FANFIC: The Siege of the South (2/3)

[lavanya_six]

Title: The Siege of the South
Rating: PG-13 (for minor language and violence)
Fandom: Avatar - The Last Airbender
Summary: "He'll have plenty of time to see the world. The Fire Nation doesn't know he's back yet and it'll be years before he'll be ready to defeat Fire Lord Azulon. So Aang studies and waits, and dreams of flying away again." AU.

Upon their return to the Great City, Hama introduces Kanna to her new home while Aang meets with Council of Chieftains. He tells them who he really is and they agree to provide him with a waterbending master. With news of a living airbender and his sky-bison having already spread around the city, the council sees little point in keeping his identity a secret. The Southern Water Tribe does little trade with outsiders, so word will be slow to make it back to the Fire Nation. Around the Great City, gossip travels faster. By the end of his first day it's like being back home at the Southern Air Temple. No one treats him like a kid anymore; he's the Avatar.

Maybe it's because he met them both under strange circumstances but, after the word gets out that he's the Avatar, Hama and Kanna are the only ones who treat him like a real person. They make an odd trio -- a forty-seven year old airbender, a fifteen year old waterbender, and a seventeen year old globetrotter -- but Aang's more grateful for their friendship than he can even tell them.

Kanna hangs out with him a lot. Aang figures that it's because she's lonely and she doesn't fit in well. Like for him, the ways of the Southern Water Tribe are strange to Kanna. She and he talk a lot over meals, trading stories about what real food tastes like. Kanna's eaten in places all across the Earth Kingdom during her year-long walk across the world. She fell in love with roasted turkey-duck and genemite.

As the weeks go by, Aang never gets used to the people passing him on the street, smiling at him with tears in their eyes, or the soldiers and sailors who cheer him on with cries of "Death to Fire Lord Azulon, and his brat Iroh too!"

Sometimes he thinks about hopping onto Appa and getting away for a while, but then he remembers finding Monk Gyatso's bones and the look of terror on Hama's face when he lost control of himself, and he puts his sight-seeing maps away. For now.

He'll have plenty of time to see the world. The Fire Nation doesn't know he's back yet and it'll be years before he'll be ready to defeat Fire Lord Azulon.

So Aang studies and waits, and dreams of flying away again.

* * * *

Master Kassuq is the one-eyed old man from the Council that talked with him when he first arrived in the Great City. Kassuq is totally unlike any of the monks who taught Aang, and not just because of his black eyepatch or his disfiguring burn scars. He's a relentless taskmaster who treats bending like it's just another weapon for a warrior to master, like a club or a sword. There's no philosophy to waterbending for Master Kassuq, just kill or be killed. Aang always feels exhausted after his classes.

"What are you doing with your wrist?" he asks Aang one morning when they're practicing disarming techniques. His tone makes clear that he is displeased with Aang deviating from the assigned drill. "That's not the way I demonstrated to you on how to perform a water whip."

"I thought I'd give it a little flair," Aang explains.

"Flair," he says flatly.

"Yeah! See, if I twist my wrist like so -- " Aang snaps a water whip at the target liquid saber and coils the rope of water around it " -- and give it a little tug, then I don't just freeze his sword in a block of ice. I also shoot it through with dozens of little spikes and -- " the ice-encrusted weapon shatters into a dozen pieces " -- ta da!"

Master Kassuq inclines his chin upwards. "Intriguing. I've never seen anyone do that before."

Aang smiles with pride. "Thanks!"

"If you were to wrap that... 'thorn whip' around the sword arm instead, you would be able permanently cripple an enemy soldier and leave him as a burden for his comrades and the Fire Nation." Kassuq grins wickedly. "Yes. A masterful idea, Avatar!"

"That's... that's not what I--"

Kassuq either isn't hearing him or is ignoring him. "Tonight I'd like you to teach this thorn whip technique to my instructors. With proper drilling, we can bring our young men and women up to speed within the week!"

