Sana floated on a dream of bliss.
The water that cradled her in sleep was blue as the light trails off the macawphins' flukes under the full moon, blue as the heart of a flame. She floated immersed in beauty, her lungs full of breath, feeling at home like she never felt on land.
She looked to the surface, the glimmer of the sun cool and bright, and when she rolled over, found herself drifting gently down into the bowl of the Spring. It was warmer than the Spring had ever been, but when she opened her mouth, the absence of salt was sweet on her tongue.
The mouth of the Spring was dark beneath her. She drifted downward, the gaping hole in the bowl of the Spring receiving her without the outflow of water that she had never before been able to push her way past. Delighted, she passed the barrier between the open bowl of the Spring and the cave of its source, thinking ifinally I made it,/i her heart alight with triumph.
The mouth of the Spring snaked back into a dark corridor. Underwater rivers through the limestone, mysterious and unexplored, beckoned to her, but there in the light from the faraway sun falling on the cave floor was her mother.
She'd always wished Ma could have shared this deep exploration with her. She held her hands out to take her mother's, but when Ma held her hands and looked into her eyes, she spoke as if her voice was coming from deep, deep within the caves of the Spring. "Go any deeper, and you'll never make it out alive."
Sana recognized the dark beyond her mother for what it was - an airless current where she could die in minutes. She kicked, but the current had strengthened, and swimming against it made her lungs shrink. With all her might she swam, expending all her air, and the current still inched her closer to the dark. She was done for. She had taken her last breath. She would never get another.
Sana woke up in the grotto with a gasp that was nearly a scream, and the sea crashed against the grotto walls, responding to her fear. Iroh spilled the bowl of water he'd been boiling on his palm.
"Are you all right?" he asked, abandoning the steaming puddle of leaves he'd been steeping. He must have been trying to approximate tea, Sana realized as he knelt at her side, reaching for her hand. He was always so preoccupied with not having it. Her hand felt cold inside his.
"Just a nightmare," Sana said, running a hand across her face, breathing deeply against having deprived herself of air in her sleep. "I'm fine, I'm fine."
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Sana looked up as Iroh slid on the sand next to her, past him to the damp sand still steaming from his efforts to make tea. "What were you brewin' this time, you weren't trying some strange plant again were you?"
"Lemongrass," he said, "and calamansi leaves."
"I told you not to do that," Sana scolded, but gently, as she leaned into his opening to be embraced. Her skin felt clammy from the nightmare, and her hand was warming in his. "If you poison yourself there ain't a lot I can do about it. I'd hate to wait out the rest of the week here on my own."
"Don't worry about it," Iroh said, brushing her hair behind her ear. It was never easy to stay focused on telling him off once he got his arms around her. "If the fruit is good, how bad can the leaves be?"
"You never know," Sana insisted, but sighed in relaxation as she leaned into the warmth of being held. It was so much nicer after a nightmare to wake up to someone to be held by. "I dreamed I got caught in a current in an underwater cave and couldn't get out. You'd think after last night went the way it did, my dreams would all be nice."
"You dream of drowning?" Iroh asked, chuckling. "I expect that fear to be on everyone's mind but yours."
"Guess my mind's full of surprises," Sana murmured, but the sensation of losing her breath was fading a lot faster than the rest of the dream from her mind. The labyrinth of dark caves before her. Her mother standing between her and oblivion, warning her a little too late. She closed her eyes, leaned against Iroh, and wished she could talk to her mother.
She stayed quiet as she digested that thought. She'd traveled so far that she hadn't seen her mother in years. She always wished she could talk to Ma, but just now the thought felt more urgent than suffocation.
She opened her mouth to say, my ma was in my dream, but something stopped her from voicing the thought.
If she could talk to her mother, this was the first thing she'd have to talk about. Ma. I met someone. I met someone and it'll never work out.
She held her tongue as she let herself be held, and wondered why the universe had put her in the path of a man who was handsome and exciting and believed in her, who she could have no future with.
Her dream-mother had spoken with a voice more like Sana's than like Ma's was. Go any deeper, and you'll never make it out alive.
There'd been a lot that was so good about being stuck on this island. This was the part that was terrible. She had so much she wanted to talk to someone about, and the only person she had to talk to was the person she needed to talk to someone about. No wonder she wanted to talk to Ma so badly she'd dream her up to tell Sana what she already knew. Ma, I met someone. Ma, it'll never work - he's Fire Nation and I really doubt he'll run away with me. Sure enough, soon as she got to Fire Nation her Ma's eyes would go from shining with visions of grandbabies to flat and resolved to tell Sana what she apparently still needed to hear. You're in danger.
Forget Ma, Sana would have even taken Captain Fang's scolding, just to hear someone else tell her what she didn't want to get through her thick skull.
She wished she could go back to the night before, to the full moon's light and the sea incandescent with power, flowing so absolute through her that she felt no cage could contain her. She wished she were still so overwhelmed with triumph and hearing a man say I knew you could that she had no room in her mind for reason and, reasonably, fear.
Iroh interrupted her thoughts. "We only have a week left?" he asked, tucking one arm around her waist, letting her out of his full embrace so they could talk eye to eye.
"Little more than," she said, "and it'll be about another week at sea. We won't be short on fish but we ought to start drying mango and papaya instead of eating it all." She pushed her hair out of her face, sorting through her logistics. "We didn't touch the sweet potatoes or the taro yet, and those'd keep us for a week, if we were willing to starve a little."
"I'm not." Iroh chuckled. "So it'll be inland for provisioning all week."
He still sounded like this was a delightful vacation he had no qualms about ending, and Sana felt suddenly twisted up in knots at the notion that she might be the only one who was going to miss this. "It - we'll have to spend some time checking the sandeq real thorough, and yeah I reckon inland there'll be more fruit trees we haven't stripped yet -"
"And you still have your new technique to show me," he reminded her, as if she could forget. "Come on, let's go for a swim. Moving around will cheer you up."
