A/N: This chapter is where the story starts to earn its M-rating, so heads up to be prepared for some spicy times.
Mini-playlist for this chapter:
Radioactive - Marina and the Diamonds
Breathe 2.0 - Vincent
This chapter's title is from Breathe 2.0.
Chapter 6
I Could Start Heading Your Way In The Dark
He got badly sunburned.
Sailing class ended early, when seasickness crept up on Iroh again with a headache that he thought at first was dehydration. By the time Sana had given him enough water that he'd ruled that out, his back and shoulders were so overheated that he couldn't vent the heat fast enough. Sana reefed the sail and surfed the sandeq back to their beach camp. Iroh stepped onto the sand with relief that didn't last long, when he realized lying on the sand would only irritate his burned skin worse.
He stumbled into the shade at the edge of the jungle, unsteady on land after the hours at sea, groaning. His front was almost as badly burned as his back.
"I know you don't wanna hear me say it," Sana chided, as she washed the boat a little further inland.
Iroh sat on the sand and groaned at her. "Is this what people who aren't firebenders feel like all the time? Is this what being too hot is?"
"Ain't you never been sunburnt before?" Sana asked, still sounding far too amused for the amount of pain he was in.
"You cannot expect me to laugh. A whole orchestra's playing in my head."
"Oh, you got your own private music? Wish I had that problem," Sana said, idly walking to him from the boat.
"You don't understand. All the musicians have swapped instruments. None of them actually know how to play what they're playing. But they're trying anyway."
She giggled, handing him a brown coconut shell full of ice and water. "That sounds just awful. I better do something about it."
"I could use a bed of ice to lie on," Iroh agreed. "But I might melt right through it."
"Just hold still." Sana knelt beside him and lifted her hands, covered in water. In the shade, her palms seemed to glow. "I'm not very good at this."
She put her hands on his shoulder, and the cool relief that flooded his skin was so good he could have cried. She dragged her hands slowly down his back and the water was so soothing, when he hadn't believed it was possible to be soothed that day.
"You are full of good tricks," he said, closing his eyes in relief as she shifted to his opposite shoulder, then to his burnt chest, leaving a residing coolness where her hands trailed. "I feel healed already."
"Well you're not," Sana said, sounding less than pleased. "You're still a bit burned."
"A bit?" Iroh opened his eyes.
Sana lifted her water-covered hands to his temples. "Any little girl from the North would have you fixed up in an instant, but sad to say, you're stuck with me."
The searing pain around his eyes followed her fingers as she drew her thumbs from his temples over his cheekbones. The pain of the whole headache concentrated between his eyebrows, while Sana inhaled deeply, her own brows knit in concentration, and all the pain flowed out and vanished through the bridge of his nose. Sana exhaled with effort as Iroh looked at his arm. His skin, red as a boiled lobster-clam a moment ago, was barely pink. He gaped at the restoration. "You call this poor healing?"
Sana smiled, pleased with herself, calm as if she hadn't just revealed an impossible power, and tapped his nose. "I told you I'd take care of you."
Iroh ran through the information she'd just given him. Waterbenders could heal. Even a healer who was not very good at it had almost eliminated pain that would have afflicted him for days. Any little girl from the North, she'd said - women were not trained to waterbend by the Northern Tribe, but did that only extended to combat waterbending? Did the men fight, and the women heal -?
No wonder the northern barbarians were relentless, no wonder their ranks never seemed to shrink unless the waterbenders died on the battlefield where Fire Nation soldiers could see. Their element was everywhere and they could heal themselves.
He had respected the Northern barbarians until that morning. He had not adequately understood their threat until now.
Sana hummed carelessly as she sliced two green coconuts down from a tree. Information was the currency of war, and she seemed unaware she had just given Iroh a fortune.
He still couldn't think the phrase without hearing it in his mother's voice. For a moment nostalgia for Ilah's lessons overwhelmed him.
