Cog In The Machine - Chapter 13
I am, in fact, still alive. Much of this has been written in bits over the last month or so, waiting for something more coherent to emerge from Sokka's interactions with the dangerous ladies. Inspiration is, to date, something of a blank. Heavy sigh. Perhaps after finals the characters will speak again to me...
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After a fitful few hours’ sleep Sokka gave up on getting any more rest. He was starting to imagine Azula and Mai arguing with one another over the proper way to throw his boomerang as he watched helplessly, wrapped in seemingly endless chains across that damned tea table, with shallow bowls of succulent roast tiger-seal inches away from his face and Ty Lee nibbling on his ear. And he couldn’t blame the idiocy on dreaming.
It was all too maddening and, strangely enough, just that little bit enough likely a scenario as to preclude more rational thought.
Then again, perhaps it had just been a dream. Granted, dreaming was also his imagination demonstrating a streak of insanity. But at least he was used to that in dreams. He liked to think his waking imagination behaved with a little more discipline. Maybe not a lot. But really, having that roast tiger-seal out of reach was going too far.
Eyes opening to a darkness no less black than that behind his eyelids, Sokka wondered how long it would be before the guards would arrive to light a new candle behind the grill of the wall sconce in his cell. He shuddered at the thought of spending any appreciable amount of time in utter blackness, and reminded himself to be a little more patient regarding Toph’s prickliness.
Granted, Toph had never known sight beyond her odd earth-bending skills, so since she didn’t know what she was missing maybe being visually blind didn’t matter to her. That’s what she said, anyway. But Sokka knew all about the use of humor to mask a person’s particular sensitivities, and Toph was the most brutally funny person Sokka knew. Since she didn’t actually laughed that much, he figured Toph found sarcasm to be at least as effective a defense mechanism as he had himself. Since Toph was rich, incredibly talented, and way too young and sheltered to have suffered much in the way of the usual deprivations, he figured her blindness must bug her quite a bit on some level, anyway.
Sokka didn’t like to think about the possibility that Toph’s vulnerability lay in a lack of love and support. So he didn’t think about that at all, at least, not most of the time. And given the panic he felt at his current blindness, clawing its way behind his eyeballs and down his throat to his gut, he saw no reason to abandon his usual line of reasoning.
Sokka swore, choosing a few words he’d picked up among the Northern warriors that he’d been careful to keep from his younger companions’ - especially his sister’s - ears, at feeling blind without any of Toph’s compensating abilities. Come to think of it, given her time at the Earth Rumble competitions, he had probably wasted effort in keeping the coarser elements of his vocabulary from Toph’s highly acute ears.
And just why the hell was he clinging so hard to thoughts of Toph now anyway?
It was just because the darkness was yet another thing out of his control. The whole prisoner thing. Something he should be getting used to.
Unfortunately, it had finally occurred to him that, in the past, they had always managed to find their way out of whatever captivity they’d stumbled into within a day or so. As near as he could figure, he was coming up on a full week as a Fire Nation captive this time. And he was alone.
Damn. This whole affair totally sucked.
Ah. The lock in that stupid door was rattling again. It was funny how he leapt through a gamut of emotions at that sound, all largely based on a single day’s conditioning. He shook his head warily as an oblong outline of light broke through the utter blackness, defining the door’s shape and bringing instant relief to some atavistic fear of true blindness hiding all-too-near the surface of his consciousness. In all likelihood, it merely signaled the beginning of another day as the guard brought a new candle for his cell. In keeping with his thoughts regarding the darkness, as the outlined warped and elongated with the opening door Sokka thought longingly of sunlight and fresh air.
“Tribesman. You’re wanted.”
“Swell. It’s so nice to be wanted. Ya know, lately I’ve been getting probably more than my fair share of attention from you Fire Nation folks. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was mutual? I mean, we could all sit around together swapping jokes and stories and it would be fun...”
Sokka was already standing and walking out ahead of the helmeted guard.