"I -" she almost agreed, almost let him pull her to her feet to go jump in the ocean and forget all her troubles in cathartic swimming, but no, she kept being too distracted by fun and she needed closure. "Just - I have something serious to talk about," she said. She could at least put it out there.
"Oh, more serious than life or death stranded in the middle of the ocean?" Iroh joked, settling beside her again. "Better get it out in the open."
Sana took a deep breath. "I don't want to never see you again."
There it was, the truth that was probably dragging her under.
His face broke into the wide smile that was dragging her down. "What a coincidence," he said. "I don't never want to see you again either."
A flare of hope. Sana remembered herself and took a deep breath. "All right, but how does that work? I can't come to no Fire Nation army base," she gestured to her telltale blue eyes and the tribal tattoos up her legs.
"I'll figure something out."
"What could you possibly figure out? Anybody besides you figures out what I am, I'll be in chains before the day's out. That wouldn't suit you, would it? I don't expect Fire Nation prisons do conjugal visits."
"You won't ever be in prison," Iroh promised her, and goodness but he even seemed to believe it as he said so.
"You can't promise that," Sana insisted. "It'd have to be us meetin' up somewhere neutral, but you don't get time off like that, do you? And - and what if your Fire Lord sends you somewhere to do war on someone I know? I told you, my ma's Earth Kingdom -"
"Unless your mother's an Earth Kingdom soldier, she's safe from anyone in my command," he said, dismissively. "We don't kill civilians. Especially not elderly civilian mothers. Unless your mother has a command position you haven't told me about -"
"This ain't a joke," Sana insisted, stonefaced as he smiled.
"I'm not laughing." When Sana sat silent, looking at him expectantly, he reached out and took her hand. "This isn't something we have to solve right now. We've got a week here, a week at sea - give it that time before deciding it can't be done."
The way his voice was gentle usually made her feel half-melted, but now it just felt dismissive.
"I feel like you ain't taking this seriously," she said.
"I'm taking it as seriously as you are," Iroh insisted, which made Sana repress a scoff. "Sana, I have more control over where I go and who I make war on than a common footsoldier. I'm a major, not a private."
"That don't mean anything to me, I don't know what ranks are."
"It means I've got more influence than a common soldier. A lot more than I think you realize."
"Right, because you're all noble and rich and whatnot," Sana said, rolling her eyes. He was noble and rich and used to silk sheets and luxury passenger vessels and wouldn't take her up on her offer of come back to my swamp, we got gullsquitos as big as your face and a cypress tree full of scrolls we can barely keep from falling apart in the humidity. "You know I don't care about that, right? It don't matter to me that you got money. I like you even without it."
"I do know." There was a tenderness in his voice, a softness in the way he caught her eye with his that made her believe he did, and that it mattered to him, too. "You know how nice that is, knowing someone likes me, not my birthright? But I bet I can convince you money's good to have, once we get somewhere I can spend it on you."
That sounded appealing on the surface. But Sana thought about being in anyone's debt, and didn't like the way that made her feel, tied and weighed down by a balance she could never match.
"Sana." Her name sounded so warm on his voice. "Everything's going to be fine. You'll never lose your freedom."
"Darn right I won't," she agreed, trying to make a joke of it, not feeling like laughing just then. She probably wouldn't feel like laughing if she kept sitting around, mulling on her nightmare. She stood up. "I got something to show you," she said, tossing her hair, willing herself back into a decent mood. "If you think you couldn't catch up with me in the water before, wait until you see what I can do now."
He laughed as he followed her, scrambling up the promontory to dive into the bowl of the grotto, working so hard to follow after her as she showed off the new way she'd found to make the sea more like home.
The logistics of it were easy, Iroh decided as he watched Sana show off her new kick, soaring through the water faster than a macawphin, like she herself had a fishtail. He wouldn't take her back to the Fire Nation at all.
He'd set her up in the colonies before returning to the capitol to inform his father of the alliance he'd obtained, and argue Azulon into allowing her to be an ally instead of a prisoner. He'd send for her once he was returned to Leijiang, and she'd never have to navigate the court politics that being a concubine required. She'd never have to cross paths with his future wife, and vice versa, for either to get jealous of, and the rest of the campaign to take the Earth Kingdom would be sweeter and easier with her companionship right up to the end.
Then, when his ownership of the territory was undisputed, he'd make her a present of this whole island. He'd set her up the mistress of her own beautiful home here by the grotto and the sea, with imported tea and silk and someone else to catch all her fish and pick all her mangoes for her. She'd get used to luxury faster than she thought.
It was ideal, and if he'd harbored any uncertainty before, she'd taken it all away by proposing a future first.
The question of when to tell her his true birthright hung in the air, but it wasn't important that she know. It was probably better the longer she didn't know, given she'd become a high value target if it ever became known she was the companion of the executive officer of a campaign as big as the Leijiang, let alone if she ever let slip his true identity. It could be a pleasant surprise to reveal once conditions were ideal to return with her to visit the Fire Nation. The look on her face when she realized she'd found her way into a royal house when her roots were impossibly humble would be a sight to see.
And in time he'd make his dream of a vacation home in this place a reality, complete his plan to give her this place back as a gift, and make her a queen in the smallest sense of the title, giving the only ally of the Fire Nation who would ever be so tied to water her rightful place here where it was sacred.
If that took longer than it took for him to return to take on Fire Lordship while Azulon ruled as the lord of the world, then he could put her up on Ember Island to keep her by the sea, and make up for dragging her through however many campaigns it took to take the Earth Kingdom. Still, she had wanted to visit an air temple - he could bankroll a more pleasant trip to the Western temple than she could make on her own, if she truly wanted to see them instead of remaining by his side while he took the Earth Kingdom in hand. There were so many pleasant surprises he could line up to give her, when she had thought all she had to look forward to next was to quit her job and stagger up an exhausting cold mountain peak to look at some burned frescoes.
