A/N: It's been a while! Several work deadlines cropped up in the same timeframe, and this chapter ended up a lot denser than I thought it would be, so I split it into two. The upside is that the next chapter is guaranteed to go up in much less time than it took to churn out this one. I hope you enjoy it! This chapter's title is from Holy Water, by Galantis.

Chapter 8

In Your Holy Water

The deck was not the most comfortable place to sleep, but exhaustion made any surface softer. The rocking of the gentle waves had its own soothing effect - and then there was the special relaxation that followed when two people who'd wanted each other for enough time gave in to satisfaction.

Iroh had already been growing accustomed to waking up with Sana cuddled up to him in some way, but that sunrise his arm was asleep beneath her head. It was worth it for the press of her body against his, and the curve of her waist beneath his free hand. He checked, quickly, that the anchor hadn't come loose overnight. There was the island, evergreen dark against the pink of the morning sky. It would be a while before the sun rose over the mountain and threatened to burn them.

Iroh resisted the urge to reposition and smiled at his good fortune, alive still after one crisis after another, still in a beautiful place, still with a beautiful woman ever more pleasant to keep company with. He couldn't ignore the increasingly urgent tingling numbness in his left hand forever, though. He slid his hand that still had feeling down the smooth curve of Sana's back, and she stirred at the touch, but cuddled in closer against his chest rather than lifting her weight.

"I know this isn't your favorite time of day," Iroh said, feeling more than hearing Sana's soft giggle as she spread her hand over his chest, "but my arm's numb."

"Oh," she exhaled, sleepily rising up over him, transferring herself to his other side. He shook out his left arm, holding his right out to receive her, as she snuggled up to his chest again, inhaling with deep contentment, yet more awake than she'd been before at this hour as she met his gaze with a smile of pure delight.

"Are you good at everything you do?" he asked, and she buried her face in his chest to cover her blushing laughter. "Besides healing."

"I'll take a look at your scars later," she promised, her voice still sleepy, her lips brushing his skin in a good-morning kiss. "Gimme enough time I'm sure I can fix them up."

"The scars can stay," Iroh said, shaking his left arm again to continue reviving it. "Soldiers collect scars. They'll be conversation starters in time."

She lifted her face from his neck, her blush a pleasant warmth beneath her skin. "You were good too," she said. She'd reassured him of as much already the night before - but he liked the excess praise. "In case I didn't make it clear already -"

"I'm not tired of hearing it."

She traced her fingers across his collarbone, her early-morning smile silent and already yearning. She slid up to kiss his lips, spreading her hands across his chest.

A repeat of the night before, as good as that would be, couldn't happen yet. "Much as I'd like to go again," Iroh said, drawing away from her lips, "I haven't prepared." Male firebenders were fortunate enough to have the option of raising their own body temperature enough to render themselves temporarily unburdened by fertility. Irresponsible or unskilled benders had been known to neglect it, but he'd been using the technique every dawn and every evening he'd been on the island and trying to get Sana into the position she was now. "There's a technique firebending men use to ensure they won't get a woman pregnant. I haven't done it recently enough."

"What a coincidence," Sana said, still trailing her fingers across his chest. "I got my own technique." She didn't elaborate. To be fair, neither had he. "I wasn't gonna have your babies even if you tried."

"I wasn't ever going to give you the chance. I'm not irresponsible. I intend to know my children."

"Aw." She seemed touched. "I did wonder if you were going to care. A lotta men don't bother to think about it."

A lot of men's hypothetical children didn't stand to inherit the honor AND the responsibility of ruling the world. There were so many reasons for him to care deeply about knowing that only his eventual wife gave him his sons and daughters, legal and political - but mostly he had considered the idea of a child of his growing up without knowing who they came from, lacking the deep rooted assurance of knowing your ancestors down to the first to bear family's name and the strength and power that came from that.

