A/N: In this chapter, Iroh invents lightning redirection, and Sana learns why we don't date fascist men. This chapter's title is taken from It's Only, by ODESZA.
Chapter 13 – I Heard the News Today, That You're Not Mine To Kill
The spirit migration that had churned the waters to the north, which Iroh watched and Sana never saw, dwindled in the last days before their departure. The last handful of mysterious, luminous creatures passed in the night before they were to leave. That day, Iroh woke in the grotto to find Sana not with him.
Either she'd woken up before him - which he thought unlikely - or she had never gotten to sleep at all after he'd passed out, and hadn't come back to the grotto. The light inside was dim and listless, and when he surfaced in the ocean outside, the sky was heavy with dark clouds.
Sana sat on the beach, staring out at the dark sky, when he swam up. She looked like she'd been awake a while.
"Those aren't welcoming," Iroh said of the clouds, sitting down beside her. "Should we wait another day to leave?"
Sana shook her head no.
"The wind's shifted southwest, and the east is clear," she said. Iroh noticed that the sandeq was already in the water, the provisions loaded, the sail ready to deploy. "There's no good reason to stay. The storms are only gonna get worse as the season goes on. We leave now, or we might not get to."
"Have you slept at all?" Iroh asked. "I would have helped load up, if I'd known you were awake."
Sana shrugged. "Couldn't sleep. Figured I might as well get work done. No point in both of us being tired at the same time. We'll have to take shifts at sea anyway."
Her tone was flat, her shoulders slumped, and Iroh wondered what was bothering her so much. She'd sailed confidently through storms before.
"I'm going to miss this place," he said, thinking perhaps that was what bothered her. "It's long since time to get back to civilization, but it's going to be hard to forget this time."
Sana sighed, as if in agreement. She reached up to begin braiding her hair. "It will be," she said, a little plaintive. "Hang onto that while we're sailing, though. A week at sea on the sandeq might make a lot of pleasant things hard to remember."
"Well, at least we are well-provisioned," Iroh joked. When Sana didn't chuckle with him, he stroked her shoulder. "I have no shortage of pleasant memories to take away from this place, don't you?" he prompted.
She sighed again, in agreement once more, longer and more final. "Yeah," she said, "yeah I ain't gonna forget this fast. It was nice. It was so nice." The wistfulness lingered in her voice, in her look, as she swept her gaze over the bay under black clouds. But she stood up, stretched, and held out a hand to help him up. "Help me triple check, and then we'll go?"
Triple-checking took half an hour, long enough that the black clouds had blown half-off the bay by the time they set out. The sea sparkled in a path before them. Sana napped as noon hit, curled around the mast with her floatvest a pillow, the tarp a sunshade hung over the boom for both of them. Iroh hung a trawling line behind the boat, and reeled in a mahi an hour before sunset. They ate it simply, with dehydrated mango and salt, and Sana took the steering oar for the night sail.
There wasn't much more to do than this for days; trade a few hours of each other's company for meals before one of them would have to sleep and the other keep the boat pointed southeast, sailing a reach on a following sea. The monotony of sailing in one direction, always watching the sail for luff, adjusting port, then adjusting starboard when that made the luff worse, then correcting a little port when the starboard adjustment became too much, made the sailing both tedious and impossible to look away from. With no islands to judge their speed by, the wind coming across the port hull instead of in his face, Iroh felt sure sometimes that they weren't moving at all, though the full sail and the wake off the hulls and the occasional visit of foxphins and macawphins told him otherwise.
At night it was better. At night the stars that came out told Sana directions that she explained to him during their shared moments of waking, and the moon rose making a show of the clouds, letting the light of the river of stars in the sky come forth when it set. High noon put Sana to sleep like a candle being blown out, but it made Iroh feel like a bonfire about to explode, with nothing to do to alleviate his need for activity but practice his forms off the back of the sandeq with the rudder oar tied in place.