* * * *

"You'll have to forgive Master Kassuq," Hama reassures him at lunch that day. The three of them are eating on the snowy plains outside the Great City. It's the only way to avoid a crowd outside of their waterbending classes. "He's just trying to keep us all safe."

Aang picks at his seaweed rolls. The cuisine of the Southern Water Tribe is lacking at the best of times, and with its heavy emphasis on meats and fish there's not much for a vegetarian to turn to. "I was trying to save lives, but he just looked it as a way to hurt people."

"I know it's not what you wanted but time's running out for us," Hama says. "The Fire Nation's getting bolder and bolder in their raids on our shipping. They've even started pillaging our outlying villages. We've held them off until now, but..."

Aang isn't blind. He's seen Master Kassuq face.

Hama glances aside at Kanna. "Bet you'd have thought twice about coming down here if you knew about the threat of invasion."

"No," Kanna replies, tucking her legs under her body. "I'd have come anyway. Better to live free and die than to be a slave to any man."

Hama chuckles. "Speaking of, I heard from a certain someone that you and the tailor's son have been spending a lot of time together as of late."

Kanna glares at Aang. "You ratfink snitch! We pinkie-swore!"

Aang sputters, "I didn't say anything!"

"Then who did?!"

"You did," Hama says to her.

Kanna curses under her breath, then adds, "What Sokka and I do in our free time is none of your business. And for your information, I'm helping him with his needlework. That's all."

"Needlework, huh?" Aang says.

Hama arches an eyebrow. She deadpans, "Is that what they call it in the Northern Water Tribe?"

"Oh, shut up! I need the money, okay?" She glowers at them. "And a little tutoring is a perfectly respectable side job until the militia gets its head out of its butt and hires me on."

Aang is surprised. "You want to fight too?"

"I walked from one end of the world to the other," Kanna shoots back, indignant. "I'm not a delicate little flower. I know how to take care of myself." She scowls, obviously irritated at the mere suggestion. "Of course, since I'm a foreigner apparently I can't be trusted with a sword."

"Just give them time," Hama says, reaching over and patting the older girl on the knee. "They'll see you're worth it. Trust me."

"Yeah!" says Aang. "If they could have seen how you took out that tiger-shark, they'd have signed you up in a heartbeat!" Hama punches him not-so-softly on the shoulder. "Ow!"

"Hey," says Hama, smirking, "does someone have a wittle cwush?"

Aang blushes. "N-no! Of course not! We're totally just friends. Right, Kanna?"

The shaggy-haired girl taps one ragged fingernail on her lower-lip. "I dunno, Avatar. You sing my praises a lot."

Hama rolls her eyes. "Blow up one tiger-shark and suddenly you're a goddess."

"You're cool too, Hama," he says earnestly.

She quickly looks away from him and mumbles, "Thanks."

* * * *

Spring is filled with waterbending lessons day in and day out. In the mornings, Master Kassuq makes Aang practice the boring basics of manipulating water, ice and vapor long after he can perform such moves blindfolded and with one hand tied behind his back -- which Kassuq often makes him do, among worse things.

"Th-this is s-s-stupid," Aang chatters one day after being frozen in a block of ice up to his neck. "I th-thought you said w-we were g-going to do the a-a-advanced s-stuff today!"

It would be wrong to say that Master Kassuq scowls at him for complaining, because that would imply there was a time when Master Kassuq wasn't scowling at anyone. "Talent is no excuse for intellectual laziness, especially from someone as talented as you, Avatar. Only once you've mastered the very basics of waterbending and you are able to perform them under any circumstance will the advanced techniques make sense."

"I've ALREADY s-s-spent thirty-five years d-doing my b-b-best impersonation of an i-ice cube, th-thanks." He wiggles futilely. "How am I even s-supposed to w-waterbend if I can't m-m-move my arms and h-hands?!"