He didn't hide his surprise in time. Sana's smile dropped as she returned with the coconuts.
"Avatar Roku wrote about that, right? That we heal?" she asked.
If he lied then, she'd know. "If I say yes, will you not feel you've given me information?"
She covered her mouth and turned away.
"Well - what was I going to do, just let you suffer?" she asked, more to herself than to him. "I should have - I should have been more insistent. Those burns were too bad to leave unhealed, but you shouldn't have gotten them in the first place! I should have insisted."
She stared into space with her hand over her mouth.
Iroh put a hand on her shoulder. "I can't think of anything that would change our fighting the water tribesmen with that information," he said, to reassure her. It was a lie. He'd recommend so much more force be allocated to defeating the tribesmen now that he knew of this advantage.
"Can't you just STOP fighting them?" she asked, even more upset in spite of his consolation. "They ain't comin' to your land -"
"Oh, certainly," he said, gently, "I'll just pop over to the Fire Lord's palace and tell him to call off the whole war. He'll listen to me."
He could think of a few things he could do to put himself out of his father's favor and lose even the authority that he had been born entitled to, and that was one of them. It was funny that she'd asked him. It was absurd to think of her asking it of the common soldier she assumed him to be.
Sana covered her whole face again.
"What am I doing?" she asked herself, standing up and walking away from his comfort.
Aiding destiny in its execution, Iroh thought, watching her go. It would be hard for him to convince her of that - she was doubtless attached to her tribe's barbarian sovereignty, and hadn't the privilege of knowing the prosperity and culture that life under the Fire Nation - under him, inevitably - would provide her. Ignorance was hard to fight, and people without the luck to have been born under his nation's flag didn't know what was good for them until they had it.
He had to tread carefully around her emotions. He stood up to walk after her.
"You're upset. I'm sorry," he said, carefully, without apologizing for anything. "For what it's worth, I'm grateful you decided not to just let me suffer."
"Don't tell the rest of the Fire Nation about it," she said. "Repay me that way."
"What's another secret, between a man and the woman who has his life in her hands?" he said. "We already have so many secrets we're going to have to keep after this month is over."
He hadn't made her a single new promise. But she seemed calmed by it anyway, tucking the stray hairs that had freed themselves from her braid behind her ear.
"I couldn't just let you suffer," she said, softly, reassuring herself more than him.
But she stayed on her feet, her arms crossed, her body language turned away from him. She was taking this so much harder than he wished she would.
One day maybe she'd be able to understand what a great thing she was doing for the world and its destiny, by saving his life, giving him information, opening up the Northern Water Tribe to him as an enemy he would, by the end of this month, understand better than any firebender did. She wouldn't be able to stop herself. She had no idea how many little details added up to a complete enough understanding to sway the tide of one battle or another.
His father might be infuriated if he could have seen Iroh that day, cavorting with an enemy woman in idle passage of time, but his mother would be proud of him. Well - proud of him for leveraging this opportunity to know an enemy better, if not proud of him for keeping pleasurable company with a commoner. Ilah would understand his strategy, and encourage him to pick up every bit of information that Sana dropped in their month together. You know yourself, he could still remember her saying, before he first left for the field. Your task has become to know your enemy. When you know both of these things, and ensure that your enemies know at best, only themselves - you will never be defeated.
She had been right thus far. It had served him well, throughout his career, to let the right people underestimate him - his power, his influence, his importance. It had served him to know his men well enough to tell which ones could be useful to him with more, or less, information about himself.
"If I had one way to thank you," he said, trying to move Sana away from the anxiety she'd spiraled herself into, "I'd make you tea." He thought back to her ditch kit. "It seems to me your survival kit is lacking. You brought all the necessities except tea."
"Oh I suppose I coulda taken out the soap and made room," she said, her tone mild again.
"Exactly!" said Iroh, waiting for her to turn back to him, and open up her body language once more. "You could have brought a whole three ounces. We could have made that last, saving it for special occasions only."
