12 Luke

"Stop!" spoke the nameless instructor from where he stood in the room. I did as I was bid and stopped, lowering my arm, not daring to wipe the sweat from my brow. I couldn't decide which feeling was more irritating, the burn in my hand or the warm sweat trickling down my face. Both called for immediate attention. One required wiping it away, the other, was an urge of sorts. One that called for further action. I wanted to bend. But I supposed that would require getting it right first.

"What do you think you're doing?!" he yelled as he closed the distance between us. "You have an enemy directly in front of you. One intent on ending your life in the name of his nation. What do you do? Do you cover your face for fear of injury?"

I knew a prompt when I got one. That was one thing I had mastered in the last few days. "No, sir"

"Do you give him a nice love tap and the chest and hope he walks away?!"

"No, sir"

"Louder!"

"No, sir!"

"Damn right, you don't! You strike down your enemy, do you hear me! You do not hold back! When you are presented with a threat, you do not evade, you do not cower, you meet that threat and end it!"

The way he was talking. Meeting a threat head on. I understood that philosophy. That way of fighting. It belonged to the Earth Nation, and earthbender's main attributes, strength, fortitude, vigor, but I knew better than to ask a veteran of war why he emulated the techniques of his enemy, the enemy no doubt responsible for the scars he bore. For now, the normal answer would do. "Yes, sir."

"You're distracted. You're improving, yes. Finally managed to raise the room's temperature, but you're sloppy. We will fix that. What is it that's holding you back, distracting you?"

Well, for one, I have some strange entity talking to me in my sleep. I'm frankly terrified that it's trying to kill me. On the other hand, one of my old gang members just woke up from a coma your guys put him in and I nor Danev have been able to visit him. Now one of us has to tell him his best friend, along with his entire gang has been massacred and we're working for the people more or less responsible.

"Just stressed, sir."

"Then deal with it. We're done for today. Find some way to fix your issues, but you're coming back here tomorrow, 6am sharp. Understood?"

"Understood, sir." I said with a salute before walking into the steel hallways that connected the Citadel school, the most impressive structure of the entire military district. It was a school on a few floors, a barracks on a few others, and the offices of the chief personnel on the top few. Nice place they had here. I doubted Aden would see it that way. Everybody save me and Danev were dead. Danev, more or less, was safe, but me, when Aden was captured by the Fire Nation, I was still rather new. Hadn't done anything to prove myself yet. When he hears just how the Hornets were put into a position where they were all slaughtered, well, I didn't have the best of hopes for myself.

Danev was waiting at the door to the hospital ward. It took a lot of talking to manage to get ourselves a meeting with Aden. Damnit, he didn't even know we were here. He's been awake for 3 days, probably thinking he was a captive of some sorts, which, he was, but, fuck it, whatever he was thinking, he was wrong, and we were going to have to be the ones to tell him so.

It was Zaydi who poked out her head to let us know we could come in.

"How is he?" Danev asked.

"Stable. For now. He fought for the first few hours. Took some sedating and some physical restraint, but he's fine. More or less."

"More or less?" asked Danev.

"He's in no worse condition than when those soldiers first brought him here."

"Wow. That's sure saying a lot. I saw him when I was brought in with him. Your soldiers tore him to shreds."

"'Our' soldiers. Those Hornets did a number on our men too, killed more than enough to even the score."

"He won't see it that way."

"I know. Which is why you need to calm him down. Stop him from doing anything rash. Anything that would get himself or others hurt. Or worse."

"Is this your concern, or your superiors'?"

"Mine. You should go in now"

I was following the conversation. Rather well, I might add. This was my profession for a good few years in the slums. Reading conversations like this, pulling what useful things I could from them, exaggerating them, and selling them. I would have to be an idiot to miss the tension between the nurse and my friend. I looked between the two of them, back to back. Despite the yelling, there was something there.

Danev lowered his head. "You're right. I'm sorry."

"It's nothing. Go on in."

We entered the ward. The ward wasn't the infirmary. For the most part, it was empty. It was no surprise really. Fighting was a ways away in Ba-Sing-Se. Nothing of note here. Well, one thing of not. I didn't need to see his face to know who it was lying next to where Aden sat. It was that some body that had beat the shit out of me time after time. Zihe wasn't looking too good, face covered in bandages the way they were. Would've felt sorry if he wasn't the pathetic cunt that he was. He's a bully his entire life, nut when something goes wrong, say, a charred face for example, it's all just whining, crying, and screaming as he's carried out on a stretcher. Wow. The more I think about it in my head, I sound like a complete prick. Meh. Screw it.

