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Title: Where No Roads Are Marked
Author: redbrunja
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Rating: R for violence and torture.
Characters: Suki, The Dangerous Ladies.
Author’s Note: written for smillaraaq. Much love to my betas. This was started in December, based purely on speculation, unrelated to “The Burning Rock.” CONTAINS NO SPOILERS, AND THE AUTHOR IS SPOILER FREE.
Summary: “Suki was the only Kyoshi warrior to make it to Lake Laogai alive.
Suki was the only Kyoshi warrior to make it to Lake Laogai alive.
She stumbled back, using her fan to deflect the azure flames that Azula was throwing at her.
Daiyu was pinned to a tree, her glossy hair a shocking contrast against the rough bark. Suki wasn’t sure where her other girls were and she tried to locate them as Azula lunged at her.
Suki dodged and Lijuan darted between them, her green uniform fluttering and then charring as the Princess blasted her with a wave of fire. Lijuan shrieked; her voice cut off with horrible abruptness.
Suki dashed around her corpse, teeth bared, wanting to see Azula dead more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life.
She slashed at the woman with her fan. Azula dodged, a sneer on her pasty lips, and then there was a blur of pink in Suki’s peripheral vision.
Fingers jabbed into her back, unyielding as steel spikes. Her body stopped obeying her, legs crumbling. She inhaled, the scent of dirt and grass rich in her mouth, and tried to regain her feet. Come on! she yelled at herself, breath hissing through her teeth with effort. All she managed to do was flop on the ground like a landed fish.
Azula sighed dramatically. “If this is the caliber of the Avatar’s friends...” she half-chuckled. “I highly doubt he’ll be much of a challenge.”
Suki clenched her teeth and tried to shove herself to her feet. She stared at her gloved fingers, watching as they did nothing more than tremble against the dirt.
Azula dug a toe under Suki’s shoulder and flipped her over. She crouched down, staring into Suki’s eyes.
Suki spat in her face.
The Princess looked almost surprised at that. Wiping the saliva away with a flick of her fingers, she smiled cooly. She grabbed Suki’s throat and pulled her up. “I’d play nice, little warrior,” she whispered. “We’re going to be spending lots more time together.”
Suki didn’t have a ready retort for that, she said nothing, letting her rage shine in her eyes.
Azula’s gaze rose to Suki’s forehead.
“Mai. Ty Lee. I have a wonderful idea,” she said, and removed Suki’s headdress. Her chestnut hair was tangled around the ribbon, and Suki heard the pops as the strands pulled free of her scalp, the pain hot and superficial. It was nothing compared to the anger seething inside her at this Fire Nation girl touching something Suki had sweated and bled and dreamed for, and she was lunging upward before she even realized she could.
Azula leaned to one side, dodging, and jabbed her heel into Suki’s throat. Suki tumbled to the ground, tried to roll back to her feet even as her brain screamed for oxygen but Azula didn’t give her the chance. She slammed her foot down on Suki’s head, grinding her face into the dirt until Mai sauntered up and bound Suki’s hands and feet.
Ty Lee and Mai tossed her on the back of one of their komodo-rhinos. Mari and Daiyu were also slung over the back of one of the beasts, which meant that–
Suki twisted her head around.
Lijuan (loved tangerines, and for her last birthday all the girls had bought her a vial of expensive citrusy perfume, perfume that had come all the way from Ba Sing Se) was a charred corpse.
Renzi (spent years chewing off her lipstick, it had driven their hand-to-hand instructor batty, but nobody was better at applying the paint) was pinned to the ground with arrows through her palms, her throat slashed wide open.
Hwalee (keep telling Suki to let her hair grow out, that just because it was a plain, pale brown didn’t mean it was ugly, but Suki would always laugh and toss her head and say she liked it short) was curled under a tree. Her uniform blended into the grass and shadows of the trees, and she looked peaceful. She looked asleep. She looked alive.
Suki knew she wasn’t, but she hoped anyway.
She lifted her head up to glare at Azula. The Princess was going through their things, tossing aside personal trinkets like trash, gathering up their spare clothing and makeup. There was nothing Suki could do. She knew that, had been trained in that, been taught to know when to wait, and be quiet, and not draw attention, but the sight of Azula stripping Hwalee’s body made her self control crack.
“Get your filthy hands off her,” Suki snarled, voice low. She wasn’t even sure Azula heard her, from where she stood across the clearing, but the Fire Nation girl rose to her feet and turned to face Suki. The wind lifted stands of her hair, and she smiled.
Suki wanted to scream, wanted to rage. Instead she bit her the inside of her cheek, bit until the coppery taste of blood filled her mouth, and looked over at her two friends. She had to twist her head painfully to see Daiyu and Mari trussed up like she was. Daiyu had her head lowered, her long, dark hair almost reaching the ground. Mari meet Suki’s eyes. They stared at each other for one long moment, and then, even bound and on the back of a kimodo-rhino, Mari’s shoulders straightened.
Suki lowered her head, and allowed a spark of hope to kindle in her chest.
By they time they arrived at their destination, Suki’s forehead was bruised from whacking against the saddle of Mai’s kimodo-rhino and her stomach aching from the jostling. Lifting her head awkwardly, she realized that they were in a Fire Nation camp, and she felt worse.
A Fire Nation camp.
A Fire Nation camp four days outside of Ba Sing Se, in the heart of the Earth Kingdom.
It was established, too - she could tell by the way that the dirt was pounded down, creating defined trials between tents the color of stripped bark. There was distinct sense of settlement, of routine; she could see soldiers playing cards by a campfire, while others moved briskly about on business of their own. The Fire Nation had been here a while, and Suki felt the urge to hunt down whoever was supposed to be guarding these lands and whack him with her fans until he bled.
“Princess,” a captain greets Azula, bowing low. “I take it your hunt was successful?”
Suki didn’t need to see the girl’s face to know she was smirking. “Oh, relatively,” Azula answered, almost coquettish. “Now, Captain Yaozu, be sure to take good care of my souvenirs.”
(≠)
Suki shouldn’t have been surprised that the Fire Nation already had a tent set up to house prisoners but she had to admit she was.
She, Daiyu and Mari were dragged to a moderately-sized tent which contained a stump in the exact center. The top scorched smooth and metal stakes rammed into what had been the bole of a spectacular fir tree. The Kyoshi warriors were stripped of their armor, their arm guards, their boots. They pulled the headdresses off of Daiyu and Mari. Suki’s was already gone.
The guards snapped metal cuffs about their wrists and ankles, cuffs attached to chains attached to the spikes, and only then sliced away the ropes Mai and Ty Lee had bound them with.
The chains had enough slack that they could stand up and reach the bucket conveniently placed by the canvas wall of the tent.
Daiyu took advantage of this new found largess by driving her foot into one of the guard’s knees. There was a pop; he screamed and fell back. The woman who’d just finished shackling Suki went to help her comrade, and Suki snagged the women’s ankle with her heel, sending her sprawling onto her comrade. She yelped as her forehead rapped into the spike of his epaulet.
The rest of the soldiers who’d helped get Suki and her friends in this tent backed away from the Kyoshi warriors too quickly for dignity, while the two fallen Fire Nation warriors glared at them from where they sprawled on the ground.
Suki smiled flirtatiously at them both.
By the time Captain Yaozu arrived to escort Suki to Azula’s tent, her nose had almost stopped bleeding from her beating and she’d come to the conclusion that her ribs had only been cracked.
Yaozu poked his head in, two guards behind him, saw the disheveled state she was in, retreated for the moment, and came back with another three guards.
Suki was flattered, really she was.
She came quietly, too, not looking back at Daiyu or Mari as she was led away.
She knew what was coming.
She was utterly docile until they brought her to the Princess’s tent. It was large enough that the lamplight couldn’t reach the corners, and shadows clung to the drape of the fabric. She could see a luxurious bed against the far wall, piled high with pillows in various shades of red.
Ty Lee was practicing slow cartwheels around one of the tent’s poles and Azula ignored her in favor of a letter she was writing.
There were thick carpets on the ground, overlapping each other, except for one large square of tan canvas where rings had been pounded through the fabric and into the ground. Beside it, an old man was kneeling, his white beard neatly braided, hands folded together.
Mai was loitering by the door, and she waved the guards towards the rings in the floor with a vague gesture of her hand as if speaking was too much effort.
They lead her forward, and after two small steps, she dug in her heels and twisted, managing to jerk her chains out of the hands of one of the men holding her. The other deepened his stance, trying to pull her off balance. Suki moved with his motions, twisting her arm around and cracking the guard who was trying to recapture her lead across the face with her chain. He tumbled backwards, Suki drove her elbow into the throat of the other one, and then Captain Yaozu threw himself at her, face contorted with rage, and the two remaining soldiers at his heels.
Suki had planned her little scrum well: when Yaozu took her down, she made sure they caromed off Mai before striking the floor hard enough to have her ears ringing, especially when the pair of guards slammed on top of Yaozu. Suki felt something crack in her chest, and had the suspicion that it was her ribs breaking the rest of the way.
Azula hadn’t even looked up, her brush still moving rhythmically across the page but Ty Lee had paused in her motions, legs in the air, and was watching the fracas with her mouth in an ‘O’, a vacuous look on her face.
