Work Text:
She’s sure that in any other world, her family would have been more impressive. She’d be an Air Nomad, or a noble, or maybe even an Avatar: it was just the way things went with these kinds of stories.
Unlike all those other stories, hers is poor and boring. She’s the daughter of a poor Earth Kingdom farmer and a seamstress. She has five older brothers. She’s a nonbender.
Her name has been long-forgotten in the midst of the darkness in-between her two consciousnesses. They call her Hana now, and she goes along with it, for she can’t think of anything better.
Ba Guo and Ba Long die in the war. They were the eldest sons, twins, and learned earthbending from the soldiers that passed by the village when they were children. They gave Hana a hanbok bought with their first salary, and she keeps it clean and safe. The only time it sees the light of the day is for their funeral.
Lee runs to Ba Sing Se with his girlfriend. They don’t hear from him again.
Chin was a war child, from the time her father ran with the kids and her mother couldn’t escape in time. Her best memory of him is when the village drowns him after he shows his first sparks. His body bloated. It floated down the river.
Po taught her the Pai Sho moves he learned from a rich friend that died of illness years ago. They practice in the dirt, as he earthbends a board and pieces for her. His control and attention to detail is remarkable, even if he is too weak to actually fight. He catches the attention of the Beifongs of Gaoling, and he promises to come back after their commission of a statue is done. She doesn’t comment on the lie.
The hunger is all-consuming. She is thin and breakable, as her older brothers’ uncareful roughhousing has demonstrated more than once. She is quiet and fair-faced. She is good with her hands and with a needle.
She is completely uncomprehending of the culture around her. The villagers look at her like she is retarded. Her parents spoke of killing her more than once, thinking her mute and deaf as a young child. No one will marry her, she is but a waste of resources.
A big famine comes one day. She is but skin and bone already. Hana dies again.
A comet will come in forty years.
It’s quite common for children to die young in the Southern Water Tribe. They have little access to medicine and healers, their waterbenders stolen from them, their sister-tribe cut off from them.
Her sister is many, many years older than her. She is the firstborn, and the only child to survive past the age of two. Their mother is quite elderly, and very lucky to survive the birth. Her sister cared for her in her stead.
It’s cold all the time, even through layers of fur. She was used to the arid landscape of the Earth Kingdom village she’d lived in, hot and dry air eating away at her skin. She was used to light robes and bare feet. The last time she touched shoes was two lives ago.
She never had a sister before. Yunari is married and a mother at the age of seventeen, when she herself is but three. She, now Hama, teaches her how to read and write, claiming she watched the elders do it and learned by herself. In truth, her second mother had made her sew phrases and proverbs as part of requests. Her brothers had gone to school, but she stayed inside during the entirety of her second life.
In her third life, she takes care of her nephew and helps with chores as best as she can. As small as she is, an extra pair of hands is always useful. They sew with a bone needle and tendons instead of metal and thread, but it’s still familiar work. They end up giving all clothes that need mending to her, and her mother teaches her traditional Southern embroidery.
She grows past thirteen this time. Last time, she was only twelve.
When the snow turns black, she takes her needles (sharp, so sharp). The soldier has a weak point in his armour, just below his helmet. The blood comes out in spurts, colouring her blue parka red, and he falls in the snow, never having heard her come from behind him.
She takes out two more in the confusion of the raid. They fall pathetically. The last takes longer to die. He is clearly in agony, begging her not to kill him, that he doesn’t want to die.
She smiles.
“First time?”
His neck is stabbed again.
The fourth soldier comes out from the Chief’s hut. It smells like burnt meat. His hands are still smouldering. He is far too alert, and picks up on the sounds of her feet before she has a chance to kill him.
He burns her. It’s agonizing. Hama dies again.
A comet will come in six years.
And the world-
-stutters.