Nope. This wasn’t a guy he recognized. That was okay. He was only talking out of nervous energy anyway. Didn’t matter what he said. Didn’t hurt, either. He felt kinda silly talking to himself, but he hated that croaky sound he tended to produce after long periods of silence. It was one thing to start the day that way in front of his friends, who laughed at him pretty much regardless. It was something else again to sound like an idiot in front of whichever-one-of-his-enemies was demanding his presence this time.
Not that he should care, really. And he didn’t. He told himself it was just a matter of avoiding any psychological disadvantages. Cause the only reason he might care what they thought of him was purely related to tactical positioning.
Right. That and, in the case of Princess Azula, simply staying alive.
As he walked down the corridor, taking the route to the deck, he continued, “Sure, you can tell me about your favorite raid and I can tell you about watching fire-benders murder my mom. It’ll be fun. Oh, don’t worry about me, it was years ago. Hell, I was just a kid and didn’t really understand everything I saw. I’m over it. Really. I’m sure your guys were just doing their job…” Sokka was muttering by now, wondering what insanity had driven him to voice that particular resentment. It wasn’t like anyone on this ship was likely to have even been there then.
Damn. There was that word again. Insanity. Was it a good thing that he was starting to notice irrationality in his thought? Or did that merely mean it was already too late for him to return to nice, practical and pragmatic Sokka, the realistic one of the group?
His steps brought him on deck to the vision of the sun breaching the horizon and the Fire Princess executing an impossibly complicated series of moves that was, undeniably even to Sokka’s prejudiced gaze, breathtaking in its beauty. In that quick moment, an odd vision superimposed itself on her dance.
As far as he knew, no one had ever claimed water-bending abilities in Sokka’s mother, and he could not honestly graft recent memories of Katara’s expertise on the admittedly idealized remnants of his mother lying largely dormant on his sense of being. Yet, in the hazy light of a new dawn Sokka couldn’t shake the sense of an older, taller woman in slightly outmoded Water Tribe dress vaguely shadowing the princess’s pristine moves. The form in his vision was definitely different - less aggressive and more fluid - but still assertive and confident. And the moves themselves were somehow different, although he felt far too ignorant to say just how. Sokka gaped for a moment, pausing at the head of the stairs until he was prodded from behind by his fire-bender guard.
As he stumbled he turned slightly, enough to catch the sight of the quarter moon low in the sky across from the rising sun. Sokka had never believed in fate, spirits or other “magics”. But since joining with Aang he’d literally been “spirited away” - granted, he’d no memory of his day in the spirit world - and watched his beloved ascend to take the place of the moon spirit, among other things. He didn’t feel wholly competent anymore to question the role of the supernatural in the world’s events. At the moment, he wasn’t sure he felt particularly grateful to Yue if this vision was her way of trying to tell him something.
Sokka being Sokka, he slid the odd vision into a compartment of his brain he maintained for “things I really don’t want to think about but should maybe keep handy for reference”, and focused on the obvious realization that Princess Azula seemed to find it necessary to speak with him again.
And this couldn’t be good.
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Like all fire-benders, in her heart Azula worshipped the sun. While ‘bending at dawn was hardly a position of strength - after all, noon was the time of greatest power - there was no denying the call of the sun upon the heart of the fire-bender, an infusion of energy after the long night necessarily spent hoarding one’s energy.
For years, Azula had found herself anticipating the sun’s rising to ensure her own presence somewhere in the open to observe the dawn. There was something so wholly intoxicating in the first sliver of molten gold breaking the line of dark earth, that first instant of conflict between the two elements, that jolted her into a heightened sense of being alive that she would not recognize again until the next dawn. She was delighted to discover the same infusion of excitement in seeing the sun ascend over a horizon limited by the ocean. Fire conquered all.
It was, for Azula, the affirmation of her innate sense of superiority over the other elements. And nothing was more exciting than the moment between conflict and conquest.
As she finished her kata, she turned to acknowledge the presence of the Water Tribe prisoner. As she appraised him, she considered how time had served to inform her against her early desire to simply dispense with him without thinking. Azula suppressed a smile in her simple recognition of the near impossibility she now felt at any action without first… thinking.
