Chapter Text
the yamen point, called the "mutism gate of the governing vessel", is located at the top of the spine just below the C1 (atlas) vertebrae. this point loosens the tongue, relaxes the spine, and reawakens the unconscious.
The sound of hail woke me.
Or, rather, the conspicuous lack of the sound of hail woke me. I lay on the futon, Asami snoring softly next to my shoulder, her hair stuck in her mouth, and stared up at the ceiling above my head. I could hear the wind screaming and roaring, and the distant plinking of hail. I could feel the pressure system coalesced overhead, raging and battering between the skies and the earth, the wind that whipped around the farmhouse. The distant hail, pounding out of the sky, was against the reach of my consciousness almost like cool dew on my skin.
I lay, hands folded on my stomach, the blankets a little knotted around my knees and ankles, and tried to figure out what it was that had woken me. Idly, I picked my nose, eyes closed as I dozed. The hail wasn’t nearby, but it was nearby, just strangely distant. Separate. The pressure system was directly overhead, the cloudburst of the summer storm pounding down from above, but it wasn’t touching us. There was no hail crashing into the roof.
My body, accustomed as it was, as it had always been, to the drives and pull of the tides and precipitation, expected the hail to be nearby. My Bending reached for it, had woken me trying to grasp it, but the ice wasn’t close enough to get an easy hand on. I flicked whatever I’d dug out of my nose onto the floor and rolled to my feet, tugging myself out of my blankets.
Asami made a questioning noise, not really waking, and I shushed her, pulling away. It was chilly in the way of intense summer storms, when the barometer dropped hard and fast, temporarily cutting to the bone until the storm went overhead, and I tugged on a sweater from where I’d tossed it haphazardly over the back of the deskchair the night before and pulled my hair out after it, sliding the door to our room open.
The main room was silent and empty, except for the coals glowing in the firepit and the steaming kettle hanging above it, but the front door was open, and I went that way, leaning against the doorframe and looking out into the storm.
He was sitting in his large basket chair stuffed with pillows, his feet up on a small stool. He looked a lot smaller like that, even though he was half a head taller than me even in his dotage, dwarfed and thin and blue-veined in the cool night air. His shirt was old, worn cotton, dark red and faded with age, and not fully belted, just hanging around his chest. He’d wrapped himself in a flannel blanket, and over his legs he’d draped one of Lieu’s leather jackets, this one probably older than I was, the leather cracked and blistered and tearing in places along seams. His hood wasn’t up and his mask was left off, so I could see the scarring that twisted his entire head and chest, pale in the light from the open door.
He had a little hair left, but not much. A few grey, coarse strands in a hunk no wider than my finger fell over his face, still thick. He was holding a cup of tea in his hands, the clay cup tucked between his thighs, steaming.
He was probably keeping it hot.
We sat in silence for some time as the hail pounded above and I stared up into the sky and the darkness, trying to make out the edges of the bubble he’d placed above the farm. I couldn’t really see it, although I could feel it, sort of, there in the distance, maybe twenty feet above our heads, clearing the house and the radio antennae and everything on the farm but the trees. “Did I wake you?” He asked after a time, his voice hoarse and quiet.
“The not-hail did,” I admitted. “How far do you have it held off?”
“Over the fields,” he said. He closed his eyes as we spoke, gently rocked his wicker chair back and forth, the body creaking slightly on its coasters. “It’s starting to give me a headache. I really thought this hail was going to be a quick thing.” It never usually lasted. “But it’s shown no signs of petering off.”
I grunted, and we kept standing there. “Want me to take over?” I offered, after a while, and he made a quiet noise that sounded sort of like a denial, so I didn’t press it. “Don’t burn yourself out,” I added, and he laughed.
“You’re not here to teach me, Avatar. I know what I’m doing. Luckily, I can sleep as long and late as I want tomorrow.” He turned to look at me then, a half-smile touching the remaining side of his mouth, his teeth and gums visible through the hole in his cheek on the right. He cocked what would once have been an eyebrow at me. He had to crane his neck a bit from his angle to see me properly, the cataracts in his right eye making him mostly blind on the side I was standing on. I was also talking toward his deaf ear, which was probably part of why he was craning so far. “I have an apprentice to water the fields for me.”
“Don’t get used to it, old man.”
Amon laughed, brief and quiet. “If you’re going to be awake, do you want to sit until it’s done? Feel free to reheat the kettle and bring out a bench.” I hesitated, and then went back inside and did as he’d suggested, pouring a cup of tea from the kettle, dropping in some leaves from the bowl beside the firepit, and I got the bench that sat next to the water pump outside the front door to sit beside him.
It was strangely quiet, in this pocket he’d made in the storm. Outside it the hail and wind were screaming, a gale trying to tear the world up by its roots. Inside it, we could hear that noise and we were still buffeted by the wind, but the storm proper was distant, held at arm’s length by the pressure he was exerting to keep the crops from being destroyed by the hail. Neither of us spoke, we just drank our tea and sat and watched the storm at the bottom of the front walk.
