There'd been a day when Noatak forgot what his mother's voice sounded like. It'd been replaced by the woman who took him in, though he had very little to do with her. It was unfair that he forgot aspects of his mother, since his father's voice still rang as clear as those nights when he'd stowed away on a large ship and chanced creeping onto the deck to see the sky. When the boat stilled on a quieter coast, everything sang out without such malice or harsh expectations.

They don't manufacture nights like that in Republic City.

Noatak believed it'd be a place of lights and dancing in the streets and freedom. A naïve dream based on radio messages and pieces of conversations from travelers. His father never really described the city itself, but everyone else turned it into an actual character.

Someone hopeful and maternal. Noatak had no ill feelings toward his own mother, but he knew she preferred Tarrlok. Because he was the baby. The poor boy Yakone never complimented or wanted to take on hunting trips. She pursed her lips and her eyes shone with obliviousness toward her husband's perniciousness to his own kin, for baleful considerations never crossed her mind. She was there for Tarrlok because Noatak didn't need the extra attention; he was a strong boy.

But the city would give him what he never received: he'd be himself. Nothing from his past would follow him here except the clothes on his back. He'd find work and discard his past. He wouldn't even be Noatak anymore. He'd be whoever he wanted in this place of many colors.

However, being a fifteen-year-old without a family left him sleeping under park benches; given the pride instilled in him by his father's admonishments toward his brother—don't cry! don't whine! hush up!—Noatak never built up the will to beg for food. While the city offered more diversity than the whites and blues of his old home, nobody enjoyed that prosperity when fear hovered over their minds.

Most of the kids darting around the streets couldn't even afford shoes, let alone defend themselves like Noatak could. If he wanted, he could make those vendors with their suspicious glowers faint and pilfer whatever he wished, but then he'd have that nudge of guilt, that attachment to not-so-far away regrets when he nudged up against the other street kids he shared a rain-pooled alley corner with.

It was an entirely selfish reason. Why can't I use bloodbending for good? he asked himself. He'd take the food and spread it out; but there'd never be enough for them all, and it'd be an exhausting amount of guilt and fighting he'd rather avoid.

So he starved. Surely his father would be proud, and that sickened the ache in his belly further as he ghosted by on bread crumbs and water from the park where people dumped their empty fire flake bags and other litter. Wrapped into himself with his back hunched, a cruelly humorous part of himself recognized his desire to be like them, to shed things they didn't want, to shrug off problems that didn't pertain to them as easily as flinging trash around and letting the wind turn it into someone else's burden.

But oh, he was so, so tempted to rupture the organs of the skittering spider-rats that lurked within the alleys so he could cook them for dinner in the fires the orphans lit at night, to steal the scraps the other children fought over, to follow after the gang members who whooped and hollered down the streets in a flurry of disturbed street rubbish as civilians huddled past and plead for a spot in one of their operations.

Masquerading as an orphaned nonbender while so many couldn't help their status as a nonbender, Noatak attempted to find work, but he was too young, too filthy and "fresh off the boat." Too new to the city and too bright-eyed.

Then came the day three men in fine suits heckled a merchant and shoved him to the ground. They reminded him of his father. Noatak said nothing, but the attack was in blinding daylight, out in the open with bustling citizens making sure to turn their heads and swerve around the trouble.

Noatak often hung around an establishment that gave very small portions of food to the indigent for free. They had very little funding though, which meant they provided scant resources. Of course, there were those who looked at the destitute and scoffed. Why did they keep their lazy butts on the sidewalk when they could use the energy they had for begging and doubling over in hunger to find a job to scrounge up some yuans?

He was supposed to be a nonbender. He swore to never bloodbend again to spite his father's ghost once it manifested to haunt him, but Noatak ran to the tall men with smiles like hungry wolf-bats and bowled one of them over.

Everything was a flurry of movement. Fire crossed his vision, pain as another person fell beside him. Then there was the shouting. First, from the assailants, then from places all around him. He crawled off of the body he'd plunged into after he heard a sickening crack, realizing it had come from his own head seconds ago and the whole world sluggishly rotated.

He didn't understand why he did that; Yakone would tell him to let the weak fend for themselves. They deserved whatever happened for not standing up for themselves.

