A/N: This chapter's mini playlist is:

SOS (Overboard) - Joseph

Start a Fire - Ryan Star

Pisces - Xan Griffin

The chapter's title is from Pisces.

Chapter 7

We Can Do What Waves Do

Iroh had to relieve his own tension. There wasn't much privacy on the island, so his options were to go to the beach to firebend his energy out, or inland to find the privacy he would have gone to his tent for. Even if he truly wanted to do anything but go inland and think about the woman who'd fled from kissing him, she'd departed seeming distressed. If she returned from the sea to him firebending onshore, she might be more unsettled.

That was more than the justification he needed to go inland for the jungle's privacy.

When he was relaxed again, lying underneath a hibiscus bush heavy with coral pink flowers, he wondered what had upset Sana so much. He was boiling over with wanting to have her, and she seemed to be simmering back at him, but something had put her off.

He wondered if she still thought he'd hurt her. She said she trusted him to lie about killing her, but that also meant she was thinking about him killing her. Evading the Fire Nation had been on her mind for longer than he had, and any other Fire Nation soldier would do their best to imprison her, if they could manage it.

Not that I'd let her stay there, he surprised himself by thinking. No, that wasn't surprising. She'd saved his life. She was owed more than an enemy's dry imprisonment. Maybe she feared he'd betray her to his nation accidentally, the way she was giving secret after secret of her own culture to him. If he told her he was the prince, she'd realize that he alone of anyone but Azulon had the power to ensure that no harm came to her -

He almost burst out laughing at the thought. Revealing his identity was so dangerously out of the question that it amused him even to have thought if it. Yes, that would quiet her concern, if she were worried he couldn't protect her from imprisonment. No, she would never know - not unless some other Fire Nation soldier did manage to put her in a cage after they parted company.

He would have his informants let him know when new waterbenders were captured, when he returned to the palace. He tried to remember where the jail built to house waterbenders even was. It was in the interior, amidst the arid highlands, but if he'd ever learned the exact location, he'd forgotten it by now.

He returned to the beach, sweat cooling on his skin as the sun dipped low and an evening breeze picked up. She was already there, sitting in the shallow water, her knees drawn to one side and her braid undone. Her sarong clung to her wet skin as it had the whole two days they'd been on the island, leaving so little of her to the imagination, and yet that tantalizing little amount was so invigorating to imagine - he all but shook himself. Her body language was closed off, her legs drawn up and her arms close, her lips unsmiling. Even her position in the water was subtly defensive. She didn't need to surround herself with her element, but she had, despite adequate dry land to sit on. Whatever bothered her bothered her a lot.

He stepped into the water, offering her power over him as he sat opposite her.

"What happened just now?" he asked. She held his gaze as he sat, direct and blue as the sea beneath a grey sky. "You seemed to be having a good time, and then -" He lifted a hand in question. "Did I do something wrong?"

Sana took a long breath and swallowed. "I have to ask you a few things," she said. "Will you tell me the truth?"

"I haven't lied to you yet."

"Why'd you attack the Southern tribe?"

She had swung right in with a big question he didn't expect. But it was easy enough to answer, even if it was a surprise. "I didn't," he said. "I've never been to the south."

"But your people did," she said, "And you work for the one that ordered it."

"I work for a lieutenant-colonel out of Fort Iruka," Iroh corrected, distancing himself down the chain of command from the Fire Lord. She was technically right, but he couldn't risk her knowing that the chain of command was ceremonial at best.

"But he works for someone who works for someone who works for the Fire Lord," Sana said. "What if he ordered you to kill me, would you?"

"No." He answered too fast to leave any doubt. It was a true enough answer. No, he wouldn't, because he'd talk Azulon out of destroying an asset as valuable as a woman with healing powers who liked him enough to use them on him, who'd done the Fire Nation the great service of saving his life, and he'd succeed. It would be the hardest thing he'd ever talked Azulon into, but he could do it. She'd not be flattered to hear herself described as an asset, but that was the only form in which Azulon would consider her life potentially valuable to him, and Azulon saw everything through the lens of what was and was not valuable to him.

Including, Iroh was wholly aware, his sons.

Sana looked skeptical. "Ain't there laws against you about that?"

"Nobody in my chain of command will ever know about you," he assured her. "No one will ever know to give the order, even if I would obey it."

"But you wouldn't?"

"No." He'd argue all night about it, and he could win the argument, and that was close enough to be the truth. If he couldn't, the possibility was too remote to be worth thinking about.

"Are the captured waterbenders still alive?"

Another hard question. The Southerners weren't even her people - though if she were enough of a traveler to get all the way North, and be disenchanted by it enough to leave, she might hope that the Southerners had more room in their ways for a woman like her. "As far as I know," he said, truthfully.

"When are they gonna be set free?"

This was the first question he didn't have a quick answer for.

