffected non-benders: first, just talking to them, and then, offering lessons. This was successful enough that he soon had to rent a building for it, but he and his group of egalitarians pooled their resources enough to cover the expenses. More and more people came, and listened, and learned. He became increasingly outspoken; so did they.
At the time, he thought vaguely of changes in law and policy, but even then, he knew it wouldn’t be enough. Bending had seeped into every corner of society. Chi-blocking only did so much, when you couldn’t target more than one person at a time, and that for a short while. There was no getting away from bending on any large scale.
In the meanwhile, he did what he could about the triads. He couldn’t get rid of them, but he could certainly inconvenience them—so sometimes he took off the mask and make-up, slipped away from his apartment into triad territory, and fought entire groups of them with every skill at his disposal. Waterbending, bloodbending, chi-blocking: they all fused into one exhilarating, horrifying whole. He loved it and he hated it, all at once.
The Red Monsoons in particular learned to fear him. But he could only spare so much time for them. He had the Equalists to lead and guide, and they occupied the vast majority of his life and thoughts, even without a clear goal in sight beyond teaching more and more people to defend themselves. He gathered so many, in fact, that he had to deputize some of his most skilled followers to take over the bulk of the teaching. Surely this was enough to accomplish something.
It wasn’t. His five years in Republic City felt like a lifetime, and yet the city remained the same.
At the end of that fifth year, when he was thirty-four, a representative of the Water Tribe died. Amon paid little enough attention to this at first; the councilman would undoubtedly be replaced by some new, equally unworthy bender. One was very much like another.
Still, any and all political changes were his business. He habitually listened to the news in his spare time anyway, so it was no great trouble to turn the radio on. He caught the tail end of the announcers’ usual babble as he drank his tea.
“A breathtaking end to the championship,” said the first announcer. “Truly breathtaking.”
“Quite, quite,” said his counterpart. “Well, in other news, Republic City has a full council again. Taraka of the Northern Water Tribe has been appointed to Councilman Nuniq’s seat—”
Amon’s cup shattered.
Blankly, he stared at the tea spilling over his skin and soaking into his clothes. It seemed ludicrous that the announcers were still talking, words like chief and interim and finally buzzing past his head as he bent the tea off himself.
Taraka? No, no—impossible—she’d be alive somewhere, but not here—and he couldn’t imagine her as a politician of all things. Whatever their other failings, the role required confidence, nerve, the very qualities that Taraka had so conspicuously lacked. And the name wasn’t unknown in the north; it must be someone else.
Noatak stalked over to the radio and wound up the dial, straining to catch every word.
“An interesting choice on Chief Unalaq’s part,” said the second announcer. “Councilwoman Taraka will be the youngest person ever appointed to the council, I believe?”
“Yes,” the first one replied, “she’s just thirty-one. Quite the accomplishment, even for an interim position.”
Thirty-one. His sister, eternally a child in his mind, was only three years his junior; she would be thirty-one this year.
It wasn’t proof. But he took the first opportunity of slipping out of his apartment as an ordinary man and buying a newspaper. Incredibly, the announcement didn’t make the first page, which was taken up with the doings of some idiot pro-benders. But on the second, a column recounted the news of the council’s vacancy and the background of Councilman Nuniq’s replacement. He read almost frantically.
Councilwoman Taraka had lived in the Northern Water Tribe’s capital for years, but one of the (supposedly) direct quotations from her said that she’d dreamed of coming to Republic City since her girlhood. She was inexpressibly honoured to be chosen, meant to do everything in her power to serve the interests of the city, etc etc. That could be anyone.
The photograph couldn’t, though. For a moment, he allowed himself to believe she was another woman, relief and disappointment washing through him. Councilwoman Taraka had a narrow face with prominent cheekbones and strong, neatly arched brows. A pleasant smile curled her mouth and her hair was smoothly pulled away from her face. Altogether, she looked assured and polished, nothing like his sister.
Her hair—
Glancing down, he saw that it was divided into three tails, each caught in what looked like wooden loops. Exactly the way that Taraka had always worn hers.
Exactly.
He looked more closely at the photograph, and now he could see it. The shape of the face was right, allowing for the loss of childhood roundness. The nose, exactly the one he saw in the mirror every day. The fierce brows and decided chin, too. This woman might very well be Taraka.
Another bender on the council, if so.
