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The last Noatak sees of his brother is Tarrlok on the wet asphalt, watching him with wide, frightened eyes, disappear into the distance as the satomobile rushes away. Tarrlok fades away into the darkness along with his heartbeat, and the door slams shut, an Equalist - Hei, if Noatak isn’t mistaken - giving him a glare through green glass.
“There was no reason to push him,” Noatak says, and his voice is very quiet.
Around him, the multiple pulse drum beats speed up and Yun tightens her fist in her glove, the electrodes sparking briefly.
He gives them all a bland look before settling back into his seat.
As they drive through the streets Noatak keeps track of each twist and turn. By the time they enter a tunnel, he knows the base they're heading for is the one nestled safely under the Varrick Global Industries compound. One major base the police haven't found; it's a small comfort.
The truck stops and the world goes dark and stuffy.
"Really?" he says through the moldy black sack Yun has put over his head. "Like I don't know where we are."
"Just get up," she spits.
Her blood shifts, and a hand digs into his arm, yanking him up and out of the truck. Noatak allows it, stretching his legs.
"I've spent months at a time here; I don't know what you're trying to hide from me."
She doesn't answer. He can hear the angry steps of Lu rounding the truck towards them.
"I'll take him," growls Lu, and the hand shifts to a gaunt one, wrapping vise-tight around Noatak’s elbow.
He doesn't resist when Lu drags him through the hallways.
The strangely empty hallways.
In the privacy of the sack, the thin line of Noatak's lips turn down in a frown, and he extends his senses. They're muted from the chi-blocking, but he can still easily feel the emptiness of the corridors around him. Surely the movement can't have dwindled that--
There they are. A cluster of pulses across the base in what Noatak recognises as one of the impromptu break rooms.
A heavy door slides open, and Noatak is pushed into what he knows is an interrogation room. A small one. The door slides shut again, clunking into its frame with a heavy sort of promise, and another shove puts him onto a low stool. Lu Ten's blood moves around him, his steps silent, and then Noatak's wrists are wrapped tight with rope and lashed to one of the stool's legs.
Noatak wants to think it overly dramatic, but Lu is safest with him tied up.
The sack is yanked from his head, revealing what he already knew. A tiny, windowless room; a cold, harsh light; and a pissed-off lieutenant.
"Lu Ten," Noatak greets him casually.
"Traitor," Lu Ten returns the greeting.
"I should think we were on first-name basis by now."
"And which name is it?" Lu asks, lip snarled. "Amon, or the other one?"
He reaches behind him, and Noatak knows what for even before Lu pulls the knife from its sheath. Noatak eyes the blade for a moment, the way the harsh light catches in the steel, then says, "Whichever one you prefer. I no longer have a preference."
"Ah," says Lu Ten, gesturing with the knife, "you no longer have a con to run, you mean."
"Get that thing out of my face," says Noatak. Then, "Please."
Lu does not. In fact, the knife comes closer, its edge drifting towards Noatak's throat. Lu Ten's pulse speeds up.
"This thing is gonna get a whole lot more uncomfortable for you, I promise you that."
"You're not killing me now," Noatak says.
Lu Ten glares at him, his jaw working, the knife turning in his hand as he considers his former leader. "And how'd you figure that?"
Noatak looks around the empty room, at the clammy walls and the rusty door, and then says, "Because you'd want an audience. You want them to see me dying, preferably pleading and begging. You'd want them to see the power of Amon draining out right in front of their eyes."
The drumbeat of Lu Ten's heart quickens again, his capillaries tightening in anger.
"Maybe I wanna fuck you up some first."
"Not with a knife," Noatak says. “I’ve looked in the mirror, I know who I look like--” He’s spent hours, tracing his hairline, his eyes, his jaw; prodding at the cruel twist of his mouth, the crease between his brows. Crumbling the blurry mugshot of his father in his hand when it’s all too similar. “--and you don’t want them to remember me as Amon. You want them to remember Yakone’s son taking them all for a cruel ride.”
Lu shifts away and something in his heartbeat is wrong, suggesting a lie instead of truth. Noatak's brows draw together as he tries to puzzle out what Lu is hiding.
His face feels terribly naked and open. He's not used to Lu Ten seeing his expression, knowing the way his jaw muscles twitch, the way he frowns like a storm.
