Chapter Text
The slash across her stomach is turning numb from the bitter cold, though she isn't sure if this is a mercy or not. And the icy wind is clotting it shut by freezing the blood spattered across her clothes and her skin, but she isn't sure if the frostbite is worth it. She takes a cursory glance at the wound for a moment as she walks, removing her hand and the useless pressure she adds, and decides at the sight of raw, mangled flesh turned blue that all of it is just insufferable.
Kuvira has a single pistol with her-- the other was painfully left behind after one of those unholy creatures managed to wildly swat it from her grasp-- and enough strength to maybe bend a small shelter. She debates even settling, though, not wanting to be caught by the swarm of demonic pests any time soon. And every second longer she takes to trudge through this barren valley, her chances of finding Baatar grow slimmer.
She feels a hot string of pain shoot up her body after stepping oddly on an uneven pot of rocks and snow, and Kuvira decides that risky or not, she'll be useless to Baatar-- or she might not find him at all-- if she doesn't settle soon to deal with her injury.
Kuvira avoids anything and everything that resembles a burrow of some kind. When she and her fiancé had been separated, it'd been shortly after the collapse of some burrow-like enclave in the side of a rocky mountain. The collapse immediately threw up a swarm of those things, and caused the beginnings of an avalanche. The train took damages fron the horde, was swarmed and thrown off the tracks, and had to be abandoned before it became a coffin. Bending hardly affected the creatures, so they were forced to rely on their guns (brand new devices, hardly tested, but already proving to be ingenious and invaluable seeing as they'd saved their lives). She and Baatar had tried to stay together, but with deserters from the altercation, they were eventually forced apart by the beasts and the quickly approaching disaster on the mountain. Several tons of snow easily divided them. And by some miracle, the frozen dust swallowed all the creatures but left her and Baatar alive and mostly able. Kuvira's never seen anything like these things before, but she has a feeling that the snow won't kill them. It's just a matter of time before they emerge and start to hunt the pair of them down again.
Finding a decently even square of land, Kuvira earthbends herself a small shelter, flipping the base bit of land so that no snow is inside her sanctuary. With a jab and a flick of her fingers, two small, square holes are punched in each slanted side of her earthen tent. The motions repeated puts two equally small, square holes before her and behind her in the straight sides of her tent.
With some light now, Kuvira bends two dark pits of mineral stone from the ground. She bends one into a flat knife and the other into a needle. The knife she brings to her hair, cutting only two strands from her head. Then she puts an eye in the needle, threads it with her hair, and uses it to sew her coat shut. The hair is thin and somewhat wiry, but it manages. With some precision, Kuvira lines the hair with earth to strengthen it.
Slumped, tired, in a corner of her shelter with a patched up coat, Kuvira moves her clothes aside and lets in the freezing cold of the mountains while she takes another look at her injury.
But the atmosphere warms too slowly if at all, threatening to kill her before the slash across her stomach does. Kuvira covers back up, unable to take the cold, and goes rooting through her coat pockets for the flask she'd brought in case of emergencies. She takes a healthy swig of the burning alcohol in it and lets it warm her insides.
Once she feels better, Kuvira puts the alcohol away, then places her gloved hands on the walls of her shelter. With time she is able to accelerate the molecules in the earth just enough to make it hot. The heat is about the same as the searing warmth of rocks that have been out in the sun all day. She doesn't have the skill of only two earthbenders in the world to heat it to its boiling point, but this is enough, all she needs.
Kuvira continues heating the rocks until the little space in her shelter is toasty and melted snow has gathered on the little square holes in the walls. Afterwards, she removes her coat and uniform again to assess her thawing injury. It looks ugly, but not infected. Yet. Kuvira presses a warm stone to the skin around her open wound, finishing its thawing process and avoiding contamination of the ice-clotted area. Luckily, there's no major amounts of frostbitten skin. Kuvira turns her knife into a pair of scissors to carefully snip the frozen bits off. She winces at the sharp tingles it sends through her body.
The cold begins encroaching again. Kuvira holds her hands to the stone walls for a few moments more to ensure that the cold does not get far. With the warmth and treatment, however, comes more pain. The cold-induced numbness fades away, and her body starts to fully understand that it's been badly hurt. Kuvira forces herself to remain calm in spite of the growing apprehension that comes with the evolution, uses deep breaths to deal with the increasing pain. Her exhales come out steady, and she uses her breath to warm her gloved hands. The stone is eventually heated once more on her command.