"I don't think anyone's planning on it," he said. The tables were turned, and he was giving her information, but so far, nothing he'd said could help the Northern Water Tribe in battle.

"So they're good as dead," Sana said. She let out a breath. "Just . . . A real long, slow death."

He was uncomfortable with this line of thought. The waterbenders in prison would kill him as soon look at him, but she was bound to be softer about them. Putting waterbenders in prison only to keep them there until they died naturally was the choice the Fire Lord had made, and it was, frankly, an inefficient use of resources. The space needed to keep all those people, the high level of training for the guards who had to keep the benders alive without allowing them free access to water, the other work those high-performing guards could be doing . . . what was the alternative? Killing the prisoners outright was a disgraceful solution, but what could be done with powerful enemies who'd harbor nothing but burning hatred after their imprisonment -? It was a problem he'd inherit, once Azulon left him the authority for it to be his problem. Some inheritance I'm set to receive, he reflected. Other people inherit money, or business. I inherit prisoners.

"I think they'll be released when the war's won," he decided. Maybe he would free them, once the Earth Kingdom was taken and there was no reason for the aged combatants to have any hope of a rebellion.

"But why'd they have to go to prison at all?" Sana asked. "They weren't attacking you."

"The Avatar cycle," Iroh explained. "Fire Lord Azulon wants a Fire Avatar sooner rather than later. The next Water Avatar was supposed to be born in the South, but if they were -"

"They're in prison now?" Sana supplied.

"Not that I know."

"Dead?"

"Maybe."

"I just don't get how y'all can justify going to someone else's home and killin' them and takin' them hostage all to get yourselves an Avatar," Sana sighed. "If the next Water Avatar wouldn't be on your side, why would a Fire Avatar be different? The Avatar keeps the balance."

The Avatar is a person, like any other, and subject to being wrong as any man, Iroh thought, thinking of Roku's blindness to the benefit of the Fire Nation extending its providence to the rest of the world. His noble descendants were still desperately trying to curry favor in the court to regain Azulon's favor, now that Roku was gone and only his disloyal legacy remained. A Southern Water Avatar would be entirely blind with Southern Water Tribe pride. An Earth Avatar, if they had been born by now, would also be a formidable hurdle for him to overcome - but he could crack that boulder when he came to it. "I can't speak for the Avatar any more than I can speak for the Fire Lord," he said, which was true enough.

"But you got men under your command, and you can tell them where to go and fight and who to kill," she said.

"I can," he agreed. "And I much prefer my men achieve their goals with as little death on both sides as possible."

"It's still a bunch of fighting that ain't gotta happen," Sana insisted.

"I'm afraid it does," Iroh argued. The Earth Kingdom would not accept their destiny as easily as he had accepted his - but who would accept a destiny that was to be the losing side, even if their loss was as certain as his mother's death had been? "The Fire Lord commands it. I can't command my men not to go to war, but I can command them to go to war with honor."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that Fire Nation soldiers need to eat, too, and a burned field feeds no one. There are Earth Kingdom captains who will salt a field and starve their soldiers rather than risk Fire Nation soldiers getting use of that field. If I take that field fast enough by outsmarting that captain, he never gets the chance - then his soldiers eat, and his civilians eat, and so do mine, instead of everyone starving. It means executing the soldier who kills a civilian right away, instead of looking the other way and then finding that others of lesser character have followed their example, and now instead of one criminal in my service I have a whole battalion. Do you think the Earth Kingdom doesn't have soldiers of poor enough quality, that they take advantage of their own citizens? And they have ones in command who are of similar quality." He thought of some of the cowards who had surrendered to him, whose personal finances were growing wealthy on tithes from the local villages. "Not so in my command," he said, with pride. "I had to challenge my first commanding officer to a duel over such a crime."

Sana's eyes were wide. "A duel?"

"Yes, right at the beginning of my career," he said. It was distasteful to think of the ways Corporal Zhu had abused his command, and his soldiers, and the Earth Kingdom civilians he had had power over, but he was still proud of his handling of that matter. "The man was a vile sadist. He wasn't limiting his crimes to Earth Kingdom civilians, but to many under his power." He still regretted not having been able to spare the enlisted Fire Nation men under Corporal Jai's command his abuse, but he'd acted as fast as he'd seen its consequences. "I challenged him to an Agni Kai - a fire duel - and burnt half his face off. His supporting officers were demoted, and he was jailed for his crimes."

At the time, he'd been taking orders under his assumed identity. The corrupt corporal had suffered first the humiliation of a thorough disfiguring in an Agni Kai by a younger man he believed to be merely a 2nd lieutenant of no particularly important family, but his appeal to the Fire Lord to punish that Second Lieutenant had gone worse for him. Jai had been called to present his case to the Fire Lord in person, delivered his case as a scathing criticism of Iroh's disrespect for the natural hierarchy of his chain of command, and the natural hierarchy of his breeding as a nobly-born warrior of high birthright. The Fire Lord would surely, Jai believed, agree that his blood was pure and noble and worthy of respect beyond what a common young fool from no family he knew to speak of possessed. That same man had to watch in unfolding horror as Azulon had turned to Iroh, who knelt barely containing his laughter, and said "I have heard the Corporal's position. What do you say in support of your decision to challenge a man of such elevated birthright, Prince Iroh?"