Like Tarrlok.

(yet Noatak always defended his brother before he abandoned him)

If they died, it was the natural cycle of things: the weak were weeded out by the strong. Noatak's only regret was that he hadn't asked if that was what happened when the Avatar stole Yakone's bending away.

But everything that happened to Noatak—for the past few months as he thinned to the point of almost snapping in half—hardly stung despite the complete collapse of his innocence. In a way, it was like looking at his reflection in a tiny rain drop. Momentary, distorted, something far away. Suddenly he wasn't the prodigy son of an infamous madman; he was as expendable as any other drifter glared at by those with tidy visages and fouled eyes.

Noatak wasn't certain if that was good or bad. He was bred to tame—to tame the most powerful being in existence. So, either his state as a filthy urchin exemplified his lack of corruption or signified all of those years he wasted crafting himself into someone cunning and worthy enough to rule over the Avatar.

Yes, he ran away from his village so he wouldn't be a tool, but being a tool who exerted power was all Noatak knew. He didn't know how to deal with this harsh freedom he'd always wanted because part of him would always craze the moments of acceptance his father flashed to him with smiles and nods. Even with the hot, hot enmity bred into him from both his stained bloodline and his bitterness.

Those had been the only times he was worth anything.

He wasn't fulfilled with disconnected, honest stints of labor that left him rubbing at his hands as they cracked and his flesh splintered; he wasn't fulfilled because everyone else unafflicted by hardships nodded in approval to those who worked to no avail, put out into the streets because of technological advancements and disadvantages due to the accident of not being born a bender. They knew their place.

Part of Noatak hated himself for acting weak when he could exert strength over all of those who snickered at what a pitiful display he and the rest of the scruffy lowlifes were.

He detested it when there were noble people less fortunate and less gifted who strode through life with far more resilience and patience. They had a right to be indignant; Noatak inflicted all of this pain upon himself. He pretended to lord above his brother, but at least Tarrlok stood up for his own sniveling morals. Inside, Noatak was just as dirty and worthless as his current physical state. He carried out his father's will without question, hungering for approval.

"Officer, help! Help!" There were several shouts, sounds of a struggle above him, and Noatak forgot where he was. There was a hand on his shoulder, and he wasn't sure if it was real. And then it's gone, yanked away. A skidding noise disrupted his repose.

Noatak? Noatak? Please, come back!

All he knew was that he was suddenly warm after months of a cold that tangled itself within the core of his bones, settling in his lungs like a slimy eel.

Dizzy, his vision skewed and reddened, disoriented. Noatak had thoughts flash by as if he wasn't really there in the midst of a scuffle with is two-second involvement. Self-effacing thoughts. Essentially, he knocked out one thug and ended up giving himself a concussion in the process.

He stood, his knees throbbing. He had to press himself against the store wall to keep himself from tumbling onto the sidewalk again. Wonderful. All it took was one fall and he was down. But the fighting around him seemed to stop. He'd been prepared to feel fire licking his skin, ready to have the earth pounce up and slam him through a window.

As usual, there was an emptiness. Head buzzing. Stomach numb with an uneasy resignation, a feeling worse than pain, like when one's limbs go numb from an obstruction in the blood flow.

The benders with their fancy clothes were all lying on the ground, restrained by metal cords wrapped around their bodies. How long was he out? The man being threatened was standing, blood pouring from his nose, clothes and hair disheveled.

"Dad, are you okay?" a girl asked, placing a hand on her father's shoulder. She appeared to be older than Noatak with premature lines creased under her eyes. She was holding what looked like—a polished, broken stick?

He peered at the ground and saw an object. Part of a broom. She'd hit one of the thugs with a broom so violently that it'd snapped in half.

Standing in front of the young woman and man, Noatak knew that, despite their clothes being patched up and missing buttons, he looked terrible. He smelled worse. Oh, how his father would laugh at this lean and flimsy boy.

"Did you do all of this?" he asked hoarsely. She responded by regarding him as if first seeing him. Well, he was flattened against the pavement for a good portion of their first impression.

