A/N: Written for The Wavesinger for Trick or Treat 2016; November hit like a hurricane and I forgot to crosspost when authors were revealed.
Fire
There is much to like about the Fire Nation. Kyoshi's firebending teacher respects her but does not let her status soften his criticism. When she has exhausted herself for the day, there is a theater in town – fancier and larger than the tiny one in her village, and without the hollow floors, but a theater all the same. Kyoshi likes the fast pace of the dancers, how they use their feet as extensively as their arms (unlike the dances she learned growing up), and the extraordinary special effects of the plays unlike anything she has seen before.
Perhaps the food is too spicy, and there is too much meat in it and not near enough fish, but these are minor things.
The firebending is easier some days than others. With the earth, Kyoshi has always had to concentrate on what was beneath her, away from her, and to turn that same exacting focus to the precise movement of her breath and the beating of her pulse is strange. Once she starts to master this, however, she excels, and the flames come easy and controlled.
In some ways, the fire is like the earth, and in some ways, like the opposite. Instead of stubborn, it is greedy and all-consuming. Instead of a level head, it demands passion, which is so easy to feel once she has figured out how to summon sparks and blazes. Instead of endurance and waiting, it demands aggression and stamina. At the same time, the sharp control and the strength she has honed over years of earthbending mean that she doesn't accidentally set things on fire very often, and she needs far less burn treatments than most of the other new firebenders.
As she studies, she makes friends with her fellow students, or at least the ones who are her age. They know she is from the Earth Kingdom, but not that she is the Avatar; she lets them draw the conclusions they will. They go with her to the theater and steer her towards the best street vendors, though most of them quickly learn not to go to her for advice:
"Ask him out, already."
"Tell your parents that their harassing you about your progress is only making it more difficult for you to learn."
"Then save some money up and go travel, if that's what you want – if you like cities, I recommend Omashu over Ba Sing Se, it's far more interesting, though the Half-Moon Peninsula has the best scenery and culture."
"Half the time," her friend Lin tells her, "we don't want advice when we ask for it, we want sympathy. Azon knows he can travel, he just feels held back by his family; he was looking for 'you should do it anyway', not an interrogation on his itinerary."
"Well, at least he seems to be planning it now," Kyoshi remarks. And she's persuaded him to come by her home peninsula. "In any case: I understand that you people don't want real answers. It's still annoying."
Lin laughs, pretty and high, hiding it behind her sleeve. All of her friends do that, here, particularly the ones who wear nice clothes and speak in a way that belies some education. They used to stare at her when she would laugh loud and outright, tipping her head back rather than hiding her mouth. Now, it seems, they must be used to it, just as she no longer wonders what they are hiding from her when they smile or take sips of alcohol from behind fans and sleeves.
"Oh," Lin says when she's done with her giggles. "Can we stop by Jade Street, first? My parents asked me to update our registry."
"Registry?"
"You know, the family registry...?"
And that is how Kyoshi first discovers the wheels of the Fire Nation bureaucracy.
There's paperwork to be done when one moves, when one marries, when one adopts or has children, when one does nearly any sort of business, when one commits any crime, even when one dies. Back home, the village elders had kept vague records of who lived with who, updated by village gossip, and the cities were only more organized by necessity.
Here, there's a national postal system, not an informal network of courier companies. How little Lin has to pay to send a letter to her cousin by hawk is astonishing. So too is the apparent country-wide co-ordination of police: the wanted posters in town all bear official seals and standard language, instead of being pasted up by anyone willing to pay for a bounty.
Perhaps her nation could use some more of this, Kyoshi thinks. She knows how little authority officials can have in some of the more remote corners of the Earth Kingdom, in terms of controlling crime, and everyone knows that corrupt officials are more common than honest ones because nobody (or nobody honest) checks in on them.
What if someone did? What if there were police to keep in check the petty warlords before they tried to carve a chunk of the kingdom out? What if there were people who actually made sure that taxes were collected, services distributed, and crime driven down? It works so well here. The people are orderly, and Lin grumbles about her taxes but pays the correct amount anyway.
To dye a tree, start from the roots, one of the elders liked to say. Well, Ba Sing Se is the root of the Earth Kingdom, and Kyoshi has seen for herself how the laziness of the government wells up there. What if she could make it work better for everyone – for the king to rule, for the government to work, for the people to live their lives in prosperity? What if she could just bring a bit more order to the whole thing?
She is the Avatar, of course, and not the ruler of the Earth Kingdom herself. But perhaps someday, when she is a fully realized Avatar, when the King begs her to help him with a rebellion or a snarl among the endlessly-bickering nobles, she will have the chance to convince him to put forth a better system for all the provinces to copy.
Air
Kyoshi spends the first day of her stay in the air temple with such a headache that they have to postpone the welcoming ceremony for her. This, she thinks, does not bode well, and it doesn't.