I was done paying attention to that pathetic sack of garbage when Aden finally noticed us. His vision drifted to us, pulled away, then looked back just as quickly. That double take confirmed what he had thought he had just seen.

"No fucking way."

He kicked the hospital sheets off his bed and stumbled over to where he sat, nearly tripping and falling to the floor. We had to catch him by his arms to stop his face from meeting the steel floor.

"Careful there." Danev said from his side of Aden, holding him by his left arm.

"Shit, man. I haven't taken a step in, what, 6 months?"

"More or less. You've missed a lot."

Shit. Don't remind me. We escorted him back to his hospital bed, setting him down nicely. He sat up, leaning his back against the wall behind his bed. "What are you doing here? Fire Nation finally catch up to you guys?"

"Yep. Guess we got unlucky."

I had never seen Aden smile so intently. Even in a Fire Nation stronghold, surrounded by those he considered to be enemies, our presence alone lifted him above all that. And now we would have to ruin that.

"Holy hell. You cannot imagine how happy I am to see you guys. You too, Luke. Great to see you both. I thought I was alone here. Guess I'm just glad some of you Hornets were as unlucky as me."

We were the lucky ones.

"What went wrong that night?" Aden asked. "We did what we were supposed to do, but, holy hit, there were so many. You sent us to distract the soldiers while you and Goni got the supplies. Meeko and I, we-. Meeko. Where's Meeko?" he asked, shifting his wait in sporadic motions, moving his legs off the bed so he could better face us."

"Aden." Danev started. "It wasn't your fault. We know you fought to the last breath. You and he did what you coul-"

"Danev. Don't bullshit me."

"He's dead, Aden."

All the joy that had been in his eyes from realizing he wasn't alone in this new world was suddenly gone. Disintegrated before his very eyes. Like the snap of a finger. "What?"

"He's dead, Aden. I'm sorry."

"You're sorry. You're sorry? It was you who led us on that damned suicide mission!" he yelled as he stood up from his hospital bed. "Saying sorry doesn't cut it. Oh, but you and Goni got out fine didn't you. Tell me, did Goni survive that?"

Danev took a deep breath before he spoke his answer. "Yes."

"Yeah. No shit. Because you two got the task of loading supplies while Meeko and I held off a damn army. What the fuck did you expect?!"

"There wasn't a choice. We needed the food, you knew that. We were starving. We were sick. We were dying. We needed that food."

Great. That should help when we tell Aden that 'hey. It didn't do any good anyway because guess what? They're all dead.

"So that gives you the right to let us get ourselves killed?!"

"Aden, I'm sorry. Okay? I didn't mean for any more of us to die. I was trying to save the Hornets.

Danev, no.

"We knew what we were in for. Nobody got out unscathed. How do you think I got here?"

"You got caught there?"

"I did." He replied. "Paid the price for it too." He lifted his shirt to show the scars on his chest, then the ones on his arms and legs. Only half of those he received on that ill-fated raid. The rest he earned on the massacre we had yet to break to Aden. And it was going so well, so far.

"Good. I hope they bled you"

"They did, Aden. I paid the price. I am sorry. Had I known it would turn out this way, I never would have allowed that raid to go down."

That was a lie. I knew it, Danev knew it, and hell, I think Aden knew it. Nonetheless, it worked. Danev sat back down on his hospital bed.

Aden sighed. "No. We did what we had to. The Hornets needed us." He chuckled and smiled. "Meeko always did say he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. I remember all those explosions. We gave them hell, Danev. We did."

"I know you did. We could hear you from miles away."

He laughed again. "Meeko got his wish. Went out the way he always wanted to. I'm glad he got his wish. Did they bury him at least, or was there nothing to bury?"

"Uh-"

"Don't answer. I should have expected that." He sighed. "Damnit." He murmured under his breath. "We're square, Danev. I don't blame you. I blame them." He sighed again. "Where's the rest of our guys? We still at the hive?"

Damn it. Danev had gotten his share of the blame. He wasn't taking this one.

"Aden, I'm s-"

"-Sure we're still at the Hive. We got the supplies we needed. Food, medicine, supplies, weapons too. Goni slipped away. We should still be well stocked from what we bled for out there."