Suki had enough time to smiled sweetly at Yaozu before he grabbed the front of her dress and hauled her onto the square of bare canvas, attaching the shackles to the rings with violent motions.
He slapped her when he was done, one hard blow that started her nose bleeding again.
“That will be all,” Azula commented when it looked like Yaozu might continue.
Suki licked at the blood that had reached her upper lip, and gave her bounds an experimental yank. There was no give. She was on her back, hands tied above her head and ankles bound to the floor.
The white haired man knee-walked to her side, moving like an abnormally graceful spider-crab. His clothing rustled like dead leaves.
He implacably turned her head to the side, fingers firm against her jaw (she resisted on principle, neck muscles screaming). The man made a precise slit along the side of her throat and then slapped something cool and numbing on it before the cut could do more than begin to bleed.
Azula moved her chair over to where Suki lay and reseated herself, crossing her legs indolently. Suki watched Azula, watched her pointed toes sway as the princess waited for something. Suki wondered where the hot irons were, the pliers, the needles. Did that Fire Nation bitch expected her to just start talking?
She realized her body was limp, her lips numb. She felt like she was floating above her body, and the adrenaline that had been thrumming through her body since Azula and her cohorts had first appeared ebbed away, leaving her loose and relaxed.
Oh, no, she thought. Oh no, oh no, nonono.....
Azula asked her a question and Suki answered.
She answered truthfully, honestly, and promptly. The words were rising from her and she tried to snatch them back, tried to force her mouth closed, tried to bite of her tongue, and she couldn’t. Words were falling from her mouth like sand, and she was telling Azula everything, absolutely everything. Everything about Kyoshi, everything about her island, their patron Avatar, the ways of the warrior, every bit of information her people had collected about the Fire Nation, everything about herself.
That was the worst.
Suki told Azula secrets, personal truths, things she’d never told anyone, things she’s never even admitted to herself, her dreams, her fantasies, her hopes. Things about her family. Things about her friends. Things about Sokka.
Azula perked up at that name.
“Go on - about that Water Tribe boy.” Her lips curled up. “Tell me more.”
And horror of horrors, Suki did.
Author: redbrunja
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Rating: R for violence and torture.
Characters: Suki, The Dangerous Ladies.
Author’s Note: written for smillaraaq. Much love to my betas. This was started in December, based purely on speculation, unrelated to “The Burning Rock.” CONTAINS NO SPOILERS, AND THE AUTHOR IS SPOILER FREE.
Summary: “Suki was the only Kyoshi warrior to make it to Lake Laogai alive.
Suki was the only Kyoshi warrior to make it to Lake Laogai alive.
She stumbled back, using her fan to deflect the azure flames that Azula was throwing at her.
Daiyu was pinned to a tree, her glossy hair a shocking contrast against the rough bark. Suki wasn’t sure where her other girls were and she tried to locate them as Azula lunged at her.
Suki dodged and Lijuan darted between them, her green uniform fluttering and then charring as the Princess blasted her with a wave of fire. Lijuan shrieked; her voice cut off with horrible abruptness.
Suki dashed around her corpse, teeth bared, wanting to see Azula dead more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life.
She slashed at the woman with her fan. Azula dodged, a sneer on her pasty lips, and then there was a blur of pink in Suki’s peripheral vision.
Fingers jabbed into her back, unyielding as steel spikes. Her body stopped obeying her, legs crumbling. She inhaled, the scent of dirt and grass rich in her mouth, and tried to regain her feet. Come on! she yelled at herself, breath hissing through her teeth with effort. All she managed to do was flop on the ground like a landed fish.
Azula sighed dramatically. “If this is the caliber of the Avatar’s friends...” she half-chuckled. “I highly doubt he’ll be much of a challenge.”
Suki clenched her teeth and tried to shove herself to her feet. She stared at her gloved fingers, watching as they did nothing more than tremble against the dirt.
Azula dug a toe under Suki’s shoulder and flipped her over. She crouched down, staring into Suki’s eyes.
Suki spat in her face.
The Princess looked almost surprised at that. Wiping the saliva away with a flick of her fingers, she smiled cooly. She grabbed Suki’s throat and pulled her up. “I’d play nice, little warrior,” she whispered. “We’re going to be spending lots more time together.”
Suki didn’t have a ready retort for that, she said nothing, letting her rage shine in her eyes.
Azula’s gaze rose to Suki’s forehead.
“Mai. Ty Lee. I have a wonderful idea,” she said, and removed Suki’s headdress. Her chestnut hair was tangled around the ribbon, and Suki heard the pops as the strands pulled free of her scalp, the pain hot and superficial. It was nothing compared to the anger seething inside her at this Fire Nation girl touching something Suki had sweated and bled and dreamed for, and she was lunging upward before she even realized she could.
Azula leaned to one side, dodging, and jabbed her heel into Suki’s throat. Suki tumbled to the ground, tried to roll back to her feet even as her brain screamed for oxygen but Azula didn’t give her the chance. She slammed her foot down on Suki’s head, grinding her face into the dirt until Mai sauntered up and bound Suki’s hands and feet.
Ty Lee and Mai tossed her on the back of one of their komodo-rhinos. Mari and Daiyu were also slung over the back of one of the beasts, which meant that–
Suki twisted her head around.
Lijuan (loved tangerines, and for her last birthday all the girls had bought her a vial of expensive citrusy perfume, perfume that had come all the way from Ba Sing Se) was a charred corpse.
Renzi (spent years chewing off her lipstick, it had driven their hand-to-hand instructor batty, but nobody was better at applying the paint) was pinned to the ground with arrows through her palms, her throat slashed wide open.
Hwalee (keep telling Suki to let her hair grow out, that just because it was a plain, pale brown didn’t mean it was ugly, but Suki would always laugh and toss her head and say she liked it short) was curled under a tree. Her uniform blended into the grass and shadows of the trees, and she looked peaceful. She looked asleep. She looked alive.
Suki knew she wasn’t, but she hoped anyway.
She lifted her head up to glare at Azula. The Princess was going through their things, tossing aside personal trinkets like trash, gathering up their spare clothing and makeup. There was nothing Suki could do. She knew that, had been trained in that, been taught to know when to wait, and be quiet, and not draw attention, but the sight of Azula stripping Hwalee’s body made her self control crack.
“Get your filthy hands off her,” Suki snarled, voice low. She wasn’t even sure Azula heard her, from where she stood across the clearing, but the Fire Nation girl rose to her feet and turned to face Suki. The wind lifted stands of her hair, and she smiled.
Suki wanted to scream, wanted to rage. Instead she bit her the inside of her cheek, bit until the coppery taste of blood filled her mouth, and looked over at her two friends. She had to twist her head painfully to see Daiyu and Mari trussed up like she was. Daiyu had her head lowered, her long, dark hair almost reaching the ground. Mari meet Suki’s eyes. They stared at each other for one long moment, and then, even bound and on the back of a kimodo-rhino, Mari’s shoulders straightened.
Suki lowered her head, and allowed a spark of hope to kindle in her chest.
By they time they arrived at their destination, Suki’s forehead was bruised from whacking against the saddle of Mai’s kimodo-rhino and her stomach aching from the jostling. Lifting her head awkwardly, she realized that they were in a Fire Nation camp, and she felt worse.
A Fire Nation camp.
A Fire Nation camp four days outside of Ba Sing Se, in the heart of the Earth Kingdom.
It was established, too - she could tell by the way that the dirt was pounded down, creating defined trials between tents the color of stripped bark. There was distinct sense of settlement, of routine; she could see soldiers playing cards by a campfire, while others moved briskly about on business of their own. The Fire Nation had been here a while, and Suki felt the urge to hunt down whoever was supposed to be guarding these lands and whack him with her fans until he bled.
“Princess,” a captain greets Azula, bowing low. “I take it your hunt was successful?”
Suki didn’t need to see the girl’s face to know she was smirking. “Oh, relatively,” Azula answered, almost coquettish. “Now, Captain Yaozu, be sure to take good care of my souvenirs.”
(≠)
Suki shouldn’t have been surprised that the Fire Nation already had a tent set up to house prisoners but she had to admit she was.
She, Daiyu and Mari were dragged to a moderately-sized tent which contained a stump in the exact center. The top scorched smooth and metal stakes rammed into what had been the bole of a spectacular fir tree. The Kyoshi warriors were stripped of their armor, their arm guards, their boots. They pulled the headdresses off of Daiyu and Mari. Suki’s was already gone.
The guards snapped metal cuffs about their wrists and ankles, cuffs attached to chains attached to the spikes, and only then sliced away the ropes Mai and Ty Lee had bound them with.
The chains had enough slack that they could stand up and reach the bucket conveniently placed by the canvas wall of the tent.
Daiyu took advantage of this new found largess by driving her foot into one of the guard’s knees. There was a pop; he screamed and fell back. The woman who’d just finished shackling Suki went to help her comrade, and Suki snagged the women’s ankle with her heel, sending her sprawling onto her comrade. She yelped as her forehead rapped into the spike of his epaulet.
The rest of the soldiers who’d helped get Suki and her friends in this tent backed away from the Kyoshi warriors too quickly for dignity, while the two fallen Fire Nation warriors glared at them from where they sprawled on the ground.
Suki smiled flirtatiously at them both.
By the time Captain Yaozu arrived to escort Suki to Azula’s tent, her nose had almost stopped bleeding from her beating and she’d come to the conclusion that her ribs had only been cracked.