"All the same," Sana went on, "I ain't shirkin' my technique just because you've got your own. I want babies, but not with a man who's gonna run back north to keep fightin' other men who apparently can't get enough of the cold."

"All the same . . . same," Iroh said, chuckling.

"So . . ." Sana said, cuddling up next to him anyway, still naked and appealing in the daylight. "That don't rule out everything, though, do it?"

It didn't.

A handful of satisfying moments later, Sana surfed the sandeq back to shore, conjured a raincloud to refresh under, and they attacked their earlier-collected mangoes and papayas with the ravenous appetites of too much fighting, healing, and other nighttime activity.

"We should see to the coconut cat, if we can find it," Iroh said, a trace of grimness sneaking into his voice as he finished a second papaya, his stomach still growling. "It was likely already injured before it tried to eat us, and if it's not dead already, we'd be putting it out of its misery."

"Oh," said Sana, with a slow tone of realization. "I see."

"They're good to eat," Iroh said, trying to cheer her up about the prospect of a hunt. Surely she was no less hungry than he was. "The claw meat is sweet, from all the coconuts they eat."

"There's some irony for it," Sana said, accepting the hunt.

Iroh was not the greatest hunter, given that the army trained rangers in that art of provisioning, but he'd learned how as a matter of practicality. The coconut cat, possibly in its death throes, hadn't done much to cover its tracks either, and Sana let him take the lead. However well she'd been trained to hunt, she clearly had not mastered it like she'd mastered fishing. Iroh made a note to set a few snares with the entrails of their fish, so that she wasn't burdened with all the provisioning.

The coconut cat was, as Iroh had expected, close to death. The cat's rear paw was swollen with infection from boarcupine quills so deeply embedded that they barely extended from the wound, which had been festering for months beforehand.

"If you'll restrain it, I'll end its misery," he offered, seeing Sana hanging back from the pained creature.

She handed him the boat knife and held her hands straight out to either side, the humidity in the air misting around her in a dome as she conjured enough water out of the air to restrain the predator.

There wouldn't be enough - but suddenly the plants around the cat wilted and shriveled into dust as Sana sucked the water out of them. She cuffed the cat's paws and its huge, snapping claws with ice. Its deep growl rose in pitch, shaking Iroh's heart and touching on the terror that had filled every bone in his body when he'd faced the Masters on the island of the Sun Warriors only a few years before.

Even the intimidating growl of a coconut cat was easy to shake off when he had the voices of dragons forever in his memories. "You did make a worthy opponent of yourself," he granted the immobilized cat, as he found the right space between vertebrae to position the knifeblade. "I hope your passing is easier than your night was."

He put the full force of his strike behind the knife. The cat's growl cut out instantly. It had been as kindly done as death could be.

"I appreciate you taking care of that," Sana confessed, tucking a tangle of hair behind her ear. "I don't even like killing fish."

She was surprisingly gentle to have made it as far from her sheltered tribe as she had. That gentleness was to his benefit, and he was too well schooled in the times and places to be hard and deadly to need anyone else to do it for him. "Even when something has to die, it's better that their suffering be minimal. I can kill the fish from here on in if you want."

They cut the cat's claws to take back to the beach. Together they polished off an entire claw, doing away with the hunger of the night.

"There could be others in the jungle," Sana said, looking over the bay.

"They tend not to hunt people unless they're too injured to chase smaller prey." But Iroh agreed with her. "That's not reassuring enough that I'm eager to risk another night like the last."

"We can't sleep on the boat every night," Sana agreed. "I have an idea, but you might not like it."

"I didn't like having my leg ripped open," Iroh pointed out, his tone joking, even if he was speaking the truth. "Let's hear it."

Sana's hesitance was slightly illuminated with eagerness. "The sea grotto I found isn't easy to get into if you're not already good at diving," she said, "but that's what makes it such a good choice. We'd be safe from storms and animals there. Plus, once you're in, the water's shaded, so it'd be much easier for you to practice diving without getting burnt. We could climb up through the jungle and slide down in on an ice ramp."