Let it never be said that Azulon was without a sense of humor. It was the closest Iroh had ever come to hearing his father snicker.

He would take the man's expression to his grave as one of his proudest moments, he was sure. Jai's mouth twisted permanently in a sneer from the twisting burned flesh that marred his right jaw all the way to the back of his neck, as ugly now on the outside as he was within, never to do his worst to an Earth Kingdom girl or an enlisted Fire Nation man again.

"I received my first promotion from that," he said. "But that man will never command so much as a room's attention again."

"You could just not obey the Fire Lord," Sana said. "Stop fighting entirely –"

It was the funniest thing she'd said yet. "If I had a death wish, yes," he agreed, near chuckling. "If I wanted to see men like the one I demoted taking command of my men, yes."

Sana was silent. She didn't seem to be finding her questions easily anymore.

"I just don't see what good it is for the Fire Lord to decide this is what his people gotta do," she said. She didn't have an insight into destiny, so of course she didn't.

"Regardless, he has decided it," said Iroh. "I can see it done with honor, or I can see it done with dishonor, but I can't see it undone." Not unless he conquered Ba Sing Se a lot sooner than was reasonable to expect. "I have chosen to see it done with honor, though, whatever you think of me for it."

Sana considered him, looked out over the beach at the setting sun, and looked back slowly.

"I'll be back around sunset," she said, leaning towards the open water. "I just need to think."

She turned over in the shallow water and disappeared into the sea faster than Iroh expected. He ran through the debate, trying to see where it could have gone better, or worse. There were far more ways it could have gone worse than better, he decided. He congratulated himself for handling the discussion deftly, and without the laziness of reactive anger. "It's destiny, and it is right because I'm the one who's destined to it," might be true, but won fewer debates with people who were, to their discomfort, destined to surrender.

The sun dipped below the horizon while Sana floated, her nose barely above the calm water as she let the salty sea carry her on her natural buoyancy. It was more comforting than anything just to be able to go to the sea when she was thrown this deep into anxiety, to have the full freedom of already being known as a waterbender and able to disappear into the water's comfort -

- known by someone who could see past the idea of a whole tribe in prison to follow the man who'd ordered it, on the principle that if he couldn't stop the war, he might as well fight it nicely.

How could someone mix such consideration to her with a disregard for what his nation would do to her? How could someone whose element was the forceful, explosive breaking-through of fire simply go with commands because he'd already decided the Fire Lord couldn't be fought?

The night had gone fully dark, and Iroh was asleep in the shelter when Sana came in from her swim. She didn't want to leave the water yet, and found herself standing in the shallows, looking at the stars on the dark horizon.

He'd never even wondered about the waterbenders in prison. Sana felt, in that thought, the insignificance the Fire Nation had afforded a whole nation it, as far as Ma had learned from the safety of her new husband's inn, had picked clean of benders. Firebenders this side of the equator had no reason to even think about near a whole tribe on the other side of the world in chains, but she had reason. She could end up alongside them, never to see these stars, stand in this sea again.

A firebender who directly defied the Fire Lord would end up the same, he'd told her. How critical could she really be of Iroh, for not wanting the same thing she didn't want? It wasn't as though she was rebelling against the Fire Lord herself, or getting justice for her southern kin.

You're doing the opposite, she reminded herself. Keeping a fire nation soldier alive. He'll leave you in the Earth Kingdom and go on to eventually put Earthbenders in prison.

So what was her solution to that? What was her moral choice - kill him?

Sana felt her soul shrink a little at the thought. I can't and I don't want to warred in he for first billing as the truth. She didn't want to kill anyone. She couldn't imagine being angry enough at anyone to do it.

Her kin in prison could. Maybe she'd be primed for it after a few years in a dry jail herself.

What good would it actually do to kill a man she deeply did not want to see die? One Fire Nation soldier was replaceable by a nation full of others, and - and you know you won't do it. She didn't even like killing fish, and she had to eat those.

She did what she did whenever whatever she was thinking about wasn't improving with thought. She began bending. Her forms were a hair fast and sloppy, the water rippling under her control, but after a few minutes of attending to the motions and tuning into the feedback of the water responding to her, she was back in form. Her mind had dipped into the same cool absence of anxiety for the future or regret for the past that she only seemed to achieve in the water.

She closed her eyes as she went through her forms. When she opened them again, the dark water glittered with a silver path. The moon had risen over the mountain, waxing full. It would be full in a few days. It had been so long since all she had to do during a full moon cycle was enjoy the freedom to feel its power.