Three days in Sana was running out of things to teach him about navigating by star, fish with salt and dry fruit had become a chore to eat, and the anecdotes they had left to share ran low. Sana told him about the tattoos up her legs that she'd earned advancing through her education as a waterbender and a tribeswoman. He told her about trouble he and his friends had gotten into and out of during his academy education. They listed the things they would miss about the island - the coral reef alive with unearthly beauty, the kiza trees heavy with orange blossoms, the fresh fruit, the smell of the plumeria tree in the grotto. Always their conversations drifted back to longing for shore; to eat rice; to sleep in beds again; to see anything but sky and ocean on the horizon.
Four days in, Sana smelled the storm.
She breathed in the notes of ozone as she felt the pressure in her ears drop, as if she were shooting back to the surface from two fathoms or so. It was sunset, and there wasn't a cloud on the horizon yet, but she felt the shiver up her spine as she inhaled a deep breath.
"I've smelled this before," Iroh said, pulling her attention away from the horizon. He was inhaling deeply, looking as though he'd pieced something together. "The colonial soldier tried to explain to me what storms smelled like before, but there isn't anything else like it, is there?"
Sana nodded. "It's a big one," she said. The last one had been a big one, and she'd gone into that one well rested and not heartsick. Now, she was already tired from days at sea, anticipating sadly the farewell that would happen once shore came in sight.
"Are you scared?" Iroh asked, as if incredulous that she should be scared of another typhoon when she'd already sailed through one.
"Well I ain't exactly going into this one well-rested," she pointed out. "What can I say? It's gonna be a long night." If we make it through it, she thought, but did not add.
"It'll be fine," Iroh said. He could have sounded dismissive, but somehow, he just sounded so assured that Sana almost believed him for a second.
"Well I wish I had your confidence," she said. Maybe if she did they would be sure to make it through.
When she looked back at him, he had concern in his expression, but a certain thoughtfulness too, as if he were evaluating her for something.
"What?" she asked. "Why're you lookin' at me like that?"
"I hate to see you so worried," Iroh said. He took her hand and squeezed it, and she let him. "I have every reason to believe we'll weather this storm just fine. First of all, one of us is a master sailor and a master waterbender, and the other one of us has been a very good student all month." He smiled at her, so charming as ever, and goodness didn't the flattery always land, even now? Sana shook her head, but she was already smiling back. "Second of all - I'm going to tell you something I've only ever told my mother," he said, and he waited until she looked back into his eyes again, to impress upon her the seriousness of this second secret. "I am destined to survive this. Certainly, if I am, you are destined too, since you are the one keeping me alive."
Sana stared at him for a moment, trying to figure out how to pick apart his statement. "Destined," she repeated, after a moment of silence.
He just smiled at her disbelief. "I thought you might find that hard to swallow," he said, his confidence unruffled. "When I was a boy," he said, looking her dead in the eye, believing every ludicrous word that came out of his mouth, "I had a vision that I would conquer Ba Sing Se."
Sana struggled to keep her face straight. "You have visions," she repeated.
"You can understand why I don't tell just anyone," Iroh chuckled, as a distant wave of thunder rolled over them.
Visions, as if he were a sage who sat at the foot of the great tree long enough that the spirits deigned to give him wisdom, not a soldier barely older than she was.
Sana pointed at the horizon. Black clouds had drifted up over the edge. The sun had disappeared behind them. The pink sunset had left the sky a green and sickly color. "I ain't so sure them there rainclouds are in line with your vision."
"You know, I thought the same when the Swordfish wrecked and I was nearly drowned," Iroh pointed out, with good humor. "But there you were, to save my life. The only waterbender roaming the Earth Kingdom at all, in a place and at a time when only a waterbender could have kept me and my destiny alive, and you found me." He squeezed her hand, as if it were all some destined romance.
Boy, Sana thought. I sure know how to pick 'em.
"I suppose I'd have trouble believing me if I weren't having the visions for myself," Iroh said. "But I have seen enough of your skill not to be afraid of sailing through another storm with you. Why should you doubt your power now?"
