It was quiet except for our breathing, the pale light of the crescent moon sliding through the shades, and Amon was laying on my shoulder, one arm thrown across my waist, breathing heavily, his skin and hair stuck to my chest with sweat. I was panting for breath , my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. Our legs were knotted in the sheets and the room smelled like sweat and sex. We had left a mess all over the bed, and currently, a good bit of it was stuck to my stomach. His legs kept twitching in the aftershocks.

Amon sighed, turned his face more into my shoulder, and curled his body around mine, and I could feel him smile. Moving one of my hands, I ran my fingers through his hair, back from his forehead, scratching at his scalp. The quiet noise of contentment he made in return was worth having to move for.

The content silence continued until I could feel lethargy sinking at the centre of my bones, and I yawned, moved my hand to run my fingers down his spine, to settle my hand over his hipbone. We should clean up, I finally said, and he half-grunted in response, shifted, curled closer, smiled into my skin more.

Maybe. I just snorted at him. Shifting his hand, Amon spread his fingers over my waist, moved it up to place his palm over my heart, feeling the beat of it against my chest, fingers curled in the hair on my chest. The quiet fell again, and I gave up on getting up to clean up. We could do that in the morning. The bed was too comfortable and he was too nice of an armful anyway.

The sound of the breeze through the shutters started to lull me to sleep, mixed with his even, deep breath, and I was half-out when he finally said, Lieu?

Mmm? It wasn't exactly a particularly intelligent response, but I was halfway asleep at that point. His fingers continued tracing shapes on my skin, brushing lightly, almost tickling but not quite.

I've been thinking… he started, and then paused. About the city.

Yeah? Amon was more of a night owl than I was, and he often stayed awake long after I did. When I had asked him once what he did he had replied that he listened to me breathe and thought. He rarely shared those thoughts with me. And when he did, it was usually at times like this—when my mind couldn't really keep up.

The laws that they just passed about Non-Bender employment. It had been met with a lot of criticism. Basically, it said that Non-Benders had to be given equal pay to any Bender, and equal benefits, but if there was a Bender that could do the job to more efficacy, they were allowed to be fired without any support, even restitution from their former employer. A lot of people were angry. More would be angrier if laws like that continued. It's unfair. The entire council is Benders—elected and picked to govern our city by outside forces. Even Tenzin represents hardly anyone, and he's still got the loudest voice on the council.

I'm too tired to think, I mumbled, turning to press my face into his hair. What are you getting at?

Someone should stop it, Amon said, and I recognised the finality and the strength in his voice for assurance, for his stubborn decision making. He had decided something, and now he was telling me. Someone needs to change that. I think it should be us. I blinked my eyes open and stared at the ceiling, listened to him talk. It's one thing to talk in bars, but I think we should gather people we know well—start a group. Protest, violently or non-violently. You're an engineer, you could design weapons and uniforms. I can talk, gather followers. If we get enough people prepared to speak out against these unfair measures, we could change things.

It's a nice idea, I said at last, and half-nodded. Can we talk about it in the morning?

Yeah. He curled closer to me. Together I'm almost certain we could change this world for the better. Together we could do anything.

I found myself smiling stupidly.

Yeah, I said it, staring at the ceiling, my eyes half-open, yawning again. With you at my side, we probably could.

He smiled into my skin, and thus the Equalists were born.

— Chapter Ten : —

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

[Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene ii ]

The rest of that year passed surprisingly quickly after our meeting with the teenagers, a quieter life than I had ever planned to have, but good just like that. The autumn turned to winter, the cold pervading the walls of our house and making my burns ache, our fall crop harvested and sold and kept for the winter, and we began to prepare for the coming spring and the first plantings. We built the workroom and the sitting room up, a real barn and a henhouse, and before the snows had thawed we had finished the house about as much as it ever would be.

Sometimes I never thought that just over to a year before we had been about to take the city on and down.

Finally, it rolled back around. All through the winter, even as the first buds began to appear under the snow, I had been working in secret on something for Lieu. He had questioned me about it a few times, and I had refused to tell him what it was, but finally it had come time that I needed to explain it to him. When the first real thaw came and it was warm enough to go outside again, we walked down to the riverbank together with a few blankets and sat in the chill spring weather, bundled up under quilts, me leaning on his shoulder while we shared mugs of hot chocolate.

"Hard to believe it's been a year," he said, finally.