"You'd like me less without soap in a month than without tea," Sana said. "I'd like you less in a month without soap than a month without tea." But she did turn back towards him, tucking her stray hair behind her ears once more.
Iroh lifted a handful of fire and demonstrated putting it to his own armpit, to burn away anything that wasn't his own skin. "You've never had tea prepared properly then," he insisted.
Sana looked alarmed when he first held his own fire to himself, but calmed as she understood what she was seeing. "Well," she amended, "We can't all take a firebath on this island." She cracked a little smile. "I might trust you to tell all your pals I'm dead when we part, but I ain't trusting you to put a handful of fire that close to me, no offense to your skill."
"It's not a technique that a firebender can even use on another firebender," Iroh explained, dropping the handful of flames. "You can learn not to burn yourself if you're well trained, but nobody's invented a technique that lets a firebender hold fire to another person's skin without burning them yet."
"So, how you can't tickle yourself, but you CAN tickle other people?" Sana suggested.
He burst into full laughter. That made her drop her crossed arms, finally, smiling again. "I am never going to explain it any other way. And I like your smell," he insisted.
He did. It had been so pleasant to sleep with her nearby to smell, instead of the slight mildew scent that often came with camp bedding, and the omnipresent smell of slightly overheated men that accompanied any band of Fire Nation soldiers.
"You say that now." Sana sniffed. "You can thank me," she said, lifting her chin and throwing her shoulders back, "by listening to me when I tell you to do something! I always got a reason," she said, "even if you don't believe it."
"I do now!" Iroh swore, lifting his hands. "I've learned my lesson!"
"Then . . ." Sana said, her eyebrows lifting. "There's something you ought to do, and you're not going to want to do it, but if you've really learned your lesson, you will listen to me."
She told him about the cave, five fathoms down, and the grotto within. Her eyes shone and her voice raise and fell with excitement as she described the beauty of it - the clearest water, the populous reef, the flowering tree on the shaded sand beach. "We have to go there," she finished.
"It . . . sounds wonderful," Iroh admitted, because it did. "But 5 fathoms is much too deep for my ears to handle." To say nothing of the amount of time he'd need to hold his breath to get through that swim.
"I can teach you to equalize," Sana assured him. "And I can help you get through. We'll have to practice the waterbending - but it's not nearly as hard as it seems."
Her expression was so eager, and the grotto sounded so worth seeing. They had ample time to figure it out, and it was something to do in between meals and sailing lessons. "I will honor your expertise with the mind of a student," Iroh promised.
That made her smile fully again.
Now that he was healed, Iroh was starving. Sana handled the catching of a pair of snapper while Iroh used the boat knife, sanitized by his handful of flame, to prepare a ripe papaya and some mangoes. They steamed the snapper whole with calamansi and salt in a banana leaf. Sana froze the fruit just to the point where it coolly resisted when bit, and all the meal lacked was spice. If only the pepper plants that grew wild on Ember Island had spread this far east, it couldn't have been improved upon.
"What are you going to do, after this?" Iroh asked Sana, when they'd eaten enough of their fill that the last of the frozen fruit was going slowly for dessert.
Sana looked at him over her piece of papaya, her expression skeptical.
"Knowing that I won't tell anyone where you've gone," he added. "Now that the Swordfish is sunk your choice to quit or not must be easier."
"Well." She looked thoughtful as she nibbled her papaya. "I'm not sure. Captain Fang and the crew all set aside insurance against the boat, so they'll be buying a new one. I put some of my wages in on that insurance. She'll owe me a job if I want it. But I don't think I do." She stared into space a bit. "I'd like to visit an air temple."
A drearier, more difficult journey Iroh could not imagine. Up a remote and freezing mountain for a burnt shell of a lonely ruin? "What for?"
"Bet they had some good ideas about how to take a deeper breath," Sana said, looking dreamily over the ocean. "I've never been able to hold my breath more than seven minutes." Iroh nearly choked on his mango at this absurd number. "Maybe some airbender secrets would help me increase my time. I could get deeper then for sure."