"The officer came pretty quickly and wrapped them up," the girl said, eying him with amusement that heated Noatak's blood, "but thanks for busting in." Noatak was fondly reminded of the time a cop harassed him at the park, pulling at the hood of his attire—a threadbare jacket—as his head snapped back and left him dizzy. The officer who incapacitated the three men never came forward to inquire about the well-being of the victims.

The store owner dabbed under his nose with his sleeve. "What's your name, son? You look pretty worn down."

Thought you could last without me? I made you!

"I'm nobody." His own voice sounded strange. He'd hardly used it after his last words to his brother, and it occurred to him that Tarrlok probably thought his brother was wolf bait. Fitting.

"Well 'Nobody'," the store owner said gruffly, "that was quite a stunt you pulled."

"I didn't do anything."

"You did more than any other normal person tried to do."

Normal? Had he truly gone so far as to be a normal person? Was it normal for a nonbender to be weak and destitute in the streets? Most of those who huddled around in shelters or in the open (the shelters often filled up too quickly and had no means of expanding with their lax funding) were nonbenders, but he hadn't seen the other side of the city.

At home, while nonbenders couldn't be as efficient as healers, they could still hunt and fish and protect. Both women and men could learn these skills, and Noatak never introduced himself to the possibility of a large divide between nonbenders and benders until he entered the city. Now, it was all too obvious with the threats and extortion.

"You're probably hurt—" the girl started.

"No, please. Leave me alone." Spirits, he was capable of bloodbending his own simpering little brother, and they were speaking down to him as if he could cause no harm, as if he was the one in trouble.

The girl stepped away from her father—his expression grave (and sympathetic?)—and put a hand on Noatak's shoulder. He recoiled. "You need help. Do you have a home?"

Noatak tasted the blood on his tongue, biting back a retort that of course he did—he simply enjoyed strolling around emaciated and grimy. "No."

She clutched him gently by the elbow and wrapped her arm around his to guide him into the store, which had the pungent smell of healing salves that reminded him of his mother, and he swallowed and forced himself not to heave.

"Well, I'm Ama, and my father and I would be more than willing to help you. So, what's your real name, Mister Nobody?" He hadn't said his name in so long. All it made him think about was how it sounded when his father barked it out, which then brought up Tarrlok's reedy pleas for his brother to come back, for him to help him, to not leave him alone to deal with their father.

You don't deserve this. You did nothing to earn this.

(Was that his father or himself?)

The home of the merchant always smelled of unctions and spices. Noatak never knew that snow and the wind could have a scent, but they did. Natural, the mingling scents of animals and the toil of village men. Heady. And now he missed them.

This family's house was suffocating. They only had room for an orphaned boy because their nephew recently died in a street fight; though the father and mother never spoke of it, Ama stated that he'd been dealing opium.

Sometimes men with oily voice would come to their house and give propositions, ultimatums. Noatak asked if it had anything to do with the nephew, and Ama laughed and told him that they swung their threats and fists long before her cousin made his mistakes.

The potency of the herbal fragrance came to be when their youngest child of fourteen months became ill. The child laid dormant on a small bed of white sheets. He almost looked like he was dead on a snowy island, on an expanse of whiteness dwarfing the grays of his complexion; that shouldn't make Noatak laugh, but the thought of a snowy island protruding from the floor was too ridiculous for him not to find some odd humor in it.

When Noatak scrubbed himself clean and cut off the rats' nests in his hair—butchering the locks that went far past his shoulder now that he no longer wore a Water Tribe hairdo—he didn't recognize himself. His eyes were shrunken in those gaping hollows sunken above his gaunt cheeks. The scalding water soothed him. His mother always said that hot water kills germs. Perhaps it would cure him.

The family, consisting of a middle-aged couple and their two children, tried to engage him in conversation, and he grew weary of attempts to dissect his past. They cared—they wanted to find out how his parents died, how long he'd been alone. Noatak couldn't answer because he honestly had no idea how long. He heard them talk amongst themselves and chatter about what must've set the poor young man out into the streets like so many disheartened vagrants searching for some respite, a reprieve from their hardships while fat cats lounged around licking up the dough of toiling workers.

He did chores and ran errands without being goaded, but he was such a reticent character that they believed something truly damaging must have melted him into this small shell, masking all of the cracks from being twisted after so many instances of pressure.