"Yes." Leaning more against his shoulder, watching the setting sun as it slid down behind the horizon that was, eventually, Republic City and Yue Bay, I closed my eyes. Asami had stayed true to her word—they hadn't appeared to have told anyone about us, and we had been left happily alone. "Although I don't think it really counts as 'a year' until the anniversary of my waking up." Lieu half laughed and wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me closer.

Life like this was simple, and quiet, and just enough to keep us entertained and happy. We had kind neighbours and a fine town nearby to sell and buy in, animals to care for, plenty of food, and enough income. And we could live like this. I wanted to—for the rest of our days.

The weight in my pocket was heavy, the weight of the single secret I had been keeping from Lieu for several months. His fingers curled into my arm, and I glanced over at him.

He looked older than he had before, back in Republic City as my Lieutenant. There were lines beside and under his eyes that had been so long hidden by goggles, lines by his mouth that weren't caused by battle sneers anymore, but by smiles. There were a few grey strands of hair at his temples. His birthday had come and gone—so had mine.

Neither of us were exactly young anymore, and the golden years of our lives were ahead of us.

"Lieu," he looked toward me, one dark arching eyebrow raised in question, waiting for me to continue. "I have something for you." We were alone out here, and even if the sun was setting and it was starting to get chillier, the weight in my pocket had been there for too long.

I couldn't put it off any more.

Shifting away from him and sliding around under the quilt, pushing it down around my lap, he hesitated and then moved as well, turned so that we were facing each other instead of side by side, and followed my movements with intent eyes as I reached down into my pocket. There was a ribbon, plain and black, that pressed against my fingers, and a stone, heavy and cool even with its proximity to my skin. I had picked it up off the riverbed next to our house late one night while he had been asleep—I had used the light of the full moon to pick through rocks with the water pressed away for hours before I came across the stone that I wanted, almost translucently blue, smooth edged, worn down by the surf.

It had been more like a stone from the North Pole than it was from here, and when I had touched it the first time, there had been a thrill against my skin like it was magnetically drawn toward me. Perhaps it was just nostalgia, or imagined, but I felt like it had been put there, by someone or something or some spirit, just for me to find. Perhaps it had been the moonlight itself that had led me to pick it up.

Curling my fingers around the stone, I drew it out, held it clasped in my palm, and felt the sweat, apprehension, at the insides of my elbows and the dryness of my throat as I hesitated, stared down at my palm, before I looked up at Lieu.

He looked like a Fire Nation man, and his mother had been Earth Kingdom, but there had to be a Water Tribesman or woman somewhere in his heritage, to give him eyes like he had, pale blue like the sky at the edge of the horizon. He had never told me where that person was, if he even knew. Probably a grandparent.

"How familiar are you with Water Tribe customs," I said, and my voice came out shakier than I had wanted it to. He raised his other eyebrow now.

"Only what you've told me, really." Our knees were pressed together, warm under the blanket. "Why?" I let out a quiet sigh and looked to the side, resisted the urge to rub the back of my neck.

I had hoped that he would know this, and he probably did, but I couldn't just ask him about it outright. With the way people lived in Republic City, we all mixed, cultures and foods and languages. It was hard to not know at least the surface knowledge about the other nations. But…maybe not. Hesitating, trying to ignore how loudly my heart was pounding in my ears and how tight my throat was, I unfolded my hands around the pendant that I was holding and set it against the white cloth of our quilt. Lieu stared down at it, and slow recognition dawned in his eyes, and he looked up at me.

Suddenly, he looked as stunned as I felt.

"Is that…" he started, and I nodded, jerkily.

"In the Water Tribe, when you find the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, it's customary to carve them an engagement pendant. It's normally for men to women, but—" we were both men. It wasn't entirely unheard of, just looked a bit askance at—normally same-sex couples, at least in the Northern Water Tribe, were seen as something more normally found in those who were not quite of this earth. Very powerful Benders, Healers with close connections to the Spirit World, and those who lived at one with the tundra.

I supposed, as a Master Bender, I was probably of that first category.

"You aren't of the Tribes. So I…carved one. For you. If you want it." I could feel the blood rushing toward my face, even if I couldn't really show a flush on my skin anymore. My head still felt warm. "If you don't want it I can just…throw it away."

Or something. Even as close as we were, even as far as we had come, I wouldn't have blamed him if he ever wanted to leave. To find a wife, to have children, to leave me behind. We were just as deeply in love as we ever had been, and I had promised him my companionship, but he had dedicated his life to me before.

