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Afterwards, pulses settle slowly. Lakeside is a sanctuary strewn with hastily-discarded armor.
All the pent-up, staggering intensity finally allowed to flourish takes its time tempering down into sated calm. Feels like the countless stars above have bloomed brighter just for them, glowing in tandem with the silken warmth between their tangled bodies. Constellations charted and aligned, held in overlap. Kyoshi’s blossomed body won’t stop buzzing.
Defying all of the world’s unresolved bleakness, her vision stays narrow around her brilliant new focal point. Rangi’s gaze—lazy-lidded, heaven-shining—pierces through the fear and uncertainty. The single good constant at her side in the mess. The only piece that makes sense. Bound for the sky, both of them. With Rangi she could just soar away. This simmer tying them together is surer than anything Kyoshi has ever allowed herself to dream of.
For once, for now, everything is perfect.
“Let me teach you something,” Rangi murmurs. Her voice is heady. It rasps through the nighttime hush like a breeze sighing over embers.
A goofy grin stirs Kyoshi’s expression. The streak of lovesick boldness surprises her, but going with its momentum is easy. “I think you just taught me plenty.”
Rangi’s cheeks and ears flare pink in the pale moonlight. Eyes glittering, she beams, she giggles—a whole new sound that skews the line between shyness and self-satisfaction. Makes Kyoshi feel sunlicked, deep-thrilled. Even with her face battered and bruised from the lei tai she’s something far beyond beautiful. Her soldier girl. Her unshakably brave hero. Hers, all hers. What would Kyoshi do without her? She presses a kiss to her brow, just gently, because now she can.
“I’m being serious.” A soft, assertive hand trails from waist to jaw and guides their mouths together instead. The slightest brush of Rangi’s lips brings Kyoshi’s heart into her throat, sends her backbone tingling. “There’s a technique I want to show you.”
“Really?” Kyoshi sniffs out a genuine little disbelieving laugh, even if she should know better. “A firebending lesson, right now?”
“In a sense.”
As though she hasn’t already worn Kyoshi out enough tonight. “Okay, sure. As long as there’s no Horse stance involved.”
Rangi’s turn to smirk. Fallen-loose hair sticks to the corner of her mouth. “Oh? Legs still feeling weak?”
After a moment of obvious fluster, Kyoshi points out, “That’s your fault.”
“I’m not apologizing.”
“And I wasn’t complaining.”
“Didn’t think you were.” Rangi throws her own leg across Kyoshi’s hips, keeping her body hooked possessively close. No one has ever claimed Kyoshi like this—as a person truly theirs, spirit to bone. It’s overwhelming, the intimacy of never again having to be unknown. “I just wanted you to admit it. Don’t worry, you won’t need them.”
That clears up absolutely nothing about the nature of whatever lesson Rangi has in store for her. Neither does this: “You said I wasn’t ready to make flame yet.”
“You’re not,” Rangi says. “There’s more to firebending than flame. We’re going to try something different.”
Cryptic. Another question poises on the tip of Kyoshi’s tongue until some awestruck corner of her mind decides better of asking it. Instead, she just waits for Rangi to continue, drowned in proximity, watching all the distant lanterns in Hujiang shine bright for her.
“When a person bends earth, water, or air, they rely on the presence of that element in their surroundings,” she says. “Fire, though—fire comes from within. You are your element, and your element is you.”
When Kyoshi tries to imagine an ever-lit candle nestled deep in the core of her being, all she can picture is Rangi’s face. Carried along in her wake, half-absent with want, she whispers, “Where you go, it goes.”
For a flickering instant it looks—feels, wave of swelter—like Rangi is going to surge in and kiss her senseless again. Eager, primed to devour. She tamps the impulse down with a bitten lip and a shaky breath before going on with her explanation.
“Your inner fire reflects your emotional state. If your mind is in turmoil, your bending will be unstable and choked-off. A dangerous, unfortunate mess.” She raises an eyebrow. “Like that pathetic excuse for a Fire Fist you showed me by the creek.”
