Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You can feel the blood straining behind the stitches in your side, liquid behind the clots, but you hold it back. Easy to do, under the moon’s pale light: you could probably call half the snowdrifts to your side, throw them up in a disorienting flurry and use the denseness of them to sense your way around. No need to see at this part of the month, when the currents inside of people call to you as much as regular water. 

You’re strongest under the full moon. Tireless. Thrilled. You killed the Four Fangs under a moon that was nearly full, even though they turned their elements against you: Bloodsoaked Chiaki tearing up the cliffside, his compatriots throwing fire and stealing air from your lungs. The ocean answered, when you leaped. It let you summon ice to stand on, coax Chiaki out to do equal, honorable battle, and of course no earthbender alive can bend the metal of your sword. Four kills, and then of course you just had to collapse as soon as Taigen showed up, and aren’t you regretting that now? Aren’t you regretting not just slashing his stupid throat when you had the chance?

Then you were a dog on our streets, living on gutter scraps.

“I said I could beat you with any weapon,” you hiss, managing to get the words out between pants. Taigen shifts, arm flexing where he has you pinned against the tree, worry flashing across his face, and you bare your teeth. His hand is hot, like metal left too close to a forge. If he’s truly incensed, he’ll sear your flesh. You’ll smell it cooking. “Do you want to know what I can do without one?”

“You’re not a bender,” Taigen scoffs. He tightens his grip, letting his hand heat just the slightest bit more. Drama queen. “That campfire didn’t flicker the whole time we were fighting, and the ground hasn’t moved once . Don’t even try to convince me you bend air, either, you don’t jump high enough.”

“Maybe I don’t think you’re worth the effort,” you bite out, shoving him off you. Bad leverage, but you budge his weight; you don’t have to headbutt him and use the surprise to your advantage. He’s intrigued. “Come on, aren’t you curious? I thought all firebenders liked to throw sparks.”

“An honorable samurai doesn’t use bending in a duel.”

“You said yourself you can’t duel me until I’m healed,” you say. “This won’t be a duel. This will be… a demonstration.”

Taigen huffs a laugh. “There are twenty-three firebending styles in all of Japan, and the Shindo Dojo feted masters of all of them,” he says, derisive. But he’s rolling up his sleeves. “You may not have seen much of our fire– though since you didn’t challenge anyone properly, you would have deserved to get charbroiled– but it burns hot, I assure you. Hot enough to melt skin off an overconfident idiot’s bones.”

If you had a gold coin for every firebender who’s said that to you, you’d be able to buy your way to the white men you seek. It’s a cliche, like tragic love in bunraku: firebenders threaten to burn you. Earthbenders threaten to crush you. Airbenders default to suffocation, unless they decide to get creative and say something about controlling most of the world around you. 

You don’t know what your kind of bender says. You’ve never met another one yourself. 

“Even the strongest fires can be doused,” you tell Taigen, close to a drawl. “Deprived of fuel, air, heat… you call it from within yourselves, but that makes it so fragile. You’re always burning your own reserves, eating like greedy lords to make up the difference.” You pause, looking Taigen over slowly, letting your contempt surface in your demon eyes. He finds it unsettling, you know. You can see it in how his eyes widen, the minute changes in his brow. The fashion in which he grits his teeth and scowls. “Though, given how little challenge your dojo offered, maybe I should be surprised you weren’t all fat. You certainly weren’t using your privilege to support training.”   

“Stop spitting out bullshit and start getting to the point, or I’ll decide you’re well enough to fight me now,” Taigen snaps, “and we can tell Heiji Shindo his tea party’s off because someone else killed you first. Are you a bender or not?”

The moon is a lovely round pearl in the sky, hardly visible through the needles in the canopy. It tugs at you like it does the tides, a swooping delightful coolness in your belly: the snow, the water Ringo used to steep his bitter medicine, the icicles bearding the branches and the cloud of your breath all shiver with your anticipation.

The most you usually do is cover your footprints when you’re fleeing or keep your blood inside your body. Sometimes you indulge and play around while training; other times you fight for your life and subtlety goes out the window, because you can’t afford to leave a vein untapped. 

The snow around you shudders, crystals condensing into slivers of ice. Five of them, so they’re easier to direct. “You tell me,” you say, and toss them at his face. 

Taigen obliterates the first three with a gout of flame, dodging the next two so they embed themselves in the tree behind him. You yank them back, splitting them apart so they’re a circle of stars, spinning around you in a radius as wide as a naginata’s, and Taigen jerks after them, staring. He flinches when you call up more from the snow on his shoulders, needles prodding against the artery in his throat, but says anyway, looking aggrieved until you draw them back just a little–   “Ice bending?”