Yaozu poked his head in, two guards behind him, saw the disheveled state she was in, retreated for the moment, and came back with another three guards.
Suki was flattered, really she was.
She came quietly, too, not looking back at Daiyu or Mari as she was led away.
She knew what was coming.
She was utterly docile until they brought her to the Princess’s tent. It was large enough that the lamplight couldn’t reach the corners, and shadows clung to the drape of the fabric. She could see a luxurious bed against the far wall, piled high with pillows in various shades of red.
Ty Lee was practicing slow cartwheels around one of the tent’s poles and Azula ignored her in favor of a letter she was writing.
There were thick carpets on the ground, overlapping each other, except for one large square of tan canvas where rings had been pounded through the fabric and into the ground. Beside it, an old man was kneeling, his white beard neatly braided, hands folded together.
Mai was loitering by the door, and she waved the guards towards the rings in the floor with a vague gesture of her hand as if speaking was too much effort.
They lead her forward, and after two small steps, she dug in her heels and twisted, managing to jerk her chains out of the hands of one of the men holding her. The other deepened his stance, trying to pull her off balance. Suki moved with his motions, twisting her arm around and cracking the guard who was trying to recapture her lead across the face with her chain. He tumbled backwards, Suki drove her elbow into the throat of the other one, and then Captain Yaozu threw himself at her, face contorted with rage, and the two remaining soldiers at his heels.
Suki had planned her little scrum well: when Yaozu took her down, she made sure they caromed off Mai before striking the floor hard enough to have her ears ringing, especially when the pair of guards slammed on top of Yaozu. Suki felt something crack in her chest, and had the suspicion that it was her ribs breaking the rest of the way.
Azula hadn’t even looked up, her brush still moving rhythmically across the page but Ty Lee had paused in her motions, legs in the air, and was watching the fracas with her mouth in an ‘O’, a vacuous look on her face.
Suki had enough time to smiled sweetly at Yaozu before he grabbed the front of her dress and hauled her onto the square of bare canvas, attaching the shackles to the rings with violent motions.
He slapped her when he was done, one hard blow that started her nose bleeding again.
“That will be all,” Azula commented when it looked like Yaozu might continue.
Suki licked at the blood that had reached her upper lip, and gave her bounds an experimental yank. There was no give. She was on her back, hands tied above her head and ankles bound to the floor.
The white haired man knee-walked to her side, moving like an abnormally graceful spider-crab. His clothing rustled like dead leaves.
He implacably turned her head to the side, fingers firm against her jaw (she resisted on principle, neck muscles screaming). The man made a precise slit along the side of her throat and then slapped something cool and numbing on it before the cut could do more than begin to bleed.
Azula moved her chair over to where Suki lay and reseated herself, crossing her legs indolently. Suki watched Azula, watched her pointed toes sway as the princess waited for something. Suki wondered where the hot irons were, the pliers, the needles. Did that Fire Nation bitch expected her to just start talking?
She realized her body was limp, her lips numb. She felt like she was floating above her body, and the adrenaline that had been thrumming through her body since Azula and her cohorts had first appeared ebbed away, leaving her loose and relaxed.
Oh, no, she thought. Oh no, oh no, nonono.....
Azula asked her a question and Suki answered.
She answered truthfully, honestly, and promptly. The words were rising from her and she tried to snatch them back, tried to force her mouth closed, tried to bite of her tongue, and she couldn’t. Words were falling from her mouth like sand, and she was telling Azula everything, absolutely everything. Everything about Kyoshi, everything about her island, their patron Avatar, the ways of the warrior, every bit of information her people had collected about the Fire Nation, everything about herself.
That was the worst.
Suki told Azula secrets, personal truths, things she’d never told anyone, things she’s never even admitted to herself, her dreams, her fantasies, her hopes. Things about her family. Things about her friends. Things about Sokka.
Azula perked up at that name.
“Go on - about that Water Tribe boy.” Her lips curled up. “Tell me more.”
And horror of horrors, Suki did.
(≠)
Suki was weeping when the guard’s brought her back, tears dripping through the wreck of her make-up. Yaozu looked positively gleeful at the sight of her, and his hands were horribly gentle as he chained her back up.
Daiyu and Mari waited until the guards retreated outside, leaving at least the illusion of privacy before they started to speak.
“Suki, what happened?”
“Spirits, are you alright?”
Suki sucked in a hard breath and forced herself to stop crying. She trapped her sobs in her chest, leveled out her breath. The Fire Nation was welcome to slice her heart to ribbons but she wasn’t going to let her girls down any further than she already had.
“What are we going to do?” Daiyu asked, voice mournful and doomed.
Suki pressed a finger to her lips.
She waited into they were both watching her, focused, their gazes still and taut, and then flicked her wrist.
The shuriken that she’d stolen from Mai slide into her palm as silently as a lover’s kiss, its edges gleaming in the low light of the tent.
“We’re going to escape,” Suki breathed, and her voice came out strong, even if her throat was tight with tears.
She waited until the low, dark hours before dawn, when everyone’s energy was at an ebb, before moving.
The two guards at the tent entrance were quiet, not bothering to chat to pass the time, and both Daiyu and Mari watched their silhouettes as Suki picked the locks.
Every scrape of metal against mental, each tremulous click as the shackles fell open felt as loud as a shout, but Daiyu was shifting like a restless sleeper and the rasp of her skirt and Mari’s perfectly timed coughs masked the sounds of their escape.
Freed, the three warriors rose to their feet. Moving silently, they gathered at the far wall, and Suki cut through the tent, the fabric parting under Mai’s knife like water around the Unagi.
Suki poked her head through the slit. Off to her left, there were other tents scattered among the trees, but no one was visible. She slipped through the tent wall, held the fabric apart for her two companions, and then the Kyoshi warriors slipped off into the night.
They almost made it.
They’d skirted past three perimeter guards, hugging the boles of the trees, blending into the night when some random soldier stumbling back from the midden caught them through sheer hotheadedness. He tripped over a rock, almost fell, swore, and then kicked at the offending bit of granite that had fouled his feet.
It hit Mari, smacking into her skull as she crouched in the shadows of a willow. She yelped in pain, tipped forward onto her hands.
The firebender jerked his head up, flames blooming in his palms. Suki was already at his back. She jabbed her heel into the back of his knee, slapped a hand across her mouth, and twisted.
The crack of his neck was loud; it practically echoed among the trees.
There was one moment of silence, while Daiyu pulled Mari to her feet, and then a shout from– the soldiers at the perimeter? the guards who should have been watching the girls from kyoshi?– someone. Suki promised herself that the next time she escaped from anywhere, she was leaving a trail of corpses in her wake; no leaving them alive to foil her escape later.
“Run,” Suki hissed at her companions, hearing the thud of boots as she fumbled the fallen soldier’s sword free.
Mari was holding her head, blood streaming down to cover half her face. Daiyu grabbed her, started to pull the other girl away.
Suki turned from them to the three sentries that approached. She engaged the first one –he came at her too fast, showing how utterly green he was in his mad rush to attack her, and she twisted aside of his first swing, and gutted him like a fish before he could manage a second.
Then she was tangling with the next, dodging a preliminary spear-thrust, parrying a sword strike. Suki feinted and then darted forward, Mai’s knife in her hand and almost managed to slit the woman’s throat.
The third sentry was moving past her. Suki tried to trip him, but he twisted past her, threw his spear forward. She heard the meaty thwack as it sank into flesh, heard Daiyu’s scream, and knew she’d failed. She’d failed to save her two remaining warriors and now - Suki had failed again.
She knew this fact instantly, deep in her bones. It was over.
She took out another eight Fire Nation troops before they kicked her legs out from under her and pinned her to the ground, her arms twisted up behind her back.
Her neck was twisted to the side, and she could see Mari hanging slack in the grip of two soldiers, blood still streaming down her face, Daiyu next to her, one spear impaled through her thigh, three spearheads at her throat.
There was the rustling sound as the warriors around her realized that their prisoners had been neutralized, a brief silence which seemed to request that orders be given.
“I hope you have a good reason to interrupt my sleep, Captain,” Azula said.
Suki wondered when she’d shown up.
The soldiers holding Suki bent her up into a kneeling position, giving her an excellent view of Yaozu standing before the Princess and her two henchwomen. Mai looked dull as ever in silky black sleepwear, and Ty Lee was wearing an oversized white shirt and... Suki focused on her feet. Slippers sewn to look like baby moose-lions in brilliant pink. Of course.
“How did they escape?” Azula asked, walking over to stand before her prisoner, Mai at her heels, examining her nails as she followed.
Yaozu held the shuriken someone had pried out of Suki’s hands. “They picked the locks with this.”
Mai’s face seemed to stiffen.
She plucked the knife from his hands, running her fingers along the blade like she couldn’t believe it was one of hers. Beneath her mask of boredom, she looked betrayed.
“Mai,” Azula said, sounding terribly amused, “if you can’t keep track of your toys, they’ll be taken away from you.”
Suki smiled at the girl consolingly. Mai flushed, color rising in her cheeks, and slapped Suki across the face.
Captain opened his mouth to continue and Azula spoke over him.
“I’m surprised at you,” she said to Suki. “I would have expected to you to be still recovering from your exhausting evening.”