When she drifted into the Storkturtle Spreads Wings form, turning slowly around, Iroh was by the shelter, awake and contentedly watching her bend. There was no trace of the anxiety she felt over her attraction to him in his flattering, admiring smile.

There was such a feeling of finally whenever she looked at him and saw him watching her that way while she was waterbending, like she was skilled and interesting and a delight to have stumbled across. The men in the North had resented her so much for already knowing something they couldn't convince her to un-learn and un-love. But Iroh was, himself, skilled and interesting and a delight to have stumbled across. It was sure inconvenient that all those things had to come together in a man who was fine with his nation being at war with the whole world.

He stood up and ambled to her side. She kept bending, conveying in her silence that she wasn't done for the day. He watched her technique for a moment, then said, "The Northmen turn their hands out at the end of that move."

"Oh?" She looked at him. The northmen had been so cagey about their bending forms once they accepted that she already knew how to waterbend, wasn't any worse than their average bender, and wasn't going to magically be as bad at combat applied waterbending as they wanted her to inherently be. And now here was an outsider, who'd seen more of Northern Style combat waterbending than she had, volunteering to show her moves.

He dipped into a form with better flow than she'd expected from a firebender. His movements were still sharper and jerkier than any waterbender would allow themselves to be seen, like the movements were utterly foreign to him - which they were, she accepted, but she recognized immediately the Storkturtle Spreads Wings form with the turned-out hand at the end. It was incredibly attentive of him to have noted the detail. She ran through the form, and the energy of the bending that she had been using to direct the water forward in an ice arrow lifted a protective wave to her right, the redirected energy flowing so naturally that a small quantity of energy produced a great deal of protection.

"Yes, like that," Iroh said, as she held the water wall in place, then dropped and repeated the move to her opposite side, flowing back and forth, nailing in the new variation on the form. "It's a pain to get fire past if you're doing a wide sweep. We try to interfere here -" he reached for her wrist before the slow motion could manifest in the ice arrow the southern tribe used the form for.

She theatrically wound her wrist under his, gently holding his blocking arm and letting him feel how she would use his own motion to pull him along the block and off balance. What am I doing? She wondered again, realizing she was just teaching a firebender more about waterbending than he already knew -

"Yes," he said, as her hand wrapped around his wrist, and he saw the path of her pull. "They do that too."

Okay. Maybe not. Maybe he was basically already too worldly to be surprised by anything she had to offer that wasn't tailored for people born in the bodies generally assumed to belong to women.

"Did they teach you any of this, when you were in the north?" Iroh asked, drawing back from her, and clumsily running through a different form - the Repelling Hogmonkey, but his footwork when she imitated it made water geyser in a pillar and rain down in ice daggers in a way that Swamp style didn't.

"'Course not," Sana said. There was no harm in saying so. "The men wouldn't spar with a woman." She fluttered her eyelashes. "What if they'd hurt me, how would they live with themselves?"

Iroh chuckled. "Not to brag, but I've sent more than a few Northern Waterbenders into a retreat," he bragged. "Imagine if they knew I'd learned my bending from my mother."

"Oh, they'd sulk for days," Sana said, a smile playing on her lips. She paused. "Your ma, huh?"

"Mainly. I studied under other masters, but none better than my mother."

Of course he had other masters, fancy rich man that he was always reminding her that he was. Sana wondered if he expected her to care more that he was rich than that he was handsome and funny and treating her like a master bender worth comparing combat skills with. And it was endearing that he was obviously proud of his ma and her power. "Must have been nice," she said, wistful. "My ma's not a bender."

It would have been wonderful if she had even been an Earthbender, one more thing that they could have shared - but instead it was just about the only thing they couldn't.

"Your father?"

"Yeah, but he died when I was young," she said, shrugging it off. "He got to teach me the basics, but he declined real sudden."

"I'm sorry," Iroh said. "My mother died two years ago."

Sana looked up from her own distant loss in surprise. "Oh, that's so recent," she said, sympathy rising. "I'm sorry too."

His smile was a little sad, as, of course it would be. "Look at us," he said, still, a joking tone in his voice, as the moon rose overhead. "Quite a sorry pair we make."

She would never have been able to kill this man, she realized. She looked at the silver path on the water, wondering if that path was a road into the spirit world, or another where she didn't have to reconcile that men she wanted could come from nations that wanted her in chains.

"So," he said, now simply following her forms as she bent, his technique slowly smoothing closer and closer to a passable waterbending form as he repeated her motions, defying his own lifelong training. "Am I ever going to hear the story about the catgator in your pants?"

She burst out laughing, the water midair rippling from her surprise. "You were still thinking about that?"

"It wasn't that long ago I missed out on hearing it the first time," he pointed out.