It was apparent to Azula that the Tribesman was the worse for wear from her meeting with him yesterday. Perhaps Ty Lee and Mai between them had done well to wear him down; she looked forward to their reports. She had been moderately surprised not to have heard Mai report on the time she had spent in the prisoner’s company the evening before, but had dismissed it remembering Mai’s disdain for him in general and her own dismissal of Mai’s concerns until the morning report.
Mai was a careful and diligent agent, for all her pose as a decadent nihilist. As for Ty Lee? Azula was confident that she knew well wherein her freedom of action lay; after all, she had never shown any hesitance in rendering service for that freedom.
Azula was a confident mistress, not out of arrogance but out of knowledge as to her underlings’ motivations. The affection of her schoolmates was no less superficial than her own, although certainly genuine on its face. What really drew them all together was a pact of mutual benefit, of which Azula was, and had always been, the arbiter.
She looked at the Tribesman with a coldly appraising eye, attempting to extricate from her own experience and perceptions the reports on activities attributed to him. It wasn’t the first, or even the second time she’d seen him thus. It was, however, the first time she’d considered him without first branding him with his status as companion to the Avatar. Or rather, it was the first time she’d asked herself, why him?
Her previous encounters had already given her partial answers.
He was, like all Tribesmen, insanely loyal. The reason why the Fire Nation had determined to either conquer or destroy the Water Tribes, rather than attempt any form of negotiation. With their culture, subversion was simply impossible.
By now she also knew Sokka was possessed of a ready wit, fully capable of conceiving means to offset battle plans. She suspected the invasion of the Fire Nation during the eclipse probably had root in his fertile brain; the Tribesman was an opportunist and a potentially dangerous leader. She knew that.
That he was her own age merely highlighted the danger. When she added in the fact that he was NOT a bender it opened up a whole new world of psychological advantage for her to consider.
Dammit! This boy, as “everyman” could prove a serious threat!
It was almost unprecedented. Maybe it was unprecedented. She wasted precious seconds searching for an analog in her memory, confident that if it didn’t lie there it didn’t exist.
Azula knew that she herself was unprecedented. She was divine perfection. That any real threat to her could come from such a clearly flawed vessel - a damned non-bender, no less - was simply not tenable!
Her first thought had been to destroy him on sight.
She blessed the instinct - or whatever - that stayed her hand, at least in this case. She would not have it that it was a mere matter of luck that she had conquered the world.
What value was victory against mere peons?
When she had bested the Avatar, when she had crushed his companions, master benders and otherwise, Azula would know full victory and the Fire Nation would reign supreme.
So why did she wait to roast one of those “otherwise associates” when she had him so clearly at hand?
Why, indeed?
The simple answer was that she didn’t want to give undue significance to any particular individual beyond the Avatar. It simply wasn’t seemly. Especially to do so for a non-bender.
Nonetheless, it would be incredibly foolish to ignore the evidence of one’s own senses just because what they showed simply wasn’t credible, like the appearance of a non-bending neophyte warrior who could anticipate her moves. A better approach was to dissect the thought processes of this arrogant warrior to first ensure the Water Tribes had not gained some unknown advantage on them; and then crush the life out of him.
Azula sighed. Virtually all of the pleasure in her short life had been garnered from asserting her supremacy over another. At fifteen she was more powerful, more clever, and more motivated than anyone in the Fire Lord’s vast legions. She was smarter than her brother - and so obviously more powerful as to not warrant even mentioning. She had out-maneuvered her brilliant uncle (his power she admitted she was not yet prepared to challenge); and she was a mere step or two of opportunity away from seizing control of the Earth Kingdom itself or, on the same scale, the Avatar.
The key to one or perhaps even both sweated in her prison cell. No, wait. She’d given orders to have him brought before her. Let him sweat as he watched her perfect tribute to the sun.
It occurred to Azula that Ty Lee might find the idea of the Tribesman bowing to the princess a bit objectionable. After all, Ty Lee had claimed him for herself. Azula took a particular pleasure in kick aimed at a non-existent opponent’s pressure points. I did warn you, didn’t I? If I want him, he’s MINE.
She didn’t bother thinking about the consequences of such a declaration. At this point it was enough merely to contemplate the assertion itself. Given her subordinate’s annoying - yet highly useful - ability to calibrate her punches so as to interfere with her opponent’s flow of chi, there was a certain satisfaction in Azula’s prerogative to override such ability. And claim, in the name of the Fire Lord, any prisoner for her own purposes.
