Work Text:
Element of Change
Pakku stopped at the steps leading up to the doors of the courtyard where he taught his waterbending students about thirty minutes before sunrise, staring up at the reason he couldn’t go any further. She stared back at him from the top of the steps.
He waited. She didn’t move. He waited a little longer. She didn’t say anything. He waited a little longer still. Still, the girl did nothing.
“Is there a reason you’re blocking the doors, or are you just going to have people walk around you all day?” Pakku called up to her.
The girl jumped and took a deep breath. “Master Pakku,” she replied. “My name is Tanaraq, daughter of Arnaq and Kalliq. For several years, I have learned healing from Master Yugoda, and now I turn to you to learn waterbending.” Tanaraq gulped, strengthening her resolve, and continued. “I come here today to be your newest student. Master, teach me.”
He didn’t even pause to consider her words before he said, “No.” With a quick flick of his wrist, he bent the snow underneath the girl to move her a few feet to the side. He quickly walked up the steps, opened the door, and slammed it in Tanaraq’s face before she could say another word. He continued his day without thinking anything else of what had happened that morning.
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Tanaraq was back the next morning.
“You should be in the healing huts instead of bothering me,” he told her.
“Healing’s important, but so is this,” she answered. “I know how to heal, but almost everything really needs healing happens outside our walls. Chief Arnook has said that he plans to send ships to help our sister tribe. There is a war happening everywhere- they will encounter combat, and they will need a healer on their ships who can defend themselves in a conflict. Both healing and waterbending are important skills for those missions, and important life skills in general.”
By now Pakku had made his way up the stairs, and he simply said, “You should know by now what our traditions are. Boys learn waterbending, girls learn healing,” before he shut the door in her face. At least he didn’t slam the door this time.
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“You taught the Avatar’s friend” are the first words that greet him the next day.
“What an unusual way to say, ‘good morning’,” he commented, raising an eyebrow.
“Good morning, Master Pakku. You taught the Avatar’s female friend,” Tanaraq gave a quick bow with her greeting and leaned forward like some sort of giraffe-heron, as if stretching her neck like that would add more importance to the word, “female”. It only made her look more ridiculous to Pakku.
He began up the stairs. “I had my reasons. Not that it is any of your business, but I saw a good reason to make an exception.”
Tanaraq’s eyes narrowed. “I see. So honoring one’s old romantic relationships is considered a good reason to ignore generations of rules and traditions that you stuck to so much before.”
Pakku stopped at the door and turned around, giving Tanaraq a glare filled with such coldness that it almost burned. “Leave,” he hissed. He slammed the door in Tanaraq’s face, almost catching her nose with it.
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“Good morning,” she said, staring down at him. “Teach me.”
Pakku rolled his eyes and sighed. “No.”
He started up the stairs, before they collapsed under his feet. “Property damage won’t change my mind.” He rode an avalanche up to where the stairs used to start.
Tanaraq tried to fight him off as he sped toward her, but she was very clearly not expecting Pakku to move toward her so quickly and was caught off guard. It didn’t help that she was a mere novice facing a master.
He bent the snow underneath her feet, dropping her into a pit that he quickly turned into a slide which deposited her at the bottom of the stairs.
“The Avatar’s female friend was worth my time. You aren’t.”
He shut the door behind himself once more.
His students could clean up the mess. It would be good practice for them.
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She was back again, in the exact same spot, the next morning.
“I see you decided to ignore my advice,” he frowned.
Tanaraq attempted to hit him with a water whip. It was a pretty poor attempt. He could see what she was doing wrong, the way she shifted her weight, how her wrists were too stiff… he knew right before she did that it what was going to happen. The water didn’t hold its shape and instead smacked her in the face.
“Go back to the healing huts and stop wasting both of our time,” Pakku scolded.
This time, Tanaraq charged him. She was a little bit faster, a little bit angrier. What she lacked in technique she didn’t quite make up for in anger, but it was clear she had learned a little from last time. She froze the landing at the top of the stairs into a solid sheet of ice, and thwarted his first two attempts to bypass her and get inside. He finally managed on his third try, shutting the doors quickly with a resounding thud.
It was a bit of a shame that she wasn’t a boy.
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It became part of his morning routine.
Pakku would arrive.
“Good morning. Teach me.”
They’d fight.
He’d go into the courtyard without her, firmly shutting the heavy doors behind him.
Pakku gave up trying to escape the fight after the first few mornings. Openings to pass Tanaraq were slowly becoming fewer and farther between. It was less effort to defeat her quickly in order to go inside.
He wasn’t going to teach her, but she admittedly wasn’t the waste of time he thought she was.
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After a week, his morning routine changed.
Tanaraq was not waiting at the top of the steps. She was at the top of the steps, but she wasn’t waiting there. Instead, she was fighting another girl in front of the doors.
Fighting was barely the word for it, though. It was a little more like the two were throwing snow, water, and ice at each other. Tanaraq was winning, barely. He noticed that her form, while still appalling, was better than it had been during their first few fights. Her movements were a little bit surer and steadier.
To say that the other girl had anything resembling form would be a blatant lie.
Pakku grabbed the water from both girls and used it to trap their limbs in icy columns.
“Just what do the two of you think you are doing?”
“Tutoring,” Tanaraq grinned. “Well, I’m tutoring. Nuvua’s learning, though I guess I am, too. Practicing with a partner really helps.”
Pakku frowned. “You’re going to have to give me a better answer than that.”
The other girl- Nuvua, apparently- turned her head to the girl next to her. “I told you this was a bad idea,” she mumbled.
Pakku snorted. “Tell me just how you are supposed to be tutoring anyone when you barely know a thing yourself. And why here, of all places?”