Right. It had been less than a week. It felt like it had been months. "Okay - you gotta hear me out in full, but there's a town in the Earth Kingdom I can't go back to, because I'm wanted for robbing a dumpling stand with a catgator."

Laughter burst out of him. "Tell me everything immediately."

"Well -" Sana pressed her lips together at the absurdity of it. "First of all, I was traveling west on a river, and I found this kittengator all alone - he was so young he came right at me demanding to be rescued, cause they trust anything Momma Catgator or human shaped when they're that little and starving. I could tell he was orphaned 'cause I could feel just about every bone in his spine through his fur. So naturally I thought, 'All right, I guess I got a pet now' and I named him Duckpossum -"

She'd paddled into a village that night on her old reed boat, and the kittengator had inhaled every tadpole she'd dangled in his reach, but she'd been out of provisions and by morning desperately wanted something besides another catbirdtail root. The first dumpling cart she came across didn't think much of her offer to wash dishes for breakfast, while the well-clothed Earth Kingdom lady sneered at her leaf hat and her moss shift, but the pants had been an Earth Kingdom gift from Ma, so she could keep her tattooed legs covered "in case raiders ever find the Swamp and you have to run somewhere else." Duckpossum, full of tadpoles and too much energy in his new Ma's pants, had been going crazy, scratching her up while she argued with the dumpling cart woman. Finally she pulled him out of her pants, but a little fresh air and sunlight hadn't been enough to entertain Duckpossum, who she hadn't expected to leap out of her hands onto the woman -

Kittengators were cute after five weeks, but before that they all looked a little diseased. Duckpossum had been in particularly bad shape with his patchy starvation fur and his bulging eyes and snaggle teeth. He was a handsome orange furred, grey-scaled boy now, but being an orphan had made him look unfortunate. The dumpling cart woman thought he looked worse than unfortunate, as far as Sana could gather as she'd tried to get her increasingly panicked new pet away from the woman who was determined to swat him to the ground, but ended up swatting most of her dumplings without laying a hand on the kittengator.

"It was a big misunderstanding," she finished. She paused. "That I got a snack out of."

Iroh was laughing fully. "You ate the dumplings off the ground?"

"Well no one else was taking them!" Sana objected, glad at least that he was laughing like it was funny, and not like she was a rustic bumpkin with no taste. She had never craved anything that wasn't an unseasoned minnow or catbird tail root more than she had that morning. "Anyway it turns out that dumpling cart lady was the mayor's auntie, so I can't go back to that village again."

"Some luck you had," Iroh chuckled. "And the catgator was all right?"

"He stays with a friend while I sail. They like having him in their ornamental pond. Keeps the roachmice out."

"At least you got something to eat," Iroh chuckled, circling back to the ground dumplings. "I hope those roads were clean, at least."

"What, it shoulda gone to waste?" Sana objected. In a second he was probably going to remind her he was rich again, and had never been hungry enough to grab breakfast off the ground. "There weren't no nice pretty lady servin' up a nice seasoned parrotfish with a side of tropical fruit to me when I started wanderin'!"

"Why did you wander?" Iroh asked. Sana thought a moment. She figured she could answer that question safely enough, but - but it was late, and she was tired, and getting into all the reasons she'd decided she just couldn't put up with another night-fire with her half-brother and his friends still made her feel like a bad sister, which was unfair, because if her brother had ever wondered if he was even an okay brother, Sana didn't know about it.

"Maybe tomorrow let's talk about it," she said. She'd already thought so hard about so much that was difficult that day. "I'm tired."

"That's fair." Iroh still watched her bending, following up as she returned the water to the sea. Sana hesitated, no more waterbending and no more energy to swim to distract her from the question of whether she was going to sleep curled up with a Fire Nation soldier again, now that she'd had another whole day to think about it.

Sana returned her bending water to the ocean without adding a new ripple to the sea. She didn't move from the waves. She'd been warming back up to him all afternoon, but Iroh still saw her hesitance.

He put his hand on her shoulder. She conceded, turning to look at him.

"The war will happen, whether I am in it or not," he said, softly. He couldn't fault her overmuch. His father had thoroughly brought her southern kin to their knees. And while it would have been wise of her and her hidden kin to take note from Azulon's decimation of the south and pledge their loyalty to the stronger nation, pride - even the pride of a peasant woman who couldn't afford to let food that fell on the ground go uneaten - so rarely conceded to logic. "It's my duty to conduct my part in it with honor." he said. "I can't affect the war by leaving it."

"What makes you think you can change it?" she asked. "No offense, but you're one person, and the war's everywhere."

I'm the only person who can change it, he thought. "I don't know all I can change, but I can't change anything by leaving my position." Abandoning his throne to his father, to conduct without the perspective of his son's eyes in the field? Abandoning his throne to be inherited by his little brother, whose only personality at age two seemed to consist of finding the worst person in the room to kick in the shins, and always throwing a louder tantrum than the one he'd thrown before? Iroh nearly chuckled. Even if he were not this world's destined ruler, even if he weren't eventually welcomed wherever he went, no one could find any good in leaving the world to those two. "It'd be filled so fast, I'd barely be missed. And probably not by someone more honorable than me."

