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The only lullaby Jae ever knew was the mantra of his haven: for the survival of Ellora. It was a phrase repeated frequently in the cramped halls of the tiny orphanage. The caretakers would whisper it beneath their breaths when the children were being particularly obnoxious and troublesome, and the brigade members who brought the orphanage supplies would chant it with their full chests. Even before he awakened as an airbender, his attunement with the natural winds guided these words into his heart, and he, too, began telling himself them every night before he fell asleep instead of crying for parents that would never come or mourning the ones he lost like the other children.
He continued after his awakening, when he traded a hot, damp room filled with children lying on mats and each other for a small but solitary one at the brigade’s dormitory. The mantra reminded him that being well-rested was necessary for the challenges that came with the next day, which made sleep come easily to him as a few notes from a beautiful voice did for others.
But he knows another lullaby. Uki would constantly sing it, usually as a hum under her breath, when she was bored or in need of soothing. Daemin, as he does, picked it up from her, and while he sang it with far less frequency, he was much louder with the lyrics and notes. As a good squad leader—as someone who was simply around them for long periods of time—Jae picked up on it. His memorization was subconscious; putting it away in the far reaches of his mind was deliberate. He had no use for the song, not to help him sleep or to cool his nerves or to gather attention to himself.
At least, he never had a use for it before, but now… now, the melody continues in a loop, spinning around his thoughts and awareness and pain with all the softness of colored ribbons in the lazy midafternoon breeze. Someone is singing to him, a voice he does not know and never has, perhaps his own recreation of what a mother—of what his mother—could sound like.
“Ugh! There has to be—!”
There is another voice among his awareness. Jae forces his heavy, dust-laden eyelids open. Through the shadows and the blurriness and the ever-encroaching darkness, Jae watches a dirtied, torn cloak move along the far walls of this hollow space far beneath the ground. The cloak turns, flaring out like a dimmed flame. The red light brilliantly shining from the protruding bismuth—the Anomaly’s manifestations—reflects off the metal brooch holding that cloak closed. It also reflects off the metal (platinum, he was told) walls, casting the figure beneath the cloak in a fiery glow.
Jae forces his eyelids to open wider. As muted as the light is, it still burns the eyes beneath. Smoke settles along the irises, darkening the gray even further. Ashes mar his tongue, and his throat is clogged with rotting blood. Yet, that lullaby continues to play in his head, and the cloaked figure across the room continues searching for a way out for the both of them.
It makes sense, he thinks, to replace one lullaby for another while watching the one who made that possible. Here, before him, is the one who made him realize there was more to live for than the haven he felt he was born to protect, the one who makes him think that dying for a person is a sacrifice equal to dying for a purpose.
Jae pulls one hand away from his waist. Without the pressure, a gush of blood bursts from the surface. The torn fabric of his clothes sticks to his skin, but it soon flutters away, only leaving behind dried flecks of blood and the sand caught in the thick, hot but cooling liquid. He holds his hand away from himself, ignoring how he shakes from exerting so much energy to perform a simple action.
And he shakes even more when he forces his dried, cracked lips open. A few drops of blood and spittle drip out, yet his voice—charred, broken, unmoored—comes out, too. “Oh, little one, where’d you take my heart?”
The cloaked figure startles harshly. Like a banner in a storm, they throw themselves to the side, unbalanced and uncoordinated. One hand clenches around their brooch, and the other one fidgets beside them with all the anxiousness of a body refusing to believe a mind when it informs all systems that nothing can be done.
Because something can be done. Jae’s sweet, perseverant Pavi wretches herself across the ashen floor. Her tiny fingers intertwine with his own, pressing the shrapnel clinging to her into his skin. She slips on the blood forming a crimson ocean around him, but he manages to catch her with his other arm. Pavi falls onto his chest, and she needs little else to curl into it, gripping his clothes like she is terrified one of them will be torn away.
Jae moves his arm upward. Carefully, he strokes her hair. Guilt sits quietly in his chest, but he has so much more to feel guilty about than simply staining the dark purple strands with an ugly brown-red. So much more, but this is all he can do, holding her close, hoping she does not feel the blood cascading from his abdomen as clearly as he does.
And he can continue with the lullaby that has since far kept him awake rather than letting him drift into the eternal storm. “Oh, little one, where’d you take my heart?”
Pavi hiccups on her next sob. She buries her face further, and for a moment, a half-smile worms its way onto Jae’s face alongside an adorably silly thought: it is like Pavi is trying to burrow into his chest like she does with the earth. Like his heart is coming back.
“Did you hide it in the moon?”
A chance encounter in a crowd of dozens, so panicked and startled that Jae could have lost sight of this little one and never have found her again. But he did find her, and this stretched out into Jae meeting all sorts of wonderful people and seeing all sorts of mystical sights. He learned far more about the world—about Ellora. Much of what he knew to be true simply wasn’t.
Like, for instance, his belief that a heart can only be purposefully given away, because it took him longer to realize that his heart had abandoned him for Pavi and Nisha than it did for his heart to actually leave him.
“Did you sink it in the sea?”
His heart is not all that has left him, though. Drop by drop, his body drains of blood, letting it color the underground chamber they are trapped in until a rescue comes. In much the same way, waves of heat depart from him, coinciding with his very strength, leaving him to shake from the cold born from within and an exhaustion forged from without. Even the pain that has been biting at his heels, roaring in his ears, slamming into his core, has ebbed away.
“Is it stuck inside your pocket?”
What little remains, however, is most precious to him. Pavi, his little heart, has exhausted herself from tears. Instead, she sings alongside him, her voice no more whole than his is. They lack genuine harmony, but there is a unification, an understanding, in the way they startle and stumble through each dazed note. Like all the memories of laughter and joy and companionship have swirled around this singular moment, a vortex to which all happiness resides, ignoring that the most damning sorrow does, too.
“Keep it close as close can be…”
Jae knows that goodbye must come soon. Pavi, stubborn and wondrous child that she is, will survive without him, he knows. She will do so with all the humility and levity that has let her live so virtuously and beautifully as she has thus far, that has brought so much light into Jae’s life for as long as they have known each other.
But there will still be hardship, and he cannot shield her from that, not even if he were to live long enough to see it. So, all he can hope for, is that his little heart, his precious Pavi, will carry all that he leaves behind—their shared memories, what little wisdom he could provide, and the courage to help others no matter what one suffers.
Plopping his weary head down, Jae presses a kiss to Pavi’s hairline. Her voice wavers, yet he finds a newfound strength in the way he quietly, nearly silently, sings, “Someday, you’ll return to me…”
He hums a moment—a second—a breath longer. And then he falls silent. His hand drops to the ground beside Pavi, splashing in his own blood. His body slumps further against the back wall. The last of his strength and heat dissipates, and the blood runs still and cold.
But his heart cries. She cries and cries and cries until an entrance is finally ripped open and she alone is carried off for safer lands, leaving the body in its final tomb to forever rot in the dim red light and listen to the only lullaby he has ever known.