“Water,” you correct him, melting them into droplets and flicking them to the ground. “Useful enough, in the right circumstances.” You tilt your head, let the moonmad glee filter the tiniest bit into your smile. “Still want to fight?”

Flames lick up Taigen’s forearms, the standard yellows of a hot forge tempered with a more surprising blue. Your body wants to shrink back at the sight, struck after all this time by the fear of an uncontrolled blaze, your pitiful home reduced to cinders and your mother screaming inside, but– well, she didn’t die there. Taigen’s not the first firebender you’ve fought. Anyway, if your body wished for you to listen to it, it would’ve come out differently. 

“It makes sense a monster would have inhuman tricks,” Taigen says, grinning meanly, and blasts a wall of fire at you, so bright it sears your night vision completely. You leap to the side, sliding on ice, see the tree behind you go up like a torch; then you explode every snowdrift in reach, smothering the air with snowflakes, and it doesn’t matter that you’re dazzled, because Taigen can’t see anything, either. He stomps, throws flames out in a circle to dispel it, but you’ve danced your way up another tree, freezing spikes on your shoes to give yourself friction– you’re above him, and a thousand icicles are calling your name. Taigen has to dodge what he can’t vaporize.

You take the opportunity to ice up the ground beneath him, and he slides off his feet, gets them trapped in thickening ice and spends precious seconds melting them free. Frost creeps over his whole body, water migrating and cooling and trying to block up his nose and mouth– that worked for you before, with an earthbender– but he’s been warming himself through his breath, and you can’t use plain water or you actually might drown him. So that doesn’t work. 

Nearer to a body of water, you could hit him with the sheer weight of a wave, hard enough to crack bones or buildings. That’s what saved you with Bloodsoaked Chiaki, whose earthbending almost killed you: the ocean was right there, and it almost felt like it wanted to take him off his feet, give you the chance to stagger up and stab him through the ribs. Here, it’s harder to keep leaching the cold from the snow, especially since freshwater freezes more easily than salt and half of your concentration is stuck on keeping yourself from bleeding internally and also, again, you’re not trying to kill Taigen right now. 

He’s on his feet, shooting another fireblast in your direction. You leap down, sliding on slush to offset your momentum, and Taigen’s too close to you when you draw up more ice shards, radiating heat like a furnace. They melt too fast. He rams into you, and all you can do is drag ice between you so he doesn’t burn you up , and the ice goes up in steam and you’re grappling again, the snow clawing up to hold Taigen down, every bit of frost in the canopy slamming down to bury him–

You’re out of breath, and you’ve definitely torn your stitches. Taigen isn’t coming at you like a tiger anymore, so you let him melt his way through the heap. He glares at you through sopping wet bangs, sizzling all over to dry himself off. Sweating despite the cold. He’s clammy in the exhausted firebender way, where they turn wan and brittle and hungry. 

His heart works hard, pumping hot blood through his veins. You could extend your attention and block it up if you wanted, puppet him to his knees and behead him with a frozen katana, snap a knife of his own blood through his skull so it slumped apart in chunks. Only under the full moon, though. Any other time, you have your work cut out for you keeping your own blood on the inside.

It’s difficult, learning how to bend an element that nobody else in Japan can use. Water is a foreigner’s skill, barbaric and unreliable, shrouded in myths as toxic as the rest of the white man’s world. It didn’t surprise you that it could be used to turn people’s bodies against themselves. It did surprise you, a little, when you realized it could help you control temperatures more exactly when you quenched metal. 

Right now you feel light, satisfied and exhilarated, but that’s the moon talking. It’s a sweet illusion, telling you that your waterbending isn’t another sign of your monstrosity, a piece of your sick heritage embedded in your very nature, but an illusion is all that is. You can’t flaunt your bending, not if you want to keep even a shred of anonymity. You especially can’t enjoy it. 

“In a real fight, I would have incinerated you as soon as your concentration failed,” Taigen says, like an asshole.

“In a real fight,” you tell him irritably, “I would have directed all my new icicles through your body, to start with. And my concentration doesn’t fail.”

Untrue, since your wound is bleeding freely, but Taigen doesn't need to know that. You pay attention to what's important.

“Sure,” Taigen says, rolling his eyes. “But hey, I can be generous– that was a good round.”

“Am I supposed to thank you for that acknowledgment?” 

“You could try thanking me for saving your life earlier, which you never did,” Taigen says. He has his breath back, along with his ridiculous swagger; his clothes aren’t even singed, though your ice tore them up a bit. You sort of wish he’d try to kill you now properly, so you could inform him that real vengeance does not adhere to codes of honor and that you have no obligation not to freeze the blood under his skin and shatter him like pottery, but he clearly isn’t doing that. Maybe now he realizes that if he gives you an excuse, you can just murder him in his sleep and move on with your life. Hell, if you do it stealthily enough, you can probably tell Ringo he had second thoughts and wandered off on his own. “Why do you use so much ice if it’s water you’re bending, anyway?”

