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She saw it, the exact moment his fire almost went out for good.
There was so much yelling, the first weeks of their awareness, and all she did was stand behind him, because what else was there to do? Sometimes she ached to pull her sword next to him, but there was something about the Makuta that always paused her. Or perhaps it was not something about Antroz, but rather something about her: something that sat at the back of her head and whispered to her, every time: patience, Toa Gali.
Not yet.
Whatever part of her that voice was, Tahu didn't have it.
“Return us. Now.”
“Return you? Where?”
Antroz was laughing at him. Gali watched Tahu's eyes burn. His sword burned too. Antroz took one step closer to them both and, drawing back a breath, extinguished the flame of the blade in one breath.
“Don't test me,” Tahu said. His eyes were not afraid. His voice did not waver. Nothing in the world seemed to scare him.
“Who is testing whom, arrogant bug?” Antroz asked, stepping past him. “You buzz like a Kofo-Jaga in its lava bath. Today is the first day of your life, so I will not put my hands on you. Tomorrow, if your attitude is the same, I might.”
Tahu's blade was extinguished, but his eyes were not. The fire burned in him so strong it almost hurt to stand behind him, watching her brother and the Makuta in silence, but she did not move from her place at his shoulder.
Antroz inclined his head at one of the servants. “Take them to their rooms. I'll speak with you tomorrow if you don't test my thin patience.”
Tahu's sword burst back into flames, but before he could say anything else, she laid her cool hand on his shoulder.
“Not yet,” she told him, soft. “Not yet, brother.”
She realized then that she did not know his name, and when he turned to look back at her, she knew he didn't know hers either.
They let the Vortixx lead them down the long halls and white stairs of the palace. It seemed a maze, then. Still does, sometimes, with all the twists and turns, secret passages and disguised doors. For a moment she had a longing for a brother she did not remember, someone who would lead her through hidden places without pausing, his eyes seeing far beyond her own, and his hand, she knew, would be sure in her own if she could only touch him again.
But maybe those were just dreams.
They were deposited in a bare room, one in a long row of them, with sleepstones sized for Vortixx, close enough for Toa. There was a moment where Tahu blinked, staring at her, and suddenly the aggression seemed to come off him like a cloak from his shoulders, and he reached out to touch her.
She leapt at him and he caught her up. She squeezed him around his shoulders as hard as she could, hard enough maybe to bruise him beneath his armor, and when his hands wrapped around her back, she felt that he was shaking, just a little.
“What was that?” he asked. “I had dreams of a monster like that, and then awoke to one staring down at me.”
She woke up just before Tahu. Antroz had been watching her. Waiting for them to wake. She had not spoken to him except to ask him his name. He had told her and then done nothing but regard her, smoke billowing from his mouth as he burned something between his teeth.
“Do we run?” she asked him. “He said he was a Lord, I don't know, a Makuta, Antroz. Do we just run away?”
“I don't even know where we are,” Tahu answered her. “I don't even know... who I am.”
His hands gritted together and he bowed his head, releasing her. She moved to the balcony of their room, gripping the ledge as she looked out across a great city and there, waiting for her, was the ocean. It rocked towards her like it was singing a song to its own rhythm, rushing up to the shore and back down again, humming music made of waves breaking and the call of the birds. She grinned out at it despite everything, something in her chest nearly breaking open with the desire to lunge right out the window and race down to the water.
But her brother was there.
“I think my name is Tahu,” she heard him say.
She looked back to him, the shoreline rhythm keeping beat in her chest. “I'm Gali,” she said. “Sit down, okay? Let's talk this through.”
“I would rather just get us both out of here,” he said. “Couldn't we just fight our way out?”
“Are we prisoners?” she asked.
“I... don't know. I just... I just think something's really wrong.”
“Okay. Well. Let's talk, then.”
And she wonders if this is how all of them get stuck, maybe. If it's not just her and Tahu who waited just a second too long, just long enough for the towers of the Makuta to seem just a little familiar, and then they compared that familiarity to the rest of the world, enormous and mysterious and completely strange, and they did not run away. Not fast enough.