Perhaps she could even be convinced to return to the Northern tribe to gather some more intelligence. Something told him it would take a long time of letting her enjoy the favors of the Fire Nation before she was prepared to make that journey, back to a place where she'd been unpopular and embarrassed herself, but he had so many gifts lined up to give her.
Arguing Azulon into allowing her to remain free, and not pressed for the location of her tribe, would take doing. It was pleasant to think of all the ways he had lined up to earn his companion's favor, but it wasn't as productive as laying out his arguments to Azulon. Why torturing her for the location of her tribe would be a waste of the resource she was as a companion to him, when her tribe, based on his intelligence, posed a threat to no one. Why imprisoning her for life would, again, be a waste. Why he could be assured that she posed no danger to him when every waterbender from the north or south would sooner kill him than kiss him. How to argue his evidence that she loved him without being crass to his father.
It would be the most difficult argument he would ever present, but the benefits were too great not to make the argument at all. He could wait, even, until she had remained at his side for at least the Leijiang to tell his father the truth. He could gather more intel on Earth Kingdom strongholds that posed a far more present danger than her hidden, impoverished tribe. He would have to secure her identity, ensure she was prepared to conceal her bending long enough for rumor not to reach the Fire Lord before he did, and that would mean some measure of concealing her telltale looks from his men. The tattoos along the outside line of her legs were recognizable as tribal, to soldiers who knew Water Tribe insignia, but the weather was cool by the river, and she'd doubtless prefer robes to the sarong she wore on the island. Her bright blue eyes were rare in the Earth Kingdom. She had worn her snow goggles as sun protection on the Swordfish, doubtless for those same reasons, and they could make a point of it to mention her sight was particularly sensitive -
"There's a bed of oysters out past the drop off." Sana interrupted his train of thought. She'd swum up so quickly that he hadn't even noticed the pressure wave of her arrival, flowing around him now. "Are you hungry? We oughta bring the sandeq out to check and harvest 'em."
"Sounds delicious," Iroh agreed. He'd done enough thinking on an empty stomach.
Sana spun up an ice board and a wave for Iroh to surf in on, but she still reached the shore before him. Her new technique was truly incredible. It was best to ensure she never went North or back to her hidden tribe, to teach them such fast swimming or deep diving at all.
They sailed out to the drop-off with the sandeq slowly, on the light breeze, and checked it masthead to rudder in anticipation of the week at sea. Iroh hadn't felt seasickness in all the time they'd spent on the island, but the notion of that week made him feel nauseated. He focused on the dives ahead of them instead to keep from getting sick on this calm sea. Sana rode the anchor down to the dropoff and secured the sandeq on the reef. The current pushed it out over deep water, and Iroh tried to follow Sana down to the oyster bed.
He made it only in sight of the oysters before his discomfort with the convulsing of his lungs for air made him turn around. He had to push against the pull of the depth to swim back to his point of buoyancy, and by the time his body was bobbing naturally to the surface, he was swimming in a panic the way Sana had told him time and again not to do. He broke the surface and collapsed against the outside hull of the sandeq for flotation.
Sana still took a minute to bob to the surface beside him. "What happened?" she asked, her restorative breathing as deep and untroubled as ever, as she opened the bag that had contained her ditch kit and began tossing oysters out of it into the bowl of ice on the deck.
"Oh, only a little near-drowning," Iroh gasped, still unsettled by the intensity of his need to breathe on the way back. "I'm still not convinced you don't breathe water."
"Oh, if only I could, you'd never see me again," Sana joked. She hung the gathering bag from the hull. "You didn't black out, did you? Seize up at all?"
"Does that just happen?" Iroh looked at her with mild alarm.
"Well it didn't, did it? Otherwise we'd be having a different conversation." Sana reached for an oyster and the knife to crack it open. "Maybe you're just hungry."
Iroh raised the shell of oyster to her and slurped it down. "These are eaten for aphrodesiac purposes, you know."
"Like we need help with that." Sana sneaked a little kiss before cracking her own oyster. "Try it with calamansi."
The oysters, cold from the ice bowl, tasted like the ocean. The saltwater fullness, cut with a little bright juice, went down too fast, and too soon the bowl was empty.
"I bet I can make it to the oysters if I warm up a few more times," Iroh said, rejuvenated by the food as he took the last one. He cracked the oyster with his elbow over the sandeq hull and saw the bulging of the membrane of the oyster before he tipped it back. Carefully he reached in with the knifetip and extracted a massive pearl.
"That wouldn't have gone down easy," he said, holding up the shining black pearl in the sunlight. It glinted with indigo hues, nearly perfectly round and only barely pockmarked. In the Fire Nation, the pearl would have been worth food for a peasant family for a month, even with the unfashionable color tones amid the black.
"I ain't never seen one of them close enough to touch," Sana said, swimming closer. "And a black one? They always come in that color here in the warm water?"
Iroh looked past the pearl to the blue-black tone of Sana's hair, the cool brown of her dark skin. The black pearl with its unfashionable tone was made to sit at the hollow between her collarbones. All at once he knew the jewelry he'd commission for her, the gifts he'd shower her in that would suit no other woman of the Fire Nation. Silverwork that would be washed out and unfavorable on his future Fire Lady would sit perfectly on Sana's skin, and no woman would covet her gifts, while yet being unable to argue that they were not beautiful and richly appointed and right for the concubine of the Fire Lord to wear. She would always be unique, with a raiment to match. He held the pearl out to her. "Have a look for yourself. I think you should wear it."
Her smile sparkled as she laughed. "Well I do reckon it'd be prettier on me than you. What do you think, I could string up a necklace? Maybe get something like yours?"
She gently tapped the seal of his identity, hanging as always from the chain around his neck.
"What is that, anyway? You never take it off."
Every general and admiral in the Fire Nation knew the design of this seal, that he could stamp any wax or paper with in an emergency to deliver orders with his full royal authority. Emergencies like being dropped off on the Earth Kingdom coast, and needing to write a letter to the commanding officer of the Citrine to reroute whatever patrol it had been assigned to get it to take him back to the Fire Nation.
