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Chapter Text

The Fire Nation attack on Adam's village comes either a month too early or ten years too late.

One month later, and he would have been gone, would have saved enough for the trip to Ba Sing Se and a cheap place to live once he got there. He had calculated how much he'd need dozens of times. He almost left after the last market day, but he decided to be cautious, to not risk being stranded in the countryside or homeless in the city. He stayed, for one more month, and now every scrap of savings is buried in the burning rubble that had once been his parents' house.

Ten years earlier -- it doesn't matter. It didn't happen.

The village managed only a pitiful defense; all the earthbenders and able-bodied fighters had been snatched up by the army ages ago. Adam, who doesn't qualify as able-bodied and barely qualifies as a bender, was in the mountains when the attack started, too far away to do any good for anyone.

He almost doesn't come back when he sees the smoke.

But after that first selfish thought he runs to town as fast as he can. It's still too late to make a difference. The Fire Nation is pulling out, leaving the death and the destruction behind for the villagers to deal with. Adam reaches his street just in time to watch the last wall of his parents' house collapse.

A hand grabs Adam. Reflex jerks his arm free, but it's only the village healer, her face smudged with soot. It takes Adam an eternity recognize her.

She doesn't notice that he pulled away. "Why did this happen?" she asks. "What do we do?"

He walks on.

His father is out on the border of town, among the dead. This was the first point of contact with the enemy, the only site close to being a battlefield and not a slaughter. There's blood on his sword and a dead soldier in front of him.

Adam takes the sword out of his hand and keeps walking. The village is behind him; he doesn't look back.

-

By nightfall he regrets his actions. It stands to reason the one time he acts impulsively it backfires on him.

A heavy rain started at some point, and the temperatures plummeted. The water hitting his face is just short of freezing. It would help to have a warmer coat -- a hat -- anything.

But nothing he owned was that nice, if any of it even survived.

He stops to try to make a shelter. That's something that an earthbender can do. One heavy stomp or one quick kick and a slab of rock should shoot straight up out of the ground to keep the wind off him.

After twenty frustrating minutes he gives up. He hadn't managed to do more than rattle some pebbles, and he's starting to lose feeling in his fingers. At least walking will warm him up.

When he sees the mouth of the cave, it feels like a tiny bit of good luck.

A very tiny bit, it turns out.

He's barely even surprised by the attack. Maybe he knows his good luck is limited. Maybe the icy rain has seeped into him, numbed him down to his heart and froze out any kind of emotion.

Whatever it is, it saves him: he ducks and rolls along the floor of the cave before he consciously registers what's happening. The bolt of flame shoots over him instead of hitting him in the face.

Another burst of fire comes a second later. It misses him by so little that his sleeve singes. And now he's rolling, too fast to stop, down into the cave, toward the person who's attacking him.

Adam lashes out in pure desperation. There isn't a thought in his head, only the need to stop: stop himself, stop whatever's happening.

A slab of rock juts up out of the ground. It slams into him, stops his descent but knocks the air out of his lungs. He bites down on his pain, straining to listen: there's a sound, scrambling from the cave in front of him.

He grabs his sword and shoves himself up to his feet.

The ground of the cave is warped, like tall grass tossed by a strong wind. Some distant part of Adam wonders how he managed to make that happen.

The present, immediate part of Adam focuses in on his attacker, who is lying flat on his back on the uneven ground. Adam lunges forward and presses the tip of the sword to his throat.

The cave becomes very still.

The man on the ground is dressed like a Fire Nation solider, but his uniform is torn and muddy. There are sweat stains around the neck and under the armpits. The skin on his face is sweaty, too, and pale. His eyes, locked on Adam's, are bright with fever, but they don't waver. He doesn't so much as flinch when the tip of Adam's sword bites into the skin of his neck.

He hadn't expected a firebender to be so young. He looks like he's Adam's age.

But he's still a firebender. He might have been at the village that morning. It doesn't mean anything, that he's young and unarmed and sick in a cave. The only thing that matters is that he's from the Fire Nation.

