The room fell silent.

Then Sokka said, "Wait, you're a waterbender? Geez, does everyone here have secrets?" He turned to his sister. "You're not secretly an earthbender, are you, Katara?"

"I think you'd know if I was," Katara said with a smile.

Yue laughed a little and placed her hand on Sokka's for just a moment before pulling away. "Yes, I am. I'm sorry I didn't tell you before, but there were reasons, I promise."

"Well, tell us the reasons," Aang said. He leaned on his elbows on the table, glad that he wasn't the one in the spotlight for once during this conversation. "You might as well, at this point."

Yue looked down for a moment, as if collecting her thoughts. "It's…complicated." She looked at Sokka. "I don't know how it is in the Southern Water Tribe, but in our tribe, it is forbidden for women to learn waterbending."

"Wait, what, really?" Katara asked. Yue nodded.

"So I wouldn't have been able to get a master, even after I crossed the entire world to find one?"

"Perhaps." Yue shrugged. "I was not in charge of making those decisions."

Katara slumped down in her chair, her expression twisted with annoyance.

"Anyway," Yue said, "normally, princesses and other female nobility of the Northern Water Tribe are also subject to this rule. I would have been required to learn to heal like the other women of my tribe, and not to fight. But there were some… circumstances that gave my father pause in my case."

"Like what?" Katara asked, still looking sullen.

Yue twined her fingers together, her expression carefully serene, but she didn't seem to be able to meet any of their eyes directly. "When I was born, I was not born as most babies are. I didn't cry, and my eyes were closed like I was sleeping. My parents took me to the healers, and they said they could do nothing for me, that I was going to die.

"But in our tribe, there is a secret, sacred place where the icy cold climate of our home doesn't reach, and in this place there is a pond whose waters are imbued with the power of the moon and ocean spirits. My parents took me and placed me in the pond, begging the spirits to save me. My hair turned from brown to white, and I began to cry. In that moment, they knew I would live.

"A few years later, when we discovered I was a bender, my father was conflicted. My very life was a gift from the spirits, and he thought it significant that they had blessed me with bending as well. He worried about angering the spirits by preventing me from learning, and so he allowed me to be taught all the ways of waterbending, in secret. Now, it is clear to me why this happened: I was meant to be the Avatar's waterbending master."

There was another stretch of silence, and then Zuko said, "Well… I'm happy to have you as my master, Yue." He bowed to her, then glanced at Katara, who was still sulking. He opened his mouth to say something, then bit his lip and looked away.

Aang thought he could pick up on what he was thinking about. "You're going to teach Katara, too, right?"

"Of course she is!" Sokka said. "We're not in the Northern Water Tribe anymore, right? The rules don't apply."

"I, ah…" Yue looked suddenly uncomfortable. "I…suppose, yes."

"Really?" Katara stood up from her seat, clasping her hands together. Her eyes were shining.

Yue smiled slightly. "We can start right now, if you'd like. I know you two came a long way to find a master, and you've had to wait a long time."

"That would be great!" Katara said. Zuko, who was standing on the other side of Sokka from Katara, looked less enthused, but he smiled in a soft kind of way as he looked at her.

"Aang," Katara said, and Aang jumped, looking back at her as she turned toward him. "Do you know of somewhere we can practice? A place with lots of water?"

"Well, we're on an island," Sokka said. "Maybe just go down to the beach?"

"I mean… there aren't really beaches, per se," Aang said. "And besides, the island kind of moves, so trying to bend the water around it probably isn't ideal. But there are some little ponds and streams you could probably use. I wouldn't say it's a lot of water, but it's the best we've got."

Katara looked at Yue, then at Zuko.

"It'll have to do," Yue said. "Lead the way."

Zuko had hoped it would just be him, Katara, and Yue at the lesson, but of course, Aang had to lead them, and Sokka decided to tag along, too, so it turned out that everyone was there.

Aang had been right; the place he took them wasn't especially impressive. It was a large-ish clearing in the trees containing a roughly circular, 10-foot-diameter pond that fed into a small stream which worked its way through the forest that had grown on the lion turtle's back.

The lion turtle. Zuko was still trying to wrap his head around that particular revelation. He had no idea why any of them had thought it would be a good idea to do this lesson right now. There was no way he would be able to focus after the series of revelations they'd just had.

Not to mention the fact that he was still worrying about his uncle and wondering what Azula and his father would do to him now that Zuko had escaped. How could he have left him? What were they going to do now that the whole world knew who he was?

And yet here they were. Aang stopped next to the pond and said, "Hopefully this is good enough?"

Princess Yue surveyed the area with a slight frown, but nodded. "It'll be fine."

"Great," Aang said. "I should probably head back to the village. Lots of reunions to handle, you know. Do you think you guys will be able to make it back on your own?"

"We'll be fine," Zuko said, quickly, grateful that at least one person wouldn't be around to see what a miserable disaster this was about to be.

Aang nodded and disappeared into the trees, heading back the way they'd come. Sokka, meanwhile, had leaned against a tree with his arms crossed and was ostensibly surveying the clearing.

"So, how does all this work?" he asked.

"You'll see," Yue said, with a quick smile back toward him.

"Why are you here, Sokka?" Katara demanded. "You're going to be a distraction."

"I'm just watching!" Sokka said, raising his hands defensively. "I'll be quiet, I promise."

"Hm." Katara frowned at him, but then shook her head and turned toward Yue. Zuko did, too—but he noticed that Sokka was definitely paying more attention to Yue than to either of them.

"First," Yue said, "I want to assess how much you already know. You've both done some training on your own before this, correct?"