"My mother gave it to me," he lied.
"Aww." Sana softened, and didn't bother to ask any more questions. "Well maybe I can get this mounted up like that someday. On a real chain and everything. I ain't never had a piece of jewelry that wasn't made of wood or leather."
"I'll get you plenty more like it," Iroh promised. "When we're back on the mainland. Consider it the first of many."
He expected her to warm to the idea, but her smile faded just a little. "I don't need all that," she said again. "This is special because we found it here, together. What would I do with a bunch of pearls I couldn't hide under my shirt, in towns like Changbao? Something like this would feed a family for a month, more of 'em hanging off me would be like asking to get robbed." She held up the pearl, glinting in the sun. "'Course, if I went back with a few, I could sell them for a pretty tidy living, maybe buy my own boat and start my own shipping company. It'd be better than working for someone else." She glanced at him almost shyly. "You ever think about doing something like that, instead of being a soldier?"
"Never have." It was an easy subject to change. "If it's investment money you want, I'll do my best to get a few more pearls before the week is out." It wasn't a bad idea for quick cash for himself as well. He certainly didn't have his hands on any to get himself to the colonies with. "Keep an eye on me, won't you? In case of that blackout."
Sana looked solemn. "Iroh," she entreated. Her voice was tentative but sweet. "I still don't see how I can meet up with you again, if you're still in the Fire Nation army."
"You don't see yet," he corrected. "All I need to do is get back to the colonies -"
"You know I can't go to the colonies, not even with you," Sana sighed.
He lifted his hand to calm her. "Changbao, then. Come, let's get you some more investment capital if you're going to hold out for me there," he said. When she didn't look convinced, he added, "It will be fine. Now, are you going to rescue me if I black out?"
"Of course," Sana said. She was satisfied enough by the conversation, because she placed the pearl in the ice bowl and rolled on her back to breathe up.
Iroh did the same, slipping the clip she'd made for him of bamboo onto his nose and breathing in and out through his mouth, in four, out eight. When he'd breathed ten cycles, he rolled over and dove, remembering everything he'd learned about diving this time. His movements the first ten fathoms were deliberate but easy, his whole body from the tips of his toes to the top of his head loose, even his chest relaxed around the air in his lungs. After ten fathoms, he stopped moving at all, as the depth outpaced his buoyancy and he drifted down in the ocean as slow and steady as a ginkgo leaf pinwheeling down in autumn.
Past shelves of fan coral and through schools of yellow and white fish he fell, until the oyster bed came into view and Iroh pried a handful of shells up. His lungs convulsed once, but he reminded himself that meant next to nothing. He still had plenty of time to stay calm in. Rays of sunlight sparkled in the water around him. He held a scoop of rock in the coral shelf and dangled from it effortlessly, prying oysters off the wall and into his pocket with his free hand.
He was no more alien under water than he was standing on the earth. The air in his lungs, and the water in his blood, kept him alive to experience the privilege of holding fire in his heart.
Even only for a moment, he thought, with the calmest variety of awe. I can belong here, too.
He tugged on the coral wall to begin his ascent. His tug pulled him too close to the wall, and the chain of his seal caught on the barnacled lip of an oyster. A sharp line of pain seared through his chest as the barnacle cut his skin. The chain jerked sharply against his neck and popped. He bobbed up, the seal dropped down, and he dropped his handful of oysters flailing to grab it.
The seal dropped into the sea well beyond his grasp. Iroh pulled himself down the coral wall after it, but the seal plunged into the dark blue dropping down beneath him and vanished into nothing. His heart thundered with the panic and the exertion of it. His lungs screamed, and he was deeper than he had ever been. Cursing inside, he turned for the surface and pulled himself up the coral wall as fast as he could.
Water pressed ominously against his nostrils, mocking his need for air. It was too late. He'd gone too deep, too panicked, and now he would never make it back to the surface - he was going to die, and it wouldn't matter that he'd lost his identity and might never make it back to the palace without it - his funeral would become validated, Azulon would name his baby brother heir, and Ba Sing Se would go untaken.
A rush of water uplifted him like a river current. Iroh burst through the surface on a column of surf and landed on the deck of the sandeq. Sana was at his side, but his vision spotted with blackness and his body shook uncontrollably.
He tried to speak but his voice was garbled. Sana rolled him onto his back and tapped his cheek. "You're fine," she said, in a calm, assured tone, and blew gently onto his face. The cold burst of air felt clarifying. "You're all right. Ride it out."
Iroh ran through a recovery breath cycle of hard fast exhales and long, deep inhales. After a moment his tongue felt like his own again, and the black spots had turned to silver fish swimming out of the center of his vision. "I didn't black out," he announced, like that was important, and perhaps it was.
"No, but you sure did dance with the deep," Sana said. Her voice was calm, her words were light, but there wasn't any humor in her voice as she ran her hand, glowing blue with investigative healing energy, over his neck and across his chest. "No more diving for you for today."
"I lost my se - my necklace," he gasped out. A pit opened up in the hollow of his stomach. It might be ages now before he found his way back to the Fire Nation. He might have to go all the way back to Leijiang first, where his CO knew him by sight and would send the necessary letters to secure his passage. No one in the Colonies knew his face to believe he was who he said he was, if he strolled into port demanding passage against orders from the Fire Lord. "How deep is the water?"
"Well I'll find out," Sana said, removing her arms from around him and standing at the edge of the deck.
"No, wait -" Iroh reached for her, but his vision spotted again as he tried to get to his feet and he stumbled to his side on the deck of the boat. The splash of Sana's dive washed over him.
She didn't come back after one minute, or another. The seconds ticked on as Iroh reminded himself that she'd listed her longest breath as seven minutes, but that knowledge crashed hard against the fact that she hadn't bothered to do a breathe-up at all. She had her new waterbending kick, but did that make up for all the diving technique she'd so painstakingly taught him to follow?
He waited, tense, as more minutes ticked on. He counted three, then four. He looked down into the water, but though the sea was clear more than eight fathoms down, he saw nothing.
