A/N: This chapter's title is from Close by 3LAU feat. Oly.

Just a heads up that there are descriptions of death by stroke and brain cancer in this chapter, in case anyone has trouble with that.

Chapter 9

I've Weathered Every Storm So Far

By lunchtime he'd made it to three fathoms, but no deeper.

The pain in his ears kept on rising up, never going away in time for his breath to last him a little farther down. His ears felt clogged and sore all the way down into his throat when they left the water for a break. "Every outlet is twice as deep as I've gone," Iroh grumbled, as the waves washed serenely through the cavern. "I'll never get out at this rate."

"Don't get discouraged," Sana said, all calm smiles where he was growing frustration. She was blissed out on the hours they'd spent floating in the sea, cool and soothed in the shade of the grotto. "Just because you can't make the depth yet doesn't mean you're not building the skills you need. If you made depth right now, you might not actually be able to hold your breath long enough to swim out. You need to take your time underwater, work on your breath hold and your ear clearing. Depth will follow once you get those two."

"I'm so close though," Iroh objected. He felt nearly deaf on his right side. He attempted to shake the water out of his ear. "I can get past the pain. It's just a distraction."

"No it's not, it's a warning!" Sana looked up from her bliss with a sudden sharpness. "You tough the pain out and you're just gonna bust an ear. Those are complicated to heal!"

"It's just a few more feet," Iroh insisted. "I'm too close to give up."

Sana exhaled slow, like she was trying to solve a puzzle. "Maybe having a target you can see is the wrong way to teach a firebender," she said. "You see a goal and you want to burn a hole right through it. But you gotta hold several things in your awareness while diving, not narrow your focus to one at the expense of everything else."

"I have very good situational awareness," Iroh objected. Not being good at something was making him grumpy, but as his stomach rumbled loudly, he realized he might have also simply been ravenous. If he let his hurt pride and his hunger wreck his courtesies, Sana might want to teach him less, possibly not ask him to make love to her again once they were done for the day.

That threat made him take a deep, calming breath, unwilling to let his pride risk ruining his chance at a night's pleasure. The memory of her hands tangled in his hair the night before, and her willful enjoyment of his attention when they forgot to watch for the green flash sparked excitement that was a challenge to draw his focus away from, particularly to a task that a firebender was so ill suited to.

He softened his mood. "But you are teaching me something I've never learned before." He had promised to attend her training with the attitude of a student. Opening his awareness was well and good, for sitting in meditation at a site of great spiritual power - like training at a Fire Sage temple, or taking in the teachings of the Masters on their island - and this was a place of great spiritual power, even if it wasn't the power attuned to his. "So - how will you test me, if not with a depth?"

"I think we'll switch to time," Sana said. "I'll have to rig something up after lunch."

They had the rest of the coconut crab meat, already cooked and encased in a block of ice that Sana had replenished since the day before. The green bananas they'd found were still ripening in the alcove, but green papaya with sea salt and the sweetness of mango juice evaporated and thickened to a syrup, sliced and pounded together with the coconut crabmeat, was crunchy and satisfying. They filled in the gaps chewing on pieces of white coconut meat as they lay back on the sand, in no hurry to get back to work.

"How are your ears?" Sana asked, sliding up next to Iroh to idly graze her fingertips along his neck while they digested. The cool of the grotto brought her closer to him even more frequently than she touched him in the direct sun, where he vented so much heat passively that sometimes the air around him rippled without him noticing.

"Better," he said, considering. The sensation of seawater in his ears had gone away slowly over the course of the meal, and his hearing no longer felt dulled.

"Good," she said, finishing her piece of coconut and turning on her side, leaning her head on her hand. She let her free hand rest comfortably, familiarly, on his bicep. "I'm sorry this isn't much fun for you," she said, her smile wry. "It'd be nice if we could just spend all this free time enjoyin' ourselves, but survivin' is always a little work."

"Plenty of important things aren't fun," Iroh said. "But everything important is better done in a beautiful place, with great food, and a beautiful companion - I've done plenty of hard work and been lucky to get even one of those three at a time." He lifted his hand to draw his finger down Sana's cheek, thinking again back to last sunset, interest stirring in him to have her love again. "This is the best vacation I've had in years."

"Me too," Sana admitted, and somehow that was what brought a blush to her face.

