Work Text:
The first lesson she learned was how to lie. She learned it quickly, and she learned it well.
At home, when her father demanded to know where she’d been, or when her mother asked if she’d moved the stones hedging the overgrown garden, she learned that dishonesty was easier. They were both nonbenders, and her abilities proved useful once they were found out, but they had never liked her playing with the dirt.
Kuvira was a quick learner, and her parents were better teachers than they knew. Little shards of of dishonesty fell from their lips at every turn-- in the market, when the tax collector came, when the new governor’s men broadcasted the decree that outlawed bending. The messenger at the door looked like a glorified brute, his face a giant mass of weather-beaten skin and sharp creases around cold, watery eyes. Turning in an earthbender, he told them, promised monetary rewards.
Kuvira had seen her parents lie a thousand times. Standing there, her feet sore and dusty, her hair in a haphazard braid, she waited anxiously for their answer. They always lied, she later realized; always, even when they told her they loved her.
“Is it a lot of money?” she later asked, the metal candlesticks folded in on themselves and the messenger sent away.
“Not much,” her mother had told her. “A few yuans.”
"We need you with us," her father had said.
That might have been true, before bending was outlawed. An earthbender was always useful with farming, but the risk of being seen had forced her to take her practices into secluded corners of the house or into underground rocky caverns. But she believed them. And so when she was turned in and forced to show her bending, neck deep in filth and muck and rocky shards, she knew that the lies she told were nothing compared to those of her parents. When Su took her in, Kuvira began the relationship with a lie.
"Honey, is everything okay? You can tell me, Zaofu is the safest place in the world. You're all right now."
"I'm fine." Maybe if she said it enough it would become true.
The second lesson she learned was sacrifice. Growing up in Zaofu, she was regaled with stories of all that Toph Beifong had done, of her service to the world and the sacrifices she made to perform them. Seeing the old lady, Kuvira could believe it. She was wizened, tough, and compact, with a tongue like quicksilver that cut sharp when she wanted it to. Praise from Toph was the highest praise, and she sacrificed the promise of quiet nights in her room or playing with Baatar to practice her bending. By the time Toph left, Kuvira was the resident prodigy, and became the youngest addition to the Zaofu security force.
Sacrifices began to hurt, after that.
She stood by and watched and held her tongue when Su insisted on a policy of isolation. Each night she helped close the domes, the shrinking slivers of night sky looking more and more like a life she would never experience. Sometimes Baatar would join her, all awkward limbs and thoughtful eyes, and commiserate about Su's micromanaging. He expressed his desire to freelance, and his frustration with the continued apprenticeship to his father, which had evolved into engineering all of his projects.
When they left Zaofu together, she hadn't expected it to feel like a sacrifice. But seeing the petals of the domes splayed around the city, Su's face and body fading into the topography as the airship gained altitude, she felt its sting. There were wet trails on Baatar's cheeks the night they left. They matched her own.
They stabilized the capital and spent the better part of a year overhauling the infrastructure. Kuvira replaced evenings with Baatar with meetings with her generals, opting instead to do her paperwork alongside him in her quarters. She sacrificed romance for efficiency, intimacy for loyalty. Their little world was a euphoric escape, when there was time to journey to it together. Their budding empire demanded constant nourishment, support, and military might. Kuvira sacrificed the best years of her life and relationship ensuring it grew, collecting states and cities like broken shards of metal and molding them into an unbreakable whole. Baatar was always there to aid and support her. She forgot her regrets and her dismissive attitude as soon as he was holding her. Saying three little words was never easy, but she made him understand in her own ways. Silver shaving knives, hot tea in the lab, a willing ear when he spoke of his insecurities and ambitions-- she found the little gestures more meaningful than words.
Kuvira had always been a quick learner, but even prodigiously talented students encounter difficulties. The third lesson took time.
The day they annexed her home town, Baatar gently asked if she wanted to find her parents. "I don't have parents," she had said. "I never did."
"If they're still here, their names will be on file for the census. I can delay our departure, if you want to find them."
"For what?" Kuvira demanded, in the short, clipped voice of the Great Uniter that bled into her personal life increasingly often. "I have everything I could ever need. I won't sacrifice a day that can be used to better the Empire just to find the two people biologically responsible for my existence. They likely aren’t even here, anymore."
The death toll of the resistant locals was tallied. Kuvira personally went through the roster, recognizable names leaping off the page and cutting at her like platinum daggers. Did they not know who she was? Had her origins been so easily forgotten? She had come bringing stability to region of disorder and disarray, to the place of her birth and early childhood.
Her hand closed over Baatar's when she saw her father's name towards the end of the tally. She registered his arms around her and his lips at her temple and his hand in her hair, but despite knowing her military operations had brought about the man's demise, she felt no regret. When they tracked down her widowed mother, she stood tall and imperious against the prematurely old woman with her hands behind her back and Baatar at her side. She cast around for some feeling of sadness, affection, or mourning, and came back with nothing. Nothing, even when insults and curses were flung at her, laced with threats and assurances that her war would claim the life of her own lover in due time.
"Mother only lies," she told Baatar. "I know that better than anyone else."
"Are you all right?" he asked her quietly, hands working over her shoulders in easy caresses, probing her muscles and mind for stiffness and pain to expunge.
"I'm fine." It wasn't true.
She began to view her sacrifices as obligation, began to view their jobs as their life, and began to cloister herself in metal as Su had cloistered Zaofu from the world. She became more disconnected from those around her as the alliance of states in the empire grew stronger, and felt the pull of power more sharply than she had before. Sometimes, she felt impatient. "It's temporary," she would tell Baatar. "We have to do this now, because the Empire needs us. We can get married, once it's all over."
"I can wait," he would say, grinning. "I waited fifteen years for you to notice me, I can wait a little longer for our wedding."
But he couldn't wait. He asked her to turn back, because he couldn't wait. Or maybe he could, and his assurances of his investment in the empire had been lies. Or maybe he had always been loyal, and he was finally being taken from her for it.
"Are you injured?" she had asked him.
"I'm fine," he had replied, but she could hear her mother's last words to her. You'll lose the man you love to your own war, as if they were back inside the dilapidated house, Baatar's reassuring hand close to her own. Kuvira had always known it was a possibility, but she had never expected to be the one snuffing his life out.
"This city isn't worth sacrificing our life together," she told him, omitting her next few words and feeling them stab at her insides. The avatar is.
She can still see his smile, can still hear the break in his voice at the thought of a life apart, and can still feel the tears that pricked at her eyes after she lied to him for the last time. She can feel the sacrifice that threatened to destroy her composure as she made her last words to him the truest she could speak. "I love you, Baatar."
But it was all for nothing. The avatar lived, and Kuvira lost more than the empire. If nothing else, her mother had been a good teacher. And alone in her cell, stripped of her uniform and title, the ring on her finger cold as the corpses under the rubble, Kuvira finally learned regret.