Her twin doesn’t remember Fire Lord Ozai, even with all the propaganda they’d been subjected to during the first four years of their life. She remembers only the peace of Fire Lord Zuko, the discontentment of their parents, the meddling of Princess Azula.
Her sister Horiko doesn’t know any better, really. Their parents had been part of the military, serving the imperialist conquest of the world. They now are assassins and spies for Princess Azula, and raised both of their daughters accordingly.
She, called Hanako, throws daggers with deadly precision. Horiko prefers hair chopsticks sharpened to a deadly point. Hanako brews poison to lace her blades with. Horiko learns seduction and poise. They pose many, many times as a noble lady and her bodyguard. Princess Azula herself gives them pointers.
Their targets suffer a quick death. Princess Azula has a clear distaste of messy ways of dealing with loose ties.
She only stays because of Horiko. Only until her twin realizes how wrong Azula is. She drops hints, sneaks historic scrolls in, sneaks out with the other girl to see the Fire Nation as it is and not as the propaganda they’d been fed. She never gets caught. She got quite good at lying, courtesy of Azula (her past lives), after all.
Their parents whisper of a mission in the Royal Palace. A child had been born to the Fire Lord, further cementing his position in power and diminishing Princess Azula’s claim to the throne. They must plan and organize. As messages are sent, plans drafted, the base has even more people than before, noblemen and former military members and the children born to them or taken from where they wouldn’t be missed.
Horiko has her face painted to the point she is unrecognizable and knows her lines by heart. There are many who will pretend to be servants. An older woman will serve as her aide.
Hanako is, as always, a simple bodyguard.
The go in procession to the presentation of Princess Izumi. Many provincial nobles come as well, allies and enemies. Blending in is a simple as always: just of matter of acting as if you’re supposed to be there. It’s something she’s intimately familiar with, to pretend to belong somewhere.
The Palace stands beautiful. The party is left to Horiko’s design, searching for a chance. Her ‘servants’ are led to the wing they’ll be occupying.
She studied the schematics of the Fire Lord’s house. Not only that, but Princess Azula knows things, of secret passages and dark corners.
Her feet are light. She knocks out a servant and steals their clothes, giving the unconscious person to her accomplices to deal with. Slipping through the dark and cramped passage, she emerges from a secret doorway in the nursery, empty.
The shadows are dark. No one notices if something is in them.
It’s late when Lady Mai comes with the child, setting her down quickly in order to avoid waking her up. She leaves quickly, called by her handmaid, but not before giving it a kiss in the forehead first.
The door closes. The room settles in darkness and silence. She removes her dagger from its hiding place and holds it up, carefully, as she approaches the crib. Izumi is asleep and settled down. She puts on her gloves (best not to leave anything to chance, not even bloodstains) and holds down the child through its meaty neck, her touch light. The dagger is placed in its place, and she makes a deep and precise cut.
The child doesn’t bleed.
The door opens with a racket, soldiers bursting in, surrounding her. The Fire Lord follows after them, holding a flame in his hand, illuminating the room, Lady Mai behind him, a baby in her grasp. Princess Izumi.
Behind them, one of the people they had brought to pretend to be servants. A spy.
They put her in prison. She stays there for two years until Horiko tries to break her out and dies in the attempt. Princess Azula, her sister had said, deemed Hanako a failure and wouldn’t help Horiko. Horiko hadn’t cared.
After the escape attempt, the Fire Lord decides to have her transferred to a prison complex in the Northern Water Tribe, far, far away from the Fire Nation.
The sailors mock her about sea prunes. An acquired taste, they say. Their faces are the ones to sour when she eats them without comment.
A storm comes one night. The ocean is wild. It swallows the boat. Hanako dies again.
She can’t quite understand what was going on.
Around her, figures whisper.
“Missed one…”
“Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong –”
“Water, Earth, Fire, Air…”
She wanders. She feels weightless and can’t feel the floor.
Someone grabs her arm. It feels like a guidance, not like it is meant to hurt.
