A/N: TW for menstruation as a topic in this chapter. This chapter's title is taken from Gravity, by Jai Wolf.
The mini playlist for this chapter:
Attom - Her
Gravity - Jai Wolf
The Ocean - Mike Perry
Freesol - Seven Lions
Silence - Before You Exit
Attom - Her
Water - Moody Blues
Dive With Me - LVNDSCAPE
Chapter 11 - When a Force Like This Pulls Me Under
Sana swam out of the grotto, lungs convulsing for air. She burst to the surface air-starved and gasping - she was lucky to have made it out at all, beginning a dive with her heart rate that far from calm.
Her heart was still pounding, her whole body tingling with anger. She swam, arm over arm, hard and directionless into the sea.
We don't have the luxury to roam, he'd said, his voice echoing in her mind through the splashing of the water as she swam. We're better for it, he'd said. He thinks he's better than me, ran through her head, followed immediately by but who doesn't? And, as immediately: who isn't better than you?
There were better healers, better fighters, better sailors. Better guests. Better sisters. Women who respected themselves too much to have fallen on top of and underneath men who thought less of them, people who didn't find that everywhere they went they were somehow just a little on the outs with everyone they met, and then there was her -
Sana whirled her arms, bent the water around her into a waterspout and flung herself into the air, shrieking out on her fall down.
The sea was the perfect place for big emotions. The waves made a soft reception for big anger, deep frustration. Sana plunged under the surface, into the bottomless blue. She let the fall drop her deep, deep under until her buoyancy surpassed the force of her fall and lifted her, effortlessly, back up to the air.
She broke the surface and lay on her back, her energy spent in anger and shame and frustration.
With unhappiness spinning inside her, Sana cast out for some comfort to cut through the way the women of the north had also thought less of her. The way her siblings thought less of her. The way the man she'd had every reason to know better than to indulge in her attraction to thought less of her. Who doesn't think you are unworthy? She asked herself.
The answers came. Of course they did. Tei. Idia. Mothmouse. Ma.
They'd welcome her back to their night-fires when she returned. Their names were like a mantra, comforting, soothing as the rolling of the deep blue sea, their good memories washing away the bad. Instead of the women of the North turning their backs and refusing to speak to her, there was Mothmouse joking as they gathered herbs. Instead of Jiu calling her half-loyal, there was Tei at the Spring, practicing breath-holds with her as they took turns lying facedown in the cold clear springwater, holding each other's hands and squeezing to mark time and check consciousness. Idia in the hollowed-out library cypress, telling her about the latest scroll she'd traded from the latest band of Earth Kingdom travelers to pass by the edge of the Swamp, her recommendation glowing, so excited to share another bit of history or poem that she knew Sana would love, because she had loved it too, because she wanted to hear what Sana had to say about it as she had so much to say once Sana had read it.
Ma, eyes shining, watching Sana waterbend, telling Sana how much she was like her pa, who everyone in the Swamp agreed had been impossible not to like and admire.
In the face of all the evidence otherwise, Sana thought wryly. Ma had never stopped insisting she was just like the father she could only remember as dying. From the bending, down to the way Sana always wanted to dive deeper and deeper into the Spring, down to the way Sana had wanted so much, ever since the first time she heard there was a place where all you could see in every direction was water, to see the ocean. He'd gone and seen it too, once.
Sana breathed a slow breath, having thought of them all.
Maybe you're making too big a deal of this, she thought.
Someday she'd die, maybe as Pa had, and by then, would she regret that she'd had more pleasure, not less, that she'd spent less time, not more, at Jiu's beck and call, that she'd failed to win the approval of the women of the North when winning it would have meant being a different woman, one who didn't have the Swamp, the Spring, those friends to come back home to?
Not at all. Not even a bit.
But Iroh had still hurt her feelings. She sucked in another deep, calming breath, exhaling a long one as she flipped upright in the water to check her drift. The island was distant enough for her to see the whole southwest facing coastline. She froze an ice slab on the downslope of a wave, rolled onto it and knelt, lifting the wave behind her to surf back to land.
Iroh breathed in meditative concentration until his racing heart was calm and his outrage spent.
His anger was justified, but this was not a place for anger, and Sana was not a person to get angry at. For one thing, as much as he enjoyed her company, her opinion was as weightless as she was in the water. To grow mad at her for insult to two of the greatest human beings who'd yet lived was like growing mad at an ignorant child - a waste of his own energy, better reserved for those in actual opposition to him.
That was the second thing - Sana was not his opponent. She was still, for the time, his caretaker, and it was in his best interest not to hold on to anger at her.
Now he would have to figure out how to get back in her good graces. He would have to apologize for his sharpness, as he apologized to the tree for his temper, and he ran back through their argument, trying to remember the things that had made Sana angry. Not listening, she had said, when she left, not considering his mother's perspective - laughable, for all that she had no idea who his mother was -
And there was the ember of his anger that had flared up so harshly. The way Sana had tried to speak for his mother. The implication that she, his first and his best teacher, had not wanted to be his mother at all.
