That whole day was tense. To the perceptive, it felt as if the air itself was on the verge of cracking. Aang and Katara practiced their waterbending with a rarely seen intensity of focus. Master Pakku and the former student who stood at his side were both quiet and refrained from criticism. Iroh brought his Pai Sho set to the diner, but regarded it as a prop, not expecting to play any games. His expectations were confirmed when, hardly giving him a chance to sit down, people at the diner came up to bombard him with questions. One of those people turned around and made a series of sharp gestures at the others. The others fell silent. That man slid into the seat opposite Iroh. "You know the guy with the scar, right? You were with him once."
Iroh nodded. "He's my nephew."
"Is he okay? What's happening? Why'd he race through the canals?" someone else blurted.
The man opposite Iroh silenced that person with a stern look. "Yesterday, he raced down the canals like something horrible was happening. Nobody's seen him since."
"Neither have I," Iroh said. "He spent the night out in the wilds and will come back sometime today, but I don't know when."
"What's happening?"
Iroh looked around. Everyone, even those seated far away, was paying attention. Something this big couldn't be kept hidden forever. Better to have the truth out at once. "He needed to talk with his water spirit urgently. Something has the spirits riled up. They need his help."
That set people a-whispering. "The spirits are upset?" the man asked, his face going pale.
Iroh shook his head. "No. No, it's not like that. There is no sign of danger. Whatever they need him for, it concerns him and the people closest to him. Nobody else. My nephew is strong and intelligent. I'm sure he will help, and do it well, and nobody needs to worry about a thing."
"How could the spirits need help from a human?"
"He's not a human, you idiot!" Someone punched the first speaker in the shoulder.
"Tell me more about this canal race," Iroh requested. That settled them. The man across from him switched places with someone else who had seen a pivotal part of the event. He told Iroh about Zuko rounding a corner atop a wave of water, about the dramatic leap over a boat. Iroh's eyes widened. Zuko had managed to train it to be less dangerous to humans, after all!
When that story was over, he told them the story of the ice dodging. The people in the diner immediately provided an alternate perspective that he had never considered. They thought Zuko must have been controlling the wave from the shore. Iroh realized that would explain something he had wondered about. The water spirit was normally very precise: freezing Zuko's boat without damaging it, pulling the Water Tribe boat away from shore in a smooth gliding motion. Why would it have been so clumsy? It made much more sense to think that Zuko had accidentally taken control of it somehow.
But in order to do that, he would need to… Hey, wait a second!
Iroh's eyes bulged. The person across from him fell silent. "What is it?"
"I just realized something I should have realized a long, long time ago," Iroh murmured.
"Which is?"
"I know what my nephew's helping the spirits with."
In the blink of an eye, the diner was rearranged. The tables were made of ice, so they couldn't be moved, but chairs were borrowed from all over and arranged to form a circle in the center of the room. Someone told the owner that Iroh knew what the boy with the scar was helping spirits with. That stopped him from complaining. The owner and everyone who had happened to be in the diner joined the circle. Several people continued to eat from plates balanced in their laps. Iroh was thrust into the center of the circle and asked to explain.
"This world needs people to keep it balanced," he told his audience. "The Avatar is one of those people. The Avatar keeps the balance among people in this world, and between our world and the spirit world. But the Avatar is not the only one. There is another. This other person, called a twospirit, keeps the balance in a different way. Every two hundred years, this world enters a period of darkness. People all over the world see monsters made of shadow in their dreams, and then, those monsters appear in the real world! The twospirit has powerful light abilities. They repel the darkness and save the world from falling to chaos."
"Why are they called twospirits?" a woman asked.
"Because they have two elemental spirits with them," Iroh answered. "Those spirits are always opposites. Fire and water, or earth and air. I suspect these spirits provide them with guidance that they need in order to fight the darkness. I don't know why there has to be two, or why they have to be opposites."
"Where does their light power come from?" another asked.
Iroh shrugged. How he regretted the wartime destruction of old records now!
"I've seen shadowy figures lurking in my dreams," a man reported. "It was very far away. But it seemed to suck the light out of the air, and it filled me with terror."