Iroh wondered if her eagerness to get back to the grotto she'd described with such excitement was clouding her judgment regarding his own ability to safely navigate deep water. But the prospect of nights spent waiting for more leopard crabs to silently yank one or both of them out to their death was already exhausting, and if nothing else, at the end of this month he'd have a new skill.

"Why not?" He accepted. "It sounds better than a month without sleep."

They would have to leave the sandeq far less well attended, to live in the grotto. They scouted the edge of the jungle for a suitable place to beach it beyond the reach of the tide, and settled on two ancient flametrees, with thick, gnarled trunks and sturdy branches heavy with orange flowers. They worked in cooperative effort to clear the brush, Sana removing the water from the plants before Iroh burnt them clear. Sana washed the boat into the slot in the jungle, far past high tideline, safer from an unexpected storm than it had been on the sand.

The remainder of their goal for the day was to reach the cliff where Sana promised a hole dropped into the security of the grotto, an uphill slog through dense jungle. At least, it would have been a slog, without the cooperation of a water and a firebender. They settled into a rhythm within a few minutes of practice. Sana walked behind Iroh and desiccated the plants in a left-arm, right-arm sweep that collected water behind her in an endless lemniscate, and he followed her rhythm with left-right jabs of fire that reduced the brush immediately to ash. He withheld heat from his jabs to minimize the possibility of leaving an ember to start a wildfire, but on the off chance that his control slipped and he left one, it drowned in the bottom curves of the lemniscate that Sana swept along the ground behind them. Razor-edged grass vanished in puffs of ash, leaving the flowering flame trees and plumeria to border the path they forged. They foraged as they hiked, pausing to spot papaya and mango trees, fresh bunches of green coconut, and clear trails to the food. By midday the ditch bag was full of mango and green papaya, sprigs of lemongrass alongside the frozen crabclaw they had left from the morning. They paused in the high heat to drink green coconut water with sprigs of crushed lemongrass, fresh ice pulled out of the air to chill the flavored refreshment, admiring the distance they'd already climbed.

The elephant grass fell away as they reached a red dirt ridge rising sharply up. The climbing became harder. Thorny trees clung to the mountainside, making hazardous handholds. Their refreshment pauses became pauses to heal their thorn-scraped hands.

The sun was drifting low by the time the ground beneath them plateaued into a short growth of coarse, short grass and the sky opened before them. The cliff was ascended, the hole into the grotto a cool darkness from which the sound of the sea sighed continuously, the cliff edge beyond towering over the ocean and the lowering sun. Scattered islands in the distance gleamed black and mysterious and numerous against the deepening sunset.

Iroh picked his way around the edge of the cliff, until he stood where just the day before he'd considered how pleasant a vacation home would be to have there. A construction crew to build a house would use up time and materials that could be better spent in the push to take Ba Sing Se, but once the war was won, once his destiny was achieved, if he achieved it soon enough, perhaps a home here would be his first victory present to himself.

Sana had crept up to stand beside him on the ridge. "Amazing how there's always so much of it, isn't it?" she sighed, looking over the ocean. Another piece of evidence that her tribe was inland, not coastal. "I never get blind to how big it is -"

Her sighing reverence made him chuckle. "If you haven't seen it every day, I suppose it would be astonishing."

"Oh, I'll look at it every day of my life and not get tired," she said, as if making a promise to herself.

They sat to watch the sunset, arms touching, sipped coconut water, ate papaya and crabclaw. The sun hadn't touched the water before they were kissing again. If there was a green flash, they missed it.

In the dim after sunset, Iroh yawned as Sana bent water up and out of the grotto into an ice slide, but his weariness vanished as soon as he jumped on the freezing slide and whirled through the dark into the splash of the warm water. Blue light exploded around him as he plunged into the dark water, surprising him with its brilliance. The light faded where he left the water undisturbed, but followed his every motion before vanishing back into darkness.