Sana was wrong. He could not have greeted the dawn with Ilah as many times as he had and believe that Sana was even a little bit correct. Why hold on to anger against her, then?
Why indeed.
He turned his mind again to what he had done to make her angry - not listening, she'd said, but that had not been the barb that sent her into the open sea. No, that had been when he informed her that the Fire Nation's success came from restraint that the Water Tribes didn't share. He could be right, and still have spoken carelessly. No one enjoyed having their flaws, or the flaws of their families, paraded before them, and if he had done so truthfully, he had still done so tactlessly.
Iroh was composing his apology when Sana surfaced in the grotto, her dark hair sleek with saltwater. He remained seated as Sana fisherfrog-stroked her way to the flat rocks where the gentle waves rushed smoothly over the little landing zone. When she bent a wave that lifted herself up on the rocks, he stood slowly, prepared to speak with contrition, but Sana spoke first.
"We can't be fighting with each other," she said, sounding apologetic herself.
"I couldn't agree more," said Iroh, holding out his hands, to seal the shared contrition, if Sana would take them. She did. "I spoke poorly to you, and it didn't do my upbringing justice. I am sorry I lost my temper at you."
"You did hurt my feelings," Sana said, sounding hurt, even though she had taken his hands. "I know you -" she paused, lips pursed, considering her words. "I know you don't respect my people -"
"On the contrary," Iroh insisted, seeing no problem in issuing his enemy a compliment. "the Northern water tribesmen have given me every reason to respect them in battle -"
"You don't respect my sisters then," Sana said.
She had been angry that he hadn't listened, Iroh remembered, as a protest came to his lips and he silenced himself. It would be hard to argue, given their previous conversation, given he couldn't think of many reasons to give his hard-earned respect to women who accepted not being allowed to participate in the fullness of their art.
"And maybe I can't change your mind," Sana went on, "but I gotta tell you you're not right. If you respect me even a little, you oughta accept you don't have the whole story, and maybe I ain't the best teller. The women of the north don't bend to fight but you wouldn't get to say what you did to one of them without getting punched in the mouth," she said, primly. "They have traditions I ain't on board with, but that don't mean the northern women got no wills." She frowned. "They are great healers. So many of them think combat waterbending is a waste of time - and maybe they're right, because they're so skilled. You can't imagine. I couldn't, and I can even heal a bit. I done a bad job of explaining them to you if I made you think otherwise. And the women who aren't benders, they're so strong, they're great hunters and survivors, they make boats and art and music - It's more complicated than you'd say among your folk."
"So many things are. There's much I don't know about the world," Iroh was content to admit. So much he didn't know yet. "But I'm relieved I didn't have to beg your forgiveness, given you hold my life in your hands still."
How risky and foolish it had been to lose his temper at her, he thought, as he held her lovely hands, the ones that pulled fresh water out of the salt air for him.
Sana looked astonished. "I wasn't gonna hold that over your head," she said.
"Others would be less kind," Iroh informed her. Others of her kin would not be keeping him alive at all, and he about smiled at the way fortune had favored him, setting him in the middle of the ocean with the rarest kind of waterbender - one not prepared to kill or ransom him on sight. "I made you feel as if I believe I am better than you." He did, but not for reasons he could safely tell her. "I am sorry for that. But -"
She had come to him contrite first. He had room to make this argument. Perhaps it was even ammunition.
"You made me feel my mother must not want to have been my mother."
His angle paid off, as remorse flooded Sana's face. "Oh, I didn't mean to say that," she said, sounding so truly sorry. "Listen, I'm sure your ma - I never met her, I could never put words in her mouth."
"I know it was not true," Iroh assured her. "It still stung to hear."
"I'm very sorry. I know how much you miss her. I'm sure she'd miss you too."
The argument was as smoothed now as the sea after a storm. Iroh was relieved. "If we can't agree on everything, can we agree to kiss and make up?"
"You better wait a little longer for a kiss," Sana said, still prim and cool as an early spring rain. "But -" she squeezed his hands. "I accept your apology. Please accept mine."
Iroh squeezed her hands back. "Of course."
That ought to have been the end of it. And between them, it was.
But a new troubling thought wove its way into Iroh's thoughts, when he ran through his forms on the beach at sunrise the following few days, remembering how Ilah had come alive when they trained together - how she never seemed to come alive for anything the way she came alive firebending.
It was foolish to let a peasant woman's words intrude on his memories of his mother. But now he found himself remembering less and less the hours he and his mother had spent honoring their fire, and more the memories of his mother navigating the rest of life as the Fire Lady.