"Why would you want to?"
Sana looked at him again. "Hmmm, I don't think I'll tell you the whole reason," she said. "Learnin' some air temple secrets would make me a better sailor. Could you imagine sailin' with an airbender? Or bein' able to bend air AND water? You'd be the greatest sailor in the world. I bet Avatar Roku was a great sailor."
"He never wrote about it," Iroh said.
"To know the ocean you gotta know breath and wind good," Sana went on, musing half to herself now. "I never woulda thought air and water could be so intertwined as they are at sea." Another crumb of information. Was her tribe not located on a coast? "Seems to me the air temples must have something I can learn that'd make the climb worth it."
Discussing the entwined nature of air and water at sea, and Avatar Roku the potentially brilliant sailor, had lit another candle of an idea in Iroh's mind. "If the avatar born to the air nomads died with them, the new avatar would be from a water tribe." He leaned into her space to look her in the eye. "Are you the avatar?"
He was joking - mostly. If she were the avatar, surely the northern Water Tribe would not have refused to teach her, or suffered her to leave them. She'd have been far too much of an asset. Maybe too much of an asset for them to contain?
But she scoffed with perfect levity, and he already knew she wasn't a good liar. "Well if I am, I don't know about it."
He leaned in, narrowing his eyes at her, but his joking smile revealed his own jest. "That sounds like something the Avatar would say."
"I'm not!"
"That also sounds like something the Avatar would say," he teased.
"Stop!" she exclaimed, pushing him away. "My goodness, I shouldn't have even brought it up. As if you need more reasons to wanna put me in a cage!"
"I don't want to put you in a cage," he objected, perhaps a little too hard. She looked at him with surprise. "I think you're projecting," he said. "I'm the one who's at your mercy here. Perhaps you want to put me in a cage."
She pursed her lips in wicked thought. "Bet I could do it."
He chuckled. "You'd have to learn to make a cage out of something that doesn't melt, first."
"Oh you think so!" Sana stood up, and shifted into a waterbending stance. "Let's have our first fight."
She was simply volunteering to give him valuable information, and he hadn't had a sparring match since ambling into Turtleray Bay. Iroh popped up and held his hands out in a defenseless stance. "I hope you won't go easy on me," he joked, "just because the sun's going down and you have a whole ocean at your disposal."
"Trying to make me feel sorry for you already?" Sana said. She lifted her arms, her wrists softly limp, and he heard almost too late the wave coming at him from behind.
Iroh sidestepped to the jungle. The tidal wave came down on the sand where he'd been standing, then enclosed him in a tightening circle of water. Sana, unlike the northern tribesmen, was taking her time. He had a fully leisurely inhale before the water wall was tight enough that he timed and released his fire.
The explosive fire he released from both outstretched hands and his mouth burst the seawater into steam, filling the air with humidity and the smell of boiling salt. Iroh charged through the space his breath of fire had cleared and caught sight of Sana's surprise before she stepped back and evaded his strike, then his next, her backward, yielding motion drawing him into the temptation to lean forward, off center.
He didn't fall for the trick, and when he set his foot down on a patch of slick ice he leaned back, instead of committing to the step, lashing out with a kick that would have, against a northern tribesman, set off a direct and focused flame. He held back from actual fire, in case Sana didn't duck in time. She did, dropping down to step up inside his center of gravity, to grab his foot before he could find his root again. He withdrew too quickly for that, but when he put his foot down, the surf rose up to meet him naturally, and suddenly his ankle was encased in ice. Not enough to hold him in place, especially not with his skin temperature elevated with battle, but enough that he had a temporary anklet when he brought that foot up again in a crescent kick.