Suki smiled sweetly, liquid dripping off her chin, gradually realizing that the reason that slap had stung so badly was that Mai had been holding her shuriken when she struck.
She ignored the blood dripping down her neck. “I bounce back quickly,” she said, her chin up, trying to make her voice sound like they were chatting over tea. She almost managed it - her breathing only hitched once.
“But it was terribly inconsiderate of me to interrupt your beauty sleep,” Suki continued, “you must need so much of it.”
Azula’s mouth twisted like she didn’t know whether to smile or snarl.
She decided on a smile. “You know, Suki, before I met you, I thought the Earth Kingdom was filled with base, gutterbreed cowards. It’s so nice to be surprised.”
She turn and started to walk away.
“Oh, Captain Yaozu,” she said over her shoulder. “I realize now that three prisoners is just too much trouble to ask you to deal with. Feel free to get rid of one of them.” She continued her exit.
“My pleasure, Princess,” he said, turning to Suki, his fists already on fire.
“Not her,” Azula corrected without looking back, Ty Lee skipping at her heels. Mai, leaning against a tree, looked disappointed.
“No,” Suki demanded. “No.”
Yaozu gestured, and soldiers were shoving Mari to the ground. They staked her down, one dagger through each wrist and the soles of her feet, and then the soldiers backed away.
Suki was struggling, bucking, twisting, desperate to save Mari, to hurt the Fire Nation, to do something.
Mari’s face was stoic, calm, and Suki could see her steel herself, wanting a death her parents could take comfort from.
She didn’t get one.
To her credit, she barely made a sound when someone handed Yaozu a whip and he flogged the skin off her back - no, then it had been Suki yelling and swearing and begging him to take her instead, she was the captain, their actions were her responsibility. She fought until they gagged her, careful not to block her sight of Mari as they stuffed strips of fabric into her mouth.
It wasn’t until he started burning her that Mari began to scream.
Suki wasn’t sure what exactly he did; there were no flames visible, but even from a body length away Suki could feel the heat radiating off him, see the air around him twist away from his body like water shied away from a freshly-forged sword.
He laid his hands on Mari, and she screamed.
She screamed and screamed and screamed.
It sounded like-
No. There no like. Mari screamed, and it was so full of pain that Suki wanted to die to escape it. In that moment, she would have killed Mari herself to silence that sound.
Yaozu was thorough; he worked from her extremities inward, careful that no scrap of her flesh was missed. Where his hands had been, her skin was pink and swollen and uncharred. By the time he reached the center of her body, she was merely making whimpering, mewing sounds. Her back wasn’t bleeding anymore, just weeping clear juices; she was being cooked alive. Suki choked, bile at the back of her throat, and new she would never be eating roast monkey-pig ever, ever again.
He rose, looked down at the barely-alive thing at his feet.
“Take them-” he pointed at Suki and Daiyu. “-back and secure them, this time. Leave this,” he dug his toe into Mari’s ribs, “for the carrion birds.”
Daiyu was weeping, had been weeping, Suki remembered, the whole time.
Her memory mercifully cut out then. No matter how many times Suki recalled this moment, revisited it in her dreams, she never remembered walking away from Mari, never remembered leaving her to die slowly, abandoned and alone.
All she had was a few fragmented images: the tear tracks on Daiyu’s face, the feel of perfunctory hands pulling her away, the taste of dirt in her mouth, Mai’s bloodless face, and Mari’s bloody, cooked fingers digging into the dirt.
She didn’t remember anything at all until she was back in the tent, blood splattered, ripping the remains of her skirt into bandages to wrap around Daiyu’s leg.
Daiyu was weeping uncontrollably, and the instant that Suki finished tying the last knot on the girl’s bandage Daiyu curled in on herself, hiding her face in her arms.
Daiyu cried, and Suki forced her to drink water, and brushed her tears away, and stroked her hair and listened when she talked, breath coming in great gulping sobs and her exhales full of Mari, Mari, Mari.
Suki bit her lips bloody, and cursed herself for not realizing they’d been lovers until now.
Her time sense started warping then. It could have been trauma, but the water tasted bitter, and the ground had stopped being solid. She keep forcing Daiyu to drink anyway, because Daiyu was feverish, burning, her body consuming itself, and Suki was going to lose everyone she loved to fire, wasn’t she?
Daiyu lasted three days.
Three days twisting with fever, babbling to the spirits, begging Suki to save her.
At the end, she thought her Captain was Mari, and Suki held her and kissed her forehead and promised she’d always be by her side. She held Mari until the Fire Nation peeled her arms away from her last comrade and shoved her into a wooden cage slung between two komodo-rhinos.
They gossiped that Ba Sing Se had fallen.
Suki wasn’t surprised at all.
It was a miserable trip from the Fire Nation Camp To Ba Sing Se. Her cage swung sickeningly between the two animals, the dust from the road caught in her throat and stung at her eyes, and the wooden slates were set too widely apart for there to be any comfortable way for her to sit or brace herself against the sway of transportation.
Suki focused on her body, ran through her injuries like a mantra, fingering her bruises, prodding at her broken ribs, counting her scratches, picking at scabs. If she concentrated, she could block out everything except the pains of her body. She didn’t have to remember Daiyu dying, Mari screaming. Lijuan consumed by fire like a moth trapped in a lantern, Renzi’s bloody throat, Hwalee’s slack body.
In her ears, the wind whispered faint cries using their voices, and her lips kept mouthing their names, and Suki dug her nails into her palms, and wanted to die with an intense lust that was far stronger than anything she’d ever felt for a man.
Whey they arrived at Ba Sing Se, the flag of the Fire Nation spread across the walls of the city, the gates and surrounding stones ripped as wide open as a whore’s legs.
Suki felt like she was finally hearing the punch line of a particularly sick joke. Still, she couldn’t help but feel a spark of something in her chest as they entered.
So this was the famed Ba Sing Se. Suki peered through the wooden bars. They were traveling along a wide, straight road. And the buildings! Suki had never seen so many pressed so close together. It reminded her of the sandcastle towns that she and her friends had built on the beach while sun beat down on their shoulders. Each building was connected to the next, whitewashed houses pushing up against each other, rising several stories further up than Suki was used to. She looked at the buildings until they blurred into stripes of cream pain and chestnut wood, and then she looked at the people.
They were everywhere: green-clad citizens thronged the streets, thronging the sides of the streets, pressing far away from the kimodo-rhinos. She’d never seen so many people in one place, being so quiet. As they progressed deeper into the city, Suki began to notice the pattern; she and her jailers would enter a new street, twisting deeper into Ba Sing Se, and the citizens would go silent, pressing against the sides of the buildings, a slight buzz of worried conversations striking up behind them.
Suki was watching the crowd, searching out the few people that would meet her eyes, who didn’t automatically look away; a faintly familiar young man with a baby in his arms, a dusky faced girl with braids, an old figure of indeterminate gender who cackled at the sight of Suki, caked in blood and dirt.
Suki had stopped looking at the people and started looking at the produce and bakery stalls that lined this section of the thoroughfare, an arm slung around her empty belly, when a shout rang out across the street.
Two Fire Nation lieutenants were dragging a struggling someone out of a teashop, one at her hands and one holding her feet.
“We’re got one of the resisters!” one of the lieutenants yelled over the swearing of his captee. They dragged her forward.
“Really?” the komodo rider on the left asked, pivoting his rhino around, forgetting he was linked up to another rider. The cage groaned in protest, and there was a dull thwack as it hit a cabbage cart.
The two lieutenants were getting closer, only about ten feet way.
“Yep!” one of them called cheerily.
Suki loathed him utterly.
She reached between the bars of her cage, grabbing a particularly small cabbage (the proprietor grabbed after it, but she snarled and him and he recoiled with a whimper) and pulled it into her prison. She pushed it through the other side, and before the two laughing lieutenants spared her a glance, she threw it right at one of their sneering faces.
Suki had never thought of cabbages as particularly effective projectiles, but apparently she’d snagged a notably hard one, because it hit the officer’s face with a nice crack.
He yelled, dropped the girl’s legs, and she promptly kicked the other soldier in he face, twisted out of his grip and bolted.
She slide under Suki’s cage. The Kyoshi warrior caught a flash of ragged hair and black eyes as she was dodging around the cabbage cart (the proprietor threw himself over his vegetables protectively) and then the little rebel was among the indistinguishable morass of people.
One of the lieutenants, clutching his bleeding nose, started to run after her and spooked a komondo-rhino, who roared in anger and then lashed out, his head knocking the officer down and his tail taking out the produce cart.
It took twenty minutes to restore any kind of order, twenty minutes during which the rebel vanished and Suki giggled until she half-fainted from lack of oxygen and the pain in her side.
By the time they reached the Lake Loagai Prison, the sky was dark, the streets were filled with grimy torch light, her escorts were in a foul mood, and Suki - Suki was feeling almost chipper.
“You’re going to die in there,” someone hissed a her, as they clicked shackles around her wrists and ankles and marched her under ground.
That thought just increased her good mood.
Who ever told her that was right. She would die under Lake Loagai.
She was put in a small, hermetic cell, and was forgotten about. Oh, sure, they dragged her out every three days with their lamps and their monotone words and tried to crack her mind open, and twice a week Azula would ‘visit’, sip her tea while they drugged her up and secrets so oft-repeated the telling almost didn’t hurt tumbled out of her mouth, but it was only habit. The Dai Li attempted to break her with the same emotional investment they put into filling out their time sheets or brushing their teeth. It was habit, and duty, and they don’t care who she was or why she was under the Lake.