"I saw a glimpse of something that filled me with terror in a dream recently," someone else murmured. "Just a glimpse. I didn't really see it. I forgot about it until now. I think I saw it in a canyon, or maybe it was a teapot. Someplace deep."
"I saw one too, but then I was rescued!" a third person reported. "A lightning bolt, or maybe it was a phoenix, came down and made this bright light. Then the thing was gone."
He looked to Iroh for an explanation. Iroh had none to give. "I come from a place ravaged by the war," he told them. "Not many old records survive. My knowledge has big gaps in it. Do not take what I say as the absolute truth. I have been proven wrong recently about many things."
The owner raised his hand. "You sounded sure of the part about spirits. Two of them; fire and water. This guy with the scar, he has a fire spirit with him?"
Iroh nodded. "Looking back, I can remember several times when fires have behaved strangely around him. I should have known he was a twospirit as soon as water began misbehaving too. But I was too invested in seeing my nephew the way I've always seen him to consider that he might be something else."
"Is there no way to test for a twospirit at birth, like they do for Avatars?"
Now it was Pakku's voice that Iroh heard. The king wants to test him. "That would be difficult, since the timing is so imprecise. The time of shadows comes about every two hundred years, but not on a perfect schedule. It varies. And since twospirits only appear every couple centuries, people forget about them. It's not necessary, anyway. They get all the guidance they need from their spirits. They don't need people to train them the same way the Avatar does."
"So he has been training with a spirit, just like the rumors say! But he's not a spirit? What about the special spirit powers?"
"You could consider him a spirit by adoption. As for spirit powers…" The only way Zuko could have taken control of the water spirit was by spiritbending. How could he possibly have learned to spiritbend? That was a fine art which required skill, self understanding, and typically advanced age to learn. Iroh never would have thought of it if he had not been forced to. "From all the stories you've told me, it sounds like he has some."
"See?!" A woman glowered at the man sitting next to her, presumably her husband. "I told you that my friend the nurse said that guy used spirit powers to heal a sick child. Why do you have to hear it from another man before you'll believe me?"
Before an argument could start, Iroh cut in. "A sick child? Tell me more!"
That woman shared the story the nurse had told her. Zuko had come into the hospital, wanting to visit a sick child. He was taken to the sickest boy they had, so sick his parents feared he would never get better. With glowing hands and the ability to make light from nothing, he entertained the boy, then touched the boy's spirit and pronounced that he would get better. Said boy was already looking better.
"He made light from nothing?" the owner said amid exclamations of awe. "So it's true. The guy with the scar really is a twospirit, and he's going to fight off the darkness."
"I'll sleep better tonight!" said one of the people who had reported bad dreams. Others agreed with him.
Iroh was thrown for a loop yet again. He knew what these people were talking about. Kalika had told him she was taking Zuko to see a sick child. Why had neither of them told him what happened?
He raised a hand. "I must go and see if my nephew has returned yet. I also need to find out more about this hospital visit. Thank you all for inviting me to speak, and for sharing your own stories. You are all excellent storytellers and I have learned a lot."
He heard the chairs being moved back as he left. Underneath his grateful and gracious exterior, he was seething with frustration and hurt. Why wasn't he being told things? He knew just who to ask to get an answer.
.
Kalika told Yagoda everything. The old woman was left speechless. Kalika had hesitated to do this for fear her words would induce a heart attack, but Yagoda seemed to be fine, although more shaken than Kalika had ever seen before. "Now that I think about it, I should have said something back when he first told me he had a spirit family," Kalika admitted, hanging her head. "But I was so focused on the need to earn his trust."
Yagoda struggled to put her doctor face back on. "You did the right thing," she said. "Now that you have his trust, you can influence him. And the water spirit trusts you because you have put his wellbeing above your own concerns."
"His wellbeing is my concern," Kalika replied. "He's more than just a patient. I'm never going to look at the world the same way again. I feel so unreal, as if I'm a character in a story. He's a legend, and I'm part of that legend. I… I never thought of myself as being so important."
Yagoda couldn't find words to say, so she patted Kalika on the shoulder. Kalika leaned in for an embrace as if she was a little girl again. Yagoda rubbed her back and murmured, "It's a lot, isn't it?"
