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Fire and Rain	By : Keyriethenightbringer Category: Avatar - The Last Airbender > AU/AR - Alternate Universe/Alternate Reality > Het- Male/Female Views: 2035 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: ATLA and its characters do not belong to me. I make no money from this work.

Chapter List
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As they talked, they slid into familiarity so quickly it was uncanny. Even Zuko relaxed enough to give them a wry smile when Iroh recalled an old aunt of his who tried to start belching contests with royal family members when drunk.
            Kairakea threw her head back and laughed. It was a joyful sound and Iroh loved to hear it. “I wish I could’ve met her,” Kairakea said, scooting a little closer to Iroh as night fell and the late fall air picked up a bite. “Perhaps if I had, living there would have been tolerable.”
            “Zuko, stoke the fire,” Iroh asked, noticing again Kairakea’s bare shoulders and exposed legs. She’d changed her costume to a flowing green shirt off one shoulder, sashed at the waist, and a loose pair of turquoise leggings that stopped just below her knees. She’d freed her hair from the bun. It was, in fact, curly, sleek and fragrant with jasmine. Iroh breathed deep of it and watched the rich orange light play in it as Zuko gently urged the fire higher.
            “If you lived in the palace, why did we never see you?” Zuko asked.
            “I didn’t live in the palace. I lived with General Yuto. You never saw me because he very seldom let me out of the house and hid me from everyone but his staff.”
            Iroh shook his head. “I never liked General Yuto. He put his men in unnecessary danger because he cared only for himself. The safety of his men mattered less to him than gaining glory and currying favor with my brother.”
            Kairakea mumbled something with her head averted.
            “Hmm?”
            “I said that if how he treated his household was any indication of how he treated his soldiers, I shudder to think what kind of general he was.” Kairakea hugged herself as if feeling a draft, but the fire was well-banked and roaring.
            The conversation rested a beat. Iroh resisted the impulse to put a comforting arm around Kairakea’s shoulders. I’ve got one surrogate son, he thought. I couldn’t keep up with a daughter. But then he stopped kidding himself. His interest in, and growing affinity for, Kairakea wasn’t completely fatherly.
            “So how did you come to be here?” Iroh asked.
            Kairakea heaved a sigh and looked up at the stars, as if asking them for help. They could only see a small piece of the sprawling night sky from their clearing in the forest, but the light of a waxing moon glowed mildly in the west. It was toward this light she instinctively turned.
            “Nobody in the entire house knew I could bend. As far as they knew, I was just a Water Tribe girl Yuto had captured and turned into a concubine. I practiced in secret. I had only learned the basics of healing before I got kidnapped, so I didn’t even know I could bloodbend. But one night when Yuto had his three favorite colonels over and they all decided to take a run at me, all the… anger I had built up inside… from all those years of… use and abuse… I just…”
            Kairakea’s words seemed to dry up. This time, Iroh did put an arm around her shoulders. The muscles there were bunched and tense. She stared at her hands as if they were repulsive things. Iroh wasn’t sure if the fire in her eyes was just a reflection or not. Either way, he liked that fire much better than the ice he’d seen during the attack on her tent. She straightened up, took a deep breath, and spoke. Her voice was steady, if a bit thick.
            “Yuto survived. The colonels… I’d blacked out. I didn’t realize what I’d done until I came to and heard Yuto’s guards pounding on the door he’d locked. I jumped out the window into the lake. I hid in that lake for days while they searched for me. On the other side I cut my hair and changed my name. I stowed away on a Fire Navy ship bound for Omashu. On board, I heard the crew talking about the Avatar, you and Prince Zuko. Then they mentioned the sudden, unfortunate death of General Yuto. Nobody on that ship knew exactly how he died, but they blamed the “spirits” that had killed his favorite colonels a few days before. I must have done more damage to him than I thought. Nobody but Yuto and those three dead colonels knew I was a waterbender, so he must have said something before he died. Fire Lord Ozai got wind of it and sent soldiers after me. Fortunately, he’s still hunting the Avatar, so that takes up his best and brightest.” She cast a conspirator’s glance at Iroh. “We get second string.”