If only someone not set on doing war were saying these things to her. "Let's just get through tonight," Sana said, with resolve. "It will be exhausting, but if we can get through it, well -" she trailed off, weakly. "Then I reckon it'll be done."
"Good enough for me." Iroh squeezed her hand in parting and slid closer to the mast. "How should we prepare? Lifelines? Should I man a line, to free up your hands?"
"Put on your vest," Sana said. "And tie the lifeline to it with a quick release, at your waist like this -"
She reefed the mainsail against the building wind, sailing southeast, off course, hoping the storm would pass north. But the horizon blackened no matter the angle, and soon the wind grew so powerful that she withdrew the sails entirely, before the wind could tear them to shreds.
She took up the rudder oar and tied it against the deck, planted her feet and doubled the lifelines around her waist, one to each side of the deck, so that she wouldn't fly off and lose her root when the deck tossed. "Give me a light between the bolts," she said, as lightning ripped the black clouds open. Thunder fell on them immediately. The first stormwave washed over the deck, and she deflected it behind them.
A ball of fire over Iroh's palm lit the deck for her lightning-blinded eyes. Sana took a deep breath and prepared for a new longest night of her life.
It was less a hell the second time, now that Iroh had had time to get his sea legs and had had the good sense to eat lightly and drink more water than usual, but to be on the sandeq in a typhoon was still hell.
The moon had never risen. The only light came from his palm, and from the lightning that arrived with the thunder, giving no warning. It crashed and shattered the sky, and Iroh thought longingly of quiet as the hours wore on.
Sana wove them through the troughs between waves, panting like a runner on a marathon, which Iroh supposed she was. Each wave would have overturned their vessel if Sana were not there to manipulate the boat's passing, and the path she found between crests as tall as buildings was rhythmic and demanding. Her shoulders were surely burning as she windmilled her arms through the hours, and her face gleamed with sweat and spray in the lightning flashes and the firelight.
It was the worst time to be at sea, trapped in the fury of its greatest power, with the merest craft to keep them from the waves. A patrol boat even the size of the Citrine would have been nearly swamped in this storm.
It was power, again, all around him, power utterly distinct and divided from the realms of might and terror that fire ruled. And yet, Iroh felt as he had back with the dragons, witnessing the supremacy of their element at work.
No other firebender would likely ever be in this position, witness in such vulnerability to this maritime rage, and live to glean any lessons from it, but Iroh hung onto the mast as he had the first time Sana sailed him half-drowned through a storm, this time with his eyes open. Walls of water reflected his fire. A master waterbender found the path through them where resistance ebbed and flowed, constant and responsive and reactive. Iroh might glean something incredible from this, or he might die, and if not for the certainty of his vision, either would seem as likely.
Sana gasped as the storm threw up a wave directly in her path, and with a howl of effort she broke the wave, scattering it to either side. She dropped to one knee to the deck. Iroh reached out to help her back to her feet, and her breath was heavier, as she braced on his shoulder in time to veer them starboard into another trough. The air smelled the way it had on the Swordfish, an astringent tang that had filled the senses when Iroh stood all those weeks ago with the stewardess telling him to go back inside, the moment before lightning had struck the mast.
The lightning bolt hit the crest of a wave so near them that Sana screamed, her exhausted breathing ragged with the fear of one who had no destiny to believe in. The smell of lightning - the crisp, wet smell of storm, that Loto had tried to explain to him once, and been unable to find the words for - lingered.
The lightning, like the storm, like Sana as she found paths of least resistance and took the energy of their movement through it, had flowed to the crest of a wave taller than them. At some point, it would reach down again for the tallest thing it could find, and that tallest thing would surely be the mast of the sandeq.
Iroh turned his face to the sky. He had practiced for this. Lightning did not give a reluctant man choices, and he was destined to succeed.
The astringent smell faded. The sky was dark. And then, bright and blinding, lightning reached down from the sky to the mast.
Iroh reached up to the lightning and caught it.
The smell of burnt hair hit Sana like a fist. She screamed as the lightning flowed off of Iroh and into the crest of a wave, leaving her blind in the dark.