"I thought you were still working," Iroh pointed out. "Keeping a valuable customer alive in the middle of nowhere?"

"A working vacation's still a vacation," she said, her lips parting in a smile that invited kisses. "You know if the storm hadn't happened, we'd have said goodbye already," she pointed out. "We'd have said it yesterday, if you'd found me in Changbao the day before, like I asked you to."

"Oh, you mean we got ahead of schedule?" Iroh said, suddenly seeing the humor. "I planned to hold off on leaving for the Colonies until I'd shown you the nearest inn with silk sheets. Were you going to accept?"

Sana leaned over and kissed his cheek. "I was considerin' it."

A lack of silk sheets hadn't hurt his prospects. He wondered if a single night of Changbao's hospitality could have lent themselves to a passion that approached their need for each other after coming so many times so close to death, after rescuing each other from pain and finding each other's company such a ward against boredom or loneliness. Sana drew her lips away from his cheek, and he rose up on his elbows to kiss her lips again.

Perhaps having had her already had ignited his desire with a pilot light that never quite went out, now that he knew he could have her, but his desire rose faster than he expected as they kissed, and he found himself needing to put his arms around her, roll her onto the sand to feel her soft and receptive against him, her tongue between his lips and her arms around his back, drawing him in, already sighing her own desire.

Iroh drew back from kissing the woman who had his life in her hands, to get his breath back and catch a glimpse of her expression of desire. The silvery energy drifting from the plumeria tree, nearly invisible in the full light of day, swirled around her, and perhaps around him too - clockwise as if drawn by a gentle current.

It hadn't done that before they kissed. The energy of this powerful place reacted to the love he was increasingly compelled to make to her. He was perfectly eager to go with it.

He kissed her lips, grabbed her thigh and slid her leg around his hip - but paused as her sighs of desire turned to refusal.

"I want to," she said, which was in contrast to her hands on his chest, her head back on the sand, pushing him away, "but this place - it's kinda -" she winced. "It could be disrespectful, couldn't it? Fuckin' in a sacred place?"

He wasn't convinced that the particular sacredness of this place was offended by mortal pleasure. She couldn't see the way the energy flowed in a mirror to the rising energy of their desire - and he couldn't tell her about it without giving away his second sight, which at best would make him sound like a liar.

"You . . . must be right," he lied. "Of course. We should keep this where the spirits aren't likely to see something they don't want to."

He couldn't stay on top of her, with her chest rising and falling underneath his touch and her lips so full from kissing and her eyes half-lidded and abate his desire to have her immediately. He backed off, his breathing a little faster than usual as he sat beside her on the sand. The cool of the water when they got back to work would take care of his arousal. But that meant -

Iroh frowned. "I must master diving before I can make love to you again?" He exhaled. "Well, if I'd needed motivation, that would have done it."

"I was going to build ice steps up and out," Sana said. "Don't worry." Her eyes were still lidded as she leaned in, drawing her fingers along his neck below the line of his beard. "I want you too much not to wanna see the sunset."

He barely resisted the urge to pull her into his arms and get them right back in the position they'd just had to pull themselves away from. Sana, feeling the same draw, forcibly sat back on her heels, tucking her hair behind her ears as she cast around for a neutral topic.

"What were you goin' to the colonies for, anyway?" she landed on.

Telling her about the anniversary of the comet would link him too deeply into the Fire Nation royal ceremony. "I hadn't taken leave since my mother died," he said, which was true. "I got permission to return for my father's birthday."

"Oh, no," she said, suddenly dismayed. "And you're going to miss it!"

"I think my father will be relieved when I'm alive at all," he pointed out. "He won't mind my missing an important day if I'm alive after all this."

It was true enough. The Fire Nation itself might not currently be aware their crown prince was missing as long as Jeong Jeong had reason to believe that searching the sea was still worth it to find him, but Azulon would be weighing the worth of declaring him dead or not. He would likely hold off from throwing his nation into mourning until after the anniversary. Iroh wondered if he'd wind up returning home in time to crash his own funeral, and chuckled at the image.

"What do you think, do they think I'm dead, or does the Captain have faith that you can keep me alive?" he asked. "I might return home in time to crash my own funeral."

"I'd pay money to see that," Sana giggled. She looked thoughtful. "Captain Fang will have faith in me. Question is, will she tell your men she has that much faith?"