Sana met his arc of fire with an arc of water that extinguished the flame and he ducked inside her center now, reaching for her hand to restrain her. He could already tell she wasn't going easy on him, but by no means was she bending with the intent to hurt him. He wasn't surprised. He was doing the same. If a little water splashed him it wouldn't do the damage that any fire touching her would do. He'd never had to pull his punches so carefully in a sparring match, though - every waterbender he'd ever fought before now had been too intent on killing him, and any firebender who couldn't turn aside someone else's fire had failed at their basics long ago.
But he was still learning with every move, sparring a waterbender who didn't want to kill him, who he didn't want to kill, learning flashier tricks than Northern tribesmen were apt to use as Sana conjured ocean waves into curved iceramps that sent her suddenly sliding out of his reach so fast that he let the fire fly and melted her ramps behind her. She covered her arms and shoulders with water again and he dodged whip after whip, fending off her focused, two-armed strikes with bursts of fire that dispensed more humid vapor into the air. He vented heat as he moved, so overflowing with power in this warm climate that even with the sun beginning to dip flecks of water landing on his skin boiled off immediately. Sana swept more water around herself and her two-armed attack turned into an octopus form, her many whips of water diverting his focus as she targeted his feet and his face.
He slipped up when his bare foot landed on a broken piece of coral, and Sana caught him with a punch from a water whip to the chest. He stumbled back, and saw Sana's face red with exertion as she held her hands overhead, performing some move that was so strenuous she'd left herself wholly open to attack. Iroh stepped calmly into place for a flashy kick that would startle her and end the fight -
- and was surprised when, suddenly, the water was welling up beneath him, Sana's tremendous effort pulling water through the beach sand and beneath his feet, cooling his skin as it ran upward. It was such a surprise, and so clearly a very strenuous effort on Sana's part, that he decided to see what came next - the water covered his body, hissing where it cooled his venting heat, and with the downturned motion of Sana's forward hand, he was encased in ice from the knees down.
"Well!" he started to say, smiling in his surprise, thinking now of the soil composition of the northern Earth Kingdom and wondering whether this was a trick the unique to Sana's tribe, or if the clay of the northern Earth kingdom were simply too dense for waterbenders to attack through, but Sana tackled him to the sand.
With his feet frozen he began trying to grapple her, but decided again to see what came next. What came next was the water on her arms and shoulders flowing down to his arms, encasing his hands to his forearms in ice that, when he tried to lift them, was firmly held down by what must have been a deep, pronged spike of ice in the sand, the weight of it holding him down.
He funneled heat into his extremities, the thick ice melting slowly. While he was focused, Sana straddled his waist, crossing her arms, looking triumphant as she knelt over him.
"Ha!" she crowed, as the ice melted around his hands and feet, giving him a little more and more range of motion. "Gotcha now!"
In a real battle this was a daunting finishing move to avoid at all costs. In a fake battle, it landed him with an upwards view of a pretty woman who had him nailed down, however briefly, at her mercy.
He was interested to note he didn't even want to burn way out of her restraints - not just because it was pleasant to have a woman he wanted on top of him, but because with him so restrained, she could do anything to him.
He wanted to find out what sort of anything she wanted to do to him.
"Ah, yes," he agreed, breaking his hands out of the ice as it steamed away around him - to bring his arms behind his head and lace his fingers there, as he enjoyed his position. "Right where I want to be."
Sana didn't blush, and she didn't laugh, and she didn't get off him, her chest rising and falling with the exertion of their sparring. Her lips were pursed with interest, as he waited to see what decision she'd come to.
A few breaths in and out to get her air back, and she knelt down to kiss him.
This was something to find out, all right - how enticing it was to restrain a man and see him . . . not mind it. Not mind being at her mercy, not mind being in her power.
Sana wondered if he'd let her do that to him again - but she didn't want to ask just then.
Asking meant talking. And waiting. What she wanted to do - what she did do was kiss him, sliding back to press her body against his, feeling him warm and solid and so strong beneath her.
The pleasure of him underneath her was already rising from her center to fill her whole body, as she caressed his mouth with hers, as she fell again into the same warm desire that had consumed her earlier when they'd kissed in the ocean.