Everyone's expression, he remembered, was strained when dealing with certain nobles that his mother had often been obligated to deal with. Perhaps his memory was only painting that strained smile onto Ilah's face where it hadn't been before because the idea had been planted in his head of going back to the Palace now and never leaving it, never going back to the field when there was so much out there to discover, to enjoy. He was the same age now that his mother had been when she was -
When she was honored to receive the Fire Lord's summons to a greater promotion than the army ever would have given her, he thought, filling the beach with fire, anger constructively released.
He couldn't ask Ilah her feelings on the matter now. Whatever her feelings had been, she knew as he did what duty meant.
Sana was a lovely woman. A kind and sweet woman, a fun woman, but on the path of her life, she was like a gasping fish flopping away from discomfort and towards pleasure with no greater aim in mind. Her priorities were not Fire Nation priorities. They were not his mother's priorities.
He was not interested in shaming her over them, no matter how she had temporarily shaken his feelings. Fate had thrown pleasures and discomforts at her that sent her into his path when he had needed her in particular out of all the people in the world, a waterbender who would keep him alive and comforted where so many others would have ransomed or murdered him to cripple the Fire Nation.
How could he shame her for her aimlessness, when destiny had used that aimlessness to set her right where she needed to be to save his life?
Destiny was a funny thing indeed, the way something as simple as his destiny to conquer the greatest city in the Earth Kingdom turned, in practice, to have so many moving parts across so much of the globe that needed attending. A waterbender from nowhere important had quarreled with her brother, and so Ba Sing Se would fall. The steps in between that connected those two events, no sage could have foretold, and yet they were inextricably linked.
His mother had enjoyed her achievements as a captain. She might have enjoyed the honor, eventually, of her achievements as a general, if any woman better than her had been born to the Fire Nation during its time of great need for great men and women to be placed as carefully as pieces on a pai sho board. It was unfortunate that Ilah had not lived long enough to give birth to more children who could have become each the many generals to the one she would have been on her own, and it would take a deal of time before it became apparent whether or not Ozai had the character to become a great leader of soldiers himself, but at least Ilah's eldest son would become the great general she had been called away from becoming.
He continued through his forms, his thoughts ever returning to his mother. Ilah had only been unrestrained and joyful at their training.
But she had been joyful.
She wanted firebending to be something he loved, not just a tool for combat. "Any fire at all is a blessing," she had told him once, when he expressed concern that he would never have voiced to anyone but his mother - concern that he was failing to meet his father's expectations, that Azulon's bending had been advanced beyond his when his father had been his age. "Even a little fire is to be graciously thankful for and celebrate. Feel the power and energy within yourself and enjoy the honor of holding that power within yourself. You are worthy of enjoying it. It is worth enjoying."
She had given him every fortune there was to have in having a great mother. He had given her in life every reason to be proud that he was her son. One day, he would honor her by making the whole of the Earth Kingdom a gift to her grandson.
That was enough to quiet his mind, and let him rise fully on the heat of his flame to bend over the ocean with all the force that he had learned from the Masters.
The days rolled on, approaching the full moon, pleasant in way after way. Sana made good on her promise to teach Iroh to sail. He'd never likely need to sail a small craft like this again after they completed their journey back to the mainland, except perhaps to amuse himself and his children one day on a vacation at Ember Island, but he found himself attending to the wind in new ways, with a new attention, even so. The sandeq under full sail could race even without waterbending to speed it, and the exhilaration of riding the face of a large wave was worth the frustration of learning to handle the craft, to catch the wind, to pick it up again on a calm day, dodge the boom during a jibe - he required only one sharp blow to the back of his head to learn that lesson.
The boat saved them hours of hiking, as they sailed around the island to discover the secrets of its coastline. A waterfall carved the eastern face of the island, plunging a quarter mile down through mountains as sharp as knife-edges, unreachable where it landed in the ocean except by boat, and except for the waves that churned the pitted, sharp black rock.
"I guess I told you wrong when I said there weren't no fresh water on this rock," Sana said, sheepish.
"It was fair enough to say," Iroh assured her. "How would I have reached it even if I'd known it was there?"
They sailed as close as they dared to the crashing rocks, through a rainbow in the mist that rose where the waterfall met the sea. Tacking farther out, a tiger shark trailed their craft, and Sana bent farther over the edge of the deck to look at the massive, black-striped predator more closely than Iroh wished she would. At least she refrained from getting in the water with it.
The northwest side of the island opened into another wide, white sand beach, hammered by wave after coiling wave of the type that Iroh had seen peasants surfing on Ember Island. When he spoke of it to Sana, she immediately took to the waves with a board made of ice, and she looked to be having so much fun that Iroh joined her, picking up the balancing act quickly. Flying down the face of the waves was exhilarating enough that Iroh briefly wished a future Fire Lord could be seen to be doing something so frivolous, but he would never ride a wooden board along the waves of Ember Island, not where common folk could witness the heir to their throne taking an undignified plunge into the water. He had to content himself with the freezing, slippery ice to enjoy as much of the waves as he could get in the next few weeks.
