Work Text:
1.
“‘Bean! ‘Bean!”
Sabine turns, smiling as she sees her younger brother toddling over as fast as he can. The three-year-old stops just before her, and she hugs him as tightly as a five-year-old can.
“‘Bean! Mommy teached me fires today!”
Sabine’s eyes widen. “Yay!”
Tristan shows her, then, kicking and punching wildly and grinning wide enough to split his face every time a flame results. Sabine claps, though a part of her, a bitter, unknowable part, spits that he’s learned firebending in a matter of months while she’s been working on it for years now, and yet has still been unable to produce a single flame.
She keeps smiling, though, keeps pretending she can’t feel Mother's tense gaze on her as she demonstrates a firebending move she learned a year ago—one that’s never given her flames—and Tristan copies it, resulting in a quick burst of sparks.
She’s the older sister. When her bending comes, it will be more powerful.
2.
Her bending does not come.
She keeps practicing and practicing and practicing, and her bending never comes.
Sabine practices, and practices, and practices, she trains, and trains, and trains, and she never produces a single spark.
Mother’s lips stay in a thin line whenever she looks at Sabine, and Sabine wants to cry out, to beg for forgiveness for her inadequacy. Instead, when Mother says she will attend the Royal Fire Academy for Girls, she says yes.
She leaves Tristan and she goes, and she watches as each of the other girls there learn bending while she can only develop other parts of herself. Thanks to Mother, though, she is never without a bending class; after all, what daughter of Fire Nation nobility wouldn’t be able to bend? So she trains, and she attends her classes, and she performs the same bending katas that each of the other girls does. She keeps thrusting her palm forward, keeps expecting a flame to ignite and burst forth with a fury that matches the resentment growing within her like a fungus in a deep cavern, and of course none does.
And then the fungus within her releases its spores, and that is how Leia of House Naberrie finds her; standing on a parapet atop one of the school’s towers. They’ve never spoken too much before, but somehow this defiance of Sabine, this threat buried within her desperation, is enough to bridge that gap.
“You okay?”
She turns to the girl, younger than her, and presses her lips into that same thin smile as Mother’s. “Why am I less because I can’t bend?”
“You aren’t,” Leia says, stepping closer. “Get down from there; you’re going to fall and get hurt.”
She doesn’t say I know. She doesn’t say that’s why I’m standing here.
Instead, Sabine gets down.
The sun is out the next day, and Sabine feels Agni’s warmth for the first time in months, even without any sort of bending beyond that of her own emotions.
3.
Sabine finds her bending, but not through Agni.
She discovers fireworks, and discovers the ways different powders and different minerals can make their colors brighter, more vibrant, more varied, more beautiful in their own deaths.
She shows Leia, who smiles and asks if she can make one purple. She does, and Sabine realizes, at that moment, that purple is her favorite, too.
A few days later, Sabine admits that she doesn’t want to work for an empire where her talents are considered second to a gift from a god. Leia says she thinks Agni blesses them all in different ways, in ways of both innate flame and of outwardly-expressed flame.
Sabine asks if she can kiss her (yes).
Leia asks if she would like to make a difference (yes).
And under Agni’s watch, in broad daylight, they leave for a better life.
+1.
Sabine is doing surveillance on the Boiling Rock, in preparation for Leia’s extraction, and she perches, hidden within the rocks and the crags of the cliffs. She wonders, faintly, why she always seems to have an affinity for getting away from everything, even when she wants so badly to be the same in terms of talent.
She hears a familiar voice, and hoists herself up further, just enough to see over the edge as someone else begins speaking. And the sight Sabine sees nearly makes her lose her grip.
A guard is up against the wall, with a man maybe ten years her senior in a different uniform—a warden’s, she thinks—looming over him.
“...yourself, Wren. It would be a shame if you were to follow in your sister’s footsteps and let our great country down.”
“Of course, sir. I won’t let you down, and I won’t let the Fire Nation down either.”
“Good,” the warden says before walking away. Tristan remains still for a long, long moment, before releasing a tightly held breath.
Sabine disappears back into the fog as she descends the cliffs, uncaring that Agni now lies hidden behind the clouds. She doesn’t think her brother would want Agni to see his failure, anyway. After all, this is why she found herself on the parapet in the dark of night, this is why Tristan is not being confronted in the light of day.
Or maybe they are all simply unaware that their actions shine brighter when there is darkness to shadow them.