“Let’s try again, child.”
She’s a street child. Her knees are always bleeding and her belly is never full. She’s Earth Kingdom again, eyes green, but has no name given by a parent. She doesn’t exist in the eyes of the law.
To those whom she can’t trust, she’s Toph. There’s a million Tophs in Republic City.
She trusts no one.
The gangs around the city are perfectly content with using street rats as delivery boys. She delivers illegal products to various shady corners. She fights the other kids for a job. Her method of punching the face before letting the other react works very well with nonbenders.
The benders aren’t as simple.
She doesn’t dodge an incoming boulder from another street kid. The force that hits her could have crushed a car. Toph dies again.
Her mother is a swampbender. It’s her first time seeing one up close.
The Foggy Swamp Tribe’s members are named by the Spirits. They put wooden plates in the river and let the Spirits pick them apart, holding them back with rocks and plants, until only one runs freely.
She is named Xei.
Although she is no bender, much to the disappointment of most of her tribe, the Guardian still takes an interest in her. He makes her sit in the banyan-grove tree, and they meditate together. It makes her feel restless.
“Sometimes, we carry mistakes from our past lives,” he tells her. “Of course, no one besides the Avatar would even be capable of remembering – but correcting those mistakes is still very much possible.”
She pretends to think about it like the idea is foreign to her. Despite what the Guardian thinks, she knows at least some of her mistakes.
Her life is dedicated to the swamp. She learns under the Guardian along with his swampbender student. The two of them become the new joint Guardians and carry on their traditions.
It feels right to marry the other Guardian. They don’t love each other (she doesn’t feel like she can even love someone else like that), but their friendship is longstanding. He, Shu, is kind to her, and he raises their children well.
Her first son, Po, dies young, perhaps as retribution of Princess Izumi’s (she is now Fire Lord Izumi, Xei recalls) attempted assassination.
Her second son, Yuo, is a bender. Her mother teaches him everything he needs to know.
The years pass by. She fulfils her duties patiently. Her prayers to the spirits become easier and easier with time.
She realizes she was spirited away, once, between lives. Why, she cannot imagine. Is she an oddity? Is she common? She is never anything special, always a secondary character in someone else’s story, so she surely can’t be meant for a greater purpose.
Her daughter, Zhee, is spirited away as a child when the rest of the tribe isn’t paying attention. Xei slips into the Spirit World for the first time, where Koh, the Face Stealer, awaits her, demanding her faces and offering Zhee in return.
She emotes four times, and for four times her past faces emerge from her. Koh laughs.
“Still one missing!”
Her look of horror is enough. Her very first face, the one she’d forgotten, is taken from her. Zhee is placed back in her arms and the Spirit World disappears beneath her feet, the voices around telling her to return one day. She falls knees first on the ground, shaking but refusing to cry.
Her husband finds them like this and tries to get her to tell him what happened. She refuses.
Zhee becomes deathly afraid of the swamp. She meets a young man and they run away together to Republic City. She leaves behind a wooden plank for her mother, a message saying ‘Goodbye’ and ‘I’m sorry’.
Her husband dies a few years later from an infection. Yuo grows strong and distanced from his mother. They rarely speak, even after the birth of his own children. Still, she manages to be a part of the kids’ lives.
Her favourite grandchild is named Xei after her. The girl is lively and mischievous, an earthbender like her mother. She learns from Toph Beifong how to bend and from her grandmother how to be a Guardian of the swamp. Xei grows quickly, like a sprout, and stands taller than both her parents at fifteen, only surpassed by her grandmother.
When young Xei is all grown, ready for the title of Guardian, old Xei stands on top of the banyan-grove tree, all alone, contemplating.
The dehydration is unbearable until it isn’t. Xei dies again.
Her parents are airbenders. She isn’t.
In this time, that isn’t so uncommon. Many children of the new airbenders don’t have the gift themselves, and accomodations have been made for them a long time ago.