Arms crossed, Master Kassuq wildly wiggles one eyebrow. It's such an odd expression coming from the normally sour elder that Aang almost doesn't even notice the snowball forming on top of his icy prison to his left, just inside his field of vision. Aang's eyes dart from the condensing snowball to Kassuq's wiggling eyebrow and back again. At last the scarred waterbending master levitates the snowball off Aang's ice prison and over to himself without moving his hands.

"H-how did you do that?!"

Kassuq plucks the snowball from the air and idly tosses it with one hand. "For your information, Avatar, I..."

* * * *

"Master Kassuq's teaching you facebending?" Hama exclaims. "That's SO not fair! I'm completely jealous!"

"Don't be. I couldn't do it." Aang tugs tighter the three layers of furs wrapped around him. Fighting off another shiver, he yells back across the empty snowfield, "And at least YOU weren't trapped in a block of ice all morning!"

Hama laughs. "Well, there is that!" She pitches a snowball at him. Aang 'catches' it with his waterbending. While it spins in the air before him, he adds a second snowball beside it and then pitches the pair back at Hama. She receives it, adds a third, and then throws it back at him.

The snowball toss is a waterbending training technique for increasing multi-object control that, between the two of them, they've developed into a kind of game. It's not airball, but at least Aang can play it with Hama.

He's the only one left who can airbend, after all.

They throw the snowballs back and forth at each other with increasing speed, giving one another less time to rest. By the time he's throwing twenty snowballs back at Hama, Aang is already bending his next snowball. When its fifty-odd snowballs flying back and forth between them, they stop adding to the mass. It now becomes a race to see who can last the longest.

The adrenalin and frantic energy of the competition warms Aang up. He drops his furs to the ground, the lingering chill from his time in Master Kassuq's ice cube forgotten.

When he finally sees his friend buried under a veritable avalanche of snow, Aang rides an Air Scooter around Hama in a victory lap. "Woo-hoo!"

"Hey," Hama says back at him, digging herself out of the mound, "how about this time every other snowball is a razor-sharp icicle instead?"

It's a wildly stupid idea.

"You're on!"

* * * *

"Hey, Kanna."

"Yeah?"

They're sitting alone together on the edge of a cliff that overlooks the sea. In the distance, one of the last sunsets of the early summer season is painting shades of yellow and orange across the horizon. They're colors Aang knows well. In a few minutes the light will fade to the red of blood and fire. After that, peaceful purple and blue and, at last, the starry black of night.

"Do you ever miss your home?"

Kanna keeps staring at the western horizon, her face expressionless. The stone betrothal necklace around her neck shines with the light of the fading day. "No," she says. "I really don't."

"No one? Not even your parents?"

She brushes the long bangs out of her eyes. Though she's grown out her boyish haircut since he fished her out of the sea, it's only been a two and a half months. The outgrowth and untrimmed appearance of it makes her look even more raggedy than ever. "I think about them, sometimes. Like now."

"When it's quiet."

Kanna hums in affirmation. "I don't think they'd like what I've become. They didn't really like who I was then." As if anticipating his next question, she glances aside at him and smiles. It's not like Hama's smile, which is rare and something the waterbender tends to slip into only when she thinks no one's looking. Kanna's smiles always make Aang feel a little sad inside. "I'm happy now."

"Yeah."

"Are you?"

Aang can't answer.

They sit in silence and watch the stars come out, then they hop on Appa and go back to the Great City.

* * * *

"It's Midnight Sun Madness," declares Sokka, the tailor's wispy son, in that nasal tone of his. "The Avatar has obviously not adjusted well to the lack of nighttime at summer's apex."

"It's not Midnight Sun Madness," says Hama. "And who asked you for your opinion anyway?"

"Don't insult him!" shouts Kanna. "He's just trying to help!"

"He's a tailor. I'm a trained healer. Who are you going to trust, the boyfriend with the needle and thread or the friend with the magical powers?"

