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Peace was never meant to last. Not for the Fire Nation. Not for him, and definitely not for you. Assigned as Zuko's personal bodyguard, you stand at his side day and night, silent, watchful, trusted. But your loyalty was never his to claim.
FireLord!Zuko x Airbender!Reader
Part 8: The Ground and Foundation
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She woke before the light.
That was normal. She always woke before the light - it was a habit so old it had stopped feeling like a habit and started feeling like a fact of herself, like the quietness of her footsteps and the way her mind catalogued without being asked to. She woke before the light and for one long, merciful second she did not know where she was.
That was the first thing. Genuinely, entirely warm in a way she was not accustomed to being - not the warmth of blankets or a well-heated room but something alive and specific and located, a warmth that had a source and a heartbeat. His arm was around her, heavy and certain in the way of someone whose body had made a decision even in sleep, and her face was against his chest and she could feel his heartbeat beneath her ear, slow and steady and completely unaware of anything, and his breath moved the air above her head in the even rhythm of someone who had gone to sleep trusting that the world would be the same when he woke.
The blank mercy of not-yet-knowing stretched a few seconds further than it should have and she let it. Let herself stay in the warmth and the weight of his arm and the slow, certain beat of his heart.
Then the knowing arrived.
All of it, in the order that knowing came: where she was, how she had come to be here, what she was, what she had done, what she had been sent to do, and the distance between those last two things which was no longer a distance she could manage because she had closed it herself last night and there was no reopening it by wanting to.
His heartbeat continued, slow and unaware.
She did not decide to. Her body did it before her mind had finished arriving at the full weight of the morning - curled closer into the warmth of him, her hand finding the fabric of his shirt, her face pressing slightly further into the solid reality of his chest. His arm tightened fractionally in sleep, the unconscious response of someone whose body registered the movement and answered it without waking.
She dressed in the dark with the efficient silence of someone who had done it in worse conditions. She did not look at the bed.
She looked at the bed once.
He was still asleep. In the early dark, with his hair loose and his face turned slightly toward the space she had left, he looked like the version of himself that only existed in the absence of everything he carried - unguarded, uncrowned, the person underneath all of it. He looked like someone who had fallen asleep trusting that things would be the same when he opened his eyes.
She carried her boots to the door and eased it open and went out into the corridor without a sound.
The courtyard at the rear of the rest house was empty and cold, the pre-dawn air salt-edged and clarifying in the way that cold was clarifying when you needed it to be. She sat on the wooden bench against the wall and put her boots on and looked at the strip of sky above the courtyard wall and let herself think.
She thought about her mother first.
Her mother who had turned grief into architecture. Who had built a resistance out of loss and called it purpose and raised her daughter inside it as though purpose and personhood were the same thing, as though Y/N had been born already knowing what she was for. Her mother who loved her - fiercely, genuinely, in the specific way of someone who had lost too much and held what remained with both hands.
She thought about that love and did not doubt it.
She thought about what that love had asked of her and felt the weight of it settle in her chest the way it had always settled, solid and familiar and hers.
Then she thought about him.
She let herself think about him properly, without the management, without the careful filing of things into categories of not yet and professional and irrelevant. She thought about three knocks at midnight that didn't assume welcome. She thought about an amended report and you deserve that much said like it was simple. She thought about his heartbeat under her ear and the warmth of him and the way he had looked at her across the room in Katara's rest house like she was something worth seeing.
He was everything, she thought.
The words arrived plainly and she let them stay because they were true and she was finished with pushing true things away.
He was everything someone would want. Not in the simple way of surface things - though he was that too, the dark hair and the gold eyes and the particular way he occupied a room - but in the ways that were harder to name and harder to find. He listened. He protected without being asked to. He was building a city from the ground up that was designed, from its very foundation, to make room for people who had never been made room for. He was trying, every day, to be something different from what he had been raised to be, and the trying was real, she knew that now with the certainty of someone who had watched it up close for eight months and could no longer pretend she hadn't seen it.
And she had been sent to destroy him.
She sat with both of those things in the cold pre-dawn and felt them clearly and completely and did not look away from either of them.
And then something shifted.
Not dramatically. Not with the weight of a revelation. More like the moment in a long piece of reasoning when the conclusion becomes visible before you've finished arriving at it - the thing you were always going to find at the end of the thinking, waiting there.
She thought about the Air Nomads.
She thought about what Aang had said, in the old garden and on the airship and in the market and in every conversation they had found their way into since the gate at the Fire Nation palace. About carrying something quietly. About the culture belonging to whoever carried it. About the air keeping moving, whatever the obstacle, whatever the shape of the mountain between where you were and where you needed to go.
She thought about the temples. The fragments he was collecting. The architectural details and the old texts and the techniques carved above doorways that he had been piecing together for years with the patient determination of someone who believed that what was broken could be continued even if it could not be restored.
She thought about herself.
About the headband and what was beneath it. About eight months of hiding in a palace and the years before that of hiding in motion, always moving, always careful, always the thing that could not be named out loud in the wrong company. She thought about what it would mean to stop hiding. Not to announce - she understood the distinction Aang had made, the carrying is the thing, not the announcing - but to stop hiding. To follow the thread of what remained of her people toward something that could be continued rather than toward something that ended in violence and ash and the completion of a cycle that had already cost everyone too much.
She thought about the Air Nomads and their philosophy.
They had not been people of revenge. That was not what they had been. They had been people of movement, of peace, of the understanding that force against force was a failure of imagination. She had been raised by people who had survived a genocide and built their survival into a weapon, and she understood why, she had never not understood why, the grief was real and the cause had been legitimate and her mother's love was not in question.
But she was sitting in a courtyard in a port city at the edge of the known world, and she had spent the night in the arms of the man she had been sent to kill, and she did not want to hurt anyone.
She did not want revenge.
She wanted - and this arrived with a clarity that surprised her by its simplicity - she wanted the cycle to end. Not through more destruction. Through the thing Aang was building. Through the thing Zuko was building beside him. Through Republic City and its foundation of room for everyone, and through whatever came after that, and through the quiet ongoing work of carrying something forward rather than burning something down.