She still feels like something is missing.
Her mothers, who name her Sangye, try to make up for it. They come from Fire Nation families, so maybe she is a late firebender. Mom’s cousin Li comes teach her katas and she follows them somewhat awkwardly, to no avail. They try again and again, but she can’t produce flames.
Master Jinora comforts her. After all, she says, nonbenders are just as important as benders in the equilibrium of the world. Key figures, like Sokka of the Southern Water Tribe and Suki of Kyoshi Island couldn’t bend any element and yet were still vital players of the Hundred Year War. The words feel warm in Sangye’s chest, but it doesn’t erase the feeling of something missing.
The monks test her when she is nine years old. She has a lot of affinity for spirits, something that can be trained even without bending. She spends a lot of time meditating and learning about chi. They make her learn airbending katas to help with finding the right state of mind to reach the Spirit World.
It’s useless, she thinks, with the Spirit World’s portals open, but her mothers seem happy with the training she’s receiving, so she has no reason to give up.
When her friends start to receive their arrows, she watches on the side. There’s a feeling of longing for something she can never have.
The mirrors she owned are all broken. She always hated her reflection, the feeling of missing something always prominent when seeing her own face, but the knowledge that she will never belong stays with her.
Alas, she keeps lying. She was always great at it.
(Her dreams sometimes have a stern-looking woman surveying Sangye’s knife-throwing. The woman’s voice is garbled, but she can distinguish something –
“The best lie is one that has some truth in it.”
The woman corrects Sangye’s stance and the dummy’s chest is hit this time.
“If you know, especially, what part of the truth certain people want to hear, you can make them play right into your hands.”
She always wakes up sweating and confused, the woman’s warm touch still on her mind.)
Her mothers teach her Pai Sho and laugh when she plays like an old lady. No one has favoured the Rhododendron Gambit in decades, except the really old grandmas who still remembered a time before the White Lotus became the norm. Sangye, since little, just shrugs and says that it’s just how she likes to play.
(She had an imaginary friend, Po, who gave her tips. He left one day to become a sculptor, she told her mothers and smiled when they said she was really grown up now.
At night, she cried.)
The monks make her an Air Acolyte, and she stays in the temples her entire life. She doesn’t marry or have children.
Sangye grows old. The Spirits speak more to her as her body begins to fail. They murmur nonsensical things, most of the time. Warnings that don’t make sense, simple jokes, snippets of stories that she is sure depict some historical happening.
Some spirits whisper to her when she attempts to fall asleep.
“Remember!”
(A bone needle covered in blood-)
“You can’t forget!”
(A street rat running around with stolen coins in her pocket-)
She furrows her eyebrows. “What do I have to remember? And why?”
(A child taken away by spirits-)
They never answer to the first question. And the second never has a straight answer.
“You can’t keep on repeating the cycle again and again,” is the most common response.
One spirit, a fox with bright red fur and terrifying human-like eyes, whispers to her once.
“Your soul can not take such torture.”
(There’s something about those eyes that is nearly familiar.)
She never sees that one again, for that night her age gets to her. Sangye dies.
She is the daughter of a whore. The result of some nobleman’s indiscretion and her mother’s despair.
There are worse ways to die. Drowned as an infant, incapable of understating what is happening, is not the worst thing that could happen to her.
Her mother names her Izumi before killing her.
Feiling is born with white hair and red eyes. An oddity, and a dangerous one for the people of the desert, who live amongst scorching sand and burning sun.
(A fox with bright red fur. A fox with human eyes.
May you be blessed. May you not falter.
May you survive.)
Her father fusses over her. Her grandmothers cover her in layer after layer of fabric, trying their best to keep her delicate skin from burning. They tell her stories of how their people sometimes die from the sun, and how they need to both revere and fear it.
(The sun, the fire, the heat, the flames. A woman in red and black and gold with blue flames. A sister with the same face and voice as hers.
