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-1.
He finds her on the beach, like always.
She’s sitting watching the waves swell and break on the shore, her Zaofu-green clothes standing out against the grey rocks that make up the shoreline.
“I’m sorry,” she says quietly, barely audible over the crash of a wave.
He blinks in confusion. “For what?”
“You’ve heard the reports,” she says. “Ever since Harmonic Convergence.”
“The new airbenders?” he guesses. “What does that have to do with–” he breaks off. “Oh.”
He stares at her for a long time, watches the wind blow her hair back, can almost see it flow around her in the way it doesn’t around anyone else.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers again, and at once he feels alone between the rocks and the sea and the wind.
-5.
Opal finds her on the beach the morning after Wing and Wei turn ten.
Kuvira’s just sitting there, staring out across the water, her hair hanging in that loose ponytail of hers.
“You’ve never really felt like you fit in, haven’t you,” Opal says quietly.
Kuvira jumps a bit.
“Sorry,” Opal says, “I thought you’d… never mind.”
“I… no, I should have been paying better attention,” Kuvira says. “And I–” she looks down.
“I have it all,” she says, after a long moment of no sound but the waves crashing on the rocks below. “I have a home, I have people teaching me how to bend, I have people who look out for me. This is all I wished for when I was little.”
Opal waits.
Kuvira stares out to sea. “And I get shown up by two ten-year-olds, and she’s just… she’s so proud of them. She’s never proud of me like that. I just…” she shakes her head.
“It’s hard, being the odd one out,” Opal says quietly, sitting down next to Kuvira. “Looking at them, seeing how they get praise for something that you’ll never be able to do, no matter how hard you try.”
Kuvira inhales and exhales, slowly, shakily. “I just… I just want to be a part of…” she falls silent again.
“Mom is…” Opal thinks for a moment. “Mom means well. But…”
“She doesn’t know what to do with you, does she,” Kuvira says.
“A nonbender?” Opal says. “A daughter nonbender, with no idea how to engineer her way out of a box? Of course not. She’s got no idea.”
They’re both quiet for a moment. The waves pound on the rocks below, slowly, slowly eroding them away. Opal wonders if Kuvira can feel it, can feel the tiny bits of rock slipping away into the sea, wonders if she can feel the sea itself, all the salt floating through it. The wind throws up some salty spray, high up onto the rocks where Opal and her not-quite-sister sit.
Opal’s eyes sting, and she blinks the salt away. “She doesn’t know what to do with you, either,” she says. “Or, well, she thinks she does, but she’s stupid.”
“Are you allowed to call your mother stupid?” Kuvira asks.
“Of course,” Opal says. “I’m eleven. That’s practically a teenager, which means I’m allowed to call her stupid and be angry and… and stuff.”
“I don’t do that angry teenager stuff,” Kuvira points out, smug with all of her fifteen years.
“Yeah, that’s because every time you get angry at her you freak out and worry that she’s going to kick you out and run away and hide until you’re not angry any more,” Opal says. “You shouldn’t worry so much. She’s not going to kick you out.”
“Not as long as I’m the best metalbending prodigy in Zaofu,” Kuvira corrects.
“She wouldn’t kick you out,” Opal says.
“There are worse things than being kicked out,” Kuvira says, and Opal thinks back to yesterday, when her mother had been teaching Wing and Wei all about metalbending and fighting and had said not now, Opal, I’m busy, we can talk after dinner, and had promptly spent the whole evening with the twins.
“Yeah,” Opal says. “I guess so.”
-3.
“All right. Deep breaths, like I told you. You can do this.”
“I haven’t been able to do this any of the other eight times I’ve tried, a change of scenery isn’t going to change that.”
“You know, this usually takes people years to learn how to do. And that’s when they’re older than fourteen. It could take dozens of tries–”
“Yeah, well, most people aren’t the first earthbending Beifong of the generation. I need to learn how to metalbend, Vira. You’ve seen the way Mom looks at me – she’s been metalbending since she was eight! I can’t–”
“Huan. Deep breaths. Close your eyes, all right? Listen to the waves on the shore. Start your meditation breathing. We’re not going to try anything new today, all right? We’re just going to go through some of the katas you already know.”
“Vira, I can’t do this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This. Fighting. I’m not fast enough, I’m not strong enough–”
“That’s all right, Huan. It’s all just practice.”
“You don’t get it.”
“You’ll get it eventually, okay?”
“But I don’t want to!”
“You don’t want to learn metalbending?” Kuvira asks carefully.
Huan looks close to tears. “No. I just… I don’t want to learn how to fight people. I don’t like stretching my endurance, I don’t like getting hit with rocks, I don’t like hitting other people with rocks. I just want…” He breaks off, taking deep breaths. “I don’t know.”
“Okay,” Kuvira says. A sea vulture cries overhead, circling out over the water; Huan tilts his head up to stare at it. “Here. Catch.” She chucks a rock at him.
It hits him in the forehead. “Ow! Dammit, Vira, what was that for?”
She doesn’t reply, just tossing another rock.
“Come on, why – Ow! Shit, I’m going to – dammit, that hurt, just – I’m not going to fight you, okay? Just STOP IT!”
Kuvira stops. Huan is breathing heavily, glaring at her. Her last attempt is suspended in the air between them. The sea vulture cries again, distantly. “Congratulations,” she says, calling the rock back to her before tossing it gently to Huan.
