Balancing Act: Chapter 2

by: TAZ-maniyack

(previously without the "y")

That night Aang and Katara were in their shared room, both utterly distraught at the detailed war stories they had heard from Zuko and Toph. Aang was deeply saddened, whereas Katara was wrestling with a mighty righteous anger. They were learning that they had avoided a lot of the ugliest parts of the war, even though that was simply mind boggling for the two teens.

He was sprawled out on the huge bed, and her head rested on his stomach. He absently ran his fingers through her thick, coarse hair.

"You're sure you want to sleep in here with me tonight?" he asked softly. "The servants will gossip."

"To hell with his servants," Katara retorted.

Despite her anger, the monk smiled. He knew that the emphasis on the words meant she was more complaining about Zuko still having servants rather than cursing the people themselves.

"Katara, where would they go if not the palace? Soldiers are already coming back home in droves and competing for quickly dwindling jobs."

She turned her face towards him, momentarily distracted from her state. "I, I guess I never thought of it that way." She closed her eyes and leaned into the soothing motions of his hands. "He could at least call them something else."

"Like what?" he asked, putting his hands behind his head, glad for any tangent that didn't involve the war, well, at least not directly.

"I don't know, he's the Fire Lord! He writes the fancy scripts and edicts." she growled. "Let him come up with a less demeaning title."

"And does he also have to go through all the existing contracts and change them as well?" he teased.

"No. Just, ugh." She pressed her hands into her face. "Keep doing that thing with your hands, please. Why'd you stop?"

"Sorry." He knew she loved it. He moved his fingers against her scalp again, and her muscles relaxed a little. He figured this must feel better to people with hair. She had tried it on him once, but he appreciated back massages more. He had certainly been so itchy when he grew his hair out, and could easily picture liking it back then. Why didn't everyone shave?

Then his mind drifted back to the topic they had left off. "Zuko told me Azula calls them drudges."

Any relaxation she had had up until that point was thrown out the window as she sat up. "Of course she would have a worse name," she spat. "I'll bet half the burn scars they have are from her." A majority of them had some sort of mark, big or small. None of them were extensive and calculated as Zuko's, however, which made the whole issue of his treatment under Ozai even worse. It visually insinuated that he was lower than a servant. And then there was the bit of what Iroh said that Katara found out from Toph earlier in the day. Azula had laughed when Zuko was marked.

"Sorry I mentioned it. I don't know what share she and Ozai split," he said heavily. "And I don't particularly want to know, either." This conversation was heading back towards violence, and though Katara would snarkily say that that was unavoidable when in the Fire Nation, he didn't like it.

He backtracked over their sentences, trying to find a suitable point to talk about. Because he did want to talk. He certainly didn't want to dwell on his thoughts. Besides, he liked her voice, even when it was mean. Maybe even a little more so, his brain tacked on the slightly naughty thought.

But she spoke up first. "Gods, at home everything is so simple. We don't write down laws. We know how to treat each other. And when we do mess up, we make amends and go about our business. Just the idea of jails was so strange to me a year ago."

"I know what you mean. We did write plenty of stuff on proper behavior but those were more about traditions and ritualistic address than anything else. The rest of the time we were free to do anything we wanted. We just didn't want to conflict."

"What happened when you did?" she asked.

"The elders got even more stern than usual and made us compose long speeches of apology detailing exactly the fault and reason for the disagreement, even if it was something small. It was pretty tedious."

"Sounds like something I'd love to instate with our children."

What felt like his entire head went deep scarlet and he suddenly felt very uncomfortable sitting on the same bed as she was.

She noticed and said quickly, "I, I meant "our" as in the tribe's children we took care of before you showed up! Not "our our.""

He drew up his knees and hid his face in them. "Right," he mumbled, "of course. Sorry."

"You always apologize so much."

"Do I?"

"Yeah. Guess now I know why."

The discomfort abated some.

The honest reason they were sharing a room wasn't because they "couldn't stay away" from each other. It was much more tame than that. On their travels the four of them, Sokka, Toph, Katara, and Aang had quite frequently slept in piles like polarbear puppies. It had started the when they had met Azula, and they all decided they liked it. At the Western Air Temple they were a little more discreet, the boys taking one room and the girls another. First it was because Aang said they might disrespect the spirits of the nomads there that rattled around during the night, who had been gender separated during their lives. It later turned out Aang did once have to meditate to fend off a specter haunting Sokka's dreams. Aang was an airbender and the Avatar, so he must've been excused, and the other two were girls, but Sokka was none of those things. Aang had informed him he and the other three, Teo, Haru, and the Duke, might be the first outsider males to have stepped onto the grounds in generations. Sokka had grumbled that it was the Kyoshi warriors' dojo all over again.