Once Noatak said to Ama, the girl who broke her broom on the thug's head, "You seem pretty old to be their daughter." The couple didn't appear that aged. He'd be amazed if the wife had hit forty; she'd birthed a child recently enough, and her complexion, while overcast with a dismal resignation, was hardly marred by the blossoming vestiges of time.

"My parents had me young." Ama's lips contorted into an exaggerated smile that didn't match the darkening in her eyes. She was old enough to start out on her own, but she stayed to help her parents out. Her younger brother needed her to stay and coddle him. The difference between her circumstance and Noatak's—other than her willing chains—was that her brother couldn't amend his captivity.

Sitting at the rickety old dining table with the family, Noatak tilted his head down. They sat in silence. In clean, if not faded and ill-fitting, clothes handed down to him, Noatak tapped his fingers against his breakfast bowl and sweat broke out on his forehead.

Unlike when he bloodbent powerless animals with callous precision. No sweating or worries then. He'd just curled up in his bed later as he demanded that his emotions rein themselves in like a pack of furry blood-sacks.

(He was always too busy keeping his brother afloat to properly break apart.)

He'd lift his head up, dry his brother's tears, despite the voice in his head that began to sound startlingly like his father: you're weak.

Stupid. Why do I have to keep sheltering you? When will you actually stand up for yourself?

Ready to snap, there'd been a day when protecting his brother came naturally to him. Noatak could make wolves bow to his will as they whimpered and gazed at him with milky eyes like a rabbit-doe's, but his brother was always cowed. Never biting back.

It didn't take anything to alter Tarrlok into submissiveness. Noatak needed to save him. In a day where a snowstorm brewed, Tarrlok fell off of a steep incline and landed on one of his legs. It crumpled under him, and Noatak couldn't heal it in time, so he had to carry his brother home.

One argument, one outburst. All he had to say: "I should've left you in that storm!" Tarrlok burst into tears. No doubt he'd run to his mother—well, their mother, Noatak would force himself to admit—while never telling her the actual problem. Even in resentment, Tarrlok would never hurt his brother because he wanted Noatak to like him again so they could confide in each other like they did during the flippant days of play and laughter.

He wondered how Tarrlok was doing, what Yakone did to his little brother after Noatak bloodbent his father and left him in the snow. Considered whether Tarrlok trudged along the ice with his father's arms tossed around his shoulders (carrying far more weight on his meager frame than could be seen), if his brother fell onto the snow and shook his father's limp body, frantically peering up with the fleeting hope that Noatak would return to assist him like he always did.

Don't leave, please!

With one thought, he could render the family who took him off the streets completely at his will. And his father's memory, the ghost curled in the back of his head like a squirming, fat maggot-leech, would shudder in approval. He could make the father bow before him; he could make the merchant's daughter—

The bowl slipped from his clammy hands. It clattered onto the floor without breaking, its viscous contents splattering onto the wood.

Why couldn't things had stayed the way they were? Why did he have to be a waterbender with the temptation of destroying lives when his circumstances didn't suit him?

"Sorry. Sorry, I'll pick it up." He bent down, and his eyes were blinded by tears. No, he wasn't supposed to cry. Warriors didn't cry. Soldiers didn't cry. Killers didn't cry.

There was some shuffling, and the mother bent down to his level to help him. They worked to figure him out, why he bore this gloominess on his shoulders, coiled around his innards and throat until words were suppressed, but he was inscrutable. Noatak didn't meet her eyes as he scooped the bowl across the floor to assist in cleaning up the gruel.

When the family cared for the ailing child, the smothering silence further pervaded the household. The boy opened his eyes at times, but some of the sounds he made as he breathed were awful, as if he could barely inhale without pain coursing through him. When his eyelids flickered open, his eyes were glazed, and the lighting in the room was so poor that Noatak couldn't decipher what color the child's eyes were.

He placed the wadded bedsheets into the clothes-basket before returning to the room. Ama sat by her brother's side, knees propped up on the hardwood floor, brushing the hair out of his face.

"What's his name?" Noatak leaned against the doorframe. This child had done nothing wrong, and he wouldn't get a second chance like those who receive then and squander their luck. That may have been pessimistic and contrary to the family's hopes, but he could sense dying animals, ones too injured that their pack abandoned them or their mothers refused to lend their milk to them.