Zuko bit his lip. "Katara has. I've been focusing mostly on air."

Yue nodded. Then she turned her attention to Katara. "Okay, Katara. Show me what you know."

Katara frowned. She turned toward the little pond and raised her hands, then looked back at Yue. "I—uh, what do you want to see?"

Yue tapped her chin for a second, considering. "First, I guess show me what the most powerful move you know is. That'll be a good baseline to start with."

"Okay." Katara stared at the pond. She raised her hands in front of her, and Zuko noticed that they were shaking. "Okay."

Then she just stood there, staring at the water with eyes wide, while the silence sat around them.

"Katara?" Sokka said. "You okay?"

"I'm fine!" Katara snapped. Then she returned to staring at the pond for several more seconds.

Zuko stepped up next to her hesitantly and put a hand on her arm. She yanked away and glared toward him, clearly ready with some kind of reprimand, but when she saw it was him, she paused.

"Hey," he said quietly, meeting her gaze. "You've got this."

Then he stepped back, but there was a change in her demeanor at the words. She stood up a little taller and took a step closer to the pond, her stance becoming stronger and more intentional. She raised her hands high above her, and the entire pond erupted into a giant wave of water that stretched higher than the tree tops, but did not crash down. She held it there, trembling, for several seconds, before letting it gently come back down into the pond.

"That's good," Yue said after a moment. "You've managed to give yourself a pretty good headstart with just your own intuition, it seems. I'm impressed."

Katara beamed.

Yue ran her through a few more tests, having her try out a few basic stances and techniques to get a feel for her skill level. Most of them, Katara seemed to do pretty well with, and as the lesson went on, her confidence level seemed to grow, too. Her motions were more sure, and her steps more precise.

Then Yue's piercing blue eyes turned on Zuko, and his stomach immediately twisted into knots.

"You've done no waterbending at all, you say?" she asked.

"Um… no. Princess." Unless you counted bending in the Avatar State, which Zuko didn't.

Yue nodded. "Then let's start with the basics. Katara, maybe you could help me out here?"

Without hesitation, Katara stepped forward.

Yue positioned herself on the bank of the pond and began rocking her body back and forth in a rhythmic motion while her hands followed the same motion, flowing forward and backward in an easy movement. The water reacted in turn, forming little waves that moved up and over Yue's toes, then back into the pond.

As she moved, she talked. "This is the most basic of waterbending techniques, and it teaches the principal that informs everything else in waterbending. Our ancestors saw how the moon pushed and pulled the tides and learned how to do it themselves. This is where it all started."

Katara started doing the motion, too, and the waves got a little bigger, coming out onto land further and then receding more than before.

Zuko watched them for a second, trying to analyze their movements and memorize them. Yue locked eyes with him and tilted her head toward the water, indicating that he should join them.

He walked to the other side of Katara from Yue and began to copy their movements. He stared at the pond, trying to reach within himself and feel the same connection to the water that he first felt to fire and then air. But nothing reached back. He was just rocking back and forth for no reason.

"Do you feel it?" Yue asked. "The push and pull of the water, the flow?"

"No," Zuko said. He stopped doing the motion. "I don't think I'm doing anything."

"Here." Yue stopped too, and Katara did as well. "Let's see. Try doing it by yourself. Focus on the feeling of the flow."

That sounded like a lot of philosophical nonsense to Zuko, but he sighed and fell back into the same stance as before and began rocking back and forth.

Saying that he needed to feel the flow was not helpful without context. After all, all of the elements he had learned so far were about feeling the flow in one way or another. When he firebent, he used the flow of energy inside his own body to create fire. When he airbent, he let go of control and let himself get lost in the flow of the air around him (as much as he could, anyway—he'd made some great strides but he would never be Aang).

But waterbending—it involved manipulating something you weren't even touching. Something you couldn't necessarily feel physically unless you did all your bending while swimming.

The pond wasn't moving. At first, Zuko thought maybe it was, but it was just the ripples left over from Katara and Yue. Once those dissipated, the pond was still again, and though Zuko continued rocking back and forth and moving his hands in the way Katara and Yue had, all it did was make him look like an idiot. He didn't feel anything. Well, he did. But it wasn't "the flow." It was an old, familiar frustration rising up inside him.

"You can stop," Yue said, and though Zuko didn't look in her direction, he could hear the frown in her voice.

Gratefully, he stopped.

"It didn't work," he said flatly.

"No," Yue agreed. "Let's give it a rest for now, and head back to the village. I think I'm going to need to approach your training from a different angle."

"Fine." Zuko turned and walked into the woods, back the way they'd come. He could feel the anger burbling up inside him, and though he tried desperately not to show it, it leaked through a little in his voice.

The others didn't seem to immediately follow him. But after he had walked alone for a few seconds, he heard Katara's voice behind him. "Zuko?"

He stopped and turned. "What?"

She looked at him for a moment, then said, "You don't need to be frustrated, you know. It's only your first lesson. It took me forever to learn how to do anything with water."
"When you were what, three, four?"

"Well…" Katara frowned. "Yes, but that's not the point."

"Then what is?"

"The place where I grew up, the culture I was raised in… our whole lives revolve around water. We build our homes out of ice, we pull our food from the sea. My connection to water was a part of me from the moment I was born. Yours still needs to be built. And I imagine it'll be even harder for you because you're a firebender at heart, and water is your natural opposite. But if you keep an open mind, I'm sure it'll work out."

Zuko grunted. "Sure." He turned around and began walking again.

He'd expected Katara to stay behind, but instead, she jogged a little and fell into step next to him. She said nothing, and neither did he. They simply walked in silence as they made their way back to the village.