"If she's told them you're a waterbender -"

"She wouldn't do that. It would be suicide," Sana said. "Harboring a waterbender instead of collecting the bounty for one? She'll never tell. But she'll do her best to reassure them you ain't dead."

Then the paperwork declaring Ozai the new Crown Prince wouldn't have a signature on it for a while. "They'll hold out hope," he agreed. "My men would hate for me to be dead."

"Your father must be so upset right now," she mused, sounding so pitying over the most powerful man in the world that Iroh almost snorted, imagining Azulon's reception of her pity. "Between you and your mother, he thinks he's lost the two people he loves most in the space of two years."

Iroh remembered Azulon's dismayed response to Ilah's sudden death - the quiet shock that the Fire Lord had displayed was, perhaps, his brilliantly detached and focused father's way of showing loving grief. It startled him to think of. He'd never truly considered whether his father had loved his mother or not. Love was the least important thing that had factored into their marriage, but that didn't mean it had never become a factor, over the years since they'd wed. That Azulon could have loved Ilah in addition to valuing and respecting her was . . . a possibility, now that he considered it.

He didn't, however, have to wonder his father's perspective on him. He'd figured out his position long ago.

"My father doesn't love me," Iroh corrected. "He likes me."

Sana sat up on her elbow. "That sounds so cold," she said, then snorted. "Especially for a Fire National."

It was far safer for him not to forget it. His mother had loved him. Azulon's approval was far more conditional. "My father likes what I've accomplished already. If I didn't keep impressing him, there'd be consequences."

"He sounds more like a boss than family."

"That's . . . more than fair."

It was why his family ruled the world while families like Sana's, less cohesive, more disorganized, willing to let their powerful heir simply run off into the wilderness on a whim, were poor enough that a beautiful and resourceful and powerful bender of a daughter had both the freedom to run off on a whim, and the willingness to eat food out of the dirt and call herself lucky to get it. A firebender with Sana's looks and power would never find anything better to do out in the rest of the world than the wealth and responsibility and power the Fire Nation would immediately honor her with.

Actually - if this woman had been born to the Fire Nation, with fire in her soul instead of water, her empathetic resourcefulness and attentive nature could have made her a contender for arrangement to marry very high. Not enough to marry him, when his marriage had been arranged before the appropriate family from the appropriate clan even had conceived a daughter who could become his Fire Lady, but high enough that he probably would have met her, and had this same affair before his marriage was conducted. Hopefully in that other lifetime she wasn't already married, for him to have to navigate the maze of etiquette that even a crown prince had to walk when he desired another man's wife and was desired back.

Love did not make a powerful family. But maybe love could come out of a powerful union, like the one that Azulon had married his mother to forge. Maybe love could come eventually out of the powerful union he was already arranged to. But unions of love did not rule the world - perfectly orchestrated unions of power did.

"What about the rest of your family?" Sana entreated, lying back on the sand, her arm still touching his, as if she couldn't quite bear not to have some part of her skin on his at all times. "Must've been so nice to have your Ma as a bending tutor. Do you have brothers and sisters?"

"A little brother. VERY little. He was three last I saw him." Iroh thought about the fretful second prince that Ozai was, quick to tantrum and such a challenge that the nurse hired to raise him had to be seconded by a firebender, to put out the toddler's errant blasts before they could hurt his nurse or set the castle on fire. Ozai was already a prodigious firebender, but he was also prodigiously emotional, and those were not a great combination of features to have in a toddler. "He's a little too temperamental to be ideal."

"He's a baby. They're supposed to be temperamental."

Iroh chuckled. "You might not have so much sympathy if YOU were the nurse he keeps almost setting on fire."

"Oh," Sana winced. "I hadn't thought about that. A toddler who can breathe fire! That would test anyone's patience."

"He is still a child," Iroh amended. It wouldn't quite do to speak ill of a prince, even a prince subordinate to him. "He has time to grow out of it. I shouldn't be so unkind. And he will never know our mother enough to miss her. I pity him for that." He grew somber again, thinking of Ilah - thinking of the way Ozai had screamed in a tantrum through her funeral, as if kicking off this new world without their brilliant mother in it in the worst way possible. The world HAD felt its worst at that moment.