She thought about six months.
Six months on this journey, close to him, and whoever her mother sent could not reach him here. She had six months in which no one could touch him, six months in which the summit would pass and the timeline would expire and the network would have to recalibrate, and six months was long enough for things to change. For her to find a way to tell someone the truth. For her to find the language for what she knew and who she was and what she wanted instead.
Six months was a long time.
Six months was enough time to begin.
She breathed in the cold salt air of the morning.
The sky had been making its decision while she sat, the grey resolving slowly and then all at once into the pale, clear light of actual morning, the eastern edge of the strip above the courtyard wall going from grey to gold without announcing the transition. The sea continued its patient movement against the harbour wall. A bird called somewhere above the roofline, once, and was answered.
She sat in the morning light and felt something she did not have a precise name for settle in her chest where the pulling had been.
Not peace - she understood that peace was not yet available to her, that there were things she had to do and truths she had to find the courage for and conversations she was not yet ready to have. Not resolution. Something earlier than those things. The quiet that came before direction. The pause before the current found its way.
She thought: I will protect him.
Not as a mission. Not as an assignment. As a choice, made in a courtyard in the early morning with cold hands and the salt air and the full weight of everything she was carrying and the full knowledge of what she was choosing instead of what she had been given.
I will protect him and I will not harm anyone and I will find a way through this that does not require more destruction.
I will follow the thread of what remains.
It was not simple. It was not clean. There were things on the other side of it that she could not yet see clearly and things she would have to face that she did not yet know how to face and a conversation with her mother that existed somewhere in her future like a wall she had to find the door in.
But the direction was clear.
For the first time in eight months, the direction was clear.
The rest house woke around her in pieces.
She heard it through the courtyard door - Aang's voice first, bright and immediate, the voice of someone who woke up already in motion. Then Katara's, lower and more measured, the two of them falling into the easy rhythm of people who had spent years waking up in difficult places and had made a practice of meeting the day directly. Footsteps. The smell of something being heated in the kitchen below.
She stood from the bench.
Smoothed her clothes. Checked that the headband was in place with the automatic gesture she had been making since before she could remember making it. Rolled her shoulders once, the deliberate settling of herself into the shape the day required.
The main room of the rest house had the organised activity of a group that had learned how to break camp efficiently - packs being checked, provisions sorted, the quiet coordination of people who trusted each other's competence. Aang was rolling something with the focused energy of someone simultaneously doing a thing and thinking about three other things. Katara was checking a supply case with the methodical thoroughness that she brought to everything.
And Zuko was standing near the window.
He looked up when she came in.
For a moment neither of them said anything, and the moment had the particular quality of mornings after - everything in it that had been present the night before, reduced now to the size of a look across a room, carried in the space between two people who had not yet found the language for what they were to each other.
Not the small controlled movement she used in professional settings, not the performance of warmth she had learned to deploy when deployment was required. The real one, which arrived without her permission and stayed without her directing it, warm and unguarded and entirely his.
Something happened in his expression. Something that moved through it like light through a window - a shift, a settling, a kind of warmth that answered hers without needing to be louder than it was.
She looked at the window and breathed and thought: I will give him everything I have. I will protect him. I will care for him. And I will find a way through the rest of it that does not require anyone to be destroyed.
They left the rest house in the bright early morning, the four of them moving through the waking streets of Yanlin toward the dock, the city assembling itself around them in the purposeful way of port cities that did not wait for late risers. She fell into the easy formation they had developed over the days of travel - Aang at the front, Katara beside him, Zuko and herself a step behind.
She was aware of him beside her. She was always aware of him beside her. She had stopped pretending this was purely professional approximately three months into her posting and had simply filed it under things she was managing, and she was done managing it now, done filing it, done pretending the warmth of him was ambient rather than specific and located and hers in a way she had not given anyone else.
"So," he said. Quietly. Just for her.
"Did you sleep well?" The question was simple and was not simple at all, carrying everything it carried in the plainest possible language, his eyes forward and his voice entirely neutral and the corner of his mouth doing the thing it did.
She looked ahead at the street.
He made a sound that was not quite a laugh. Low and warm and entirely his.
The city moved around them, indifferent and continuous. Ahead, Aang had found something interesting in the window of a stall - she could tell by the quality of his pause, the way his whole body oriented toward a thing that caught his attention - and Katara was already steering him gently forward by the shoulder with the practised ease of someone who had been doing this for years.
"I know we have a ship, I'm just-"
He went. Cheerfully, without real resistance, the easy compliance of someone who had chosen good company and trusted it to know where they were going.
Y/N watched them and felt something warm and specific in her chest that was not complicated and not managed and not filed anywhere. Just warmth. Just the simple, clear warmth of being somewhere she had chosen to be, with people she had not expected and could not now imagine being without.
She thought about six months.
She thought about Republic City and what it would be.
She thought about the thread of what remained of her people and the carrying of it and the way forward that was not over the mountain but through the crack in it, the current that existed whether you could see it or not.
She thought: all right then.
Beside her, Zuko's hand brushed hers in the movement of walking. Brief. Barely a contact. She turned her hand slightly and their fingers found each other for one step and then released, both of them looking ahead, both of them aware of it, neither of them saying anything.
She breathed in the morning air.
The dock was busy with the early activity of a port preparing for the day, the particular purposeful noise of things being loaded and lines being cast and people going efficiently about the business of moving things from one place to another. Their airship was where they had left it, the crew completing the morning checks with the calm professionalism of people who understood their job and did it without ceremony.
She supervised the loading of the last provisions with the focused attention she brought to all logistical tasks - weight distribution, access order, the arrangement of things according to how likely they were to be needed and how quickly. It was the kind of work that used her hands and let her mind settle, and she was grateful for it.