He lifted a hand to her face, caressing her gently and pulling her in for a deeper kiss, and the pleasure swallowed her as he shifted beneath her - the ice on his legs was doubtless melted - and bent his knee to rub his thigh along the inside of hers, drawing closer and closer with a slow, deliberate movement to press against her -
She bore down on the welcome pressure of his thigh, a moan escaping her lips as she took his lower lip between hers and held it there with just enough pressure to draw it out - shifting her kiss to the corner of his mouth and caressing his lower lip lightly with the tip of her tongue. He put his hands to her midback and pulled her in, the caress of his hands down to the small of her back releasing tension - she wanted him to touch her from head to toe like that, with his big warm hands and their deliberate, knowing pressure. The requests were forming on her lips.
What did it matter that this was so soon? They only had a month. What reason did she have hold out anymore -?
His people would put you in jail for existing, and he might not try to stop them, came the thoughts she'd been relying on to keep herself free, always in her ma's voice, always followed by the plea her ma had put forward when Sana paid her that first visit to Ma's new Earth Kingdom home, with Ma's new Earth Kingdom husband, and confessed she was planning not to go back to the Swamp at all. Just go home. The world ain't safe for you, no matter how good a bender you are.
She pulled back from the kiss.
Iroh was understandably surprised as she pulled away from him, breathing fast. "What's wrong?"
On the one hand, how could he even ask that, on the other - why would he? Sleeping with him was no more dangerous than kissing him, and she'd already done that with barely a thought, heightened on the rush of having almost died in the typhoon. He kept promising not to do to her what his nation would. He sure couldn't do it, when she had all the control over whether he ever got off this island and where he got to once they left it.
"I-it's too soon," she settled on, standing up, turning away. Her whole body was trembling with what she wanted crashing up against what the entire rest of the world was. "We've - we've still got a long time to be alone here -"
"A long time to pass one way or another," he agreed. She heard him standing up, felt his hand on her shoulder, gentle, heard the concern in his voice. "You're upset," he said, when she didn't look away from the ocean. He must have felt her trembling. "What's the matter?"
He sounded as genuinely concerned as she could ever want a man to be, seeing her so upset, interrupting a moment that had been barreling towards intimacy.
She looked into his concerned face, still slightly sunburnt, his amber eyes so warm and bright, like the riverwater a few miles out from the spring, where the tannin from the cypress trees turned the water from bluer than sky to a jeweled golden brown.
"I need a moment to myself," she said. She felt the apologetic smile unbidden on her own face. "I have to think about -"
She couldn't come up with a quick enough summary of "I have to think about whether or not to let myself get in any deeper with you because you're an enemy no matter how much I don't want you to be and you may kill people I don't like but don't want to see them dead and I'll be responsible for it because I saved your life."
"I have to -" she stepped away from him, gesturing at the ocean. "I have to cool down."
He blinked. "I'll be here when you are," he said, sounding confused, but not hurt, and not angry.
She got into the sea as fast as she could.
The cool of the water washed away her sweat, but not enough of her tension. She swam arm over arm into the deep blue, diving under just a few fathoms and letting herself bob to the surface.
She floated in the ocean, relaxed, breathing deeply to restore her heart to calm. She'd been too tightly wound up with it to think clearly. Now she'd surely reach a conclusion that let her go back to shore, and -
- and deal with him laughing at her jokes and kissing her hands and her arms and her lips when she inevitably gave in to her urge to put her arms around his broad shoulders, and let him wrap his strong arms around her and pull her into his lap and -
His people had put waterbenders she'd never met in prison. He'd fought Northern tribesmen. She'd never go back to the North Pole if she could help it, but that didn't mean she wanted to see any of those men in another nation's prison, or burned alive, and maybe he'd already burned a few men she'd known alive, maybe she was an absolute fool never to have asked before now. Maybe she'd walk away from this and he'd go on and kill someone she'd known in the North, or - or maybe he'd just go on to kill people she'd never met and never would meet and never would know about, and she'd be responsible, wouldn't she? Because she saved the life of a Fire Nation soldier? Because when she realized that's what he was, she didn't take a soldier's stance in return, and finish what the storm had started.