She choked on a sob. The lightning would flash and reveal his charred corpse on her deck. Would it be worse if it flashed and the deck was empty, would it be worse if the waves had already washed the remains away?
Firelight flared up and she nearly fell to the deck as she saw him, hair standing on end, alive, wide-eyed as if shocked as she was that he still was so.
Sana nearly fell to the deck in gratitude. The waves tossed the sandeq back and forth and collapsing wasn't an option. She reached out to pull him in, and he half-hugged her, trembling, free hand clinging to the mast.
"I sure am glad that worked," he said into her ear. Sana, weeping, kissed him and pushed him back to the stability of the mast as another wave rolled the deck and she struggled to flatten it out beneath them.
Morning found Sana her flat on the deck in the shade of the sail. She could smell the soft humidity of a sunny morning, and a storm behind them. Sana curled her fingers in the air to trickle some humidity into her mouth.
She glanced to the stern, and Iroh had the steering oar in hand, eyes on the horizon, lifting his hand to check the angle of the rising sun against the mast. He had everything in hand. Sana closed her eyes, relieved to be able to drift back into her exhausted slumber.
But Iroh scrambled to his feet, jolting her awake. He shouted with elation, and before Sana could sit up, he'd shot a jet of fire into the air three times higher than the mast.
"What are you doing?" she screamed, heart in her throat,
"It's one of our ships!" he shouted, beaming ear to ear, firing off another signal blast. Sana raised a wave to shut down his signal, but a foghorn blast from the ship rattled her ears. Iroh extinguished the jet himself. "They've seen us."
Sana whirled around, heart pounding, to see the towering black metal ship, a Fire Nation Navy ship, like a stain cresting the horizon, black smoke dissipating into the bright sky.
It looked like a floating prison.
If she got on it, it would be.
"It's the Citrine, I think," said Iroh. The ship flew a flag that looked like a yellow crystal from this distance, but no matter the ship's name, that it was one of his was unquestioned. He dropped to the deck to finger comb his hair, grown wild with the weeks of salt water. "I expected to have time to make myself presentable. If the men see me without my topknot -"
"Why would you signal them?" Sana choked out.
She looked at him like a trapped animal. He looked at her calmly, tucking his hair into order. "What, you wanted to spend another few days going through nights like the last one?"
"I'm not getting on that ship."
Iroh imagined another few days on the sandeq without him, in the potential of storms like the last, and laughed.
"Do you hear me?" Sana pressed. "I'm not getting on that ship."
"Sana," he said, patient as he would be with a child in need of reassurance, "that ship has food and beds and baths and rides a lot better in typhoons than this one does. It'll take you to Changbao after it takes me home."
"No," she said, voice sticking in her throat. "No. Get off my boat."
"Sana, don't be ridiculous."
"No." She held firm, though her voice trembled. "Get off my boat if you want to get on that one, but I am not getting on that ship."
"Sana -"
"You can't protect me there! No one can!" Her eyes were wide with terror, her hands tight on the line, ready to drop the sail.
The buzz of a powerboat motor caught both their attentions. A smallboat had been deployed from the back of the Citrine. It would be alongside them in seconds.
"Jump off," Sana said. "Take a floatvest, jump off, signal to them in the water. Let me go," she pleaded. "Please. You can't protect me from them."
It had reached the point of being comical. Here at the end of needing to conceal his identity, and being able to at all, Iroh chuckled. "Sana, I am the only man who can protect you from them."
"I will sweep you off this boat if you won't go by yourself," Sana warned. "I love you, but I ain't goin' to prison for you."
Her declaration warmed his heart. Her apprehension deserved a rest.
"Sana," Iroh chuckled, standing up to hail the smallboat. There was no point withholding any longer. "I am the crown prince of the Fire Nation. Fire Lord Azulon is my father. No man could protect you in the Fire Nation but me."
It took Sana a moment to realize he expected this to delight her.
It took her a moment, staring blankly, to figure out he expected anything from her but fury. He must have misinterpreted her stare as awe, because he turned his entire back to her to look at the power boat. He showed her his back, still smiling, confident, secure that he had nothing to fear and nothing to be ashamed of.