"Yes. It is. The Avatar's only twelve. How can he take it?"
"He has no other choice."
"Having no choice doesn't stop people from crumbling under stress. We know that."
"He's got most of the world cheering him on. This boy of yours has spirits backing him. You have me. Nobody is going to crumble."
Kalika laughed and buried her face in Yagoda's shoulder. "Don't let my mom hear that. She'll be jealous."
"Speaking of, how's your brother? Has his waterbending gotten any better?"
Kalika pushed herself away and composed herself. "Yes. Lee taught him a lesson yesterday. I don't know what happened. Kalla's spirit is on fire, in a good way. He dashes around, practicing his waterbending with this crazy intensity that I can't begin to describe, and he is getting a lot better at it. I mean a lot. He spent dinner last night going on and on about the things Lee said during the lesson. He says he's going to be better than Master Pakku. The depressed little kid I've been trying to cheer up for the past year is totally gone. I was there. I saw the entire lesson and heard everything Lee said, and I still don't know what he did."
"Looks like there are upsides to being part of a legend!" Yagoda chuckled, then opened her mouth to say more. But movement outside made her pause. There was a man searching the huts. He saw them and came inside.
"Mushi!" Kalika exclaimed, jumping to her feet. "Has something happened?"
"Yes, something happened," he said. "Several nights ago. A visit to the hospital that went very well, I've heard."
Every part of her body that wasn't her legs went limp. "He didn't tell you about that, either?"
"I want to hear this," Yagoda said.
"Lee can talk to the water spirit silently," Kalika said. "I took him to visit Mallum. He made ice that was soft and glowed, and then he asked the water spirit if Mallum would get better. It said yes. After that, I told him… I told him he had a future here if he ever wanted it. That someone who could do that was more valuable than a dozen water healers. That no matter what bad things anyone tried to say about him, he had helped a child. He looked so receptive to hearing that, so happy. Why wouldn't he have told you?"
"I already know the answer to that," Mushi said. "He didn't want to challenge my view of him. But why didn't you tell me about it?"
"Because I was following the rules of doctor's confidentiality," Kalika said. "Which was exactly the right thing to do, at first, when I needed to earn his trust. But once I had his trust, I shouldn't have kept everything that happened in our sessions to myself. I should have recognized that it was too important not to share."
Mushi closed his eyes and centered himself. Then he patted her on the shoulder. "It's alright. I'm not mad at you. You did what you thought was right."
"Let's go my hut," Kalika said. "It's time you knew everything."
"I could say the same of you," he replied. They left Yagoda's hut together, ready at last to speak their minds.
.
Zuko learned many things from the water spirit. It was happy to speak, now that he was ready to listen. It told him the fire spirit was sorry for causing the worst thing that had ever happened to him. It told him the fire spirit would like to help him and be a friend, if only it could have a chance to. It told him the fire spirit had not helped him on the day of his banishment because the water spirit had said not to.
Zuko jumped to his feet. "What?! You're the one that betrayed me back then?!"
Several hours passed before he was ready to listen to another word the water spirit had to say. They went back to the edge of the iceberg, where it caught another fish for him. Zuko threw the remains back in the ocean. He could hardly look at the fire.
When he eventually cooled down, the water spirit explained that it foresaw him getting in big, big trouble if the existence of an elemental spirit was revealed while he was still in his father's power. They could not have revealed themselves unless he was about to be killed. The water spirit went on to stress that yes, they would have intervened to stop him from being killed.
"Why didn't you? Then she wouldn't have had to, and she would still be alive."
That decision had been a gamble, yes, and the water spirit acknowledged that there were many ways it would not have worked. It couldn't foresee the future perfectly. Allowing him to lose the one human who cared for him might have been a disaster. Luckily, it hadn't been.
"This is your definition of not a disaster?!"
The water spirit did not tell him anything more until the moon dipped low. Then it tapped him on the shoulder and pointed towards the city. "I would love to go back there," Zuko snarled. "I can't stand to spend another night with you. You make the fire spirit look like a field of sunflowers."
