[One-shot] The Metalbender's Insurrection (PGtE/Avatar)

[PoignardAzur]

I tried to be a humble woman. My entire career had been defined by the failures of others, and me not wanting to repeat them. I had seen way too many sneering faces, way too many nobles and clerks and officers caught up in their own self-importance, even among my own ranks, to ignore the crushing price of hubris. The moment I was confident in my victory, the moment I started acting like it was owed to me, I would lose everything.

Still, seeing the forces arrayed around me, huddling in backstreets and sitting on rooftops, soldiers and rebels, earthbenders and ordinary men, traitors and patriots, all waiting for me to speak... Well, it was hard not to feel proud.

I should hurry. There was no way to hide a gathering of so many people. The loyalist Dai Li agents had probably already started mobilizing. The speech would have to be short. I glanced at Hakram, who gave me a quick nod. Our forces were ready.

"I could tell you pretty lies." As the words escaped my mouth, it occurred to me I should probably have prepared this speech in advance. Oh well.

"I could tell you that today marks the beginning of a new age, of power and glory to the Earth Kingdom."

The tension in the crowd was palpable. Bodies were pressing towards my podium, people on rooftops were leaning forward. I tried not to wince as I saw someone falling off into the crowd below.

"But you're not here because you want a pretty story. You've felt the price of this war. Your brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers sent away, never to return, all while the King feasts in his palace and tells you everything is fine. You being told that the Kingdom is triumphant, and having to stay silent about your dead friends and family, lest the Dai Li arrest you."

Faces in the crowd scowled and spit. The pain I shared with them was old and ran deep.

"I can't promise you victory over the Fire Nation. I can't even promise you independence. You all know of my military victories, some of you participated in them. But winning on the battlefield isn't enough to win a war. The Fire Nation has better training, more wealth, and more equipment than us. The Avatar is dead. For all that our King brags about our victories on the battlefield, the truth is our armies are in the last stage of getting crushed by the enemy."

Yeah, I really should have rehearsed this. The crowd looked about as tense as an elephant-bear in front of a mouse.

"So I can't promise you glorious victory. We may have it in time, but not today. What I can promise you is justice. A leader who cares, who has been on the battlefield and seen the cost of this war. A leader who knows what it takes to win a war, and won't just send army after army into a slaughterhouse for the sake of appearances. A bureaucracy that listens to its people, and doesn't silence everyone who dares to complain that their father was sent to their death."

"We may fight for victory, one day." This was the dangerous part. I was acutely aware of the Fire Nation plants in the crowd, watching me. I had to strike a delicate balance, allude to a future war with the Fire Nation, while not saying anything that couldn't be explained to the Fire Lord. "But today, we fight for survival. Today, we fight against pointlessness, against blind leadership, against a King who can't even see us from his golden palace. Today, we live to fight another day!"

With that, the crowd erupted into cheers. Soldiers struck spears against armors, earthbenders shook the ground. My companions rallied around me, and the Penitent Thieves formed around us as we moved forward.

"Good work," Hakram said.

I nodded. "Now comes the easy part."

---

As the sounds of war echoed around me once more, I took a deep breath.

The doors to the Earth King's chamber stood before me. This was my third time seeing them, and still they impressed me. The doors were a work of art, taller than most houses in Bah Sing Se and finely decorated in gold and jade. Too bad I was about to smash them.

In theory, the chamber was impregnable. The doors, walls, and ceiling were made of pure steel. No earthbender or firebender could break them.

In practice, such limitations didn't apply to me.

I put all my weight in the punch, and felt the metal bend away. I opened my eyes. There was a dent in the door, large enough to put a cabbage in. Not bad. I took another breath, and started punching away.

The fight was still raging throughout the palace. The Fire Nation's archer squads had taken the exterior walls, and could probably hold them for weeks if need be, but inside the palace the combat raged between my rebels and the palace guard loyalists. The guards were severely outnumbered, but most of them were earthbenders, and we were inside a huge building of stone. The guards were making barricade after barricade, and fiercely defending choke points.

I tried to put the fighting out of my mind, and focused on metalbending the door. Around me, I could feel the Penitent Thieves standing ready. Their steel bracers, once a reminder of the time I'd threaten to cut their hands under a minecart, were now a symbol of pride, but from the beginning they'd been intended as an easy way to keep track of them. I had been worried about assassination, then, but now the feeling of their presence around me was reassuring, a reminder that that my personal guard was keeping me safe.