The next to pick up the reins of the war that had already all but destroyed the south, and he'd turned his back to her on the open sea, trusting her not to kill him.
It was like there were two different sets of people on the boat - Iroh and Sana, who were just people, compared to the next Fire Lord and a Water Tribeswoman whose future did not exist if he did.
His back to her. She had been pushed out to sea by the river in the Swamp, the current tugging at her ankles all her life while her friends felt nothing, in the Swamp where visions came to everyone but her, who only felt the current pushing her out to sea. Carrying her away from home.
Here.
To where the next Fire Lord had given her the only opening he might ever give anybody.
Her hands were halfway positioned. The humidity in the air would be a blade in his back faster than he even realized he was in danger.
She hadn't left home to kill anyone.
But the river had pushed her here.
Her fingers shook. Her pulse rushed in her ears louder than the sea. As if all her kin she'd never met from the South, rotting in his father's dry prison, were screaming at her through their shared blood to do it.
I didn't leave home to kill anybody.
"How could you?"
Her voice trickled out of her like a stream.
He turned like a victim surprised by a tidal wave as she exploded at him.
"All this time I - and you were - my family, my people, you don't even understand - your father -"
Iroh raised his hands to calm her. "I'm not saying it won't be difficult. My father is proud of his conquest of the south, but your people are no concern of-"
"How could you do this to me?" she yelled. "How could you think I'd be okay with this?"
"Okay?" Iroh interjected. "Okay with the favor of a prince?" He barely held back his bark of laughter. "You have no idea how much life in the Fire Nation will be -"
"I just don't know? I just don't know what, anything? I just don't know - I just don't know why you think I, I, I'm -" She tugged at her hair and screamed. "Am I even a person to you?"
"What are you talking about?"
"My whole family! Are they even - do we exist to you? You can't wage a war on people I love and expect me to love you!"
"You just said you did."
Sana broke down in tears.
"We can talk about this on the way," Iroh said, sounding like he was suppressing irritation, if anything. "Get on the boat, and if you're so set on it, we'll let you go -"
"No," Sana breathed.
"Don't be ridiculous. Land is still days away. Another storm could come"
"No, I will not get on that boat with you." She gasped back a sob. "Not unless you promise to tell your father to stop the war."
"That isn't funny." Iroh's voice was flat. "I told you I wouldn't hear that kind of talk."
"It isn't a joke!" Sana shouted. "Tell your father you oppose the war, or I will swim to the Earth Kingdom before I get on any boat of yours."
Iroh looked at her like she'd suggested murdering his father in his sleep. "You know I can't do that."
"You're the only one who could!"
Silence fell between them.
"But you don't want to," Sana concluded, her screams softened, her voice fraught with hurt.
"Sana -"
"Get off my boat."
"Sana, come -"
"I said get off!"
She raised a wave to sweep him overboard.
The wave took him into the water, not before he heard raised voices on the smallboat and a thud and a scream echoed through the water. He surfaced to see a grappling hook from the smallboat sunk into the deck of the sandeq, and a firebender setting fire to the sail, interrupting Sana from raising a wave to swamp the powerboat. The wave she'd raised fizzled and rocked the boat without capsizing it, and the wave she'd lifted put out the fire on the sail, but it was tattered and burnt to uselessness already, dry with the hours of hot sun and salt air.
Sana raised another wave to surf the sailless boat away, and a lifering hit Iroh in the head. He grabbed it, felt the tension on the rope as he was pulled in, heard the ratcheting of the grappling hook pulling Sana's sailless deck back towards them, and the chopping as she frantically tried to cut the hook out of the deck.
Soldiers reached into the water to pull Iroh overboard. He ran to the bow of the boat, to the chain pulling Sana in and yelled over the sound.