Then it's time to seal the wound.
With a foreboding sigh, Kuvira takes a sliver of metal from one of her epaulettes and bends it taut between her two hands. She twists it and pulls it, twists it and pulls it, twists it and pulls it. Again and again her hands do the same motions, taking metal from her gear as if unraveling it by the seams until she has a long chord of pure alloy, smooth and warm and very thin. She then takes the metal string and threads her needle with it.
Between her two fingers, the needle heats. Because it is small and conductive, Kuvira is able to make the end of it red. She grabs her coat, rolls up one of the sleeves and puts it in her mouth, between her teeth. She braces herself for this, her eyes looking out the square hole in front of her to see the daylight dying.
Not keen on wasting anymore time, Kuvira pierces her flesh with the hot needle and begins the torturous process of stitching herself back together.
Eventhough she's in a lot of pain with tears in the back of her eyes, her jaw aching against her coat sleeve and her hands shaking from the cold, Kuvira doesn't stop until she's forced to. Her breaths come quick and shallow, quicker and more shallow, then fall slightly in tempo as she collapses against the earthen wall with her needle still attatched to its string, halfway through the process. Kuvira's body is wracked with small shivers in rapid succession as the last of the heat is sucked from her shelter. She lifts a trembling hand to the stone to heat it up once more, but the blood loss and searing frozen air cuts the attempt short. Her hand falls to her side, useless. Frustrated beyond any level of previous fury, Kuvira clenches her jaw, furrows her sharp brows, and feels her face set like cooling molten stone in the face of her catastrophic failure. The cold grips her in an unforgiving vice. The darkness at the edges of her vision begins to creep inward, her limbs turning to lead.
Baatar. . . she thinks urgently, heartrate spiking as she loses the feeling in her fingers, the Empire. . .
Kuvira hisses a final spiteful, frostbitten curse to the air as her heavy eyelids slide shut. Then she's dragged, inwardly kicking and screaming, into a very deep sleep.
: : S P L I T : :
As he sees the sun change colors behind the thick clouds and feels the temperature drop several degrees, Baatar sincerely hopes that Kuvira is having an easier time than he is.
He's almost certain of it, actually, given that she's a bender and he is not, but he'd seen Kuvira suffer a heavy blow from one of the demons the very instant they were separated and he doesn't doubt that it's painful and troublesome. Hopefully it isn't too crippling.
He himself is currently occupied with playing tag with a small group of the bloody hounds that'd emerged from the mountainside earlier. He loathes the things. They're faster than any wolfcat he's seen and leagues more aggressive. A shot right in the center of their ellipsic heads-- the spot that, had they any eyes, would be right between them-- doesn't even stop them right away. They keep on going for at least thirty seconds after the hit before they die, all long limbs and feral instinct, as if their brains have almost no connection to their bodies. He doesn't like the implications of the existence of something like that-- he doesn't like anything about any of this.
The things have shoulders high over their heads that protrude like doorknobs, no neck he could see, two rows of teeth and limbs jointed like a wolfcat, but no ears, no nose, no eyes-- no face. The skin is raw-looking everywhere, as if they'd been burned alive in one big fire or just crawled out of the depths of Hell, and it was thin as paper, peeled back, torn like rotting parchment-- rotting like torched leaves. They have wiry bones and virtually no muscle, yet they manage to launch themselves forward as far as tree frogs. They're freakish, something out of a nightmare; they're nightmare personified.
In the beginning, their stupid resilience had made successfully avoiding them a challenge. But with some timing and coordination, he's making it work. Sort of. Sometimes he loses track of the seconds in between shots and the beasts that receive them, gets lost in the horde and forgets which direction he came from and which way he's supposed to be going. He's got a brand new scar forming across the left half of his chest because of the latter mistake. Fortunately, it's not deep enough to be critical (but eventhough he really shouldn't have the headspace for it between trying to kill these creatures and trying not to die, Baatar can't help but wonder what Kuvira will think of it).
Baatar falls to his knees and lets inertia propel him forward across the frozen sand, leaning back low to avoid wide jaws and flailing limbs that seek purchase in his flesh. The demon sails over him from his side and lands behind him, then Baatar pops back onto his feet to feed two rounds into two more of the leaping creatures ahead as he continues to run. He feels a quick gust of air behind his head that feels like one of the demons is dangerously close to biting his head off, but he doesn't look back.