Sana put her hand on his shoulder. "You miss her so much."

"I do." He inhaled deeply. "I will keep on missing her."

"How did she die?"

"Suddenly." Suddenly was the simplest way to frame Ilah's death. "She was mid-sentence to a visitor at a garden party, and out of nowhere she shook as if struck by lightning, and fell to the ground. She was dead by the time any medics arrived." At least there had been enough witnesses that no one suffered the indignity of being accused of her murder.

Sana put a hand to her mouth, thoughtful, as if considering the symptoms. "I've known of some elders died that way. But your mother couldn't have been an elder?" He confirmed that she had not with a shake of his head. "How terrible. I'm so sorry. The shock must've been awful."

"I had considered, during childhood, what life might be like if my mother or father passed away," he said. It was true. As Ozai grew closer to the age he'd seen his younger brother in the vision of Ilah's funeral, and Ilah had gone on being in perfectly good health as befit a middle-aged firebending master, he'd begun to doubt his vision and to hope it were not true. He could have stood losing faith in his vision of taking Ba Sing Se if it meant more years of his mother's guidance. But she had taken all his doubt to the funeral pyre with her. "It didn't make me miss her less, but it did help to have thought it out before hand. It gave me the perspective to cherish our time together."

And it helped to know that he would be a great Fire Lord in her honor.

"Well she must have been an amazing firebender," Sana said. "Not that I know much about firebending." Her tone was sympathetic, joking. "But you sure look like you know what you're doing, when you do it."

"She was a great firebender," Iroh assured her. "Some say she was the second-best in the nation, after the Fire Lord himself."

The some who said it included the Fire Lord himself. Azulon had married Ilah for many talents she'd displayed in the field, but above all others, he had valued that practical purpose.

"She sounds wonderful."

"She was. I was lucky to be her son." He was lucky in so many ways for his birthright, and to say so in the Fire Nation could have been taken as a slight against his father for not saying foremost and only that he was blessed with the highest and most singular of honor in being the Fire Lord's son - but it had not been busy Azulon who had greeted the dawn with him each morning, or tutored him privately first in all lessons, so that he had the safety and the freedom to make his first mistakes where only Ilah would see and correct them. So that he had the joy of learning to firebend from someone whose first lesson had been to take joy in the blessing that was being born of fire.

Azulon was many things, but one of them was not joyful. Ilah had been serious, focused, exacting, and as any good firebending master would, permitted no disrespect from her son to his teachers, his art, his station - but she had wound joy into her many life lessons anyway.

He would always miss their private mornings, the games she played with him to hone his skills past the point where there was even the possibility that he could make an error in form, the warmth and kindness that another who looked in on the Fire Lady training her son could have mistaken for a lack of seriousness, if they made the mistake of conflating dourness with effectiveness.

"Do you get to talk about her with your Pa a lot?" Sana asked. "Does he bend with you?"

Iroh considered that possibility. "Perhaps he will, now that I am trained," he said. "It won't be like training with my mother. She was teaching a student. My father will be looking for ways that my mastery is imperfect. If he finds them -" Iroh shrugged. His mastery was indisputable by anyone he'd ever sparred with since his mother had pronounced him a master, but Azulon was . . . He was Azulon, the firebending prodigy and brilliant engineer who saw every detail and always found something to improve, and was always offended that it had taken his time to spot the error rather than being caught by the people he relied on to ease his workload. "When he finds them I will have drills to do until they don't exist anymore. It won't be a tropical beach vacation."

"That sounds exhausting," Sana said, "Always having to be producing results, living up to standards even to your family."

That was a strange thing for her to say. There wasn't a Fire Nation family of any standing who didn't hold their children up to high standards, and keep some of those standards so high they were out of reach to discourage complacency, the enemy of excellence.

But then, that was the difference between the Fire Nation and all the other bending nations of the world.

"Traveling across the whole world because it would have been harder to stay home makes your family sound exhausting too," he pointed out. Sure, Fire Nation court life was tiring. It was why he treasured downtime like this to the fullest, and returned to the field and the court refreshed by it, ready for another round of the games of civility and war. "Did you travel north just to learn healing, or were you running from something?"

"Were you running from something?"

