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Hitoshi watches as a group of sailors load crate after crate into a longboat floating in the village harbor. It’s hard to see much from this distance, but it looks like they’re preparing for a long journey. The ship already looks well-stocked, and they haven’t even finished yet.
He pulls his quilt tighter around his shoulders, shivering despite the crackling fire in the hearth behind him. Even indoors, he never seems to completely rid himself of a creeping cold. It’s made a home deep within his bones for as long as he can remember.
Glancing through the polished ice window, he looks out across the field of snow outside, glinting faintly in the late afternoon sun. This late in the season, the days are short, which certainly doesn’t give much time to prepare for a long journey. Hitoshi wonders if the sailors will finish in time, or if they’ll have to postpone their sendoff till tomorrow.
As Hitoshi watches, a man carrying an armful of boxes that look like they weigh at least half of what he does trips over a frozen snowdrift, causing his load to tumble across the icy white. The man himself lands face-first into the snow, immediately sitting up and clutching his leg. His face twists in pain.
Hitoshi looks to the man’s comrades, expecting one of them to turn and help him up, but none of them seem to realize what happened. They’re all too set in their work, too focused on preparing for the journey ahead.
Biting his lip, Hitoshi peers through the window at the man sprawled in the snow, who makes no signs of getting up or calling for help. He’s probably too embarrassed. Or perhaps he’s in too much pain.
Before he even realizes what he’s doing, Hitoshi stands letting the quilt draped around his shoulders fall to the floor and turning to smother the fire. He steps out of his house, making sure to pull his hood up before making his way out and jogging over to the fallen man.
“Are you okay?” Hitoshi asks, stooping down to help him up. Wrapping an arm under his shoulder and around his waist, the boy grimaces, realizing the man is much too heavy for him to lift on his own.
“O-ouch!” the man yelps as his weight shifts onto his injured leg.
Hitoshi sighs, attempting to heave the man upright again but having no luck. The boy bites his lip and sends a prayer up to whatever gods might be listening…
This time, he manages to get the man to a standing position, letting him lean on his shoulder, and taking the weight off his leg. The two of them start awkwardly limping in the direction of the village healer’s home. If anyone will know how to help, it’s that old eccentric.
“Thanks for helping me, uh…” the man trails, wincing with every step as the two of them hobble along.
Hitoshi nods, careful to keep his hood covering his face.
“Could you… at least tell me your name?” the man prompts. I know it’s a pretty small village, but I can’t say I’ve seen you around before.”
Biting his lip, Hitoshi shakes his head.
“I’m Kuruk, named after the avatar from centuries ago. Come on, what’s your name?”
As they round a corner, a gust of wind knocks Hitoshi’s hood off, revealing his face. Shocked, Hitoshi does his best to tug his hood back on one-armed, making sure to keep the other wrapped around the man’s waist.
Kuruk’s eyes widen. “Your hair… it’s white. I’ve heard about you.”
Twisting himself free from Hitoshi’s grip, Kuruk tumbles into the snow. As if forgetting all about his crippling injury, he flips onto his back and stares up at Hitoshi in horror, edging away from him like a spooked hermit crab.
Hitoshi frowns, stooping down and attempting to help the man up again.
“No!” Kuruk cries. “Stay away from me. I’ve heard about what you can do. I… felt it. When you lifted me up earlier. I thought something was strange!”
“I can’t just leave you out in the snow,” Hitoshi says.
Kuruk glares. “I’d rather freeze out here than experience what you did to me again. Stay away!”
Sighing, Hitoshi turns, tugging his hood over his hair and face and walking away. As he trudges home, he makes sure to leave a note at the healer’s house explaining what happened to Kuruk. Sooner or later someone should come by and pick him up, especially once his sailing party starts looking for him. He can only imagine the stories Kuruk will tell them.
Hitoshi never should have gotten involved.
XXX
The next day, Hitoshi sits cross-legged on a rug, staring at a bowl of water placed at the center of the room. He glares at it, feeling a pulse start to beat at the corners of his temples. The water reflects specks of gold and orange from the fire but otherwise remains stubbornly tranquil. Unmoving. Unyielding.
Baring his teeth, Hitoshi growls in frustration, rising from his crouched position to cross the room and kick over the bowl, watching as the useless water splashes and seeps into the rugs covering the floor. He tugs at the roots of his hair. Great. On top of everything, now he’s made a mess. And he has no way to clean it up.
A thought creeps into his mind, sliding in through his ears like a chilling draft, the same thought that had been haunting him since childhood.
If he were a bender, it would be easy.
If he were a bender, a whole lot of things would be easy.
XXX
They say Hitoshi was born cursed.
His mother died shortly after giving birth to him, a strange child with tufty white hair, and his father went missing on a hunting trip not long after that. They were a complete mystery, his parents, and some say they don’t even remember how or when they came to the village in the first place. Once Hitoshi was orphaned, he was taken in by an aging waterbender with no children of his own, who waited anxiously for Hitoshi to become old enough to train. Unfortunately, that time came and went, with Hitoshi showing no signs of having any command over water at all.
That was all well and good - there were plenty of other nonbender children - at least until the night of a full moon a few days after Hitoshi’s seventh birthday.
Hitoshi was out helping his guardian carry in driftwood for kindling when the old man stumbled and fell. The boy reached out to grab him, but even though he wasn’t fast enough to catch him physically, the old master was somehow suspended in place, held in midair by an invisible force.
That was the night they discovered that Hitoshi was a bloodbender - and only a bloodbender.
They tried their best to keep it secret from the village. After centuries of misuse, bloodbending was a forbidden practice among waterbenders, and the master had never even heard of someone who exclusively bent blood before. Coupled with distrust the other villagers already showed Hitoshi because of his shadowy heritage and strange, white hair, it would only bring him more trouble.