Lieu might have told me, entirely truthfully by his own admittance, that he was wrong about not needing me, but that might not stay true. I couldn't help but think to myself, even with his promises and the loving way that he held me, the way he looked at me, his reassurances in the dark of night to never leave me, that he eventually would.

I stared down at the pendant in my lap, afraid to look up into his eyes, until he reached out and hesitated, took it from where it sat, turned it between his fingers. I looked up then, and watched his face. His cheeks were flushed slightly, showing strongly against his pale skin, as he continued to look at the pendant, feeling the carvings.

I had toyed for a while with carving it with an Equalist symbol, one of the many signs or letters that we had chosen to represent ourselves, but I had realised that doing something like that would only dredge up bad memories for both of us. We had thrown that life away—Amon and Lieu now were different than Amon and Lieu then. We had spread too far apart when I was the Leader and he the Lieutenant. I relied on him to survive, just like—I hoped—he relied on me. A symbiotic relationship. He had dedicated his life to me. Now I did the same for him. In the end, I had picked something simple for the design—a single outer circle just around the edge of the pendant, a single line down the middle dividing it into two equal halves, and across those two halves, the spiritual symbol of the Northern Water Tribe that meant 'counsel' on the left half, and on the right half, the symbol that meant 'king'. They were mirrors of one another, and met in the middle, carved symmetrically, half-spiraling, all smooth, careful lines, like the waves themselves.

Lieu ran his thumb over the carving, and turned it over in his palm, looked at the back. It was plain there, like most engagement stones were, and he finally ran the ribbon between his fingers and looked up at me.

The smile on his face in that moment was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen, and I couldn't help but grin helplessly back, even if it was hidden under the mask.

It was starting to get chilly outside, the sun finally almost-set, the last few rays of its light pouring over the fields and us, casting everything in a yellow glow. It was the light, shadowing his skin, brightening other parts, that allowed me to see them—there were tears in his eyes.

My heart suddenly felt tight, hard in my chest, and my breathing was shallow and fast. Lieu hesitated, reached out, the necklace in one hand, and pulled me close, pressed our foreheads together. He was smiling wider than I had seen him do in months—I was too, smiling enough that it felt like my cheeks were going to break.

"I love it." He pressed it back into my hands, squeezed my palm. "I wouldn't want anything more than to spend the rest of my life with you. If you hadn't asked, I would have." Lieu shifted and pulled me close until I was wrapped tight in his arms, pressed his palms to my shoulder blades and his face into the side of my neck. My throat felt tight again, and my eyes hurt.

"I'm happy," and it was probably a miracle it didn't come out shaking, or teary. "I've thought about it for weeks. I couldn't image waking up without you. I've never wanted something more." Lieu pulled back, and there were smiles beside his eyes. He curled my fingers around the necklace, and pulled my hands to his neck.

"Put it on." I hesitated, but did as he asked, spreading out the ribbon and wrapping it around his neck, shifting to stand behind him to make sure I was tying it right and loose enough to be comfortable, like I had seen my father do for my mother so many times, the few and far between times that he showed lasting, true affection for her. When it was tied, Lieu reached up to hold the stone in his hand, and I hesitated, my hands on his shoulders.

"You don't have to wear it all the time if you don't want to," my voice came out quiet, half-muffled against the inside of my mask. It would probably be obvious to everybody who saw it what it meant—and this far out in the country, people did tend to look strangely at people…like us. Lieu laughed, a smoky chuckle, and tilted his head back, grinning, to look at me. His cheekbones were stained red.

"Are you kidding me," our eyes caught, and he slid his hands up my arms, and since I was kneeling close enough, he pulled me down, one of his hands wrapping around the back of my neck under my hood, until our foreheads were pressing, "I'm never going to take it off."

My heartbeat was loud in my chest, and it was a good thing that we had brought the quilts out here and we lived so far out from the town, because the next moment he was setting aside our mugs and pulling me down onto him and against him and into his arms, and I couldn't have refused—even out here—even if I had wanted to.

It was mid-Spring when there was finally a long enough span of good weather that there came a chance that rolled around for us to take advantage of and travel. We saddled up our other ostritchhorse and set out, me guiding Vaya, Amon sitting behind me, pressed against my back, his arms around my waist. It was almost like we were back in Republic City on my motorbike (since someone didn't have particularly good luck with cars and had always just ridden around on the bike with me, even once the Equalists were big, clinging to my back) except more foul-tempered, smellier, and more prone to making annoyed noises whenever we made her go too fast.