“Well, waterbending wasn’t around forever. The first waterbenders created these forms through discovery and trying things out to discover whatever worked. We can figure things out and master our bending together, though,” Tanaraq gave Pakku a meaningful glance. “It would be a lot faster and easier with a master teaching us. As for why we’re here, we thought it would be rude to barge in but there is a beautiful courtyard with plenty of room for waterbending pretty close by. Maybe the two of us could use it someday.”
Pakku took a deep breath, almost as if asking the spirits for patience. He unfroze the two girls and started walking away.
“I’m going to go get some tea,” he announced over his shoulder. “Maybe by the time I come back you two will have tired yourselves out and I can get in without a fight for once.”
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The next day, he returned to old tactics and tried to get around the girls to get inside. Thankfully, it was the fastest he had been able to get into the courtyard in a long time. The new girl struggled to keep her guard up and the moment he saw an opening, he deflected her attack to head toward Tanaraq and quickly headed inside and left the two girls to deal with it.
Unfortunately, it seemed that he had given Nuvua too much of a wake-up call. She was extremely vigilant the next day, leaving few openings the next day and causing him to be delayed substantially longer. Soon enough, his students started arriving before he had finished with the two girls, and started giving them questioning looks.
As he slammed the door behind him after yet another fight, he let out a huff in irritation. It looked like he would have to adjust his morning routine yet again.
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He didn’t bother to fight them anymore. Now, he went to go get some tea and brought it with him to drink as he waited for the girls to tire out enough to let him pass. On lucky days, they tired themselves out before he got there, and it took very little effort to get in. Generally, they would take maybe fifteen minutes at the most.
Today was not a lucky day. They weren’t done by the time he got back. Pakku groaned, bent the snow next to him to form a chair, and sat down to drink his tea. The girls would probably stop soon, and he was in no mood to spill his tea while dealing with this nonsense.
He watched the show in front of him in the meantime.
He had seen it before, but he hadn’t actually watched the two, really watched them, until now. There was actually more to their fight than just throwing water, snow, and ice back and forth. Every now and then he’d see the barest resemblance to one of the moves he’d used against Tanaraq, and later, against them both. It wasn’t very good, and usually the water would either lose its form or backlash onto the girl attempting it (while the other girl tried to press her advantage), but it was there. Considering the only way that the girls were picking any of this up was through having each of those moves used against them, it was surprising that either girl was able to show even the smallest level of skill at all.
He watched Nuvua’s sloppy octopus form get dismantled by Tanaraq wrestling control of one of the back tentacles to grab Nuvua’s right arm and quickly freeze it to her back in an uncomfortable position.
In response, Nuvua let her octopus form dissolve and sent the water streaming toward Tanaraq. Judging from the opening kata, she was attempting the finishing move he’d used yesterday when the girls were starting to interfere with his class time, making him both irritated and a little vindictive.
However, she was attempting it one-handed. That wasn’t the problem; the move could be done one-handed with the right amount of control and concentration, but Nuvua hadn’t reached that level yet. She was struggling to keep so much water under control one-handed, making larger, sharper, quicker movements with her arm. Ones that were starting to look painful.
“You’re going to pull something and potentially cause permanent damage to your wrist if you don’t keep it parallel to the ground,” Pakku reported from the sidelines. “And your concentration must be pretty bad if you can’t manage to focus on what you’re doing and keep the water’s shape and momentum.”
Half of the water dropped when Nuvua heard Pakku’s voice. Tanaraq paused in her attacks, too. Nuvua brought up a screen of snow. Tanaraq dispersed it quickly, but by then Nuvua had freed her wrist, leaving both hands free to try the same move again. She kept her wrists parallel to the ground, and her water stayed together more cohesively. She sent the water at Tanaraq, who dodged, grabbed what water she could from the attack, and did the same move back at her. Pakku noticed that she held her elbows too far to her sides, but her wrists stayed parallel the whole time.
After watching the girls repeat the same move over and over at each other for the next few minutes, Pakku turned his chair into a tidal wave and rapidly rode it over the doors.
He tried to keep the corner of his mouth from twitching upward. As he taught that day and some of his students groaned and grumbled as he critiqued their form and technique, he tried not to think about the two girls from that morning who corrected themselves quickly, efficiently, and without complaint.
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Pakku found himself voicing his complaints about the girls’ fights from his position on the side more and more as the days passed:
“You’re moving too slowly. At that rate, you’ll lose control and your opponent would have time to finish a game of Pai Sho and knock you out before you can even attack them.”
“Your breath control is terrible. If it weren’t, that would be ice instead of the disgusting slush you have there.”
“If your ice isn’t sharper, the only thing it will be good for is giving your opponent a concussion. Stop fighting the shape the water is trying to take.”
Every single time, the girls would stop, give one or both of them time to fix what was wrong based on what he said, and resume their fight with substantially more energy and vigor.
He also noticed that what he said stuck- once he said something, the same mistake would be changed for the better throughout the current fight and, after a few days, almost completely gone.
It was odd, but not unpleasant, and slowly, he was finding that he didn’t mind it.
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Two weeks later, he approached the stairs leading up to the doors once again.
“You both need to stop coming so early,” he called up. “Either you can wait here calmly and quietly or come back in thirty minutes with everyone else.”
The fight stopped immediately, and he walked by two flabbergasted girls. As he closed the doors behind him, he saw two ecstatic grins start to form on their faces.
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Three days later, Anik did not show up for lessons with the others. He started anyway, but after about an hour with no sign of the boy, he sent Tanaraq to go find him.
She appeared fifteen minutes later, dragging the boy behind her through the doors and loudly announcing that she had found him in one of the healing huts.
Pakku sighed and poured himself another cup of tea.