The Avatar's Master

22. Happiness is a Warm Bun Bao

10 months ago...

Kuvira was starving. And tired. And freezing. It was winter and she came upon a farming village looking for somewhere to warm her miserable bones. She had walked for days on end, enduring the frigid cold and a new heaviness that seemed to tug at every bit of her body.

The reality of the loss of her bending would slip in and out of her consciousness a painful reminder of her decision. Regret on pivotal matters was perhaps her true weakness. And now she had to deal once more with the aching restlessness that hummed within her, and as a nonbender.

What plagued her was the thought that perhaps all of this could have been avoided if she was a nonbender to begin with. Maybe her mother would have loved her more; maybe she would have been wanted -- and not in the way her face was plastered to posters all around the Earth Territories with bounty hunters itching to reap their generous reward.

The plains surrounding the village frosted over with wintry weather, the ponds frozen beneath the bridge leading into town. On the verge of collapsing, Kuvira huddled into a soup restaurant, the smell of dumplings and warmth of the hearth wafting into the air, painfully seducing her senses.

"Hey you, what'll be?" A wideset, matronly lady said.

"Uh, I- I don't have any money. Please," Kuvira said. "I'd like a warm cup of water."

"Get out of here!" The lady retorted. "I can't have any more of you vagabonds running amok. Don't you know these are tough times? And what with everybody flocking to the cities. Now, scat!"

The lady chased Kuvira back out into the cold. The former Great Uniter was humiliated but too weak to fight back, too weak to care. She found a building with a slanted roof to lean against and ponder the end of her days. Maybe this was it – she would go to sleep and die in this very spot and then be reborn and have another shot at life.

She closed her eyes and let the cold consume her. But her apathy soon-to-be despair was interrupted by survival instinct, when she felt a big burly hand squeeze around her neck and lift her high in the air.

Kuvira bulged her teary eyes as she was being choked alive. A large man with bouldering muscles smiled at her and she swung her legs wildly, her hands gripping and scratching at his sausage fingers about her neck.

"Well well well, what have we here," the man snarled. He had a tattoo of a prickle snake on his face. "You look an awful lot like the lady on that poster right behind you: The Great Uniter. And I wouldn't have to worry about meals for a long time if I bring her in – dead or alive."

Kuvira was desperately clinging to life, to whatever was left of her, but in a brief cowardly moment, she gave up and hung flaccid in his hand. So this was how it ends after all, she thought.

Just as she was losing consciousness, the bounty hunter dropped her and the ground smacked her. He towered over her as she gasped for air on her hands and knees.

"You look like her, but the Great Uniter was a powerful metalbender, and you're just... nothing." The bounty hunter howled a guttural laugh and kicked Kuvira in the gut.

Kuvira got the wind knocked out of her and fell lower to the ground. The man turned his back toward her, not even giving her the dignity of closure from their encounter.

She dug her hang in the dirty snow, no longer caring how it froze her fingers to near numbness. Rage filled her entire being and she slowly reached for a dagger hidden in its hilt at her waist. How easy it would be to slip the blade into his jugular. His own fatal mistake would be the hubris of turning his back on someone who was 'nothing.'