It seemed now that they'd had an argument, and come away from it peacefully, that there was no more tension building towards a snap between them. Their conversations stayed to funny anecdotes from their journeys in the Earth Kingdom, observations about the island as they explored it. They had a few weeks still to pass between now and the shift of the current and winds that would let them sail safely to the Earth Kingdom, a few weeks to sail, to surf, to swim and climb and eat and enjoy each other's company as they would never enjoy it again once the weeks ended. None of these activities was going to grow old in a mere two or so more weeks of waiting.
This was not to say that nothing bothered them. Their food was delicious, but limited to fruit and fish, even the dried sweet potato and taro they would need for returning rations began to look tasty. One afternoon rainstorm, their conversation devolved into merely listing foods they could not wait to eat again once they'd parted company in the Earth Kingdom. At first they were creative - steamed buns, roast duck and noodles, sweet bean paste - but soon their wishes devolved into simpler fare.
"Rice," Sana ended up sighing. "What I wouldn't do for just a banana leaf full of rice now."
"With pickled ginger, and chili oil," Iroh sighed, longingly. "Chilies at all."
"And the fried dough that's only good if you eat it five minutes after the cook hands it to you," Sana sighed. "With honey."
Neither of them were hungry. They had both eaten their fills of snapper, but it could not be denied that they each longed for something to round out the corners.
"I miss nothing," Iroh sighed, again, "so much as tea."
"Not even spicy rice?" Sana asked. "Not even roast duck?"
"You have never had a properly prepared cup of tea. You would understand if you had," Iroh sighed. "One day I will make you tea, in thanks."
"That's a nice thought." Sana had stopped pointing out that they would never see each other again after they parted ways in the Earth Kingdom. She sighed, smiling into the fantasy. "What else do you miss, from your fancy rich man life?" she teased, as the wind ruffled the bougainvillea that dangled from the walls of the grotto, stirred up the smell of the plumeria tree to freshen in their noses.
"Silk sheets," Iroh listed, immediately. "A hot bath. Musicians."
"Decadent." Sana laughed. "Were there silk sheets in the inn you were gonna take me to in Changbao?"
"I could still take you to an inn in Changbao," Iroh teased. "We could always part ways forever after one hot bath and a whole night under a real roof."
"Right, and one of them full fancy tea ceremonies where you gotta sit like there's a peach on your head for an hour," Sana teased back. "I ain't good at sittin' still unless I'm asleep."
Iroh did know. It was what made day after day on an island with her so much fun - her unwillingness to simply sit unless the weather were making some beautiful changing art out of the sky for them to look at, her restlessness channeled endlessly into finding and having fun. "What else do you miss, from the mainland?"
"It ain't a thing, but -" Sana sighed. "Just the sense of always something to look for. I'd visit a new island each day if it weren't safer to wait out the winds and tides." She took a deep breath in and out. "My ma worked in our library," she said, a rare freely given glimmer into the organization of her tribe. "I spent so much time in there with the scrolls, keepin' 'em dry, and there was so much to read about. The ocean, and the Air Nomads and their travels - we even got some fire Nation scrolls, does that surprise you?"
"Not much," Iroh said, shrugging. "Our literature is worth reading in any part of the world." Her tribe traded with the Earth Kingdom, then. There was no other way they could have gotten Fire Nation literature, when none of theirs had made it to the rest of the world - if they produced literature at all.
"Well we have one with dragons painted in it," Sana surprised him by saying. "It's real lovely. I used to hope I'd see a dragon someday."
Iroh nearly laughed, thinking that she had, in him, even if that was only by a title, even if she would never know it.
"I knew I'd never meet an Air Nomad -" Sana went on. Iroh wondered if she would ask him to justify the destruction of the Air Nation's army, but she carried on. "- but I didn't find out all the dragons were hunted until I'd gotten far away from home."
She sounded so sad, and Iroh had to restrain himself from smiling at the secret he had to keep from her.
She sighed into his silence. "It seems like I just got out into the world and it's being pared off in little slices," she said, melancholy taking over her tone.
"Well, I am no dragon," Iroh lied. "But I could breathe fire like one, if you wanted to pretend."
"Ain't you sweet." Sana rolled over, successfully drawn out of her melancholy. She rested her head on her arm, her free hand on his bicep. "What would you do if there weren't a war?" she asked. "What would you be if you weren't a soldier?"
"I hadn't thought about it." That was the fast answer, but it was also truthful. Until the war was won, until his son was born and grown and the mantle of Lord of the World to be passed on to him, there would be no other option for him to think about. "If I were no soldier -" He fished around for an ideal, and picked one that would flatter her. "I'd relax on this island with you every day."