My final punch blasted the doors away, and we entered the chamber. Long Feng was there, sneering, an assistant at his side. Behind him was the king and his bear. Of the two, it was hard to say who looked the more confused. A circle of Dai Li agents protected them.

"Your Majesty. I'd like to request an audience."

"I... uh. Audience denied," the King replied.

I chuckled. I actually really liked the man. Too bad I was going to have to kill him.

"Katherine Stone. You dare barge in here, and make a mockery of this sacred chamber?" Grand Secretariat Long Feng sneered. "I knew I should never have trusted you. You were always a low-life traitor, no matter how many battles you won."

I rolled my eyes, and strolled forward. Behind me, the Penitent Thieves fanned out. I could feel the presence of a steel dagger in the rafters above. Ah, when would they learn? I cast a quick glance behind me, and got a nod in response.

As I moved forward, the assassin jumped from his perch above, knife in hand. His fall was interrupted halfway with a sickening crunching sound, the assassin hanging awkwardly in the air, his muscles tetanized. The man had the look of someone who'd just tried to knife the Lady of Blades and now found himself paralyzed two paces in front of her. Before he could even try to speak or move, his neck turned abruptly with another disgusting snapping noise, and the man fell, limp.

Behind him, Indrani winked at me. Yeah, there was a reason I'd waited until the full moon for this assault.

Long Feng had the look of a man who'd really thought he could pull a fast one on the Lady of Blades and was just proven wrong.

"This isn't over," he snarled. "If you think the King's own guard is going to go down without a fight, you are in for a rude awakening."

The thing is, I really wanted to monologue at him. To take the years of veiled or overt insults, of incompetence and greed and short-sighted repression, and throw them back in his face. Every time I'd made a speech to my followers raging against the King, the Grand Secretariat had been the one I thought of. There was still a part of me that felt that, if I made a speech that was eloquent enough, maybe he'd finally realize how shitty his rule had been, how self-destructive and pointless his decisions, that he'd realize he deserved to lose.

But I had seen too many aristocrats do the monologue thing, sometimes giving away vital information for no reason, to engage in it. I wouldn't gain anything from it, Long Feng would still be the same power-hungry bastard, and I'd waste precious time in the process. Stupid risks were just that, stupid.

Instead, I snapped my fingers.

Long Feng's assistant moved forward and, in a fluid motion, put a dagger to his throat.

Oh spirits, how I loved teamwork.

"Vivienne." the Grand Secretariat's voice was tightly controlled. "I expected treachery from many, but not from you."

"Oh shut up," Vivienne hissed. "You know what you've done."

"Tell your Dai Li agents to stand down." I ordered. "Also, Dai Li agents, if he tells you something else, keep in mind you're surrounded, and I know the secret exits of this room."

Long Feng hesitated. Yeah, he knew he had nothing to lose. He was dead if he surrendered. I nodded at Vivienne. Despite her earlier words, she looked somewhat hesitant. Still, her hand was steady as she slit the spymaster's throat.

The Dai Li looked torn. Finally, one of them raised his hands in surrender, and like dominoes, the others followed suit.

"Good. Agents, here are my terms. Spread out throughout the palace, and tell the guards the Grand Secretariat is dead, and I have the King in my custody. I am in a room only I can open and close, so any rescue attempts will be pointless. Everybody in the Kingdom knows I'm good for my word. There will be no repercussions against anyone who runs away or surrenders. Most of them will even get to keep their posts. But if anybody is still fighting by sunrise?" I looked at each of them in turn, making sure they took in the weight of my next words. "I'll bring this fucking palace down on their head."

I could feel the collective impact of these words on the Dai Li. Some of them exhaled, one other had a nervous chuckle. Good. They were cowed.

"Now go. Spread the word, and there will be no repercussions against you either. You can disappear, and I won't hunt you down." Mostly because I already had plants in their ranks, and I wanted them to feel safe joining insurrection movements so I'd know where the next threat would come from. But playing up the 'gracious warlord' angle didn't hurt.

The Dai Li scattered, some leaving through the secret exits, some scuttling for the door behind me.

Vivienne was still looking at Long Feng's corpse.

"You okay?" I asked. I was pretty sure this was her first kill.

"I'm fine," she snapped. She wasn't looking me in the eye. "I should make sure the Dai Li don't do anything stupid." She left the room.

"She'll be fine," Indrani told me. "I've been there too. Pretty big difference between knowing about war in the abstract, and getting your hands dirty."

I nodded absentmindedly. Two soldiers dragged Long Feng's body out of the room. "How's the fight outside going?"