She was securing the last case when she became aware of Zuko nearby, his voice shifted into the register he used when official matters required his attention - lower, more precise, the Fire Lord rather than the person who had brushed her fingers in the street. She looked over. One of the crew, with a sheaf of documents requiring his review before they could depart. Navigation permits. Port authority clearances. The administrative reality of a head of state in transit.
He caught her eye over the crew member's shoulder.
She held up the case she had just secured. Done. He nodded, the small precise nod, and turned back to the documents.
She watched him for a moment.
The morning light on his face, his hair down, the focused quality of his attention when something required it - the version of him that was both the Fire Lord and the person she had woken beside, both things simultaneously, the same person in different registers.
She thought about what she had decided in the courtyard.
She thought: six months. Nobody reaches him. And I will find the way through.
She turned back to the loading.
Ahead of her, Aang had already boarded and was visible at the rail, looking out at the city with the open expression of someone taking in everything and finding it worth taking in. Katara was at the ramp, speaking with one of the crew, efficient and warm simultaneously in the way that was entirely her.
Behind her, Zuko's voice continued its careful review of the documents. Patient. Precise. The sound of someone doing the work of what they were even when they would rather be elsewhere.
She thought: I am going to protect him, I am going to figure out the rest.
She picked up the last bag and walked up the ramp into the morning and the ship and the six months ahead of her, and the current moved, and she moved with it, and the mountain was still there, and she was not finished finding the way through.
For the first time, she was genuinely, wholeheartedly looking.
And that, she thought, was the beginning of something.
The peninsula looked like a beginning.
That was the first thing she thought when the airship descended through the cloud cover and the land came into view below - not impressive, not dramatic, not the kind of sight that announced itself with the grandeur of places that knew they were important. Just land. A long arm of it extending into a wide natural harbour, the bay curving around it on three sides in a shape that looked, from altitude, almost deliberate, as though the geography had been considering this use for a very long time and had arranged itself accordingly, patient and unhurried, waiting for the idea to catch up with the place.
The water was the colour of deep slate in the morning light. It moved in the particular way of sheltered bays - less than the open sea but more than stillness, a contained restlessness, the water doing what water did everywhere, which was move and keep moving regardless of what was being decided on the land above it. She had always found something grounding about that. The indifference of water. Its complete commitment to its own nature regardless of circumstance.
There was a camp on the southern edge of the peninsula. She saw it before anyone else commented on it - the cluster of temporary structures, canvas and timber, arranged with the functional efficiency of people who had been here long enough to develop a system. Survey flags dotted the land in precise grids, bright orange against the pale winter grass, marking out the geometry of what was not yet there. The skeleton of an idea. The map of something that didn't exist yet but was going to.
He was at the forward rail, both hands on it, leaning forward slightly the way he did when he was fully present in something. His voice had the particular quality of someone seeing for the first time what they have imagined for a very long time - not surprise, nothing as small as surprise. Something more like recognition. The face of someone arriving somewhere they have always been going.
She looked at the peninsula and thought about cities she had moved through over the course of her life. The trading port where she had spent three weeks at fourteen, learning the particular skill of disappearing into a crowd of people who were all disappearing into the crowd. The mountain settlement that had burned. The Fire Nation capital with its deliberate, overwhelming grandeur and its polished black floors that reflected everything back at you twice, as if once wasn't enough to make the point. The mountain camps of her childhood, functional and temporary and portable, the architecture of people who had not been permitted to stay anywhere long enough to build something permanent.
She thought about a place designed from the foundation up to make room for everyone.
She thought about what it would mean for that place to exist.
She thought: this is where it starts.
The descent took twenty minutes. The temporary dock at the peninsula's southern tip was barely a dock - planks over a stone foundation, enough for the airship's mooring lines, functional rather than finished. The kind of structure that said we will build better when there is time with the particular confidence of people who believed there would be time.
The camp received them with the organised welcome of people who had been informed of the visit and had prepared appropriately without overpreparing. A senior Earth Kingdom surveyor met them at the end of the dock - broad and competent, with the weathered look of someone who spent most of their working life outdoors assessing ground and had made peace with all weather long ago. Two Water Tribe engineers stood slightly behind him, brother and sister by the look of them, with the alert engaged expression of people who had questions they had been saving for this meeting. A small delegation of Fire Nation architects completed the reception, bowing to Zuko with the precision of people performing a formality they had practiced, their eyes moving between him and the plans rolled under their arms with the barely contained impatience of people who wanted to get to work.
She watched all of it from her position - two steps behind and to the left, the professional formation she had maintained for eight months and which now felt less like a discipline and more like a habit, the arrangement of two people who had learned each other's rhythms and settled into them without discussing it.
She was also watching Zuko.
He moved through the welcome with the ease of someone who had done this many times in many contexts - the formal greeting, the appropriate acknowledgments, the precise degree of warmth that communicated genuine respect rather than performed courtesy. He shook hands with the Earth Kingdom surveyor and it was the handshake of two people who had corresponded at length before meeting, who had already built something between them in words and now were confirming it in person. He spoke to the Water Tribe engineers with the specific curiosity of someone who had read their reports and wanted to understand the thinking behind the calculations. He thanked the Fire Nation architects by name, which she noted that he had prepared, had done the work of knowing who would be there before he arrived.
He looked, she thought, like someone who had arrived somewhere he had been going for a long time. The particular quality of a person who has been working toward something through years of planning and disagreement and the slow accumulation of the right conditions, and is now standing in it.
She looked at the peninsula. At the survey flags in their precise grids. At the bay curving around the land in its almost-deliberate shape.
The formal meeting was held in the largest tent. It was large enough for its purpose without being palatial - a working space, maps pinned to boards on three sides, the smell of canvas and cold air and the particular focused quality of a room full of people who had been waiting for this meeting long enough that they were genuinely ready for it. No ceremony beyond what was necessary. The kind of gathering that trusted the work to speak for itself.
She stood at the back, as she always did in official settings, with the wall behind her and the full room visible ahead. It was the position she had chosen on her first day at the Fire Nation palace and had never varied from, the position that gave her the complete picture - every face, every door, every shift in the room's attention.