He’d extended the bubble just enough to keep our car from getting hailed on. I found myself smiling a little.
“So,” I started, gauging him to see if he’d talk. Amon, the way I remembered him, wasn’t taciturn—when he’d been leader of the Equalists, he’d used words as weapons. Now, as an old and sick man, he rarely spoke more than he had to. Lieu, who had once only talked in his shadow and was silent otherwise, did most of the talking for them now. He made a quiet noise of acquiescence, and I continued, “You just…boiling that water?”
“For the tea?” He laughed again. “Yes, I’m keeping it hot. Are you just warming the cup?” I looked down at the clay, which I was, actually, keeping hot with my hands. I flushed slightly. “Shortcuts are sometimes the best way, when you can find them.”
“I guess I forget a lot, that not everyone can.”
“It always has been your greatest weakness.” The way he said it, it wasn’t really a judgment. It was more like gentle chiding, reminding me that I’d forgotten to put my turn signal on or that I’d left a window open overnight. He wasn’t disappointed in me; he just knew I could do better.
“Have I gotten better?” I asked, after a few minutes.
“Yes.” I looked over at him, and found him staring straight ahead, into the storm. His eyes, one grey with cataracts that had overcome his ability to heal them back, and one still the pale ice-blue of a glacial core, were seeing something that was beyond both of us. “Korra, you don’t have to live that role. You never have, and you never truly could, even if you never Bent again in your life. The experiences of Non-Benders are not ones that can be replicated by even the most fervent attempts at belief.” He took a long sip of his tea, and looked at me. “I would know. Be yourself, and give them voices. If they can’t speak, give them a platform to talk. If they can’t stand there, only then can you put yourself in their shoes and say their words.
“Were you not one to think with all the elements first, and without them later, you would not be the Avatar.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, looking down at the cup in my hands. “I know. But you still make me feel like a kid.”
“We’re all children, really, in the grand scheme of the cosmos. I’ve just got more practice at it than you.” He paused, and then shrugged his left shoulder slightly, the whole one. “When I was your age, I thought I had it all figured out.”
I laughed at him. “Yeah. Trust me. I remember.”
“Then let me be a lesson to you, young Avatar.” Amon shook his finger at me. “Don’t go trying to start any cults, religious sects, or terrorist organizations. These are poorly planned diversions, and will end with you exploding.”
“Do you regret it?” I asked. It slipped out without my meaning it to, and we stared at each other for a moment. Amon made a strange, unreadable face at me, and looked back over his farm into the storm. He didn’t say anything, and I was almost getting ready to apologize for being insensitive and brash when he said:
“Yes.”
Amon’s face was as dark and impenetrable as the storm was, and he did not look at me as he spoke. He didn’t really look at anything, even though his gaze was turned towards the storm. He seemed to be looking inside, deep into himself. “Not for the reasons you think,” he added, lifting his right hand, haltingly, to touch the side of his face, where his skin was marbled, twisted, and ruined by scars and the inelastic whorls of decades-old burns. “Pain and deformity get easier with time. They start to become a part of the world around us, and while they do not ease, it does become easier to find yourself in that agony, and carve from it peace. No.”
Amon shook his head, lowered his hand. “I regret it because I should have always told the truth, from the beginning. I did not have the voice to speak for the voiceless, not without them knowing who and what I was. I am, and always will be, a Waterbender. It is a fundamental part of my very base self. I should have given the stage to those who could not make a stage for themselves. I should never have allowed mob mentality to rule myself and others; I should never have attacked children; I should never have tried to break those who were already themselves broken.”
Overhead, thunder rumbled, low and basso profondo. It made the hair on the back of my neck rise, static, and the window shutters of the farmhouse rattle.
“I once told Lieu I would do it again, because it brought us to happiness in the end. But I was younger, then, and foolish. I couldn’t see outside my own front door. No, Korra, I would not do it again. If I could go back and restart this life, I would lift them up on my shoulders and let my brothers and sisters use me as their weapon, rather than demand they become mine.
“There is nothing I regret more in this life than that I used the movement for equality as one for revenge.”
It was quiet, then, and after a moment, I felt the pressure abate, the bubble over our heads open. The rain came down, cold and heavy and drenching, and it crashed into both of us like a wave, like birthing blood, and I closed my eyes, felt it fold around my body as a friend.
I could hear Amon crying next to me, lost in the storm, and I reached out, set my hand on top of his without looking. I could feel his blood, pounding in his veins, hotter than it should be because of his constant fever, unable to sweat. He’d taught me, now, and I felt him turn his hand over beneath mine. I squeezed his fingers, and he squeezed back, and neither one of us said anything, in that enormous cacophony of sound, in that storm that felt like the end of the world.