Adam doesn't move.

The firebender tilts his chin up. "Get it over with."

Adam stares. At the firebender, at the drop of blood on his neck. At the sword. He can't stop looking at the sword. It's the same cheap steel that hung on the wall of his home and haunted his nightmares for years.

He steps backwards so fast he nearly trips on the uneven floor. Almost drops the sword before he thinks what a bad idea that would be. He swallows down enough disgust that he can cling to the hilt.

The firebender doesn't move right away, and then only moves slowly, only goes so far as to prop himself up on one elbow and reach for his throat. Adam notices, somewhere between horrified and fascinated, that there is a massive burn the entire length of his arm. It's oozing, infected; probably the cause of his fever, which makes sense if he's been hanging out with an open wound in a dirty cave, but --

Adam didn't know firebenders could burn.

His eyes snap back up to the firebender's face. He's still watching Adam, and Adam feels something like fear or embarrassment. Maybe both. He isn't sure what he's supposed to do after capturing an enemy combatant, but it's probably not this.

If he already screwed up, he might as well make the best of it.

"You can start a fire, right?"

"Is that a joke?"

"It's a question."

"Why would you ask someone who tried to kill you to start a fire?"

"Because I'm freezing," Adam answers. "And I just tried to kill you, too. But if I had I'd still be freezing. So. Can you start a fire or not?"

The bender pushes himself up until he's sitting. His body curls in around his injured arm slightly, protective. "I can start a fire. It won't last without something to burn."

"Fine." Adam nods, trying to look decisive. "I'll get some wood."

The firebender snorts. "I could escape while you're gone."

"Yeah, you could. Have fun in the rain," and he leaves before there can be any more questions.

The world around him is soaked. He gives up on finding anything dry and settles for a rotten tree trunk that he can break apart with his hands. Let the fact that it's drenched be the firebender's problem, if he doesn't just leave while Adam is gone. If he isn't setting up an ambush for when Adam returns. It would serve him right if he did, just to find out that Adam has no money and nothing of value.

He looks for anything edible, but there isn't much. Probably the villages around here have beaten him to it, foraging to make up for burned harvests and too few workers. He pushes through the foliage anyway, to see if there's anything they overlooked.

He does find a plant he recognizes. He'd never had money for the village healer, but sometimes she'd let him help out with with chores around her workshop, mix up treatments for bruises and scrapes and keep some for himself. So he recognizes that the plant that he's looking at. Moon orchid. Good for burns and fevers.

Helping a firebender would be treason. Helping someone who had tried to kill him would be stupid.

Getting sick from cold, soaking clothes would be stupid, too.

Adam plucks the orchid and searches through the brush for more.

"Here." He dumps an armful of wood in front of the firebender, who scowls at it and does a quick slice-punch motion. A shot of flame licks at the wood and disappears, sending a gust of steam off of the wood as it heats so quickly the moisture evaporates.

It occurs to Adam that the firebender's clothes aren't wet. He must have done the same thing to them. Adam clamps his lips shut against the desire to be dry. Treason is one thing; begging is worse.

The firebender stacks the wood in swift, deliberate motions. No need for kindling, apparently, but otherwise it's nothing that Adam couldn't have done on his own. Not until he does another of those quick strike movements. Fire shoots straight at the wood. It catches immediately. The flickering light does strange things to the firebender's face. He doesn't look sick or injured or young anymore. He looks eerie and demonic. Adam offers him the herbs anyway.

"Here. Take these."

The firebender stares at his offering in disgust. "I don't want your weeds."

"They'll help with your burn." Adam adds, pointedly, "we've all gotten really good at treating burns, in the Earth Kingdom."

"In the Fire Nation we use this thing called medicine."

Adam drops the flowers in front of the firebender and scoots around the fire. He extends his fingers out and eats up the warmth through his palms.

