"Lower the opacity a bit from that last image; I think I see some writing..."
Dragon nodded from behind the computer screen, using a pen on his worn Wacom tablet to zoom in. The keyboard from Syl's laptop was practically collecting dust as he read each image that passed to his screen across the other side of their table... like two kids passing notes across their desks. Syl kept scribbling notes on a pad while the images zoomed, feeling his belly swell with pride as his own footage passed the screen in sepia tone.
The moon was slowly floating across the night, and Syl could already hear the chattering dying down in the residential tents outside as he and Dragon continued diligently.
Andrea, her crew and the interns had long given up on a hard day's work, snickering about the latest American celebrity gossip through their imported People subscription with some rounds of strong chai tea to warm themselves. Dr. Chen was nowhere to be found.
Funny, how even with all this excavation excitement put into a petite girl's body, Grace Chen would find a way to make it to sleep by eleven o' clock every night... quiet as a mouse. Syl predicted it from the get-go, remembering how prompt she would be with her study time back when they were Stanford kids. He smiled, recalling a time when she even lectured about the importance of a seven-hour sleep to get a decent grade for some class's final exam.
Shit; what class was that again? Syl wondered, laughing inside.
Dragon didn't need to look over his screen to note that smile in Syl's face... smiling.
"When are you going to do something about it?"
Michel couldn't resist the question.
It made Sylvester flinch out of thought, placing his fingers confusingly on the keyboard as if he'd been typing his report all along. "Um... come again?"
Dragon made a grunt - a noise the two of them had perceived as either the need for a midnight snack... or the need to discuss girl-trouble. Sylvester gulped.
"She reminds me of my first wife, you know?" Michel pointed out, pushing his glasses further up his hooked nose with a finger. "She keeps you feeling like you can never do enough to please her…"
"Uh huh," Sylvester easily brought a hand to scratch unshaved chin, clenching his teeth as he focused on the screen, his brows tensing at where this conversation was going.
In the span of three years working together, that topic was bound to be brought up at some point.
"…so you keep working your hardest, waiting for a sort of acknowledgment from her voice. Even a gentle touch of her hand is enough to make you feel like you're on top of the mountains." Michel Dragon's french accent kept on coming.
"Look, we're just friends, okay?" Syl arched his bushy eyebrow over to Michel's space on the other side of the desk, feeling a slight ridiculous chuckle deep in his throat. "Grace– Dr. Chen– and I don't really float that boat. Believe me, we tried."
Syl and Dragon were the only two night-owls on this OmaShu expedition, and every night it was a constant battle of who'd be the weak link - the one who'd have to call it quits and head to bed, first. Syl continued pretending to type on his laptop, determined to not let a simple talk about girls keep him from leaving the station.
The images on screen were too wonderful to pass off, anyway.
"If you'd seen how much our friends teased us back at Stanford…" Syl snorted, "Grace was the party-pooper whenever I took her out for fun. We just didn't click, and we knew it. Apparently our friends wanted to think differently...?"
Syl chuckled just thinking about how those nights partying late with Grace at school would always end with her desire to leave early, and him having to walk her home. He smirked at those memories... remembering how their friends' whistling and cooing would always commence.
"So you never loved her?" Michel's eyes stayed glued to the screen, but his smirk widened.
"You kidding me? Of course I do; I love Grace."
The young man knew how a simple pause in his voice could send the wrong message, so he kept talking. Explaining.
"She was one of my best friends and kept me sane all through college, what with our antics. We were really close at one point, but I just think people started putting way too much pressure on us… on this idea for us to be a couple, and things just got too... awkward."
"But you're back together now," the archaeologist kept wiping off the dust to Syl's thoughts. "There's always room for true love to occur, don't you think?"
"Yeah... I wouldn't count on it, Dragon." Syl smirked, remembering the salty taste of Grace's lips, that night he'd accidentally let her have one-too-many Long Islands after final exams. He'd never felt more parched for water. "It's all professional."
"Ah well, to each their own," Michel made another one of his signature smirks before returning to business, enhancing the detail of the Fire Lord's sepia-colored tomb onscreen. "Any sign of writing?"
Syl burrowed his bushy eyebrows in focus, leaning closer to his laptop screen to look at the same image. "I'm trying to make sense of whatever's in the corner of my buddy's tomb here – but I don't think it's an inscription. You think it's a symbol?"
"Let me see..." Michel's serious voice came back into existence, gathering his pen and tablet and refocusing on the same image angle Syl had been preoccupied with. "Ah, I've seen that insignia before. The mark of the Sea Raven raiders."
"What're you two smirking about?"