"Sana, stop this! This is crazy. You're going to -"
Behind him a sailor threw a line to lasso her. She deflected the line and the hook in her boat pulled her closer. Next to Iroh, two sailors ran into the bow with a net, and he heard the coxswain at the helm shouting "get her! Get the waterbender -"
Iroh shouted "No, stop-" and turned back to Sana just in time to see her fling a jet of water into his face.
He was already inhaling as the water found him. He stopped inhaling as he felt his nose and mouth enveloped, the water streaming into his nose, felt the water freeze around his face shocking him into what would have been exhalation if he hadn't only just spent so much time learning the importance of hanging onto the breath in his lungs. Ice froze all the way up his nostrils, sealed his mouth shut, weighed his head down such that he dropped to the deck immediately, knowing that it was relax and suffocate slow or panic and suffocate faster.
Shouts from his men, muffled by the ice around his ears. He had his hands over his mouth and nose already, warming and melting the ice, but it was inches thick and the breath of his firebending was depleting the potency of the air in his lungs. His men pulled his hands away from his face. He could only trust they were replacing his with theirs. Fire licked his chest, adding the pain of burns to the pain of the ice encasing his head, and he forced himself, against every instinct to do otherwise, to relax.
No thrashing. No gasping for air that would not come. Just letting the men do their work as ice melted into a pool beneath his back and shoulders, and he contributed only the breath inside his lungs through his mouth, out of his nose where melting droplets were already finding their way into his sinuses, triggering convulsions that told the part of him without reason that he was surely dying already, exhaling only from his lips until he felt the heat of his mens firebending break through, and he exhaled all the expended air in a breath of fire and gasped new air in.
Now he rolled over to drain the water from his sinuses and exhaled forcefully, breaking ice from his nose. With no dignity left he snorted and pushed water from his sinuses, as his men melted the rest of the ice from his face and his hair, until he was coughing and snorting on the deck, a wet, sopping mess, but alive.
"Where -"
"Gone."
Jeong-jeong stood above him, reading the question he was still barely able to ask. "Saving your life became the priority."
"She went straight down, your highness," Saburo supplied, next to his second. "Nobody's seen her come up."
And still, Iroh had to look for himself. The surface of the sea was unruffled. The sandeq burned, already half sunk. No graceful woman swam like a sea creature at any depth he could see, and he could guess what she'd done. Dove out of sight, picked a direction, and used her macawphin technique to swim far enough from range that even if she ran out of air and blacked out, if her body surfaced, they wouldn't find it.
He was speechless. Staring out into the blue, still forcing drops of water out of his raw sinuses, he could not find a single word to tell the men around him she tried to kill me in a way that they would understand the weight of it.
"The Fire Nation has lost a valuable prisoner today, but I expect the Fire Lord will prefer losing a prisoner to losing the next in line," Jeong-Jeong prompted him, as Iroh leaned on the liferail and breathed his panic down. "Even if that prisoner was a waterbender."
"Even a waterbender's sure to drown out here," Saburo said, but he didn't sound any more confident in it than Iroh thought he should, when Saburo didn't even know the extent of Sana's ability. "She went straight down," he repeated. "Waterbenders can't breathe underwater, can they?"
"If they can, the North would have swum up the Leijiang already," Gen pointed out.
"If she lives, she'll be wanted for attempted assassination of the crown prince," Jeong-Jeong said. "The Fire Lord will be glad to see her, dead or alive."
"She is surely dead," Iroh found himself saying.
Yes. It was the most likely. Her kick had failed her at depth and blacked her out once. Perhaps she was drifting too deep to float to the surface somewhere now, taking her last unconscious breath.
She had said she'd die before going to a Fire Nation prison. Maybe she'd been correct.
She tried to kill me, he thought again, but couldn't say it in a way that the men would understand the sting of it.
In the silence of the unbroken sea, the foiled boat crew turned to Jeong-Jeong, their senior officer, then to their prince. Shame was on each face - terror on two.
Gen and Saburo knelt on the deck.
"Your highness," said Saburo, eyes on the deck.
Iroh remembered how the soldier had once shot him a look of indignation for taking the last of the lychee preserves at breakfast. The man's voice trembled now like he was speaking from death row. Which, Iroh realized, as Saburo and Gen's hands both went to the knives on their belts, he was.