She thinks about it, still. That first week, running away and her brothers: those were the two thoughts that consumed her, but all she did was stand behind Tahu and let him lead her. She doesn't think that she needed to follow him, but he did need her to stand at his back, and she did. She does, without hesitation. Without pause. She stands at her brother's shoulder and she follows.
“Do you enjoy fighting?” Antroz asked them.
He was drinking from a cup wider than her hand. She glanced at Tahu and Tahu glanced back.
“Under the right circumstances,” he said roughly.
The fire was burning in his chest. She was just close enough that their shoulders brushed, and she felt the heat of him like it was a part of her.
“Good,” said Antroz. “Let's start with that, then. It's not so much the protection that I need, you see. The bodyguard idea. Teridax keeps his Hagah very well-organized, you know. They do rounds, shifts, they keep an eye on him twenty-four seven, dead silent. Professionals, as it were. But I'm not really interested in that. I'd really rather see you get in a fight.”
Gali and Tahu exchanged gazes again, frowning. What is wrong with him? she remembers thinking, and she was pretty sure Tahu was thinking, hell, I don't know.
Antroz never explained much to them. But the problem, as she quickly discovered, is that she has a little fire in her chest too.
Maybe too much.
And she and Tahu both loved the fighting almost as soon as it started.
Their first victory was an easy one. Antroz led a Vortixx out to them in his arena, a stadium of some kind, ringed in empty seats. He told them the Vortixx was a thief, and had to be punished, so they may as well test their mettle on her. The Vortixx did not make things harder on them. She drew her weapon and taught them both a couple new slur words for Toa and for males before they had her pinned to the ground. Tahu held his blade at warning above her while Gali wrapped her hands around her throat just tight enough to shut her up.
Gali looked back at her brother. Tahu smiled at her, something dark alighting in the fire in his eyes, and even then she thought to herself this isn't a time for smiling.
But she smiled back anyway, and felt that first vitriolic satisfaction in her chest, rolling in like the tide, inevitable, perhaps.
She loved it. The adrenaline, the victory, the knowledge that she protected her brother and he protected her, and the safety that comes with it. And it wasn't really a big deal, the fighting. Antroz just liked to show the city that he was too important to waste time dirtying his claws with things his Toa could handle for him. Besides, didn't it make him look so important to have two Toa doing his fighting for him? It was about his ego, sure, but all they did was trash a couple criminals, and she liked it.
It escalated slowly. She should have seen that coming too. One day there was a crowd watching them, and one day Antroz brought them two to punish instead of one, and one day she found herself collecting a fallen blade like a little trophy, carrying it back to their room to decorate the bareness of her room, and the satisfaction as the knife found its place in her drawer was sick and enthralling, making her bounce on her heels, turning to Tahu with a smile. And for weeks after that, things were good, truly good, and she felt at peace.
Except when she thought of the others.
The day she decided to stop trying to think of them, she should have run away. She should have run to Tahu's sleepstone and roused him, pulled him up and out towards the sea, and she should have swam until her legs gave out, just trying to get her brother to safety. The day she decided it would be easier to not think so much about the others and just focus on this, on the now, on her real brother and the enemies the Makuta gave her, she should have run like every monster from her dreams was right there at her heels.
She didn't, though. She got stuck. She waited just a little too long, and one day, she turned around, and Antroz was smiling along with the both of them, and she felt herself smile back.
It's not a very Toa thing for her to admit, but she loves Xia, truly. She loves when she and Tahu take the evening and slip through the city together, dodging the creeps who call names at Tahu and eating the heavy-spiced food from the vendors, her brother always trying to get her to admit that it's too hot for her. The capital city of Xia is enormous and sprawling, so tightly packed with Vortixx and the occasional other species that it makes her grateful for the isolation of Antroz's cool palace. Everything in the city seems to gleam: males and females both in starry jewelry, glass in every building, colorful flowered weeds bursting up out of the dirt and seashells along the coastline. It was overwhelming the first two weeks, and after that, every night with her brother was just a new adventure.