Sokka's voice cracked as the wholesome pair of silhouettes slowly formed back into Aang and Katara, strolling back into Iroh's tea shop after what seemed only minutes of admiring the Ba Sing Se sunset on the balcony. The others had still been laughing about Iroh's consistent suggestion that Sokka trim him down on his painting, but the boy couldn't help but notice that newfound glow that had taken form into the Avatar's face.
No one could've expected Katara's nervous, musical laugh to come in. "It's a beautiful sunset out there. You should all come look at it with us!"
Aang started to laugh himself, his new Avatar robes practically wrapping him up like a present as he crossed his arms embarrassingly. "Yeah, it's… it's so beautiful."
The waterbender's eyes glimmered inexplicably to her friends, with multiple shades of pink on her cheeks, and yet she could not find the courage to look over at Aang as she stood just inches from him. While Zuko had noticed the girl's change immediately, his face seemingly unchanged, Suki stood behind Sokka's chair, ultimately beaming.
As Sokka searched through the others' faces for some sort of explanation, he saw a dainty grin forming in the old man – the kind of grin he'd seen Pakku get the moment he'd mentioned he was their new grandfather. And Toph, for some odd reason, couldn't stop smirking herself.
Did he miss something?
Sokka was beginning to push himself out of the chair, "Okay, seriously… what hap--"
"Come on, tough guy," Suki instantly held him by the arm and helped the boy limp towards the open balcony, practically ignoring his strange glances and attempts to rephrase his question back at Katara. Nobody understood why, but Toph promptly followed suit, and boldly suggested that Zuko and Mai try and catch the last bit of sunshine to ease their sullen moods.
The young Fire Lord felt Toph's Earthbending feet tug him forward on the ground, almost spilling the hot green tea from his hand.
Zuko choked. "But I'm not finished with--"
"Let's go, Your Highness," Toph murmured with a grin, with Mai just rolling her eyes and following behind them gracefully and quietly.
Iroh, however, had chosen to stay behind, watching the young Avatar and his newly-found bliss walk back to meet their friends out in the sunset. He could hear them talking about things from the past, hearing them share their mutual experiences of adventure, imprisonment, and near-death as if they had been friends their entire lives.
Momo chirped on the old man's shoulder, and Iroh sighed with certain nostalgia as he sat back down to play his horn.
"When should I tell them, do you think?" He asked over to Momo sincerely in his thick, elderly voice, and the lemur just stared blankly at the man's moving mouth. Iroh laughed, petting the little creature as he sat and began to play the horn once again, watching the falling sunset admirably like a distant moth-fly.
It was the same feeling he sought whenever he managed to reunite with the Order of the White Lotus – friends who had kept so many of the same secrets and fought the same battles to prevent a dreadful Hundred-Year war from accomplishing absolute power. And yet, as Iroh looked over at the boy now… he could already see Avatar Aang making a name for himself in this dynasty, with his young nephew keeping him grounded on the realities that this Fire Nation would give to challenge their authority.
And Iroh sincerely wished he could be young again, just for that moment on the balcony.
He watched the children laugh together, huddling in their respective boldness, awkwardness, and -- in Mai's behalf - reluctance… and Iroh knew this group would change the world. He could already imagine some of them being at odds with one another, figuring out the best ways to reorganize the government of Ba Sing Se (among many other villages out there) attempting to clean them from underground corruption.
Iroh wished that… somehow… he could close his eyes and let those problems disappear like dust, all for the sake of keeping those children on the balcony happy about the future, and hopeful. Alive.
The man's brows furrowed, remembering those dreadful, inevitable sounds of his son's life being taken in the heat of battle… convinced…certain… that it had not been an accidental death of any kind. Iroh had been too preoccupied to ascertain such an idea at the time he invaded Ba Sing Se, but he couldn't dismiss the fact that this city had been corrupted for quite some time. Centuries, in fact. The Dai Li must have known about his son. They surely must have known how such a loss would've crumbled a high-strung Fire Nation general to pieces… making him feel helpless.
Hopeless.
Iroh watched the children admire the last few bits of deep red and indigo from the sky, wondering when would be the best time for their vacation to end… and when it would be the time for the Avatar to understand the depths of a painfully-divided world.
"Really?"
Syl looked at the same insignia questionably.
"You sure…"
"Boy, trust me;" Michel Dragon's accented voice came with a hint of smugness. Dr. Kiely made certain I knew of that insignia during his ice glacier expedition to the South Pole years ago."
It seemed that the insignia was getting larger by the way both men looked at it from their respective screens, and Syl could not help but lean in closer, reaching for his tablet pen to zoom in more on the details. "That's interesting, because according to the Fire Nation tradition, establishing an insignia like that on a royal tomb means one of two things: he gained their respect… or he overthrew them."