She wanted to scream. She didn't want to kill anybody. She hadn't gone out into the world looking to kill anybody, or be killed, but that was the world she'd floated off into, when she left Ma's, when Ma had pleaded with her to go back and she'd decided to continue following the river anyway.
You could have just stayed in the Swamp, she thought. You could have just sat beneath the Tree and waited until you weren't sick to death of sitting for once in your life. You could have just kept trying to reach the bottom of the Spring. You didn't have to go downriver. You didn't have to come here.
But you did, and now you're keeping a man alive who'll kill your kin, and you're this close to letting him have you, because you been alone too long and got yourself alone with him too long and you ain't good at thinkin' about anyone but yourself.
Just like they said at her night fire, when she got lost in staring off into the darkness and neglected to fill her half-brother's friends' cups again. Just like they said in the North, when she had to ask the same stupid questions over and over in the Healing Hut because the little girls were effortlessly getting it, speeding the lesson on ahead while she was still lost, frustrated over how hard this was, how easy it seemed to be for the literal children she was learning with, how useless that made her and how stupid it made her look to fail to learn because she kept getting lost in wondering if any of this healing that she couldn't get the hang of could have saved Pa, or if the magnolias were in bloom yet in the Swamp, or how Tei and Idia and Mothmouse, were doing and if they wondered how she was doing too -
It wasn't an either-or thing. Whether she slept with him or not, he wouldn't stop going to war against the Northern Tribe and the Earth Kingdom. She wished she could talk to her ma about it. She wished she could talk to anyone about it.
She didn't have anyone to talk about it with but the man in question, and the only thing talking with him about it would do was go on giving her reasons not to let him into her body, not to enjoy that he was alive, and with her.
She was just resisting accepting what she knew was true. That she shouldn't be allowing herself to indulge feelings. That she'd been avoiding thinking about the hard things because she wanted something for herself, she wanted something that was good only for her and only for a moment, and because she didn't want to walk away at the end of the month feeling like the right thing to do would have been the thing she knew she could not do - take a man's life.
It didn't matter whether she'd won their sparring match or not. Whether she was physically capable of it or not - she couldn't kill him. She couldn't do that.
If she opened herself up to accepting that he might be kind to her when she was the only means he had to get off the island, but that didn't mean he'd be kind to the rest of the world, or even to her if she didn't have leverage over him -
Well, then she could eliminate something she wanted.
Even if she wanted to go on wanting him.
She ran herself through twenty diving breaths before she made herself look back to shore. Iroh wasn't there when she swam in, and remained in the shallow water that gently washed the beach, but it wasn't long before he emerged from the lengthening shadows that darkened the jungle, and walked down the beach to join her for what could be nothing but an uncomfortable conversation.
A/N: Ilah's advice to Iroh is paraphrased from a Sun Tzu quote: "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat." I think it's fairly accurate for the characterization we see from Iroh in the show, constantly embracing being underestimated and seen as nonthreatening, right before kicking everybody's ass. I'm threading my headcanons for Fire Lady Ilah throughout this story, which I intend to use to reveal her backstory and fate through her influence on her son.
The breathholding time and diving depth Sana describes as her limits are well under the current records for real life freedivers. The seven-minute breathhold she describes is the longest she can hold her breath lying perfectly still and relaxed in cold water. Submerging the face in cold water automatically increases the length a person can hold their breath by triggering the mammalian dive reflex, which shuttles oxygen-rich blood out of extremities and to the vital organs. Sana's deepest possible dive, which she lists at 180 feet, probably takes her about 4 minutes to complete and is the maximum time she's been able to hold her breath while expending the energy needed to swim that far down and back up again. Hashtag goals.