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After a fitful few hours’ sleep Sokka gave up on getting any more rest. He was starting to imagine Azula and Mai arguing with one another over the proper way to throw his boomerang as he watched helplessly, wrapped in seemingly endless chains across that damned tea table, with shallow bowls of succulent roast tiger-seal inches away from his face and Ty Lee nibbling on his ear. And he couldn’t blame the idiocy on dreaming.
It was all too maddening and, strangely enough, just that little bit enough likely a scenario as to preclude more rational thought.
Then again, perhaps it had just been a dream. Granted, dreaming was also his imagination demonstrating a streak of insanity. But at least he was used to that in dreams. He liked to think his waking imagination behaved with a little more discipline. Maybe not a lot. But really, having that roast tiger-seal out of reach was going too far.
Eyes opening to a darkness no less black than that behind his eyelids, Sokka wondered how long it would be before the guards would arrive to light a new candle behind the grill of the wall sconce in his cell. He shuddered at the thought of spending any appreciable amount of time in utter blackness, and reminded himself to be a little more patient regarding Toph’s prickliness.
Granted, Toph had never known sight beyond her odd earth-bending skills, so since she didn’t know what she was missing maybe being visually blind didn’t matter to her. That’s what she said, anyway. But Sokka knew all about the use of humor to mask a person’s particular sensitivities, and Toph was the most brutally funny person Sokka knew. Since she didn’t actually laughed that much, he figured Toph found sarcasm to be at least as effective a defense mechanism as he had himself. Since Toph was rich, incredibly talented, and way too young and sheltered to have suffered much in the way of the usual deprivations, he figured her blindness must bug her quite a bit on some level, anyway.
Sokka didn’t like to think about the possibility that Toph’s vulnerability lay in a lack of love and support. So he didn’t think about that at all, at least, not most of the time. And given the panic he felt at his current blindness, clawing its way behind his eyeballs and down his throat to his gut, he saw no reason to abandon his usual line of reasoning.
Sokka swore, choosing a few words he’d picked up among the Northern warriors that he’d been careful to keep from his younger companions’ - especially his sister’s - ears, at feeling blind without any of Toph’s compensating abilities. Come to think of it, given her time at the Earth Rumble competitions, he had probably wasted effort in keeping the coarser elements of his vocabulary from Toph’s highly acute ears.
And just why the hell was he clinging so hard to thoughts of Toph now anyway?
It was just because the darkness was yet another thing out of his control. The whole prisoner thing. Something he should be getting used to.
Unfortunately, it had finally occurred to him that, in the past, they had always managed to find their way out of whatever captivity they’d stumbled into within a day or so. As near as he could figure, he was coming up on a full week as a Fire Nation captive this time. And he was alone.
Damn. This whole affair totally sucked.
Ah. The lock in that stupid door was rattling again. It was funny how he leapt through a gamut of emotions at that sound, all largely based on a single day’s conditioning. He shook his head warily as an oblong outline of light broke through the utter blackness, defining the door’s shape and bringing instant relief to some atavistic fear of true blindness hiding all-too-near the surface of his consciousness. In all likelihood, it merely signaled the beginning of another day as the guard brought a new candle for his cell. In keeping with his thoughts regarding the darkness, as the outlined warped and elongated with the opening door Sokka thought longingly of sunlight and fresh air.
“Tribesman. You’re wanted.”
“Swell. It’s so nice to be wanted. Ya know, lately I’ve been getting probably more than my fair share of attention from you Fire Nation folks. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was mutual? I mean, we could all sit around together swapping jokes and stories and it would be fun...”
Sokka was already standing and walking out ahead of the helmeted guard.
Nope. This wasn’t a guy he recognized. That was okay. He was only talking out of nervous energy anyway. Didn’t matter what he said. Didn’t hurt, either. He felt kinda silly talking to himself, but he hated that croaky sound he tended to produce after long periods of silence. It was one thing to start the day that way in front of his friends, who laughed at him pretty much regardless. It was something else again to sound like an idiot in front of whichever-one-of-his-enemies was demanding his presence this time.
