#korerambles

"Tui and La, your moon and ocean, have always circled each other in an eternal dance. They balance each other. Push and Pull. Life and Death. Good and Evil. Yin and Yang".

I. The First and the Last

In the beginning, there was the push and the pull, and neither had a name for the other because names were a mortal invention, and they had existed before mortals.

The Moon moved first.

She always moved first. This was not hierarchy but nature. It was the specific truth of a thing that could not help circling, that had been circling since before the water below her had learned what it was. She did not think of it as leaving. It was simply the shape of what she was.

The Ocean rose to meet her. This, too, was simply his way of existing—his identity found in rising to meet her, as surely as the tide responds to the moon.

Their dance had no beginning and would have no end. It was the endless negotiation of distance, the only language available to things too large for proximity. He pulled. She turned. He followed her turning. She moved further, which was not cruelty but the nature of orbit. It was the specific grammar of a relationship conducted in celestial mechanics, not words.

"You know I'll always find you, right?" La said, and his voice was the sound the deep water made when it moved against stone in the dark; not loud, simply present, simply certain.

Tui laughed. It sounded like light on water, the brightness that arrived at the sea's surface when the moon was full, and the world below went silver. "I don't doubt it. Though I do doubt you’ll catch me."

She moved away. He followed. This had been true since before there was an ocean to cross, and would be true after the ocean was something else entirely, and neither of them had ever once found it worth discussing.

“I’ll always try.”

The push and the pull. The first argument. The only one that mattered.

II. The Mountain and the Valley

Two villages in the mountains. Between them, the war that had been running since their grandparents were children and would run, they had been told, until their grandchildren were old.

They had decided not to wait that long.

"This is impossible," Oma said.

She was standing at the tunnel entrance—the one they had made between worlds. It was carved not by pick or shovel, but by the specific determination of two people. They had decided the war between their families was not their war, and the dark between mountains was better than daylight that made them enemies. The stone smelled like rain, deep earth, and the cold of places the sun had never reached.

"This is impossible," she said again. "Everyone will see us."

"Only if you keep arguing about it at the entrance."

"I'm not — " She exhaled through her nose. "Shu. I'm serious. If my father finds out. If your father finds out. If anyone from either village sees us on the road tonight — "

"Then we will not be on the road," Shu said, with the absolute patience of someone who had decided what mattered and was done performing uncertainty about it. "We will be in the tunnel. Which is why we made the tunnel."

"You made it sound so simple."

"It is simple. It’s the rest of it that's complicated." He held out his hand. "Come further. With me."

She looked at his hand. Then, at the dark beyond it, the earth they had moved together, season by season, lesson by lesson. Her earthbending and his, hours spent in secret, teaching each other what their villages had taught separately, as though knowledge could be kept on one side of a mountain. She thought of her father's voice. She thought of the word 'enemy,' how long she had heard it used for the person in front of her, and how completely wrong it had always been.

"You're impossible," she said.

"You said that already. You came anyway."

She took his hand. Then, because she had always been the better earthbender and had never let him pretend otherwise, she pulled him into the dark first and sealed the entrance behind them. Stone moved smoothly at her direction. The mountain closed its mouth around their secret.

They walked. The tunnel was long, lightless, and entirely theirs. It was the only place in the world that belonged to neither village and therefore, by some logic she had worked out while building it, to both of them.

At the far end, where the tunnel opened onto the valley neither village claimed, she stopped.

The night outside was very large. The road that led away from the mountains was pale in the moonlight, running south toward cities neither of them had seen, toward a world that did not know their fathers' names or their fathers' quarrel.

"Oma," Shu said.

She turned.

He kissed her there at the tunnel's mouth, the threshold between the mountain's dark and the night's open. She let him and kissed him back, with the force of someone who had waited for the moment when there was nothing left to lose. She found, now that it had arrived, that it felt less like loss and more like the first full breath after a long time underwater.

When they pulled back, she did not look at the mountain behind them.

"You know I'll find you," she said. "Wherever we end up. I always do."

"I don't doubt it," he said, and took her hand. They stepped out of the tunnel together into the moon-pale road and did not look back. The mountain held its silence around the space where they had been. The war above them continued without them. They were already gone.

III. The Blue and the Crimson

There is a version of this story in which she was never supposed to be here.

In the oldest tellings, the spirit court had not wanted her. She was too recently human, too warm, too likely to interfere. Rua had stood before them and said: She is one of us now. His word made it true. She had not forgotten this. Neither had he. That memory was its own kind of tension.

Ren found him at the river. She always found him at the river, which she suspected was not a coincidence.

"You moved the fishing nets again," she said.

"The family upstream was starving."

"There are protocols — "

"The protocols," Rua said, without heat, "were written by spirits who have not been hungry in ten thousand years or more and who confuse procedure with wisdom."

Ren was quiet for a moment. The river moved past them both, indifferent to the argument, which was not new. It was, in fact, the argument. It was the one they had been having since she arrived in the spirit court, still warm from her human life. She still carried the knowledge of what it meant to need something and have no recourse.

She had not lost that knowledge. She suspected she never would. She also suspected this was why Rua had vouched for her. She had not yet decided how she felt about being completely understood by someone before she understood it herself.

"They don't remember you," she said. Not cruelty — inventory. "The coastal villages haven't spoken your name in three generations. You intervene for people who have no idea you exist."