He catches it one-handed, then examines it more closely. “This is–”
“Meteorite,” she says, telling him what he can’t quite believe yet. “Congratulations, metalbender.”
Huan sits down on the grass, staring at the meteorite in his hand.
Kuvira sits down with him. “You don’t have to learn how to fight, you know,” she says. “But you’re going to have to find your own way. What finally got you to metalbend?”
“I didn’t give up,” Huan says. “I decided what was going to happen, and I… I stuck to it.”
“You may not be a fighter,” Kuvira says, “But now you know that just because you won’t fight doesn’t mean you have to give in.”
-6.
Opal found the beach first, back before anyone but her had realized that she wasn’t a bender and was never going to be. She called it a beach, but really it was almost a cliff, jagged spurs of grey rock steeply sloping down to the crashing waves.
Baatar found her there, perched on the highest rock, curled up and staring out into the wind, the day everyone else realized that she wasn’t going to bend.
“It’s not so bad, you know,” Baatar says.
“For you, maybe,” Opal tells him. “Mister thirteen-year-old genius.”
“Opal–”
“I know,” she says. “I know. Maybe I’m really good at public speaking, or I’m secretly an amazing animal trainer, or I have the best skills the world has ever seen at… at candlemaking or something. It doesn’t matter, okay, Baatar? It still hurts when she looks at me like I’m… like I’m broken!”
“You’re not,” he replies instantly. “Opal, you could never be broken. You…” he looks at the rocks, sighs, and clambers up next to her, trying to pull her into a hug despite the uncomfortable rock. She giggles a bit. “See,” he says, humorously. “You’re already better at climbing than I am.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m gonna be a famous climber, and I’m going to climb all the way to the spirit world!”
“The spirit world’s not in the sky, you can’t climb there,” he scoffs.
“Yes you can,” she says resolutely. “You totally can. I’m gonna do it. And that’s something that you can’t do, and neither can Huan, or Kuvira, or Wing and Wei! So there!”
-4.
“I know,” Kuvira says. “I’ll teach you how to dance.”
Opal eyes her dubiously. “How?” she asks. “Believe it or not, Vira, but I still can’t metalbend.”
Kuvira rolls her eyes impatiently. “Not that sort of dancing, dummy,” she says. “The normal kind.”
“Oh,” Opal says, mentally refiling dancing from something metalbenders do to ???. “Of course.”
“Come on, stand up,” Kuvira says, “It’s much easier on flat ground.”
Opal blinks up at her. “What, now? Here?”
“Avatar Aang once danced in a cave full of fire nation kids,” Kuvira says, her face grave. “If he can dance in the heart of enemy territory during a war, I think you can dance on a beach.” Then she snorts, breaking her deadpan. “Come on, Opal. I’ve seen you watching the dance troupe practice.”
Opal bites her lip. “There are really nonbender dances that you could teach me?”
“Of course,” Kuvira says. “Now come on, over here, to the flat area, okay? We don’t want you dancing off a cliff. Even I might not be fast enough to catch you.”
“All right, then,” Opal says, the winds catching her skirts as she stands. “How does this work?”
“It’s really all about two – well, three – things,” Kuvira says, taking Opal’s hands. “Your partner, and the rhythm, which – well, we don’t really have one here, but we can pretend. You’re working with your partner, moving together.”
“And the third thing?” Opal asks. “You did say three things, Vira.”
Kuvira hums. “It’s how you move with your partner. It’s just… circles, I guess.”
“Your partner, the rhythm, and moving in circles,” Opal says. “Okay. I think I can do that.”
-2.
When Baatar finds Huan at the beach, he’s busy throwing rocks into the water.
“You think it’s so easy,” Huan says without prompting. “But it’s – it’s not, and Mom just – she looks at me, all disappointed because I can’t fight for shit and it makes me want to scream.” He exhales sharply. “Sorry. I’m – sorry. I know this is… your place, for you and Vira and Opal, but I just.”
“Needed to be away from it all?” Baatar says quietly.
“Yeah,” Huan says after a moment. He sinks down to his knees and runs the grass through his fingers, not quite touching the earth itself.
“You got her to accept your sculptures as… I don’t know, a good use of your talents or something, though,” Baatar says. “So. Uh. Good job on that?”
“Thanks,” Huan says.
They sit in silence, listening to the waves wear away at the rocks below, watching the sun lazily arc its way down the sky.
“You just have to be… completely uncompromising,” Huan says eventually. “If you want something badly enough. You can’t yield even the tiniest bit.”
“I want to go study the architecture in Republic City,” Baatar says.
“How badly?” Huan asks. “Mom thinks we have everything we need here, you know. The pinnacle of architecture, the pinnacle of metalbending… it took me weeks to get her to understand that my sculptures are art, and that was with me playing to all her ideas about expression of the inner self. Weeks hiding in my room all day, weeks getting extra work or not being allowed near my art supplies, weeks giving up everything I loved so that I could do it any time I wanted.”
Baatar watches a cloud morph from a turtleduck into a jackalope.
“How much are you willing to give up to get what you want?” Huan asks.
0.
I decided what was going to happen. And I… I stuck to it.
How much am I willing to give up to get what I want?
0.
“I love you, Kuvira.”
“I love you, Baatar.”
1.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and he turns and walks away.