Inspiration: "Santiago" by Loreena McKennitt

Once you've graduated to walking, you know it's only a matter of time before you can start bending again.

The sand is out there, its dunes rolling under the hot sun you now have to avoid. Still, you can almost feel the heat baking off of it during the hottest part of the day, when Xi Wang and the Fire Prince take their turn to go outside and train.

It's not fair, you think, that the pale-skinned firebenders should have such immunity to something that nearly killed you, that they can train half-naked and not think a thing of how much skin they're exposing to the elements. Anyone else of that complexion in that little clothing would end the day red and blistered. These are the favorites of the sun, though, so the sun won't touch them.

At least Nori is on your side. She goes about her day covered head to toe and has still managed to pick up a never-fading tinge of pink. You can't help but feel gratification at the thought that there's at least one person here who's worse off than you—and then you feel guilty, because you wouldn't wish what you've been through on anyone outside of the tribal raiders, least of all an Nori.

The kid sometimes spends her time in there with you, "getting to know each other" as Nori keeps saying, but you're not yet ready to teach her, not until you've recovered some of your own strength. So, you leave Nori to watch her, and step out onto the sand as well.

Katara has told you that it's finally beginning to scar over, and has given you leave to do light exercise. It's evening now, the sun low enough in the sky that its rays can't hurt you. There are no more excuses. You'll have to get back into shape sometime.

When you begin, you start off light. You know that Katara is also recovering from an injury and take your cue from her, stopping when she stops, trying to match your sandbending to her waterless waterbending so you know whether it's normal to start out gasping for breath. As it turns out, it is.

"Mind if I join you?"

You turn. Xi Wang is standing behind you, actually wearing clothes for once (though to be fair, the desert is quite a bit cooler in the evening than it is during the day), her hair tied back out of her face. You raise an eyebrow.

"You didn't train with Prince Zuko today?"

In response, she only shrugs, in that maddening way that she has of doing when you want nothing more than to see her react. "Zuko can handle himself for one day. Besides, it's good to practice at a time of day when my bending is weaker once in a while."

"Whatever," you mumble, before going back to your forms. To be honest, you don't get her. Nori was easy to figure out—she's the kind of person who can't be happy unless she's taking care of someone else. Xi Wang, though? She's a fighter, not a lover, hardened like your people, and Fire Nation besides. Since you were old enough to understand words you've been taught to despise the Fire Nation, that its people were savage monsters who wanted all the world for themselves. By this point you've spent enough time around Xi Wang to conclude for yourself that she isn't a monster… but she is an enigma.

"I'll take that as a yes." Before you can say another word she's beside you, flames wreathing her hands.

You try to concentrate on your own forms. You really, really do. Still, it irks you, for reasons you can't explain, that she's here confusing you and invading your space. Almost without you noticing your motions get more aggressive, the formerly smooth movements of your arms becoming choppy jerks. The sand spews up in front of you, hardens, cracks and falls apart again, every shift in your stance creating a new crater in the already abused ground.

Xi Wang says nothing. She watches, silently, as you pound and punish the sand for her affront against you that you still can't name, and you dimly notice that she's not even pretending to firebend anymore. You continue to ignore her and keep going.

It doesn't take long for you to succumb to exhaustion. Though you try to make one last swipe at the sand, you ultimately end the session by falling to your knees, gasping for breath. The ground in front of you looks like a war zone.

"Now do you want to tell me what's wrong?"

Her voice is infuriatingly calm, and it makes the rage flare within you all over again—you want to hit her, to make her react—but you're already spent, and can only clench your fists impotently against the sand. She waits.

"Why are you doing it?" you burst out at last. Your breath is coming out of you in harsh, wheezing gasps that tear at your throat with every inhale, as if the very air wants to burn you. "I'm not yours. I'm not Nori's. Why do you have to keep acting like I am? Why do you treat me better than my own parents? Why…"

You're shaking now, and to your shame you find yourself once again fighting back tears. Nori, in this situation, would have immediately wrapped an arm around you and pulled you close. Xi Wang only continues to stand where she is, and for some reason that fills you with an absurd sense of gratitude—though it's not enough to remove your confused anger.

A few more minutes pass. Once it's clear that you're finished speaking, she settles on the ground beside you with a sigh. "And is there any particular reason you think we should be treating you horribly?"

"Because that's just the way that it's done! We're not on some farm in the Earth Kingdom, we're in the middle of the desert! Life here is hard! You can't…" You take in another gasping breath. "Why can't you see that you can't afford to be soft?"

"Maybe because compassion isn't a weakness?" She's looking at you now, her face saying that you're confusing her just as much as she's confusing you. "You might think of others as being soft, but I call it being a decent human being."

