A/N: In canon, Katara has her fight with Master Pakku during the daytime, and I find it hard to believe she wouldn't have gone to the palace to make him take Aang back as soon as she could, so it must have been morning. But in the next scene, he chastises her for arriving after sunrise - implying that a whole day has passed. That doesn't make much sense to me, and I have no idea what the characters would have done for the whole rest of that day, and the implication that training with Master Pakku takes place in one huge block over the whole length of the day also never made sense to me so I reworked his training schedule for this story. For all of these reasons, the timing has been adjusted slightly from canon.

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Master Pakku held two classes for older students: a morning class and an afternoon class. That afternoon, Aang scanned the edge of the training ground anxiously. He leaped up in the air with joy as he saw Katara come over the stairs. Three other boys about his age whispered together. Word traveled fast in the Water Tribes, so they knew exactly who she was and what she had done. They stepped back in respect and possibly fear as Katara came to take her rightful place in the class.

"Let's begin," Master Pakku said. The class turned their attention back to him. Master Pakku picked up some water and fashioned it into a circular stream that he held like a hoop in front of him. "This is a water circle. It's very important as a foundation for other techniques. If you can't even make a basic circle, good luck with anything else." He tossed the circle to a random student, who tried to keep it going. He failed. The circle twisted into loops and sprayed the boy in the face.

"That is why we're learning the water circle today," Master Pakku said. "You squeezed it too harshly. In order to waterbend, you have to learn to let the water flow. I expect you all to practice making and sustaining water circles until you master it." He walked away, made himself a seat of ice, and settled down to watch.

Aang tried it. It should be easy. He could push and pull water in any direction he wanted, so making it go in a circle should be simple. But the stream of water bent beneath his grasp, going all squiggly, and he couldn't quite get it to connect into a closed loop. "Come on," he whispered as he tried to force the water into shape. It snapped and hit him in the face.

"You were being too harsh," Katara said. "Like Master Pakku said, you have to let the water flow." She tried to make a circle. Her stream of water closed into a loop, though it wibbled and wobbled and wouldn't take the shape of a perfect circle. She tried to gently nudge it into shape, but it broke apart beneath her grasp.

"Avatar, you looked like you were trying to strangle that water," Master Pakku said. "Katara, you need a firmer hand."

Aang tried to take a looser, more flow-y approach. He didn't even get to the loop stage before it broke apart. He immediately tried again. More bending and twisting. He tried to relax, and it fell apart. "Master Pakku," Katara called. "Any advice on how to find the proper strength?"

The rest of the class was having similar troubles. The other three students were too forceful, too weak, and kept alternating between the two, respectively. Master Pakku sighed and stood up. He went up to Katara. "I can't teach my students how to use their own strength," he told her. "Shall I also teach you how to walk? To flex your arm? Keep practicing until you figure it out." He went back to his seat.

"You'd think he could try," Katara muttered under her breath as they resumed practicing. "Give us something to visualize, another demonstration. Something."

"Why is this so hard?!" Aang complained. His water went wild and smacked him again. "I'm a great waterbender. You know I am. I've used it to fight off firebenders. How can making a stupid circle be so hard?"

"I don't know, Aang," Katara said while staring up at her blob-shaped but intact loop. "It looks like Master Pakku's right. There's some kind of feel for the water that you don't have yet."

"I have a great feel for water," Aang insisted. Whatever that meant. He didn't really understand what she was talking about, but he was starting to get jealous. He'd been better than her at waterbending from the start. Now she was beating him. Yes, he'd been magnanimous and insisted that she was just as good as him, but her performance now seemed unfair. Why was everyone suddenly beating him at bending whenever they learned from an old master? Why did everyone seem to get so much more from the masters than he did? Aang's pride was further insulted, and he couldn't pretend it was just a bad match this time. If he was failing to learn from two masters, it had to mean something was wrong with him, that he was a bad learner or something. He was not! It couldn't be true.

He kept trying to bend his water into shape. it smacked him in the face yet again. He glared back at it. The stream of water waving in front of him looked an awful lot like an enemy. Master Pakku shook his head, but did nothing to help.