The firebender picks up one of the plants and sniffs it, lifts it up to his face and nibbles at one of the flowers.

Adam snorts.

"What?" he asks, instantly suspicious. "What's it really gonna do, make me shit myself?"

"You're not supposed to eat it. You boil it and mash it up and spread it over the burn."

"How am I supposed to do that?"

"A kettle, a bowl -- "

"Because I've got those just lying around in a cave."

Adam doesn't answer. The cave isn't outside, that's good enough for him. He strains his eyes staring into the fire. It makes him feel warmer. Right now he'll take whatever he can get.

The firebender stands with a grunt and picks up a soot-streaked helmet from the ground. He walks up to the mouth of the cave, trailing his empty hand along the cave wall. He still stumbles once or twice. Adam half-expects him to fall when he holds out the helmet to catch rainwater.

He doesn't fall. Adam turns back to the fire.

The firebender holds the helmet over the fire. After a few minutes he starts swearing and rolling the helmet in his hands, trying to keep the hot metal from touching any one part of him for too long.

"You're going to give yourself another burn."

The firebender just drops the flowers into the water and pokes at them with one finger, like he has to prove that he doesn't care how hot the water is.

Adam stretches out. He's exhausted. He's hungry, but he's used to going to sleep hungry. There's a chance that the firebender is going to kill him in his sleep, but even with that threat there's no way he'll be able to stay awake all night. And what if he did stay up, and then he tripped from exhaustion tomorrow and broke his neck and died anyway, how embarrassing would that be?

When Adam wakes up, the fire has burned down to coals. The firebender is still asleep, goop glistening over his burn.

He walks to the mouth of the cave and discovers that it's morning. Better yet, it's stopped raining. His clothes are dry. He sets out again.

-

Adam stops on the outskirts of a village, at what had once been a farm. It's abandoned now, hasn't been tended in a year or more. He hides his sword in the overgrown field. He doesn't have a sheath, and he doesn't want to walk into town with a naked blade, like he's looking for trouble.

He stops at the next building he passes, and the next one, until he finds someone who's willing to trade lunch and a few coins for a morning's work. He pulls weeds and patches roofs and chases turtle ducks around to collect their eggs for a woman old enough to be his grandmother. Her house is too large for just her. Adam doesn't see anyone else. He doesn't ask.

Lunch is plain, rice and one of the eggs. He doesn't taste it. The food disappears into a void inside of him without making a dent in his hunger. He thanks the old woman and sets off after lunch. His feet object strenuously. They've been hurting all morning, like he'd walked a lot longer than a couple of hours yesterday.

Which he didn't. He was in the mountains, and then it had been nearly dusk when he left the village, when --

-- and then it was dark when he found the cave. That was a couple of hours of walking, at most.

Adam knows the towns near his. He takes work where he can find it; his village isn't very prosperous, and none of their neighbors are, either. No one can afford to pay for labor regularly. He's walked half a day before to find someone who could take him on, or who could buy the things he'd foraged up in the mountains.

He's never seen this town. He knows as soon as he gets to the town proper, walks along the main road. This is nowhere he could have walked to in just a few hours.

But if he'd walked longer than a few hours, it would have been the middle of the night, or early morning, when he found the firebender, which means he'd only have gotten a few hours of sleep, and his body insists that isn't so.

But it has to be. Has to. Because otherwise -- he'd left home one night and found the firebender the next. There's no way. He can't have been walking for an entire day. He would remember that.

He's more focused on telling himself that, firm and determined, than he is on the merchant's cart he's looking at, so he barely notices when someone says, "stop right there."

He only looks up when the speaker steps up next to him, too close to be ignored.

"Trying to shoplift?" the man asks, in a nasty way that isn't a question. He's looking straight at Adam, but Adam's confused enough to look to his other side -- but there's no shoplifter there, just another man, dressed in the same armor as the first, stepping up to stand as uncomfortably close. "You know what happens to thieves around here?"

Adam says calmly, "I didn't steal anything."