Damnit, Danev. I knew the look I wanted to give Danev, but he had made up his mind. He had chosen a path for us and I was going to follow it despite the hell it was going to lead us to down the road.

"Well then. Shouldn't we be on our way out of here? He asked standing back up.

Danev put a hand against his chest. "No." he said a bit too urgently. He caught himself, however. "There's no rush. In truth," he said, lowering his voice. "I was thinking we make our time here count. The Fire Nation thinks they're going to turn us to their side. They've put us in their ranks and they mean to do the same to do. Follow along for now. Be a good soldier, follow orders, stay discreet. Don't do anything to give yourself away. I'm keeping an eye out for a chance to explain. Gather what information you can. Troop movements, orders, anything, but don't get caught. When the time's right, I'll tell you and we'll be on our way out of here. We sell the information to the Earth Kingdom, gather the Hornets, and leave Citadel for good. Okay?"

"Okay. I'm trusting you."

We left when Aden had decided to sleep once more after being visited by Zaydi who told him he would be out in a week.

I turned to Danev right when he shut the door to the hospital ward behind him. "What the fuck was that?!"

"You saw how he reacted when I told him on of our own had died. And he had just calmed down. Did you expect me to go right into how not only was Meeko dead, but the entirety of the fucking Hornets?!"

"So you give him false hope instead?! And what was that, sending him on a fucking scavenger hunt. Look for intelligence? Are you out of your fucking mind. In here?!"

"It was the only way I could think of to make sure he bought it."

"Great. And now we have a ticking time bomb. When he finds out the Hornets are dead, and have been for 3 months, do you think he'll be dumb enough to not connect the dots. You have him searching for intelligence. Who's to say the next intelligence he finds isn't about two new slum kids brought in for training following a massacre on the grain road?! Well?"

"I didn't think about that, okay! I did the only think I could think of. I'm sorry, alright?!"

"Damnit, Danev. You know this is going to blow up in our faces, right. Now, I'm waiting to see what happens first: he gets caught poking around and gets executed, he gets caught poking around, rats us out, then we all get executed, he finds out we lied, then he executes us, there's so many fucking things that can happen, and none of them good."

Danev sighed. "Look. We'll work this out, okay? Right now, we have more things to worry about. How are your lessons?"

I was angry. And that helped. I produced a flame about the size of the palm of my hand and held it slightly levitated above my right hand. I then turned around and shot it at the far end of the hallway. It travelled quick and struck the end of the hallway before anyone could object.

When I turned back around to face Danev, his eyes were wide, and he nodded his head in some form of awe-struck approval. "Impressive."

I knew he was trying to humor me, make me forget about the fact there was a ticking bomb in the hospital ward we had just left. I had no time for this. "Thanks." I said. "I'm going to bed."

"Goodnight." He said in one last effort to reverse the dumb shit he had just done in that hospital room.

I didn't hear the same whispers in my ears as I tried to sleep tonight, but I heard the whispers. For the last few nights, since that one night, they had been the whispers of that same voice. Low, deep, dark. They were calls I pieced together. The door to the abandoned room had opened again, but I was in no rush to get in there.

Tonight however, the voice was different. It had begun the same. That same dark voice, keeping me from sleeping. The voice finally left, and I felt myself finally drift into asleep until I heard a different voice this time, a woman's voice saying "rise."

My eyes opened. My room was empty, but the door to the other room was wide open, a white light shining from within. I could feel my heart pumping quicker, feel a knot tightening in my stomach. I was not up for this.

"Get up." That same voice called. The female one. Angelic, beautiful, but fierce, determined. I knew better than to argue. I rose.

I followed the light.

I stood in the abandoned room, searching for a source of the light. There were no lights in the room, no candles lit, no torches lining the wall. There was, however, the stone walls.

Stone?

Between the cracks in the, stone, walls, white light shone through, illuminating the entirety of the room. It was blinding. I tried to back up and turn my gaze away to face the door back to my room, but there was no doorway there. There were no doors at all. Just the stone walls, with the blinding light shining through the cracks. Then I heard that voice one last time.

"No matter what he offers, no matter what he promises, do not listen to him, do not fall for his lies. Resist the temptation he offers."

Before I could let any words escape from my already opened mouth, I was standing back in that steel plate room with a door leading wide back to mine. This time, I walked out on my own. The second I took the last step back into the shared bathroom, the door behind me shut and locked. I knew better than to ask any questions. For now, the whispering was gone, and I needed the sleep. The sleep I had missed for the last four days.