            Iroh’s hand slipped off her shoulder. “Kairakea--”
            “If I’m not to call you General, please don’t call me Kairakea. Kea will do fine.”
            “Kea. If the soldiers we fought today were so far below your skill level, why did you kill them?”
            “I didn’t.”
            A weight lifted from Iroh’s heart.
            “One got away and I just made sure the other two wouldn’t dare follow me. If you’re worried about me using bloodbending to revenge-kill in a futile attempt to regain my lost innocence, don’t. I won’t.”
            Iroh smiled in spite of himself at her razor-sharp perception. But he knew better. He’d seen her eyes, those wells of blue frozen by years of bottled hate and abuse. At the hands of a man with whom he’d shared tea.
            The fire suddenly guttered; Zuko had fallen asleep. The night-cold enveloped them; Kea shuddered and cuddled close to Iroh. Four hours ago, he would have been over the moon with joy. But the woman nestled in the crook of his shoulder now seemed more like a ticking bomb. He banked the fire with a gentle flick of his wrist.
            “You may not mean to kill anyone, but such pent-up rage is bound to get the best of you eventually if you do not control it.”
            After a long pause she said only, “Yes.”
            “There was no need to bloodbend those soldiers. If you really did not intend to kill them, you could have just knocked them out.”
            “There was no water to bend. I usually camp near a stream or a well, but they were too close to the village center this time. I don’t have the strength to pull enough water out of the air to use for an attack.” She turned to him, putting her face within inches of his, and cocked a half-smile. “What was I to do? Pull water out of you or Zuko?”
            “What about the tea? Or the bowl of water you were using for your jasmine plant?”
            She sighed and turned back to the fire. Iroh was equal parts relieved and disappointed when she removed herself from his side and stepped nearer to the fire. She put her hands out to warm them, then turned around to face Iroh. The moon had crept into the narrow crescent of visible sky they had. Kairakea gazed up at it, seeming to drink its power in.
            “Everyone seemed to have a different opinion on why you were—are—called the Dragon of the West. They say you faced the last dragon and killed it. You may have seen a dragon, but I don’t believe you killed it.”
            She’s quick, he thought, and glanced at his sleeping nephew. Was he hearing this?
            “They say you were born on the day the earth passed closest to the sun, and that gave you power no other firebender has ever had. That may be true. I favor that explanation because I was born on the day when the full moon was closest to the earth. And so, oddly enough, was General Yuto.”
            Iroh remained silent. Years of trying to talk to his imperious, bullheaded brother had taught him that if he forced the other party to supply both question and answer, he’d learn much more about them than even they knew.
            “Whatever the explanation, I always listened hard when they talked about you. Yuto thought you were overcautious, soft and irresolute, especially after you lost your son.”
            Iroh felt a pang deep in his heart for Lu Ten. He always would.
            “But one of Ozai’s advisors respected you and always defended you to Yuto. He didn’t have the guts to say it, but I could tell he’d always believed you should have been Fire Lord and not Ozai. What were his words? ‘You mistake wisdom for laziness and grief for weakness. It doesn’t matter who has more power. What makes a great Fire Lord is power tempered with humanity.’”
            The pang of grief melted and warmed into gratitude for the man, and longing for his home. The way it was. Before Ba Sing Se, before Fire Lord Ozai.
            “You eavesdropped on war meetings?” Iroh asked, trying unsuccessfully to keep impish pleasure out of his voice.
            That half-cocked grin surfaced on her face again, making her look positively wicked. That look stirred embers in Iroh that hadn’t been stirred in many years. They flared deep and low in his belly.
            “Just in Yuto’s house. Since he knew much about me, in the carnal sense, I felt it was my due to learn as much as I could about him and his.”