She used it now for its stated purpose and also for the other thing, which was watching him.
The meeting had the quality of something that had been in preparation for years finally arriving at its own reality. Zuko and Aang presented the framework together, and she had not seen them work in this particular tandem before - the formal version of the easy partnership she had watched develop over the weeks of the journey. They were different in the presenting of it, differently suited to different parts of the argument, and between them they covered everything. Aang expansive, moving his hands in the unconscious illustration of someone who thought in movement, speaking about the philosophy and the purpose and the what-it-was-for with the genuine conviction of someone who had been thinking about this since before he fully understood what thinking was. Zuko precise and specific, the practical architecture of governance and the structures of law that would make the philosophy liveable, the things that had to be true on paper before they could be true in stone.
Together they were complete. She had the thought and filed it in the place she was no longer calling the locked place.
She watched the faces around the table as the presentation progressed. The surveyor's contained professional approval, the particular expression of someone who recognises that a plan has been properly thought through. The Water Tribe engineers leaning forward with the specific energy of people who were already solving problems in their heads, already three steps ahead of the presentation into the practical implications. The Fire Nation architects exchanging glances that she read, after a career spent reading rooms, as cautious optimism - the look of people who had been asked to do something difficult and were beginning to believe it might actually work.
The concentrated authority of him in this setting was different from the authority he wore at the Fire Nation palace. There, it had the quality of something inherited, something that had been given to him and that he was working to be worthy of. Here it was something else - something earned, something that came from knowing exactly what he believed and putting it forward with the directness of someone who trusted that the belief was sound. Not performing confidence. Simply having it.
She thought about what he had said in the study, at the window, with the Fire Nation spread below them and his hand warm at the edge of hers on the sill.
I want it to be a place where someone like you doesn't have to brace for it.
She stood at the back of the tent and breathed and kept her face entirely still and felt the warmth of that remembered moment move through her chest and settle somewhere she had designated for things she intended to keep.
The formal confirmation came at the end of the meeting. Signed by the representatives of all parties present, the Earth Kingdom surveyor pressing his seal into wax with the gravity of someone who understood that what he was doing would outlast him. Republic City was confirmed. The building would begin in earnest, in the spring, with the full resources of three nations behind it.
Afterward, outside the tent, Aang did something that might technically have been described as a victory lap on Appa. It covered a significant amount of the survey grid and earned an extended and increasingly specific protest from the surveyor about disturbed markers, which Aang received with complete cheerfulness and genuine apology and, she noted, absolutely no alteration of course.
She stood at the edge of the survey site and watched.
The wind off the bay was cold and smelled of salt and open water. The survey flags moved in it, the bright orange of them catching the afternoon light and throwing it back in small, insistent flashes. The camp noise continued behind her - the practical sounds of a working settlement, voices and tools and the particular rhythm of people who had a task and were doing it.
Zuko appeared beside her.
Not officially - he had finished with the architects and the formal requirements and was now simply standing at the edge of the land they were going to build something on, his coat open in the bay wind, his hair moving in it in the way she had become accustomed to over the weeks of the journey and had entirely failed to become indifferent to.
He looked out at the bay. At the water moving in its sheltered, contained way, the light on it shifting as the afternoon progressed. At the survey flags dotting the land in their precise grids, each one marking a decision about what this place was going to be.
"It's smaller than I imagined," he said.
She looked at the peninsula, at the raw land and the pale grass and the geometry of possibility mapped out in orange flags. "It'll be larger when it's finished."
"That's generally how building works."
He glanced at her. The corner of his mouth moved, the small involuntary expression she had catalogued months ago and kept returning to against her better judgment. She looked at the bay.
They stood there for a long moment, the cold wind coming off the water and the camp noise behind them and the enormous fact of what had just been confirmed settling around them like weather - like something that had arrived and intended to stay.
"Thank you," he said. Quietly. In the register he used when he meant something completely.
"For coming," he said. "For all of it."
She held his gaze for a moment. Thought about Yanlin. About the courtyard bench in the cold pre-dawn, and the strip of sky going from grey to gold, and the direction that had become clear while she sat with cold hands and the weight of everything she was carrying and the salt air coming off the harbour.
"I'm exactly where I want to be," she said.
He looked at her with the expression that had a name she used privately now without hesitation.
She looked back at him with something that answered it.
Appa made a sound in the middle distance that suggested Aang had proposed something and was receiving a considered response.
They turned back to the camp.
The first month was framework.
Not the framework of the city - that came later, built slowly in the patient way of things that were going to last. The framework of the life inside the building of it. The rhythms that assembled themselves without being planned, the kind that emerged from a small community of people doing difficult work in close proximity: who woke earliest and who needed two cups of tea before they were functional and who disappeared into focused silence when they were solving a problem and who talked while they worked and who preferred to work in quiet.
She woke earliest. That had always been true and remained true regardless of where she was or what the circumstances were - it was a fact of herself as settled as the quietness of her footsteps. She had the first hour of the day to herself, the pre-dawn hour, which she used for the same things she had always used it for: movement, attention, the careful survey of a space she was coming to know the way she knew all spaces she stayed in, which was completely and from every angle and in every light.
The peninsula in the pre-dawn was a different place from the peninsula in daylight. The camp sounds reduced to the minimum of those with overnight duties, yes, but more than that - the quality of the light at that hour changed everything. She had noticed it first in the mountain passes of her childhood, the particular clarity of the world before it committed to the day, when the shapes of things were precise and unambiguous against the pale sky and the air had the quality of something not yet breathed by very many people. She found it here too. The bay going from black to dark grey to the particular colour that preceded colour. The survey flags just visible in the dimness. The civic building's pale stone foundations, already higher by the third week, accumulating slowly and then all at once.
She walked the survey grids in the pre-dawn, methodically and completely, until the geography of the peninsula was as internal as her own breathing. The high ground to the north where the civic buildings were planned, the view from there taking in the full curve of the bay and the open water beyond. The lower eastern district where the Water Tribe engineers were designing around the natural water channels that ran through the land, incorporating rather than ignoring, which she thought was the right instinct. The harbour front where the first commercial structures would go, designed deliberately to face outward, toward the arriving world rather than turned inward toward itself.