Sana looked over the water, away from him.

She'd never accept the gift that was the Fire Nation's rule until she realized for herself that it would mean not having to eat stolen dumplings out of the dirt and laugh about it as if it were a funny misunderstanding later. He touched her shoulder lightly, and she looked back to him again. "I know that keeping you a secret isn't really repayment for all you're doing for me here. You're saving my life every moment of every day. That's going to be hard to repay."

She waited, as if to hear how he planned to do it.

He cleared his throat. "What I mean to say is, I, ah. Could use a drink."

"Oh." Her eyes widened. She pulled water out of the air, drawn back in by practical need. "Right. I guess I could too."

Iroh waited patiently, though she held her hand out with a bubble of water at her fingertips, for her to finish drinking her own fill with her other hand before he took her hand and drank his fill, then, as usual, kissed her palm again, eyes on hers.

She still blushed and smiled as he did, and he parted the kiss from her palm to kiss the heel of her hand, then her wrist. Her smile was firmly back in place by the time he was done, as she looked to the sand and tucked her hair behind her ears and kept her hand in his.

"I keep waitin' for you to get anxious about bein' shipwrecked," she admitted. "Or . . . About anything, I guess."

"Anxious? Here?" he echoed. A chuckle entered his voice. "Of course, because it's such a trial to be in the middle of nowhere with no demands on my time - a beautiful woman kindly attending to my every need -"

"I just figured, men like you -"

"Men like me?" he repeated, already intrigued to hear what sort of common man she had to compare him to. "What kind of man am I like?"

"Fightin' types," she supplied.

"You're a fighting type of woman."

"No," she put her hands on her hips, looking proud. "I'm an exploring type."

"I stand corrected. Tell me about the fighting type of man."

She had drifted slightly closer to him, tethered by his hand, warmed by the promise of kisses on her skin.

"Fightin men, hunters –" she sighed. "They don't like to say they're being taken care of. They like to say they take care. But if a woman prepares the meat they bring home and adds food she found to it, and gets the water, and keeps camp - they don't like to admit that's them being taken care of. They act like it's the least we can do."

"Was that what they told you in the North?" he asked, thinking of the growing corps of female soldiers who were enhancing the Fire Nation's army back home. Ilah had been a powerful, skilled, unusual, exceptional woman in the field before duty to her Fire Lord had brought her back home - but she wasn't the only exception. And the women posted to the home guard were far from doing the least they could. No Fire Nation man would disrespect them by implying it, at least, not where ears as honorable as his could hear. "That you owed them wifely duties because they would hunt and fight for you, while they refused to teach you to hunt and fight for yourself?"

"It wasn't like that at home," she said, rising to her home tribe's defense. "But in the North – the men I was around would get so mad after days without a successful hunt, and they'd get madder and madder at themselves the longer they went just eatin' what their wives had stored. They never thanked their wives when the hunts were bad. They just expected thanks when the hunts were good." Her blush came back. "But you thank me all the time, and you never get mad when things don't go your way."

He slipped his hand to her waist, confident he'd be received

"It's the farthest thing from a chore to kiss you," he said, feeling humor creep into his voice. "If another man sees every opportunity to thank you kindly and didn't take it, that's his loss, but it won't be mine."

She giggled, her walls fallen again.

Iroh settled his hand on her hip. "And do you like it?" he asked. "When I thank you?"

She smiled. "You even gotta ask?"

"Maybe I just like to hear a woman say it when she likes what I've got to give her," he pointed out. "I might not be born to provide as easily in this environment as you are -" Fire was the superior element to hold in one's heart, but water clearly had its uses to be held by an ally. "But I can think of a few things I could do to thank you that begin with kissing."

The last of her walls crumbled. She stepped a little closer, put her arms around his shoulders, and let him rest both his hands on her hips. "You got a compelling argument," she agreed.

"I'll make any argument I can to keep from being left lonely under the net tonight," he said, "You're too nice to wake up next to."

He didn't have to exaggerate to flatter her. He was so used to being taken care of because of who he was. Whether that meant his birthright, or his rank, there was usually someone from the Fire Nation stepping up to serve him because it was expected, before it was because they liked him. And they were soliciting from him, too, protection as a soldier, as a prince, the providence of what he conquered, the possibility of his father's favor -

She needed his protection from the Fire Nation, but she didn't know he could give it. She had no interest in his social status. She simply liked him enough to heal him, provide for him, and then praise him for the absolute non-chore of letting her know he wanted to do more than kiss her.

