Author Note: Be advised this chapter contains very gruesome details of r@pe, torture and very graphic violence not for under 18, will update this story's tag list.
Enjoy! If you love my story so far throw them power stones, all of them!
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Katara gasped in anticipation.
"I didn't even know they had my wife. They had kept her and the baby in isolation to use as leverage against me if I ever rebelled. The warden had only ordered them to threaten to kill them to get me to talk. But they had other ideas."
What happened next totally surprised Katara. He began trembling, his lips quivering and his knees buckling. Tears began to form but he held them back.
"Six of them, I'll remember every feature of their faces for the rest of my life. They started by whining about how lonely being a prison guard is because they can't date the female guards. Then they said it doesn't matter though because…" A single tear streamed down his face.
"No one cares what they do to the female prisoners."
Katara clasped a hand to her face. She remembered the animal-like guard, and how furious jing had been to catch him attacking her. She felt like she was going to be sick.
He was barely keeping together. "I was strapped down and helpless with no earth to bend. They made me watch every single second. I begged them to stop. I said I would tell them anything, do anything. They just laughed. When it was over she was totally broken, physically and mentally.
There are no words to describe their brutality. She had lost the energy to scream. Then almost as an afterthought one of them lit her on fire. That gave her back her voice. Another picked up my son and dropped him onto the fire like a log and I watched my family slowly burn to death."
He began crying openly. He couldn't have stopped himself even using all his strength. "I begged them to kill me! BEGGED them! It was the only end in sight for my unbearable pain! But they couldn't even give me that small mercy. They just laughed and laughed..." He shook his head wildly. His sobbing made him unable to form words anymore.
Katara was crying too. Hearing that story, watching him break down like this; in spite of everything she had been through herself it was enough to break her heart. He was right; the depths of his pain were unimaginable to her.
"You poor, poor man" she said, barely able to choke back her tears. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know…"
He managed to regain his composure. "Keep your pity," he said curtly. "I don't need any. I got my revenge."
"You did?"
"They kept me in isolation for weeks, force-feeding me and keeping me away from any sharp objects I could use to end my misery. They kept me alive just to torture me further. On the Day of Black Son fortune smiled upon me: one of those bastards came into my cell carrying a hand mirror. He presented himself in front of it, brushing his hair and talking about how handsome he was. He called my wife…lucky because she got to experience his touch." Anger had replaced
sadness in his voice.
"I didn't know glass was made of earth," he explained. "And apparently that peacock didn't either. But when I got angry, I shattered it by clenching my fist. Then it was my great luck the eclipse started that very minute." He balled his fist to make the point. "Shards of broken glass, a perfect weapon for an Earthbender. I freed myself from my restraints and showed him an agonizing, messy death. He had been stupid enough to leave the door open."
He laughed but it sounded forced. "I couldn't believe it. I left my cell and in the middle of the room, sitting at a table eating lunch, were the other five men, those five monsters. No one else was around. Apparently when the eclipse had started fighting had broken out in the courtyard that the guards were having a hard time suppressing with their Firebending gone so most of the them had joined the effort. But these guards were selfish and uncaring. I walked straight over to the table; the shards of bloody glass in my hand and my hate as plain as the nose on my face. I waited for them to say something as my hatred prepared to boil over."
"Then one of them looked me right in the eye and said 'She was sure was a beauty.'" Katara felt sick again.
jing had a much easier time describing this part. "It's amazing the damage you can do with a few simple pieces of glass in eight minutes. Or maybe by the time eight minutes were up they were too maimed to start defending themselves. Either way, it was slow, excruciating and thorough. Every time they begged for mercy, I redoubled in the pain I gave them, every time they apologized or asked for relief. They had no right. My wife begged for mercy as did I and they didn't give it! No matter how cruel I was it wasn't enough. I tore them apart, careful not to kill them too quickly.
When they finally died, I hadn't even realized it. All that was left was a bloody, indistinguishable mess that looked like it had never been made of human beings." He had started off sounding excited but now his voice was cold, almost dead.
Katara couldn't even imagine what was being described, and when she tried it only terrified her. It was very hard to keep listening. After all the times jing had shown her mercy, she couldn't believe he had done something so gruesome. But she also couldn't totally blame him. After the horrible thing those men did to his wife there was no doubt, they were monsters. Monsters that made Yon Rha look like nothing.