Not that he should care, really. And he didn’t. He told himself it was just a matter of avoiding any psychological disadvantages. Cause the only reason he might care what they thought of him was purely related to tactical positioning.
Right. That and, in the case of Princess Azula, simply staying alive.
As he walked down the corridor, taking the route to the deck, he continued, “Sure, you can tell me about your favorite raid and I can tell you about watching fire-benders murder my mom. It’ll be fun. Oh, don’t worry about me, it was years ago. Hell, I was just a kid and didn’t really understand everything I saw. I’m over it. Really. I’m sure your guys were just doing their job…” Sokka was muttering by now, wondering what insanity had driven him to voice that particular resentment. It wasn’t like anyone on this ship was likely to have even been there then.
Damn. There was that word again. Insanity. Was it a good thing that he was starting to notice irrationality in his thought? Or did that merely mean it was already too late for him to return to nice, practical and pragmatic Sokka, the realistic one of the group?
His steps brought him on deck to the vision of the sun breaching the horizon and the Fire Princess executing an impossibly complicated series of moves that was, undeniably even to Sokka’s prejudiced gaze, breathtaking in its beauty. In that quick moment, an odd vision superimposed itself on her dance.
As far as he knew, no one had ever claimed water-bending abilities in Sokka’s mother, and he could not honestly graft recent memories of Katara’s expertise on the admittedly idealized remnants of his mother lying largely dormant on his sense of being. Yet, in the hazy light of a new dawn Sokka couldn’t shake the sense of an older, taller woman in slightly outmoded Water Tribe dress vaguely shadowing the princess’s pristine moves. The form in his vision was definitely different - less aggressive and more fluid - but still assertive and confident. And the moves themselves were somehow different, although he felt far too ignorant to say just how. Sokka gaped for a moment, pausing at the head of the stairs until he was prodded from behind by his fire-bender guard.
As he stumbled he turned slightly, enough to catch the sight of the quarter moon low in the sky across from the rising sun. Sokka had never believed in fate, spirits or other “magics”. But since joining with Aang he’d literally been “spirited away” - granted, he’d no memory of his day in the spirit world - and watched his beloved ascend to take the place of the moon spirit, among other things. He didn’t feel wholly competent anymore to question the role of the supernatural in the world’s events. At the moment, he wasn’t sure he felt particularly grateful to Yue if this vision was her way of trying to tell him something.
Sokka being Sokka, he slid the odd vision into a compartment of his brain he maintained for “things I really don’t want to think about but should maybe keep handy for reference”, and focused on the obvious realization that Princess Azula seemed to find it necessary to speak with him again.
And this couldn’t be good.
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Like all fire-benders, in her heart Azula worshipped the sun. While ‘bending at dawn was hardly a position of strength - after all, noon was the time of greatest power - there was no denying the call of the sun upon the heart of the fire-bender, an infusion of energy after the long night necessarily spent hoarding one’s energy.
For years, Azula had found herself anticipating the sun’s rising to ensure her own presence somewhere in the open to observe the dawn. There was something so wholly intoxicating in the first sliver of molten gold breaking the line of dark earth, that first instant of conflict between the two elements, that jolted her into a heightened sense of being alive that she would not recognize again until the next dawn. She was delighted to discover the same infusion of excitement in seeing the sun ascend over a horizon limited by the ocean. Fire conquered all.
It was, for Azula, the affirmation of her innate sense of superiority over the other elements. And nothing was more exciting than the moment between conflict and conquest.
As she finished her kata, she turned to acknowledge the presence of the Water Tribe prisoner. As she appraised him, she considered how time had served to inform her against her early desire to simply dispense with him without thinking. Azula suppressed a smile in her simple recognition of the near impossibility she now felt at any action without first… thinking.
It was apparent to Azula that the Tribesman was the worse for wear from her meeting with him yesterday. Perhaps Ty Lee and Mai between them had done well to wear him down; she looked forward to their reports. She had been moderately surprised not to have heard Mai report on the time she had spent in the prisoner’s company the evening before, but had dismissed it remembering Mai’s disdain for him in general and her own dismissal of Mai’s concerns until the morning report.