Sana realized she could frame it like that. Running from the obligation of having to always be in the same place each night, to drag herself away from whatever better option had presented itself during the day to go back to the same group of people she didn't like, laughing over the same mean stories, keeping her trapped in the circle of their firelight by the invisible tethers of familial obligation so much longer than they needed to, where everything she said was strange or morbid, because they spent their days doing the real work of ferretfish noodling while she played with silly little kids and fussed in the scrolls and hung too much around the bog of the dead. They had no interest in talking about kids waterbending, when they'd never waterbend themselves, no interest in reading the scrolls because who cared about air temples and enormous walled cities and the endless, deadly expanse of the sea when they could tell, yet again, the outrageous tale of when Kenui had the temerity to use Jiu's best fishing line and break it (how dare he), or all the things that Jiu had done for his ungrateful former gal who was all the way on the other side of the swamp with the Oxbow Clan now that she'd cut ties (how dare she), and every other way that everyone else in the clan was wrong and rude and couldn't act right, including Sana, who never had anything to say that was worth hearing, and never did keep the cups full like she'd promised her brother she would. She had one job. And it wasn't to bore them with toddler talk, airhead stories, or worse, afternoons with Tei -

"You gotta stop hangin' out with that deathkeeper," Jiu would just say, every time she brought up her best friend ever, as if the way that Tei conducted their funeral rituals with dignity and without fear were anything less than a heroic kindness, and an astonishing display of her bending power.

"She's makin' you creepier every day," added any one of his friends, the ones Jiu was always telling her she was so up herself for not taking up with. "It's not attractive."

Sana took a long breath and exhaled. She didn't want to complain about them. All they did was complain about everyone else. But dragging herself away from her friends' company, from the kids inviting her to their family's fires for the night, just away from the loveliness of twilight in the swamp when the fog cleared and the trees were black against the cerulean blue of the sky, the fisherfrogs and cicadabirds singing so sweet, to block it all out with the light of her brother's fire and the voices of his complaints, had been the worst part of her day, every day. She was shocked at how long she'd just gone on letting it be part of her day, when always, always, the current in the swamp tugged at her ankles, pulling her west, even when all the other waterbenders insisted they felt no current at all -

She'd turned aside Iroh's questions about her choice to wander the other night, but it was the day after tomorrow, and she'd promised him answers yesterday that they'd turned out not to have time for.

"No - and yes," she said. "It's said that when our people left the north, they left great healers there. I always thought it was kind of a tall tale, but maybe if I'd known how good they were, I'd have gone straight there instead of meandering around the Earth Kingdom as much as I did." But the river, and its westward current only she'd felt, had pulled her so strong. "When Pa got sick, he got real sick real fast, but he stayed alive for so long. We got great doctors, but they still couldn't do much. Maybe that's why I've never been good at it. Maybe I just don't believe in it enough. Maybe if I'd heard about what the Northern girls could do, I'd have gone North faster, been better at it from the start." She shrugged. "What's gone by is gone by."

"That's a whole lot about what didn't make you leave," Iroh pointed out.

Sana frowned. "I love my home," she said, stubbornly. The singing at night, her students, her friends, the endless braided rivers, the deep, deep blue of the spring . . . "It was hard to leave them. But I wanted to all my life." There was the paradox her love was built on. "I wanted to see things outside home. Seemed worth doing, seeing what else there was in the world to see, then having my beautiful place to come home to. When my friends and I were kids, we did a lot of little short trips, but we never ever went far enough that I was tired of wanderin'." She exhaled. "And lately, nobody had a mind to wander anymore. All my friends were settling into their trades, havin' babies, and I wanted those things, but . . . I wanted to see the ocean more."

He stayed silent, looking her in the eye, and by the Moon wasn't it nice to be listened to. She exhaled into the silence. "And I was sick of puttin' up with my half-brother."

A knowing smile crossed his face, like he'd heard what he was waiting to hear. "Family can be difficult. I do find my father easier to love from the distance of the field," he said, tucking his hands behind his head. "What did your brother do?"

Sana pursed her lips. "I wasn't supposed to be at his night-fire more than a month," she muttered. "When our sister took her daughter to her father's night-fire and my brother's lady left him, I promised I'd make sure he had drinking water until he'd built his own distiller. But he kept putting off building the distiller, kept inviting more and more of his friends over, and I got caught in gettin' water every evening for so many people, and none of them liked me."