"Oh, you must say that to all the girls who save your life."
"I'd invite all my friends to join me here," Iroh went on. "I'd have them bring a ship as close as it could come, with every delicious thing in the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom, and a whole orchestra to play music while I planted tea high on the mountain." The impossible little fantasy was so pleasant that he smiled into it.
"That sounds lovely," Sana said, adding, "maybe you should just skip being a soldier and do that."
He laughed at the thought of going AWOL, then once more at the thought of his father's anger if he did. "Oh, and board games," he added, layering a little more onto the fantasy. "Every day, I'd play pai sho."
"What's that?"
Iroh sat up. "You had a board on your boat, and you never played?"
"I wasn't exactly living the life of leisure on that boat, sir!"
"I must teach you."
They were not bored for the rest of the rainstorm. A collection of shells and stones stood in for game tiles on the board Iroh drew in the sand. It was an advantage that a board drawn into the ground could not be flipped, as he let Sana get close time and again to beating him, only to execute one strategy or another that turned the game out of her favor and into his. But she lost in good humor, after cursing him gently out for stringing her along time and again. She was not a bitter beginner. She was not even a boring beginner, willing to play the new game again and again as the possibility of winning hovered just out of her reach.
What an advantage it would be to take a healer of her caliber into the field, Iroh thought.
He dismissed the thought outright. This was the pleasant haze of vacation making him think nonsense, an impossible future made rosy by leisure. Sana was calm and collected in a storm, but she ran from war. She wouldn't stay at his side in a landlocked war the way she stayed at his side surrounded by a warm and bountiful ocean where her power was at its peak.
He wondered if she'd ever be crafty enough to visit the island of the Firebending Masters at all, if she'd ever risk close contact with the Fire Nation again enough to see the dragons she'd once dreamed of. It warmed his heart to think of them, safe there, the secret he'd kept to leave to his children against his grandfather's tradition. Even if she never saw the dragons, he had preserved them there for her to find her way to, should she become so daring. It was not quite giving her a gift. But it warmed his heart to think of it, still - how much more wonderful she would find them, if she ever did, and how if she ever found them, it would be because of him.
Sana never stopped practicing the macawphin kick in her quiet moments. Iroh would return from firebending in the morning to find her hanging from a branch of the plumeria and rolling her lower body forward and back, moving the energy through her core and tinkering with the play of motion of her hips, her knees, her ankles.
His dive into the grotto, which had seemed superhumanly impossible the first week, grew easier each day. He practiced his breath of fire twice as much now as he ever had before, and if the diving was easier because of how much he was improving his breath of fire, or his breath of fire was improving because he breathed in the waterbender's preparation to dive each day - he couldn't say. But he steadily grew better at both, while Sana seemed to be stagnant at her kick.
At night, when she practiced her waterbending, the moon drifting overhead in the hole in the grotto waxing fuller, Iroh joined her in her practice. If she were uncomfortable allowing him to be such a close witness to her peoples' bending, she stopped showing those signs after the first few nights. The slow pace of waterbending, with no inertia to carry him from one form to another, made him attentive to movements that felt effortless when he had inertia to carry himself through them. The slowness brought control, smoothness, flow to the motions that allowed Sana to move water.
The grotto filled with steam when Iroh copied Sana, the flow of his own energy creating gentle heat, rippling mirage waves of warmth like what rose from a desert sand surrounding him in the night. The energy that filled grotto, invisible to Sana, never responded to him, but followed Sana's motion like she was a magnet. Blue light illuminated the water she bent, and the silvery glow from the plumeria followed her motions. By the end of her practice, light clung to her, her hands glowing like lanterns, her hair like a night covered with stars. She concluded her practice looking like the night sky come down to earth as a woman.
It was a shame, when she could be such an asset in the field, when she was such a pleasure to lay down beside, that he would never see her again.
It was an inevitability. But it was such a shame.
Sana was certain she was close to mastering her kick.
No matter how many times she tumbled through the water, mismanaging her energy, no matter how many times she burst to the surface with her nose flooded and sputtering for air, she was sure she was close.
It was nicer to focus on refining her technique than thinking about the arguments that just weren't worth starting with Iroh. It bothered her, to think that he might just go and get himself killed in war. He would do that, or he would kill some other soldier whose death she could have prevented by not having saved his life - and that was such a tangled train of thought that she wanted nothing but to veer away even touching upon it.
It bothered her now because he was interesting and fun and pleased her consistently. It bothered her because she was not going to be tired of the way he was interesting and fun and pleased her in the few weeks left before the shift of the current, when the moon was a crescent again. It bothered her to be facing down missing him, inevitably. She'd thought at the start that she wouldn't.
