Starting Over

By,

Aestivate

Rating: K+
Characters: Amon/Noatak, Tarrlok
Summary: But Noatak can't reach an endgame here; he can't fix what's irreparably broken.
Word Count: 509

"The two of us together again, there's nothing we can't do…"

Land disappears behind them, opening into the wide expanse of ocean, and though Noatak's face is now exposed, he's glad that his back is turned so that Tarrlok can't see his grateful smile. Noatak's face feels hard, and the smile starts off almost as a grimace at first: it's been so long since he'd found reason to smile at anything. Yet his lips curve upward at the thought of being again in a world in which he is not the sole inhabitant.

"Yes, Noatak."

"I'd almost forgotten the sound of my own name." The sound of it thrills him; brings him back to places where ice and snow stretch as far as the eye can see and where little boys make snow forts and ice sculptures with newfound skills under the watchful eyes of doting parents.

Noatak can bend organs, change flow in arteries and veins, and drain a body dry of its blood. He can overwhelm a heart, deprive a brain of oxygen, and block a spiritual chakra. He doesn't have the same kind of experience on the flip side, but he can also mend gaping wounds, bend the water out of a drowning victim's lungs, and knit bones and muscles back together. He can feel the water flow of the ocean, of a person, and control it to do his bidding.

But Noatak can't reach an endgame here; he can't fix what's irreparably broken. Noatak just wants to go back to those days when Noatak was his only name, when he wasn't known as a masked vigilante, when he wasn't a supreme ruler set to equalize the world, and when power was a goal, not a means to an end. He wants his brother to forgive him, so that they can start over, but Noatak knows that if it's one other thing than skill that the boys had inherited from their father, it was this propensity towards vengeance and violence.

Tarrlok is putting on the glove now.

There's nothing they can go back to. Too much has changed. Hate and rage and revenge still flow through these brothers' veins. No matter how hard they tried to shed their identities, when the mask comes off this is all that's left. Amon is never honest but Noatak is. And Noatak just wants to know where he went wrong, when his vision for equality became so distorted with power that caused a young boy to knock his little brother into the snow and call him a weakling. He wants to know from where he gets this sick, vicious pleasure of cutting his puppets by their strings.

Noatak just wants to start over. And Tarrlok… Tarrlok can do that for him. For both of them.

"It'll be just like the good old days."

Tears that Noatak doesn't even realize are pooling in his eyes pour down his cheeks. After all these years, he's never been unable to not control water before.

The boat explodes.

All that surrounds them is water.

Fin.