She noticed, in the first week, that the foundation surveys for the central plaza had an error in the northeastern corner. The markers were off by approximately two feet, which was invisible at the planning stage and would be catastrophic at the construction stage - the kind of error that announced itself three years into the building of something when correcting it required undoing a significant amount of work.
She mentioned it to the Earth Kingdom surveyor.
He checked. She was right. He corrected it with the professional equanimity of someone who had been doing this long enough to understand that errors caught early were not failures but simply processes - the ordinary work of building something that had to be right.
After that he started bringing the surveys to her in the pre-dawn before he finalised them.
She did not have an official role in the construction. She was here as personal guard, as security, as the professional perimeter around a head of state on an extended working visit to a project site. She did that job thoroughly - maintained the perimeter, assessed the threat profile of each new arrival to the camp with the attention she brought to everything, knew where the exits were and what the rotation schedule looked like and which of the construction crew had histories worth additional monitoring.
She also, in the margins of all that, helped build a city.
It happened the way things happened when you were good at something and the right people noticed - gradually and then suddenly, the accumulation of small useful things becoming a pattern becoming an assumption. The structural problem in the northeastern corner became a conversation with the lead architect about the load-bearing calculations for the plaza fountain, which became her presence at the next planning session, which became the construction foreman coming to find her when something didn't look right in the eastern residential section, which became - quietly, without anyone sitting down and deciding it - her being part of the thing.
She found she did not mind.
She found, more precisely and with some surprise, that she minded the opposite. That she woke in the pre-dawn and walked the survey grids and planned the day's work with the specific engagement of someone doing something that genuinely mattered to them. She had not had access to that feeling in a very long time. She had not been sure she still had access to it. She was glad, in the quiet way she was glad about things she had not expected, to discover that she did.
She had not seen him work in this particular way before - not the administrative work of the palace, the meetings and the reports and the careful management of a nation's machinery, which he did with competence and which she had watched him do with the specific attention of someone cataloguing a target and then with the different specific attention of someone who had stopped cataloguing and started watching. This was different. The physical work of making something. The presence required by a thing that was actually being built rather than managed.
He did not do the heavy labour - he was not a construction worker and did not pretend to be, and no one expected him to be - but he was present in the way that mattered, which was completely. He learned the names of every worker in the first two weeks and used them consistently, which she noted because it was the kind of thing that was easy not to do and he did it anyway. He asked questions that were genuine rather than performative, the questions of someone who wanted to understand the problem rather than appear to understand it. When difficulties arose he engaged with them directly rather than delegating engagement downward. When decisions had to be made he made them with the specific quality of someone who had done enough thinking to trust their own judgment and did not need to perform certainty by making it louder than it was.
She watched him in this setting and thought about the word real that she had used in Yanlin, in the small room at the rest house, holding her tea in the late dark.
He was real here in a way that was different from the palace. Less layered. The formal registers fewer and further between. This was the version of him that had knocked three times at midnight and amended reports and said you deserve that much like it was a simple thing - but expanded, given room and context and the particular freedom of being somewhere that had not yet decided what it was, which meant no one had yet decided what he had to be in it.
She watched him cross the construction site one morning, stopping to speak with one of the Water Tribe engineers over a set of plans, the wind in his hair and his sleeves rolled up in the practical way she had come to associate with days when he was going to be useful rather than official, and thought: I would have known him anyway.
Meaning: even without the mission, without the eight months of deliberate proximity. Even if she had simply encountered him somewhere as a person - at a market stall, on a road, in a room that neither of them owned. She would have known him. The recognition would have been the same. She was certain of that in the particular way she was certain of things that had been true for long enough to feel inevitable.
She stored that thought in the place she was no longer calling the locked place, because she had unlocked it, and she was not going to lock things again.
The evenings were theirs.
Not officially - they had not announced anything, had not named anything, and she was not certain either of them was ready for the naming even if the thing itself had been entirely real for longer than she could now pretend otherwise. But the informal geography of the camp had developed in the way small communities always developed their social maps, without planning, by accumulation - and in this map it had become simply understood that when the day's work was done and the meal was finished and Aang had reached the natural end of whatever had been absorbing him and Katara had retired with the book she was always reading, Zuko and Y/N were where the other one was.
Sometimes they talked. Sometimes they didn't. She had come to value the second kind as much as the first, which told her something about the quality of the thing between them - that it did not require filling, that the silence was its own kind of presence rather than the absence of one.
She told him things, incrementally, in the way she told true things. Sideways at first, approaching from angles that felt manageable, and then more directly as the telling became less frightening, as she discovered that the things she said to him did not get used for anything other than being received. About the mountains. About the specific quality of childhood spent in constant movement, the camp-to-camp rhythm of people who had not been permitted to stay anywhere long enough to call it home in the conventional sense. About Dov, who had taught her the geometry of fighting rather than the force of it. About Sera, with her three-fingered hand and her patient instruction, who had given her the wooden knife and said: the knife doesn't do anything. You do everything.
He listened the way he listened, which was completely, without the restlessness of someone waiting for their turn to speak or the performance of someone demonstrating that they were paying attention. He just listened. She had not had that before, not in this way, not from someone who had no professional requirement to do so.
He told her things in return. About the years of banishment, which she had read as a series of documented failures in intelligence reports and which she understood now, from the inside of his telling of it, as something entirely different - not a catalogue of failures but a specific and irreversible education in what mattered and what didn't, conducted in the hardest possible conditions. About his uncle Iroh, who was the reason he could sit here and be who he was trying to be, and whom he missed with the particular grief of someone who has been loved well by a person and knows exactly what that cost them and is trying to be worth it.
About his father, which was the hardest, which he said the least about, which she received without pressing because she understood that some things were not yet ready for language and forcing them into it only made them smaller than they were.