She leaned in under the moonlight to kiss him some more. She'd run from her tribe, and then from another, across the whole of the Earth Kingdom and found her way to his pleasant company. If that was all it took to put him a cut above the men of the Water Tribe and the Earth Kingdom, in time, she'd surely understand what the other nations were too proud and defiant to accept - that the world was his to rule, whether other men agreed or not.

In the shelter, Iroh awoke suddenly.

He was as immediately awake as if it were the height of noon, but the dark still pressed in against his sight. Sana was perfectly relaxed with her forehead against his shoulder, her hand lightly warm on his bicep. No sound had alarmed her.

Yet something was wrong. He always awoke like this when something was wrong.

He tilted his right hand up to produce a light and saw the coconut leopardcrab bent over Sana, its claws the size of an oar open and reaching for her leg.

He kicked flames at the cat and felt its shred his leg instead, lashing with its front paw instead of its crushing claws. He shouted as Sana screamed, bolting upright beside him as he charged the cat, his clawed leg wet with blood, the air full of the smell of smoking crabshell and fur. The shelter came down upon Iroh as he shoved Sana back, and he batted the tarp away and jumped to his feet, the pain from his shredded leg still dim with adrenaline but suddenly powerless to support his weight when he even thought about leaning on it.

The moon illuminated the cat. Fully ten feet from snout to tail, it long antenna sweeping with agitation, its black eyes glittered like lumps of unliving glass. Its armored head and shoulders had shrugged off Iroh's fire, though a patch of its yellow and black spotted fur smoldered, and its hissing was half a chitter that raised the hair on the back of his neck. The moonlight gleamed off its bared, yellowed fangs, and on the sharp edges of its crushing claws, and the huge paws that dug their own two-inch, slashing black claws into the sand.

"What is that?!" Sana screamed, sounding as panicked as he'd felt when he'd been drowning. He was surprised she had to ask, but not that she was terrified. Leopardcrabs were upsetting animals to look at, and more upsetting to be ambushed by at night.

Iroh struck the cat with a jet of fire. It dodged, nimble as it evaded his attack, rippling with muscle and screaming like a possessed woman, but as a barrage of water joined Iroh's fire, the cat ran for the jungle and crashed into the dark bush. The smell of burned crab and fur was noxious as the pain caught up to him.

He managed not to faint, bending slowly to the sand as he clenched his teeth. "Coconut cat," he hissed, willing himself not to allow the pain to become a thing to focus on. "I didn't know there were any this far east -"

"Where are you -" Sana didn't finish asking where he was hurt as she skidded to his side and saw the blood pouring from his mangled calf. She let out a little sound of nausea, but sucked in a deep breath, then another. "I-I have to sanitize that before I close the wound," she said, drawing pure water out of the air. "I go to the boat and get the alcohol," she said, running the pure, clean water over the wound.

Iroh grabbed her arm. "No," he said, through gritted teeth. "I can heat it to purity." He inhaled, his fingers still tight on her arm. "Stay - in case it comes back -"

She took his hand and let him grip her hard as he breathed in through the pain and out through the pain, wrenching his focus onto the heat that the breath built within him.

Water steamed off the surface of his skin, spilled blood boiling as he heated the wound from within, glad that his mother had never allowed any court physician to attend his own childhood scrapes and cuts until he had sanitized them himself, preparing him for moments in the field, just like this, when he'd have to undergo the immense pain not just of injury, but of sanitizing his own wounds.

Eventually, head reeling, he lay back on the sand, his strength utterly sapped. "Okay," he said, giving Sana the go-ahead. She pulled more water out of the air, spun it in a tiny wheel like the massive one she'd tried to trap him in earlier, the flow pulling cooked blood from his skin. The pain, while great, was at least merely constant, so that Iroh could breathe through it without surprises. Sana tossed the bloodied water over her shoulder, into the ocean, and pulled more fresh water out of the humid air, to coat her palms, glowing in the moonlight.

She laid her hands on his leg and finally the touch was soothing. He felt the skin knit together in a way that should have been painful, but was merely neutral as the damage healed at an accelerated rate. "Thank you," he breathed, feeling the sweat on his face cooling, the aches and tension rising as his adrenaline receded. "Good at it or not, you're -"

"Don't talk," Sana cut in. "Can't focus."

He could see the concentration knitted into her features and her deep breathing. Perhaps a "skilled" healer would manage damage like this without breaking a sweat and while holding a conversation, but what she was doing was still far better than the months of healing that would have been ahead of him in a Fire Nation camp.

When she drew her hands away from his leg, the dull ache resumed, but her hands were shaking from exertion. Iroh sat up to view the result - angrily scabbed scratches that itched, but were still better than days of agony and the possibility of infection resetting.

Sana looked drained. He put his arms around her. She went willingly into his comfort, returning his embrace, and he found he was desperate for that comfort from her too, relived to be able to sink from the panic of pain and battle into an embrace from someone who promised him relief from pain.