Even the bed where the oysters hung had been dim, and there'd been no bottom that he could see. The seal was mostly black with a little gold for detail, hardly highly visible in limited light. How long would she look for the seal before giving up, if it had sunk into soft silt?
The fifth minute passed. Iroh slipped into the water. His stomach was tight with fear. He hadn't known her to be this impulsive before.
The shape of a person rose into view. A bubble crashed through the surface. Iroh took his deepest breath and swam down.
She was floating, her head hanging limp, her hair wafting, her hand still tight around the gold chain of his seal.
Iroh swam down, ears straining, lungs convulsing, and grabbed her shoulders. Her eyes were open when he crashed through the surface, grabbing the sandeq hull and throwing her face-up over his arm. She stared unblinking and skyward, not breathing.
It occurred to him that he was going to die here without her. It occurred to him that even if that weren't the case, this was still the worst moment he'd lived through since his mother's funeral.
What had she done to him, but a moment ago? He tapped her cheek and blew on her face. "Wake up. Sana, wake up." Her voice had been calm. His was shaking and desperate.
First his mother, now Sana. The people he would mourn most were leaving him before anyone else.
Her eyes stared unblinking skyward.
And then her whole body seized as she sucked in a massive breath, like she was making up for a year of not breathing. Her fingers dug into his arms as she became aware of everything that must have happened while she was out.
The exhalation that left her mouth trembled with a sob. Iroh hung onto the sandeq hull and let her cling to him for buoyancy, for once. Her recovery breaths were ragged and unpolished. His arm was falling asleep around the hull, but he would have kept it there another hour if he had to.
Slowly, she relaxed in his arms, until with her breathing regular again, she lifted her clenched fist and dropped the seal onto the deck.
"Why would you do that, just for - it's only a necklace," Iroh objected, as Sana loosened her vice grip from his shoulder and placed one steadying hand for herself on the sandeq hull.
"I thought -" she sounded bitter, disappointed with herself, embarrassed to have needed saving. "My kick ain't as good at depth as I hoped." She coughed a little, her breath trembling. "I burned through my air faster than I guessed. That was stupid," she said, her voice turning bitter. "I wanted to see if I could do it."
"You don't need to die for a thing," Iroh agreed.
"But your mother gave it to you," she said, and the lie suddenly burned in the back of his throat.
Iroh took a deep breath. "Still." She'd saved him a lot of trouble. She hadn't brought him anything with real sentimental value, but she had saved him a long impoverished trudged back to Leijiang, to people who knew him by sight, but if the spirits had put the bargain to him - if he'd been told a moment ago to weigh the balance of her life over the convenience of having the seal - it wasn't just practicality that would have made him welcome the trudge. "What would I do if you died?" he asked, stroking her jawline, and somehow, this made her look more embarrassed.
"You'd sure have a harder time finding water," she said, like she was feeling guilt. "And getting back to the Earth Kingdom."
"Well - that too." It stunned him, that she seemed more embarrassed to have needed saving than frightened to have come close to death. "Sana, if you died here, surviving would - I guess it would be my biggest problem, but it wouldn't be the worst problem I have with you dying."
She didn't say anything, just looked at him like she wanted to believe him, but didn't.
Finally she sighed, leaning her forehead against his. "No more diving for me today too," she sighed. She inhaled deeply, and looked up at the horizon. "There's a storm coming anyway."
Iroh inhaled the smell of the salt air, still trying to detect that note that meant storm. "Let me sail us in. I need the practice."
He held his hand down in the water to give her a step up onto the hull.
The rain broke over the reef as they made the sandeq fast to a coconut palm onshore. They took shelter under a kiza tree thick with orange blossoms, and Sana ran a ring of ice around the trunk to divert the rainfall. She snuggled close to Iroh as he exhaled to warm the space around them, the chill of the rain cutting through the humid heat. Rainfall rolled in across the bay, and forked lightning over the ocean in clouds black as smoke from a coal ship.
The thunder took half a minute to reach them. Sana tucked her arms around Iroh and laid her head on his shoulder. He thought of the glassiness in her eyes when she'd seemed dead and breathless and no amount of steam breathing warmed him up.
"Can we talk about it?" he asked. "I didn't expect so much - you haven't been impulsive like that before." He tried to turn it into a joke. "Who is going to keep me in check when I try my luck if you're trying yours as well?"
"I got overconfident." Sana tried to shrug it off again. "I didn't know how the kick would work at depth." She paused before adding, "it was stupid of me."
"I don't need any thing badly enough to want you to die for it," Iroh said. "Haven't I made it clear I'd mourn you?"
She turned her face up from his shoulder. "I know you would."
"Then why jump to such a risk? You - you have a dangerous art," he said, thinking of the way the too-long dive he'd taken had made his body shake and his tongue betray him. She had faced down that same terror, but deeper than he'd felt it today. "If you hadn't recovered me just before, I wouldn't have known what to do to help you."
Sana nodded. "I didn't do right by you not teaching you how to do a rescue dive sooner, but you did everything right," she said, spreading her hand across his chest. "You really are a fast learner."
"Aren't you afraid? I was terrified today."
"Well, I wouldn't want to die at sea," Sana said. "I'd hate to reincarnate with a fear of the ocean."
"Have you done that before? Gone unconscious?"
"Only when I was young, and training. Never alone. Never diving with someone I hadn't already taught to recover a blacked-out diver." She traced her finger across his chest.
Iroh stared into the dark clouds, the rain falling across the bay, and a fork of lightning blazed like a river across the sky. The thunder that smashed into them was louder than any drum.
"Did you know firebenders can produce lightning?" Iroh asked, the gears in his mind turning.
"Now how would I know that?"
"You wouldn't," Iroh agreed. He covered her hand with his. "The only technique I can think of in firebending that could be as dangerous as your deep diving would be trying to channel lightning the bender didn't produce. If I knew how to do that, we never would have had to abandon the Swordfish, but when trying a technique at all could be deadly - a technique like that would elevate my bending beyond the limits we have now, but testing it's too big a risk even for me to try. But you push your limits - how often?"