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Kalika's heart beat fast. All her training could just barely keep her in check. She placed sticks of charcoal in her pouch, erasing material in one pocket, binding material in her other pocket, and prepared several blank scrolls. Then she stopped to take a deep breath.

She had just six months before been granted permission to operate as an independent healer alongside Yagoda. Her patients were her responsibility, solely, and she didn't get to be a qualified healer by taking such responsibility lightly. It stressed her more than she let show. And now, she was taking on a challenge the likes of which Yagoda would struggle to handle. Kalika reviewed in her mind everything she had learned from her very brief talk with Mushi the day before. A young man, troubled in such a way that he refused to open up about his troubles, and those troubles were likely very odd ones that would be difficult for her to even understand (if having fights with his own personal water spirit was any indication). Kalika figured that her first challenge was going to be getting him to trust her enough to describe what was wrong. In order to accomplish that, she was going to have to perfectly master her every expression so as not to let disbelief show, which would be difficult and exhausting. And after she accomplished it, then came the minor little task of, oh, just resolving the actual problems. Who knew what that would take. And Mushi had mentioned that they had come with the Avatar, who was only going to stay for as long as he needed waterbending training. So she needed to tackle the single hardest and most time-consuming kind of problem she knew of, do it perfectly, and do it under time pressure.

No wonder Katara had wanted to pass the responsibility on to the first person to express an interest. Kalika wondered if, by accepting, she was being brave or just being a sucker.

Such thoughts, however, never showed on her face. She had all her note-taking materials ready. She then prepared food, on the off chance that the conversation would last long enough for her to get hungry. Then she went to speak with Mushi.

His house was empty. Nobody was there. Kalika wondered if she should go and come back another time. But no - Mushi had said she was welcome to come any time she liked. So she looked around and made her own observations.

It looked like both Mushi's and his nephew's possessions fit into one pack. Were they poor, or just frugal? They slept on simple blankets, had some spare clothes piled on top of their toiletry chest, and had a nice plain tea set beside the chest with several kinds of tea. The pack wasn't entirely unpacked, so there might be some small objects in there. That appeared to be it. Kalika guessed that they were probably poor. If so, it would explain why Lee didn't open up about his problems much. A hard life on the streets did that to people, she had heard.

A flap rustled. She turned. Mushi blinked at her in surprise. "I didn't expect you to come so soon!" he said, placing a bowl and some eating utensils aside for washing. "I thought it would take you longer to prepare for such a difficult case."

"My most important preparations are here and here," she said, pointing to her head and heart. "How is he now?"

"He's awake and talking, but very tired," Mushi told her as they sat down across from each other. "He's less determined to risk his life, thankfully. He's been convinced that the water spirit's too powerful to fight. He's going to try to train it now."

"Train a spirit?" What on earth was he thinking? Kalika had never heard of such a wild idea.

Mushi shrugged. "Whatever keeps him from killing himself. Shall I put on tea?"

Kalika pulled out a blank scroll. "Yes, please. I like my tea aromatic and not bitter."

Mushi made excellent tea. Kalika drank some to moisten her throat, then began to ask Mushi a long, long series of questions about Lee's background and family life. Everything she learned here would (hopefully) be checked against Lee's answers to the same questions, of course, but Mushi's account told her a great deal. She learned that her initial impression was wrong; they came from a very wealthy and powerful family, and only appeared destitute because they had been forced to leave most of it behind in order to travel with the Avatar. She was very intrigued to hear that Lee's father had high and punishing expectations, but despite this Lee practically worshipped the ground he walked on. Mushi explained that he was a very responsible young man who keenly felt a need to do what was right and fair by others. Kalika wondered how much guilt he suffered under. She frowned as she wrote down that, aside from his uncle, Lee had had no supportive family members since he was eight years old. He barely had any family at all, at least by her standards, and Mushi had never seen him with any friends.