But—Taraka!
verse: the edge of darkness (Amon backstory + f!Tarrlok)
characters: Noatak
stuff that happens: Noatak becomes Amon.
previous sections: one, two, three, four, five, six (of the edge of darkness)
What would he be, without his bending? What would any of them be? He could hardly imagine a life without water at his call. But for a moment, he let himself recall his childhood, before everything went wrong. Before bending. He’d been a good son, a good brother—in fact, he might not not have made any worse a man as a non-bender than he was as a waterbender.
He might have made a better one.
He might have made a better one.
CHAPTER ONE
In the first few years after his escape from Yakone, Noatak drifted: from place to place, from name to name. He did his best to subsume himself in each identity he pulled over himself, burying stray thoughts of where he had come from and what—who—what he had left behind. There was no going back; those thoughts belonged to someone else, a boy who could only trip him up now.
He had to scrape by on his wits and bending, as he had always expected; and he had to do it alone, which he’d never expected.
Sometimes, despite himself, he thought of Taraka. She would be alone, too: alone with nothing but their unseeing mother between her and Yakone’s wrath. She was weak, and that made it worse. He didn’t know how she’d break, but he knew she would. He’d left her there (with Yakone, with—)
But he’d given her the chance to come with him, to be free. It was Taraka who chose subjection.
He told himself that over and over, squelching the guilt and fear that touched him whenever he thought of her now. Instead he focused his thoughts on scraping by from one village to the next, learning whatever he could; you never knew what might be useful someday. And though the memory of shaking hands and anguished blue eyes flickered into his mind whenever the fragile and helpless crossed his path, he helped these ones, protected them, saved them.
It happened frequently enough, and happened more and more often over the years. Perhaps he hadn’t been able to save Taraka, but breaking away from her had freed him to save so many others. Non-benders, too, where she had her formidable waterbending to protect her, if she would only use it.
She wouldn’t, but at least she had the choice.
For himself, at first he felt the same enjoyment in bending that he always had. He even felt a touch of gratitude; he knew that he owed his survival to it. He was pleased when he encountered other waterbenders as he travelled, and could either teach or learn from them, though he had the sense to keep everything he knew about bloodbending to himself.
From stray waterbenders in the Earth Kingdom, he picked up healing; that far from home, tradition held less sway, and the masters he found were both skilled and eager to teach so interested a pupil. Taking bending away didn’t occur to him then, but at twenty, influencing chi paths struck him as a far more remarkable power than it had seemed as a boy. His mother must have been stronger than he’d imagined—a stronger bender, anyway.
He was Sura’s son as well as Yakone’s, and he soon mastered healing as he had mastered everything else. More complex problems required a careful, precise hand, but he’d learned that with bloodbending. It was more of the same; it just didn’t hurt them, most of the time, and he didn’t feel so distant from everything afterwards.
For some time after he finished his training, he worked as a healer. By then, he lived a good distance from either Water Tribe, and found that people were willing to pay good money for a waterbender—much better than they paid non-bending doctors. And if they couldn’t, he didn’t mind doing it for free.
For awhile, this much satisfied him. He was helping people, and quietly adding to his savings as he did. But increasingly he felt that something was missing, that he could be doing more—that he should be doing more. And while he had to make his way somehow, he found that he didn’t care for driving non-benders out of business. They knew as much as he did, and often more; they should be his equals.
Without warning, the past jolted him: Taraka’s high clear voice crying, It’s not fair! He’d meant to make the world fairer, more equal, and what was he doing? Only deepening the gap between benders and non-benders, one of the greatest inequalities of them all. They had to work for what came so easily to him, and they would still never be what he was.
What would he be, without his bending? What would any of them be? He could hardly imagine a life without water at his call. But for a moment, he let himself recall his childhood, before everything went wrong. Before bending. He’d been a good son, a good brother—in fact, he might not not have made any worse a man as a non-bender than he was as a waterbender.
He might have made a better one.
But it was pointless to wonder. He couldn’t change his power or anyone else’s. Still, the thought lingered, recurring at odd moments. He imagined himself as a non-bender, imagined the sort of life he could lead. And eventually, it occurred to him that he could do more than imagine it. He was under no obligation to tell anyone he was a waterbender. He could keep quiet about it, let people draw their own conclusions, and see how he got by.
With or without his bending, he was strong and fast and flexible. He got by with only slight, motionless forays into waterbending, inventing names and histories for himself as he continued on. It became nearly as much a habit as bending itself. He felt more sympathetic to the non-benders he met than any bender, felt—aligned with them, in an odd way, even as he saw them intimidated and exploited by benders.