Kyoshi frowns. Not at the jab—it was pretty well-deserved—but at memory. Her mouth, her knuckles, blistering pain. Fear and anger within and without. “That’s why it hurt me before.”
Rangi gives her an affirmative hum. “Usually, Firebenders naturally prevent their own bending from burning them. You managed to push right past that instinct. Impressive, honestly.”
Makes sense. Plowing through walls is apparently one of her specialties. “So it won’t be painful every time?”
“Of course not. That’s what I want to show you.” Rangi finds Kyoshi’s arm and traces it to her hand, raising shivers. As she laces their fingers together, her voice dips low. “Tell me how you’re feeling right now.”
Alive. Afloat. Hoisted from the water. Balanced and beholden and blissed out and bolstered. Like the summer sun lingering gladly on the horizon, glow-throbbed. Looking into the depths of Rangi’s eyes makes Kyoshi feel much older than she is, like an echo reaching back and back and back.
“I think you know,” she whispers, throat thick.
Rangi’s achingly tender smile shows that she does know, and that she feels it too. It’s disarming. Dismantling. She untwines their hands and reaches lower between their bodies. Slow fingertips slip under the hem of Kyoshi’s tunic. As they brush along bare skin, Kyoshi shudders, clamoring in silence for Rangi to consume her.
“Fire burns,” Rangi says, “but it also warms.”
Her palm, sliding upward. Taking time to caress the same paths claimed in breathless haste moments ago. The roaming touch is at once assertive and deferent, mindful of permission. Kyoshi wouldn’t dream of asking her to stop. She can’t remember how it felt to be a vessel for rebirth, can’t even really conceive of it, but she imagines that it must have been a lot like this.
Soon Rangi’s slender hand splays and stills over Kyoshi’s chest, pressed right against the gallop of her heart. The gentleness of her touch tends to come as a surprise, even if it shouldn’t. Sometimes it’s hard to reconcile this softness with the image of a powerful girl hewn sharp for battle, who came into Kyoshi’s world with her shoulders set straight and her body brimming with flame.
“And you can share your warmth with others.” Bronze irises flash and glimmer, moon-stained. Reflected in them, Kyoshi is something that matters more than her parents thought. More than the spirit that was poured into her before she could choose. Something worth keeping, something held safe. She and Rangi form a perfect-fit unbroken circle. “Like this.”
It doesn’t take Kyoshi long to understand. With those words, Rangi’s palm ripples with heat—smooth, subtle, like the pulse of live cinders resting in the bottom of a hearth. It seeps through the fabric of her breastband and fills her chest, tendrils spiraling in and saturating to the marrow. Kyoshi’s nerves ignite smolder-sweet. Tremors, fractals, sparks of promise and possibility.
Held captive by Rangi’s gaze, Kyoshi lets the sensation roll through her. It’s addictive. Rangi is addictive and she wields her element so beautifully.
Whether by someone else’s cruel choices or by all the turmoil in her own mind, Kyoshi has been deprived of beautiful things for far too long. She’s sick of refusals and refusing when a new beginning of acceptance—a beacon in the raging storm—is right in front of her.
So she’ll reach for it.
“Wow,” she breathes, shaky on the exhale—a soft, needy sound.
Rangi’s smile broadens in answer. It brightens her face against the surrounding night, leaving it nearly as radiant as the heat of her touch. Her beckoning light rivals the firmament of stars above.
“In close relationships, it’s a way to show trust and reassurance.” Here she pauses, chewing her lower lip—then adds, “And love.”
The word resonates. Kyoshi’s head spins with the simple abiding truth of it—the thrill of falling from a great height but landing safely on her feet. She’s never felt more centered.
“You’ve done that to me before,” she says with the quiet weight of realization. The iceberg, so far away. The last trace of solace before the world shattered around her.
Rangi shrugs, chin tucked into her chest, trying to brush off the implication and the sudden bashfulness it provokes.
“I did.” Vulnerability tinges her blunt declaration. “And now you’re going to try it.”