She falls into the ocean. She’s filled with the taste of salt.)
Feiling doesn’t care that much. She just wants to have her own sand-sailer and see all the desert. She just wants to steal all the gold in the world.
They’re pirates. They steal money and rob the transport lines on the oil extraction plants.
(A kid with empty pockets and clever hands.)
“We used to be a noble people,” Grandmother Leeli tells her and the other kids amidst the campfire. “We taught and guided. But then the Republic came, looking for fuel, and the desert gave and gave until it had nothing to give us.”
(She feels hunger in her stomach, curling and rotting in her bones. Her brothers eat and eat and eat and she has nothing but crumbs. Her brothers speak and speak and speak and she is mute and dumb.
Her parents speak of killing her. She embroiders their proverbs on spare fabric.)
“That’s not fair!” one of her cousins shouts.
Grandmother Leeli nods with a serious expression on her face. “And that’s why we became pirates.”
And not pirates in name only.
Feiling learns how to hold a dagger before she can speak properly. She can use needles and thread as weapons. She can pick out poisonous weeds and grind them into a grain so fine that none would notice it in their drink. She can dodge and kick and punch.
Her first kill comes when she is ten. Her first raid, a merchant vessel with too little watch and too much food.
She is something savage then, baring her teeth like a spider-snake about to strike.
(Her nephew is sleeping peacefully. Her hands are covered in blood. The soldier is dead dead dead, they are safe.
They are not safe yet.
She tears her needle from his neck. She can still hear screams outside.)
It doesn’t bother Feiling that she is no bender. Benders are rare in their tribe, even more in their clan, precious, but not expected. The last sandbender her clan had had died before her father was even born.
Grandmother Hua shows Feiling the tapestry made from his life.
“This was him, parting the sands for our people to survive the storm,” she points with her wizened hands. “And this was his fight with the Earth Kingdom alongside the rest of our tribes. And this was his meeting with Avatar Chou.”
It's a work of meticulous details, made from all the hands of their clan and all the knowledge of weaving they possessed. It took them nearly two lives to finish it.
Grandmother Hua braided this tapestry, as did Grandmother Leeli, Grandmother Tuocha, Aunt Yiling, and so many other women that have since left the scorching sands for the resting place of the dead. An inheritance just for Feiling’s people.
(Tradition, spirituality, inheritance. That is her legacy.
The spirits speak to her. The spirits beg to her.
The spirits steal her face.)
She is twelve when the raid comes.
They’d been happening for decades, really. The Republic comes and kills and kidnaps, pushes her people off their land for their oil plants. Sometimes, they have to hurriedly get in their sand-sailers and leave in the middle of the night.
The warning comes too late.
Feiling stands between the soldiers and her little cousins with a dagger and a growl, ignoring the cold of the desert night and the sand between her bare toes. They laugh at her, despite the blood she’d spilled before, despite the ease with which she twirls her weapon.
They grab her and twist her arm broken.
She nearly falls unconscious, but manages, just barely, to stay awake for just long enough to find her father. To meet his gaze.
She watches as the soldiers force the adults against a tent and fire their weapons.
Feiling and her cousins are separated. Something about re-homing, something about re-educating. She doesn’t care. The school she’s put in doesn’t like when she talks her own tongue, doesn’t like when she covers her body like her people, doesn’t like when she fails her tests, doesn’t like when she answers back with violence.
She gets hit. A lot.
One day, it goes too far.
She is born under an unlucky moon. For someone like her great-great-grandparents, that might have meant something, but the Northen Water Tribe has since then moved on from such ancient spirituality when it has little bearing in the modern world, or so her family says.
Auka grows up as the only child of a fallen family. They’re related to the chief’s family, distant cousins who were granted money and prestige for their blood and occasionally marrying into the main branch.
That had been until Auka’s grandfather’s childhood.