But the master was getting older, and it wasn’t long before they were forced to allow doctors and caretakers into their house.
Hitoshi was never sure of what gave them away, but by and by, the secret got out, and once the master died, he had no way to defend himself against the horrible rumors that started to circulate.
Some even say he killed the master.
The one man who had shown him any kindness.
Since then, Hitoshi kept to himself - as much as he could in a small, remote village, at least. He rarely left the house, arranging for a delivery service to bring him his weekly groceries and firewood. They never even knocked, preferring instead to leave his parcels waiting on the doorstep until Hitoshi remembered to check. More than once he’d been forced to gnaw his way through arctic seal jerky that had frozen solid out in the cold.
By the time he was sixteen, Hitoshi had resigned himself to a life of isolation. But a small, nagging part of him couldn’t help but wonder how things might change if he could somehow learn to bend water in addition to blood.
Every week, if not every day, he would fill a bowl and place it in the center of his room, willing with every fiber to make it move. And every time, he was disappointed.
XXX
Hitoshi wakes to a light knock at his door.
He rubs the sleep from his eyes, groggily sitting up from the place he’d drifted off on the floor and making his way over to the door. He doesn’t have a clue who it could be. The only person who ever came by his house willingly was the delivery man, and he never knocked.
Resting his hand on the door, he tenses. Maybe this is a prank of some kind, just another way for the village to express their collective disgust.
Hitoshi sighs, realizing with dismay that he’s desperate enough for any form of human interaction at this point to take the risk. He opens the door.
Standing outside is a young boy, likely not much older or younger than Hitoshi. His face is red and he’s shaking slightly, but he doesn’t look cold. He has a mass of dark, curly hair, long enough to almost cover his eyes, and Hitoshi can see a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose.
“What do you want?” Hitoshi asks, a bit harsher than intended. At the very least, it doesn’t seem like this kid is trying to prank him.
“I-I, um…” the boy stutters, glancing at his seal hide boots. “I-I don’t mean to disturb you…”
“You’re not disturbing me,” Hitoshi responds, trying to soften his voice. It’s hard. It’s been a while since he’d had a real conversation with someone, not counting Kuruk.
“A-ah, good, I’m glad!” the boy says.
“Get to the point,” Hitoshi sighs, crossing his arms. Despite being secretly thrilled by the chance to actually talk to someone, he was still suspicious.
“Oh, um… I just wanted to thank you for helping Kuruk yesterday. None of us realized he was even injured, and by the time we started looking for him, he was already at the healer’s.” The boy makes a face. “He said some pretty awful things about you, but I knew they couldn’t be true. Not if you’d helped him like that.”
The corner of Hitoshi’s mouth twitches. He’s taken aback. Other than the master, no one had ever said anything remotely positive about him that he could remember, let alone thanked him. This must be a pretty elaborate prank.
“I uh, also wanted to say I think your bending is really cool,” the boy continues, carding a hand through his hair. “I’m not a bender myself, so I’m pretty jealous of anyone who can do stuff like that.”
“There’s nothing to be jealous of,” Hitoshi says quietly. “My bending is a curse. It’s done nothing but hurt people.”
The other boy’s eyes go wide. “That’s not true! You helped Kuruk. And I’m sure you’ve done plenty of other things to help people before. There are so many possible uses for a bending style like yours.”
Hitoshi thinks back to the night he first manifested his bending, when the master almost fell, and he’d managed to catch him just in time. He thinks about Kuruk, who’d been nothing but grateful up until the moment he’d discovered Hitoshi’s identity.
“Honestly, I don’t know why you haven’t become the village healer’s apprentice or something. I’m sure bloodbending has a lot of medicinal applications in particular,” the boy rambles, grabbing his chin and furrowing his brows. “Not to mention physical therapy, or living assistance, or…”
Hitoshi holds up a hand. “Okay, okay. I get it. Now why are you really here?”
The boy looks up, confused. “Why am I… I just told you.” His eyes light up. “Oh, I almost forgot! I brought you this, as a proper means of thanks.” He reaches into a satchel slung over his shoulders and pulls out a package of arctic seal jerky. “It’s the best our sailing crew has access to, fresh from the Northern Water Tribe… or at least as fresh as cured meat can be.”
Narrowing his eyes, Hitoshi takes the package. “Okay, if that’s all, you can go now.”
As Hitoshi closes the door, the boy reaches out a hand to stop him. “W-wait! Could you at least tell me your name?”
Hitoshi stiffens, hearing the echoes of Kuruk’s words from yesterday in the boy’s question.
Regardless, something tells him he can trust the kid, at least for this. “It’s Hitoshi,” he replies. “What’s yours?”
The boy smiles brightly. “I’m Izuku.”
XXX
A few weeks later, Hitoshi is standing just a few feet away from where he’d left Kuruk all that time ago, at the entrance to the village healer’s residence. Taking a deep breath, Hitoshi steels himself and knocks.
Almost before he finishes knocking, the door flies open, revealing a tall, broad-shouldered man with long, messy hair and a deep grimace of fatigue. He glances down at Hitoshi, who had subconsciously taken a few steps backward. “Took you long enough,” the healer says.
“You were expecting me?” Hitoshi asks.
“Of course. With your ability, you’d make an excellent healer,” the man replies. “But I wanted you to come here on your own volition. Otherwise you wouldn’t be fit.”
The gruff man turns, motioning for Hitoshi to follow him inside. “Now, are you ready to get started?”
Hitoshi blinks, letting the healer’s words sink in. He smiles softly, and nods. “Yeah, I’m ready.”