The sleeping arrangement turned out to be a good idea anyway, what with the new people, who would probably give them odd stares, and the additional newcomers that came after that.

After getting used to other people's breathing to lull you to sleep, trying to nod off in a big, silent room by yourself was not fun.

And the Fire Nation rooms were uncomfortably big and over furnished, for both of them. They had discussed the mutual feeling, and even though it probably would send tongues wagging, they were happy staying with each other. They felt few qualms about flying in the face of Fire Nation dating etiquette, and they were comfortable enough with the boundaries they had set between them, personally. They trusted each other with their lives, long before Aang figured out what he was feeling or Katara considered his connection to Aunt Wu's prediction. To them, this was little more than an extension of that.

Nevertheless, Katara crawled to him on her knees and rested a hand on his arm. "You don't have to feel sorry for thinking anything about us, you know."

"I know," he said to his ankles, face still burning slightly. "It's just, the monks. Even sterner about that sort of thing."

"What about freedom?" she asked, a little annoyed. "Sometimes it sounds like they were awfully controlling."

He gazed up at her. "I never considered it like that."

"Never?"

"Not really. I regretted running away." His eyes strayed from hers and he rested his cheek against the back of her hand. "Not just because of the hundred years that passed, though as we've learned today, that was plenty awful in itself."

He took a breath. "I let myself be caged by my emotions. Controlled by them. Do you understand?"

In his periphery he saw her sit, and the hand slid out from under his head to fold with the other. "I think so. But." She straightened a bit. "Surely you resent them some! They were turning your whole life upside down."

"Really, Katara, I don't. Maybe you see it as restricting, but they were only "controlling," about things that, that" he tried to explain again, "that took freedom from us."

"Seems about as logical as eye for an eye."

His hands fisted in the covers and he gave an uncharacteristic growl. "No, that barbaric way of thinking is not anything like what they did for us!"

She was momentarily dumbfounded at his use of that word. That was a word Fire Nation people used to describe everyone else! They had probably even used it to describe air nomads, once upon a time.

But, she thought, regulations and guidelines about what she might consider personal freedoms were nothing to compare to physical retaliation and bodily harm. And Aang was worn thin, right now. He had every right to be angry and mouthy as she was being, he just tried not to be. He saw it as a negative, even though she saw it as expressing herself.

"You're right," she said softly. "You're right. You must disagree with them about some things, though, or you wouldn't be with me, right?"

"You don't want to know the answer to that question."

Soft words with intent to dodge or no, he might as well have just pushed her off the bed. "What?"

"Please, Katara. I'm tired." the boy pleaded. "Maybe you're right about this stupid place. Maybe it does make people fight."

"You don't really think that."

"No. Th'attitudes are pretty overwhelmin'though," he mumbled sleepily.

"It's like a bad stench," she joked.

He chuckled despite himself. Maybe he was just weary of defending the people to her. Maybe what they had heard today made him less willing.

She wouldn't press him on that particular question. Not right now. But she simply couldn't believe that he wasn't angry with the Air Nomads at all. She didn't like people denying things. It had reached a head with Toph before she had finally admitted that she knew she had hurt her parents. "You don't blame them. For anything?"

"It's hard to blame people who are dead."

"Oh no, it's all too easy."

He started at something in her voice, searching her face, over which a shadow had passed.

She elaborated. "Aang, you can't possibly tell me that you've never been angry with your people for not fighting back harder. For not surviving."

"Of, of course I have," he said past a lump in his throat. "That's different from being angry for the way they raised me."

"It is. Oh, Aang," she said more gently. She leaned forward, offering him a hug, and he uncurled and reciprocated. "You never told me. Until I thought of it just now, I always assumed your anger was just at the Fire Nation. I should have seen it sooner. For the longest time, I was, I was angry at my mother for not fighting back. She was in exactly the same place I left her in when we found her. No scuff marks in the snow, nothing."

They were both crying, and now it seemed inevitable from the first report they heard that the night would end with lots of tears and ensuing exhaustion.

They slept curled against each other for comfort, knees intermingling and noses almost touching.

When the first rays of the sun peeked into the room, Aang was the first to flutter his eyes awake, inner fire stirring in his stomach.

A small wave of disgust passed over him at the sensation due to yesterday's proceedings. Directly after defeating Ozai, he had gone to re-check his chakras with Guru Pathik before Zuko's coronation. Finding them all clear, he had at first expected the negative feelings associated with each chakra to not plague him much anymore. He quickly learned the opposite was true, that it was an ongoing process. The Air Nomad elders always said that feelings were inevitable, it was how you responded to them that determined your mettle.

He rubbed his eyes and rolled away from Katara, focusing on the little fire in him. He took up a modified meditation pose, palm turned up in his lap with a flame. It was a part of him. The Fire Nation was a part of him, he reminded himself.