They chatted with anyone who didn't make her feel like Tahu was about to get grabbed or called handsome, sailed on a pretty little boat of Antroz's he doesn't use, made friends with a couple servants and some of the males at the docks, and learned to barter for useless riffraff they didn't need but liked to trade for anyway. Tahu got her bracelets and rings even if he wouldn’t wear them himself – except just one beaded wristband that she bought him, a red and blue one he could sort of hide beneath his vambrace, and he heated redder than ever when she gave it to him and insisted he wear it until he stopped complaining. She liked the symbol that they were siblings, like she got to put a bit of a mark on him no one else gets to have. Tahu developed a skill for a Vortixx sport that mostly consists of throwing small axes at your opponent; Gali had sailing races with some of the females from up-coast.
Gali never once saw a Matoran in all that time. They just don't live in the City of the Queen. After a while, she stopped thinking about that too.
Antroz let them go whenever and wherever they want. He was unconcerned with what they did or the beings they did it with. He did not expect them to guard him unless he was throwing one of his parties. Antroz called the parties pure politics, affairs for him to remind the reigning royal family and all their stuck-up nobles of just how easily he could destroy either their reputations or their skulls, but then again, he always seemed to take a cold sort of pride in the events, and he would drink until she considered just taking his cup away. He always towered over the Vortixx who came. She has a fondness for that, for the way her Makuta never looks the least bit flustered, never looks the least bit uncomfortable, bigger than everyone and completely untouchable. Her loyalty to him developed slowly, but once she decided she liked him, it was there. She ate with him sometimes, though Tahu never would. Antroz talked to her like an equal, most of the time, but then again, he's sly like that. He has a terrifying charisma, a veneer of charm fixed into place over a secret bloodlust he carries like a second heart beneath his armor. She called him a snake to his face once, and that was the only time she ever saw him wink. He told her she was cleverer than her brother, and she didn't say anything back.
Tahu hated Antroz. By the Spirits. She should have saved him from that too. But Antroz – she thinks he hid things like that from her, now. She thinks Antroz probably squeezed Tahu's arm too hard when he would guide him somewhere, and she didn't notice. She thinks Antroz probably talked nastily to him when he was alone with him or when she was distracted. He would always call Tahu stupid in front of her, yes, and he made no secret of their little rivalry, but she thought that was just... games. Not dangerous ones. She thinks Antroz might have done things to Tahu he never let her know about.
And how could she? Tahu kept them secret from her too.
She looks at him sometimes, these days, and wonders if it wasn't just that one night that caused him to go so quiet. No. She thinks there must have been others. But why would he not tell her? Why would he just leave her to watch on in concern as he got quieter and quieter, burning with this white-blue sort of flame, hot to the touch and turned away from her? She saw all his humiliations day to day: every female who called at him as he passed, the laughter and degradation from the on-lookers every time they blamed him for a fight they both lost, and every little taunt from Antroz and those Vortixx with an understanding of who they are, calling him a mockery of what he was meant to be, some poor excuse for Mata Nui's guardian. The same comments never came to her. She is a female in Xia, and, moreover, she was not meant to be the leader of the Toa Mata, wearing the Hau of the Great Spirit, cast in his image.
Tahu hissed back insults and spat fire, at first. Got into plenty of fights without Antroz's help, his sister leaping in to help him. After a while, fighting became one of their primary sources of entertainment, within and without Antroz's palace, even after the Vortixx began warning each other that Antroz's twins were not to be messed with. But as time went on, he stopped responding to anything that hurt him. She thought that might be maturity, at the time.
Now, she thinks maybe it was resignation. It might even have been shame. His gold eyes would lower to the ground. He stopped reaching for his swords. Stopped barking threats. Silent.
She lies across from him now, watching him at rest on his sleepstone, breathing heavy through his dreams. By the Spirits, she thinks. I should have taken you and run.
But Mata Nui, Mata Nui. It's too late now. She knew what she was doing would be irreversible as she did it, and she did it anyway.
She wishes Tahu would wake. She doesn't want to sleep.
When she does, she dreams of an Ice Toa, standing on the prow of a ship as she swims back from the great wave the boat gives off. He shouts something she does not understand and leaps forward as though to jump into the water and come swimming after her, but a white and red figure pulls him back.
It doesn't matter. She is already turning away from him anyway, sinking beneath the blue waves of her nightmares, inevitable.
“Do you have memories of Artakha, Toa Gali?” Antroz asked her once.