He lifted a hand above the calm surface of the saltwater and lit a fire in his palm. Sana was already crouched on an outcrop of rock, and she swept him up on a wave that glowed blue as she bent the water. The blue glow flashed and faded constantly where the waves broke on the rocks.

It was impossible to miss - unless you couldn't see it at all, and Sana wasn't even looking at the light, her attention devoted instead to the plumeria tree that grew past the waterline, in the sand where the full light of noon would fall. The tree, covered with blossoms, filled the cavern with its sweet fragrance. "D'you think it would be disrespectful to hang the tarp from one of its branches?" she asked.

She'd have spoken of the blue lights if she could see them, Iroh was sure. But she hadn't said a word - so this must be another thing that only his eyes could see. His mother seemed to come to his mind so often in this place, and here were her words again, the first time as a young boy he'd come to her frustrated when nobody had believed him the first time he saw a phoenix rise from the flametree that bloomed in the center of the Fire Nation capital.

Second sight skipped many generations at a time through Ilah's clan, but she immediately recognized her son's claims for yet another gift alongside the firebending he'd been born to so powerfully had been so proud - even as she'd advised him to keep his visions protected information.

"Better to let others tell you what they see, and never give them more information than they believe is available," she'd taught him, saying again - "for information is the currency of war, and you are blessed with more of it."

Others would always accuse him of lying when they could never have proof that he saw what he saw, and so the advantage was for him alone. "But some secrets need a relief valve," she had admitted, when she'd finished telling him the tale of his great grandfather through her clan's side - a masterful admiral whose ships had never once sailed through rough weather while he advised their helmsman. "So I think you should at least tell me."

He'd been all too thrilled to tell her when he had his vision of conquering Ba Sing Se. He'd never found the voice to tell her of his vision of her death. Though she hadn't lived to see him approach the victory that defined his destiny, he would remember her pride on that day that he achieved it.

"Disrespectful?" he repeated, to Sana's question, waiting for her to tell him the fraction of information someone without second sight could glean about this place.

"Well I don't know, it just seems so stately here all by itself. Like it ain't no average tree, like it's special," Sana said. The blue glow rippled across the waves that lapped at the stone, but her eyes were firmly on the yellow and white blossoms illuminated by Iroh's handful of fire. "Don't this feel like a special place to you?"

It was absolutely a special place. His skin vibrated with spiritual energy. The water rippled with it in beautiful sparks as blue as the heart of a hot flame.

"You tell me," he said. "There are sacred cenotes back home, but none that are half sea."

A misty energy rose from the plumeria tree like silver fireflies, and every intake of breath left him . . . calmer than he expected. It was not a drugged calm, but a cool and soothing touch, like fingertips caressing one's cheek. Both invigorating and so welcomely calming.

He took advantage of the opportunity to draw his fingertips across Sana's cheek, letting his handful of fire go out. A gesture of affection seemed more appropriate for this space than fire did. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, tiredness came on him again.

She smiled at him. "I don't think we need to put up the tarp anyway," she concluded. "The stone overhangs the sand there - if it rains the water will run down from us. We can lie flat on the tarp. How roomy."

Iroh yawned, already pulling the tarp out of the ditch bag. "I'm looking forward to that."

"The sun goes down and you go with it," Sana teased, as she took a corner.

Iroh was asleep the moment he rolled over onto the tarp. Sana surprised him by joining him right away, no doubt tired out from the short night and long day. She'd tucked a fallen flower into her hair, and with a deep breath of both her hair and the plumeria that filled the cavern, he was deep in a dream so soothing that it was better not to wake from.

Dawn revealed the full loveliness of the grotto.