"Not even your brother?" Iroh asked.

"He'd be the first to remind you we're half siblings," Sana said. "Pa was a waterbender. None of my brothers and sisters are. Got a few nieces and nephews that are, though. I think everyone thought it was supposed to skip a generation. I think they thought when Pa got with my Earth Kingdom Ma it'd skip my branch of the family entirely. But here I am."

She rolled onto her back to look at the blue, blue sky through the hole in the roof of the grotto.

"The nights just kept going by and I had to spend them with all these people who didn't want me to be the only waterbender they could get," she said. "I got to thinkin' about how Pa passed. How one day he was fine, and then one day he wasn't, how it came on so sudden but it was still so slow - " She waited for Iroh to change the subject, tell her she was getting too dark. When she glanced over he was still looking at her, offering her silence. "He got stupid before anything. His mind not workin' right. Then the headaches started. One day, he got one that never ended. By the end he was just pain. That's all he was - in pain. He couldn't even speak to us but a minute or two of the day. And it still took him a week like that to die." She inhaled, exhaled. "What if I went the same way, I thought? What if tomorrow, I woke up with the headache that never ended, and all the rest of my life was just pain surrounded by people I didn't like? Once that became all I could think about . . . It was harder to stay than to go."

And the current in the swamp got stronger and stronger, never showing her a vision, never giving her the guidance it gave so easily to Tei and Idia and Mothmouse, just threatening every day a little more to sweep her off her feet.

Westward. Oceanward.

Here.

She stared at the sky for a moment. When she looked back over, Iroh was still paying attention to her.

He registered the end of her story with a half smile, reached out and put his hand on hers, resting on her sternum. "I'd have left too," he said.

She closed her hand around his. "Oh yeah? You'd break a promise to your own brother, leave him to gather his water the hard way?"

He chuckled. "It might give him time to build some character."

She had to laugh too, but softly. Back home Jiu was telling anyone who'd listen what a faithless bitch she was, his half-loyal half-sister, and with all his friends having to gather their own water he doubtless had a very receptive audience.

"Your father's death left a great impact on you," he commented, sympathetic in her silence. She leaned into the sympathy.

"I was young. Awful things shape you when you're young."

"If my mother had died when I had been that young, I would be a very different person," Iroh agreed. "I'd be a lesser bender, if nothing else."

"That was a big part of it, all my time growin' up," Sana said, rolling on her side to be a little closer to him and his sympathy. "I had good teachers, but none of 'em were my pa, you know? I'm so jealous of your time with your ma." She paused. "I know this is all heavy stuff," she said, seeing his grief closer than hers was. "Thank you for listening."

"I should be thanking you. My father is not exactly the king of speaking long about feelings, and my brother is so young he'll never know our mother well enough to miss her." He squeezed her hand. "It's nice to talk about her again."

"It does help, don't it?"

He ran his thumb along the back of her hand, the soothing touch pulling her out of the darkness of death. "Well, I'm sorry that your home life became too unpleasant to stand, but I have to say, I am very happy you left."

She smiled. "Lucky for you, wasn't it?"

"It was." She felt it had been lucky for her, too, the way her hand felt so warm in his. "Destiny did me a favor, sending you."

She sat up, snorting with laughter. "Oh, it's destiny that brought us here? Do you say that to all the ladies you're trapped on a desert island with?"

"So far just the one," Iroh said, sitting up beside her. "Tell you what - in my gratitude for your help, I'll come up with something else to say to the next woman who saves my life at sea."

He touched her chin gently, just brushing his thumb over the edge of her bottom lip, and she leaned in for a kiss.

Just the one, she thought. Then, all right, maybe two.

"I want to have done something worth celebrating by sunset," Iroh said, breaking the kiss before she could commit to a third. "Let's get back to work. If I can't swim out of here by the end of the day, it won't be for lack of trying."

"But it's much easier to get out than it is to get back in," Sana said, wryly, as she stood up, eager to get back in the water.

"Well." Iroh rolled his broad shoulders, which just made Sana want to put her hands back on them - "Then I'll just go on being grateful I've got a master waterbender from the far secret corners of the world here to keep me alive in it."

It would have been worth it to have left home just to see the ocean, Sana thought. And yet here the world was, giving her even more reasons to be so glad she'd come all this way.