It would have been easier if they’d hated her personally.
Truthfully, Suki didn’t hate them either. It was their job to try and erase who she was and it was her job to remember (remember, remember, fans and strength like water and Avatar Kyoshi rising above her town like a benevolent goddess, remember) who she was.
Suki knew her duty.
She was a warrior of Kyoshi.
She was captain of a cadre of the best warriors of her Island.
She had left her home to fight in the war.
She’d failed in almost every way possible but that didn’t negate her responsibilities.
She was a beaten warrior, captain of a cadre of corpses, failed in her goals, but that was still her and she wouldn’t give that up.
“She’s more resilient than we suspected, Princess,” a voice said as she twisted on her cot, rough blankets scratching her back. She wasn’t sure when the fever had began. She’d lost track of the days back when she’d been watching one of her oldest friend die in her arms. Time didn’t matter. All that mattered is that she kept fighting (the fever, the Dai Li, Azula, the part of her that said give up give up give up, would Joo Dee’s life really be so bad?) until the moment her last breath passed between her lips.
She turned her face into the slightly cooler side of the hard pillow, felt sweat slide down her side. She was going to die by fire. By fever. The total lack of surprise at this thought struck Suki as funny. Of course she was going to die by fire - she’d wanted to fight the Fire Nation, hadn’t she? How else would she die? She giggled into her hands as the walls trembled with her.
“She should have relinquished herself by now. We’ll increase-”
“Oh, Long Fan, you have no grasp of subtlety,” Azula replied. “That’s why you’re taking my orders. Despite her low breeding and pathetic training, she’s strong. But she’s not without weaknesses. Don’t try erase her. Erase the Water Tribe boy.”
They used an hourglass. A rotating hourglass that spun so slowly, so quickly, that sand was always moving inside. It ensnared her mind like a weaver-snake, and Suki felt herself swaying back and forth against the restraints.
Sokka hadn’t forgotten about her.
Of course not - but if he was real (dashing between her and the Fire Prince’s blasts, protecting her from spiders) wouldn’t he have rescued you by now?
How do you know he hasn’t tried? He might have just failed.
Oh, you mean like you? But don’t you think it’s more reasonable that he just never existed?
No. He traveled with the Avatar. He trained with her. He wore her face paint and she kissed his cheek and later he walked at her side as they traveled across the Serpent’s Pass.
Are you sure?
Of course. I remember. He was smart and brave and funny–
Are you sure?
-and he would have saved me if he could, but he has other priorities, other things he must do and if he could have saved me–
Are. You. Sure?
No.
No, she wasn’t.
Suki stared straight ahead, eyes dilated, sweat dripping down her face, and didn’t move.
“Sokka of the Water Tribe never existed. Sokka of the Water Tribe never existed. Sokka of the Water Tribe–”
Suki was doing crunches when two pale guards opened her cell door, Azula behind them.
“Good afternoon, Suki,” Azula said pleasantly.
Suki didn’t pause.
“You know, in polite society–”
Suki rolled to her feet, smoothly. The two guards inched forwards, thin clubs pointed at her chest, and the princess didn’t even paused.
“-when someone visits you, you say hello,” she finished. “But I supposed I can’t expect a peasant like you to understand that.”
“No,” Suki agreed cooly, “You can’t expect your enemies to be polite.” She smiled sweetly. “Hello, fire nation scum.”
One of the guards swung at her, she dodged unthinkingly, and then Azula held up her hand.
“Halt,” she commanded, and they obeyed. She gestured, and the guards stepped back.
Azula smiled. “I have an offer for you, Suki,” she said, voice soft, “During these past weeks... I admit, I’ve come to admire you. You’re strong - stronger than those foolish girls you traveled with. You could go so far.” She held out her hand, nails glinting in the light. “Join me. Serve me. Don’t let yourself rot down here when you could join the glorious Fire Nation.”
There was a long pause, and then Suki reached out, like she was going to clasp hands, hooked Azula’s pointer finger and bent it back. Azula dropped to her knees and the two guards lunged for her.
Suki lashed out with her foot, Azula twisted away, and then the other two enemies were on her, raining blows down on her. Suki curled into a ball, trying to take the hits on her shoulders and arms.
“That’s enough,” the Princess ordered.
The two guards backed away.
“I’m leaving Ba Sing Se,” she continued, as Suki slowly raised her head, not bothering to push herself off the floor. “So I brought you a present.” She held up a pot of safflower lip rouge. Suki remembered it. It had been a gift from her mother, and she knew the details of the delicate gold and black paint, the feel of the shell cover, smooth and nubby under the pads of her fingers. She had a visceral memory of slipping the rouge, cool and smooth, across her lips, tasting the faint chalk/oil flavor.
Azula’s eyes were cold, lips gracefully curved. “This has been so useful to me; I’m sure you’ll find it comforting.”
Her words were perfectly chosen; all Suki could think about was her mother’s gift being used to capture the greatest city in the Earth Kingdom.
She exhaled, shame twisting in her stomach, staring down at her dirty knees.
Azula dropped the makeup on the floor, the shell clinking musically as it hit the stones.
“Oh, I’ll be sure to give Sokka your love,” she added.
Suki looked up, utterly confused. “Who?” she couldn’t help but ask and Azula’s agate eyes brightened.
She walked away from Suki’s cell with a lilt in her step, the guards locking the door behind her.
Suki reached out, grabbed the rouge, and slammed it down, the shell splintering beneath her palm, lacquer staining her fingers.
She always lost! Why did she always have to lose?
Suki stared at her hands. The makeup stained her fingers wet and red, the Kyobeni lip stain indistinguishable from the drips of blood oozing out of the cuts on her palm.
She had an idea.
Suki lay limp on the cot, eyes closed.
She could hear the rhythmic slide of metal as the guard checked on each prisoner.
He got to her cell door, slide the metal shutter back, peered in, turned to go and then paused.
Then the door was thrown open with a horrific bang (she didn’t even twitch). He rushed to her side, swearing, eyes fixed on the streams of red liquid that dripped from her wrists to stain the floor.
“No,” he breathed, eyes locked on her wrists.
Suki jerked up, and before he could do more than widen his eyes, she was slashing a piece of shell across his throat.
His blood splashed across her face, hot, coppery. It reminded her of the metallic tang of metals being smelted.
She jerked off his overcoat as he gurgled, dying, threw it over her shoulders, and dashed out of her cell.
Suki had expected it would be hard to find her way out of the Lake Loagai prison. It wasn’t. The corridors were laid logically, and after a scant handful of breathy, eternal moments, she was walking under the sun, a tranquil lake behind her, Ba Sing Se before, and a well trod path under her feet.
She’d scrubbed the Kyobeni lipstick off her wrists as best she could, rubbed her face clean with the underside of the coat, tried to turn the bloody collar under but in the bright light of day, the red tinge to her fingers looked horribly obvious.
A pair of men were approaching and her fingers clenched around the shard of shell in her pocket. She stared past them and walked purposely forward.
They nodded politely as she passed, and she deigned to tip her head towards them.
She make it into the city proper before she started shaking.
She found herself in what looked like a mix between a residential and a business district. The lowest floors of the buildings contained shops, but washing was strung from building to building, dresses and pants and undergarments fluttering in the breeze.
Suki discreetly slipped into an ally, pressed herself again the wall, and trembled so violently her teeth chattered.
She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe she was alive. She could believe she could see sunlight on her face without shackles on her wrists.
She let herself rest for a moment longer, and then she wiped her eyes, straightened her shoulders, and set off to find clothes, money, and someplace relatively safe to stay.
She was two steps out of the alley when her plans were hijacked.
Suki was looking up, deciding on the best way to steal some new clothes, when a short person grabbed her wrist, hissed, “You,” with recognition in her dark eyes and dragged her back to the alley.
Suki waited until they were out of sight of the civilians and then drove her thumb into the girl’s throat and shoved her against the wall.
“Who–” she started and then the girl’s companion grabbed the back of her coat. Suki shot her elbow back into his eye, twisted out of his hold, and then skipped backwards a few steps, giving herself as much room as possibly in the cramped space between the two buildings that loomed above them.
“Longshot, cool it,” she snarled. “This is her, this is the girl.”
“What?” Suki asked.
The girl turned to her, her shaggy hair poofing about her face like a dandelion's seeds.
“Don’t you remember? I was there when you took out that Fire Nation jerk with a cabbage.”
“Oh,” Suki said.
“I’m Smellerbee.”
“Suki.”
There was an awkward silence and then Suki decided to take a chance.
“I don’t suppose you know where I can get cleaned up?”
By dusk, Suki was just finishing her first bath in weeks, a deliciously pleasurable experience, even if she was kneeling in a small hip bath with tepid water. The soap was scented with cheap fragrance, and Suki was trying to recall if anything ever had smelled sweeter.
She carefully rinsed herself off and shrugged her still damp body into a set of Longshoot’s clothing.
Suki watched herself in the vanity mirror, and was distantly shocked by what she saw. She’d always been thin, but now? Her ribs and hips stood out like the neck bones of a sway backed ostrich horse, and her eyes had dark hollows under them that looked like she’d inexpertly removed khol from around her eyes. Most jarring was the vivid line of red scar tissue that ran from the corner of her left eye to just above the corner of her mouth.