She pulled the glass away from him. “I have no memories of anything, my Lord.”
He hummed, his head thudding back against his chair. “I have read the old stories. The legends about you and your brother, I find quite over-exaggerated.”
She can't help but smile. “Is that so, my Lord?”
“Matoran have such high hopes for their heroes. But you, at least, have some of the ocean ferocity you're meant to have. Tahu is less so like a legend.”
“It is not for you to judge him,” she reprimanded him, something hot leaping up in her mouth. “You are male yourself, but you have allowed so many of the prejudices of the Vortixx to influence you. You think him more foolhardy than if he were a female.”
“On the contrary. Vortixx separate by male and female; among Toa I judge only by element. And though he fights wildly, he has not the flame he was meant to have. That being said, I will admit I have developed something of a fondness for the way a female kills. So unlike a male.”
Gali paused to look at him, shaking her head. “You've had too much to drink, Antroz.”
“Males are more brutal, of course,” he continued, as though uninterrupted, his eyes sliding shut. “But a female... the brutality is more patient. It hides in the planning and obsession. Poison, betrayal, thin blades through the exact spot of the ribs. The rush of blood and the satisfaction she takes in it... yes, I do prefer female Vortixx to male Vortixx.”
“What a horrible thing to even consider,” Gali chided him, approaching his throne. “The hour is late. Go sleep, Antroz.”
“You do not dwell on such things?” he breathed out, eyes unopened still. “You fight with a restraint in your hands... your brother does not restrain himself like that. He lashes out like a wildfire, burning himself to the ground. You pull back like a wave from the ocean. I know your thoughts, Toa, without having to look into your mind. Do you think no one sees it in you? Do you think no one sees the craving in your chest, as the ocean longs to swallow sailors?”
Something in her chilled over. She stood above Antroz, taller than him for once as he sat, leaned back, his throat bared to the gleam of the moon.
“You are mistaken,” she told him.
“I am not,” said Antroz, and at that, those red eyes slid open, like the gaze of a snake upon her. “You can't hide from me, Toa.”
“Antroz,” she says. “You sound like a real creep.”
He laughed, dragging a clawed hand over his face. “By the gods and the stars and the spirits,” he breathed out, suddenly sounding exhausted. “One day I'll watch you kill, Toa Gali, and that, I think, might give me some peace.”
“Me, kill for you? Not likely.”
“To protect me, would you?”
She considered it. “I suppose, if it really came down to it. If it was you or them. That's my duty, I suppose.”
“Do you know what the Code of a Toa is?”
“Is there a Code?”
“Not so much for Toa Hagah, as I understand. You are meant to be an extension of my will as long as you are here, until destiny calls you away. And as a Makuta, I am given the authority to kill as needed.”
She had seen him kill a few times by then. It was... unpleasant to watch. But neither she nor Tahu had anything to say about it. He killed villains, anyway, Vortixx and intruders who had done bad things. It wasn't for her or Tahu to make a decision about life or death. Makuta do that. Once or twice, she and Tahu had defeated an enemy Antroz gave them, and once they were downed... Antroz finished them off.
“I don't take orders from you all that easily, my Lord.”
“No.” He watched her wearily as she began to put away the remains of the day, scattered things across his work desk in the corner. She picked up a snake discarded by him for its lack of vitality, cast aside to die beneath the desk. It wriggled weakly around her fingers. “Neither of you do, I'll give you that. You do so entertain me. For Tahu... for Tahu, would you kill?”
She stood up, brushing her hand across the smooth stone of the table. Her eyes found the twin moons, silver in the night sky.
“Absolutely,” she said.
Yes. For Tahu? Without hesitation. She'd kill Antroz for Tahu. She'd kill anyone.
Antroz hummed, low in his throat.
“One day,” he purred. “Yes, you two do so entertain me.”
He reached out his hand for the little snake she was holding. She paused. Passed it over to him. He crushed it between his fingers and it stopped writhing.
She couldn't tell you how often in those days Tahu asked her about her dreams, but she remembers some times better than others.
“Nightmares again?”
His whisper came to her through the darkness, reassuring her that she was, in fact, awake. She sat up sharply on her sleeping stone, casting about for him in the darkness, and he lit up a flame in his hand without hesitation, already sat upright.
