It was hard for Long Feng to determine how he should feel. He had lost his base at Lake Laogai and all of the equipment for his rehabilitation project. On that account, he was livid, both at the Gaang and at Jet. He couldn't fathom why Jet was able to break free of the condition and that turn of events was key to the loss. For such a grandiose failure, at times the Dai Li head thought that Jet wasn't worth keeping alive.
On the other hand, the Gaang's rush to escape due to Longshot and Smellerbee's urging had provided a rare opportunity. The Dai Li was eventually able to subdue and capture all of the members of the Freedom Fighters that were present. Longshot and Smellerbee had to be restrained and were going to be kept under lock and key until a replacement for Lake Laogai could be created.
With Jet having broken through once before, there wasn't going to be any negotiation for his friends' safety. Jet was severely injuried, but his injuries wouldn't be fatal if quickly and properly treated. It was hard for healing to be done on an internal injury, but Long Feng knew what he had done, so it wasn't hard for him to identify how to preserve such a rare specimen.
The Joo Dees had proven to be too incompetent to perform the simple task of keeping the Gaang under control and thus there wasn't any intention of replenishing their numbers. In fact, doing so would more than likely blow his cover.
He needed to make sure to not draw suspicion to himself until he had the replacements to Lake Laogai. Not just one, but several. He could control the entire world through such a means. Disrupt trust in the leaders and contribute toward having selected pawns be elected in their place. He wouldn't take over for Kuei, but would attend all the meetings of all rulers to determine what would happen.
At that point, he could use the Gaang's prior disregard for law into an act they will learn to regret. At the same time, it wouldn't hurt to put a mole in their group, someone to strike at them from the inside. Jet provided the perfect opportunity, he just needed to set up a good way to alleviate any lingering suspicions about the prior conditioning.
He couldn't risk blowing his cover by having Jet cross paths with the Gaang while he was being 'pursued' by the Dai Li. So he was going to let Jet go after he recovered enough to move, even if his injuries weren't fully healed. But only after showing that Lake Laogai's destruction doesn't mean that the condition goes away.
However, this means that he had to wait til Jet regained consciousness. He might now what he had done, but there was no significant way to saying how a body would respond. Long Feng despised having to wait on someone for him to proceed.
Seeing Jet start to stir, Long Feng would calmly grin as he stands at the doorway with his arms behind his back. "You certainly took your time waking up Jet." He stated calmly as he slowly makes his way over toward the bed.
Jet wished he could say that the sight of Long Feng filled him with nothing but rage instead of this terror that crawled beneath his skin before his mind had fully caught up. Rage would have been easier. His pulse lurched violently, and every muscle in his body tightened until the stitches across his chest protested. His breathing became shallow despite every effort to steady it. He hated that reaction. He hated that Long Feng had managed to condition it into him and he refused to let it show. Jet held the older man's gaze without answering. The silence stretched between them, taut as a drawn bowstring. His jaw clenched hard enough to ache, but he gave Long Feng nothing.
His body, however, betrayed him anyway.
His hands trembled almost imperceptibly against the blankets from the adrenaline flooding his system. Every instinct screamed at him to move, to fight, to put as much distance between himself and the man crossing the room as possible, but he couldn't. The attempt to push himself upright ended almost as soon as it began. Fire erupted in his chest, forcing a sharp breath through gritted teeth as dizziness washed over him. He braced one hand against the mattress until the room stopped tilting, refusing to let the pain draw so much as a groan from him.
That alone told him everything he needed to know. He was in no condition to escape and that realization twisted his stomach. Jet had spent years surviving impossible situations by relying on speed, instinct, and the certainty that he could always run if he had to. Now his own body had become another prison.
His eyes flickered briefly toward the doorway, then the windows, measuring distances and found them all too far and too exposed for someone without any weapons. His attention settled back on Long Feng, and he searched the man's face for some clue as to why he was still alive. Long Feng was not a merciful man. Mercy implied compassion, and Jet had seen firsthand how little of that existed beneath the polished veneer of Ba Sing Se's Grand Secretariat. If he had been spared, it had not been out of kindness.
Which meant he was useful, another things to twist his stomach tighter.
His memories of Lake Laogai flooded back with nauseating clarity. He remembered the endless repetition, the commands spoken until they burrowed beneath conscious thought. He remembered losing hours, then days, unable to tell where his own mind ended and Long Feng's orders began. Worst of all, he remembered becoming aware that he had broken free only because something inside him had refused to disappear completely. But breaking free once did not mean he was free forever, and that uncertainty was its own kind of torture. Jet no longer knew whether every thought belonged to him. He no longer trusted the quiet spaces in his own mind.
How many commands were still waiting? How many words could reduce him to a puppet again?
His fingernails dug into his palms until fresh crescents formed. The sting anchored him, reminding him that pain was real. Pain belonged to him. Pain meant he could still tell where he ended and the conditioning began. For now. His thoughts drifted to Smellerbee and Longshot. The memory of the catacombs surfaced in fragments. He remembered seeing them. He remembered them shouting. After that, everything dissolved into agony and darkness. He had no idea whether they had escaped and uncertainty gnawed at him far more viciously than his own injuries.
If Long Feng had them...
Jet forced himself to stop. He could not afford to think like that. He’d learned enough about the Dai Li to know that fear was another tool. They thrived on uncertainty because uncertainty made people desperate, and desperate people made mistakes. He wouldn’t give Long Feng that satisfaction. Not again.
Jet drew a slow, painful breath through his nose and let it out just as carefully. The movement pulled at every bandage wrapped around his torso, but it steadied the frantic rhythm of his heart enough for him to think. He was injured. He was trapped. He was almost certainly still carrying commands buried somewhere inside his own mind. None of those things meant he had surrendered.
“So,” he said quietly, the corner of his mouth twisting into the ghost of a bitter smirk. “You couldn't stand the thought of letting me die before you got another chance to crawl around in my head.” He held Long Feng's gaze without blinking.
Though the gestures could be minute, it still demonstrated weakness to Long Feng. Nothing more than cracks in a boulder. All it would take would be weathering and eating away at that boulder before it was reduced to mere pebbles. Those pebbles could be used however he wanted to with a lot greater ease. Then he would just have to apply the right molding to capture those pebbles.
The incident at Lake Laogai was only akin to the molding being broken like the boulder had been broken, but with a natural molding. All that he had to do was make sure that the molding was impenetrable. Though with the manner of molding being mental, it was hard to say that it was ever going to be that set. In a controlled environment, it was easy to make it seem like such a thing could be accomplished.
It was significant difference to the real world where there could be a lot of separate interference that could gradually wear away at the molding.
Long Feng didn't have anything to be afraid of Jet for, though his attitude was just another reminder of how he had broken through his control once. It was a situation that he would greatly prefer to avoid having recur.
"As much as I would prefer to have just let you die for proving to be worse than useless. You are just barely worth more to me alive than you are dead. Plus, there is plenty of insurance to make sure that my orders have your complete attention." With him most likely being assumed dead, it didn't mean that anyone was going to be looking for him and with Longshot and Smellerbee captured, he had leverage.
"Or would you prefer to be dead? I already have a good alternative, just needs some time to get them in line." He would prefer not to have a damaged tool, but until he could get a replacement Laogai up and operational, it was out of his hands, much to his ire.