Sana shrugged.
"I don't think you want to hear it," she said, quiet, "But everybody's gotta die sometime. If I drown, I ain't lingering on a sickbed surrounded by folks I don't like."
Iroh recalled her father's lingering death. His skin felt chilled. This was a moment for the wise, but he was only educated - he had no idea what to say to such sentiment. He wondered if he ever would.
"I don't want to, if that's what you're wondering," Sana said, seeming to pick up on what he was asking, without asking. "I'm not trying to get myself killed any more than you are. There's still too much out there I want to see." She parted from him just enough to look him in the eye. "But there are things I'd die before I let happen. Going to a Fire Nation jail is one of them."
Iroh took her hands in his, looked her in the eye. "You will never - be - in a Fire Nation prison," he assured her, again. "I can assure you of it."
"You can't," Sana insisted.
Maybe it was time to tell her the truth of his birthright.
"But you could run away with me," she suggested.
She meant it, too. Iroh tried to laugh, but Sana wasn't laughing.
"No," he said, trying to say it gently. "I couldn't. And anyway, I don't need to," but she sighed and sat away as he said it. "Sana," he said, taking her hand. "I know you're afraid, but it's all going to work out. You just have to wait in Changbao until I get word to you that it's safe to come to my unit, and I'll -"
"And you'll what, keep me in your tent with all your army buddies at your army camp? Iroh, everyone there will be my enemy. How much do people get for turnin' waterbenders in to the Fire Lord?"
"There's no bounty out for waterbenders -"
"But if any one of them thinks there is -"
"Sana, I'm second in command at my unit. You'll have privacy from all the other soldiers. None of them have to know you're a waterbender at all."
"Who's gonna look at me and not be able to tell? I can't wear my sun shades all the time. And if you get in some fight and I fix you up, it's gonna look miraculous enough to make people ask questions, isn't it?" She gripped his hand. "We could find something else to do, something on the coast. I don't need rich things, I just want -" Her voice broke a little. "I just want this not to end."
"It has to." Iroh felt the shadow of their last argument creeping up on them. She did not understand. How could she? "I care about you, and I want to keep you, but I will not abandon my family."
She pressed her lips together, her face downturned. "What if you go die in the war, would your family prefer that?"
"It doesn't matter. This is something you don't understand. Look -" She opened her mouth to object, but Iroh barreled on, forceful. "You have a kind of luck, that you can choose to be loyal to yourself before anyone else, but my mother, my father, my ancestors fought and bled and died to give me everything I have, and I will not dishonor them with disloyalty, even when it means choosing hard work over leisure and pleasure. I am glad our paths crossed. I am glad you are in my life now, but I won't hear any more of turning my back on my family. If we have a future together, there is no running away in it, and if you can't understand that, we have no future at all."
"But I -"
"I won't talk about this anymore," Iroh warned her. "Don't suggest it again."
He did his best to sound calm, and kind, but firm. She didn't understand honor; that didn't mean he had to be cruel to her about it.
Sana kept her mouth shut. She looked downcast, but nodded, quietly stood up and dove into the sea in the rain.
Back in the sea gray with rain, Sana thought well here you are again, ain't it sunk in yet?
What a cruel trick it was, that someone could love her but not respect her. And that she could still love him back, could trust him to save her life, even when staying with him was impossible.
In the sea, it made no difference if she cried. It was only a little more saltwater. Sana floated when she was far enough out that she felt she had her privacy again. Rain pooled in the hollows of her closed eyes, diluting her tears.
She was going to have to say goodbye to him. Not here, not when they still had a few days left to provision, and another week stuck at sea, at least. She could let the companionship last as long as it took to get to the Earth Kingdom, but she'd have to leave him there on the shore, no different from what she'd promised in the beginning, when this was supposed to have been just a little fun.
She was going to have to say goodbye to this place, too. That choked her up all over again. No more blue so clear you could see every line of the coral. No more lessons from the sea creatures. No more water so warm it wasn't work to dwell in for hours. No more sweet smelling tree in a sacred place where she'd been allowed to feel more moonlight coursing through her than she'd ever felt anywhere outside the Spring.
It would be back to sailing for someone else and pocketing change and barely waterbending at all, to hiding the whole of herself from anyone who might stand to pocket some Fire Nation money, and never knowing how much she could trust any new person she met. Back to no one kissing her and holding her at night and saying they believed in her, which had been just fine only a month ago but now seemed intolerably lonely.
It wasn't intolerable. A Fire Nation prison would be intolerable. Biting her tongue for a man who thought her family valueless, without honor, thought her shiftless and uncivilized, was intolerable.
What a cruel joke, she thought again, and tried to pull the memory of floating in this warm clean sea free to explore all her power into her mind forever, so that she could remember it and dwell in it whenever she wanted.
Maybe it was time to go back to the Swamp.
Maybe it was time, after all, to see Ma again. If she couldn't have the ocean and be free in it, the way she wasn't free in the coastal towns, maybe it was time to go back to the Spring and remember the sea there in the cold, sweet water with all her friends again. Maybe once she cried on Ma's shoulder and told Tei the story front to back it would become something to laugh about, her foray into a world that she understood each day was a little more dangerous for her, her fling with a rich man in a place where money had no value, who could buy her everything but safety.
Her heart said yes to it, for the first time. Yes, it was time to go home. Time to see Ma again. Time to see if the river had released her from its westward current. Time to sit at the roots of the Tree and see if she'd moved around enough to be so still that Enlightenment could find her.
The rain poured down harder, and lightning forked across the sky. She wondered if it was more dangerous to be lying in the ocean with the storm on than it would be to sit beneath a tree, so like the mast of a ship. She thought that if Firebenders could conjure lightning, it was the gravest foolishness for her to have ever believed she was safe with Iroh. Water had every defense against fire, but not if it came in that form.
