The Pawn |Katara

EIGHTEEN

The arrival of the Avatar along with his companion, the airbender named Jaya, was something Akira had absolutely no knowledge over. They were the only friends of Zuko's he had had no way of interfering with for they would be coming on a sky bison and their time of landing was the one they chose. So he had gotten to the palace early, even chose to train there, in the courtyard he had once gone to every day for the very same purpose that he now had forsaken for the comfort of his home. This way, he would be present whenever the Avatar ended up coming.

Over the years, he had seen him around the palace once or twice and yet they had never spoken beyond the general niceties etiquette commanded Akira. He knew nothing about the Avatar. For the young woman that always seemed to be around when he was, though, he knew a couple more.

Jaya had been a thief for many years in the Fire Nation, never doing too much damage but always enough to gather some attention to herself. The very first prison she had been put into—and from which she had subsequently escaped—was the prison his father had been the Warden of then. It seemed like his father had seen that as a personal attack on his ego and ever since then he had watched her every move as she got to a new prison, broke free, then got locked up once more elsewhere, and the circle was repeated. Now Akira knew why it had seemed so easy for her to break free from those prisons; they weren't meant to keep airbenders in.

No Fire Nation prison—and no prison in the world for that matter—was built specifically to keep airbenders in. After the genocide, there was no need for them but even before that, the airbenders had been gentle and kept mostly to their mountains so they hadn't had many dealings with the outside world. Jaya's prison escapes had been sudden and quick for that exact reason and he knew for a fact her methods had been taken into consideration when it came to building new prisons in the Fire Nation.

Her life story was one he was familiar with through rumors. Everyone had wanted to know about the sudden appearance of another airbender when all of them were supposed to be dead, and eventually they made a story of their own.

The elderly claimed the Fire Nation never stopped looking for airbenders and any family that was suspected to have any relation to them was slaughtered. Jaya's family had been no exception but she had managed to survive. That was the mildest story. Others claimed she had been tortured for days after she was captured so that the military would be convinced she wasn't an airbender and she still fooled them, others claimed the military never caught her and that she used to live in the forests of the Fire Nation, closer to the nature where she felt the most at home.

Akira didn't quite know what was the truth when it came to her and he wasn't about to ask her either. No story coming from an airbender was one without pain and he had no wish to reopen old wounds.

Until the company would arrive—and he was rather sure he would either realize their arrival or someone would notify him of it—he stayed in the courtyard, training under the relentless sun. He had lost his shirt long ago, he had tied his hair up in a bun so that it wouldn't touch his skin and he went on and on without stopping, his focus unwavering as he shot blasts of fire and repeated the technique that was his only shot at survival if he ever had to fight. He was so lost to his training he failed to take notice of anything else around him.

"Why does he keep on doing that in the sun?" Sokka grumbled from his position under the shade of the building. He was sitting on the step leading into the courtyard, Katara sitting right next to him while Toph was standing against a column, throwing a pebble in the air and catching it without making a sound. "There's perfectly good shade over there under that tree!"

Katara shrugged, "Maybe he doesn't want to risk the tree catching fire."

"Or he wants to be in the sun so that he'll sweat more and his body will glisten and we'll have to pay attention to his abs and muscles."