“A bender carries the nature of his element,” you say. You do not say that small things are easier to control, and that you had to develop most of your techniques from scratch, in secret, and that creating weapons that leave no evidence is much more valuable to your mission than whipping streams of water around anyway, even though all of those things are true. “Do I seem changeable to you? Like the tide, shifting from day to day?”

“I could see someone like you as a flash flood,” Taigen offers. He straightens his shoulders, grimacing at the pull of some wound, and adds, predictably, “Well, I’m going back to the campfire, to be ambushed in the night or dragged along in the morning, whatever the gods decide. You do what you want, I suppose.”

“I’m not dragging you anywhere,” you say, but he’s already out of hearing range, leaving melted footprints in his path. It’s just you in the snow, surrounded by blackened trees and a patch of exposed ground, the moon lingering hopefully above you. 

Blood drips from your pulled stitches. You gather most of it at your wound and hold it there, willing it to clot up again, and trudge back to camp to tell Ringo you need his needle and thread.

Chapter Text

“So can you make it snow?” Ringo asks hopefully, and you pause, turn a little to frown at him. Ringo’s been about as accepting of your unnatural bending as he is of everything else about you, so you haven’t exactly expected him to avoid the subject, but you thought the inane questions ended an hour ago. That was when you sliced a small tree in half with an ice spike. You figured that was the most impressive thing you could show him, considering the cleanness of the cut. 

“No,” you tell Ringo, and he wilts, looking remarkably like a disappointed child for a man who is both older than you and twice your size. That’s the way of airbenders, apparently. There were not many airbenders in Kohama, and you don’t often have business with them outside of combat, so you weren’t sure until you met Ringo, but now you are certain that at least one of them is exactly as distractible as advertised. “Making it snow would require bending clouds. My abilities don’t reach that high into the air.”

“Oh,” Ringo breathes, speeding up so he can walk beside you. His bell jingles. “That makes sense.” A pause the length of three heartbeats, and he adds hopefully, “Do you think you could bend clouds if an airbender helped you?”

Ringo primarily uses his bending to move small objects and to play around. You’ve never seen him use it to jump high , much less glide as some trained airbenders do, and yet this sounds like an offer to try just that. 

It could be instructive. It could also be a great risk for very little reward, since the odds of breaking a bone on the descent or otherwise hurting your fighting capacity would be far from zero, and so you ask dryly, “Would flying up to make it snow help me kill Abijah Fowler?”

“It could,” Ringo says, bobbing his head in thought. “You could do that thing where you use the snow to blind him, or that thing where you make it so the air is all knives, or, ooh, does it have to be knives? Can you make other things? Because this one time, I met this monk– I was twelve, and I think my father had forgotten that he brought me along, because he traveled incredibly far before I caught up to him again and I only did that because the monk made a tunnel underground, and he was so skilled that he could create a statue of a phoenix just through earthbending!”

Ringo holds his arms close together, staring down as if he carries the statue now. “Each feather on his wing was exquisite ,” he says wistfully. A breeze curls into a miniature whirlwind behind him, tossing up snow and stirring the needles in the trees. Tugging at your cape. “I had that statue for years, you know. Until a customer broke it.”

“It sounds like it was very dear to you,” you say, something catching in your chest. If you have suffered for your deformity, Ringo has surely endured comparable harms. “I am sorry that you lost it.”

“It was made of sand,” Ringo says with a shrug, and it’s as if the motion itself throws his sorrow from his back: he beams at you. You will never understand him. “Any statue you made would be even more temporary, and yet it would be just as fun to see!”

You draw up to blink at him. The road you travel now is not well-trafficked, but out of caution you’re wearing your spectacles, so he appears to you faintly orange. Everything appears faintly orange, always. You’re used to it. “You want me to carve you a statue?”

“It’s often said that a masterful bender can precisely control his element,” Ringo says, blatantly coaxing. 

It’s true. You have seen firebenders who could hold a thousand sparks aloft at the same time, allowing not a single one to extinguish, and earthbenders who can grow precious jewels from scrap. Once, you met a whore who could relight a series of candles in another room, just from sensing the faint heat of their smoldering. 

That’s the kind of trick that a bender from a family of non-benders scavenges up, especially if that bender is a woman who wasn’t strong enough to get marriage offers for her bending alone. A skill for the untrained, the unloved and the orphaned. 

Most of your tricks began similarly, made worse by the shameful unreliability of your element, shackled to the phases of the moon like a woman’s cycle of fertility. You really don’t need to indulge in your waterbending, especially when you could be making better time to your destination, and yet Ringo looks– very hopeful. 