"When there isn't enough to go around, I call it survival."

"Well, you are free to leave any time you want after you're better, you know."

The words startle you so much that you whip your head around to stare at her incredulously. "I'm not saying we want you to," she continues when you don't answer. "As a matter of fact, we'd both rather you stay. But if you honestly think you'd be better off alone—if you're sure you can survive without our help—then it's not our place to force you to stay."

That night, you lie in bed, staring at the moon outside of your window as you consider the possibilities.

You're not yet fully recovered, and you're sworn to teach the Avatar earthbending—Katara kept her end of the deal and healed you, and now you have to give what you've promised in turn. You can't even think about leaving until the kid knows everything that you know. After that, though…

Do you want to stay with Nori and Xi Wang? Sometimes it's nice not to have to worry about where your next meal is coming from or how you're going to get a drink of water when you can't even stand, but others it feels so stifling here, and your anxiety rises every time you remember that you owe them but have no idea what they want in return.

Maybe until I've figured out how to repay them, you think. You can't strike out on your own again knowing you have an unpaid debt on your shoulders; that would be against everything you were raised to believe was right.

Nara was practicing again.

Lien had been trying to listen to the sand, just like Katara had told her to. Sometimes, she could even hear a whisper, a promise that if she only stayed longer, it would tell her all of its secrets. It had never quite resolved into a real voice, though, not in the same way the water had. Even so, she was now sure that it was there.

Nara knew. Several times now she had seen Nara come outside and talk to the sand. It was a one-way conversation, though: every session would end with the ground in tatters, the grains forced together into mangled shapes that were no longer sand, yet not quite solid enough to be true rocks. There were even massive holes that went well beneath the sand, baring the solid earth below like open wounds.

At first, she didn't dare do anything, only watched in silence and cringed as Nara rent the ground asunder. Her Master had always made it clear that she was never supposed to fix anything unless he told her to fix it, and a lot of the time Nori or Xi Wang were standing right there and said nothing. She couldn't do anything to stop it. One evening, though, when everyone was cleaning up after dinner and too busy to notice her, she slipped outside and made her way to Nara's practice grounds.

The sand was as badly hurt as ever, gouged and crumbling after being forced to do so many things it didn't want to do. She had to fix it, though. Seeing anything hurt always made her hurt as well.

She had never learned how to heal with anything but water, and water itself never needed to be healed: it took every blow with only a brief change in shape before flowing back to whatever form it wanted to take. Sand was different. It wouldn't move unless something else moved it. Now, she had no water to heal with (Katara was always telling her how important it was not to waste water, and Katara couldn't talk to the sand; Katara wouldn't understand). The only thing she could do was help the sand on her own.

Lowering herself to the ground, she leaned forward and took a clod into her hands as gently as she could. Though she could tell that it used to be sand, the grains had been jammed together with such force that they were now stuck, unable to move free of their neighbors.

Slowly, grain by grain, she pried the thing apart, cringing every time she had to use force to get the grains to dislodge. The ball of sand both wanted and didn't want to come apart; though it was happy to get free, in order to get it free she had to tear it up.

I'm sorry, she thought, but didn't stop. She'd seen the army doctors do things to wounded soldiers that made them hurt more, both before and after she was told to heal them. She'd seen Katara hurt Zuko to help him get better. She knew that the healer lady had hurt Katara for the same reason. Even knowing what was necessary, though, she didn't enjoy it. Before she was even halfway through breaking down the ball of sand, she had tears streaming down her face.

It was worth it, though, when at long last all of the sand in the ball was free. She let out a small gasp as the grains flowed from her hands and back onto the ground… but then looked up and realized how tiny that clod had actually been, and how many more there were still scattered over the ground in front of her.

She was just reaching forward to pick up another one anyway when a light fell over her. "Lien?"

She flinched, the ball flying from her hands and rolling into a hole in the earth; she had been concentrating too hard to notice how dark it had gotten, or to hear the footsteps or the opening door. "What are you doing out here?" Zuko continued.

Slowly, she looked up. Zuko had one hand out and a flame burning in his palm. Behind him, the light from the house spilled out of the doorway and onto the sand. He didn't look angry, not yet, but she still found herself frozen, her knees beginning to shake underneath her. Was she doing something she wasn't supposed to? She couldn't refuse to tell him, but if she did then he might tell her not to do it anymore…

When she didn't answer, he didn't ask again, and she held in a sigh of relief. "It's time for you to go to bed."

She looked from Zuko to the torn-up earth in front of her (there was so much more that she still had to do), and then back to Zuko again. "Can I stay up later tonight?"

"No." Still, he was raising his eyebrow, looking at her almost as if he thought something was funny. "You can come back out here tomorrow, though, if you go to sleep now and don't argue with me. Fair?"