As far as Syl could remember, that insignia had never appeared in the textbook illustrations that depicted Fire Lord Zuko's tomb. Or perhaps he had somehow brushed over the idea that the Sea Raven raiders may have obliged to follow this young Fire Lord's news mission towards a better world, when at first they had been reluctant to do so. It seemed highly probable to Syl: he may have just forgotten about Zuko's connection with the Sea Ravens.
And yet he could not rid himself of the idea, and something… something just didn't click with this insignia.
"Dragon, what do you remember about the operations of Sea Raven raiders?" Syl Matsko didn't blink once.
"Let me see..." the older man scratched his unshaved chin, casually moving a thermos from the desk to sip a bit of tea brewed inside. "My last lecture with Dr. Kiely dealt with the historical Fire Nation raids that claimed the south glaciers in Antarctica. According to our findings in the Pole, it seemed that the raids had continued more and more with the progress of the war. They had already made their claim to the land, and yet they insisted on coming back over time, taking poor water tribesmen prisoner at will. Dr. Kiely – I remember this clearly – his theory stated that Sozin and his son Azulon were merely taking water-benders hostage in the Fire Nation until they lost hope over their powers and couldn't bend anymore… whereas Ozai…"
Syl did not need to guess: "…that guy didn't have that much patience, did he?"
"Very true," Dragon confirmed. "Ozai was ready to fully invade the Earth Kingdom by then, and so he broke off the naval military into separate regiments. He specifically gave The Sea Ravens a permanent base near the South Pole, ordering them to kill any waterbenders they found without question. It's why their symbol was a sea raven – in folklore, those creatures crept out of the sea and snatched whatever helpless prey they found, devouring it into the water in hordes."
"Hmm," Syl took those images of massacre as best he could, writing down a note and lowering his voice at another thought. "What really bugs me is that this so-called Sea Raven insignia is engraved on the very bottom-left corner of his tomb. This means that, hypothetically, it was the first group of people Fire Lord Zuko had to deal with during his reign period, and either it ended in a compromise in the Fire Lord's favor… or… he… got rid of them."
"Improbable," the archeologist looked over to his partner in a skeptical look. "Fire Lord Zuko would never have followed his father's steps and massacred people – I don't recall any public documents depicting the young man in that nature."
Syl could feel goose bumps sprouting behind his neck already. "Maybe that's because… maybe only a few select people knew about this thing he'd done. I don't think it was a massacre at all that was kept secret. What do you suppose if… Zuko had killed one man… who'd led the raids in the Southern Water tribe during Ozai's early years--"
"Yon Ra?" Dragon responded instantly, but with utter ridiculousness in his voice. "No… that man had long paid his respects to the Fire Nation. I wouldn't think he had any debt to pay for this new order with Fire Lord Zuko"
"Oh yeah he did," Syl said dangerously slow, staring at the computer's image like a moth to a lamp.
No bar-hopping night could've made him forget that one particular connection between Zuko and his best friend. Sylvester Matsko could feel his eyes beginning to glimmer with tears of joy, and discovery of pieces finally fitting in his head.
"See, back when he led the Sea Raven raiders...Yon Ra was the ruthless vigilante in the South Pole; he didn't hesitate to kill off women and children just for being water-benders, as it was strictly ordered by Ozai to wipe out the benders for good. But the thing is… one of them slipped through his fingers.
"According to the text, he thought the last waterbender was Katara's mother, Kyna – or Kyosk - I think that was her name?" Syl racked his brain for a second, but then dismissed that name-tracking and continued his story. "Back when she'd been captured by Yon Ra, she was a peasant woman from the tribes - something that Fire Lord Ozai would've easily overlooked. But Zuko… he took it personal."
"No joke?" Dragon's eyebrow rose again, marking a reference number on the edge of his computer image with the tablet pen. "He and Katara must've been very close by that point."
Syl snorted that ridiculous notion into a laugh.
"I guess you can say they'd tolerated each other's existence prior to helping the Avatar fulfill his mission." Dr. Matsko sipped a bit of his lukewarm coffee, scratching his nose with the pen before writing some more. "I remember reading about this theory Kiely wrote, dealing with Fire Lord Zuko's psyche. It talked about how the 'sudden absence of his mother had left Zuko arrested in social, even romantic development. He lived a meaningful-yet-quiet life among the Council of Avatar Aang, and only married out of obligation to the throne'."
Dragon did not need to look up to sense the bitterness in Syl's last words as he spoke about Kiely.
"God, what an asshole."
"I second that," the archaeologist took a sip out of his warm thermos. "So you also believe that this Fire Lord Zuko had it rough from the start?"
"Well, who wouldn't?" Syl exchanged perplexed looks with Dragon in the dim light, taking out a file of notes from his desk drawer. "I mean Zuko was only seventeen when he was crowned. He'd been banished for years prior to that, and… okay, he wasn't the most social of the Fire Lord lineage… but he was not alone.