It reminded Iroh of the freshwater cenotes that dotted the Fire Nation, the water turquoise and clear, but all the way down to the brown-and-green coral ringing the sand bottom, swarmed with fish. Sunlight shone in from the cave mouths to the open ocean, and the water at those light filled edges was so intense and electric a cerulean that the whole grotto seemed rimmed with liquid lightning. It was different from the spirit glow he'd seen the night before, which had vanished in the light of day pouring through the roof. A single beam of sunlight fell on the black rock that rose against the shifting sea, cradling the sand beach and the plumeria tree at the back of the cavern. Iroh climbed the rock to sit on its rough surface and take in the sunlight.

He wanted to greet the dawn in his usual manner, but firebending anything more than a handful for illumination felt . . . tactless here. Like holding an agni kai in a garden. The heat of the air had no impact on the feeling of coolness, of soothing, flowing energy that he could describe best as the opposite of the way his awareness had been ignited on the island of the Sun Warriors, where the energy of the Firebending Masters had permeated every volcano-shaped stone. Perhaps that energy had drawn Sana there, for her to have found it so easily - the deep, oceanic energy drawing a waterbender, as he'd once been drawn to hunt down the Firebending Masters.

If he were to greet the sun in his usual manner while they camped here, he have to learn Sana's secrets of diving sooner rather than later.

He passed the morning in meditation while Sana slept, the soothing energy easing him faster than ever before into no-mind. He hadn't meant to match his breaths to the sound of the waves, but they did, and he'd been inhaling and exhaling with the waves for nearly an hour before he marked that he was doing it. The coolness had painted his mind all in blue, his awareness floating as easily as Sana did on the uplifting waves -

A sudden irrational fear lanced through him at the coolness he had waded into with his meditation. Was a firebender who made himself too open to this energy in danger of extinguishing his own flame? His mental calm was so abruptly shattered by the horror story of a thought that Iroh abruptly opened his eyes and held out a hand to check -

- his internal heat rose as quickly as ever at his breath and flame overflowed in his palm. He felt silly at caving into fear. What was ignited in him at birth could never be lost - no one in the history of the Fire Nation had ever proven themselves unworthy enough of their gift to have lost it.

Sana yawned behind him. He stood up quickly and picked his way across the rough stone in his excitement to greet her. The island was not lonely while she slept, but it was far more interesting to be inhabiting it while she was awake.

"You missed the whole morning again," he said, sliding in beside her mid-stretch. She was less than fully awake, her laughter groggy, but she rolled towards him and accepted his arms around her, offering her own. She met his good morning kiss with hers.

"Well, what do you think?" she asked, when they'd greeted each other adequately. "Isn't it beautiful?"

"It's the loveliest place I've ever been unable to leave," Iroh agreed.

"Oh, you'll be able to get out," she promised, sitting up. "It'll be getting back in without me that'll be the trick." She took a deep breath of the air. "That plumeria scent never goes away, does it?"

His nose had never gone blind to the smell, not all morning. The tree filled the grotto with its sweet smell. "I think you were right, to say it's a special tree."

"I think this whole place is special," she said, looking around the grotto, the beams of morning sunlight cutting shafts into the turquoise water, the bougainvillea draping around the hole in the roof, drops of water sparkling as they dripped from the hanging vines. Iroh could still, faintly, see the spirit energy rising from the plumeria tree, silvery in the sunlight, but Sana's gaze didn't linger on their upward track. Her eyes landed back on his. "I was thinking about it last night, but I don't think we should kill anything in here."

Iroh thought of the fish swarming the deep bowl and the reef. "Then we'd better figure a way out sooner than later." His stomach growled. "I already ate most of the papaya."

Sana reached upward, stretching, and yawned again. "Let's get going then," she said, through her yawn. "No time like now to start practicing. Hold on," she said, as Iroh got up to make his way to the ocean. "I gotta teach you how to clear your ears before we jump in the sea."

He sat across from her. His ears had felt like someone was taking knives to the sides of his head when he'd tried to follow her to the seafloor their first morning, and he was eager to avoid that pain.