"Well, Juniper just sent word. Hakram and Masego are doing fine, apparently. Now that they've got the walls, they're taking it slow, limiting casualties. We're really banking on them collapsing once they learn about Long Feng."

"They will."

Vivienne had been sabotaging the palace's bureaucracy for months now, making sure most of the guards didn't get paid on time. Some of them hadn't been paid at all in over a month. Meanwhile, Hakram had been working extra hard to make sure that my own soldiers were always paid on schedule, and that they made it known loudly. This, combined with the current political climate in the city, the Avatar publicly going against the Grand Secretariat, the recent losses against the Fire Nation, and the poor state of the Kingdom's overall finances, meant the guards weren't sure their pay would come even if they held out long enough for reinforcements to arrive.

For all we liked to talk about loyalty to the Kingdom, soldiers were loyal to their purse first and foremost. Patriotism didn't put a roof over your head or feed your family.

"He was right, you know." The King spoke up. I turned towards him. "We shouldn't have trusted you."

I shrugged. "Well, 'we' is a bit of an overstatement. You never had as much of a say in these decisions as you thought you did," I said, not unkindly.

"What's going to happen to me now?" he asked. Spirits damned him, this man was a big puppy.

"I'm afraid this is the end for you, Your Majesty." I gave him an apologetic shrug. "We'll have a show trial, and you will be publicly hanged. I wish it didn't have to be this way, but."

I had seriously considered faking his death, or arranging to have "the Avatar" free him, or having him publically exiled, but the risks were too damned great. Even if he swore to give up power and... what, travel the world alone with his bear, somehow? He'd just get snatched up by a rival general and be used as a puppet yet again, destabilizing my new Kingdom. Killing him was the only option. At least we'd release his bear into the wilds.

"I guess I understand. You need me out of the way. I do have to ask, do you regret any of it? Lying to me? Manipulating me? Spreading lies about me to the people?"

"Nope," I lied. "Everyone in the court was doing it too. The difference is, everything I did, I did for the people, not for some shallow fucking political games."

"Even betraying us to the Fire Nation?"

"See, this right there?" I said. "This is why we could never work together. You're just too bad at politics. This isn't a question where I can give you a good answer. No, I did not betray us to the Fire Nation. And if I had, I wouldn't discuss the specifics with you in a room that's specifically designed to help the Dai Li spy on you."

"Long Feng told me you trained with them," the King replied, glancing at the trail of blood on the floor. "I don't think he was lying about that?"

"It's public knowledge," I said. "And no, I don't regret my actions, even insofar as they benefitted the Fire Nation. I do want the Kingdom to be stronger in the long run, but we're not going to accomplish that by throwing away army after army at them. This war has to stop. I don't know if it will resume one day, but if it does, it won't be the same war we're waging today, and we'll at least be ready for it."

The King shrugged. "I suppose I'll never know."

---

After many hours of fighting, it was finally over. The King was in a secure cell only I could open, the palace guards had surrendered, the most dangerous Dai Li had been arrested and the others dispersed, the riots had ended. Tomorrow, there would have to be a big speech, and distributions of grain to appease the people. I would need to open communication channels with the generals who weren't already onboard, disband the Joo Dees, organize the King's trial, start diplomatic communications with the Fire Nation, and a thousand other tasks over the coming weeks.

I would have to watch out for traitors, rivals, counter-coups, the Avatar, and maybe treachery from the Fire Nation. These would be the most dangerous weeks of my life.

But right now, the fighting was finally over. After years of hard work, of fending off bandits and humiliating Fire Nation armies and being looked down on by the Earth Court despite it all, I'd finally won.

Now I got to monologue.

The Crystal Catacombs were an expansive network of caves and tunnels running beneath the Royal Palace. This specific section of the catacombs was used as a prison, with rows of metal boxes set in the walls, lit only by the glowing crystals of the cave.

Today, all of the cells in this arm of the complex were empty, except for one.

Princess Azula was glowering at me from behind bars. Even in these conditions, she was still the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. If anything, her pale skin was complemented by the low green light.

"Well, what do you know? You're still alive, Katherine. I wonder for how long."

I smiled. "You're just mad that I won. You thought you were so much better than me at this game, you barely even noticed me."

"I will admit I was surprised by the cunning you displayed," Azula replied. "You managed to place the Avatar in my way just in time to stop my coup and win the King's trust. I don't think that timing is as accidental as you pretend. And you managed to kill him and pin his death on my brother, in a way that gave you credit with both factions. I honestly have no idea how the Avatar could be foolish enough for your plan to work."