“Sorry.” She regained herself roughly, clearing her throat. “Was I talking in my sleep?”
“No,” he told her. His big golden eyes blinked patiently at her in the lowlight, his heat a familiar friend beside her. “But you thrash around a little. What was it tonight?”
She slipped out of bed to sit beside him on his sleepstone, pulling her knees to her chest.
“Do you ever dream of them?” she whispered. “Our other brothers?”
Tahu picked at the dried paint on his shoulderpiece. Antroz's marking was red against the silver of his armor, a twin to the mark on her own. “My dreams are silent since I woke here. I see no one.”
She sighed, letting her head thud back against the stone. Tahu waited for her, pretending not to be sleepy, keeping her warm. He's always good about that. For her, never too hot, never cold at all.
“I see the two of them most often,” she told him.
“Still the Ice Toa and the Air Toa?”
“Yes. Always the Ice Toa, lately. The Air Toa – he used to call for me all the time, and I would have dreams where I just ran and ran and ran, trying to find him, and never could. But ever since I stopped running after his voice, he doesn't cry for me anymore. Now I dream of the Ice Toa.”
Tahu hummed, pulling his knees up to mimic her. “What does he do?”
“Nothing.” She shuddered. “It's worse than any of the yelling or calling for me. All he does is look. His eyes seem to pierce through me. And yet there's no menace to him. He always looks terribly small, standing in the snow beneath a great mountain. I often find him lying down, looking at the stars, and when he sees me, he just looks at me instead.”
“He doesn't speak?”
“Not very much. Once he asked me my name, but I didn't give it to him. I don't like seeing him. I turn and walk away from him, and he lets me go.”
Tahu's low rumble answered her again. She had found that he was more likely calm at night after he had spent the day fighting. Like there was some flame in him that needed something to consume before it could dim down into a hearth for her to sit beside. “Why don't you like seeing him?”
She turned to Tahu, meeting his gaze.
“It's enough to worry about looking after each other,” she told him. “I can't worry about them too. I'm sick of being scared for figments of my imagination.”
Tahu looked out the window, past her head, his eyes examining the stars for only a moment, and then he turned away from them too.
“I guess it's just you and me,” he said. “Until we find the others.”
“If they're even real,” she whispered. “If they're even alive.”
“Yeah,” said Tahu. “Right.”
She saw the way he ducked his head down low, in that moment. The way her words dealt a blow to him. She realized he had not doubted that until she said it aloud.
She fell asleep on his sleepstone, that night. He sat up and watched over her, looking out at the stars, and if she dreamed of her brothers, Tahu saw nothing at all.
There were other times when she would hear him whisper a half-forgotten name in his sleep, but she doesn't think anyone ever answered him. He just called out, and nobody replied, so there was no one but the two of them, alone.
Months passed like this.
She should have run.
“Gali. Toa Gali.”
It was one of the servants, a female named Vakera. She was a skilled sailor, and, moreover, the one who had introduced both Gali and her brother to the sweet fermented drinks made with berries, instead of that clear foul stuff the Makuta drink. Gali reached out to link her arm fondly with Vakera's, but the Vortixx drew back.
“I didn't tell you this,” she said, her voice hushed and urgent. “But you must go to the courtroom by the protodermis pool.”
“Why?” Her heartlight had picked up from the tone of voice alone. “What is it?”
Vakera shook her head. “Your brother is using his Hau,” she said, and turned to hurry down the hall.
Tahu behind his shield? Even in danger, he was so much quicker to attack than to defend. Gali took off with her hands already clenched into fists, sprinting down the long hallways towards the courtroom and cutting through a shortcut of hidden stairs before she arrived, leaping into place in front of Antroz's pool of energized protodermis, a symbol of both creation and destruction which all Makuta, she has been told, must keep close at hand. Other Makuta often visited Antroz, a high-ranking member of his Brotherhood, and she had spoken with the few she felt spoke to her with respect, or at least without aggression. They always increased her respect for Antroz, because she saw, when she spoke with them, their passions beyond brutality, passions for science and law-making and promoting peace and prosperity in their territories. Then she would look at Antroz and suppose that he had helped to make colorful, wild, flavorful, bustling Xia the place that it was.