            Iroh, forcing the flame in his belly back down by reminding himself that Kairakea was a full thirty years younger than he was, searched his memory for any war meetings he’d been to at Yuto’s sprawling estate. He’d avoided too much contact with General Yuto except that which was necessary to maintain a professional relationship. Yuto had ridden Ozai’s coattails into the inner circle instead of using skill, intelligence and wisdom. He had shown extraordinary selfishness and ignorance as a general and instead of learning from his mistakes, he blamed other generals and advisors for his failings. And Ozai had believed him.
            Kairakea returned to her seat next to Iroh, but not too close. She tipped her head back and (did not bend) lifted the water bag to her lips. Iroh watched with interest the interplay of red firelight and bluewhite moonlight on the delicate skin of her throat as she drank. He followed the lights as they seemed to fight down her neck, across the gentle ridge of her collarbone and into the lovely little space between her breasts.
            “Aaahh,” she sighed and recorked the bag. “I think I saw you once. It must have been just after the siege at Ba Sing Se, because you looked… well… you looked bad. You were the only one who never spoke.”
            He remembered. It had been about seven months after that day. Only weeks after he’d returned home from his first self-imposed exile.
            “Even though I’d never met you, I had this idea of you as someone who’d sympathize with me. Or at least not treat me as badly as Yuto did. Call me crazy, but I thought that if I somehow found my way to you, you’d… I don’t know… be a friend. Give me sanctuary.”
            Iroh chuckled. That soon after Lu Ten’s death, he may have done worse to her than Yuto.
            “I was stupid and young. And desperate.”
            He let her think.
            “Even after I escaped, I never really let go of that image of you. Especially at first. After sixteen years isolated at the top of the world, then another fifteen sequestered away in Yuto’s house, the wide world frightened me. I hate to say it even now, but I spent the better part of my formative years in the Fire Nation, so that’s what I knew. I also knew Zuko had been exiled and you had gone with him. So I looked for you, because you were the one good thing about the Fire Nation. After two months I found a waterbending master. After six I’d gained some control over my bloodbending and enough confidence to make my own way. After a year, I stopped looking for you and tried to make my way as a traveling healer. I figured out pretty quickly that people paid more to see me dance than to have me heal their sick and wounded.”
            “You were a healer?”
            “Am. Bloodbending didn’t start out as a weapon.”
            Neither did firebending, Iroh thought bitterly.
            “I wish I could heal mental wounds as easily as some physical ones.” Kairakea gave him a meaningful look. It touched him on a different level than her half-grin had. He re-realized how profoundly her ordeal had scarred her; he understood how hard she had fought to rise above the rage and pain with which it had left her. And how wrong he had been about her. Yes, she had a deep well of anger, but she also had a well just as deep of kindness, of gratitude and generosity. It gave his heart another twinge to think that his countrymen, his brothers, could have warped such a giving, selfless soul so badly.
            “Time heals all wounds, no matter what they afflict.”
            Kairakea scoffed a laugh. “That’s very Zen, and not at all true.”
            “It would be true if you let yourself be healed.”
            “Don’t tell me you didn’t feel a stab of grief for your son when I mentioned him, because I know you did. I saw it in your face. That wound is still very much open. Fat lot of good all that time has done you.” Her voice bit.
            “I never said time heals quickly.”
            “It heals incompletely, if anything. Leaves scars.”
            “You must take part in the healing as well. The more you dwell on the past, the slower those wounds heal.”
            “Our pasts make us what we are.”
            “That does not mean our pasts should rule us in the present.”
            “You’re infuriating when you’re right.”
            Iroh smiled.
            “So I’ve been surviving on sips of your story. When do I get to drink the whole well?”
            “Tomorrow. I’m getting sleepy looking at my nephew.”
            Kea glanced over at Zuko, who slept close to the fire. She nodded. They rose from the log and laid out their bedrolls. “You’ll make tea tomorrow?” She asked as she snugged down into her blanket.
            “Did you bring any of that jasmine with you?”
            "A little. The one thing all the generals agreed on about you is that you make a cup of tea so divine it hurts.”
            “I wouldn’t want to cause you any pain,” Iroh said with a chuckle.
            “I’d welcome this pain,” she said, and drifted off to sleep.
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Fire and Rain