"So what's keeping you? Bring in the audience, get the show started."
"You're the showman here, not me," Lu Ten snaps, but there's no heat to it--it's more automatic than angry.
"Is that why I haven't heard of any new rallies?" asks Noatak, his voice low and acidic. "You lack the theatricality ?"
"How would you know? Like they'd tell you shit in the joint."
Noatak's brows arch up, his lips down. " Are you holding rallies?"
Lu Ten's lips thin further still, his gaunt cheeks hollowing.
"No," he admits.
"So you're letting the movement die?" He hates how he can hear his father in his own voice; the poisoned sweetness of a leading question.
His once-lieutenant represses a sudden, violent movement. Like he wants to cause pain, but lacks the immediate target. "You lied," Lu Ten grits out. "Everything-- everything you claimed to be was a lie, and you dragged us with you."
"Then use it, moon damn you!" Noatak spits, jerking hard enough against his bonds that the chair jolts. Lu Ten steps back, startled. "You were deceived and used by a bender, so go out there and scream it from the rooftops! Instead of just sitting here in the dark like a wounded badger mole!"
Lu Ten stares at him, his expression blank. After too many moments, he says, "You don't get to tell me what to do, not ever again. You lied about everything--"
"Not Equalism," Noatak says, sharp as Lu's knife. "Never about Equalism."
"You filthy fucking--"
"Why haven't you been keeping up operations? Why is this base running a skeleton crew? Why don't you want them to know I'm here?"
Lu Ten hesitates, turns to eye the door. "Because some of them agree with you," he says.
Noatak frowns, uncomprehending.
"They don't care that you're a bender," Lu Ten says, low and bitter, "they just care about your ideals."
Noatak opens his mouth and closes it again, mulling. Lu Ten waits.
"Is there a schism forming?"
Lu Ten doesn't answer and he doesn't look at him.
"Lu Ten," Noatak says, his voice growing dangerous, "is there a fucking schism forming in our movement?"
"Because of you!" Lu Ten snaps, rounding on him.
"And you're allowing it!" Noatak snaps back.
"I'm trying to keep this fucking movement together!"
Noatak grits his teeth, almost hisses through them, "That sack wasn't to hide the base from me, it was to hide me from anyone else. That's why they're clustered at the other side of the compound, Lu, for fuck's sake!"
"How did you--" Lu Ten starts, but Noatak ignores him.
"I'm gone for a few months, and this is what you allow to happen to my movement?!"
"I don't know if you fucking noticed," Lu Ten growls, pointing the knife at him, "but your departure was pretty spectacular, starting with you throwing me into a wall by my blood!"
"I didn't do anything a good doctor couldn't fix."
"You bloodbent me!"
"I've bloodbent plenty of people, Lu; you're not special in that."
Lu Ten glares at him. “Or in anything else.”
It hurts, and Noatak doesn’t know why--
But he knows; of course he knows. Lu Ten has been special since the first time they met in that grungy alleyway, in the middle of a fight. Now, Amon didn’t have companions and Noatak doesn’t have the courage.
--so he ignores it.
Noatak deliberately loosens his jaw and says, "The schism , Lu."
Lu Ten's lips pinch together hard enough for them to disappear. "Quan feels that as long as your philosophy is sound, you have a place with the Equalists."
"What?" Noatak asks, more to himself than to Lu.
His once-lieutenant sighs, aggravated, and replies, "Half the fuckin' movement is with him. Damn you."
Noatak stares at him. Then chuckles. Then chortles helplessly, bending over on his stool, laughing until he can barely breathe.
"Alright," says Lu, "get it out."
"Quan!" Noatak cackles.
"I know," Lu says, tired.
"I was going to purge him!"
Lu rubs his forehead. "I know."
The laughter has an edge, sharp enough that Noatak can hear it himself, and he recognises it for the hysterical reaction that it is. With an effort, he forces it under control. Noatak takes a deep breath, feeling a little light-headed.
"Maybe I should re-evaluate Quan and his uses," he says.
"Really?" demands Lu, and the disgust in his voice stings.
"I don't particularly want to die," Noatak says coldly. "Necessity makes for strange bedfellows."
