The makeshift dock creaked underfoot as Sen marched across it. Hao followed close behind, struggling to keep pace with the determined energy of his son.
Their search for Miyani began on the island Sen had first suspected, an out of the way stretch of land far to the west of the crash site. Upon closer inspection Sen found good reason to have suspected it. A single isolated homestead was visible atop the stones. Someone lived on this island -or at least, had lived. Sen currently couldn't feel any heartbeats other than his own, or his fathers.
Hao politely knocked on the cabin door and then waited for a response. When none came, he pushed the door open a crack, peeked inside, and then slipped through the door into the empty building. While he poked around the cabin interior, Sen pressed a palm against the ground. In the volcanic reaches of the Fire Nation, there was always a low level of seismic activity. It made for a very easy scan of the island's surface over great distances.
Inside the building, Hao poked his way through a few belongings -old trinkets, a long-dormant fireplace, and clothing for an old, short woman. Hao knew very little about Miyani, but he knew for a fact she was neither old nor short, so these couldn't be any of her belongings. Hao stepped outside.
"Nothing there," Hao said. "Just a bunch of old things, gathering dust in an empty cabin."
Sen kept his focus on the ground for a moment longer before standing up. He shook some dirt off his palm, and shook his head.
"If she was here, she's not anymore," Sen said. "Let's do a quick look to see if we can pick up a trail and then get back to the ship."
"You think she went west, yes?" Hao asked. Sen looked towards the horizon, and the two serpentine spires of rock that seemed to bite at the sun, and nodded.
"Well, we'll start by looking that direction, then," Hao said. Sen wordlessly began the search.
With nothing better to do with her time, Ada examined the hall of royal portraits. There was a stark jump from the grandiose, titanic portraits of Azulon and Ozai to the smaller, more artistic paintings of Zuko and his successors. Even Goto, despite embracing some of their ancestors domineering tendencies, had maintained the tradition of the more personal portraiture -though they resisted calls by the populace to remove images of tyrants like Sozin.
"I take it from your perusal that you have no news," Mika said. She wandered down the hall, guarded by her usual entourage. The Fire Lord had given Ada and Zas access to most of the capital's resources in their search for Miyani, but it had been fruitless so far.
"Nothing yet," Ada sighed. She kept hoping Zas would come running around the corner, explaining that they'd made some breakthrough, but nothing of the sort had happened yet.
Mika leaned to the side and whispered something to one of her advisers. The nobleman wandered off to fulfill some objective and Mika returned her attention to Ada, who gestured to the wall of portraits.
"I notice you haven't sat for a portrait yet," Ada said. Mika broke away from her entourage and stepped to Ada's side, close to the portrait of Goto. Goto's harsh features stared back at them both. While Mika's face was similarly angular, her features were far softer, and showed her emotions clearly. There was an unmistakable sadness in her eyes.
"I am a busy woman," Mika said. "I will pose for a portrait when my station allows me to."
Ada glanced to the side, towards the empty space where Mika's portrait would someday hang, and then back at the portrait of Goto. She didn't believe Mika for a second.
"I get it. A new job can be overwhelming. It'll take time to embrace the change, but it'll come," Ada assured her. The reality of all they'd lost in the war against Sarin had taken some time to sink in, for Ada, though she hadn't lost someone as close as a father. It would take Mika much longer to come to term's with Goto's passing. Ada tried to express her sympathies without confronting the issue directly. Mika was her father's daughter, and she shared his fierce pride, one that did not take well to being pitied.
Out of the corner of her eye, Ada spotted Zas and Colonel Cujo approaching, and she felt a brief flicker of hope in her heart. Zas saw the spark in her eyes and shook his head. It was not what they were all hoping for, though it was apparently still important. Colonel Cujo stepped up to deliver the report.
"Fire Lord," Cujo said with a bow. "Suda and Whistler brought something to my attention, which I believe you should handle personally."
"What is it?"
"We should discuss this in private," Cujo said, with a glance to the Avatar's allies. While he had nothing but respect for Sen and all his associates, Cujo preferred a more decisive approach to certain issues -as did Mika. Their input was unnecessary.
"Very well, then. Ada, Detective," Mika said. She bowed to Ada and Zas and excused herself. The detective bowed back and headed back to the office they'd converted into a command center, this time joined by Ada. They'd been taking turns keeping an eye on the phones and radios, and it was nearly Ada's turn. She would hang around the radio room until it was time for the shift change. Zas took a seat and twiddled his thumbs idly for a moment before making conversation.
"Any idea what that was about?"
"None whatsoever," Zas said. "Suda said he'd like to talk to somebody in the Fire Nation police, and Cujo has been handling that sort of thing recently, so I handed him over."
Mika had been stepping into her duties gradually, and Cujo, as one of her father's most trusted associates, still bore a great deal of responsibility in running the government. The new Fire Lord had every intention of taking full control some day soon, but for now she abdicated control of the Fire Nation's police and military matters to Cujo.
"Well, I was hoping they could at least give us something to talk about," Ada sighed. It had been a dull few days since arriving at the capital.
"If you're bored, why not call home?" Zas asked. "I heard you made a habit of calling your paramour whenever possible back in the day."
"I couldn't call Canto if I wanted to," Ada said. "He's not home anyway. He was traveling for his new job when I left."
"Really? I thought he was just sort of, well, for lack of a better word, freeloading," Zas said. Most of Ko Rin's former minions had left Zaofu, only mostly by choice. Despite having been brainwashed, Ada's former companions had found themselves pariahs in Zaofu and the United Earth Kingdom at large, shouldering the blame of the region's economic collapse in the aftermath of Ko Rin's arrest. Ada had been spared most of the cities ire, due to being the Avatar's companion, but that did not extend to Canto. Like many of their former companions, Ada's boyfriend had been forced to seek work abroad.