"Oh?" The armored man holds up a necklace. There's others like it on the cart in front of him. Adam has been staring at a jeweler's goods, blindly, uselessly; that isn't even close to being what he needs. "You're saying you paid for this?"

"I'm saying I've never seen it before." He turns to the girl behind the cart for support.

Her eyes are low and turned away from the scene. Adam knows that expression: don't let them notice me. There's a bad feeling in his gut.

"A thief and a liar. They'll love you in the work camp."

He tries reason again. "I haven't broken any laws -- "

The guard grabs his arm. "Work camp needs people, it doesn't care if they're guilty or not."

Adam can't move. Can't speak. It's like he hasn't gone anywhere. He screwed something up without knowing what it is, and now he's getting punished for no discernible reason. His words have no effect, like he didn't speak at all. He can't do anything to stop what's about to happen.

It wasn't supposed to be like this after he left.

The guard twists his arm. Adam can't even react to the pain.

There's a sound of metal sliding along metal, a clear deadly schink, and then a voice says:

"Let him go."

The firebender is standing in the middle of the street, sword in hand. He's wearing long sleeves that hide his burn, but his face is as pale as it had been the night before. It makes him look dangerous, inhuman, unfathomable.

"You want a piece of what he's getting?" The guard who isn't holding Adam steps forward and draws his own sword.

The firebender darts forward and swings his sword in a fierce arc that rips the guard's sword out of his hand. He pushes his momentum forward into a body slam. Knocks the guard back a step, off balance.

The grip on Adam's arm tightens. His guard steps back from the fight and jerks Adam along with him.

The firebender's attention snaps over to them.

"Let him go," he says again. It provokes that same wave of numb confusion in Adam: people keep talking about him and none of it makes sense. The entire world doesn't make sense: towns appear where they couldn't be, guards arrest him for stealing things he never touched, homes are burning burning burning down, how can Adam live in a home that's burned down, how can Adam live in that home --

The disarmed guard charges, bent low and putting his weight forward into his shoulder, a solid force hurtling toward his opponent.

The firebender steps out of the way at the last second

The hand on Adam's arm lets go. The second guard charges for the firebender.

He dodges that attack, too, but now the first guard is coming back for him. He lands a solid punch on the arm that Adam knows is covered in a weeping open burn.

The firebender falls to his knees.

The guard kicks his hand and sends his sword skittering away across the ground.

"Got you now, punk." The guard grabs his shoulder.

The firebender ducks and rolls into a somersault away from him. He comes back up with one leg extended and thrusts a hand forward, palm out.

A colossal fireball erupts from his hand. It misses the guards by a hair and slams into the building behind the merchant's cart, which promptly bursts into flames.

"Firebenders!" The guard falls on his ass. His partner can't even managed words, just stares with wide panicked eyes. "It's a Fire Nation attack! Get them!"

Adam's eyes dart around, looking for the second firebender. There must be one, the guard said get them --

He sees the merchant girl, ducked low to hide behind her cart. Now she can stand to look at Adam. She's staring at him, her mouth open and horrified, like she's seen a monster.

"Go!" The firebender shoves Adam's shoulder, and his body follows the motion, sets off running without a thought.

He doesn't think again until they're passing the abandoned farm, when he remembers his sword. He doubles back for it.

"What the hell are you doing?" The bender doesn't follow him, but he doesn't go on alone, either, just stands in the road thirty feet beyond Adam and yells at him.

Adam grabs the sword and runs back.

"Oh, I'm so glad that we didn't lose the world's crappiest sword, that's worth dying for -- "

Adam slows to say "it was good enough to beat you" as he catches up to him.

"You lucked into capturing a dead man, that doesn't count for shit --"

Adam spots an opportunity through the tall grass. There's no time to explain, no time to even be sure this will work, because bells are ringing a warning in town, summoning more people to hunt them down. There's no time to do anything but trust his instincts.