Auka grows up with no money or prestige or recognition for her noble blood. She knows her family resented it, resent their conditions and fall from grace.
She doesn’t particularly care.
Her parents insist that she trains with the waterbenders, despite Auka showing no propensity for it herself. “She might be a late bloomer,” they say, fully ignoring the possibility that a child of their line might not be a bender at all.
Auka says nothing. She learns early on that speaking out in her family is a bad idea.
She grows up. She shows no ability to bend. Her parents are disappointed (and it shows), but they ultimately sigh and teach her how to be a worthy political pawn to pull them back into power.
She learns from old women the traditions of their nation. She learns how to embroider ancient patterns.
She learns she’s quite a natural at that.
She learns the old tongues, she learns family lines, she learns how to cook their traditional dishes.
Auka learns she’s a natural at all that – almost like she knew all of it before.
She is seventeen when her parents arrange a marriage for her. Her groom-to-be is Arnook, son of some general or the other, whose family is looking for a claim of noble blood. They fit together well for their families’ designs.
Personally, Auka feels that Arnook and her will be a disaster of a marriage. He is of a choleric temperament, and far too proud to accept any sort of criticism. And Auka does not have the patience for that kind of man, even if she is used to it.
Her mother is pregnant with her younger brother when she sends Auka off to her in-law’s estate, smile brighter than what she’s ever shown her daughter before.
“Make us proud,” her father says, face stern.
Auka doesn’t say anything.
Married life is boring. She spends a long time stuck inside the estate, her husband sent off on some campaign. He’s forbidden Auka from leaving without him, except to go pray to the spirits, which she doesn’t do anyway.
A year later, Auka has her only son. Her husband calls him Tarrlok and has him raised by a nursemaid and an army of attendants.
Auka barely feels anything towards the infant. As much as she tries to hold him, he cries whenever she touches him.
She stays inside her rooms instead.
Auka sews and embroiders. She writes and writes and writes.
Amidst her nightmares, dreams that come and go without her understanding, Auka writes.
She writes of an Earth Kingdom girl in the Hundred-Year-War dying of hunger.
She writes of a Southern Water Tribe woman killing Fire Nation soldiers with a soiled needle.
She writes of a Fire Nation Imperialist attempting to assassinate the heir to the throne.
She writes of a Republic City street rat’s struggle to survive.
She writes of a swamp’s spiritual guide dying on a tree grove.
She writes of an Air Acolyte meeting spirits.
She writes of a sand pirate’s adventures amidst her clan.
Her husband doesn’t like it, but Auka learns how to keep her writing a secret. She publishes it under a pen name, tying the profits of her famous historical fiction novels to it.
Years pass. Her son grows to be five, then ten, then fifteen. Auka watches him grow behind windows, closing the curtains whenever he looks back at her.
She sees when he is grown enough to join his father in campaigns. For the first time in fifteen years, the estate is empty but for the bare minimum of staff. Auka is all alone in her rooms.
She grabs her money and her travel clothes. She takes a ship to the Republic.
Auka writes more. She brings out strange dreams of sculptors and nephews and war-torn towns. She gets grants to read books and books and books and write more.
A professor of the University looks at Auka and offers her a place to teach. History and languages, culture and traditions. She teaches it all, and her name becomes synonymous with historical research.
Years later, she travels the continent. Town through town, village through village, Auka sees it all. Every nation, every land.
At forty-eight, Auka finds a village in the Republic. It is arid, the people are poor, the only source of work are the local industries. It is an old village, dating back at least fifty years before Avatar Aang’s victory, but it is maybe even older than that.
There is a statue of a famous sculptor in the centre of the poor village. There is an ancient graveyard maintained only by tradition and fear of spirits.
A grave calls to her.
Auka meets Hana.
And two threads-unite.
She is hungry. There is no food. Nothing in the fields survived, the animals drop dead with rot.