Maybe one day she'd be smart. Maybe one day she'd be wise, and then this would all would be a memory she could save the pleasant bits from, and excise the pain like a stonecarver turning a block into a sculpture. If that day ever came, she was determined to live to see it. She rolled over in the water and swam back to the grotto, out of the range of lightning from the sky, back to a man who could still surprise her with it.
Iroh left the tree soon after Sana took off for the ocean, making the same connection of the tree to the mast of a ship. They would be terribly exposed if a storm like this rolled over them in the open sea while they sailed east on the sandeq. He thought about the moment lightning had struck the mast of the Swordfish, about how defenseless even a firebender was from lightning, the way the bolts he'd watched from the shore forked like -
No, come to think of it, the bolts didn't fork like metal being twisted and wrought. They flowed. Like rivers.
Sana wasn't in the grotto when he dove in, but for the moment, that suited him fine. He climbed onshore and began performing the motions of waterbending he'd observed Sana do every night, and the air rippled with heat, and the energy moved through his body in a path that he could follow.
Energy flowed through the movements without being diluted or absorbed, like a river flowed through rock along the paths that opened to it. What did lightning seek? The tallest object. The purest metal. The path of least resistance.
Iroh firmly hoped he'd never have to test his theory, as he retreated from everything he knew about the positive power of bending fire, into everything he'd learned about the negative energy of bending water.
He was still absorbed when Sana surfaced in the grotto, quiet as a turtleseal. "You tryin' to steal my secrets?" she joked, whirling up out of the water on a small waterspout.
Iroh dropped out of the waterbending stance. "If I hurt your feelings, I'm sorry," he began, but she shook her head.
"I don't want to argue," she said. "It doesn't matter. I know what you meant."
"I meant that I care about you," Iroh insisted, stepping off the promontory that towered over the bowl of the grotto to go take her hand. "I meant that you're important to me, but even so, there are others who will always be important too."
"And they were important first," Sana finished, for him. "It's fine. I get it."
She met his eyes, and seemed to mean what she said. Thunder shook the island, and the hole in the roof of the grotto let lightning turn everything black and white for one sharp moment.
"Ain't no need to make a fuss about it," Sana said. She yawned. "I'm awful tired. Aren't you?"
"Almost drowning does that to me," Iroh agreed. He felt relieved as they settled in on the tarp for a nap. Still, though they lay curled together under a lip of rock that the rain dripped off, away from their sandy bed, lighning flashing everything searing bright and back to dark, sleep wouldn't find him. His eyes didn't drift closed but that he saw Sana, breathless and unblinking, alive in his arms now but still in that moment so much like a corpse that he was sure he would slip into a nightmare.
"Are you asleep?" he murmured, feeling her stir.
"Nah," she said. She patted his arm. "Too much energy in the air, I reckon."
"Can I tell you a secret?"
If he had taken a risk in all this time on the island, it was not as big as this one could be. But there was no one to hear but her. No one who mattered would ever trust her enough to believe, if she repeated the secret, that it was true.
"Why? Sure, but - why?"
"You mentioned the dragons. That you heard they'd all been hunted." Perhaps she wouldn't try to go any deeper than she had today if she knew there was one more wonderful thing out there that she could, by a great stretch of the imagination, still see, that the war hadn't denied her. "Well, they haven't. Because I was supposed to kill the last one. I didn't."
"Come on." She laughed at first. Then, incredulous. "Are you kidding me?"
"I lied about it. And it wasn't the last dragon that I found. There are two."
"You're joking."
"After my mother died, I needed to get away from my home for a while. I decided to do something that would bring her memory glory. Firebenders who kill a dragon are respected and honored. They are given the title Dragon. I mean to become one, a dragon myself."
"Well that don't make no sense," Sana said, like a sulky child, "deprivin' the world of a real live firebreathing dragon and then callin' yourself one -"
"Well I am a real live firebreathing Dragon and I've deprived you of nothing," Iroh teased, breathing heat onto the back of her neck. Sana sighed and relaxed again in his arms. "I'll tell you the whole story. You remember my companion from the ship, the seasick one? I asked him along as my backup. Dragons are hunted not by armies, but by single warriors, and I brought him in case I might need to be carted back home a burnt husk. We camped on that island three days before we saw any trace of a dragon, and I can tell you, as far as island camping companions go, he hasn't got a single thing in his favor over you."
Sana giggled. "I'm sure that'll break his heart."
"I did mean to kill it, those first three days. I truly did. Every track we found was massive, the disturbed jungle, the burnt swathes of land, all of it told me how big, how terrible, how powerful the Last Dragon was, and I was so sure that I would kill it and mount its skull on my wall and wear its fangs and my title with pride. I could taste the honor of it in my mouth. Even when I first saw the dragon for myself, with its wings as wide as a cloud and its scales gleaming like armor, head like a siege engine - I still believed I could kill it."
"I don't understand how any of y'all killed one in the first place, when they're so big and powerful," Sana murmured. "Are they really as magnificent as the scrolls say?"
"More. Far more." Iroh tightened his arm around her waist. "The words and the paintings do not come close."
She exhaled a breath of wonder. "Then what stopped you killin' it?"
"The magnificence did."
Iroh closed his eyes, and brought himself back to that moment years ago, when he and Jeong-Jeong were barely done being youths and becoming men and he dragged his fellow academy graduate out on the most ambitious graduation trip he could think to take. The year before, the valedictorian of the same academy had gone to the island and been brought back by his second in an oiled silk bag, the body so burnt that cremation was a formality. Jeong-Jeong had been unable to refuse Iroh's request, but the prospect of having to bring the body of the Crown Prince back to Azulon had him higher strung and in worse temper than usual. Now, he felt a tinge of sympathy and regret at putting his friend through such stress. Back then, Iroh had found it hilarious.