He almost keeps running, anyway. The firebender can't have much stamina. If Adam can leave him behind, if the guards catch him, if that's enough to satisfy them --

Too many ifs.

Adam breaks from the road and runs through the overgrown field.

"What is it now," the bender yells, but this time he follows. He can do the same math that Adam can: he doesn't have a chance on the open road alone, and he's desperate enough to hope Adam has some other solution. Though he's not so desperate he won't complain the entire time. "Is there some moth-eaten blanket that you can't bear to lose -- "

Adam pulls him down into an old irrigation ditch. The water has dried out to a thin trickle of mud at the bottom. It's just the deep enough they won't be seen if they lie down flat.

They won't be seen from the road, at least. If anyone comes twenty feet closer they'll be done for.

It's better odds than outrunning an entire town. It has to be. Adam needs to be right about something --

There's a deafening thunder of boots and swords, closing in, and then on top of them, endlessly, so loud Adam can't hide anywhere in his own mind. He can only wait for them to be found.

The thunder passes by and disappears.

Adam waits, just to be sure, and after a minute of silence he pokes his head up over the edge of the ditch. There's no one in sight, just raised dust and footprints.

"I guess we're not taking that road," he says.

The firebender is scowling at him. Adam realizes that he'd grabbed the burned arm, that he'd kept a hold of it, that he's gripping tight enough it would probably hurt even without the injury.

He lets go. If this were anyone else, he'd apologize. He's thinking about apologizing anyway, before the firebender speaks.

"You fucking owe me."

"I owe you?" Adam asks, incredulous. "I saved your life last night."

"Yeah, and I saved yours just now."

"Well, I saved your life twice."

"Bullshit."

"You're looking pretty good for a dead man."

The firebender ignores that, which means Adam is right. Of all the things to get right today, it would have to be saving this ungrateful soldier. You see what happens when you try to think for yourself, stupid boy --

"It's going to take forever to get anywhere if we can't take the road," the firebender says.

"Might as well get started," Adam says, "it's only going to take longer the longer you complain."

They crawl along the irrigation ditch until they get to the river it connects to. Adam scrapes mud off the front of his clothes as best he can and washes his hands in the shallow murky water; it doesn't leave him feeling much cleaner than he started. The firebender looks at the river with disgust and doesn't bother.

Adam walks along the drier parts of the river bed. The firebender follows behind him. Adam should probably tell him to go away, to find his own path, but -- it's not like there's another option, besides the road. So he says nothing, and neither does the firebender.

They walk well into the night without seeing anything that looks like shelter. It isn't raining, though, and they're far from town. There hasn't been any sign of pursuit since the ditch. Adam figures that guards who frame people to drum up labor for work camps aren't going to be too scrupulous about hunting down real dangers.

"We might as well stop here."

The firebender gives him a sarcastic look, but doesn't challenge him. He drops down to a seat right where he is and pulls a roll out of his bag, takes an enormous bite.

Adam has only had two small meals in the last two days. That is, he discovers, nowhere near hungry enough that he'll beg a firebender for food. He walks along the river and through the open wilderness, until he's turned up enough to get through the evening.

He finds a thick bunch of moon orchids. This time it's an easy decision to pick a handful and drop them right in front of the firebender.

"Three to one."

He picks them up even as he says "this is the same one."

"Okay," Adam agrees. "Two to one. You still owe me."

He scoffs. Adam smirks, content with his quiet victory, while the firebender sets out wood for a campfire. He sets up a kettle that he must have picked up in town, and then he swings one arm out toward the wood in a graceful arc.

A tower of fire shoots up out of his open hand, obliterating the firewood and launching the kettle twenty feet into the air.

Adam falls back onto his elbows. There's a second where he can't think of anything, and then there's a second where he thinks the firebender caught him smirking and decided to teach him a lesson. But the firebender is glaring at the fire, not at Adam, like he's annoyed with it. Like that wasn't what he wanted to happen.