That night, the scientist and the diplomat were gone, devoured by the fang-toothed hunger of a Makuta who seemed feral as a new Rahi to her in that moment. Antroz had cornered Tahu in the back of his room behind a huge black dining table, and he was shouting.
“You continue to defy me, you continue to invoke my wrath – you ought to put that fucking shield down, you fire-spitting worm, before I decide to bring the ceiling down instead and bury you like the dead remains of a futile legend you are.”
Tahu did not drop the shield. It was wreathed in his flame, a flame so hot and so angry it turned pure blue, and his hands and eyes were blazing with fire.
From his neck, ichor was dripping. Her brother's ichor. Green as poison, spilled down his throat by the claws on Antroz’s left hand. It seemed burned across him too. Down his black neck. Down his silver chest piece. Down his golden heartlight.
Gali heard herself howl.
Gali likes to fight and she's good at it; she uses both her silver axes and her elemental power to great effect, most often on the daily. So why she flung herself at Antroz, one of the most powerful Makuta alive, with nothing but her fists swinging, was a mystery to her. She has clawed his Jutran half-off before he even seemed to recognize that she was there, like a vamprah bug settled on his arm, and he reared back in surprise as she struck him once, twice, hard, on the shoulder. “Get off him!” she screamed. “Get away from him!”
Tahu yelled too, standing straight up from where he was hunched back against the wall, his flame bursting higher. Antroz roared and backed away from him, throwing Gali to the floor. She leapt back up and drew her axes, coming at him a second time.
Antroz intercepted her axe with his bare hand, the armor so strong it held against the blade itself, and then he grabbed the hand that holds it.
“No!” Tahu shouted. “You said you'd leave her out of this!”
“You've done nothing I've asked you to. Maybe your sister will prove more obedient.”
Antroz grabbed her by the back of her armor with one hand and wrapped both her wrists in the other, dragging her towards the stairs that go down into his cellars, where she had never been allowed, the door always locked to her. She screamed in rage, kicking at Antroz's chest and legs, but he shook her so hard she was briefly dizzy and kept pulling, lifting her fully off the ground. Her armor chafed her back.
Tahu was just rushing after them. There was flame in his hands and wreathing his shoulders, not to mention the look in his eyes, but he didn't use it. He would burn her too.
“Gali,” he called. “Antroz, don't touch her.”
“Why don't you come down here and do what I asked for once in your meaningless existence then, fire-spitter?”
“Antroz, get off me!” she shrieked. “I'm going to pitch you into the ocean.”
He laughed, loud and vicious, and threw her onto a stone floor.
She found herself gripping her aching wrist beside a metal table, where a figure just larger than her was writhing against his bindings. She still does not know what species he was, or why he was there. There was ichor dipping down the silver legs of the table, viscous and purple. He looked at her with dark blue eyes she still remembers and made a noise like a whimper.
“What's going on?” she managed, but her voice was drowned out by Tahu and Antroz's shouting.
“I am Mata Nui's Toa!” she heard her brother scream, something wavering and frail in his voice in a way she had never heard, and it cut something inside her. “I'm still the leader of his Toa!”
“You're a green-leafed fire, puffing nothing but smoke, a symbol of an absent god, and little more. You'll bow to my will or I'll punish you until you do.”
“I won't kill for your fucking pride,” Tahu cried.
A bolt of chain lightning burst into crackling light above him, clutched in Antroz's hand. Gali yelled, trying to summon water, but a force of gravity threw her into the table again before she could rise, striking her head and leaving her disoriented.
“You belong to me now,” Antroz said. “You think I have to listen to Mata Nui and his destiny? You think you can disobey me? Mata Nui's Toa will do as I ask. Where's the Great Spirit? There's only you, Tahu, and your lost sister. You are nothing. Call Mata Nui to save you, Tahu. He can't stop me doing as I please. Get up and kill him. He's nothing but a vagabond.”
Tahu had his shield up again, but he was grey in the mask behind it, and Gali could see how heavy his ichor was coming down from his throat, beginning to drizzle down his chestpiece. She dragged herself to her feet, panting.