She had to know more. "Then what happened? How did you feel? What did you do?" Unlike her when jing had faced his monsters seeking his revenge he had decided to take it. She needed to know she made the right choice by sparing Yon Rha.
jing looked tired now, as if he hadn't slept in days. "I thought I'd be happy. I'd thought about revenge every minute since it had happened. I let out all of my hate at once. The problem is I also let everything else out."
Katara was confused. "What does that mean?"
"I just…" jing started, trying to figure out the right way to phrase it. "…. Was empty, totally empty of any feeling. I wasn't happy or mad or sad or anything. I just felt drained, like everything was over. Now that they were dead, I just had nothing, no reason to live."
Aang's words came back to Katara.
The monks used to say revenge is like a two-headed rat-viper; while you watch your enemy go down, you're being poisoned yourself.
This is what he had meant. She had been so mad at him when he first said that, so mad that he was telling her to forgive the monster that had murdered her mother. She thought he just didn't understand her pain. But now she knew this is what he had been trying to spare her from, the reason why he it was right she didn't kill Yon Rha.
"I just didn't care about anything anymore, "jing continued. "I slumped down on the floor next to a wall and waited…I thought about suicide again but I didn't have the energy even for that. So, I waited. I figured once the other guards came in and saw what I had done they would immediately kill me." He was so casual about stating how little his own life mattered to him.
"But then my brother found me" he said. "I was so surprised but they didn't know he was planning escape. I was the only one named by that prison rat. He managed to improvise our plan and use the prison riot to escape. He was all I had left in the world, the only person who could make me stand up after what I had been through. He didn't even question why I had killed those men or done it so brutally. We just went to work with our plan."
Katara was surprised. She asked, "You mean you never told you own brother what happened?"
jing shook his head. "He never liked Ning. He never was a social person to begin with; I might be the only person he's ever liked, besides Long Feng. So, he was jealous of her. He always said we only needed each other. What's more because he always hated the Fire Nation, he hated her for the pacifist ideals she held so close to her heart. She tried to be nice to him because he was my brother but he rejected her. He's never even asked what happened to her or why I never mention her anymore. I think he's relieved honestly."
Katara liked poli less and less the more she learned about him. Sokka always protected her and put her happiness first. She couldn't imagine if he acted like this. "That's awful."
"It hardly matters now" jing shrugged. "After that we found spare prison guard uniforms. We used our own clothes to make it look like some of the corpses I killed were our own so it would appear we had died in the fighting. We snuck out dressed as guards during the rioting completely unnoticed and the Boiling Rock's record for no escapes was secretly broken. We had some very hard years after that; we were basically wandering refugees. We got to see first-hand just how war-torn the rest of the Earth Kingdom was compared to the city. In our years of prosperity, we had almost forgotten. Eventually we found Long Feng, apparently after Azula took over the Dai Li, she had simply let him leave Ba Sing Se without incident. She did it to mock because she didn't think he was any kind of threat. After that we rebuilt the Dai Li. Some of Azula's agents came crawling back after she banished them but most of the current Dai Li are victims of the war we recruited.
We've dedicated ourselves to revenge on the Fire Nation and those who deposed Long Feng as Grand Secretariat and to rebuilding the Earth Kingdom by placing him at its head once more."
Katarra felt this was the one part that still didn't make any sense. "But why? Why is it so important to take over the Earth Kingdom?"
jing sounded confident in his answer. "After escaping the Boiling Rock I realized how in my years of happiness I had forgotten about the suffering of others caused by the war."
"But the war with the Fire Nation is over! How will starting a civil war help anyone?" Katara asked.
"Nothing is stopping a war like that from happening again," jing answered. "That war proved how pathetically weak the Earth Kingdom's military is compared to the Fire Nation. The Earth Kingdom's government is totally outdated and inefficient with the Earth King being nothing but an impotent figurehead."
"But that's Long Feng's fault!" Katara argued. "He kept the Earth King in the dark about the war,
about the Dai Li, about everything!"
"Oh please" jing scoffed. "Do you think it would have been so easy for him to do so if the system wasn't already set up that way? The Dai Li had been in control of the Earth Kingdom since Avatar Kyoshi founded them. The Earth King was groomed since birth to be a completely useless socialite. You should have seen Ba Sing Se before my master came to power. It was pathetic!"
"I saw it when he was in power" Katara countered. "Everyone was scared, people were spied on, brainwashed and oppressed! Long Feng was an evil dictator!"
"Those measures were the only possible way to maintain order," jing said as if he was quoting a drill manual. "Talk of the war would have caused instability."