Smellerbee meet her eyes in the mirror, blushed hotly, and then went back to streaking her cheeks with rouge.
“Tonight me and Longshot we...” she said, and careful of the thin walls, continued. “Have plans.”
Suki felt her lips pull into a flirty smile as she sat down next to the girl at the miniscule vanity and started brushing her hair, silently thanking Avatar Kyoshi for leading her to these people.
“I’d love to tag along,” she said to Smellerbee, taking the little pot, “if you two don’t mind company.”
Smellerbee’s mouth turned down. “We’ve been pretty short on company lately.”
Suki tilted the Smellerbee’s chin up, dipped her pinky in the make-up, and dabbed a touch at the corner of the younger girl’s eyes, pretending she didn’t know that the shine in them was the threat of tears.
Smellerbee had a homely face, but her eyes were nice and large, and now, bright as the moon.
“On Kyoshi Island,” Suki told her, taking a minute to smooth a few wayward strands of Smellerbee’s hair, seeing how terribly young this girl was, “all the warriors wear face paint. It is worn so that our enemies can only see our strength, never our fear.” She set down the pot of rouge.
“Oh,” Smellerbee said, and then held the pot out to her.
“No thank you,” Suki said, forcing a smile, her lips feeling stiff and awkward, “but I am no longer worthy to wear warrior’s paint.”
“So what happened?” Smellerbee asked, almost belligerent, like she couldn’t let her voice soften.
Suki looked in the mirror, and her eyes seemed as empty as bits of gray glass.
“I lost something,” she said simply. Her mouth tasted salty and for one moment she felt like the emptiness in her chest was going to swallow her whole. Suki pressed a hand to her stomach, forced her back straight, and then began to pin her hair back.
She wondered why the hole inside her felt so much bigger than the sum of all the names of her dead.
Suki was weeping when the guard’s brought her back, tears dripping through the wreck of her make-up. Yaozu looked positively gleeful at the sight of her, and his hands were horribly gentle as he chained her back up.
Daiyu and Mari waited until the guards retreated outside, leaving at least the illusion of privacy before they started to speak.
“Suki, what happened?”
“Spirits, are you alright?”
Suki sucked in a hard breath and forced herself to stop crying. She trapped her sobs in her chest, leveled out her breath. The Fire Nation was welcome to slice her heart to ribbons but she wasn’t going to let her girls down any further than she already had.
“What are we going to do?” Daiyu asked, voice mournful and doomed.
Suki pressed a finger to her lips.
She waited into they were both watching her, focused, their gazes still and taut, and then flicked her wrist.
The shuriken that she’d stolen from Mai slide into her palm as silently as a lover’s kiss, its edges gleaming in the low light of the tent.
“We’re going to escape,” Suki breathed, and her voice came out strong, even if her throat was tight with tears.
(≠)
She waited until the low, dark hours before dawn, when everyone’s energy was at an ebb, before moving.
The two guards at the tent entrance were quiet, not bothering to chat to pass the time, and both Daiyu and Mari watched their silhouettes as Suki picked the locks.
Every scrape of metal against mental, each tremulous click as the shackles fell open felt as loud as a shout, but Daiyu was shifting like a restless sleeper and the rasp of her skirt and Mari’s perfectly timed coughs masked the sounds of their escape.
Freed, the three warriors rose to their feet. Moving silently, they gathered at the far wall, and Suki cut through the tent, the fabric parting under Mai’s knife like water around the Unagi.
Suki poked her head through the slit. Off to her left, there were other tents scattered among the trees, but no one was visible. She slipped through the tent wall, held the fabric apart for her two companions, and then the Kyoshi warriors slipped off into the night.
They almost made it.
They’d skirted past three perimeter guards, hugging the boles of the trees, blending into the night when some random soldier stumbling back from the midden caught them through sheer hotheadedness. He tripped over a rock, almost fell, swore, and then kicked at the offending bit of granite that had fouled his feet.
It hit Mari, smacking into her skull as she crouched in the shadows of a willow. She yelped in pain, tipped forward onto her hands.
The firebender jerked his head up, flames blooming in his palms. Suki was already at his back. She jabbed her heel into the back of his knee, slapped a hand across her mouth, and twisted.
The crack of his neck was loud; it practically echoed among the trees.
There was one moment of silence, while Daiyu pulled Mari to her feet, and then a shout from– the soldiers at the perimeter? the guards who should have been watching the girls from kyoshi?– someone. Suki promised herself that the next time she escaped from anywhere, she was leaving a trail of corpses in her wake; no leaving them alive to foil her escape later.
“Run,” Suki hissed at her companions, hearing the thud of boots as she fumbled the fallen soldier’s sword free.
Mari was holding her head, blood streaming down to cover half her face. Daiyu grabbed her, started to pull the other girl away.
Suki turned from them to the three sentries that approached. She engaged the first one –he came at her too fast, showing how utterly green he was in his mad rush to attack her, and she twisted aside of his first swing, and gutted him like a fish before he could manage a second.
Then she was tangling with the next, dodging a preliminary spear-thrust, parrying a sword strike. Suki feinted and then darted forward, Mai’s knife in her hand and almost managed to slit the woman’s throat.
The third sentry was moving past her. Suki tried to trip him, but he twisted past her, threw his spear forward. She heard the meaty thwack as it sank into flesh, heard Daiyu’s scream, and knew she’d failed. She’d failed to save her two remaining warriors and now - Suki had failed again.
She knew this fact instantly, deep in her bones. It was over.
She took out another eight Fire Nation troops before they kicked her legs out from under her and pinned her to the ground, her arms twisted up behind her back.
Her neck was twisted to the side, and she could see Mari hanging slack in the grip of two soldiers, blood still streaming down her face, Daiyu next to her, one spear impaled through her thigh, three spearheads at her throat.
There was the rustling sound as the warriors around her realized that their prisoners had been neutralized, a brief silence which seemed to request that orders be given.
“I hope you have a good reason to interrupt my sleep, Captain,” Azula said.
Suki wondered when she’d shown up.
The soldiers holding Suki bent her up into a kneeling position, giving her an excellent view of Yaozu standing before the Princess and her two henchwomen. Mai looked dull as ever in silky black sleepwear, and Ty Lee was wearing an oversized white shirt and... Suki focused on her feet. Slippers sewn to look like baby moose-lions in brilliant pink. Of course.
“How did they escape?” Azula asked, walking over to stand before her prisoner, Mai at her heels, examining her nails as she followed.
Yaozu held the shuriken someone had pried out of Suki’s hands. “They picked the locks with this.”
Mai’s face seemed to stiffen.
She plucked the knife from his hands, running her fingers along the blade like she couldn’t believe it was one of hers. Beneath her mask of boredom, she looked betrayed.
“Mai,” Azula said, sounding terribly amused, “if you can’t keep track of your toys, they’ll be taken away from you.”
Suki smiled at the girl consolingly. Mai flushed, color rising in her cheeks, and slapped Suki across the face.
Captain opened his mouth to continue and Azula spoke over him.
“I’m surprised at you,” she said to Suki. “I would have expected to you to be still recovering from your exhausting evening.”
Suki smiled sweetly, liquid dripping off her chin, gradually realizing that the reason that slap had stung so badly was that Mai had been holding her shuriken when she struck.
She ignored the blood dripping down her neck. “I bounce back quickly,” she said, her chin up, trying to make her voice sound like they were chatting over tea. She almost managed it - her breathing only hitched once.
“But it was terribly inconsiderate of me to interrupt your beauty sleep,” Suki continued, “you must need so much of it.”
Azula’s mouth twisted like she didn’t know whether to smile or snarl.
She decided on a smile. “You know, Suki, before I met you, I thought the Earth Kingdom was filled with base, gutterbreed cowards. It’s so nice to be surprised.”
She turn and started to walk away.
“Oh, Captain Yaozu,” she said over her shoulder. “I realize now that three prisoners is just too much trouble to ask you to deal with. Feel free to get rid of one of them.” She continued her exit.
“My pleasure, Princess,” he said, turning to Suki, his fists already on fire.
“Not her,” Azula corrected without looking back, Ty Lee skipping at her heels. Mai, leaning against a tree, looked disappointed.
“No,” Suki demanded. “No.”
Yaozu gestured, and soldiers were shoving Mari to the ground. They staked her down, one dagger through each wrist and the soles of her feet, and then the soldiers backed away.
Suki was struggling, bucking, twisting, desperate to save Mari, to hurt the Fire Nation, to do something.
Mari’s face was stoic, calm, and Suki could see her steel herself, wanting a death her parents could take comfort from.
She didn’t get one.
To her credit, she barely made a sound when someone handed Yaozu a whip and he flogged the skin off her back - no, then it had been Suki yelling and swearing and begging him to take her instead, she was the captain, their actions were her responsibility. She fought until they gagged her, careful not to block her sight of Mari as they stuffed strips of fabric into her mouth.
It wasn’t until he started burning her that Mari began to scream.
Suki wasn’t sure what exactly he did; there were no flames visible, but even from a body length away Suki could feel the heat radiating off him, see the air around him twist away from his body like water shied away from a freshly-forged sword.