She thought, sitting with him in the evenings, about her mother. About the letter she had not yet written. About the summit that had passed six weeks into the journey, expiring quietly while she was here, and the network recalibrating somewhere she could not see, and the conversation that was waiting for her somewhere in her future like a wall she had to find the door in.
She sat in the evenings and talked and did not talk and felt the warmth of him and the growing, solid, undeniable reality of something between them that was not professional and not managed and was not going anywhere.
Katara left at the end of the second month.
She had her own work and her own places to be and the ongoing full life of a person who was needed in many directions simultaneously. She embraced Aang with the warmth of two people who did not need to make goodbyes long because they trusted absolutely that they would meet again. She and Zuko had the particular farewell of people with a long and complicated shared history - brief and genuine, carrying everything that history contained without needing to list it.
Y/N had not been hugged by anyone in - she tried to identify the last time and could not, which was its own kind of information. She stood in it for a moment, and then she returned it, her arms around Katara's shoulders, the clean cold smell of her, the warmth of someone who gave physical affection the same way she gave everything else, which was completely and without reservation.
"Take care of him," Katara said. Just for her. The voice of someone who trusted the person they were speaking to.
Katara pulled back and looked at her with the warm, direct gaze that Y/N had come to understand was simply how Katara looked at people she had decided to take seriously. "And yourself," she said. "Both things. Not one at the expense of the other."
Katara held her gaze for one more moment. The look of someone who sees something and has decided they are at peace with what they see.
Then she left, and the camp was three instead of four, and Y/N noted the absence with the surprised clarity of someone who had not expected to notice.
The third month was when the city started to look like a city.
Not finished - not remotely close to finished, the nature of building something of this scale was that it proceeded in the patient, incremental way of things that were going to last, each day's progress invisible against the whole until suddenly you looked up and it was there. But the bones of it were becoming visible. The first permanent structures rising from their foundations: the administrative building at the centre of the civic district, two stories of pale stone that caught the morning light in the specific way of new stone, clean and unweathered, throwing the light back cleanly before time softened it. The beginnings of the first residential blocks to the east, their outlines established. The harbour front taking shape, the planned promenade a line of timber framing now that would become stone when the quarry shipments arrived from the south.
She stood at the edge of the civic plaza one morning in the pre-dawn, in the hour that was hers, and looked at what was there.
Behind her, Republic City was being built one stone at a time, in the patient and irreversible way of things that had found their direction and were following it.
She thought about everything she was carrying.
She thought about the letter. About her mother. About the wall she had to find the door in.
She breathed the cold pre-dawn air.
She heard her before she saw her.
This was, she would later understand, entirely characteristic of Toph Bei Fong, who announced herself through the quality of the ground rather than through any conventional signal - the particular vibration of someone who moved through the world with the specific, unself-conscious confidence of a person who had never once in their life doubted their right to take up as much space as they required.
The camp became aware of the arrival in pieces. First a distant rumble that the construction workers initially took for geological activity, before the more experienced among them revised this assessment. Then the quality of the camp's collective attention shifting, the particular alertness of people who could feel through their feet that something was approaching and that it had opinions.
Y/N was on the northern high ground, reviewing the civic building's second-floor framework with the construction foreman, when she felt the change in the air - the specific quality she had learned to identify as the precursor to something that would require her professional assessment. She looked south.
A column of dust was moving across the peninsula with a speed that had nothing to do with wind. It resolved, as it approached the camp's boundary, into a figure standing on a moving disc of compressed earth, arms loose at her sides, entirely relaxed at a velocity that should by rights have required some form of active effort.
The disc slowed at the camp's edge and deposited its rider with the abrupt, efficient landing of someone who had done this enough times to have eliminated all unnecessary motion from it.
Toph Beifong was not tall. This was the first thing you noticed about her, and the last thing that ended up mattering. She was broad-shouldered and solid, dressed in Earth Kingdom green that had clearly been chosen for durability rather than appearance, her hair pulled up in a way that suggested it had been arranged approximately once and had not been reconsidered since as a matter of principle. She was blind - Y/N knew this from Zuko's accounts of their time together - and she oriented herself through what was clearly a comprehensive seismic awareness of everything in her immediate vicinity, her feet planted flat on the ground with the attentiveness of someone reading a very detailed page.
She carried herself with the specific posture of someone who had never once been in a room they felt smaller than. It was not arrogance - or not exactly arrogance - it was something more fundamental than that. The complete, unperformed certainty of someone who had decided very early that the world was manageable and had not found significant evidence to revise that conclusion.
Her sightless face turned toward the camp.
Then she grinned, broad and unguarded, and said: "Somebody want to tell Twinkle Toes I'm here?"
To no one in particular. To everyone in general. The voice of someone who had never needed to project and did it anyway purely because they preferred it.
Aang appeared from the direction of the harbour front as though summoned, which in some seismic sense he probably had been. "Toph!" The genuine, full-bodied delight of a person who had missed someone and was not performing missing them.
"Took you long enough," she said, already crossing toward him, and the embrace they exchanged had the specific quality of people who had been through genuinely dangerous situations together and had arrived, on the far side of all of it, at something permanent and uncomplicated.
Y/N watched from the northern high ground.
She watched Toph pull back from the embrace and tilt her face upward in the orientation toward sound that Y/N had already identified as her version of looking - comprehensive, attentive, reading the camp through the seismic information her feet were continuously receiving and processing. The sightless regard moved across the camp in sweeping arcs, cataloguing.
It paused when it reached Y/N.
There was something specific about being on the receiving end of that regard. Something more thorough than most sighted people managed, actually - as though whatever information Toph received from the ground was more detailed than what eyes generally delivered. Y/N did not know what she read: heartbeat, presumably, the specific weight and distribution of a person, the vibration that was individual to each body. Whatever it was, Toph's expression during the moment of orientation held the look of someone filing something away with care.
Then she turned back to Aang.
"Where's Zuko?" she said. "I can tell his hair is different. Someone in this camp is very aware of it. It's practically radiating."