The temple itself is nice. Kyoshi doesn't need a soft bed to sleep on, and while most of the food is bland, the fruits are delicious as long as one guards them from the lemurs. It is strange to be surrounded by only women, but she soon gets used to it, and the girls are constantly begging her for stories and trying to offer her advice. And the environment is beautiful; this may be a place for the airbenders, but the pulse of the earth is strong here, too.
Which, unfortunately, doesn't help Kyoshi that much.
Airbending is so strange for her. She has to unlearn everything, it seems like. Don't stand still like a tree, her teachers tell her, and relax your stance. Move, be open, float rather than stomp. It is three months before Kyoshi produces her first puff of air, and she improves only very slowly.
She doesn't know how to let go of the earth she clings to by instinct now. She doesn't know how to let the bending come to her rather than forcing it through her will. She doesn't know how to move in the floating, graceful movements of her teachers, and imitating them only makes her aware of her height for the first time in years by how awkward she feels.
Still, she has to learn this, so she buckles down. She goes through the movements they teach her over and over, like memorizing her childhood dances. She attends meditation morning and evening and tries to connect to the sky rather than the earth (though her teachers say she ought to connect with nothing at all – she still isn't sure what that means).
And when she can't take any more for one day, she goes out wandering the sheer cliffs of the mountains. She follows the lemurs and the bison and the other strange creatures, and takes in the beautiful solitude of the sky and the mist before her.
After her first year, she's made frustratingly little progress. Well, little to her – the children are amazed at her learning speed, even though all of them are far more advanced than she is. They ask her how she can pick things up so fast, and she can only reply truthfully that she's had experience with learning new elements.
For the most part, the day-to-day life of the temple doesn't change much. Meditation, chores, lessons, interrupted only occasionally by holidays. Like the autumn solstice, when many traveling families stop by to visit, and like the New Year.
In the lead up to the end of the year, things change. Family after family starts to arrive, bring food and trinkets, making the whole place alive. Meanwhile, everybody (including some of the of the guests) is frantically cleaning every inch of the temple. It's something of an impossible task, given how much the bison shed and given the number of children, but they sure put effort into it.
The festivities themselves are full of pastries and sweets from every corner of the globe. The children gather to watch as one young boy shows off a series of tops from the Fire Nation, and then they compete to see who can keep them all spinning at once for the longest time.
So many people have brought instruments, and while the Air Nomads may not eat meat, that doesn't mean they can't enjoy a good drink. Kyoshi wins some smiles when she waters down an overly bitter rice wine that someone has brought with litchi juice until it actually tastes good. Everybody here must know who she is – she's almost the only one not wearing yellow or orange, but the dull green of her traveling clothes – but they treat her normally all the same.
One of the families enjoying the rice wine with her has been spending time in the Earth Kingdom lately, learning to play different styles of music. They get to talking about it, and then a girl who lives at the temple wanders over from the crowd of dancers, hears the talk, somehow remembers a story Kyoshi must have told a year ago that mentioned her village dances, and begs Kyoshi to show them.
Well, what the heck. The family has learned a popular folk tune that she still remembers the dance for; all she has to do is fetch the fans she still has, presents from her older brother that she's barely looked at since she left the warm weather of the Fire Nation.
The song is unseasonal; it's a melody about watching spring cherry blossoms. Kyoshi tucks one fan into her belt and pulls her hands back into her sleeves, then positions her feet just so and bends her knees in a way that is now a little uncomfortable.
It's not like the Air Nomad dances. She slides each foot back one at a time as her arms shift and sleeves flutter, bobbing down on each knee until her legs threaten to collapse. The feel of each rib of the fan opening beneath her hands is satisfying: one, two, then the whole thing at once so she can spin it from one hand to the other.
It's then that she gets the idea, passing the fan back and forth with smooth spins before she claps it to her shoulder and extends it in a wave.
A few days later she goes through her normal exercises with a fan in each hand. The teachers pick up on her idea immediately and help her focus her energies like they do through their glider-staves. Somehow, it works; the movements don't come to her naturally, but she learns to circle like an airbender, moving on a shuffling half-tiptoe like a dancer, swinging her fans until the air comes with her.
Later, she thinks after a good day, she must replace them with something sturdier, like iron war fans. Something that can stand up to earthbending, that won't catch fire when she bends that, and won't threaten to tatter in the strong gusts.
The fans let her batter her practice targets with harsh winds, cool her tea with soft breezes, help her dodge and whirl through defensive exercises until she forgets to think like an earthbender. About the only thing they can't do is let her fly like a glider, but that's no great loss. Kyoshi isn't quite prepared to let go of the earth so wholly just yet.