"Kiely discovered Fire Lady Ursa's tomb back in '97, and he claimed in his second book that Ursa and Zuko had reunited 'happily in the midst of his first ten years as Fire Lord'. Zuko had practically raised himself out of a giant grave after he replaced Fire Lord Ozai, and I honestly think if he hadn't had so many good people at his side, he wouldn't have started the Fire Nation's golden age."
Flipping through a few loose pieces of paper in that manila folder file, Dr. Matsko pointed fiercly at exactly what he'd been looking for. A Xeroxed photograph.
"Wha'dya know," Syl beamed, returning his focus on the screen as he saw the markings of the real tomb match the ones on the photograph. "They're Sea Ravens, all right. I'm putting this as number 17-A, April 4th. Got that, Dragon?"
"Way ahead of you, boy," the older man had instantly opened up an Excel spreadsheet on his laptop, bringing in more light on his side of the room. To any other person, the spreadsheet would have looked like a laundry list of random dates, coordinates and trinkets… but to Dr. Chan's team, this document was more valuable than gold.
"It's beautiful, how that peasant girl chose to stay friends with Zuko," Dragon brought up, typing away on his keypad, "after all those differences they had with one another."
Sylvester Mastko snorted. "I take it you watched that History Channel special, too?"
"Famous Love Stories of Ancient China," the man with grey hair mused behind his spectacles, and Syl just shook his head in disbelief.
"You know, those crazy HCers will make anything into a romance just to boost the ratings…" Syl vented, putting away the file and returning his computer pen to the Wacom tablet. "They love to think Katara tolerated Zuko's bullshit because she secretly had a thing for him."
"You're not that much of a Romantic, are you?" Dragon side-commented, keeping his eyes on the spreadsheet while Syl mouthed back mockingly.
"Let me set the record straight, Dr. Michel Dragon," Syl laughed at his own formality. "This guy, Zuko? He must've been the luckiest son-of-a-bitch for not getting killed by that water peasant after he almost destroyed Avatar Aang. She was so fricken' against the idea of trusting Prince Zuko when he finally wanted to play the good guy and help end the Hundred-Year War. My theory is she gave in only because Aang – God love him – still trusted the guy.
"But they would've easily lost touch after the war was over," Dragon pointed out in his usual under-toned manner. "If Katara did not want anything to do with this young man… why did she marry him?"
Syl took another sip of his coffee, as cold as it was now. "I kept pestering one of my professors about that, and she couldn't give me a straight answer about why Katara tolerated him after the war. The only reason I could think of was because… they had a connection over their lost mothers.
"Ah yes, the famous search for Fire Lady Ursa," Dr. Dragon took a moment to recall that tale he'd investigated long ago. "Didn't she promise she would help Zuko find her, soon after he got crowned?"
"Yeah; it was just as Zuko had promised to help her find the Sea Raven who killed Kyosk."
"Yon Ra."
"Yep. Zuko may've looked all stoic on the outside, but inside he was hurting over Lady Ursa's disappearance. I have a feeling he was emotionally taking Katara's loss as if it'd been his own mother. Hell, it's in the history books! They set out on a mission to find Yon Ra together."
"It's funny you mention that. I was going through a few documents the other day about the Fire Navy, during Ozai's reign. One of them dealt with an unusual eye-witness account of two strangers attacking the Southern Raiders. Apparently, two dark spirits had invaded one of their ships on Whale Tale island and demanded to find the where-abouts of Yon Ra--"
"Zuko and Katara, hands-down."
"Wow."
"Yeah, and the thing is… they did find Yon Ra. But they didn't do anything."
"But why would they walk away from that so abruptly?"
The question bled through Syl's mind, and the possibilities seemed to appear one by one: Katara was his best friend. She'd saved his life. They'd once gone on a hunt to find this man and kill him near the end of Aang's training as the Avatar, and done nothing.
But that's crazy, the young man wondered, Zuko and Katara were straight-shooters, and this was personal shit! They'd gone through hell and high-water to get to the Sea Ravens, only to accomplish nothing!? No... They would never just leave an obstacle hanging like that, unless they'd planned to finish it later... because something else had to be accomplished, first...
And just as quickly, it hit Syl's head like a bolt of lightning to his temple.
"Aang."
His training.
"He hadn't been fully realized as the Avatar."
A/N - Hey everyone. Sorry I've been out of the loop for a while, but I've been abroad and had so many work-related projects going on the past couple months! I'll be writing whenever I can despite my busy schedule, because this story is really intriguing me as much as it is you (maybe because I've been watching too many DEXTER-type of shows lately. Haha.). Thanks for commenting, and stay tuned! --MM