He stalked back to the tunnel, ignored the memory of sledding down it, and climbed down the hard way. He stepped into the city and followed his usual route home. Or rather, he tried to. He hadn't even made it to the first canal when Riri came flying into his arms. "Lee! You're back!"
Her call attracted other people. Children came out of the shadows, lanterns lit up nearby houses, and soon Zuko was surrounded. Riri did her best to shoo people away so that he wouldn't feel crowded, which was good, because his head was spinning. These people had watched for him for hours. They asked him over and over if he was alright. They laughed and welcomed him back, asked what he had learned from the spirits while he was away. Why are they looking at me like I've come home?
"Everyone, give him space," Riri called. People listened to her. She gasped in delight. Then, with a big grin, she turned to Zuko. "You were talking with the water spirit, right? It must have been about something important, or else you wouldn't have left in such a hurry."
Zuko opened and closed his mouth a few times. "Y-yeah. Important. The water spirit decided I was finally ready to find out what it's been training me for."
"You're going to defend the world against darkness?" someone asked.
"How did you find out about that?"
"Your uncle told us all about it in the diner," someone else replied.
Zuko stumbled back. His vision wavered. Uncle knew? He sat down, his knees too weak to keep him up. Riri ran to assist. He knew. I thought he would never understand me. I told him nothing because I thought he was just like everyone else. But he TOLD ME he wasn't just like everyone else. That's what he was trying to say in the hospital! He was trying to say he's like me, he's an outsider too, he would never judge me. And I didn't hear it. Oh, Uncle. I've been so deaf.
With Riri's help, he stood up. "I need to talk to my uncle," he said. "I have to tell him I'm okay." The people obligingly parted. He ran through the growing darkness, across the canals, towards his home.
He darted through the doorway. "Uncle!"
Iroh got up, a big grin on his face. "Nephew!" He stepped toward Zuko. Zuko ran up and embraced him. "Oh? What's this for?"
"I'm so sorry, Uncle," Zuko said. "You tried to tell me that you weren't like everyone else in my life, that you would understand me and wouldn't judge me. But I didn't hear it. I'd already judged you, and I wasn't willing to let go of that. I was blind and deaf."
"What's done is done, Nephew." Iroh hugged him back forcefully. "I'm so glad you finally realized."
"I've finally realized a lot of things." Zuko released the hug and stepped back to look his uncle in the face. "Things I've seen this whole time, things I have known for my entire life, but I pretended I didn't know them because I didn't want them to be true. I was finally forced to stop denying everything and face the truth. I should have been brave enough to do it without being forced to."
Iroh smiled and took his hand. "Sit down and eat first. You can't tell a proper story with your tummy rumbling."
Iroh wasn't the only one there. Kalika was present, as were Aang, Katara, Sokka and Momo. As soon as Zuko sat down, Momo flew into his lap and put his face right up into Zuko's, chattering curiously. His ears were straight up and his tail waved from side to side with no signs of shyness. "Yes," Zuko told him. "It's gone. You don't have to worry anymore." Momo screeched and leaped up onto his shoulders, nuzzling Zuko's cheek.
"What's gone?" Aang asked.
Zuko accepted the bowl of seafood soup Iroh thrust at him, and the plate of salad, and the roasted fish. Iroh had gone all-out. He was grilling three octopuses now. The hides on the wall had been taken down and made into mats for everyone to sit on, and bottles of skincare supplies were arranged around the room in lieu of actual decorations. The firelight sparkled off their glass sides. Zuko chuckled at the sight. He held out a hand. Snow blew in from outside and gathered in it. The fire spirit sent a spark out through his palm. The pile of snow glowed. Zuko lifted up his hand. Glowing snowflakes flew into the air and hung over their heads like fairy lights.
"What is that and how are you doing it," Sokka exclaimed, shrinking back like he was afraid of the lights.
Zuko ignored him. He lowered his head, meeting Aang's gaze. "You remember after we got here, when I was so cruel to all of you and I said the most hurtful things?" Aang nodded. "That's gone. It might sneak back and try to whisper stuff at me, but it'll never control my actions again."
"Who are you?" Katara asked.
