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Omashu still stands, and has stood for a long time. With one way in and one way out, it has remained untouched, and still has in the last century as the war has raged.
Even if it remains physically untouched, they send soldiers off to war, and they carry the war back with them, in them. Maybe war hasn't breached their door, but it sits on their children's shoulders, and hides in their eyes, filled with horror and bloodshed that they can't talk about. Maybe Fire Nation soldiers have not yet broken down their doors and murdered their benders, but the war hangs over them anyway, lurking at its entrance, waiting for a moment of weakness.
Xulen has never seen combat, and she has never held a sword or a club or a spear, and she has not used it to pierce the flesh of another human. There are some moments where she wishes that she had followed in some of her peers footsteps, stepped onto the battlefield and played her part in the war, to do anything so that she can step out into the greater Earth Kingdom and feel the impending disaster of a nation that wants to crush them all to ash.
There is no glory in having blood on your hands, Fire blood or not, but some days, when the sun is high in the sky, and it threatens to burn her flesh she wishes she could say that she has fought and that she has not hidden herself away where it is safe and hoped and hoped that someone else will fix it, that someone else will fight and win and her nieces and nephews and the children that live down the street, can grow up without the guilt burning them alive.
Xulen has not fought in the war. Her hands are worn, but not from fighting, but from labour. And most days she is okay with this. Her sister needs her here to help her raise her children. She is needed in the community, and she is loved, and she would not be any use to them dead.
Other days, it is difficult not to feel like a coward. That she is hiding in her work. That every swing of her axe to chop wood, that every methodical push and pull of washing clothes, is her hiding. She knows it's illogical, she knows that her involvement on the battlefield will not overall make an impact on a war that has raged and raged and raged for near one hundred years, but that does not make it easier.
Her mother fought in the war, and died in it. Her body lies somewhere out in Earth Kingdom’s north, but there is a headstone that her and her sister visit, even if there is none of their mother there to mourn. Her mother was a brave woman, Xulen knows. She did what she thought she had to do, but the place that she held in Xulen’s life is as empty as it was the day she left, and time will never fill it. It’s the only thing that keeps Xulen tethered here, the threat that her sister will be left with children with no family more than her and her husband, that she will only be able to mourn two empty graves. That all she will cause is more pain, more suffering than all that they’ve already endured.
And suffer they have, and suffer they will.
Maybe she’s a coward for it. Or maybe she’s brave for it. Either way, history will not remember her, only the people that loved her will, and they are all that matters.