"I'm telling you guys," says Aang, enunciating each word carefully, "that there is a dragon RIGHT OVER THERE." He sweeps his arms towards the scaly serpent coiled atop the Great Roundhouse. As if on cue, the dragon roars wickedly. "ARE YOU ALL BLIND OR SOMETHING?!"

His outburst draws the attention of all the partygoers around them. A bubble of silence forms, the only noise coming from the rest of the festivities filling the Great City. There are people from the farthest flung Southern Water Tribe villages gathering here today. Aang knows he should be putting on a better display for all these visitors to his adopted home, but come on already and open your eyes, people!

"Aang," Hama says, resting a hand on each of his shoulders, "we don't see any 'dragons'. Now be honest. I know we're celebrating the solstice, but did you drink anything unusual today? Anything that tasted funny?"

Aang brushes off her hands. "I'm not drunk. I'm just seeing a phantom dragon that apparently no one else can perceive."

"Oh," says Kanna, "is that all?"

Aang pops open his staff glider. "I'm going to go check it out."

"Don't drink and fly!" Hama shouts after him.

* * * *

Seeing Avatar Roku isn't like seeing an old friend for the first time in ages. It's like someone reminding you of a cherished memory you'd somehow forgotten.

The elderly Fire Nation man says, "It's good to see you, Aang."

He bows in respect. "You too, Avatar Roku."

* * * *

Even seeing it in a memory, Aang knows the temple is still home. The winds carries the smell of moon peach blossoms, of baking pies, and of wood burning stoves.

"Air-surfing," marvels Aang. "I can't believe I never thought of that! I can't believe you were friends with Monk Gyatso just like I was."

"Some friendships are so strong, they can even transcend lifetimes."

Aang turns away from his past self.

"Aang?"

"I'm sorry," he says, wiping his eyes with his sleeve.

"Aang." Roku touches the small of his back, grounding him just like Monk Gyatso used to. He almost loses it then and there. "What happened was not your fault."

Aang shakes his head. "No. I know. I just..." There are a lot of ways he can end that sentence. Too many.

"The blame for that day lies with others, myself included, as you will see. If you had stayed, you would have fought and died alongside Gyatso. Our friend wouldn't have wanted that. He would want you to live and be happy."

"I know," he whispers. "And...." He swallows. In a low, low voice, he says, "I might be."

The elderly Avatar keeps the palm of his hand pressed against Aang's back, anchoring him. "We have much to see yet, and little time left to talk," Roku says as his dragon Fang swoops down before them. "Come. I think you'll be quite impressed by my waterbending..."

* * * *

The festival has wound down by the time Aang returns to his body atop the Great Roundhouse's dome. Hama, Master Kassug, and several dozen other residents of the Great City mill about on the ground at the Roundhouse's foot. Even Sokka looks relieved to see him awake and walking around.

Kanna, of course, wanders unconcerned down the north avenue several minutes later, sipping from a frothy mug. "Oh," she says, "you're up. I kept trying to find the stall that sold you the brew you were drinking but no one was selling it. This stuff's not bad though."

* * * *

Later, after he's made his apologies for ruining everyone's solstice, he retreats with Hama and Kanna to his guest house that the city government gave him when he announced he was the Avatar. It's nothing special, just one tiny igloo among many. The walls are bare, which his girl friends gave him a lot of flak for, but Aang's a monk so minimalism is par for the course. Plus he only uses the place to sleep, so what's the point of hanging art or buying furniture?

"Huh," says Hama, after he's told his tale. "So Sozin and Avatar Roku were friends."

"What an SOB," says Kanna. "He let his friend die even after showing him mercy. Not that I'm surprised."

Hama nods in agreement. "Some people are just born villains."