Her parents eat whatever they can find and leave nothing behind. She is but a waste of a mouth, she knows.
She digs for roots. She digs for water. She grows weaker and weaker, thinner and thinner.
She wonders if her parents will bother with a grave for her or simply let her rot away on the street.
She misses Po. She misses Ba Long, Ba Guo. She misses Lee. She misses Chin.
Her lips are dry and chapped. She wets them with whatever saliva she can produce.
Here, under the scorching sun, Hana will die.
There is a merciful shadow above her. She looks up, the movement tiring. A woman, older, darker skin, with different eyes, and yet Hana recognizes her.
“…Auka.”
“Hana.”
“Will you remember?”
“…” The woman looks to the side. “Not for a long time. But I will be reminded.”
Hana smiles. “Make sure to remember the others too, then.”
She closes her eyes and stops breathing.
And two threads-unite.
She is burning. Sizzling still in the snow. She has since lost the ability to scream.
Her nephew sleeps peacefully. Her sister breathes still.
Her blood spreads around, matching the already-red hue of her bloodstained parka. She can die having known she took out those bastards, at least.
She sees cold feet crunch the snow in front of her. Sandals, fancy, made of leather.
A familiar face appears through the lights of the fires still burning. Hama wheezes.
The woman kneels. “I will remember, Hama,” she promises.
She closes her eyes.
And two threads-unite.
The ship is in panic, sailors trying to pull ropes and steady the vessel. She’s found herself at the surface, moon bright in the sky despite the clouds covering nearly all of it.
Horiko always liked the moonlight, she thinks.
A wave splashes her, and its twin grabs her by the waist. She can feel her feet losing traction, her balance shifting.
A familiar face comes from the waters. An older woman, a face she’s never seen before and yet recognizes.
“I will remember, Hanako.”
And Hanako smiles, feeling the wave pull her towards the wild ocean.
And two threads-unite.
She sees an older woman, holding her hand through the pain.
“I will remember, Toph.”
Toph wheezes out a laugh through broken ribs and punctured lungs.
And two threads-unite.
She sees a younger woman, offering her company through her meditation.
“I will remember, Xei.”
Xei smiles peacefully, sitting cross-legged on the banyan-tree grove.
And two threads-unite.
She hears a familiar voice, penetrating through the haze of her dreams.
“I will remember, Sangye.”
Sangye sleeps, dreams filled with spirits.
And two threads-unite.
She sees a familiar face, hazy through the blurriness of her underdeveloped eyes.
“I will remember, Izumi.”
Izumi smiles a toothless smile.
And two threads-unite.
She sees a familiar face, behind the matron ready to punish her.
“I will remember, Feiling.”
Feiling stares up with defiance at the whip, posture like that of a child used to fighting for her life.
And the threads-
-untie.
Auka finds someone else. Someone she’d forgotten so thoroughly, not even spirits could make her remember.
The woman is indistinct. Auka can’t tell what her face looks like, how tall she is, what colour is her hair. She doesn’t think it matters.
“I’m sorry I can’t remember your name,” she tells the woman.
The woman answers in an incomprehensible tongue, looking up at Auka with deeply sad, deeply familiar eyes.
“I will remember anyway,” Auka promises. “I will get all of them back.”
Auka sets off to find the spirit that stole her faces. She is fifty-one when an ill-timed boulder ends her life.
She remembers anyway.
Mimi grows up amidst a merry band of wandering musicians. She is daughter of none and yet of all, a child found crying in the middle of nowhere, features telling of a mixed heritage and yet nothing else to suggest where she might have come from.
Her family, familiar with the ways of the new Air Nomads, blink not an eye at her connection with spirits, or her acting beyond her years. They simply laugh when she comes to them with a new memory to tell and let her regale them with the tales of a past life around the fire.
Mimi learns instrument after instrument, song after song. She can sing before she can speak and can play before she can walk.