It would hurt to think he had gone off after they parted ways to die. It would hurt to think that he'd gone off after they parted ways to kill. She wondered how long it would take her to get over enjoying her time so much with someone there was no future with, how long she was going to wonder if he were still alive before she stopped wishing -
- wishing she could suggest he simply not rejoin the war, and get a response other than laughter.
The night of the full moon, they floated in the sea to watch the setting sun.
There was no need between them to speak about it. No need to point out which colors were the most beautiful, as Sana had done the first night on the island - she knew Iroh knew how to look with appreciation. He knew that the thing then was to do it.
The sun slipped down behind the cliff, highlighting its dark shape. The high-floating wisps of clouds were pink, but the lower-floating clouds caught the light from the set sun and glowed orange. Their color reflected on the surface of the water in rippling flashes highlighted with the teal and lavender and pearl-blue of the sky to the east. It was more color than Iroh had ever thought water could hold, more like floating in paint than in salt water.
It brought to his mind the hunt for the Last Dragon, and the rainbow that the masters had shown him in the spectrum of their fire. If Ilah had not already instilled in him what an honor it was to bend fire, the Masters would have instilled that honor in him. How vividly he had felt the gratitude to carry fire within himself after the gift of their staggering lesson. How dynamic and energizing and fulfilling fire was to hold within himself. How cold and lifeless and immobilizing water would have seemed then, by comparison, if he'd thought of it at all.
But there was nothing cold or immobile about this painted water lifting and gently setting him back down again under the loveliness of sunset. There was nothing cold or immobile about Sana, floating beside him. The appreciation for the sunset was lovely on her face, she who had trickled like a stream from her hidden home, to the sea, to be there when he needed her, to sustain his life where everything but fresh water could be found, and nothing but fresh water would do.
He was going to miss her. It was becoming an inevitability, as the moon waxed full.
The moon glowed behind the island, but it had not yet crested into view when the sun was fully down.
Iroh yawned. "Won't you come in before the light all goes?" he asked Sana.
"The moon's about to rise." She nodded him off. "I'll have plenty of light to get back. You go ahead."
Far be it from him at this point to question her mastery of herself in the ocean. Iroh swam back to the cliffside and prepared himself to dive into the grotto.
Sana indulged her eyes as the last of the sunlight leaked slowly out of the clouds, gone a purple-tinged grey as the sunlight left them. There were times, even here, that she still thought nostalgically of the Swamp, particularly at this time - post sunset, when the sky through the black silhouettes of the cypress trees was an even, ocean-pure blue, and yet surely once she was back there, seeing that same sky through those same trees, it would be this painted sunset and ocean that she longed for.
The longing was never to be put away, but Sana considered that perhaps the longing she'd always assumed curable by wandering was not something to try to cure at all. If one beautiful place did not satisfy, and if two beautiful places did not satisfy, maybe that was not a curse, but a blessing to have seen them both to long for.
The sky and ocean became blue and grey, then for a small moment purely black but for the glitter of stars in between the clouds.
Then the moon crested the mountain. The surface of the sea glimmered with silver flashes, and the moon was so full it was almost too bright to look straight at. The clouds, recently emptied of gold, caught silver, and the night was full of light again.
With the moon overhead, Sana lay on her back in the water, her hands on her stomach, and breathed deeply into meditation. It was good to be in the ocean for this. Better by far than being on the Swordfish, and even a little better than being in the Swamp - though she missed Mothmouse, who was so much better at this than she was that the women of their band who didn't have bending went to her to ensure they stayed free of pregnancy at the full moon.
Mothmouse could execute the technique without causing any discomfort at all. Sana always had to work herself up to it. Mothmouse should have ventured north to learn healing, and she would have learned it perfectly, but the idea of any man telling tiny, angry Mothmouse, always ready to have any argument, anywhere, anytime, that she couldn't learn anything BUT healing would have begun a real show -
Sana centered herself with another deep breath. She had to conduct the technique. Even doing it every month since she'd first begun to bleed hadn't stopped it from being a chore, but it was certainly better than bleeding all over herself indiscriminately for a week. Much better than having a baby by a man she'd never see again at the end of the month. It still comforted her to think of her friends back home, faced right now by this same chore, Mothmouse with a line of patients, Tei who could have taken some of Mothmouse's patients off her hands, but whose reputation as the tribe's deathkeeper made even the women hesitant to let her bend any part of their bodies. Tei would have done away with her moon's blood already, practical and fearless, and must be on her way now to the Bog of the Dead to practice, or perhaps to conduct her duties, if any of the elders in the distant bands had died since Sana left, their bodies preserved in that bog where nothing rotted, waiting for Tei to bend all the water from the remains, and safely send their water into the sky, away from the water that ran through the swamp, bravely and skillfully keeping death out of the water they drank, leaving the earthly remains of the tribespeoples bodies dry and safe to put back into the earth without any rot to poison their water.