"I know."

"It doesn't trouble you."

"Why would it?" He was watching the water rather than her, as he often did when he was about to say something he considered obvious. "Remembrance is for the remembered. The nets needed moving. I moved them."

She glanced at him, "And when the court finds out — "

"They will find out," he agreed. "They always do. And they will convene, and they will deliberate, and by the time they have finished deliberating, the family will have eaten and the season will have turned, and the question will be moot." A pause. "I have found this to be an effective strategy. Ask forgiveness later if even that."

Ren looked at him—the mask pushed up on his face the way he wore it when he thought no one would see him. The court had accepted his dual nature but never fully welcomed it. She thought of the session where he named her before the spirits, certain he was not asking permission.

She thought: you have been doing this a long time. Finding the ones who fall through the cracks in the protocols and catching them before the court finishes its deliberations.

She thought: I was one of those once. Before you stood up.

"You are interfering," she said, "with the trials and tribulations of man. It is confusing. They don't remember you."

Rua was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice carried the register she had come to know as the one beneath the rough surface — not soft exactly, but honest in the way of deep water, which did not perform its depth but simply had it. "True. But they are mere humans." He glanced at her, brief and direct. "Remembrance or not, they are interesting."

"Interesting," she repeated.

"There is a girl on the eastern bank," he said, "who has been carrying water to her grandmother every morning for six months despite the ford being impassable since the autumn floods. She has not asked anyone for help. She has not prayed to anything. She has simply kept going." He looked back at the river. "I find that interesting. I find it worth a move net."

Ren stood with this for a while.

The river did not care. The night above them did not care. She had learned, months since entering this existence, that indifference was not the world's default. It was simply the condition of things too large or too old to attend to specific nets, girls, and six-month fords. The oldest spirits had mistaken age for wisdom and called it protocol.

Rua had been here long enough to know better. She was new enough to remember why it mattered.

"Next time," she said, "tell me first."

He looked at her.

"I was a healer," she said, simply. "Fire Nation, river town, twenty-three years of knowing what this water carries and what it withholds. I can do more than move a net." She paused. "If you tell me."

Something shifted in his expression;  not quite surprise, but the specific quality of a person recalibrating an expectation they had held so long they had stopped noticing it. He had vouched for her, and then, she understood now, had been careful. Had kept her from the consequences of his own interventions. As though the debt ran in only one direction. As though she were still the thing he had spoken for rather than someone who could stand beside him and speak for herself.

"You know I'll always find you here," she said. "At the river. Watching them. You may as well make use of me."

Rua looked back at the water. The mask settled on his face, not all the way, not full concealment, but halfway. The position he held when he was deciding something.

"I don't doubt it," he said. “But we should stop meeting like this.”

Below them, the fishing nets held. The river ran on. Somewhere on the eastern bank a girl would wake before dawn and make the crossing she had been making for six months, and she would find it slightly easier than the day before; the stones shifted, the current gentled at exactly the right point, and she would not know why, and she would cross anyway, and the water would carry her, and two spirits would watch from the far bank and say nothing, because some things did not require witness to be real.

IV. The Fire and the Water

Book Three: The Southern Raiders.

"This isn't fair."

Katara did not turn around. She had been walking back to the tent, and she had not turned around, and Zuko was aware, with the precise awareness of someone who had spent two years learning the specific vocabulary of being not-forgiven, that this was intentional.

"Everyone else seems to trust me now," he said, and heard how it sounded after he said it, and kept going anyway because he was nineteen and had never been particularly good at stopping. "What is it with you?"

She turned.

He had been ready for anger. He had been ready for the controlled register she used in arguments, the one that was precision instead of volume. He had not been ready for this; the specific expression of someone who had trusted something that broke, who was looking at the person who broke it, and could not stop themselves from remembering when they had not.

"Oh, everyone trusts you now," she said. The voice was flat in the particular way of flatness that costs something to maintain. "I was the first person to trust you. Remember? Back in Ba Sing Se." She said it the way you said the name of a place that used to mean something. "And you turned around and betrayed me — Betrayed all of us."

Zuko closed his eyes. This was the thing about Katara; she did not let him have the easier version. She would not let him abstract it into a political decision or a moment of weakness or the terrible arithmetic of a boy trying to find his way home. She gave it back to him in its actual size.

"What can I do?" he said. Not to fix it. Because she deserved the question. "To make it up to you, so you trust me again."

She laughed once, sharp and without warmth, the specific sound of someone who has enough grief that the edge of it occasionally comes out sideways. "You really want to know?" She tilted her head. "Hmm. Maybe you could reconquer Ba Sing Se in the name of the Earth King." A pause. "Or — I know. You could bring my mother back."

She walked past him toward the tent. He did not reach for her. He stood in the space between where she had been and where she was going and understood, not for the first time, but more completely than before, what Ba Sing Se had actually cost.

The specific person she had been when she had looked at him in that cave and decided, against every piece of evidence the world had given her, that he might be someone worth believing in.

He did not follow her.

He stood at the river's edge instead, which was the only place left to stand, and the water moved past him with the indifference of things that had been moving since before he was born, and he thought: I was the first person to trust you and you betrayed me, and he understood, finally, the full weight of what that meant.

ko-fi if you like what i do