From what he can see, there's no cover to be had out here without bending (and even if there were, he's not positive it would even hold up against creatures like these). He's going to have to be resourceful. His eyes trail along the peak of the lowest mountain ridge as he simultaneously keeps the mangled beasts at bay, going back and forth between searching for the quickest way over and watching for razor sharp teeth gnashing too close. Baatar maps out the situation in his head.
Assuming she hasn't been forced to change trajectory and has also been looking for a way over the divide, Kuvira should be within an approximate one mile radius of him, moving in the same direction and hopefully not surrounded by demons. If he can find a quick way over without losing any of his agility or speed, it would be ideal. Unfortunately, the odds are not in his favor on account of the blood thirsty creatures quite literally nipping at his heels and the instability of the freshly fallen snow, not to mention his mounting fatigue (it's quite impressive that he's lasted this long actually, it must be the adrenaline--)
--click!click! No amount of adrenaline can drown out the damning sound of his guns' empty chambers. Baatar curses colorfully. He hastily dodges a wide-armed attack by one of the more rabid demons, ducks under its armpit and, in a quick burst of desperate energy, drives the barrel of his pistol through suprisingly thin tissue to pierce its gland just beneath the junction. The thing screeches and darts back, hissing and spitting and tumbling into some of the others behind it. Baatar slips past the small commotion in the sea of predators to make a break for up the mountain, the only window to the summit that he'll have for a long while. He doesn't mourn the pistol left behind; it was only a prototype, and he can't waste anymore time, especially not now that his main means of defense is used up and gone.
As he sprints up the snow and stone, his lungs burning with righteous indignation and the metal ring on his finger threatening to dismember him, Baatar tries to envision Kuvira's situation. Surely she's fine. . . right? It wouldn't be a stretch to say that she's already halfway up her side of the divide given her abilities; her endurance and the like are superior to his, and she can bend the earth beneath the snow. By all rights, she should be waiting for him at the peak.
That's right, she would know to wait for him there; they'll reunite at the peak and then use the radio in his satchel to escape this horrid, god-forsaken tundra together. Baatar glances back and sees the few demons he hadn't killed tripping over themselves on the incline, fighting one another for every step they take in their dense cluster of raving madness, and he actually hazards a laugh-- all he has to do is keep up the pace and he'll make it for sure.
. . . But Baatar doesn't find Kuvira waiting for him at the peak.
All that's waitng for him there is thinner air and a perfect view of time slipping away just beyond the horizon. The latter would be lovely, and the former negateable, if only Baatar were any surer that his fiancé isn't dead.
Focusing on deepening his breaths, Baatar shades his glasses from the sun's purpling rays, getting rid of the glare hindering his vision. A hasty scan of the surrounding area reveals nothing and no one but white snow, rocks, and more jagged hills in the distance. Desperation begins to build in Baatar's chest with the fierce burn of anxiety as worry eats at him; worry that Kuvira is just gone somehow, just swept away with the evil howl of the scathing wind, worry that he'll never ever see her again. He begins to wonder if the demons got her, or if it was the cold; maybe the snow had taken her with the train at the beginnng and he's been mistaken all along. Baatar starts pacing back and forth atop the low ridge as the worry builds. He desires to shout, to call for Kuvira and let her know-- wherever she is in the great expanse of tragedy-- that he is alive and looking for her, but he refrains from doing so lest he cause another avalanche or attract more of those things to his position.
He looks around again and again and again. The world is quiet but for the crunch of his steps in ice and the whistle of a cold, cold breeze. His helpless cycle continues for an eternity until finally, as the sun dips lower behind the distant hills, the harsh golden glare melts into soothing pink waves of light and Baatar spots a triangular rock on the ground that's cut a little too perfectly. Baatar decides to take a chance on it.
He takes a step back towards the way he came, the runs forward and hops onto the descending slope ahead. His momentum takes him down the steep hill fast, snow gathering at the edges of his boots as he slides as gracefully as he possibly can to the base of it. Once he's at the bottom he stumbles a bit, but Baatar quickly fixes himself to make a speedy break for the earthen pyramid he's spotted.