Kyoshi thinks of her oldest gift from Kelsang turning to dust in her hand, by her hand, and balks. Her ongoing struggle with control and precision could have more dire consequences here. There are few things Kyoshi touches without fear of staining or breaking them. “I don’t know if that’s a good—”
Her protest fades abruptly when Rangi grasps her wrist and tugs it close. She presses Kyoshi’s palm firm and flat against her sternum, holding it there with her own. Beneath the thin cotton of her shirt, her heart ticks a wild staccato rhythm. Steady but quickened, pounding through the delicate lines of her body and shuddering straight into Kyoshi’s hand—the seam where two halves meet.
“I trust you,” she says with sincerity intense enough to make Kyoshi tremble. “You won’t burn me. Just keep your eyes on mine, breathe, and…feel.”
Feeling comes easily when she looks at Rangi. So does bravery.
Taken by the naked hope and devotion shining in Rangi’s eyes, she nods, draws a breath, and—
—still isn’t really sure what she’s supposed to do.
But maybe knowing isn’t the point. She might not know how to firebend, but she knows with profound certainty how she feels about Rangi.
So she latches onto that conviction and follows it to the root, spirit-deep. Hujiang fades away and takes everything else with it—everything except for Kyoshi, and Rangi, and the slow current flowing between them.
Warmth comes loose. Pouring. Flooding. Kyoshi’s mind, her veins, her blood, her heart flux and flow with a nascent flicker eager to be fueled. Keeping her gaze locked tight with Rangi’s, Kyoshi holds back the inner doubt and lets herself become a vessel for the building energy instead. She concentrates on that precious hinge of contact, on the desires she’s kept buried since everything fell apart. On how Rangi is the only thing in this bitter, confusing circumstance that has made her feel like she could be anywhere close to worthy—a glimpse of some distant after, if she can manage to deserve it.
A calm wave of silken heat emanates from Kyoshi’s palm straight home into Rangi’s chest.
Her inner fire, shared. A tangible tether connecting them.
The awed surprise is mutual. When Kyoshi lifts her gaze from their layered hands, she finds Rangi’s lips parted around a hitched breath, cheeks tinged vivid red under the bruising. Her lashes flutter as her eyes widen. Kyoshi swears she sees them glistening with tears the instant before she’s hauled headlong into a mind-melting kiss.
It’s not the frenzied firestorm of contact from before—this kiss is slow and thorough. Heavy as honey, laden with purpose and intent. From the very start it renders Kyoshi dizzy. Eyes falling closed, she lets out a helpless groan. Rangi takes advantage of the space with the slide of her tongue. In spite of her bruises she presses closer, harder, hips slotting against hips as the lengths of their bodies meld together. Reeling on the cusp where instinct meets adrenaline, Kyoshi gives herself over and clings like she could drown.
Once she’s satisfied with her effort, Rangi draws back. Kyoshi chases the hairsbreadth separation in a shudder-sigh, kiss-drunk daze, earning another affectionate giggle. Rangi brings Kyoshi’s hand to her mouth and trails her lips from the base of her wrist to the tips of her fingers.
“I’ve wanted your hands on me like this for so long,” she whispers, nuzzling into Kyoshi’s palm.
“Oh yeah?” Spirits forgive her, that dumb grin finds its way back onto Kyoshi’s face. “How long?”
A playful scoff. Rangi rolls her eyes and bumps Kyoshi’s calf with her heel. But Kyoshi distracts her—spreads her fingers, inviting her to fold her own into the spaces. Enthralled, entwined silence follows. They’re lost in one another, with only the stars beholding from above.
“Everyone’s probably wondering where we are,” Rangi says, reluctantly, after some time passes. “But—” A pause, an admission. “Maybe it’s selfish, but I’m not ready to go back yet.”
It’s bittersweet and nearly cruel, the reminder that this moment is fragile, finite. Kyoshi’s ugly work of vengeance is far from finished.
She still stands in the mouth of darkness. But now she has a light that won’t go out.
She rests cheek against the crown of Rangi’s head, content beyond measure to spend tonight on the hard ground with her Firebender wrapped around her. Grateful. Heartspun. Unalone. “Neither am I.”