Y/N looked at the civic building's second-floor framework.
Beside her the foreman was watching Toph's arrival with the expression of someone rapidly revising their expectations for the remainder of the day.
He looked back at the framework.
Toph had been in the camp for four hours when Y/N revised her initial assessment from significant presence to force of nature with opinions about everything and everyone, delivered without pause for consideration of reception.
She moved through the construction site with the ease of someone who had memorised its layout in the first thirty seconds - knowing precisely where every tent stake was and every foundation trench and every person's specific weight and gait, reading the ground continuously the way other people read the room. She spoke to the construction workers with the bluntness of someone who had decided that directness was a form of respect and had committed to it entirely and without exception. She was funny, in the specific way of people who were not trying to be funny but simply had a very accurate perception of how things were and said so without the usual social softening.
Within two hours of arrival she had identified three structural problems in the harbour district that the engineers had missed. She announced these without ceremony, gave each a brief and accurate description, and then sat down on the relevant foundations and earthbent the corrections before the engineers had finished processing the existence of the problems, let alone begun discussing how to address them.
The construction foreman, who had approached the arrival with the wariness of someone encountering an unknown and potentially destabilising variable, was by the end of the afternoon watching Toph with the unconcealed professional admiration of someone recognising superior competence and making their peace with it gracefully.
Y/N watched all of this from wherever her work took her through the day and thought, with the dispassionate accuracy she applied to competence wherever she encountered it: she's extraordinary.
She had thought the same thing about Katara. She meant it about Toph in the same way - cleanly, factually, without complications. Toph was extraordinary. The evidence for this was extensive and continued to accumulate throughout the afternoon.
She was also, Y/N noted with the professional attention she applied to changes in a person's behaviour around a specific individual, tracking Zuko.
Not visually - the tracking was seismic, continuous, available to her in a way that visual attention was not. But Toph's orientation toward him had a specific quality that went beyond general spatial awareness of a camp's occupants. She knew where he was at all times. She moved into his vicinity with a frequency that the afternoon's data did not support as coincidental. She had said four things directly to him since arriving, each of which had produced a specific response she appeared to find satisfying:
"You look different. Less miserable. It's a significant improvement."
"Your posture is better. Did someone work on that with you or did you figure it out yourself?"
"You're doing that thing where you make a decision look easier than it is to seem more confident. Stop it. It's the opposite of convincing."
And, most recently, standing beside him at the harbour front surveying the eastern section: "Your heartbeat does a thing when you're actually pleased about something versus when you're professionally pleased about something. You're actually pleased right now. It's good. You should be."
Zuko had received all of this with the specific quality of someone who had known this person long enough to understand that the bluntness was not hostility but its own form of intimacy - the language of someone who had decided, somewhere in the years of knowing him, that he didn't require the softening that she extended to very few people and that not extending it was itself a form of trust.
He had laughed at the posture one. The real laugh.
Y/N had been across the site when it happened and had heard it and had looked at the load-bearing calculations she was holding and applied her attention to them with renewed focus.
The evening meal had the informal warmth of a working community at the end of a long and productive day - people settling into positions that had by now become habitual, the noise level finding its natural comfortable volume, the particular quality of shared exhaustion that was not unpleasant, that had the texture of a day well used.
Toph had seated herself next to Zuko with the complete absence of consideration for whether this required negotiation, in the way she apparently did everything - without asking and without appearing to notice that the question existed.
Y/N sat across from them, between Aang and one of the Water Tribe engineers, and ate her meal and participated in the conversation with the appropriate portion of her attention while another portion of her attention was doing something she was not going to acknowledge by naming.
"The foundation work on the north plaza is solid," Toph was saying, eating with the efficient focus of someone who had expended significant physical energy and was replacing it without ceremony. "Better than I expected. The northeastern corner had a recent correction - within the last month." She tilted her head in a direction that was approximately Y/N's direction, the sightless regard with its specific quality of knowing more than it should. "Good catch, whoever did that."
"Y/N noticed it," Aang said. With the tone of someone stating something he found entirely unsurprising.
Toph's orientation shifted. Settled on Y/N across the table with the attentiveness she brought to things she was interested in.
Toph turned back to Zuko. "The harbour eastern section needs reinforcement before the next foundation pour. I'll do it tomorrow morning."
"The engineers have it in their schedule for-"
"I'll do it tomorrow morning," she said again, without altering her tone. "Their schedule accounts for conventional methods. My method takes four minutes and doesn't require a seventy-two hour curing period."
Zuko looked at her with the expression of someone who had learned, through considerable experience, when the argument was not worth having. "Fine."
"Obviously fine." She took bread from the central plate without looking, which she never needed to do. "Also your tea is getting cold again. You do this every single time and then you make a face about it."
"Zuko." She tilted her head toward him with the patient tone of someone explaining something to a person who already knows it. "I can feel your face. You definitely make a face."
Across the table, Aang was engaged in what appeared to be an earnest conversation with the bread in his hands, his expression suggesting that he had absolutely no opinion about anything currently happening.
Toph's expression shifted - not the grin she used for impact, something quieter, the expression of someone who is genuinely fond of a person and has no language for saying so that they find acceptable, and so expresses it in other ways. She settled her elbow against his on the bench in the easy, unstudied way of someone who occupied physical space near people she liked without making a calculation of it.
Y/N looked at the construction plans she had brought to dinner.
She looked at them with the concentrated attention of someone who was genuinely reviewing structural calculations and not using them as an object to look at instead of the thing she was not looking at across the table, which was Toph's elbow against Zuko's arm and the comfortable, unself-conscious ease of two people who had a long physical history of existing in close proximity.
He's not doing anything, she told herself, with the precise internal tone of someone being scrupulously fair. This is how they are. This is how she is with everyone she's comfortable with. It means nothing beyond what it is.
