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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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   “I’m beginning to suspect you are unlucky,” Iroh said to Kea.
            Kea glared at him. “You’re the unlucky one, Mr. I’m-Going-Into-Voluntary-Exile Even-Though-I’m-The-Most-Powerful-Fire-Nation-General-Ever. You brought this on yourself.”
            Their hands were bound in rock, so they could not bend. Fortunately, Iroh did not need his hands to bend fire. He filled his lungs to capacity, giving the fire inside him plenty to grow on. It grew and grew and the rock around him got hotter and hotter until the earthbenders approaching him dissolved in a soupy heat shimmer. The rock softened enough for Iroh to blast it away. It, half-molten and glowing red, showered the earthbenders.
           He turned toward Kea. “At least I didn’t kill three colonels and another general.” With one hand he seared a wide swath of ground in front of him to keep their attackers back and used the other to free Kairakea. She leapt out of the smashed rock and ripped the water from her waterbag, immediately forming it into wicked-sharp stakes of ice.
            “You killed way more than four men in your time, old man. Karma’s—watch out!-- coming back to bite you hard.”
            Together they volleyed the four earthbenders with fireblasts and icicles.
            “Not if I head it off by opening a tea shop,” Iroh said, pausing to knock back an earthbender with a fiery leg sweep.
            “What?” Kea flung a water boomerang at a soldier. It crushed his armor, then returned to her.
            “If I serve delicious tea to everyone--” he blasted a soldier back, “—they will be happy and I will restore my good karma.”
            “Somehow I don’t think tea is an acceptable trade for mass slaughter.”
            “It is a good start. Behind you!”
            Kea ducked a chunk of rock and snapped the next one into pieces with her water whip. “If you open a tea shop, can I be your assistant?”
            “You can be my scantily-clad personal secretary.” Iroh grinned while he took out two earthbenders at a time with a redirected blast of earth and fire.
            “Just what I always wanted. Be still my heart.” She rolled her eyes.
            “See? I have restored my karma by granting your wish.”
            Kea looped her whip around a bender’s leg and hurled him several feet away into the trees. “If Yuto weren’t already dead, you could probably kill him and get yourself back to even.”
            “So one firebender is equal to hundreds of others? I didn’t know you thought so highly of us.”
            “If we weren’t in the middle of a fight, I’d slap you with a fish.”
            “Delicious! I haven’t had fresh fish in so long!” He grabbed the last earthbender and tossed him to Kea, who used her arms sheathed in water to fling him in the opposite direction.
            Swiftly they struck camp. Kea picked up a fragment of white. “They broke your teacups.”
            “We will get more.”
            “We can’t stop. They’re tracking us.”
            “Then I will drink tea from your bellybutton.”
            Kea blinked at him, then burst into laughter. It was infectious. They went due east at a good clip, laughing in erratic fits as they ran. The trees began to crowd each other and push out the grass, turning the trail narrow and winding. Iroh knew it wouldn’t be many more days until the hills started to roll under them, then turn to mountains. Then Serpent’s Pass.
            “I’m sleepy,” Kea mumbled, after four hours had turned their run into a jog and then a walk.
            “We will stop soon.”
            When they did (by a small pond), Kea didn’t bother unrolling her bed. She flopped to the ground and fell asleep immediately. Iroh gathered wood for a fire, lit it and watched the gentle rise and fall of her chest as she slept.
            He woke early, despite only a few hours of sleep, and found he’d acquired a strange Kea-shaped growth. She must have gotten cold in the night, having neglected to unroll her blanket, and in her sleep sought out the nearest source of safe warmth. She clung to his side, her head tucked into the curve of his shoulder. Iroh smiled and let her lie there for a while, basking in the feel of her soft, warm body. Eventually the itch to move compelled him to rise. He did so gingerly, trying to ease out from under her, but she woke and moaned groggily.
            “Mmmuh. Wh’timezit?”
            Iroh glanced up at the sky. “Midmorning.”
            She groaned and rolled over. “No. Still dark. Sleep. No morning.”
            Iroh chuckled. He’d never met a waterbender who was a morning person. Owing to their reliance on and respect for the moon, they more frequently lived in the night.
            He busied himself around camp, briefly disappointed that they had nothing to make tea with, then remembered his new Tsungi horn. He sat down to play away the time until Kairakea woke. She showed signs of life about twenty minutes after he started to play.
            “Welcome back to the world,” Iroh said. Kea smiled drowsily and stretched like a cat. The shirt she’d been wearing had sustained a large tear on the side from their skirmish with the earthbenders, and Iroh begged the spirits to move the tear just a tiny bit higher.
            “You play that well,” she said, inclining her head toward the brass horn looped around Iroh’s middle.
            “It’s a hobby of mine.”
            “All we need is someone to play shamisen and someone to sing and we could form our own troupe.”
            “If you dance while I play, I will show you some firebending techniques.”