He didn't understand either, but there was nothing she could do. She nodded and followed him inside.

The next day, of course, Nara tore up the ground even more, and she nearly cried when she slipped outside and saw the new devastation.

She couldn't find the ball of sand she had been about to pick apart before Zuko had told her to come inside. The first one she had set free might even be pressed back together all over again, lying at the bottom of some crater. Still, she had to try. After a few more minutes of searching in vain, she picked up the nearest sand clod and started to pull it apart.

She managed to get through a few more that day, each bit of repaired earth a sigh of relief. Once again, though, Zuko called her inside before she could make any visible progress, and she had to reluctantly follow.

Because she knew she couldn't get them all done outside, she started tucking sand clods into her clothing as soon as she noticed the sun going down. After Zuko had put out the lantern and bade her goodnight as he closed the door to her room, she would take them out one by one and start to free them by touch alone. Soon there was sand all over her hands and clothes, and even though she told it to stay with her it still got onto the floor, and Katara started complaining about the itchy grains that seemed to invade her skin and hair every time she set foot in Lien's room.

"Shouldn't we make her wash up after she's been playing in the dirt?" she overheard Katara saying to Zuko one night when she was supposed to be asleep.

"She's only going to get dirtier after Nara starts training her. Besides, we—"

"—can't waste water. I know." There was a brief pause. "We need to at least make sure to get some of the sand off of her before she comes in. I'm starting to feel like I might as well just go outside and sleep on a dune."

The next day, she told the sand to come with her.

It was sluggish, and reluctant, and didn't want to follow her back to the place where it had been abused. "I'll heal you again," she promised as she let it all outside at last. "But this is the only way they'll let me."

Katara gave her a look that evening when she came into the room to say goodnight and saw that there was no longer any sand in her bedroll, but didn't say anything. She breathed a sigh of relief when Katara didn't ask her where the sand had gone.

She had to get faster at it. Right now it was taking her too long, and more and more damage was being done to the sand every day before she had even finished healing a small part of it. If she couldn't work inside, she'd have to get it done before sunset.

Instead of picking them apart gently, she started crumbling the clods with as much force as she could without injuring any of the individual grains. "Sorry," she whispered on the first day as she broke apart sand ball after sand ball, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry…"

When she first started out, even after she had broken up one clot there would always be a few smaller clumps of grains still clinging together, and it took her even more time to break those apart as well. She'd been working as fast as she could, but she barely managed to finish before Zuko called her inside.

There must be a faster way to do it. She started gathering all of the clods of sand and piling them up beside her before she started pulling them apart, so that she wouldn't have to get up and search for a new one every time. The next day, she managed to finish a few moments before sunset, and as the days passed by and she got more practiced the work became easier, she could do it more smoothly, and soon it was the work of seconds to pull apart sand grains that didn't want to be lodged together.

Of course, the earlier she finished, the more time she had to look at the other wounds that Nara had inflicted on the earth.

There were spots where the whole ground had been hardened, first jammed together before the stress had caused it to crack apart. When she finally got to the point where she could finish with the smaller clods while the sun was still high in the sky, the first thing she did after was try to soften the crust on the sand. It wasn't all that difficult, once she figured out how to use her force over a much wider area, and that she needed to pull up rather than out. After that, all that was left were the holes.

The first time she looked down into one, she swallowed. Many of them had gone beneath the sand, exposing raw clumpy earth. These weren't wounds that could be knit with water, though. She had to find all the earth that had been torn away, and put it back where it came from.

Nara had filled in most of the biggest ones already—"Lien plays out there," she'd once heard Nori say, "and you wouldn't want her to fall in and hurt herself, would you?" "If you don't want the kid to hurt herself, you should teach her not to do stupid things," Nara had grumbled back—but the holes were still always filled in by the time she came out.

They weren't filled in well, though. Sand and loose rocks were piled in without regard to where they had come from, moist tender earth stacked on top of dry, crumbling grains. The sensitive undersoil was left to bake in the hot sun, while the loose sand was trapped beneath without the freedom to move like it wanted to.

She knew the sand grains best, so she started with them. Picking through the rubble that Nara had used to fill in the holes, she separated the loose sand out from the rest, and let it go where it wanted from there. Figuring out which earth went where was a bit trickier. Eventually, though, she reached her arm down into one of the holes she'd cleared out and it told her: the farther down the soil was, the more water it had.

Instead of just the earth, then, she started calling to both earth and water. It told her where it had come from, and she put it back gently, layer by layer, padding it down until it was settled and comfortable before topping it off with a layer of sand. Just like with the sand clots, she started off slow, filling in the smallest and shallowest holes first. Eventually, though, she was healing the bigger ones, the gaping wounds in the earth, and then came the day when she was finally finished, and the training ground looked as it must have looked before Nara had touched it.