He felt the larger presence of the Avatar Spirit close over the little fire, testing it.

He indulged Katara's quips and genuine resentment about the place. But he wouldn't allow himself the luxury of truly hating. He could dislike what had become of the teachings and beliefs, but he did not hate the people. Especially if he was to stay firmly at the helm of the presence that had the power to snuff out that little warmth and re-stoke it into something much more threatening.

He breathed in, and both the internal and external flames grew, pushing back against the presence. Everything is perfectly fine here. Go back to your den to sleep.

The presence whispered, unconvinced.

He pushed harder. A strangely insightful thought popped up almost of its own accord. The men he was getting to know through Zuko might seem new and raw, like fresh burns, but everything that happened was human doing. Tragic, flawed, human doing. Old. Ancient.

A brief flash and he was standing, much taller, in unfamiliar surroundings. He punched a slab of rock, hurtling it at the other person, eliciting an anguished gasp,

He must have made a sound and time must have passed because Katara was awake, standing in front of him, and shaking his shoulders. "Aang, are you all right?"

He blinked. The Avatar Spirit was gone. Felt like it had been as soon as whatever that was started. "I'm not, er, sure. Give me a sec."

He lit a fire in his hand again, and none of the inner recoil when he had awakened repeated itself. "Yes."

"What happened?" she asked, taking the hand without a flame.

He let it go out and reflected on the experience briefly. "This is going to sound kinda backwards, but I think Kyoshi just chased off the Avatar Spirit."

Yes, it must've sounded very odd, because she looked stumped. "That doesn't make any sense. Your past lives take hold of you through the Avatar Spirit, don't they?"

"That may be how it appears. Roku has told me the experiences the Avatar has are rarely ever that straightforward, though."

"You weren't that upset by those reports were you?" she asked, suddenly wary. "Did I almost wake up to an exploded room?"

He shook his head vigorously. "No, it's not like that. The glowing is the Avatar State at full pitch. This was kind of an inverse. When we were on my, her island" he corrected, casting away the last vestiges of her consciousness. He regathered his thoughts. "When I was defending her against the people of Chin Village, she became me. I kind of went away. This was me being her in the past. And the Avatar Spirit, well, since I've mastered it I've felt it at random times. Sometimes it's downright peaceful and transcendent. Other times it's just a little," he smiled, "grumpy."

She still looked like she didn't quite believe him. ""A little grumpy"? That's an awfully light way to describe the spirit of the whole world."

He shrugged. ""Pet" is an awfully light way to describe a ten ton fluffy flying giant."

She laughed, sending her unruly morning curls bouncing.

He loved it when she did that.

At breakfast, he told Toph and Zuko about it, too. Toph was uninterested. He remembered her words on the day before the invasion.

You know what I just heard? Blah blah spiritual mumbo jumbo blah blah something about Space.

Zuko, however, seemed to hang on his every word. Probably because he had spent weeks drifting through the wreckage of the Fire Nation's navy at the North Pole.

The table, like their bedroom, was huge. Toph teased Zuko about how, if such important guests were coming to any other nobility's house, there would be food lining the entire length, of many different dishes to taste.

Zuko rolled his eyes and said, "Such waste is more my dad's style."

"Maybe you could make small sampler platters," she suggested. "Then whatever people like they could order more of."

"And I thought my uncle was hung up on food," Zuko groaned.

Toph chuckled. "Hey, I like my different dishes."

Something about this comment seemed to make the Fire Lord slump.

"What's wrong, Zuko?" Aang asked.

"Nothing."

"Liar." Toph said. "Don't worry. He does that sometimes. Best not to bug him about it." She skipped straight to the next thought. "So, did you and your Sugar Queen have fun last night, Twinkles?"

Aang choked on his bit of egg.

"How old are you again?" Zuko snarked at the girl.

"Sorry to disappoint you, Toph, but we haven't done anything and aren't planning to." Katara rolled her eyes. "Anyway, it was actually the exactly the opposite of fun trying to fall asleep after blood and guts du jour."

Toph rubbed the balls of her feet on the stone floor while Katara spoke. To reach the floor, the small girl had to sit at the very edge of her chair. "Aw. Too bad. You're being frightfully honest. And I'm old as Twinkles, Sparky, and he's shacking up with a girl on his own."

"Seriously, Toph, knock it off." Aang asserted.

"Fine." She snapped her fingers twice and a waiter at the far end of the room walked up to her. "More sausages."

"At once, Toph."

"You could at least say please." The waterbender said tartly.

"Or I could dump dumplings in your lap," she said just as tartly.

"Same old Toph," Aang chuckled.

Katara watched the man retreat through the kitchen doors. "Hey, he called you Toph, didn't he? Finally got some of them to stop calling you Lady Bei Fong?"

"Yep. Nice that none of you have to bother with last names."