He laid his hands on Mari, and she screamed.
She screamed and screamed and screamed.
It sounded like-
No. There no like. Mari screamed, and it was so full of pain that Suki wanted to die to escape it. In that moment, she would have killed Mari herself to silence that sound.
Yaozu was thorough; he worked from her extremities inward, careful that no scrap of her flesh was missed. Where his hands had been, her skin was pink and swollen and uncharred. By the time he reached the center of her body, she was merely making whimpering, mewing sounds. Her back wasn’t bleeding anymore, just weeping clear juices; she was being cooked alive. Suki choked, bile at the back of her throat, and new she would never be eating roast monkey-pig ever, ever again.
He rose, looked down at the barely-alive thing at his feet.
“Take them-” he pointed at Suki and Daiyu. “-back and secure them, this time. Leave this,” he dug his toe into Mari’s ribs, “for the carrion birds.”
Daiyu was weeping, had been weeping, Suki remembered, the whole time.
Her memory mercifully cut out then. No matter how many times Suki recalled this moment, revisited it in her dreams, she never remembered walking away from Mari, never remembered leaving her to die slowly, abandoned and alone.
All she had was a few fragmented images: the tear tracks on Daiyu’s face, the feel of perfunctory hands pulling her away, the taste of dirt in her mouth, Mai’s bloodless face, and Mari’s bloody, cooked fingers digging into the dirt.
She didn’t remember anything at all until she was back in the tent, blood splattered, ripping the remains of her skirt into bandages to wrap around Daiyu’s leg.
Daiyu was weeping uncontrollably, and the instant that Suki finished tying the last knot on the girl’s bandage Daiyu curled in on herself, hiding her face in her arms.
Daiyu cried, and Suki forced her to drink water, and brushed her tears away, and stroked her hair and listened when she talked, breath coming in great gulping sobs and her exhales full of Mari, Mari, Mari.
Suki bit her lips bloody, and cursed herself for not realizing they’d been lovers until now.
Her time sense started warping then. It could have been trauma, but the water tasted bitter, and the ground had stopped being solid. She keep forcing Daiyu to drink anyway, because Daiyu was feverish, burning, her body consuming itself, and Suki was going to lose everyone she loved to fire, wasn’t she?
Daiyu lasted three days.
Three days twisting with fever, babbling to the spirits, begging Suki to save her.
At the end, she thought her Captain was Mari, and Suki held her and kissed her forehead and promised she’d always be by her side. She held Mari until the Fire Nation peeled her arms away from her last comrade and shoved her into a wooden cage slung between two komodo-rhinos.
They gossiped that Ba Sing Se had fallen.
Suki wasn’t surprised at all.
(≠)
It was a miserable trip from the Fire Nation Camp To Ba Sing Se. Her cage swung sickeningly between the two animals, the dust from the road caught in her throat and stung at her eyes, and the wooden slates were set too widely apart for there to be any comfortable way for her to sit or brace herself against the sway of transportation.
Suki focused on her body, ran through her injuries like a mantra, fingering her bruises, prodding at her broken ribs, counting her scratches, picking at scabs. If she concentrated, she could block out everything except the pains of her body. She didn’t have to remember Daiyu dying, Mari screaming. Lijuan consumed by fire like a moth trapped in a lantern, Renzi’s bloody throat, Hwalee’s slack body.
In her ears, the wind whispered faint cries using their voices, and her lips kept mouthing their names, and Suki dug her nails into her palms, and wanted to die with an intense lust that was far stronger than anything she’d ever felt for a man.
Whey they arrived at Ba Sing Se, the flag of the Fire Nation spread across the walls of the city, the gates and surrounding stones ripped as wide open as a whore’s legs.
Suki felt like she was finally hearing the punch line of a particularly sick joke. Still, she couldn’t help but feel a spark of something in her chest as they entered.
So this was the famed Ba Sing Se. Suki peered through the wooden bars. They were traveling along a wide, straight road. And the buildings! Suki had never seen so many pressed so close together. It reminded her of the sandcastle towns that she and her friends had built on the beach while sun beat down on their shoulders. Each building was connected to the next, whitewashed houses pushing up against each other, rising several stories further up than Suki was used to. She looked at the buildings until they blurred into stripes of cream pain and chestnut wood, and then she looked at the people.
They were everywhere: green-clad citizens thronged the streets, thronging the sides of the streets, pressing far away from the kimodo-rhinos. She’d never seen so many people in one place, being so quiet. As they progressed deeper into the city, Suki began to notice the pattern; she and her jailers would enter a new street, twisting deeper into Ba Sing Se, and the citizens would go silent, pressing against the sides of the buildings, a slight buzz of worried conversations striking up behind them.
Suki was watching the crowd, searching out the few people that would meet her eyes, who didn’t automatically look away; a faintly familiar young man with a baby in his arms, a dusky faced girl with braids, an old figure of indeterminate gender who cackled at the sight of Suki, caked in blood and dirt.
Suki had stopped looking at the people and started looking at the produce and bakery stalls that lined this section of the thoroughfare, an arm slung around her empty belly, when a shout rang out across the street.
Two Fire Nation lieutenants were dragging a struggling someone out of a teashop, one at her hands and one holding her feet.
“We’re got one of the resisters!” one of the lieutenants yelled over the swearing of his captee. They dragged her forward.
“Really?” the komodo rider on the left asked, pivoting his rhino around, forgetting he was linked up to another rider. The cage groaned in protest, and there was a dull thwack as it hit a cabbage cart.
The two lieutenants were getting closer, only about ten feet way.
“Yep!” one of them called cheerily.
Suki loathed him utterly.
She reached between the bars of her cage, grabbing a particularly small cabbage (the proprietor grabbed after it, but she snarled and him and he recoiled with a whimper) and pulled it into her prison. She pushed it through the other side, and before the two laughing lieutenants spared her a glance, she threw it right at one of their sneering faces.
Suki had never thought of cabbages as particularly effective projectiles, but apparently she’d snagged a notably hard one, because it hit the officer’s face with a nice crack.
He yelled, dropped the girl’s legs, and she promptly kicked the other soldier in he face, twisted out of his grip and bolted.
She slide under Suki’s cage. The Kyoshi warrior caught a flash of ragged hair and black eyes as she was dodging around the cabbage cart (the proprietor threw himself over his vegetables protectively) and then the little rebel was among the indistinguishable morass of people.
One of the lieutenants, clutching his bleeding nose, started to run after her and spooked a komondo-rhino, who roared in anger and then lashed out, his head knocking the officer down and his tail taking out the produce cart.
It took twenty minutes to restore any kind of order, twenty minutes during which the rebel vanished and Suki giggled until she half-fainted from lack of oxygen and the pain in her side.
By the time they reached the Lake Loagai Prison, the sky was dark, the streets were filled with grimy torch light, her escorts were in a foul mood, and Suki - Suki was feeling almost chipper.
“You’re going to die in there,” someone hissed a her, as they clicked shackles around her wrists and ankles and marched her under ground.
That thought just increased her good mood.
(≠)
Who ever told her that was right. She would die under Lake Loagai.
She was put in a small, hermetic cell, and was forgotten about. Oh, sure, they dragged her out every three days with their lamps and their monotone words and tried to crack her mind open, and twice a week Azula would ‘visit’, sip her tea while they drugged her up and secrets so oft-repeated the telling almost didn’t hurt tumbled out of her mouth, but it was only habit. The Dai Li attempted to break her with the same emotional investment they put into filling out their time sheets or brushing their teeth. It was habit, and duty, and they don’t care who she was or why she was under the Lake.
It would have been easier if they’d hated her personally.
Truthfully, Suki didn’t hate them either. It was their job to try and erase who she was and it was her job to remember (remember, remember, fans and strength like water and Avatar Kyoshi rising above her town like a benevolent goddess, remember) who she was.
Suki knew her duty.
She was a warrior of Kyoshi.
She was captain of a cadre of the best warriors of her Island.
She had left her home to fight in the war.
She’d failed in almost every way possible but that didn’t negate her responsibilities.
She was a beaten warrior, captain of a cadre of corpses, failed in her goals, but that was still her and she wouldn’t give that up.
“She’s more resilient than we suspected, Princess,” a voice said as she twisted on her cot, rough blankets scratching her back. She wasn’t sure when the fever had began. She’d lost track of the days back when she’d been watching one of her oldest friend die in her arms. Time didn’t matter. All that mattered is that she kept fighting (the fever, the Dai Li, Azula, the part of her that said give up give up give up, would Joo Dee’s life really be so bad?) until the moment her last breath passed between her lips.
She turned her face into the slightly cooler side of the hard pillow, felt sweat slide down her side. She was going to die by fire. By fever. The total lack of surprise at this thought struck Suki as funny. Of course she was going to die by fire - she’d wanted to fight the Fire Nation, hadn’t she? How else would she die? She giggled into her hands as the walls trembled with her.
“She should have relinquished herself by now. We’ll increase-”
“Oh, Long Fan, you have no grasp of subtlety,” Azula replied. “That’s why you’re taking my orders. Despite her low breeding and pathetic training, she’s strong. But she’s not without weaknesses. Don’t try erase her. Erase the Water Tribe boy.”
(≠)
They used an hourglass. A rotating hourglass that spun so slowly, so quickly, that sand was always moving inside. It ensnared her mind like a weaver-snake, and Suki felt herself swaying back and forth against the restraints.