That's because the Avatar isn't dead. That was another delicate balance to walk. Aang probably wasn't very happy with me right now.

I shrugged. "I had good teachers." Whoever Lady Malicia really was, she understood court intrigue on a level that honestly scared me.

Azula's eyes narrowed. "I see. You know, I could never figure out who your patrons in the Fire Nation were." Yeah, join the club. "At first I thought you were just lucky, but now...
They must be quite cunning, to hand such a victory to you."

"Azula, I know you're trying to bait me, but still, that attitude? That's why you lost. Everything you were born into, I fought for. You think that means my talents are somehow less valuable than yours. Do you think I can't just make my own plans, my own allies, that I can't play politics because I wasn't born powerful?"

The princess sneered. "Your methods certainly betray your origins. For all that your plans have a kind of cleverness to them, they're still vulgar and unrefined. You left much to chance in our confrontation."

"And yet, you're on the cramped side of these bars. I guess I have my way with people."

"Your speeches may appeal to the unwashed masses, but they betray a deep misunderstanding of rhetoric."

"Yup. I don't talk good to people. I don't tell them sweet nothings. Because that's the one thing you miss, you and all the idiots in the Earth Court. That some things matter. That it's not enough to find the perfect way to explain to people why it's good and proper for them to go hungry. Their belly is still louder, no matter how good your rhetoric is. They don't listen to me because I threaten them, or because I'm just that good at finding the perfect argument to sway them. They listen to me because, at the end of the day, I deliver what I promised and no-one else will."

"What good will that do to you, when the Earth Generals arrive? You don't know how to play this game. They know you're a pawn of the Fire Nation. And they'll never accept someone who's half Water Tribe as their queen. You'll need my help to cow them."

"I don't know, I like my chances."

Azula looked at me again. Spirits, she was beautiful, especially when she did the suspicious glare thing.

"You know something."

I handed her the scroll. She read through it, and let out a small gasp.

"You're bluffing. He... You publically arrested me. The Fire Lord would never stand for that."

"Guess politics are more important to him, huh?"

"He's actually going to negotiate with you?"

"Everything he wants from the Earth Kingdom, I can give him. And even if he thinks he can win the war, he knows I can make it very costly for him. I mean, not to brag, but I did take out half his fleet already."

Azula looked... sincerely devastated, huh. That wasn't a look I'd thought I'd ever see on her. In that moment, I did kind of see the resemblance to Prince Zuko.
I'd thought I would twist the knife a bit more, make a few references to Zuko getting welcomed back with prestige now that he'd "slain" the Avatar, but honestly? I wasn't even tempted. It just felt cruel, even though Azula was the last person I'd ever thought I could have empathy for.

"Hey," I said. Azula looked back at me. "I was serious earlier. This isn't just a game. These people's lives matter, and we have a responsibility to do what's best for them. It doesn't matter which of us gets to hold the keys to the Earth Kingdom, as long as the slaughter stops and we get to a stage where..." Azula was glaring at me, tears in her eyes. My words were falling on deaf ears, weren't they?

"Anyhow." I struck the door, and metalbended the lock open. "You're free to go. The guards will escort you to your room. You can either take a ship back to the Fire Nation, or wait here for your father to arrive. Obviously, I don't recommend you go into the city alone, for your own safety. People remember your face."

With these eloquent words, I left the cavern. There was a long day ahead of me.

---

Aang, Katara, Toph and also Sokka were sitting around a fire, quiet. Appa was snoring loudly, and they all felt exhausted, yet nobody felt like going to sleep.

They had trusted Katherine.

They'd thought that her ideals, her speeches meant something. That she really believed in the Earth Kingdom. They'd played right into her hands, to the point Aang had almost gotten killed by the Fire Prince. Now his Avatar state was locked away, Katherine was about to become the Queen of Blades, and the King, an innocent man, was about to get executed. It all felt somewhat hopeless.

Toph jolted up. "Incoming." They all turned, and saw an old man, slowly making his way towards them. He had clothes marking him as a Ba Sing Se merchant, but something in the way he walked suggested an old soldier.

As the old man reached the fire, Aang, Katara and Sokka recognized him. It was General Iroh.

"Hello, children. We have much to discuss."

---

---

An idea I had rolling in my head for a while. Turns out a lot of plot points and worldbuilding bits of PGtE map pretty well to Avatar!

AOOO link: The Metalbender's Insurrection - NarrateurDuChaos - A Practical Guide to Evil - erraticerrata [Archive of Our Own]

 

[Reader007]

Looking forward to seeing how this plays out.