"But don't get too sure about that," he insisted. "He has hinted recently that there is much about his life I don't know. He said he had a secret friend in his childhood, and that when he goes out by himself at night he's having fun. Who knows what his social life is really like. All I can say for sure is that, however many friends he has, he hasn't brought any of them home to meet his uncle."

Kalika dutifully recorded Secret friends? on the scroll she was using to chart Lee's relationships. "What about others in his life? Do his sister or father know about these friends of his?"

"No," Mushi answered.

Kalika drew a line between Secret friends? and the rest of the chart. Underneath, she wrote, Kept hidden. Secret life? She showed nothing, but beneath her coat she was starting to sweat. By all the watchful spirits, what magnitude of a task had she blindly accepted?

"Tell me about any distinct events, positive or negative, that have happened to him," she requested.

Oh no. Mushi's first answer was that Lee's father had burned him in front of witnesses and thrown him out of his home, and somehow it got worse from there. Having his mind twisted until he doubted his own ability to tell the truth. Witnessing war. Cousin, mother and grandfather dying or disappearing in the space of a single week. Kalika tried to maintain her composure, but couldn't. She realized that her face was frozen in horror. She reached for her tea and swallowed the rest of it in a single gulp in order to regain the ability to speak. "Excuse me," she gasped. "This is a lot to take in."

Mushi nodded solemnly. "Now that I have to describe it all at once, I see how much my nephew has been through," he said. "No wonder he takes his life so lightly. It is so heavy that he would be crushed if he didn't."

"Have any particularly good things happened to him?"

"Aside from the water spirit's intervention, no."

Kalika reached for her last scroll. "It seems like we'll be moving on to my last question, then." She unrolled it and fixed the ends in place with ice. "Tell me all about this water spirit."

Mushi stroked his beard. "Everything I can tell you about it is incomplete and possibly flat out wrong," he began. "I don't know anything about the water spirit. I don't even know what kind of spirit it is."

"Tell me what you can."

"Our first encounter with it was when it froze the boat Lee and I were traveling on." Mushi described the mysterious wild waves that pounded them under serene windless skies, the inexplicable gripping of the boat that slowed it to a crawl even at maximum power, and finally the creeping ice. "At no point did I see any sign of the being that was doing this to us, either in the physical dimension of this world or the spiritual dimension. Which I can see into," he added. "It's as if it hides within the water, perfectly concealed. Or it's invisible."

"That's normal, I think," Kalika said. "Water spirits don't generally show themselves."

Mushi accepted her expert knowledge in that area with a nod. He went on to describe all of the spirit's actions: forcing Lee to change his plans from going home to traveling to the North Pole instead, destroying the ship of a Fire Nation admiral that pursued them, clumsily mishandling a boat but saving the people in it at the last moment, playing with the Avatar one time. "You know the rest."

He seemed to have more to say. She asked, "What do you think of this?"

"Your story of it sewing up his shirt reminded me very strongly of a mother tending to her child," Mushi said. "And it took Lee here, where there are doctors to tend to his spirit. And it made him travel with the Avatar and his friends, who are the closest Lee has ever come to having normal friends his own age. In other words, I think the water spirit is looking out for him."

"Why?"

Mushi shook his head. "I have no idea."

Kalika looked at her scrolls, frozen open and filled with charcoal writings. She sensed connections that could be made between them, connections that eluded her right now. "Thank you. This will help me a great deal when I begin working with him directly." She applied the binding agent to the charcoal to prevent it from smudging, then carefully rolled up her scrolls. "I plan to start after he is released from the hospital."

"Come here tomorrow morning," Mushi requested.

"Is he being discharged so soon?"

"He's awake, in full possession of his senses, and has a goal. There's a limit to how long they can keep him."

"Maybe the water spirit will make him stay in bed," Kalika joked.

"I doubt that," Mushi replied seriously.

A very strange thought occurred to Kalika as she returned to her hut to file away her notes. In the middle of wondering about Lee, she realized she had stopped wondering about who she was going to try to treat. At some point, she had begun to question what she was treating. That made little sense. He was human…wasn't he?