Three days of muddy, mosquito-bitten, dehydrated camping in the jungle, dodging Sun Warriors intent on stopping them from finding the dragon's lair, had been so uncomfortable and exhausting that Iroh wondered if the field of battle could come close, and his eagerness for the triumph and the title of the hunt made him embrace every moment of the suffering. Becoming a Dragon felt earned more every day than he'd understood, back in the luxury of the Palace, back even in the sterile austerity of the Academy, where suffering was streamlined and regimented. The island of the dragons was chaos and danger and discomfort and enemies around every corner and he felt closer to understanding his father, his grandfather, with every step he took in their footsteps towards the kill. They had also, at one point, chosen the demands of the hunt, where it didn't matter to anyone but your second whose son you were, what title you already had. There was no respect on the island. Only power.
And he'd felt powerful every step of the way, with everything wanting to kill him, everything failing to do so.
"We tracked the dragon to a valley on the fourth day. You can't imagine how much pride I felt when I realized that the rumors were wrong, that there was not one dragon left, there were two, and I meant to kill both of them. They would have to invent a whole new title for me, when I returned with two heads to mount. The honor I would bear, before my career as a soldier had even begun - I had never wanted anything so much as I wanted that. I was so glad the Dragons before me had left me two of my very own."
He paused, to be sure she was still awake.
"And then?" she asked, on cue.
"And then, we had them in our reach, and they had us in theirs. And I thought - one day I will have sons, and I cannot give them a world there are no dragons in."
"All that!" Sana giggled. "Just to go 'actually, nah?'"
"Oh, you undercut it," Iroh said, squeezing her so that she laughed more. "Dragons are awesome. I was awed. I had never been awed before like this. I have never been so awed since. They were a gift that the elders had left to me, and I knew I could kill them, and that I would not. They must have read it on my soul, because they knew it too."
"How could you tell?"
"I'm still alive, aren't I?" Iroh chuckled. "But more than that. They showed me."
"Showed you what?"
How to tell her? A waterbender, who had no frame of reference for the way that fire felt to hold forever in one's heart, how the sound, the heat, the pressure of that tornado of rainbow fire opened up understanding in him that he thought, no other firebender must know, if they killed the dragons without being shown?
He couldn't even explain it to Jeong-Jeong after.
"They showed us the true mastery of firebending," he said. "They wreathed us in their flames like artists, like master craftsmen, like they had brought the sun down to the surface of the Earth to share secrets with us. And do you know what? Only I saw. The minute they opened their mouths, Jeong-Jeong collapsed to the ground in terror."
"Oh, poor guy," Sana moaned.
"He was sure we were both about to die. He missed out on the most incredible thing a firebender could ever see. I think he will never stop kicking himself," Iroh chuckled. "I may never stop teasing him."
"Oh, that's mean."
"He did it to himself. Nobody made him cower. I have tried to tell him what he missed - it was like meeting the source of all life and understanding half of the words it spoke. I think the Dragons before me were fools not to have been patient enough to learn from the masters. I stayed a few more days, to learn everything they had to share, and concoct a convincing enough lie that no one would come for them after me. The Fire Nation believes I killed the last dragon. Maybe someday they'll be allowed to know, I left two for my sons."
"What if you have daughters?"
"Then I'll take them to meet the Masters too," Iroh said. "And they'll be glad I saved dragons for them. Someday I'll take you to see them too. Since you came all this way, and were disappointed."
She was quiet for a moment, before she rolled over in his arms.
"That's two promises you've made me," she murmured, pausing as lightning seared the grotto white. "To make me tea, and take me to see the dragons."
"And I'm good for my promises," Iroh said. "I haven't lied to you yet."
At least, he hadn't about anything important. Sana kissed him, sealing her belief. Thunder crashed farther away, echoing over the sea as the storm rolled over and away.
A/N: Has it been almost two years? Is this the longest chapter I've ever dropped? Sure. Things do keep happening all of the time. I want to thank anyone who's been with me on this story journey so far, especially now as I begin angling towards the end. I started this story because I was bored and depressed during lockdown and needed to generate some dopamine by writing something really self indulgent, and even though I'm not living under stressful conditions anymore I still care about this story a lot and intend to see it done. That said, since the last chapter I have moved to the other side of the planet for work and started grad school, so I do have a lot less time for working on it. I also don't get to freedive nearly as much in my new location, which bums me out, but also keeps me wanting to dip back into this story.
A few notes about some events and places I included in this chapter. Iroh's experience after his botched oyster dive is called a samba. Sana uses the term "dance with the deep" because of the involuntary muscle contractions that accompany a diver running low on oxygen. Sambas are rare but they can be precursors to blackouts, and feature symptoms like slurred speech, an inability to open the eyes fully.
I went back and forth on featuring a shallow water blackout through Sana but ultimately the special interest won out because I always want to talk about shallow water blackout rescue. The most valuable part of all my freediving training was shallow water blackout rescue, and it's the main thing I tell people about when I recommend taking classes from a certified pro. Most freediving blackouts happen in the last 30 feet from the surface, and occur during severely low oxygenation. A person already holding their breath underwater who blacks out continues holding their breath for a while longer as the body tries to conserve the oxygen it has. Drowning occurs when the deoxygenated person spontaneously takes a final unconscious breath. A rescue diver has time to bring the unconscious person to the surface during this interval. Blowing air on the person's face simulates the movement of fresh air to signal to the unbreathing body that fresh air is available at all, which encourages the body to resume breathing.
The Spring Sana dreams of is a feature I added to the Foggy Swamp for the purposes of my own worldbuilding. Florida, where I grew up, has limestone geography with a lot of cool freshwater springs bubbling up throughout the swampland (which most of the state was until modern irrigation diverted most of the water) and I added one to the Foggy Swamp for Sana and her friends to have grown up practicing their deep dives in. The underwater river system of caves that the Spring wells up out of would be enticing for a waterbender, but massively dangerous to dive in. Cave diving in the real world is an expensive and difficult way to die horribly, and it has one of the highest body counts of any hobby. Still, in the Four Nations with its water magic and unique spiritual environment, who can say for sure there isn't anything in those caves worth risking one's life to discover? I may be thinking about that for other stories.