Water
Kyoshi spends the first two years of her waterbending study with the Southern Water Tribe. There are many strange things about it – the persistent chill even in summer, the feel of ice constantly underfoot, the lack of vegetables in most seasons – but the people are gracious and friendly to her.
The first day of her training, a man only slightly younger than her accidentally throws a bucketful of water in her face instead of at his target, and then he freezes it when he tries to remove it. Thankfully, Kyoshi can break out her firebending, and the man apologizes over and over before she even gets his name – Tadda. Despite the mishap, they become friends.
He helps her navigate the crowded streets of the city when they have spare time. Kyoshi likes the docks, best, where they can see the coming and goings of ships like the one she arrived on, and even better are the paths that lead to the open beaches where they can sit and watch the waves. It's familiar, and soon Kyoshi starts to study the patterns in new ways, learning how to apply it to her waterbending.
Her teacher expects that waterbending will be hard for her, but in truth, it is not nearly as difficult to grasp as airbending. Perhaps it is because she grew up in a sea village, where she played in the waves and practiced her newfound earthbending on the sand. She doesn't have the knack for it like the fabled sandbenders, but the way the water feels in her hands is surprisingly close to the way the grains of sand, slipping past each other, moved as she struggled to control them.
Ice, too, proves relatively easy for her. Solid, but compressible, like the earth, though far more fragile and not so resisting. She masters the transition between states – solid, liquid, floating mist – almost at once, because it feels like just another application of firebending.
She and Tadda constantly spur each other onward to better skill, and after two years, their teacher announces that they will be part of a group sent on a cultural exchange with the sister tribe to the far north. There they will study the northern style and bring what they know to the people there.
Tadda is ecstatic. His sister, on hearing the news, immediately drags Kyoshi out shopping for a new coat that actually fits her. "It will be winter by the time you get there, and you'll have to go outside training," she says. It's easier said than done, especially given the state of Kyoshi's wallet.
Still, when they arrive to the north weeks later, Kyoshi stands by Tadda in a proper coat, long enough to hit her boots, to watch as they approach the elegant, gleaming city. Everything about it feels more polished, less homely than the south, and it's even more closely crowded.
It's at the welcoming ceremony that night that she first feels discomfited, because every bender that performs for them, every speaker, most of the people sitting at the high tables – they are all men. In the south, things were skewed in a way she wasn't quite used to, but here... this isn't an Air Temple. Where are the women?
When they start their new training, the master wants her to go off to the healer's lodge with the other women learning waterbending. She flatly refuses, pointing out that she has already tried it (and been terrible at it, though she doesn't say) and that as the Avatar she needs to learn what he will teach.
Tadda later begs her to try it, saying that it might be useful, though she knows he finds the loud arguments uncomfortable. "Then why doesn't everyone learn it?" she asks. "Why can't your warriors heal each other in the middle of battle?"
Several days later, either Tadda has decided that she has a point, or the continued arguing has made him too anxious, because he says that he will come with her. When they enter, the girls stare first at him, then slowly turn towards Kyoshi, who has to bend nearly double to get in and out of the lodge. With a few days, though, the novelty has worn off for them, and though some of the other men try to make fun of him for it at first, Tadda continues to walk with her to the classes.
They end up spending half days in the healing classes for the rest of their stay. Kyoshi will never be a proper healer, but the principles are not completely alien to her. The flow of energy is the flow of breath in firebending, in airbending, in earthbending. She finally picks up enough to, perhaps, be useful in an emergency, if only to get to someone who knows what they are doing.
A week in, after class, a young girl hangs around to chat with her. It's nothing very important, and Tadda goes ahead without her. Kyoshi is about to make her excuses and follow him when the girl looks around at the empty room and says, her words in a rush: "I know you're probably very busy, but if you have time, could you teach me a little bit of real waterbending? There are these guys in the market – it's not like I can leave the stall when they come – they scare me so much, I'm afraid they're going to follow me, I just want to be able to get away if I have to."
Kyoshi knows this story. She's been the one to stop harassment in the marketplace, petty criminals, obnoxious sailors. She agrees to help, and they start secret moonlit lessons. Word spreads, and soon half the healer class is coming to her. When Kyoshi leaves, things end as quietly as they began, but at least the women can defend themselves.
It's not enough to fight off a single drunk sailor, Kyoshi thinks as they drift south past the latitude of her home peninsula. Not everyone can be a waterbender, but anyone could use their way of turning an enemy against themselves. Perhaps fans, iron ones like hers, not too expensive, not an obvious weapon, could help do the trick.
People want to be able to help themselves and their families; now Kyoshi knows how she can give them that help. This is a way to bring justice to those who don't get it from others. If she has time, she could set up a school in the village, train the vulnerable, and then they could go and train others... She's already working out the forms they could use with just the fans and without the bending.
