Not Too Far from the Yew Tree (an ATLA fanfiction)

Still as a Shell: Hear what an Age of Glass

A/n: At this time Katara is 20, Zuko is 22, Aang is 18, Kiyi is 9, Yuze is 4. (This takes place the same year as White Light, which was spring.)

#

[2 months later]

The sky lit with a roar and flash. Rain pounded impossibly heavy on the ground, seeming like it would wash away everything in a great deluge, but by morning it would return to a flawless late summer morning with hardly a trace remaining of the storm's passing. Summers—violent, spectacular bursts of all the extremes his nation could hold. Katara held his hand as she watched the window with him. She had taken his right, and so, with his left, he reached for the jasmine tea. The carved beads of horn were cool against his wrist as they jostled in the motion, one of them replaced with black obsidian.

He felt the heat of the tea in a new way, with a new sense; awakened by his training with the twin dragons and with his new teacher, he felt heat as life and energy whereas, in instruction from his father, he'd been taught it as wrath and force, and it felt like seeing at last in full color after growing up in black-and-white. His damaged hands were flecked pink, like holding a handful of petals, but had made a full recovery otherwise.

Impromptu rivers tore across the ground as the heavy downpour was repelled by a fulfilled saturation and flowed downhill seeking a return to its source. The palace had been built at a highpoint of the city. The caldera was sloped, like a thumb-mark pressed into a circle of fresh dough that wasn't quite even, and the downslope fell towards the harbor. The ground was stony and hard, so they'd worked drainage channels into the stone to handle the volume of summer storms. Those would look like canals at that moment, filled to the rim, dragging grass-cuttings and waylaid items to the internal sea of the archipelago's crescent.

The pond at the center garden would be refreshed, pounded clean of algae and mixed with the fresh rain clean and cool. The turtleducks sheltered under the bridges, content to preen and nestle to wait it out. He marveled that the slender flowers, with their blossoms of velvet, did not rend. The surrounding palace sheltered them from gusts of wind, at least, but to the sky they were fully exposed.

He was falling into routines. Jeong Jeong seized his mornings for intense training and his evenings were given to study and work, but the more proficient he became with firebending the more weaknesses he saw revealed in himself otherwise. He still mulled over the events at Shu Jing, each repetition finding more he'd been mistaken in. Zuko still doubted his abilities to rule and was in want of something to further himself by, a new subject to study or new source of experience, but had nothing on hand.

Katara never seemed to be inflicted with the relentless self-doubt he was. When he had wandered alone after the detonation of his ship, he had almost starved, and, while she said it was the same for her at first, she'd found a way out of that poverty by learning a marketable skill, whereas his next step had been still in following the path laid out for him by his father retreating back towards home. She was resourceful and he felt equal parts envy and admiration. Jeong Jeong or Piandao would surely help him learn any subject but he didn't know what question to ask them to begin.

A servant announced herself and walked over with a newly arrived letter. He opened it to read.

Dear brother,

My apologies for not responding to you more promptly, and I imagine your previous situation will have already resolved by the time you'll receive this. I was reminiscing and recalled something that my husband had once mentioned to me. Knowing you had suffered difficulty lately, I am offering it to you to lift your spirits as it was an engaging story. Far away, lost in the golden sands of an immense desert, there lies buried a fantastic library containing more knowledge than could be read in any lifetime. Zhao tells me that, rather than being a legend, he himself made a visit there and proved it real. While courting me he once promised to take me there someday.