She told him. With a solemn nod, Ama added, "It means 'peace' in an old language."

"Do you need anything?"

"No, there's nothing you can do." A part of Noatak bristled at that statement. How dare she say something so insolent? She had no idea what he was capable of. Then part of his wanted to be anything but a coward, to mend what was impossible for even the best healers to fix.

"I'm going to rest," Noatak said, standing in the doorway with his shoulders drooping.

"You need to take something for your nightmares." He slipped away, uncomfortable with the concern.

Noatak woke up in the middle of the night with chills, a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. With a strange ache behind his eyes, he had the vague sense of abruptly escaping a bad dream, yet he couldn't dredge up what he'd torn away from. He rarely slept easily, but nights in an actual bed spurred bouts of deep sleep.

Wind and rain clattered harshly upon the roof, the wind sometimes impersonating the moans of a moribund turtle-seal in torment after a spear harpooned itself into its belly.

Oh yes, the beautiful memories of home.

That was when he made an uneasy decision after the slowly trickling days of watching a family dwelling in bleakness.

Without a sound, he got off of the bed. The room had no windows, and the wallpaper was crinkling in parts where rain had seeped through the ceiling. He moved carefully, silent as he approached his destination.

He imagined his mother's eyes. His jaw tensed. When he, Tarrlok, and their father returned from their "hunting trips," she gave them a bleak smile. Even without the knowledge of her husband's past, she saw the chasm between her sons. Tarrlok's downcast eyes and the slouching of his shoulders. The steeliness in Noatak's demeanor.

The room was pitch black, but because of his dear father's lessons, Noatak learned how to detect heartbeats as if he were partly inside the other person, stuck within their ribs and reaching out. He could feel the lurching of a broken heart inside of the child's bedroom, a torpid thudding that in no way mimicked the quickness of his own heart. He willed his heart to calm, and it obeyed.

His intents were good. His intents were good.

He moved a thumb against the boy's forehead, inhaling the thick scent of perspiration. Eyes dimming, he pressed his fingertips against the ill child's shoulder blades, taking deep breaths as he guided both of his hands down lightly to the boy's chest. Noatak closed his eyes, and he could almost envision what was inside the child from his many training sessions with his father where he had to touch and see what living creatures were composed of on the inside of their bodies. Tarrlok protested killing the animals, and Noatak promptly shushed him.

He paused. A mass of things congested in the child's extremities, festering after several months, black amidst the pulsing red. Thick and obstructive, almost alive. A slow death with nothing but prolonged suffering inadvertently caused by those trying to heal him.

"I'm sorry, brother," Noatak said to the child named Amon, though his words weren't meant for the dying boy, and he closed his eyes and breathed in rhythm with Amon's thick, slow heartbeat. There was no kinship with the child, though people clung to meek and helpless things, like abandoned, cute squirrel-hound pups or children with bright, empty bead-eyes.

The child named Amon died underneath the palm of his hand, and the thumping that soon grew audible and reverberated in Noatak's ears flickered and died like a lantern's golden flame. But it was still heard dully, similar to how lullabies stay even when the singer has passed.

He forced himself back to his room, not sensing his own legs as he collapsed and sobbed, pulling the bedsheet into his fists and putting it against his cheek. Pulling it over himself, hoping to suffocate.

Cold again. It was the second time here that his composure completely shattered like thinning ice tread upon by fur-lined boots.

Noatak couldn't bring himself to abandon the family, yet again torn into another broken family. He didn't want a place to belong anymore, another thing to sully; he wanted to be on his own. Becoming someone new, not a filthy little child with abilities that could only hurt others.

You liked that, didn't you?

No, Noatak took no satisfaction in ending that boy's pain—because either way meant the family would be severed. He wanted to console them with the fact that Amon was no longer in pain, but their grief was more than tangible.

He hated himself for not being remorseful. He didn't enjoy it, but it was the most useful thing he did to alleviate the suffering in Republic City. The gazes and downturned heads in this home when trouble arrived and the father's insistences that they never answer the door. Just come get him. He would handle it.

But no, one person could not make a difference.

This is the first time you've killed, boy. Aren't you proud?

He had no family, and it was for the best.