“I could try,” you tell him, and he whoops with glee. “But something small would be best. It can’t be anything that leaves a trace.”

“A tanuki,” Ringo suggests immediately. “Standing up, and wearing a hat! I think that would be best.”

“Shall I include all aspects of its anatomy?” you ask, trapped somewhere between resignation and a creeping, reluctant amusement. “Or are we basing this off the animal, and not the yokai?”

“Well, you can’t leave his testicles out,” Ringo says, horrified. “The tanuki I knew spent most of their time eating small woodland creatures, but they definitely had balls. It would be unlucky not to add them!”

Does this serve a quest for vengeance? Maybe. Possibly. In the sense that it’s teaching you never to give in to Ringo again. But it's too late now. You've put yourself on this course, and now you must see it through.

“Fine,” you say, bending a clump of snow up into your hand. “But you should know that I am never doing this again.”

“Once is enough,” Ringo tells you. “And don’t worry about it being good! This is a new skill for you. Needing practice is natural.”

You nod, compressing the snow into a denser ball of ice. The shape of a blade itches at you, heavy with memory– putting an edge to ice without having it shatter on contact with flesh takes effort, and a knife is easier to throw when it is precisely balanced, so that the air has difficulty slowing it– but that is not the task you’ve been set. Tanuki statues are often upright, with their balls between their legs to create a flat surface so the statue can stand. 

Okay, then. Squeeze the ice. Shift some of it, so the tanuki’s oval shape becomes more obvious: the hat as a wide, flat cone. A rounded head underneath, not much of a neck. The body. The legs. 

It’s harder than you expected. You now hold a vaguely tanuki-shaped lump, wearing a vaguely hat-shaped lump. “I’m not sure this is working,” you admit. Ringo comes closer to peer at your attempt; you hold it out to him apologetically, cold seeping through your gloves. “Do you see the cracks going through the middle? It’s brittle. I could keep going, but the best way to do this must be to form the shape from water first, and freeze it evenly. Maybe… maybe from the inside out.”

The lack of precision rankles. Master Eiji taught you about timing, and all the impurities that could make their way into a blade. You have formed your body into a weapon in itself, capable of bearing you over long distances and up the sides of cliffs, and you have honed your mind as much as you are able, and yet you can’t mold your bending in the same fashion. Lifting water in a ball is almost as much as you can manage, and even then it drips, wavers, tries its utmost to escape your hold. It’s almost like it hates you.

“I bet you could still give him eyes,” Ringo offers. “Try it. Two little chips right there, and you can put divots there to separate the legs from what’s between them–”

The statue shudders and cracks down the middle. You catch the pieces unthinkingly, let them drop when you realize their uselessness. Very firmly resist the urge to sigh. 

“Or we can try again later,” Ringo says, patting you gently on the shoulder. You jump– he wasn’t that close to you– but no, he hasn’t moved without ringing his bell. He just used his airbending to simulate the exact force of a pat on the shoulder. If he’d wanted to, he could have slashed your neck. He could have stolen the air from your lungs. “That was a good first attempt! Very controlled. I couldn’t have done that good, not in a thousand years.”

“You created your own tools,” you point out, biting back the urge to threaten him. You’ve never forbidden Ringo from bending near you. The fault here is yours for not keeping up your guard, when you know airbenders can act almost invisibly, leaving clues only in the actions of their surroundings or the shifts of moisture in the air. 

It's terrifying. You're lucky that they're rare, and that they don't often have the temperaments to be samurai. If you had been an airbender, you would have had access to blades that nobody could parry. You could have created them at any time of the year, without unnecessary fluctuations in your strength. You could have studied actual styles. 

“That’s true, but it took me longer than a day,” Ringo concedes. “It took me several days! Years, even. You’re just starting out, Master.”

“I don’t have years,” you tell him icily. “I have days, and a man to kill. Three men. I don’t have time to waste playing with tanuki.”

“Right, of course,” Ringo agrees, nodding at you. Your heart’s still beating too fast, unexpectedly primed for combat. “The path of the warrior, full of seriousness and training. No art allowed.”

“We have to be at the harbor by morning,” you say, so you don’t have to respond to that, and step back onto the path, setting a fast enough pace that Ringo has to jog to catch up. 

Which he does. Easily. If he ever wanted to kill you, if he didn’t do it while you were sleeping across the fire from him or trusting him to follow you or eating his cooking, he could probably do it by ambush. All he would have to do is remove that bell. 

It’s ringing behind you, two paces back and synchronized with the shifts in the snow where his feet land. He's already saved your life once, guarded your secret against Taigen while you were unconscious, poisoned a man so he could come back and save your life. You try to force your shoulders to relax and only half-succeed.