It wasn’t just a bad apple here and there. He saw it happen over and over again. And hadn’t benders been the ones to bring war after war? Didn’t they bring suffering everywhere? He could only imagine what his father had gotten up to in Republic City, before Avatar Aang took his bending away. But he knew only too well what bending could do to a family. It was families, cities, nations.
Something should be done. If he were the Avatar, he’d strip the world of bending altogether, even his own. He had reason to know that de-bended people would still produce bending children, but if they could just stop it for a generation—if they could make people understand what it was like to be vulnerable and afraid, put everyone on the same level—then—
He couldn’t change the world. But there had to be a way to help.
Nobody had talked of chi-blocking in his village. Even in the Earth Kingdom, years passed before he heard a word of it. Once he did, however, he knew he’d found the answer.
An answer, at least.
He’d been wandering from the day he fled the north, patching up small problems, absorbing knowledge as he came across it. Now, he went looking for it. There was a way to even the odds, equalize benders and non-benders, if he could only learn how. He spent a good year searching for chi-blockers, then—with some effort—swallowed his pride and begged them to teach him. He didn’t even recall all that he promised in exchange for lessons; he’d have said anything.
He dared not bend while he was learning, but the fluid maneuvers he’d learned from childhood on, defense sliding into attack and back again, served him well. Effective chi-blocking required speed, agility, instant adaptation to attacks that could easily kill him (well, not him). He had all that, and in short order, he made a skilled chi-blocker. But he had to be more than skilled; even after he left his latest set of masters, he practiced constantly, looking for bending criminals and oppressors and launching himself at them without bending at all.
It worked better than he’d dreamed. They crumpled like paper. When he combined it with slight amounts of bloodbending, enough to slow down his opponents a little, he found himself unstoppable.
He couldn’t and wouldn’t teach bloodbending (he thought of Taraka, and his blood chilled). But he taught chi-blocking wherever he could.
The problem was that people, even vulnerable people, had only so much time and willingness to learn from a traveller out of nowhere. He needed to settle down. Set up a school, maybe. But that would still limit his reach, especially out in the Earth Kingdom countryside. On top of that, he was a young man, and looked younger than he was; people often doubted that he could have anything of value to teach.
Yet he’d been teaching since he was a child, since he shoved their father’s lessons down Taraka’s throat. Cautiously, he dared think of it: himself, the waterbending prodigy; Taraka, small and scared. She’d been right to hate their bending, more right than she knew. If he’d only listened, things might be different. She might be fighting at his side even now, and instead, he would never see her again.
He jerked his thoughts away from futile what-might-have-beens. All that mattered was that he did know how to teach, but she’d been right, and their father, horrifically wrong. Yakone would have had them waterbending their way south and terrorizing a whole city as he had done.
A city. Wasn’t that what he needed? A place to start, a place to reach people and help. A way to practice, too, but that was all right; criminals flourished in cities.
They had certainly flourished in Republic City. Probably even without Yakone. He could go there—the very place he’d dreamed of all those years ago, but as a liberator instead of the oppressor he’d been trained to be. It suited his sense of the appropriate; he’d long ago turned on Yakone in person, and now he could turn on his plans, grind his dreams into dust.
It felt like destiny. Without further hesitation, he headed south.
He never did start a school—not formally. But Republic City turned out to be more fruitful than he’d imagined. Bending gangs ran rampant on the streets, sprouting up again every time they were quashed by the bending police. The council that governed the city was comprised entirely of benders. Benders were preferred for every office, high and low. They even dominated the world of entertainment as pro-benders; he watched a few games, unimpressed by the waterbenders’ performances, and repelled by the sport.
It took very little time to find people who dreamed of standing up to benders, and sometimes more. Earning their trust was a more difficult matter, all the more as an outsider.
It didn’t help that he was instantly recognizable as a member of the Water Tribe. The bulk of non-benders in Republic City, like the bulk of everyone in Republic City, had origins in the Fire Nation or Earth Kingdom. Most of those from the Water Tribes were waterbenders looking to find their fortunes, or their descendants. At first glance, people almost always assumed he was a waterbender himself. They were right, of course, but it didn’t help.
On top of that, he’d realized that he needed to reach people who didn’t know him personally to have any hope of changing the city. He had to be a leader.
After years of passing himself off as various non-benders, the idea of Amon coalesced quickly. He needed to conceal his origins in the Water Tribe to avoid any association with waterbending, which meant a mask to hide his features and blue eyes. Judicious use of make-up did the rest. He needed to attract sympathy without pity, which meant yet another invented history. A firebender attack—the sort of story he’d heard too many times, even if it wasn’t his own.