"Yeah," says Lu Ten, "like a bender getting himself to the top of a movement fighting against monsters just like himself."
Noatak eyes him. Then says, "If I am monstrous, I could at least be monstrous in the service of something good."
Lu Ten huffs and turns away from him, but Noatak can still hear his mutter of, "At least you're self-aware."
"Oh, I'm very aware of what I am. It's hard to miss when I can hear every fucking heart-beat in a half-mile radius."
"You can do that?" asks Lu Ten, the anger bleeding out from his voice. He's looking at Noatak with something between fear and fascination.
Noatak hates that look.
And he hates how it makes his own pulse quicken.
"I can do anything you can imagine to be done with blood," he says, and he can't help the bitterness in his words. "Why do you think I never lost a fight, Lu? It's so easy to nudge a limb in the thick of it, and people never notice."
Lu stares at him, still that look on his face. "You lost one fight," he finally says.
Noatak doesn't know whether to be angry or amused at that. He settles for resignation. "Airbending is surprisingly slippery."
That gets a snort from Lu, and Noatak's once-lieutenant looks as startled at that as Noatak feels. Lu Ten turns away from him sharply, pacing the short length of the room. He absently weighs the knife in his hand, bouncing it almost playfully in his palm as he thinks.
Noatak waits and watches.
The sole of Lu Ten's boot rasps as he turns to face Noatak again, lips pinched.
"You really expect me to believe you started a movement condemning yourself?"
Noatak stares at him, his brows creasing.
That felt horrible! I don't want to do that to anyone!
The cold realisation of that moment, coiled like a snake around Noatak's heart, squeezing it as hard now as it did then; the first time he realised what he was, reflected in his brother’s frightened eyes.
"I deserve to be condemned," he says. "All of my kind does. You know as well as I do what bending does to a person." He meets Lu Ten's eyes and tries to ignore the understanding in them. "Power corrupts, Lu. I learned that lesson by my own example before anyone else's."
"And your solution," Lu Ten says, "was to claw more power into your grasp and stringin' all the rest of us along for the ride?"
Noatak smiles without humour. "I'm a bender. It's my nature. But I did start the Equalists with the best of intentions, I can promise you that. I just..." He scowls at the rough concrete floor. "I should have let you take charge. That was my plan, but once I felt that power, that rush--"
Lu Ten is silent.
"I was weak. I failed the ideals of the Revolution."
Lu Ten sighs, loud in the small room.
"Damn you," he says, tired. " Damn you."
A shuffle, a shift of blood, and suddenly Lu is right there, crouching down and reaching around Noatak, his face only inches away. Noatak can smell his sweat and his anger, hear the thudding drumbeat of his heart loud enough to drown out the rest of the compound.
Noatak isn't used to feeling like this, with his heart in his throat and his breath stalling. There's a faint whiff of chewing tobacco, and Noatak thinks, I want to kiss it from his mouth.
Then his hands are loose, the rope cut and falling to the floor, and Lu Ten draws back.
Noatak can breathe again.
"I'm not losing them to Quan," Lu Ten says. The knife slides back in its sheath with a cold snck . "And if that means bringing you back into play, I suppose that's a risk worth taking."
Noatak rubs his wrists, movements slow and deliberate. "That's a dangerous game to play."
Lu Ten shrugs.
Noatak stands. "Thank you, Lu T--"
"Oh, don't make any mistake," Lu Ten cuts him off. "Nothing's forgiven. You're getting chi-blocked for the rest of your fucking life, however long that might turn out to be. And in the meantime, you do exactly as you're told."
"Of course," says Noatak, and he can't help a touch of mocking deference in his voice. "Maybe I'll make a better puppet ruler than I did a leader."
"You'd better. Or I'll figure out how to make a spectacle, just for you."
This is penance, Noatak tells himself. And then he thinks, For which crime?
There are so many to choose from, and some he's been repenting for decades.
He hopes his debt to Tarrlok is, at least, paid now with his brother's freedom. His debt to Lu, however...
"I'm an excellent actor," he says. "Just look at how well I played a saviour.”
Lu Ten considers him, his eyes cold and his face frozen. Then he reaches to open the door.
“Go on then. Win them back for me.”
Noatak breathes deeply, feels the hearts thrumming through-out the compound, and steps out the door.