The Air Nomads had no use for second names, as they did not trace descendants in personal life, only by record. The Water Tribes, in long-standing tradition, drew no verbal divides between families, in the belief that the tribe itself should be treated as one large family.

The Fire Nation, in contrast, placed a great deal of weight on noble clans. But the imperial family itself bore no surname. The Earth Kingdom perhaps stretched it even further, with its feudal structure. Maybe it was a good thing that Ba Sing Se had authority in name only, because it and King Kuei were going through plenty growing pains without also having to deal with other areas' problems.

Convention established using the Avatars' first names, because much of the lower classes didn't have surnames.

Toph puffed out her lip to think. "They're still calling you Princess, though, aren't they? I shoulda done something about that before you came."

"It is annoying."

Aang gave her a disapproving look.

"Hey! I didn't bring it up!" she protested, referring to her promise to him the day before.

"And what would you have done?" Zuko asked Toph. "Pulled a stunt like you did with your attendants?"

"Aw, come on, Zuko, it was funny."

"What?" Aang asked.

"She tore up the big floor tiles in her room, with the women on them."

"One of them liked riding around through the air."

"Sure, as soon as she knew you weren't going to flip her like a pancake. The other three didn't." He turned to Aang. "And then we had to re-grout most of the room."

"Wait, did they think you were going to hurt them? Were you angry?" Katara scolded.

"No!" Toph explained. "Just annoyed with their constant fretting over me!" Then she grinned. "I decided you were the only one who could do that, Madame Fussy Britches."

"Awww. Really?"

"Really really."

Aang caught Zuko slightly slumping again.

"Well, that's sweet. But you should really go easy on them," Katara said sadly.

"Why? Just because they aren't benders?" she said, kicking her feet over the arm of her chair and lounging in it.

"Why? Because of everything they endured under the previous owners of this place!"

"Toph," Zuko added, "didn't you notice how they all cowered around me when you first got here?"

"Well, yeah, but you're an intimidating guy."

"You, you think so?" he sounded genuinely surprised. Coming from Toph, that was praise.

"Sure."

Katara ignored her evaluation. "Just take that man you just sent in the kitchen. Looks like someone grabbed him by the elbow with fire and pulled."

"How was I supposed to know that?" she waved her hands in front of her face.

"Gah, right." Katara put her face in her hands. "Wow, I'm as bad Sokka."

"You don't have to know that." Aang disagreed severely. "We've just spent nine hours going over decadesof what some nobles did to their own soldiers who didn't measure up. How do you think they treated their staff?"

"Oh . . . oh." Toph sat up straight. "Zuko, why didn't you ever say anything about this?"

"I, um," he cast his eyes around the room.

Aang and Katara then looked at him, and he reddened a good deal. "Earthbenders are frequenting the palace for negotiations. A lot of them have worse dispositions than you. It didn't, it never seemed pressing."

"And? There's something else." Toph now had her feet on the floor again, reading him.

"You mentioned how you didn't like your parents' nagging. I didn't want to, you know, add on top of that."

Soon it was time for them to go back to reviewing reports. Ironically, although Aang probably disliked the entire process the most, he was the one who insisted on going into detail. He had to know what he was doing was justified. This pushed him into having to ask questions like, Did they burn down the town and let people run or did they round them all up? Were their orders better or worse than their actions?

Perhaps the worst part was the peripheral knowledge he gained. For instance, that teenage nobles were often given command to shocks of troops not only because of their birth status but because they were always ready and itching for a fight.

Katara had even said angrily, "This is the problem with giving kids authority, no offense, Zuko."

At the end of the thirteen profiles, the peaceful monk was ready to grind his teeth, take a long, excoriating shower, and crawl into bed even though it wasn't even dinnertime yet.

Toph's closing statement on the matter was this: "I don't know how to read, but I do know that words on paper can only tell you so much. If what they did wasn't bad enough, the way some of them talked about" she took a long, labored breath and her pale fingers dug into her elbows. "Past a certain point, I didn't even have to tell Zuko whether they were telling the truth or not. They were spiteful and malicious curs."

"Thank you for indulging me anyway." The airbender said gratefully to both of them.

"We actually have one final case to discuss." Zuko touched the back of his head sheepishly. "And I'm not sure that the circumstances, but, that is to say, it didn't make the main list because, well- the active duty was only for a handful of months, and, but there are still, er, reasons for, uh,"

"Zuko, for The First Four's sake, stop dancing around the topic." Toph interjected. "You've been putting this off long enough." Her milky mint eyes stared at nowhere in particular, but still somehow projected a direct and focused vibe. "He wouldn't even work up the pluck to write you about it." Illiterate by no choice of her own, she clearly implied that she would have stepped in to do it in his stead had she been able. "He's talking about Azula."