"No," Aang says, "that's not what I think Roku was trying to tell me. See, both Sozin and R--"

The frantic ringing of the door bell that hands outside his igloo cuts him off. Before any of them decide who's going to answer it, there is a thundering of boots and Kanna's boyfriend bursts into the room. "GUYS! YOU HAVE TO COME OUTSIDE RIGHT NOW!"

Hama frowns. "Wh--"

"NOW!!"

Mystified, they follow Sokka outside.

"Black snow?" asks Aang, looking up into the sky. "Weird. Does this usually happen on the solstice?"

"This isn't snow," Hama says, closing her eyes. "It's soot."

* * * *

The war horn sounds and the Great City erupts in frenzied running and shouting as people are awoken from their beds to fend off the 'nighttime' attack. Aang and his friends hop on Appa (who was sleeping out back behind Aang's house) and rush to the Great Roundhouse.

Flying up gives them a good vantage point. They can't miss the fleet of metal warships that dominate the seascape. Fifty vessels the likes of which Aang has never before seen. The sight takes Aang's breath away. This world is so different, he thinks, not for the first or last time.

"Those monsters waited until practically the whole Souther Water Tribe was gathered here for the conclave, off our guard, full and drunk from the solstice festival." Kanna begrudgingly admits, "It's a good plan."

"And with the midnight sun," adds Hama, "their firebending will be fully powered but our waterbending will be weak."

"Double whammy."

"I'm gonna be airsick," moans a green-faced Sokka.

"Suck it up," says Hama.

Chief Atka and the rest of the elders are waiting for them when they arrive. "Avatar," says the grey-haired woman, "our scouts report that the Fire Nation has assembled an armada. We would be hard pressed to fend off five warships, let alone fifty."

"They sent them here for me, didn't they?" Aang isn't asking. He doesn't know a lot about war, but he knows this many ships is overkill. The Southern Water Tribe's Great City is even smaller than one of the city-hills of Omashu. Ten ships would still be overkill. "And they're coming after you because I'm here."

Atka nods. "You... you can't stay, Avatar. The world needs you, and this is our fight. No matter what, we'll survive somehow."

"It's been decided," says Master Kassuq. "I've taught you as much as I can. The time has come for you to begin your earthbending training elsewhere. You mu--"

"NO!"

The scarred master freezes up. "No?"

"No," repeats Aang, clutching Appa's reins with white knuckles. "I wasn't there when the Fire Nation attacked my people. I'm going to make a difference this time. I'm not leaving."

Chief Atka stares at him. "Can you actually make a difference here? Because the world doesn't need a hero. It needs the Avatar."

Aang jumps off Appa. He lands on the ground right before Chief Atka and stares her down.

"...Very well," she says. "Master Kassuq?"

"Madam?"

"It's time we made the Fire Nation pay a price in blood for attacking our people."

"Yes, ma'am!" The one-eyed man glances over and up towards Aang. "HAMA! Round up your squad and meet me at the city gate in five minutes."

"Sir!" Hama hops off of Appa's back. "Good luck, Aang!" she shouts back at him, and then she runs off.

"You there!" Chief Atka says, pointing up at Kanna. "You're that Northerner, yes? The one that's been petitioning to join our militia?"

"Y-yes, Chief Atka."

"What are you waiting for? Get down here and pick up a weapon! You're escorting the civilians to the mountain refuge."

Surer this time, Aang's other friend says, "Yes, Chief Atka!" and jumps to the ground.

"What about me?" asks Sokka, clutching his stomach.

Aang hops back up top and passes Appa's reins to him. "Here! You can help fly children and old people out of the city to the mountains. Just say 'yip yip', okay? Appa will take care of the rest. Won't you, buddy?" He pats the sky-bison's furry head.

"Oh spirits..." groans Sokka.

When they're alone, surrounded by streams of people running about preparing to fight off the invasion, Chief Atka turns to Aang and asks, "What's your plan, Avatar?"

"Dunno." He shrugs and snaps open his glider. "Win, I guess."

* * * *

Part 3