"What in the—"

She was in the middle of a writing lesson with Zuko when she heard Nara's voice coming from outside, and cringed. Master had always, always been angry if she'd tried to talk to water without him telling her to, or tried to heal someone without him telling her to, or… well, if she'd done anything without him telling her to. Nara hadn't told her to heal the earth. While she'd had to do it, she was also sure that she wasn't supposed to, and now that Nara had found out…

"Lien."

Looking at the parchment in front of her, she saw that the ink had been dripping from the brush she still held in her hand, forming a black splotch in the middle of what was supposed to be the character for sand. Wincing, she pulled it away, only to find that Zuko was already lifting it from her hand.

"Is something wrong between you and Nara?" Even as he said it he was wiping the brush on a blotting cloth, which meant that the lesson was over. His fingers were stained black with ink.

There were no words for her to answer. "I don't know," she said instead, and Zuko set the brush down as he turned his full attention on her.

"What, exactly, do you mean that you don't know?"

She didn't answer; she couldn't. She'd done something she wasn't supposed to. Nara was going to be angry. She didn't know whether Zuko would help her… she didn't know whether Zuko could.

"Lien—"

Before he could say anything more, though, Nara's footsteps could be heard against the floor, and then the door was opened. "Hey, kid—"

"Nara." Even as she curled in on herself, Zuko interrupted, his voice serious but still not angry. "Did you do anything to scare Lien lately?"

"What? No! I've barely said anything to her because she won't talk." Then, Nara seemed to notice her, and cocked an eyebrow when she ducked her head farther down behind her knees. "I was only going to ask why she repaired my arena."

Zuko seemed startled by that. It was always already dark by the time he called her in; he must not have seen. "Is that what you've been doing outside every evening?" She only curled in tighter around herself.

"Look, it's not like I mind or anything. I guess I'm just curious, since there's really not much of a point—"

"Why do you keep hurting the sand?" The question came out before she could think better of it, and as soon as she had spoken she wrapped her arms tighter around her knees, wishing she could curl up into a little ball and disappear.

"Kid, it's sand." Nara heaved an exasperated sigh. "It doesn't feel anything."

Well, at least Nara wasn't angry. Nara didn't seem to know or care about inflicting damage either, though… "You're hurting it. I've been listening."

"To the sand?" Rather than incredulous, though, Nara seemed genuinely intrigued, and moved into the room to sit down across from her. "You mean you've been communing with the sand this whole time?" Quietly, Zuko began to pack up the writing supplies.

Chin still resting on her knees, she nodded. "It doesn't like what you're doing to it."

A few moments of silence passed, during which Zuko left the room. Then, Nara let out a sigh. "I'm just so frustrated."

Slowly, Lien lifted her head from her knees. "Why?"

"It's—no, you wouldn't understand."

"Why not?"

Nara let out a sigh, eyes closed. "Look, you just wouldn't, okay?"

Slowly, she uncurled from her ball and leaned forward, peering more closely at Nara's face. "But why not?"

Finally, Nara relented with a sigh. "Nori and Xi Wang are so nice to me, and it drives me up the wall."

Moving in closer, she craned her neck to get a better look at Nara's face. "Why?"

"I told you, you wouldn't understand!" Nara swiped a hand at the dusty landscape outside. "Things are hard in this place. People have to be hard with them if we want to survive. They helped me, and they won't even tell me what they want from me."

Fear forgotten, she leaned in even closer, before moving back to look at Nara from another angle. Nara responded by turning pointedly away, but she followed, crawling around to the other side instead. "Katara and Zuko don't want things from me."

"That's different. You're the—" Nara came to an abrupt halt, flushed, and turned away once again. "Look, it's just different, okay?"

"Why?"

"Argh!" Nara shot to a standing position. "Okay. You want me to tell you stuff? Come outside and I'll show you how to talk to the sand. Would you like that?"

She looked at the floor. "Will you stop hurting it?"

"Yes! For the love of Oma and Shu, yes! Now would you please stop asking questions about my personal life and join me already?"

A delighted grin spreading over her face, she bounded outside after her new teacher.

A/N: Once again drawing Lien's characterization from my own childhood, namely the tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects.

And that concludes Part 1 of this fic (finally). And please don't kill me, but I need to put the story on a (hopefully much briefer) hiatus again while I hammer out Part 2. I finally, finally have at least a rough idea of how I want the whole spiritual arc to go, and want to get a good buffer going so I can update smoothly. The next part will pick up after another time skip. I will try not to make it longer than a month or two, but I also don't want to start posting the second half until I'm sure that I can finish it.