            She hiked an eyebrow. “Why would you show me firebending?”
            “I can control fire and lighting with waterbending techniques, remember? I am sure you could find some use for--”
            “Deal! Play something with a good beat, please, since we don’t have drums.” Kea unhooked the waterpouch from her shoulder, drew the water out, and settled into a neutral stance.
            Iroh began a gentle but lively song which, if he weren’t playing, he would have sung with relish. It had always been one of his favorites, and he’d been wanting to see how Kairakea danced to it since he met her. She’d been a large factor in his purchase of the horn in the first place. Once again, he let his mind divide. One half he sent outward, to control his fingers and lips and breath, and one half he let settle back so it could soak Kairakea in as she danced.
            Within seconds, Iroh formed an apt analogy to describe her dances. The first one in the marketplace, accompanied by drums, a flute and a fiddle, had been energetic, spirited and varied, like the choppy, bubbling flow of a creek over stones. This one, however, was much slower, with softer, more undulating movements. Her stances went deeper and her body moved sinuously, like a wide and gentle river. He could see in this one much more of the unique and intelligent blend she had created between waterbending and dancing. The dance in the marketplace had had more movements designed to show off her body than to use for bending, but the dance in the marketplace had been designed to draw a crowd. Naturally she’d have wanted to sway her hips and curve her body more for the money it got her.
            But now that she wasn’t dancing for money, she could let the true artistry of it shine through. Though she had much more on this time than strips of cloth, he appreciated this dance more than the other one. He played the last note of the song and seamlessly began another one with the same tempo. It was evidently one she knew well; she smiled and the flow of chi through her body became almost instinctive. He played the song twice through, chose another and played that twice.
            “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were going to keep me dancing all day to weasel out of your part of the deal,” she said, twirling her loop of water close around him like a snake. It kissed his cheek with cool wetness. He winked and played on.
            “You keep teasing me like this, old man, and I’ll leave you all alone.”
            He finished the song, rested his horn on his ample belly. “Empty threats get hollow answers.”
            “Heave yourself up and teach me something before I soak you through. And that is not an empty threat.”
            They practiced by the pond because it was the largest open area in the dense forest. Kea learned the motions quickly, having seen them all many times before. But pushing enough chi through the foreign moves to actually bend water with them created quite another challenge for her. Iroh fell naturally into the role of teacher he’d already played for his brother, his son and his nephew. Already a skilled and savvy bender, Kairakea required of him a different approach to teaching the techniques. He enjoyed the challenge.
            Iroh ended the lesson when he saw Kairakea begin to tire. She had hardly broken a sweat through over an hour of uninterrupted dancing, but thirty minutes of forcing her muscles to memorize foreign techniques (belonging to a bending style opposite in chi of her own) and intense focus on getting the chi to flow through these motions had her dripping with sweat and out of breath. Iroh himself had begun to sweat; that hadn’t happened during a training session since the true nature of firebending had clicked for Zuko.
            The water seemed to instantly relieve her when she stepped into the shallows. “Whew. That was much harder than I thought it’d be.” She splashed water onto her face and rolled her shoulders to work out the tension there.
            “It will take time to sink in. I did not fully master how to redirect lightning until almost a year after I learned it.”
            “Oh. This, right?” She swayed her body from one side to another, the chi starting in one hand, moving with the gravity shift in her body to the other hand.
            Iroh nodded.
            “That’s not a basic technique, so I’m not surprised it took you that long. It took me a couple of months.” She stepped back until she was thigh-deep in the pond. “A firebender can only use it like a lightning rod, to redirect, but a waterbender…” She widened her stance, put her arms out. The water began to rise as if a large wave were building. She moved one arm up; a huge column of water lifted from the pond and blocked out the sun. Iroh felt the water level in the pond drop by several inches. He followed the chi in her body, suppressing his minor but instinctive alarm at the tidal wave towering above him like a massive soldier at attention. Yes, there was a difference. Instead of letting the power flow in and out of the core of her body, she kept it whirlpooling right below her heart, letting it build in a tightly focused, well-controlled ball. It, compressed, gained power as it spun. Iroh had to ignore another impulse to step back. At once she shifted her body and released that ball of chi. It shot up her arm and out her hand. The column of water followed in a roaring rush. She swept it grandly across the clearing made by the pond. As the wall of water crossed between them and the sun, Iroh spotted several fish, paddling frantically, backlit by the sun. With another broad pass of her arms, she guided the wave back into the pond. “A waterbender uses it like a tsunami. The principle is the same: the accruing of potential energy suddenly transformed into kinetic. If you tried to do that with lightning, you’d probably fry yourself from the inside out. Speaking of frying, let’s make supper.” She dropped a respectably-sized fish into Iroh’s hands.
            Iroh cooked. It was delicious. Kea danced. That was delicious too. They both slept soundly.
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Fire and Rain