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He remembers reading the newspaper that day, the day after the elections when the new city council members were announced, every headline screaming it at him in thick black letters: COUNCILMAN TARRLOK TO REPRESENT THE NORTHERN WATER TRIBE.
He had been watching the elections closely. He’d known from the start that his little brother—charismatic, manipulative, devious in all the ways he’d never been when they were children—was going to win. He wonders, emptily, when his little brother had last used bloodbending, how long it had been since he’d held another’s life in his hands, so precariously, so delicately. Whether he still remembers those long winter nights at the North Pole, nothing but the wind and the snow and the howling moan of wolves to keep them company as the cold seeped through their clothes, into their bones, and their father said—
Well, it doesn’t matter what he said. That was a very long time ago.
(He wonders, though. If Tarrlok and their mother and father had buried a ghost after his disappearance, an empty grave, whether they had mourned, whether they’d ever been the same. It’s selfish and childish and meaningless and he can’t fucking stop, his memories haunting him even as he pretends they do not matter.)
+
He considers going to his brother, just to see him. Would they recognize each other now? Time has surely changed the both of them, for better or worse. He walks like a sleepwalker through the dark streets of Republic City at night, the distant sound of the sea, the light of the stars. He paces in front of the council building, back and forth, wearing a pathway into the cobblestones.
He doesn’t go inside.
The movement—his movement, the equalist movement—is just beginning, and Amon has only one rule: the movement comes first. Always, without exception.
Some things are more important than personal desire.
+
The mask he wears is a message. A symbol. A rallying call for non-benders, who whisper in secret to each other in the dark, their backs to the wall, an exit always in sight. The revolution is coming, they whisper. They press equalist gauntlets into the hand of their children, who watch wide-eyed as their parents explain the mechanisms, the dangers of these weapons—the protection that they can provide.
Amon puts on the mask to make a point, but when the point is made, he can never take it off. He and the mask are one. He and the movement are one. He is the plight of Republic City’s non-benders, even as he lulls himself to sleep at night by pushing and pulling the waves against the shore of the city.
The waves rise and fall and he tastes blood in his mouth and the mask stays on, even to sleep.
+
“I swear it,” the man says, a new recruit—breathless, younger than he looks. On his knees before Amon. “I swear my life to the cause.”
He looks up then, directly into Amon’s eyes for the first time. His eyes are clear and blue and shining in the moonlight, so full of hope, so naïve.
“I swear my life to you,” he whispers, and Amon can’t look away.
But he remembers his rule. Some things are more important than personal desire.
(The years pass and the movement grows and that man eventually becomes Amon’s lieutenant, his right-hand man. The naiveté in his eyes fades, hardens to something like silver glass or steel, indestructible, and as time goes by, Amon breaks his only rule.)
+
“You’ve never once asked me my name,” his lieutenant says. He looks out over the city, his arms crossed behind his back, outlined in the light from the streets below. Ethereal. Ghostly. “Not once.”
It’s one of those things they’ve silently promised never to talk about, and the conversation takes Amon by surprise. He doesn’t know what to say, so he approaches his lieutenant, hoping his presence will be enough to remind him—some things are best left unsaid.
If he never has to say it, then he’s not really lying. The silence is a presence unto itself, a third party privy to this personal moment.
“Don’t you care?” his lieutenant finally asks him, and Amon hears the note of despair in his voice; it makes his fingers itch to touch, to rip off his mask, to push his lieutenant up against the wall and kiss him long and hard and deeply.
“It's safer this way for the both of us,” he says instead, because he’s a coward. “You know that.” He doesn’t add in case we don’t like what's left of us behind the lies, but the words hang unspoken; he knows his lieutenant hates them, their implication, so he moves closer, puts his chin on his shoulders. “Besides—” his hands slip down his lieutenant’s sides, then lower still “—doesn’t the anonymity thrill you?”
His lieutenant shrugs him away, his face open and honest in the dim light, bare. Amon’s mask is a barrier between them, insurmountable, like the high mountains that surround the city. “Not when it means you can never know my name,” his lieutenant says. “Not when it means I can never see your face.” His voice grows softer, gentler, and Amon hates it. “Never kiss you properly, or see you smile, if you ever smile. Never know you.”
“You know me,” Amon says, but he feels helpless, like he’s drowning, trapped beneath the weight of all the lies he’s told, the secrets he’d held close to the chest, the past he keeps locked away, forever hidden.
“I used to think I did,” his lieutenant says. He bows—stiffly, awkwardly—and leaves the room.
+
Amon tries to make it up to him later when his lieutenant fucks him deep and slow, like he’s holding back, like something’s changed. Amon presses his heels on either side of his lieutenant’s spine, presses him closer, considers murmuring an apology as if it will change anything.
Afterwards, in the few short moments before Amon rises and leaves (he never stays, can never stay), his lieutenant’s hand reaches up towards Amon’s face, then twitches away. A heartbeat of time passes, like he’s holding his breath, and then he touches the mask.
Amon recoils instinctively; his lieutenant’s hand closes, empty.