Zuko took a moment to think before answering. I'm the same me that made all these stupid mistakes. But now, I'm not taking advice from that voice. I'm listening to Dragon Me. And the me that made the lights for Mallum is in play, too. "I think I'm in three different states right now. But they're all in agreement."
"Has that ever happened before?" Kalika asked.
"Probably. But it wasn't my usual experience."
"Your jerk personality is gone," Katara repeated. "We never have to worry about it again."
"That was my best attempt to be what my father always thought I should be. I'm ready to face the truth, and the truth is that I'm not what he thinks I should be. And I'm never going to become something I'm not. So I won't try."
"Uh huh." Sokka rolled his eyes. "We're supposed to believe this."
Katara and Kalika shot him warning looks. Being disbelieved made Zuko want to instinctively lash out. But now he was strong enough to resist that urge. "No," he retorted. "Why would you? I just want to say the truth for the first time in my entire life. I don't care if you believe me now. See how I act for a week, and then tell me if you believe me or not."
Katara and Aang looked at him, impressed. "You've never been able to speak the truth before," Kalika said. "You've spent your entire life, ever since you were three, knowing that all anyone wanted to hear from you was lies. This must be so liberating. Keep going, Lee. Tell the truth."
He smiled back at her. "Okay. There are a lot of things I've pseudo-lied to you all about. I think I should start with this." He held up a hand and clenched his fist. As soon as he did so, his entire outfit turned to water. It leaped off of him and circled the room before flowing back onto his body and turning to ice. "The seamstress my uncle and I visited only had Water Tribe-style coats available," he told Kalika. "I couldn't stand to wear it. So the water spirit made me something I could stand."
Before anyone could pick their jaws off the floor, he went on. "The same is true of my swords. I told you I'd gotten them from the blacksmith. What actually happened is this: the blacksmith didn't have any reason to trust me. He refused to give me weapons. He chucked a pair of broken sword hilts at me and told me to get lost. I had the water spirit make blades for them out of ice. So I did technically get them from the blacksmith, but not really."
"Ugubaba?" Sokka said.
"Speaking of towns we stopped at along the way here…" Zuko got up and grabbed his and Iroh's pack. He checked the side pocket and found the necklace, exactly where he remembered last leaving it. He held up the necklace so it shone in the firelight. "The kid I rescued from that creepy swamp thought I was a waterbender because I walked on the water. I can walk on water, climb it, scratch my back on it, anything, with the water spirit's help." He wondered whether to wear the necklace now. He decided no, not after that argument. He put it back.
Katara raised her hand. "I have a question."
"Yes?"
"How did the water spirit teach you to speak lemur?"
She finally figured that out. Zuko smiled. Even after I hurt them, she never stopped trying to figure me out. His insides melted into a gooey warm ball of happiness. She never stopped looking for the real me. He crossed his arms so nobody would realize how much he loved that and made sure to keep his voice at a normal firmness. "The water spirit shapes water into a physical form so it can talk to me when we're alone. Said form happens to have a few body parts in common with a lemur, and it talks through sign language so I have to watch its every gesture."
Momo nuzzled him again. "Neat," Katara said. "I have another question. You said I wasn't right, but I wasn't wrong, either. Later, you clarified that I was right to be worried about an untrustworthy jerk, but that jerk wasn't you. Who was it?"
"Fire spirit."
The fire flared up, startling everyone. Zuko glared at it. "Hey, making campfires explode is a jerk thing to do. Don't try to deny it." The fire waved back and forth slowly. "No, I am not a sissy. Humans aren't fireproof. Shut up and stop interrupting. This is my moment."
Iroh took the singed and slightly overgrilled octopus off the flame. "Speaking of the fire spirit, can you think of any reason why it would have thanked Jeong Jeong?"
"Well, his spiritbending training really helped me."
They all looked at him. "You received spiritbending training from a human being?" Kalika asked.
"He said he was training me and Aang in normal bending," Zuko said, "but that couldn't have been true. The first thing he did was ask us to hold a pose and concentrate, but he didn't say on what, and then he left us there for hours. I figured out that we were supposed to turn our concentration inward and focus on making ourselves patient enough to stand the training, but not too patient, or else we'd relax and wouldn't be able to hold the pose. Then he had us do breathing exercises in the same pose, again for hours. I learned how to control the strength of my inner grip, and how to use my breathing to help. Turns out spiritbending for a whole day is not a good idea. I strained my spirit and used up all my patience." He shook his head. "I hope I never have to do that again.