"We are prepared to restore our honor after our failure to protect your life," Saburo said, but his voice shook as he said it.
"The Fire Lord gave them the choice of restoring their honor in the capitol, or of searching for you in a life of banishment to restore their honor before you," Jeong-Jeong informed Iroh. His expression said, without needing to be spoken, it would be a waste of good men, and you did this to them.
Iroh remembered throwing both bodyguards off himself on the lifeboat. At the time he'd thought only of Huaji, still on board. He hadn't considered the sword he would leave dangling over the two men's necks by throwing them off to save one. "That's not necessary," he said, quickly. "Fire Lord Azulon will hear from me directly that these men discharged their duties to their utmost. It is not a punishable offense to be unable to subdue a prince of the Fire Nation." It was the most tactful way he could think of to say I made my own choice, and no man should answer to Azulon but me. He could hardly admit that a prince of the Fire Nation made mistakes explicitly. Gen and Saburo's hands left their knives, but still they trembled, quiet, their eyes downcast.
Iroh remembered the friendly fireside banter that had grown in the band between Lejiang and Changbao, the joke they had all shared undercover on the Swordfish as men who were not equal, but who were like enough to share the joke of being undercover. There would never be such companionship again between him and these soldiers. Not now that the truth of his identity was known.
And Sana had tried to kill him. Iroh wiped his eyes against the sting of the salt water and took a calming breath. "Are Loto and Huaji with the search crew?" he asked Jeong-Jeong.
Jeong-Jeong's schooled, expressionless pause told him he was in for worse news yet.
"I regret to inform your highness, Huaji didn't make it to shore. He succumbed to his injury in the lifeboat."
Sana reappeared in Iroh's memory, carelessly waving her hand with her good cheer after a night of horror, insisting in her ignorance Oh it doesn't matter. Nobody died. Reassuring him baselessly, perhaps as Huaji breathed his very last.
"Loto was reassigned to the border of the Si Wong," Jeong-Jeong said, "for his part in his failure to protect the crown." He exhaled carefully. "His division was attacked by Sandbenders. He was on watch when the raid began. His family will have received his ashes by now."
The colonial boy, sitting upon sunrise at the bow of the Swordfish, would never tell him why he had joined the army instead of the navy.
It surprised Iroh, after so long getting his sea legs, to feel his knees about to give beneath him. He managed not to stumble, but it was the vision of the boy at the bow of the Swordfish, the sun rising before him, that robbed him of his breath. Both of them dead, and Gen and Saburo prepared to find him and die, while he had been cavorting with an enemy he'd been foolish enough to believe could be brought around to their side.
Tears welled in his eyes. It was enough to be too much. The men had the right to see that he cared that his choices had such fallout.
He gave himself the release of two, perhaps three tears. He kept his sobs quiet. With a long, calming breath, Iroh brought himself back to the position of stoicism that the men needed to know, too, that he could return to this quickly.
"I will see their families compensated," he said, quietly. "And to their promotion," he said, nodding to Gen and Saburo, who both looked up in surprise tinged with hope. It almost made Iroh smile. Now that the men knew his face, his voice, his mannerisms, knew him too well to ever mistake him for a common soldier, there was no job left for them but to continue to be on the rotation of royal guardsmen. "I hope you won't find royal guardsman training too rigorous."
Gen and Saburo all but lost their composure, as the weight of their coming responsibilities - and probably, the increase in their salaries - struck them both.
"You must be exhausted," Jeong-Jeong said, giving him the window to admit it.
"And starving," Iroh agreed. "What does the galley have? Anything without fish or fruit. And with every kind of pepper on board."
"I'll have it brought to your stateroom," said Jeong-Jeong.
"Brief me there," Iroh instructed him. "I need to get cleaned up before I address the men properly."