I’m sorry, Amon thinks, but he doesn’t want to say it.
His lieutenant turns his back to him, and Amon dresses and leaves, his fingers unsteady and useless.
+
The mask is more familiar to him than his own face, changed by long years away from home and the touch of a surgeon’s knife, just in case, just like his father. Ever so cautious. When he looks at his reflection in the morning as he paints on the scars, he doesn’t know who he is.
He puts on the mask, and he remembers. He puts on the mask and it’s a shield.
+
He goes after Tarrlok when his bloodbending is revealed, finds him before the city police arrive and take him away forever.
“What are you?” Tarrlok asks, terrified, as Amon moves through the moonlight and takes another shuddering step and then steadies, breaking the grip of Tarrlok’s bloodbending as easily as shattering a set of rusty chains.
Amon wants to laugh, high and uncontrollable and cheerless—he hasn’t seen his brother in twenty years or more, and neither of them recognizes the other. What have you become, Amon thinks, and turns the question back on itself. What have I become.
He takes his brother’s bending, equalizes him. It’s the first time that he’s ever hesitated to do it—the first time that he wonders what he’s done. He puts his brother in the back of the truck and cannot stop staring at him, is he real?
“What are you going to do with him?” his lieutenant asks on the drive back, his hands tight on the steering wheel.
“I don’t know,” Amon says, and his lieutenant is silent.
+
“Amon isn’t my real name, either,” he says one night, into the deep unbroken early morning silence.
His lieutenant: nameless and therefore not dangerous, because Amon has wondered, has wanted to ask, has burned up inside with the terrible hollowness of not knowing his name—but if he knows, all of this will change.
His lieutenant takes a deep breath. “I know it’s not,” he says, and he sounds so tired, so fucking exhausted by it all. Amon wants to kiss him, and can’t.
+
“You traitor,” says his lieutenant; damn him, damn him for this, for sounding heartbroken. For sounding like he had expected a different outcome, something better, something that wasn’t lies and masks and half-truths even if that’s all they’ve ever had and he knows it.
“I dedicated my life to you,” he says, unfurling his weapons, electricity crackling at the tips. And Amon reaches out and stops him, slips into his skin, feels the blood pulsing in his arteries, in his veins, in every fucking capillary. He can feel him breathing, taste the smoke in his lungs, count the bounding beats of his heart.
“You’ve served me well, Lieutenant,” Amon says.
He’s careful, precise, his fingers crooked and trembling. His lieutenant falls but Amon makes sure that he isn’t too badly hurt, that he will recover. He wonders if his lieutenant will recognize this, if he will understand what it means. (A poor apology, but all that Amon has left to give.)
Most likely not. His lieutenant was very good at recognizing Amon’s lies, but not at understanding his truths, however rare they were.
+
The mask is a shield until it is torn away, borne off by the waves towards a distant shore. The water churns beneath him and his breath burns terrible in his lungs but he’s alive, the scar on his face washing away like the ones that he bears internally never will.
He’s exposed and ripped bare, he feels as if someone has dug into his chest and pried open his ribcage, pointed at his beating heart—look, he’s a bender after all—any minute now they’ll tear it out from between his lungs and sink their teeth into it, rip him apart.
He looks up, away from the crowd of people shouting maledictions at him, towards the stadium windows. They’re empty save where the Avatar and her plaything stand; save where a single shadow watches from another window, wounded and clutching his side but alive, seeing Amon without the mask for the first time.
You got what you wanted, then, Amon thinks, and he turns away from the shadow of his lieutenant and flees beneath the surface of the waves, the pulse of the sea stronger and more familiar to him than the beat of his own heart.
+
He runs, he runs, he runs. The breath in his lungs is torn ragged from his chest and an ache pounds behind his eyes, but he runs. Tarrlok falls into step behind him, so familiar, following like he once did on the sloping, endless expanses of snow in the North Pole, so very long ago.
Noatak, he’d called him then.
Brother, he’d said.
It will be just like the good old days.
+++
The smoke from the explosion lingers on the horizon for several long hours, a shadow against the sky. A man walks along the shoreline, slowly, clutching at his side and several bruised—but not broken—ribs. Recently betrayed, bloodbent, heartbroken, alive.
The shore is difficult to navigate, rocky and unforgiving, but he does not give up his search. He steadies himself with his free hand against a particularly large boulder, stumbling, his breath catching in his throat, and that’s when he sees it. Down by the water, a speck of color among the foam. He makes his way down.
The mask is damaged, cracked down the middle but still in one piece. He picks it up with gentle fingertips, traces the familiar shape of it, touching what he’d never been allowed to touch before.
He remembers Amon’s face, wide-eyed, desperate, searching. Remembers meeting his eyes for the first time (I swear my life to you) and the last time (you traitor).
His touch isn’t gentle enough, and the damaged mask splits in half. He digs a hole with his hands by the sea, the sand gritty beneath his fingernails, his whole body shaking.
He buries the mask in an otherwise empty grave; when he’s done, he looks up at the horizon, where the sky has finally cleared.