Baatar runs a hesitant hand down the surface of the rocky slab, then knocks firmly on it; in addition to its too perfect shape, it's too smooth to be perfectly natural. Someone made this. Even if it wasn't Kuvira, there is still a chance that he might get some help with the situation. Baatar continues knocking, slowly getting more firm as the howl of the wind picks up and muffles some of the noise he's making. Nothing happens.
Baatar shivers and huffs out a great cloud of warm air. Tired and losing hope, he slams his fist against the earth more now, but starts using his voice.
"Kuvira? Kuvira! If you're in there, it's me-- it's Baatar! You have to let me in, Kuvira!. . . Kuvira, it's me, let me in! Kuvira?"
The cold starts getting to him-- he's been sitting still too long. Baatar wraps his arms around himself and succumbs easily, as mentally and emotionally confused as he is physically spent. He leans his side against the flat slate of earth he'd been knocking on just moments before. All is deathly quiet but for the sound of the wind and the haunting squealing of more predators just over the ridge. Baatar finds himself hoping the things will just kill themselves in their rabid clamor to beat each other to him.
Just as he closes his eyes and the swirl of final thoughts begins to settle and fade away, the earthen slate under his arm begins to move. Baatar is slow to react because he thinks he's delirious, but me manages to steady himself atcthe last second. Looking into the shelter, relief floods his system at the sight of green and silver robes, heavy boots, and a black tangle of hair. He breathes her name into the steadily encroaching night with his final vestiges of strength.
"Kuvira,"
Something about his tone must stir something inside her, because Kuvira shifts toward him just a little when he speaks. But the stinted way she moves and doesn't come off her back rubs Baatar the wrong way. He reevaluates her.
With the golden lense of relief pulled away, she looks bad. She's shivering uncontrollably, with heavy-lidded eyes and pale skin. Her face is red around the nose and ears as blood desperately tries to keep the areas from decaying in the bitter cold. It seems like he's made it just in time, maybe even a little too late. Baatar hurriedly crawls in, careful not too alarm her with too much movement.
: : S P L I T : :
Kuvira feels like she's died, but she manages to steal a glance at Baatar as he enters. He looks a certain kind of bone tired, with streaks of dark blood smeared on his face and his hair blown wild from the frosty wind outside. Kuvira's shivering subsides just a tiny bit as she reacts to the sight of him, eager to pull him inside and hold him close for a number of reasons. She reaches forward as Baatar crouches down and slides into her makeshift shelter. But intense pain strikes Kuvira right down the middle at the effort, stopping her short, reminding her of her dire situation. When Baatar sees her flinch and fall back, his relief immediately turns into worry. Kuvira focuses her energy on keeping them safe as Baatar's eyes methodically scan her over; she raises the fourth earthen wall behind him to keep heat in and the monsters out.
Baatar doesn't spare anything else as much as a glance. Kuvira can see his olive gaze locked on her abdomen, worry and calculation swirling in an apprehensive mix, bleeding into the frown of his mouth and the furrow in his brow. Carefully, Baatar pushes the edges of Kuvira's tunic aside and assesses the damage there. Kuvira feels lightheaded and miserable; she faces the sky with her eyes closed as he does this and tries to find some kind of inner peace to level her slightly panicky head.
On some distant plane of awareness, she feels Baatar take hold of the needle. That plane becomes very intimate the moment he begins to tighten the stitches she'd started, and Kuvira finds her voice. "Baatar," she protests, gasping at the pain. He lets up immediately, and she moans hoarsely as the ache lingers.
"I know," Baatar tells her from her side. He reaches an ungloved hand up to her face, carresses her ice-cold cheek. "But I have to do this. You'll die if I don't."
Kuvira grunts in a rare moment of petulance, conceding to the hard truth. Baatar takes the affirmative with as much grace as he can, burdened heavily by fatigue and concern, just as unwilling to hurt Kuvira as she is to be hurt. He bunches her coat around her shivering form to ease the stress on her body and gives her the sleeve of his own coat to bite on. Kuvira protests again.
"It's just for a moment," he tells her, his teeth grit to keep them from chattering. "Until I can stitch you back."
Kuvira's tension doesn't go away, but she bites down on the frozen cloth and closes her eyes. Baatar feels her hand grip a fist around the tail of his waistcoat as he gently brings the ends of her skin together with his hand. Adrenaline burns through his tired haze and gives him the strength to concentrate as he finally brings the needle to her skin.