His men had died and suffered and searched while he'd fallen into a complacent idyll. One pretty face and one promise of a month off and he'd been all too ready to forget that his absence was a tragedy that would destroy the lives of the men around him. He mulled over this as the smallboat crested the waves back to the Citrine, the coxswain doing nothing to navigate the troughs of the waves as they bounced from crest to nauseating crest.
In the master's stateroom, Iroh mused about how he'd displaced the captain and wondered if it was worthwhile to insist the master take his own room back, or if the man would, quite literally, rather kill himself than have the Crown Prince of the Fire Nation refuse his gesture of hospitality. But he did this after a hot shower, in a silk dressing gown, his hair combed, oiled, and retied into a neat topknot, mouth still burning from the spirit peppers of the roast duck the galley had prepared at his request. He picked at the last grains of rice, thinking he had never understood how beloved rice was to him until now, when the knock came at his door.
"Enter."
The door to the master's cabin slid open. Jeong-Jeong stepped in, closing the door behind him.
"Come, sit," Iroh insisted, waving his second over, where a plate of unfinished dumplings still rested. "I'm sorry I didn't leave you many leftovers."
"It's well enough," Jeong-Jeong said, sitting, but doing so as rigidly as a man could, only because he couldn't refuse Iroh's direct order. "The Fire Lord has directed the Citrine to transfer you to the Lahar to return to the capital. You were very . . . subtle, to survive alongside a waterbender so long," Jeong-Jeong said, carefully. "Did she know you were -"
"Not until the end," said Iroh, not caring if Jeong-Jeong had been intent to say "firebender" or "crown prince." He'd been foolish. He didn't need to hear it from anyone but himself.
"The Fire Nation will rejoice at having an heir who is so crafty and resilient," Jeong-Jeong went on. "To turn your almost certain death into another great triumph for the royal family is almost worth risking death at all, if it isn't above my station to say so. "
"I wish I could laugh about it now," Iroh muttered, "instead of in a few months."
"You're surely weary," Jeong-Jeong agreed.
Weary, yes. Heartsore, yes, that even he could not turn an enemy as valuable as she could have been to their side. Heartsore that she had turned on him so violently in the end.
To Iroh's surprise, Jeong-Jeong picked a discarded dumpling off his plate and nibbled at it. The Citrine took a wave and rocked gently, but Jeong-Jeong showed no signs of the seasickness that had plagued him on the Swordfish.
"A month at sea seems to have widened your comfort zone," he said, picking up another dumpling to nibble, since they were now at a premium. "I think that's more than I saw you eat the entire time you were on that box of tinder we got lost at sea on."
"Yes, that's another thing I have to brief you on," Jeong-Jeong said, almost ruefully. "I have requested a transfer to the navy."
Iroh almost spit his dumping out.
"You?" he choked down a bite of spiced chickensow. "Now you are surely playing a joke on me."
"Do you know, even the captain of this vessel says he too is seasick for the first two days of every voyage?" Jeong-Jeong said. "I didn't know how many days it takes to overcome that. I do now." He breathed, deeply. "The navy is hurting for firebending instructors."
"And there's no finer instructor of new soldiers than you," Iroh agreed, thinking ruefully of training a brand new second to talk to him like a person, not a prince.
"And there's a peacefulness upon the sea that I hadn't had the chance to feel until searching for you put me on it so long," Jeong-Jeong added. "When I'm on a boat where I can firebend and enjoy the peace of the sea, I -" he paused. "I feel I serve the crown better. I will spend the rest of my service at sea, should the Fire Lord allow."
Iroh thought of saying you served me fine on land, but looking at the contentedness behind Jeong-Jeong's placid face, he felt he could not dissuade the man from following his peace. Not when the Jeong-Jeong he knew had always been close to exploding, in court, and in camp.
Not here, though.
"How people can surprise you," he said, mildly. He sniffed. Water burned in his sinuses. Salt stung his eyes and still flooded his mouth. "For myself, I could stand not to see the ocean ever again," he added, bitterness in his voice. "A desert would not be dry enough for me after this."
The Citrine sailed west. Iroh had never been more relieved to go home.
A/N: one chapter and an epilogue left to go!