We had gathered up a bag of our good home-grown rice and some of our own cornmeal, and those hung from her saddle, as well as a whole bag of some of our own seeds from the last harvest, and a box of carefully wrapped and padded eggs from our goosehens.

We set off in the early morning, and were well on our way by noon, me pointing out to Amon all the things along the road back toward Republic City that he had missed the first time we had come back this way, since he had been unconscious and badly injured at the time. He kept his commentary quiet and whispered into my ear, and it was just at the tail-end of sundown when we reached our destination—a fork in the road along the seaside, one path leading deeper into the woods. And as we approached, the trees gave way to farmland, to a stable where two ostritchhorses, one incredibly familiar, squawked at us, a light in the window. A farmhouse where we had been once before, only when we had stopped here, I had been close to death's door, and Amon had been even closer.

Stopping at the bottom of the porch and tying up Vaya to the bottom of the railing, I got down and helped Amon (since he couldn't use his right arm to correct his balance or slow his descent) and we climbed the steps together. The last time that we had been here, I had been supporting him, and he had been unconscious.

This time, I knocked on the door and waited, one hand on my hip and the other hanging at my side, while he folded his comfortably behind his back. It was quiet inside until footsteps approached and the lock in the door turned and it opened inward.

Xian stood there. She looked much the same as the last time that I had seen her, but no longer visibly pregnant, her dark hair plaited down her back, and she stared at us in surprise before her face lit up in a smile "Te!" She exclaimed in surprise. "Noa!"

"Surprise," I said, and Amon's masked face was impassive, but I could tell by the way that he stood that he felt almost-comfortable. "We brought some things for you." Xian peered out around us, and smiled.

"You can put your horse with ours, bring the things in—I think we can extend dinner to include you two as well."

It took a few minutes to settle Vaya down with the other two, although she immediately took to snapping at Rentu, as if asking him where he had been all that time, and Amon brought in the eggs and the seeds while I took the cornmeal and rice, and we handed them all over to a very grateful and happily surprised Xian and Toloak, while Amon found himself getting verbally grilled by Nan, the little old woman asking him all about how his recovery had gone, how his burns were. And, the whole time, crawling around our legs, was the little girl, born the year before—as Xian told me, half-smiling, she had guessed right, and their little girl, born under the full moon, was named Yue. She had a bright smile, and the bluest eyes that I had ever seen, and was incredibly interested in the cloth of Amon's socks, following him around with the doggedness that only a newly-crawling child can have.

That evening we spent in their company, enjoying a good meal, even Amon partaking with his mask pressed up even if he did keep his face hidden by tucking it in toward his chest (they might have seen him before the burns had scarred, but he was still self-conscious) and afterward, once Yue was put to bed and the moon started to rise, we sat around the sitting room in the house and shared a cool plum wine, Amon sitting just close enough that our toes could press together, and although both Nan and Xian, with their own engagement pendants, had noticed the one he had given me, neither of them said anything.

It was a fine evening, full of good conversation and good food and good company, and it was up toward the height of moonrise that we bid our farewell to return home in the darkness to make it home in time for the morning watering the next day, and we were sent on our way with the ostritchhorse that we had bought from them, Toloak explaining that they had gotten two more with the money I had paid him with and kept them stabled behind the house, with some of Xian's oats and a homemade loaf of bread, and our promise that we would come visiting again, and sooner. Nan thanked Amon for how well he had taken care of Mako and he thanked her for saving his life, and we left again in the darkness, Rentu tied to Vaya and squawking when she jerked him along, impatient, Amon still sitting behind me, leaning on my shoulder.

We talked quietly all the way home, and I could hear the smile in Amon's voice in every word he said. His hands on my waist were warm, and the stone of the pendant against the hollow of my neck was chilled slightly by the air, a heavy, tangible reminder of his love for me.

When I looked over my shoulder to see him, his eyes were watching me back, and every unsaid word and smile in them spoke of absolute, unfaltering, unfailing love.