"No, he found himself a job."
"What's he doing now?"
"He does marketing and retail for Raisu Plastics," Ada said. Zas nodded. He'd forgotten that Canto's skill set was rather dull compared to most of the Avatar's immediate associates. "So naturally he's mostly in Raisu province."
"Not a bad place to be," Zas said. "It's up and coming, thanks in no small part to our missing combustion bender."
"Yeah, I've heard it's pretty great," Ada said. Zas, true to his roots as a detective, read her like an open book.
"Have you been thinking of moving, Ada?"
Ada bit her lip and chewed on it for a moment.
"Maybe," Ada said, after a long pause. "I've been thinking about thinking about it, at least. It just seems...wrong."
"How so?"
"Because of everything I've been through because of Zaofu, for Zaofu, and I- I spent all those years traveling with Sen hoping for the day I'd get to go home. Now that I'm finally home, how can I want to leave?"
Zas cast an aside look at the radio, just in case, and then turned his focus back to Ada.
"If I had to guess, Ada, I'd say it's less to do with not wanting to be home, and more to do with your definition of 'home' changing," Zas said.
Ada wrung her hands together.
"I don't think 'home' can change that easily," Ada said. Zas nodded.
"Very well then," Zas said. "Then perhaps the definition hasn't changed as much as it's grown. If I had to guess, I'd say you miss traveling with Suda and Hanjo and the rest as much as you ever missed Zaofu."
While Ada would never openly admit it, Zas was right, in a way. While she didn't miss anything about having to live in fear of Sarin or his men, those old days of adventure -traveling the world with her closest friends by her side- had lit a spark in her heart that she'd never felt before, or since.
"Home is where the heart is, as they say, Ada," Zas said. "But the heart can go a lot of different places with a lot of different people. Opportunities abound, after all. I hear there's plenty of work for skilled fighters in Dalen province."
The former Hua-Long province was now thriving in the absence of it's tyrannical leadership, though there was an ongoing bandit problem, as Hua-Long's former soldiers turned to simple theft. The ideal of regular combat had some appeal to Ada. Her school of swordsmanship had been operating purely in theory up to now, as Zaofu, despite its troubles, had a lack of true villains to fight. A move to Dalen province might offer her and her students a chance for some practical application, and help keep innocent people safe to boot.
"I'll think about it," Ada said. It was too big of a decision to make so quickly.
"Or will you think about thinking about it?"
Ada gave him a look, and Zas promptly shut up.
It was getting late, but Sen refused to leave the prow of the ship. He leaned against the railing, keeping his eye on the horizon even as it darkened. Hao stayed by his side, fighting his exhaustion, but persevering. They had found almost no trace of Miyani on the island, just a faint trail in a sandy beach that may or may not have been her. It lead west, at least, so they continued that way.
Hao could now see the intensity that Zas had spoken of. Sen's eyes never broke with the horizon, even as the ship swayed in the waves beneath him. It was almost unsettling. Apparently Hao was supposed to be the one to break that focus. He tried the first thing he could think of.
"Did I get to tell you about your hometown, before we left?"
Sen shook his head.
"You were born in a town called Hsinchu," Hao said. "Only a few hours east of that house of yours, actually. It skirts the edge of the Earth Kingdom's border by just a bit."
"Which edge?" Sen asked.
"It's on the Republic side," Hao said. He raised an eyebrow as a thought occurred to him. "Which makes you the first Avatar to be a citizen of the United Republic, doesn't it?"
"Huh. Well, I was the first Avatar born there, maybe," Sen said. "As the Avatar, I'm technically a citizen of every nation."
"Really?"
"Yeah. It was something Aang came up with. Legally speaking, my house is an embassy for every nation at once."
"Hmm. Well, I imagine the Republic will still try to "claim" you, as it were."
"Probably," Sen admitted. There were already plenty of people who argued that recent Avatar's had favored the United Republic too much, with Korra and now Sen having chosen to call it home. This little piece of trivia probably wouldn't help anything.
"I'll have to show you around some time," Hao said. "Hsinchu's a small town, so there's not much to see- well, I imagine it's grown while I've been away."
"What kind of school do they have there?"
"Small one. Basically just a house they added a few extra rooms to. I actually helped build it. The new rooms, that is."
"Sounds very rustic," Sen said.
"Very much so."
Sen looked out to the horizon again, but this time without the intensity in his eyes. He looked at the distance, this time wondering what might have been.
"I always wondered what it would've been like to go to school."
He'd never actually been inside a school building until the Moon College had invited him to give a lecture. It was an odd thing that some of his first experiences with true academia had been as a teacher, not a student. Sen could take solace in the fact that he knew he was smarter than most of the people in that college, but a part of him still wondered what it would have been like to take classes like a normal young man.
"Did you never attend a single lesson?"
"I had some tutoring done, up at the Northern Water Tribe, but that's a very different learning environment," Sen said. "Before that, there were just a handful of books in the whole building, so I taught myself how to read and that was about all I could do."
"You taught yourself how to read?"
"Yeah," Sen said. "Is that weird?"
"A little bit," Hao said. "Though now I can tell you exactly how your schooling would've gone. You'd be running the place within a week."
Sen looked away, and gave a quiet chuckle. His eyes caught the setting sun, and he shook his head.
"I guess we should get some rest," he said. "It's been a long day. I'm not going to do any good if I find Miyani exhausted."
"I'll tell the Shorewatchers to wake us at the first sign of anything," Hao said. Sen nodded gratefully and retreated to his quarters. Hao also gave a glance to the horizon, and looked at the endless expanse of the horizon with a quiet sigh of contentment.