Sana reached out and pinched his nose shut. "Breathe out."

He exhaled through his mouth.

"No," she said. "Pretend I don't got your nose, and exhale against the pressure until you feel it in your ears."

She put the fingertips of her other hand at the crease where his nose met his cheeks. Iroh blew out, but the resistance of her fingers pinching his nose shut seemed to inflate his nose and not do much else. She shook her head.

"Harder," she said. "Use your lungs if you gotta, just to get the feel for it -"

Iroh exhaled through his mouth, and took another breath. This time he engaged his diaphragm, forcing air against her fingers as if trying to overpower her grip with the flare of his nostrils. Instead, the pressure seemed to force liquid into his ears, changing the tone of the ocean in his left.

"Is it supposed to deafen me?" he asked, his voice made nasal.

"If you do that underwater, it relieves the pressure," she said, seeming satisfied by his results. "Now try to do that without using anything below your neck," she said, putting her hand on his stomach. "Use your throat and your tongue instead of your diaphragm. It uses less breath up."

He was reminded of the feeling of going up a tall mountain, and needing to yawn to relieve the painful sensation in his ears. He yawned, and the pressure relieved itself, the temporarily fuzzed sense of hearing popped and cleared.

That pop made the pieces fall into place. He suddenly identified the feeling of too much pressure within oneself atop a high mountain, compared too much pressure without oneself when going the opposite direction beneath the ocean.

Iroh took another breath, pinched his nose shut and pressed the back of his throat and tongue to the roof of his mouth, feeling the pressure mount in his ears as he imagined his mouth full of water he could not let slide down into his lungs. His hearing dulled as pressure build up in his ears.

Sana took her hand away from his stomach. "I think you got it," she said, pleased, putting a hand to his throat to feel the muscle contractions there. "You ready to try it underwater?"

Iroh remembered that he was doing this for the purpose of expressly getting deeper in the water, closer to drowning then - well, maybe not closer than he'd ever been in his life, but closer than he'd ever come on purpose. "Only one way to find out," he said.

Not wishing to seem like he'd been rattled by his near-drowning only a few days ago, he ran theatrically up the central rock and flipped theatrically into the air and the dragging plunge of the sea.

He hadn't reached the surface before Sana crashed through next to him, but her perfect dive took her on a deep arc underneath him. Iroh broke the surface, sucking in air as he treaded. The form she'd taught him the day before made treading less difficult, but he wouldn't have called it by any stretch easy to keep his head above water. Sana surfaced next to him with a calm, deep inhale, already seeming more serene at being in the water.

She'd brought a floatvest with them in her ditch kit. She pushed the vest at him and Iroh hung onto it, relieved at the assistance.

"You know, you're gonna be real good at diving," Sana said, which struck him as an odd conclusion to have reached. "You won't have to fight your way down below the Doorway like I do."

"Seems like being good at sinking will only make half of diving easy," Iroh said. "What about the return trip?"

"Don't worry about it," she said, very carelessly for someone speaking to another who was not a waterbender. "I won't let you drown."

He at least trusted that that was the truth.

Sana handed him a bamboo clip. "When I say to, put this on your nose, but to begin with, you gotta breathe up. Roll over on your back. You can lie on the vest, but you gotta relax as much as possible, and take breaths as deep and slow as possible. Imagine you're trying to get to sleep after a long day. When you're done breathing up, I wanna see how long you can hold your breath. I'll tell you when to roll over and hold. Your job is to relax as much as possible. You hold your longest breath when you're relaxed."

Firebenders were good at deep breathing. Iroh had been studiously practicing the deepest inhale possible since he'd met the Masters, and breathing drills were the first form of training he could remember receiving. But holding breath in was anathema to a firebender. Who would cut off their own fuel by keeping it inside to burn uselessly, rather than unleashing it in the longest, most fiercely propelled stream possible?