"That's ridiculous!" Katara shouted. "Long Feng just didn't care about the war! He wouldn't even listen to our plan to invade on the Day of Black Sun!"
"Such and invasion would have required moving the majority of the military out of Ba Sing Se, leaving us completely destabilized and vulnerable."
"You mean it would have left Long Feng vulnerable! All he cares about is his own power!" "Long Feng is a great wise leader. Everything he does is for the good of the Earth Kingdom." Katara was furious now. "That's a lie! He brainwashed and murdered a 16-year-old boy!"
jing raised an eyebrow. "You mean Jet, that disturbed little psychopath? You of all people know how unstable he was. When you first met him, he was planning on murdering a village full of Earth Kingdom civilians. Killing him was little different than putting down a mad dog."
Katara still carried some resentment of Jet but that insult angered her. Jet's hands were certainly not clean but he had died trying to redeem himself in a way. "Is that what you really think or is that just what Long Feng told you to think?"
"I beg your pardon?" jing responded.
"Have you ever once tried to think for yourself since you started working for Long Feng?" Katara asked. "Or are you just as much of his puppet as the Earth King was?"
jing was angry now. "You don't know what you're talking about."
"Oh, come on!" Katara insisted. "Doesn't anything he's doing seem wrong to you?! You called Jet a psychopath, but how many civilians has this civil war killed?"
"That is unfortunate but unavoidable" jing responded. "In this monarchy there is no mechanism for establishing a more competent leader peacefully. War is the only way to replace the current government with a better one. Once we have won the Earth Kingdom will be under Long Feng's wise leadership. He will use his genius to transform the whole country, not just Ba Sing Se, into a modern, prosperous nation. War and poverty will be a thing of the past."
"You can't trust Long Feng!" She was practically begging jing to understand. "You'll never convince me of that," jing insisted. "My faith in him is unshakable."
Katara was determined to find some weakness in his armor. "Then why didn't you kill me?" As it always did this question made jing hesitate. "If Long Feng's orders are so perfect, why didn't you obey them? Why did you let me live?"
jing said nothing for a second then sighed in defeat. "I guess you were right before. I tried not to think about it. I never really think about Ning anymore anyway. But in that moment, you reminded me of her, if just for a second, and I pitied you."
"I knew it" Katara said.
"It doesn't matter though" jing interjected. "I still played my role in your kidnapping and your husband's death just as ordered. I will remain loyal to Long Feng."
Katara was frustrated with his stubbornness. But she had one other counter. "Then why are you bothering to talk to me right now? Why are you telling me so much about yourself?"
jing considered her for a moment before answering. He thought about how the plan was to keep her alive for the rest of her pregnancy then either take her baby from her and raise it for their own ends or to kill the both of them. And either way they were going to kill her.
"I guess you're just so pathetic it's hard not to pity you. Like how you can't help but hand a stray dog scrap even when you know it'll just come back for more." He turned around to leave.
"Jing stop!" Katara shouted. "You're just going to leave now?"
jing opened the door. "I've told you, my story. It's yours to figure out as you please. I have other matters to attend to." He took a step forward.
"Please wait jing!" she pleaded. He just barely stopped short. "You know what Long Feng's doing is wrong! Somewhere inside your heart you know! That's why you told me this; you wanted to see if someone would finally understand you and I do! You were right I can't understand the pain you've endured, the things I've suffered are nothing compared to it. But now I understand why you're the way you are. And I know you are a good person deep down."
"You're grasping at straws," jing replied. "None of that means I'll help you."
"Long Feng has no more reason to keep me alive," Katara said. "He's probably planning to kill me now. You have to know that."
jing tightened his grip on the door. He said nothing.
"For the sake of my and Aang's child I have to escape as soon as possible," she went on. "Please help me."
jing gritted his teeth as he held the door. He still refused to speak.
Katara had one last arrow in her quiver. "You said that Ning was a kind, gentle woman who believed that one day the nations would live in peace again. Is any of this what she would want? Would she be happy if she could see what you were doing?"
jing lifted his head. He didn't turn around. "You talk too much." He slammed the door behind him.
THAT day he was all confused, thinking about what she said "Would she be happy if she could see what you were doing? "
Jing went to bed thinking what is wrong with her and what is wrong with him and was suddenly interpreted by Poli "what are you doing? "
"What am i doing? i was just thinking about something. "Said Jing
"well get Your ass up and come with me Long Feng wants to discuss some plans about his army"
"okay lemme just drink some a cup of Sake "
"well you weren't always sake guy since when did you start drinking regularly "