Safety. Relief from pain. What a novelty, for a son of the Fire Nation, where danger and pain were certainties to meet head-on, where safety and relief were earned by the promise of delivering more danger and pain than challenging you was worth.

He let his forehead rest on Sana's shoulder, comforted in the softness of her skin and the smell of the sea that clung to her hair.

"I've never seen one of those before," Sana said, sounding dazed. "I'm sorry - if I'd known I would have set up camp in a safer -"

"If anyone's responsible, I am," he assured her. "I have seen those before. They're almost all hunted out on Ember Island but they turn up every once in a while -"

"It's still alive," Sana pointed out.

It was. "We should . . . probably sleep on the boat tonight," Iroh suggested.

"We should," Sana agreed.

Another moment passed.

"We have to stop hugging in order to get on the boat," Iroh realized.

"We do."

Sana dropped anchor in the sloping sand off the beach, then surfed the boat gently to the middle of the bay to check that the anchor had taken. She let out enough line to keep it slack in the water.

"We should stay up a little longer, to see how the boat drifts," she said, making the line fast around one of the sandeq's cleats. "How's your leg?"

"Aching," Iroh said. "Less than it would if you weren't here, though."

"Let me take another look at it," she said, pulling more water to her hands.

"You know, even not very good at it, this is still months of pain you've already spared me," Iroh said, before she got to work.

She looked up to half-smile at him in the moonlight. "How many times I gotta say it?" she asked, light in tone for the first time since the cat had woken them up. "I'm gonna take good care of you."

That promise was a little breeze fanning the ember of his affection. When she drew her hands away from his leg, the ache that lingered was diminished. He ran his fingers over the wounds and found them raised and scarred, the flesh irritated, but closed against infection. She lifted her hands to his temples again, and the soothing energy of her healing as she pulled her hands down his neck, to his shoulders, released tension he hadn't realized he'd been carrying.

He put his hand on her cheek, caught her gaze in the moonlight, drawing his thumb over her cheekbone.

He leaned in to kiss her, and she leaned in to be kissed. He ran his hand down to her shoulder, felt her own tension there.

"If only I could do the same for you," he said, smiling against her lips as his fingers pressed into her tense muscles. "Oh, wait."

He put both his hands on her neck, found the tension that began on either side of her spine, and put pressure there as she sighed at the touch. He swept his hands down her neck, pressing down on her shoulders, trailing his fingers down her chest to her sarong tied across her chest.

"That's good thanks," she said, tension leaving her under his warm touch, her lips slightly parted each time his fingers brushed the hem of her sarong.

He leaned in to kiss her parted lips. Her kiss grew deeper, her voice a soft moan as he dug his fingers into her tense shoulders, wrapped his arms around her to pull tension all the way from her shoulders down to the small of her back.

"Oh," she sighed, arching under his fingers, pressing her body against him. He took his kiss from her lips down her neck, and she stayed there, tilting her neck, exposing more to be kissed. "That's - that's good."

"You've been nothing but kind to me." His hands at the small of her back drifted, one to her shoulder again, the other to her hip. Her thigh was soft beneath his hand.

"You ain't making it hard to be kind," she said, a little laughter in her voice.

He pressed his fingers into the softness of her thigh, thumb landing in the crease where her thigh met her belly. "I want to thank you more."

She met his gaze in the moonlight, leaning into his touch, holding his gaze.

Her hand went to the knot holding her sarong in place around her chest. "Okay," she agreed. She untied the knot.

She leaned in to his kiss again as he drew the sarong away from her body. Her whisper was breathless. "Please."

A/n: Sana is, unfortunately for her, not a great debater, or her debate with Iroh might have been a little more productive. Iroh, meanwhile, is thoroughly entrenched in the cognitive dissonance needed to wage a war on a continent that didn't start it, against people he doesn't hate, based on a vision and his own sense of exceptionalism, and is used to having to debate Azulon for what he wants.

He touches on but fails to adequately explore the idea that while dishonorable behavior within the army might occasionally happen where he can see, there is - and will always be - so much in a military environment that the officers and even higher ranking enlisted who are responsible for setting standards of behavior don't know about and will never see. Obviously he firmly believes that dishonorable behavior within the Fire Nation is an anomaly that he has to go undercover to witness, but dishonor is so much closer to the surface and more frequent than idealistic but uncritical leaders like Iroh are willing to assume here. He'll figure it out . . . mostly too late, as he figures out most of these things.

The coconut cat is a combination of a leopard and a coconut crab. I don't suggest googling coconut crabs if you have any kind of large bug or spider phobia, not because coconut crabs are either of those things, but because they are VERY LARGE crabs and they aren't comforting animals to look at. They can crack coconuts open with their claws, and combined with a leopard, one of the most terrifying ambush predators, they would scare the absolute hell out of me just to share a world with, let alone an island.