You gotta stop hanging around that deathkeeper. She's making you weird and morbid. Sana's half-brother's voice echoed in her head again. She rolled her eyes at the thought. Without Tei and her undertaking, the swamp would be such a darker, more morbid place. Tei faced death all the time and softened it so that the other tribespeople were troubled by so much less sickness than they would be, if she weren't willing to tend a bog that almost always had a dead body in it, and take the water from those bodies when the moon tugged her power to its highest.
Sana was still procrastinating, thinking of her friends. She sighed, resumed her meditative breathing, and felt the moonlight on her skin. Her awareness deepened, past the sound of the sea, to include the very rush of liquid inside her, the blood that ran through her like the endless braided rivers of the swamp, to the tiny inland sea of the blood inside her womb where it might, if she let it stay there, become a baby with a very unsuitable father. She spread her fingers into the proper form, and sharply flicked her wrists, and evacuated the blood from her womb.
As always, the cramping was sharp, and Sana breathed through the discomfort. She swam with a fisherfrog kick away from the cloud of she'd left in the sea. Sharks would be swimming in soon, looking for the source of all that spilled blood, tiger sharks and packs of lion sharks than the small, shy blacktips that skimmed the reef so beautifully. Sana had no desire to see a big tiger or a pack of lions in the water with her. Or worst, a wide-horned, furious bullshark -
She dove to the cave into the grotto, but paused on the seabed to look out into the ocean sparkling with moonlight. It was so lovely, the white rays of light filling the unending blue. If only Tei could have come with her to see this, if only Mothmouse and Idia could share and understand this loveliness, this sheer unbelievable -
- the macawphins swam by, surprising her with their nighttime passage, trailing blue streaks of light through the water.
Sana pushed off from the seabed and kicked for the surface. As she rose, streaks of light trailed like magic from her fingertips. The water boiled with blue as bright as stars when she broke the surface, the light vanishing as the water calmed. She could have grown distracted so easily by the light of her own hands trailing through the water, but the macawphins swam in an arc to pass her again, their illuminated passage impossible to miss.
They swam by her, tails trailing waves of light that marked the lines of their kicks. Sana spun up a waterspout beneath herself, to lunge ahead of the macawphins and mark their passage, her eyes glued to the arc in the water their tails left.
Even airborne, she'd been holding her breath, not to miss any secret that the light in the water illustrated for her now. How the arc of energy through the macawphins tails traveled, shorter than the arc she'd tried before, their wide flukes - bending just a touch, flexing just a little, when she had tried so hard to keep her feet as locked as her knees, when the energy of her waterbending had gotten lost in her loose ankles previously.
Only a little bit of flex. She braced her core and the kick rippled from her stomach down her legs, the energy smooth through her barely-bent knees, not lost, but released in a perfect unleashing of built, enhanced, magnified power through the intentional channel of the slight flex in her ankles.
Sana shot through the water. The macawphins swimming by kept pace with her, their dark eyes curiously on her as she kicked from her core again, and matched pace with them. Again, and again, until four kicks rendered her breathless.
She arched her back, aimed her head up and launched through the surface, breaching like a soaring foxphin, with no wings to glide as far as the macawphins, and she breathed in the breech, coming down to the macawphins still keeping pace beside her in the water.
She'd have shouted with joy if she hadn't needed every second of breath in her lungs.
I got it, I got it, I got it, ran through her head like a song, and she wished she could scream it to the macawphins in words they would understand - not just the words, but the victory, the tone, the years of trying so hard to unravel their lesson. I got it, I got it, and she would take it home and teach it to Mothmouse and Tei and Idia, I got it and she would shoot back into the grotto under the full moon, fast as a macawphin, to tell Iroh that she had gotten it and celebrate her victory in sharing her joy with him.
The macawphins breeched and Sana did too, for the sheer joy of doing it, following them as they hit oxbow bends in their courses. She followed them until she was exhausted, until she had no choice but to float at the surface, her heart racing, her breath all spent, gasping in great recovery breaths as the macawphins made blue streaks on their journey away in the silver path the moon made on the ocean.
She floated for a full five minutes before she had her breath back, rolled over, and smoothly shot through the cave into the grotto like a thread through the eye of a needle, surprised, when she flew through the tunnel, to find herself - instead of rising into a soft and welcoming darkness, floating in a full bowl of light.
Iroh woke up slowly, then quickly as he registered the light flashing on the other side of his eyelids. When he opened his eyes the whole grotto was full of it.
The full moon beamed in a cloudless sky straight down through the hole in the ceiling of the grotto, down onto Sana, standing on the promontory over the water, and onto a sea that was as blue as the heart of a flame. Drops of light, shimmering like jewels, filled the air, and Sana stood in the middle of them, her hands upraised to lift the light out of the water. There was too much wonder in her open mouthed gaze for her not to see the it too.