Mai was a careful and diligent agent, for all her pose as a decadent nihilist. As for Ty Lee? Azula was confident that she knew well wherein her freedom of action lay; after all, she had never shown any hesitance in rendering service for that freedom.
Azula was a confident mistress, not out of arrogance but out of knowledge as to her underlings’ motivations. The affection of her schoolmates was no less superficial than her own, although certainly genuine on its face. What really drew them all together was a pact of mutual benefit, of which Azula was, and had always been, the arbiter.
She looked at the Tribesman with a coldly appraising eye, attempting to extricate from her own experience and perceptions the reports on activities attributed to him. It wasn’t the first, or even the second time she’d seen him thus. It was, however, the first time she’d considered him without first branding him with his status as companion to the Avatar. Or rather, it was the first time she’d asked herself, why him?
Her previous encounters had already given her partial answers.
He was, like all Tribesmen, insanely loyal. The reason why the Fire Nation had determined to either conquer or destroy the Water Tribes, rather than attempt any form of negotiation. With their culture, subversion was simply impossible.
By now she also knew Sokka was possessed of a ready wit, fully capable of conceiving means to offset battle plans. She suspected the invasion of the Fire Nation during the eclipse probably had root in his fertile brain; the Tribesman was an opportunist and a potentially dangerous leader. She knew that.
That he was her own age merely highlighted the danger. When she added in the fact that he was NOT a bender it opened up a whole new world of psychological advantage for her to consider.
Dammit! This boy, as “everyman” could prove a serious threat!
It was almost unprecedented. Maybe it was unprecedented. She wasted precious seconds searching for an analog in her memory, confident that if it didn’t lie there it didn’t exist.
Azula knew that she herself was unprecedented. She was divine perfection. That any real threat to her could come from such a clearly flawed vessel - a damned non-bender, no less - was simply not tenable!
Her first thought had been to destroy him on sight.
She blessed the instinct - or whatever - that stayed her hand, at least in this case. She would not have it that it was a mere matter of luck that she had conquered the world.
What value was victory against mere peons?
When she had bested the Avatar, when she had crushed his companions, master benders and otherwise, Azula would know full victory and the Fire Nation would reign supreme.
So why did she wait to roast one of those “otherwise associates” when she had him so clearly at hand?
Why, indeed?
The simple answer was that she didn’t want to give undue significance to any particular individual beyond the Avatar. It simply wasn’t seemly. Especially to do so for a non-bender.
Nonetheless, it would be incredibly foolish to ignore the evidence of one’s own senses just because what they showed simply wasn’t credible, like the appearance of a non-bending neophyte warrior who could anticipate her moves. A better approach was to dissect the thought processes of this arrogant warrior to first ensure the Water Tribes had not gained some unknown advantage on them; and then crush the life out of him.
Azula sighed. Virtually all of the pleasure in her short life had been garnered from asserting her supremacy over another. At fifteen she was more powerful, more clever, and more motivated than anyone in the Fire Lord’s vast legions. She was smarter than her brother - and so obviously more powerful as to not warrant even mentioning. She had out-maneuvered her brilliant uncle (his power she admitted she was not yet prepared to challenge); and she was a mere step or two of opportunity away from seizing control of the Earth Kingdom itself or, on the same scale, the Avatar.
The key to one or perhaps even both sweated in her prison cell. No, wait. She’d given orders to have him brought before her. Let him sweat as he watched her perfect tribute to the sun.
It occurred to Azula that Ty Lee might find the idea of the Tribesman bowing to the princess a bit objectionable. After all, Ty Lee had claimed him for herself. Azula took a particular pleasure in kick aimed at a non-existent opponent’s pressure points. I did warn you, didn’t I? If I want him, he’s MINE.
She didn’t bother thinking about the consequences of such a declaration. At this point it was enough merely to contemplate the assertion itself. Given her subordinate’s annoying - yet highly useful - ability to calibrate her punches so as to interfere with her opponent’s flow of chi, there was a certain satisfaction in Azula’s prerogative to override such ability. And claim, in the name of the Fire Lord, any prisoner for her own purposes.