A waterbender would, apparently, and what would his mother say if she could see him learning breathing techniques from a waterbender -? His father would surely say he was wasting his time and honor by not killing her, but his mother would repeat - that information was the currency of war, and he was being blessed with more of it.

"Take your last breath and hold," Sana instructed. "When you're ready, put the clip on and roll over. Slow movements. As little effort as possible."

Waterbending was so strange. Less effort, in Firebending, only made for ineffectual fire that ghosted harmlessly across an opponent's skin. Iroh drew in his deepest breath yet, slid the clip onto his nose, and rolled over, face down in the sea.

The first handful of seconds were fine, but after a mere moment Iroh's lungs felt overfull. He wanted to exhale, suddenly uncomfortable with the pressure within, as if his closed lungs were swelling as they converted air into . . . whatever lungs converted air into.

He fought against the growing pressure until his breath burst out of him, the water boiling at his exhalation. He rolled away from his expressed heat, sucking in air as water welled up beneath him, lifting him to the surface.

Sana was waterbending him up. She pushed the floatvest into his arms. "You almost got a whole minute," she said, encouraging. "That's good for a first timer!"

"Almost?" Iroh was dismayed. That had felt like an eternity. "How can your best be seven minutes? That felt like five."

"I been doin' this since before I could walk," Sana soothed. "Whereas you been, what, spittin' fire since then? I can't spit fire at all. At least you can hold your breath."

"You can't possibly hold seven times the air I can," Iroh protested. "Firebending is powered by the breath. I know I can take a deeper breath than many firebenders -"

"It's only part about the deepness of your breath. The other part is resisting letting the breath go," Sana said. "You know, when you exhale, there's still good air in your lungs. There's a technique we use when someone's come near to drowning, where one person forces their own breath into someone else's lungs. If your lungs scrubbed all the good stuff out of the air immediately and exhaled only trash, that wouldn't work, would it?"

Iroh made a mental note to ask to learn that technique next.

"You gotta resist the urge to replace your breath," she went on. "The first step is realizing that you don't need to replace it as fast as you feel you do. It takes so much longer than you think it does for a conscious person to drown."

Iroh sat half-up in the water, holding onto the float vest. "That's the most alarming thing you've said in the entire time I've known you."

Sana looked suddenly self-conscious.

"I ain't gonna let you drown," she said. She paused, looking at him. "You don't really want to learn this, do you?"

"I want to be able to get in and out of here without having to wake you up every morning," Iroh said. "It's a good, safe place to camp," he reassured her. She seemed so brought-down so suddenly. "I can't promise you I'll ever love the idea of being as far underwater as a waterbender likes to be."

Sana inhaled and exhaled a long breath. "Well, I just wanna keep you alive. I ain't gotta make you love anything."

The Fire Nation was full of women poised like leopardcrabs in waiting for any opening to inspire and ensnare his love. He wondered if she'd change her mind and join their ranks if she knew his true identity.

He smiled, reassuring her. "I don't have to love something to know I need to learn it. What's my next lesson, sifu?"

The flattery of the title brought a half-smile back to her face. "Three fathoms deep," she said. It sounded like so little, there on the surface, and yet -

Iroh sighed after watching her demonstrate the depth. Three fathoms looked twice as far underwater as it did on land.

But this was the lesson he'd asked for. He inhaled, dove, and put the waterbender's teaching to good use.

A/N: Using bending for birth control was, obviously, not an issue that needed to come up in the show, but I thought about it too much. The details of the swampbenders' techniques will come up in the future.

The blue spirit-glow described in the grotto is based on real life bioluminescent phytoplankton. I've never seen it anywhere but in a youtube video, but it's on the bucket list.

The technique Sana teaches Iroh in this chapter is called the frenzel method (using the tongue and throat to manipulate air pressure in the sinuses), with a brief pass through the valsalva method (employing the diaphragm) to get him there. Some people can equalize pressure hands-free just by cracking their jaws in a certain way, and until further notice I'm jealous of them.