Iroh sat up, making noise as he pushed the tarp aside to alert her to his attention. "It's beautiful," he said, as if he hadn't seen the water illuminated by light before. And as he crested the rock over the bowl of ocean in the grotto -
"Have you ever seen anything like it?" Sana asked, but it was rhetorical. Though Iroh had seen the light in the water since they first entered the grotto, he could have answered her honestly - no. Because the sea was full of light. Instead of glowing only in the motion of the waves, at the edges of the grotto where water lapped stone, on the landing beach where waves curled over the rock, the whole bowl of the grotto glowed, with a light that illuminated every drop Sana held in the air.
The blue glow reflected in her dark hair, in her gleaming eyes. The moonlight fell through the roof of the grotto onto her in a spotlight.
"Even the tree -" she pointed out, looking at Iroh as he crested the stone promontory over the water, and he knew she could see the silver glow of energy that emanated from the tree, mixing, mingling with the water that she held aloft.
"I see it," he confirmed, not taking his eyes off her.
"I feel I could swim all the way to the north pole," she said, opening her hands. The water droplets in the air danced and intertwined like a lacemaker's threads at the motion of her fingertips. "I've never felt this much of anything -"
Her voice trembled, awed by the intensity of the moonlight and the ocean, sacred and united here at the latitude where the sun, when it rose, rose highest.
"Show me," Iroh prompted, at her awe threatening to overwhelm her.
She caught his eye with a look of wonder that he guessed must have been on his face, when he'd met the Masters on the island of the sun warriors. No one had seen his face to see the awe in it, when the Masters had enveloped him in a tornado of flames in every color that had ever been captured in a flower, in a jewel, in the scale of a fish flashing through coral, but he must have had something on his face like Sana did now, here where water had a place of honor.
Sana drew her hands together and spiraled the glowing drops of the ocean from every corner of the grotto into a mandala of arcs and curves. The water collected in a single, massive drop, then fractured into a crystalline lattice as Sana slid her hands past each other. The patterns shifted at her every motion - each of them structured, lovely, fractal and making so much sense that Iroh wondered how water knew to shape itself like that at one woman's command.
She shifted, and the water flowed, flowed on after she stopped, spiraling in the completion of the move she only had to suggest, the energy flowing through her completing its own spiral arc. She shifted again, and the water followed, the energy never diminished, only absorbed, only flowing continuously, as if it could not ever be ended.
"It's beautiful," he said. An understatement. "It's incredible. I didn't know waterbending could do this."
His admission caught Sana's attention again. "I figured it out," she said, suddenly, the jewels of water falling out of the sky when her concentration wavered, pattering back into the sea as she looked at him. "My kick - the macawphin kick, I figured it out just now." Her excitement thrilled through her. Her awe gave way to so much triumph.
He smiled at her joy. "That's wonderful," he said. "I knew you'd get it."
She surprised him, for a moment, by looking about to cry.
She kissed him, surprising him again.
The silver light from the plumeria filled the grotto, bright as the moon come to Earth. Sana put her arms around his shoulders, and the light descended to cover her arms, and his too, when he put his around her waist.
It looked like a blessing. It felt like one, the air sweet and glowing, the sea rushing gently, nothing feeling more appropriate just then than to kiss each other, under the fullness of the moon.
I could bring her home.
Iroh entertained the thought for the first time.
She could heal his wounds and provide him with water in the dryest lands. There was nothing to be argued but an advantage in that. His father had made his life's work out of eradicating the waterbenders of the southern tribe, but she was not of the southern tribe, and no southern waterbender had ever clung to him the way Sana clung to him now, like she would drown if she did not get her arms far enough around him.
She was a healer and a comfort. It was inarguably useful for the crown prince of the fire nation to have healing and comfort, insurance against thirst. A month ago he would have laughed at the idea of a water tribeswoman as a concubine, but a month ago, he would have thought water tribeswomen as cold and rigid as their male peers. She was not cold and rigid. She was cool and soothing. Instead of being lifeless as the arctic ice, she was nourishing as a river valley. Energy flowed through her, without being absorbed, or extinguished, or burning out. Any energy he put into her, she seemed to gather just to give it back to him.
It would be the hardest argument he would ever make to his father. He would have to think carefully how to make it.
Later, he would think carefully, impossible as it was to think of anything but the moon, and her lips on his, and the way that no injury could cripple him, no thirst destroy him when he had this sweet alliance.
A/N: This is the chapter where I most regret not knowing how to sail a crabclaw rig yet. If I ever get a chance I might come back and edit a real sailing lesson into this.
A:tLA and LoK presented bloodbending as this horrifying art only applied to hurt and control other people, but nobody can convince me that people born with menstrual cycles and the ability to manipulate blood would not use that ability to make their cycles more convenient.