Sokka hadn’t forgotten about her.
Of course not - but if he was real (dashing between her and the Fire Prince’s blasts, protecting her from spiders) wouldn’t he have rescued you by now?
How do you know he hasn’t tried? He might have just failed.
Oh, you mean like you? But don’t you think it’s more reasonable that he just never existed?
No. He traveled with the Avatar. He trained with her. He wore her face paint and she kissed his cheek and later he walked at her side as they traveled across the Serpent’s Pass.
Are you sure?
Of course. I remember. He was smart and brave and funny–
Are you sure?
-and he would have saved me if he could, but he has other priorities, other things he must do and if he could have saved me–
Are. You. Sure?
No.
No, she wasn’t.
Suki stared straight ahead, eyes dilated, sweat dripping down her face, and didn’t move.
(≠)
“Sokka of the Water Tribe never existed. Sokka of the Water Tribe never existed. Sokka of the Water Tribe–”
(≠)
Suki was doing crunches when two pale guards opened her cell door, Azula behind them.
“Good afternoon, Suki,” Azula said pleasantly.
Suki didn’t pause.
“You know, in polite society–”
Suki rolled to her feet, smoothly. The two guards inched forwards, thin clubs pointed at her chest, and the princess didn’t even paused.
“-when someone visits you, you say hello,” she finished. “But I supposed I can’t expect a peasant like you to understand that.”
“No,” Suki agreed cooly, “You can’t expect your enemies to be polite.” She smiled sweetly. “Hello, fire nation scum.”
One of the guards swung at her, she dodged unthinkingly, and then Azula held up her hand.
“Halt,” she commanded, and they obeyed. She gestured, and the guards stepped back.
Azula smiled. “I have an offer for you, Suki,” she said, voice soft, “During these past weeks... I admit, I’ve come to admire you. You’re strong - stronger than those foolish girls you traveled with. You could go so far.” She held out her hand, nails glinting in the light. “Join me. Serve me. Don’t let yourself rot down here when you could join the glorious Fire Nation.”
There was a long pause, and then Suki reached out, like she was going to clasp hands, hooked Azula’s pointer finger and bent it back. Azula dropped to her knees and the two guards lunged for her.
Suki lashed out with her foot, Azula twisted away, and then the other two enemies were on her, raining blows down on her. Suki curled into a ball, trying to take the hits on her shoulders and arms.
“That’s enough,” the Princess ordered.
The two guards backed away.
“I’m leaving Ba Sing Se,” she continued, as Suki slowly raised her head, not bothering to push herself off the floor. “So I brought you a present.” She held up a pot of safflower lip rouge. Suki remembered it. It had been a gift from her mother, and she knew the details of the delicate gold and black paint, the feel of the shell cover, smooth and nubby under the pads of her fingers. She had a visceral memory of slipping the rouge, cool and smooth, across her lips, tasting the faint chalk/oil flavor.
Azula’s eyes were cold, lips gracefully curved. “This has been so useful to me; I’m sure you’ll find it comforting.”
Her words were perfectly chosen; all Suki could think about was her mother’s gift being used to capture the greatest city in the Earth Kingdom.
She exhaled, shame twisting in her stomach, staring down at her dirty knees.
Azula dropped the makeup on the floor, the shell clinking musically as it hit the stones.
“Oh, I’ll be sure to give Sokka your love,” she added.
Suki looked up, utterly confused. “Who?” she couldn’t help but ask and Azula’s agate eyes brightened.
She walked away from Suki’s cell with a lilt in her step, the guards locking the door behind her.
Suki reached out, grabbed the rouge, and slammed it down, the shell splintering beneath her palm, lacquer staining her fingers.
She always lost! Why did she always have to lose?
Suki stared at her hands. The makeup stained her fingers wet and red, the Kyobeni lip stain indistinguishable from the drips of blood oozing out of the cuts on her palm.
She had an idea.
(≠)
Suki lay limp on the cot, eyes closed.
She could hear the rhythmic slide of metal as the guard checked on each prisoner.
He got to her cell door, slide the metal shutter back, peered in, turned to go and then paused.
Then the door was thrown open with a horrific bang (she didn’t even twitch). He rushed to her side, swearing, eyes fixed on the streams of red liquid that dripped from her wrists to stain the floor.
“No,” he breathed, eyes locked on her wrists.
Suki jerked up, and before he could do more than widen his eyes, she was slashing a piece of shell across his throat.
His blood splashed across her face, hot, coppery. It reminded her of the metallic tang of metals being smelted.
She jerked off his overcoat as he gurgled, dying, threw it over her shoulders, and dashed out of her cell.
Suki had expected it would be hard to find her way out of the Lake Loagai prison. It wasn’t. The corridors were laid logically, and after a scant handful of breathy, eternal moments, she was walking under the sun, a tranquil lake behind her, Ba Sing Se before, and a well trod path under her feet.
She’d scrubbed the Kyobeni lipstick off her wrists as best she could, rubbed her face clean with the underside of the coat, tried to turn the bloody collar under but in the bright light of day, the red tinge to her fingers looked horribly obvious.
A pair of men were approaching and her fingers clenched around the shard of shell in her pocket. She stared past them and walked purposely forward.
They nodded politely as she passed, and she deigned to tip her head towards them.
She make it into the city proper before she started shaking.
She found herself in what looked like a mix between a residential and a business district. The lowest floors of the buildings contained shops, but washing was strung from building to building, dresses and pants and undergarments fluttering in the breeze.
Suki discreetly slipped into an ally, pressed herself again the wall, and trembled so violently her teeth chattered.
She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe she was alive. She could believe she could see sunlight on her face without shackles on her wrists.
She let herself rest for a moment longer, and then she wiped her eyes, straightened her shoulders, and set off to find clothes, money, and someplace relatively safe to stay.
She was two steps out of the alley when her plans were hijacked.
Suki was looking up, deciding on the best way to steal some new clothes, when a short person grabbed her wrist, hissed, “You,” with recognition in her dark eyes and dragged her back to the alley.
Suki waited until they were out of sight of the civilians and then drove her thumb into the girl’s throat and shoved her against the wall.
“Who–” she started and then the girl’s companion grabbed the back of her coat. Suki shot her elbow back into his eye, twisted out of his hold, and then skipped backwards a few steps, giving herself as much room as possibly in the cramped space between the two buildings that loomed above them.
“Longshot, cool it,” she snarled. “This is her, this is the girl.”
“What?” Suki asked.
The girl turned to her, her shaggy hair poofing about her face like a dandelion's seeds.
“Don’t you remember? I was there when you took out that Fire Nation jerk with a cabbage.”
“Oh,” Suki said.
“I’m Smellerbee.”
“Suki.”
There was an awkward silence and then Suki decided to take a chance.
“I don’t suppose you know where I can get cleaned up?”
(≠)
By dusk, Suki was just finishing her first bath in weeks, a deliciously pleasurable experience, even if she was kneeling in a small hip bath with tepid water. The soap was scented with cheap fragrance, and Suki was trying to recall if anything ever had smelled sweeter.
She carefully rinsed herself off and shrugged her still damp body into a set of Longshoot’s clothing.
Suki watched herself in the vanity mirror, and was distantly shocked by what she saw. She’d always been thin, but now? Her ribs and hips stood out like the neck bones of a sway backed ostrich horse, and her eyes had dark hollows under them that looked like she’d inexpertly removed khol from around her eyes. Most jarring was the vivid line of red scar tissue that ran from the corner of her left eye to just above the corner of her mouth.
Smellerbee meet her eyes in the mirror, blushed hotly, and then went back to streaking her cheeks with rouge.
“Tonight me and Longshot we...” she said, and careful of the thin walls, continued. “Have plans.”
Suki felt her lips pull into a flirty smile as she sat down next to the girl at the miniscule vanity and started brushing her hair, silently thanking Avatar Kyoshi for leading her to these people.
“I’d love to tag along,” she said to Smellerbee, taking the little pot, “if you two don’t mind company.”
Smellerbee’s mouth turned down. “We’ve been pretty short on company lately.”
Suki tilted the Smellerbee’s chin up, dipped her pinky in the make-up, and dabbed a touch at the corner of the younger girl’s eyes, pretending she didn’t know that the shine in them was the threat of tears.
Smellerbee had a homely face, but her eyes were nice and large, and now, bright as the moon.
“On Kyoshi Island,” Suki told her, taking a minute to smooth a few wayward strands of Smellerbee’s hair, seeing how terribly young this girl was, “all the warriors wear face paint. It is worn so that our enemies can only see our strength, never our fear.” She set down the pot of rouge.
“Oh,” Smellerbee said, and then held the pot out to her.
“No thank you,” Suki said, forcing a smile, her lips feeling stiff and awkward, “but I am no longer worthy to wear warrior’s paint.”
“So what happened?” Smellerbee asked, almost belligerent, like she couldn’t let her voice soften.
Suki looked in the mirror, and her eyes seemed as empty as bits of gray glass.
“I lost something,” she said simply. Her mouth tasted salty and for one moment she felt like the emptiness in her chest was going to swallow her whole. Suki pressed a hand to her stomach, forced her back straight, and then began to pin her hair back.
She wondered why the hole inside her felt so much bigger than the sum of all the names of her dead.