"The third exercise he had us do was all about repression, which is important because…" Uh oh. He looked at Kalika. "So, uh, about the training he was having us do… It might have been firebending training."
She blinked. She opened her mouth. Don't say it! "That's why I freaked out and ran away from you that you one time when you said that thing. I didn't want you to accidentally reveal to anyone my secret. I'd really rather not talk about it out loud anywhere within the city walls. Don't say anything."
She closed her mouth. Yes! Even if I am telling the truth, I don't want to talk about myself as a waterbender. Not yet. He cleared his throat. "Controlling the size of fire is important because fires of different sizes have different personalities. The smaller a fire is, the tamer and more cooperative it is. In order to learn fire spiritbending, you have to start with the smallest fire possible. That's why he had us practice making it so small it hardly burned anything.
"Then he had us put all of this together, combining focus, breathing, and repression in order to burn a patch of cloth in straight lines. Once you learn to do that, all you have to do is drop your hands. That's how I learned to spiritbend fire." Zuko smirked proudly. "It's good to hear that someone thanked him for his excellent teaching. I should have. The only thing I would change if I was teaching someone is that I would warn them ahead of time that they could hurt themselves if they stay concentrated too long. Aside from that, his method was perfect."
Dead. Silence. Nobody moved. The fire was as quiet as it is possible for a fire to be. Everyone except Zuko had gone as still and quiet as statues. It reminded him of the watcher. The only things that distinguished them from him were that their eyes did not glow, and they blinked occasionally.
Zuko's proud smirk faded. "Don't tell me." He looked at Aang. "You actually thought he was trying to teach us firebending? Even after all of that, you still didn't realize what he was really teaching us? Wow. It was so obvious."
Kalika raised a hand. "You said the first lesson required you to control your emotions using spiritbending. His training wasn't for beginners. It would only work for someone who already had a pretty good level of skill and just needed to refine it."
"So I shouldn't be so harsh on the kid?" Zuko looked at Aang more sympathetically. "You were right. He was just the wrong teacher for you. You needed someone who could start at the beginner level, not the intermediate level."
Aang's jaw moved up and down. He couldn't make a sound.
"The beginner level would be how to feel your inner grip and how to use it to control your emotions," Zuko murmured. Everything he said made perfect sense to him. It had already been organized and processed into a useful form. He was ready to charge ahead and apply it, and didn't realize that everybody else was at least two steps behind him. "The advanced level would be what the water spirit did with me, where it had me practice elemental spiritbending. That's the hardest form of spiritbending. No. Second hardest. The hardest would be altering another person's spirit. I can't imagine the level of control that would require." He shivered.
Katara raised a hand. "It sounds like you should be teaching this. You know what teaching methods work best for every level except the hardest."
"You think so?" Zuko looked down. "I'm only sixteen. I never thought I would be in a position to teach someone else about bending until I had white hair, at least." He mulled over this idea privately. When nobody said anything to interrupt his thoughts, he remembered that he was hungry and began to eat. His stomach woke up at the first mouthful. He drained the broth of the seafood soup, ate half his salad, slurped up the squid, grabbed an entire grilled octopus from Iroh's unmoving hands and chewed it apart, tore all the meat off his fish and mixed it with the rest of his salad, then ate that. I was starving! How did I not realize?
"Your doctor was right," Iroh finally said. "You don't live in the same world as everyone else."
Zuko smiled. "That's why you've always understood me so well, Uncle. You can see into the spiritual dimension." His eyes unfocused. "Ugh. Remaking my whole life has me exhausted." He yawned. "I'll talk to you more in the morning." He crawled into bed and was asleep within seconds.
Nobody else said a word. They looked at each other, then reluctantly returned to their food. To them, everything that had been said was new. It was a lot to take in all at once.
As Aang and his friends left to return to their own lodging, Katara glanced back at Zuko. Did she dare to follow him into that other world?