It was also true that Toph was extraordinary and genuinely funny and completely without pretension and had known him through years of things Y/N had only read about in reports, and that she moved through the world with a confidence that had no performance in it anywhere, and that her elbow was against his arm and he had not moved away, and Y/N was feeling something that she was committed to honesty about, including honesty with herself, and the honest description of what she was feeling was something in the general territory of mine with an intensity that surprised her by arriving so fully formed.
"You're doing the face," Toph said.
There was a pause around the table.
Y/N looked up from the plans.
Toph was not oriented toward Zuko. She was oriented toward Y/N. Her sightless face tilted in Y/N's direction with the specific attentiveness of someone receiving information they find interesting.
"I'm reviewing plans," Y/N said. Evenly. Completely evenly.
"Mm," said Toph. In the particular tone of someone who has received a significant quantity of data and is making a selection about which portion to comment on, and has selected: none of it, for now.
Aang appeared to find something in the middle distance worth looking at.
Zuko looked at Y/N across the table. She looked at the plans.
"The eastern section needs an additional twelve inches of reinforcement at the base," she said, to the plans, to the general principle of having a professional thing to contribute. "I noted it this morning. Toph is right about the timing."
"Obviously," Toph said. Without emphasis. She picked up her cup and drank from it, her elbow remaining precisely where it was.
She finished it with the focused efficiency of someone who had somewhere to be, excused herself from the table with the appropriate brevity, and walked out of the common area into the cold evening air of the peninsula.
The northern high ground was quiet.
She stood at the edge of it with the camp behind her and the bay below, dark now, the water moving in its patient way, the survey markers catching what light filtered from the camp and throwing it back in small pale gleams. The civic building's pale stone was silver in the dark, two stories of permanent structure rising from the ground that three months ago had been survey flags and intention.
She stood and looked at it and breathed the cold air and did the thing she had committed to in a courtyard in a port city that smelled of salt - she acknowledged what she was feeling without managing it, without filing it, without directing it into a category and closing the drawer.
She was feeling something that had no clean name but that occupied the general territory of this is mine, do not, I found him first and which was entirely irrational because Toph's elbow against his arm was not a declaration of anything except the ease of old friendship, and she was a person who had committed to the ending of destructive cycles and the carrying of things forward rather than the burning of them down, and jealousy was not compatible with the version of herself she was choosing to be.
She was also a person who had woken in his arms in a rest house in a port city and made a decision in the courtyard after and meant it completely.
Both of those things were true simultaneously.
She heard footsteps behind her.
She knew before she turned. She always knew before she turned, with him - some quality of the ambient warmth shifting, some change in the air that she had catalogued months ago under professionally irrelevant and had long since stopped pretending was irrelevant.
He came to stand beside her at the edge of the high ground, looking out at the bay, at the dark water and the survey markers and the pale stone of the growing city.
He was quiet for a moment. She let the quiet be what it was.
"Extraordinary," she said. Simply. Because it was true, and she was done with the complicated versions of true things.
"She is," he agreed. A pause. "She's also-" He stopped. Tried a different approach. "She's been my friend for a long time. Through things I don't talk about easily." He looked at the bay. "She doesn't soften things for people she respects. That's - I know it can seem like a lot, if you don't know her."
"I know," she said again. More quietly.
A silence, different in quality from the ones before it.
She turned to look at him.
He was already looking at her. In the dark, with the camp light behind him and the bay before them and his hair moving in the cold wind off the water, he was the version of himself that existed only when the formal layers were somewhere else - open, direct, the expression with the name she had stopped pretending she didn't know.
"She's my friend," he said. "That's what she is." He held her gaze steadily. "I know what you are. If that's what you're wondering."
She had been wondering that. She had been wondering it with considerable thoroughness for the past several hours while staring at construction plans and her dinner and the middle distance and anything that was not the easy proximity across the table.
"And what am I?" she said.
He looked at her for a long moment. The expression steady and direct and underneath it the thing she had stopped trying not to see, the thing that had been building since a balcony and a locked door and three knocks at midnight and a window over the Fire Nation with the warmth of his hand at the edge of hers.
Simply. The way he said things he meant entirely - without the architecture of a declaration, without performance, just the word placed between them and left there for what it was.
The bay moved below them.
The city rose in pale stone behind them, permanent and patient, one stone at a time.
She reached out and found his hand in the dark and held it. Felt him hold hers back immediately, without hesitation, with the certainty of someone who had been ready for this and was not going to pretend otherwise.
They stood there together in the cold evening air of the peninsula that was becoming something, looking out at the water, and she breathed and felt the warmth of him against her side and thought about everything she was carrying and everything she had chosen and the conversation with her mother that was coming and the truth she still owed him.
"She's going to be insufferable about the foundation work tomorrow," she said.
He made the sound that was not quite a laugh, low and warm. "She's insufferable about everything. It's genuinely one of her best qualities."
"That is a very specific definition of best."
"I've had years to arrive at it."
She stood in the dark with his hand in hers and the city behind them and the bay before them and the cold air coming off the water, and felt the warmth of him specific and located and entirely, uncomplicatedly hers, and thought:
Soon I will say the true things and it will cost me and I will pay it.
She stayed where she was.
In the camp behind them, Toph sat on the edge of a foundation trench with her feet flat on the ground and her face tilted slightly toward the northern high ground where two heartbeats were close together and steady in the specific rhythm of people who were exactly where they wanted to be.
She had known approximately four minutes after arriving. That was how long it had taken the seismic picture to assemble itself fully - the way certain frequencies changed in certain proximity, the way a person's heartbeat had a different quality around someone it had decided on.
She was not going to say anything about it.
That was not how she operated. She operated by being entirely and completely present in the vicinity of people she cared about and letting that be its own kind of statement, and by being insufferable about foundation work, and by elbowing people in the arm at dinner.
But she was also going to keep her feet on the ground and her attention on the one with the careful heartbeat and the headband and the quality of stillness that Toph recognised - in the way she recognised things that the ground told her, which was without doubt and without the need for confirmation - as the stillness of someone carrying something large.
She did not know what it was.
And when she did, she was going to have some opinions about it.
She generally did about most things.