Earth
Kyoshi sits in her childhood home, alone in the small house. Everyone else is out setting up the party in her honor, and here she sits thinking while she still has the space and quiet to do so.
Tonight, it will only be locals at the party. She deliberately traveled to her home village in secret, and only just arrived this morning. She did not want to give far-flung nobles and priests and generals the opportunity to come and try to convince her to their interests. She does not, for one day more, want them watching.
But the villagers will be watching, and in a way, the world will be watching. They will be watching, and wondering: who is she? What kind of Avatar will she be? Will she be charismatic and popular but ultimately ineffective, as Kuruk was? Will she be harsh but practical and successful, as Yangchen? Will she cling to her Earth Kingdom roots, or adopt a stateless identity? Will she order or guide, teach or command?
Kyoshi knows only some of these answers.
From now on, she will no longer be a simple girl from a fishing village with gangly, too-long limbs poking out of her clothes. She will be the Avatar, a symbol more than a person, a god more than a mortal. So she will need to make the right impression every time, to make sure people hear her words the right way before they follow them and cling to them. She will have to wait for the right moment to act, and then act properly, before the situation is too dire and after she will be seen as meddlesome. She will need to make people listen to her, and see what she does, and interpret the meanings behind them in the way that she intended.
Because of this, she reaches for her old stage make up.
Like most of the children in this village, she spent time as a dancer when she was younger. She learned how to use her fans, then, before she learned how to use them as weapons, before she learned how to use them in bending, before she learned how to use them as extensions of herself. She participated in the festivals, twirling about with her friends, stomping the hollow stage to make loud sounds in time with their swinging sleeves and fans. With so many people to get ready each time, they all had to learn how to make themselves up.
It has always fascinated her, how the white face suddenly becomes a canvas, a way to make any person anything other than themselves. A man becomes a woman, or a woman a man. A plain person becomes beautiful enough to drive stories, and a mere mortal becomes a divine being. With the right lines drawn, a person can become a ghost, or a doll, or a wild boar.
So Kyoshi rubs the wax onto her skin, then waters down the white pigment until her brush can spread it easily across her face. She uses a sea-sponge to pat it all down and dry it, and then with a stark white face staring at her from the small mirror, she reaches for the red.
It's a gorgeous red, made from the same flower that grows so much more abundantly in the Fire Nation that every lady there can put it on her lips. Here, it is only for special occasions. Normally, in the theater, as a dancing girl, Kyoshi would dab it at the corners of her eyes and paint her lips in a small bow. Now she draws it in great sweeps across the whole of her eyes and down the sides of her nose, angling up across her temples.
She wants them to see her eyes. Sometimes, already, people look anywhere but; she thinks they don't want to look up so much to meet her gaze. Just to make sure, she lines the top and bottom of the red, from her eyebrows to her hairline, making wings at the sides of her eyes.
A darker, deeper red, like plums, is what she draws her lips in. Her eyes first, and then the words she is saying.
The woman who looks back at her in the mirror looks fierce. Confident. She looks like the masked hero of a play, ready to stroll in and chase off whatever demons and criminals plague the townspeople.
Kyoshi knows that this is the person she will be from now on. Like anyone, she has her doubts, but she will paint the cracks over, and become a strong leader. Of that she is certain.
Outside, the music is starting. Kyoshi rises and dresses in her new clothes. They are dyed the favorite greens of her village made from the local plants and sewn by her family to her measurements. A cobbler in the village made the boots to fit her enormous feet, as he has done since she was a child pinching in her shoes. As a final touch, she dons a head-dress that she wore long ago as a girl playing a priestess dancing for the spirits.
Then are her fans, not the paper ones she learned to bend with, but the iron ones that can stand against the strain of the earth and the heat of flame and the cold touch of water. In a pinch, she has found, with a little airbending they do quite well as thrown weapons. She tucks them into her belt and stands.
Kyoshi takes one last moment to look around the small house where she grew up. The hearth is put out, but an iron kettle still hangs above it. She remembers the nights in their bedrolls laid near the embers in winter, whispering with her brother when neither of them could fall asleep. In the dying daylight, she can see the warped floorboards that have been scrubbed clean with sand, the loom in the corner where her mother spent hours weaving click-clack, the plain earthenware dishes sitting out to dry on the counter.
From the airbenders she learned the principles of leaving attachments behind, so Kyoshi closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and does her best to mentally step out of this life she has been leaving behind for nearly a decade now.
She will be the Avatar. She will counsel people of all the nations, and the stateless ones, too. She will keep balance and harmony and leave the world more even, more peaceful, than when she left. She will do these things, and she will still come back sometimes to her village and make sure that the people here are happy, because this is the place from where her roots grew.
Her brother calls her name from beyond the door. Kyoshi has to duck her head on the way out, and then she is off to show herself to her village.