An unseasonably late frost in early May had nearly killed our first few buds, but I had saved them through quick application of some inventive Waterbending, and Lieu had kissed my mask in triumph right there in the fields before I pushed him away, half-laughing. It was hard to remember that we hadn't always lived this way, comfortable and utterly happy in our shared, perfect life. That night, as we lay wrapped side-by-side in bed, his nose pressed against the nape of my neck and his hands wrapped around my waist, telling me about something that had happened when he went into the general store that afternoon involving the next neighbour down the way and an eight-bladed Future Industries tractor that was being shown off, that we fell quiet.

Everything felt right, and perfect, and whole. Even me, as broken as I was. Lieu had glued me back together in ways that I could never have done all on my own, and even given the hairline cracks makeshift caulking. I wrapped my hands on top of his, laced our fingers together, and turned my head more into his, pressed back into his arms, and smiled into the pillow.

His engagement necklace was on the bedside table, with the lotion that we used for my burns (and the lotion that we used for other things) and my mask, and I couldn't imagine a better assortment of items to lay there. We would probably never have any ceremony of our wedding, but that didn't make it any less true. Lieu had wedded and bedded me long ago, even if we had never made it true between us until now.

"You know," Lieu said finally into the back of my neck, stretching his head forward to rest his chin on the top of my shoulder. I could see his nose and one eye if I looked as far to my side as I could. "I've been thinking lately."

"About what?" Turning in his arms so that we were facing one another, I pressed my hands to his chest, dark skin and fractured burn scars pressed against his own paler complexion, tanned and goldened from a year working in the fields, with the scatted scars from years of fighting etched into it—the fractal down one arm, from when he had taken a bolt of lightning for me. Plenty of thin scars from cuts and stabs, a starburst from a pressure injury from a rather irate Earthbender who had been left handed when we hadn't expected it, and there, on his side, the single puckered puncture scar from when I had used my Bloodbending for the only good thing it had ever done. My fingers curled over his collarbones and he shifted, hands wrapped around my hipbones, his nose pressed to the bridge of where mine had been, since there was nothing else there for him to press it to.

"About the Equalists." My breath caught in my throat, just like it did every time that name was mentioned, whether I wanted it to or not.

"What about them?" I said it cautiously, almost afraid of what he was going to say next, and it must have shown in my expression, because Lieu smiled reassuringly at me.

"Nothing bad, I promise. I was thinking—there were probably a thousand thousand different ways we could have lived our lives, where we could have not met, or where we could have stayed together a few years and grown apart, or entirely different paths for us could have come up. Lives where you or I could have died somewhere along the way, or at the end of the story." He didn't have to give any more details than that for me to know what he meant. "And I realised something," he tilted his head up to press a kiss between where my eyebrows had been before, and settled there, his breath warm against the burns on my skin, the limited nerve endings sparking as I felt him exhale. He was looking past the top of my head into the room. "As awful as some things have been—as much as your life would be easier if you weren't burned, as bad as things were for a while, as angry as I was…as hurt as you were. As much as we screwed up…that all led us here." He moved back so that our eyes could meet, and pulled one hand from my hip to reach up, brush my remaining hair out of my face, to cup my cheek with his palm.

The lines beside his eyes crinkled more as he grinned. "If you asked me what I would change, I would go back and do it all over again, just to be here with you."

My heart felt tight in my chest, and after a moment, I slid my arms around my lover's chest and pulled him close, pillowed my head on his shoulder, and closed my eyes. He smelled like love and safety, like shared sheets and home.

"I could do without the horrific scarring," I confessed, and Lieu snorted.

"I think you look fine,"

"If just for practicality and my own health," I added, and for the first time, I realised it was true. Burns, even if they had been lies, had been part of me for so long, I didn't even find it hard now to learn to live with real ones. "But…I think if it would get us here, I would do it all over again too. Maybe without the part where I almost killed you."

"No, keep that part. That was the part that ended up fixing us in the end." There was something in my eye, or my throat, or my chest. It felt a little bit like I was an old vase that had been glued together too many times, feeling a chip come loose again.

I hugged Lieu tighter, breathed a quiet, aching breath into his chest.

"I love you," I whispered against his skin, "Like I could never even say."

"I know," he replied, and I realised—

It wasn't a chip in me that was hurting. I had just forgotten what it felt like to be whole again

A/N: Thank you guys very much for reading! I hope you enjoyed Give & Take. It was a long road, but it's finished now. If you have any criticism, feel free to share it, because criticism is almost always good. I hope whenever you read this you have a marvellous day and again—thank you for reading!