He started with the most overtly disaffected non-benders: first, just talking to them, and then, offering lessons. This was successful enough that he soon had to rent a building for it, but he and his group of egalitarians pooled their resources enough to cover the expenses. More and more people came, and listened, and learned. He became increasingly outspoken; so did they.
At the time, he thought vaguely of changes in law and policy, but even then, he knew it wouldn’t be enough. Bending had seeped into every corner of society. Chi-blocking only did so much, when you couldn’t target more than one person at a time, and that for a short while. There was no getting away from bending on any large scale.
In the meanwhile, he did what he could about the triads. He couldn’t get rid of them, but he could certainly inconvenience them—so sometimes he took off the mask and make-up, slipped away from his apartment into triad territory, and fought entire groups of them with every skill at his disposal. Waterbending, bloodbending, chi-blocking: they all fused into one exhilarating, horrifying whole. He loved it and he hated it, all at once.
The Red Monsoons in particular learned to fear him. But he could only spare so much time for them. He had the Equalists to lead and guide, and they occupied the vast majority of his life and thoughts, even without a clear goal in sight beyond teaching more and more people to defend themselves. He gathered so many, in fact, that he had to deputize some of his most skilled followers to take over the bulk of the teaching. Surely this was enough to accomplish something.
It wasn’t. His five years in Republic City felt like a lifetime, and yet the city remained the same.
At the end of that fifth year, when he was thirty-four, a representative of the Water Tribe died. Amon paid little enough attention to this at first; the councilman would undoubtedly be replaced by some new, equally unworthy bender. One was very much like another.
Still, any and all political changes were his business. He habitually listened to the news in his spare time anyway, so it was no great trouble to turn the radio on. He caught the tail end of the announcers’ usual babble as he drank his tea.
“A breathtaking end to the championship,” said the first announcer. “Truly breathtaking.”
“Quite, quite,” said his counterpart. “Well, in other news, Republic City has a full council again. Taraka of the Northern Water Tribe has been appointed to Councilman Nuniq’s seat—”
Amon’s cup shattered.
Blankly, he stared at the tea spilling over his skin and soaking into his clothes. It seemed ludicrous that the announcers were still talking, words like chief and interim and finally buzzing past his head as he bent the tea off himself.
Taraka? No, no—impossible—she’d be alive somewhere, but not here—and he couldn’t imagine her as a politician of all things. Whatever their other failings, the role required confidence, nerve, the very qualities that Taraka had so conspicuously lacked. And the name wasn’t unknown in the north; it must be someone else.
Noatak stalked over to the radio and wound up the dial, straining to catch every word.
“An interesting choice on Chief Unalaq’s part,” said the second announcer. “Councilwoman Taraka will be the youngest person ever appointed to the council, I believe?”
“Yes,” the first one replied, “she’s just thirty-one. Quite the accomplishment, even for an interim position.”
Thirty-one. His sister, eternally a child in his mind, was only three years his junior; she would be thirty-one this year.
It wasn’t proof. But he took the first opportunity of slipping out of his apartment as an ordinary man and buying a newspaper. Incredibly, the announcement didn’t make the first page, which was taken up with the doings of some idiot pro-benders. But on the second, a column recounted the news of the council’s vacancy and the background of Councilman Nuniq’s replacement. He read almost frantically.
Councilwoman Taraka had lived in the Northern Water Tribe’s capital for years, but one of the (supposedly) direct quotations from her said that she’d dreamed of coming to Republic City since her girlhood. She was inexpressibly honoured to be chosen, meant to do everything in her power to serve the interests of the city, etc etc. That could be anyone.
The photograph couldn’t, though. For a moment, he allowed himself to believe she was another woman, relief and disappointment washing through him. Councilwoman Taraka had a narrow face with prominent cheekbones and strong, neatly arched brows. A pleasant smile curled her mouth and her hair was smoothly pulled away from her face. Altogether, she looked assured and polished, nothing like his sister.
Her hair—
Glancing down, he saw that it was divided into three tails, each caught in what looked like wooden loops. Exactly the way that Taraka had always worn hers.
Exactly.
He looked more closely at the photograph, and now he could see it. The shape of the face was right, allowing for the loss of childhood roundness. The nose, exactly the one he saw in the mirror every day. The fierce brows and decided chin, too. This woman might very well be Taraka.
Another bender on the council, if so.
But—Taraka!