She teaches her family olden embroidery. She teaches them old dialects of local languages. She shows off her skills with daggers. She teaches them how to identify poisonous plants. She shows them the now dead swamp’s method to commune with spirits. She shows them a noblewoman’s manner and laughs at how ridiculous all that protocol is.
They teach her the newer Air Nomad prayers. They teach her how to tame a sky bison, how to fly with her companion. They teach her how to fight benders with chi blocking, how to use various weapons she’d never touched before. They show her how to plan a nomad lifestyle, how to stay on her feet, how to laugh and laugh and laugh.
Mimi is happier than she ever thought she would be.
She hopes it never ends. She hopes she can be Mimi forever, never anyone else after this.
Besides, she still has a promise to fulfil.
“I need to find Koh the Face Stealer,” she tells her family. They sing and cheer and feast and then they all fly to the Air Nomad’s floating temple.
Avatar Yue is a young woman with Air Nomad arrows and Water Tribe eyes. She travels from nation to nation atop her airship but always returns to the temple. Avatar Yue’s father is an old man, with white hair and blue eyes and more enthusiasm about his airships than height left.
“Come see my old lady!” he offers a curious Mimi. “I built her when I was a young man still. She’s rough around the edges but survived all these decades regardless.”
The airship is an old model indeed. Mimi’s family travels around with an older model too, and she’s learned the basics of repair and maintenance. It’s based on Ancient Air Nomad gliders and the sand people’s skiffs, with all kinds of mechanical parts to make sure it has enough strength to remain in the air.
The old man offers his old ‘Lady Auka’ to Mimi and Avatar Yue when she decides to accompany Mimi on her trip to the spirit world. “Let her have one last hurrah,” he says. “Perhaps she’ll find the real Lady Auka there.”
Mimi contains herself before she tells everything to him. Before she breaks down and apologizes for not being there. She can tell Avatar Yue is staring at her.
“Are you sure you don’t want to tell him?” The Avatar asks when they are alone.
Mimi shakes her head. “Tarrlok doesn’t need to be abandoned by his mother twice.”
And that’s that.
Avatar Yue is young and inexperienced. Unlike Mimi, she doesn’t remember her past lives, despite having lived much longer than the child in front of her.
“Koh steals faces when you emote,” Mimi explains. “He got mine because he’d taken my daughter hostage, but he should have no such advantage now.”
The Spirit World bends to the two of them as they enter. Mimi had never been there truly physically, not even when Zhee had been taken. Spirits scurry back and forth, sing, cry, call out, ignore, run.
The Avatar brings Yue to a clearing.
Koh the Face Stealer greets them both with mirth. They do not emote.
Koh the Face Stealer taunts them both. They do not react.
Koh the Face Stealer threatens them both. They do not respond.
A spirit arrives. A red fox with human eyes, one that had watched Mimi even before she’d been Mimi. One that had watched Hana and Hama and Hanako, and Toph and Xei and Sangye and Izumi, and Feiling and Auka.
The fox snarls.
She attacks.
She bites and swipes and bleeds. She throws back her head and howls like an animal. She grins and cries and screams and laughs.
Her nails are sharp, her teeth are long, her hair is red like blood and her eyes are human.
She is covered in blood of a spirit when she comes back.
There is no fox.
There is only Mimi and the weight of her whole soul, and the weight of all her faces.
Avatar Yue nods with wisdom beyond her years. “You should be free of this cycle, now that you are truly whole again.”
Mimi looks down at her bloodied hands. “I didn’t realize how much I’d forgotten. Not until… not until it all came back.”
“You were protecting yourself. It’s a crude method, going through life after life until your soul is mended, but it works.”
“I did this to myself.”
“On accident.”
Mimi doesn’t answer.
When she and the Avatar leave, she turns back, for just a moment, to look at where the fox with human eyes – with eyes that were once hers – was, once upon a time.
“Don’t worry. I will remember your name.”
And she walks away, never to return.