“I could punish your sister instead,” Antroz said.
“No,” Tahu croaked. “No, don't touch her. Anything but that.”
“Kill him, then. You can both go upstairs after it's done, and she will wash the ichor from your hands like it never happened.”
Tahu looked at her, his gold eyes wide and his mouth twisted up. Mata Nui, she never knew he could look so afraid. She hated it, then, so badly that her hands grip into fists, and a white-hot pain came over her. To see him afraid. It was never meant to happen. She saw it: his flame so close to dying out forever. Even if he lived on, the fire would be gone.
He's going to do it, she realizes, and Antroz turns towards her for a moment, his gaze, once amicable towards her, narrowed into this blade-pointed thing. Tahu would kill the being on the table to stop Antroz from hurting her. She could see it: they would go upstairs together, and she would wash the ichor from him. She would press their masks together and whisper every reassurance she could think of to him, but he would never be the same.
He would never burn the same again.
“If I do it,” she heard him say, and Antroz turned to look back at him.
Gali looked down at the being on the table at her waist. There was a knife nearby. Her hand grabbed it. She felt hot, and then cold. She didn't think about it, because she knew that if she did, she would lose track of the place in her head where she has to go to do this. That place is so familiar now. The first time, that place was new: a riptide trying to tear her in half, bringing her somewhere she never went before.
The being didn't say anything to her as she picked up the stray blade, already stained in his ichor. Antroz had already tortured him, she would realize later. She will never know why. But Tahu or Gali would kill the being, or he would keep suffering, and that was the one thing she needed to know to push her over the edge.
“If you do this,” Antroz was agreeing, to something she didn't hear Tahu say.
She put the blade through the prisoner's heart. The ichor splattered up on her mask. He died fast, a few pulses of his heartlight, then darkness.
Of the rest, she remembers very little. Tahu was holding her shoulders. Took her back to their room. Wiped the ichor from her face and whispered every reassurance he could think of to her.
“You should have let me, you should have let me,” he whispered. His voice was horribly despairing, but still, the softness was familiar, and she loved him. She touched one of the scars Antroz's claws left in his neck. Her brother soldered his own throat back together with his fingers. His ichor was green, still trailing down to the bright light over his heart.
“If I ever have to see you kill,” she whispered back to him. “I'll leap into the ocean and I'll swim forever, til my legs give out and the Great Spirit drowns me, and maybe then, we'll find whatever destiny we were supposed to have.”
He shuddered so hard his hand spasmed in her own. He sucked in this deep, desperate breath that rattled in her head. No more humiliations for her brother. No more betrayals of his duty. Tahu. Her Tahu.
“Okay, then,” he told her. “You never will.”
“Promise me.”
“Promise. I Promise. I'm so sorry. I'm not a leader. I can't even lead you. I promise.”
She pressed her mask against his own.
She dreamed of the Ice Toa and the Air Toa.
They were both standing at the end of a dark hallway, looking back at her. The Air Toa grabbed his brother's hand, and then reached out for hers.
Gali looked down at herself. She was stained in green and purple like a macabre venom had spilled over her, and she knew that the ocean herself couldn’t wash it all away.
“Sister,” said her brother, reaching out for her. “We need you. Where are you? Sister?”
She turned her head away.
“We could go.”
It's all she remembers of the morning after her first murder, other than lying around on her sleepstone, exhausted.
Tahu had never said those words with confidence before. Never really thought that they could escape. But that day, he was ready, she knows. He would have found a way to get her... well, somewhere. They could have run away. She just shook her head at him, though.
“No,” she said. “No. The Great Spirit will call when he needs us. For now... it’s just you and me.”
He never explained to her what had transpired between himself and Antroz. She would ask, but he wouldn’t answer, and Antroz, who had burned with so much poison that night, was so cordial the next time she saw him that it made her head spin. He can be two different beings so easily. She doesn’t understand how Tahu and Antroz are able to go back to their distant, harmless loathing afterwards, but she understands even less how she is able to go back to speaking with Antroz like nothing happened.
They left it behind them, and they stayed. She stays. At Tahu’s side, at his shoulder. She follows.
Who would take her now, other than him? She loves Xia. She belongs here.
She only belongs here.