He rebuilds a new stack of wood, over a couple of smoldering sticks from the last attempt. Uses the remains of the old fire to light the new one, the way a non-firebender would have to do. When it finally catches he tromps off into the woods and re-emerges with a now-dented kettle.

"I guess the volatile firebender is a stereotype," Adam observes.

"So's the useless earthbender."

No one has ever called Adam an earthbender before. He doesn't even realize that's supposed to insult him until he adds, "why didn't you just flatten them?"

Like hell is he telling this asshole I don't know how to or it didn't even occur to me.

"I don't need to blow things up to get through the day."

"Yeah, look where that gets you."

"The same place as you."

The firebender scowls at him. "You can't talk to me like that. I could be a spy. Maybe I'm going to capture you and torture you for information."

Adam finds that he isn't, actually, scared of that possibility. "If the Fire Nation's strategy depended on lone injured maniacs, the war wouldn't have lasted ninety years."

"Fine. Since you feel so safe, you take first watch."

Adam shrugs. That's supposed to be a punishment, but he's too wired to sleep anyway.

The firebender makes the orchid salve and applies it to his burn. He picked up bandages at some point, and he painstakingly wraps them around his arm. The whole process is messy; it clearly hurts. Adam feels a strange impulse to pretend he wasn't watching, that he didn't notice. He turns his face up to the stars.

Wound treated, the firebender slides into a sleeping bag and curls up to sleep.

Adam's eyes soften, lose their focus. His mind drifts to the utterly bizarre turn his life has taken in the last day. In the last -- how long was he walking -- how long has it been since --

"Hey. Firebender." There's no response. "Kettle killer. Sparky."

That gets a reaction. The firebender sits straight up and growls at him, incensed. "Sparky?"

"What's your name?"

"You woke me up for that?"

"What if someone attacks and I need to get your attention?"

The firebender glares. Adam has already won. After that reaction, he is never calling him anything but Sparky.

"Ronan," he says.

Adam wonders if that's a lie. It doesn't matter, but he's curious. It's something to think about.

He waits for Ronan to ask him his name.

Ronan lies back down and goes to sleep.

-

Ronan is lousy company, which Adam already knew but which is driven home as they trample through the grasslands the next day. He makes no attempt at conversation. He curses at every minor inconvenience. He doesn't share any of the supplies he picked up in town, even when that costs them time because Adam has to hunt for something to eat.

But it's impossible to lose track of time, to shut his eyes in one place and open them in another, when Ronan is stomping and scowling and swearing and calling Adam's attention to every tiny irritation.

They hit a new road two days later, with a new town coming into sight ahead.

"Finally," Ronan says, "I was starting to think this whole continent was nothing but mud."

Adam lets the insult pass. Ronan is very nearly out of his life forever. There's no reason to let him under his skin now.

The town isn't much to look at, a small grouping of shabby buildings huddled forlornly along the side of the river. Adam can tell at a glance that the people here don't have much to spare. Still, there might be some way to earn a little food, maybe even a little money. At the very least, he's going to need a fire starter; he's about to lose his.

But before he can look for an opportunity, before Ronan can even split away from him and go find whatever non-mud things he's looking for, someone yells out:

"Firebender!"

Adam throws a look at Ronan, wondering what he's done now. But Ronan is just -- standing there. He looks grumpy and unpleasant, sure, but not dangerous.

Adam turns back and discovers that the yeller is pointing straight at him.

"Firebender!" the man yells again. People are their heads out through doorways nearby. It's distressing, being the focus of that kind of attention.

"I'm not a firebender," Adam says. It isn't a defense. It's just confusion.

"Firebender!" and why does his voice have to be so grating, on top of everything.

There's a sound like paper tearing -- Ronan, ripping something off the side of a building. Before Adam gets a chance to worry about this second, much less pressing mystery, Ronan grabs his arm and takes off at a run.

Adam squirms. He digs his heels in to the road, but Ronan is bigger than he is, and stronger than anyone with that fever-hot skin should be. He manages to slow them but not stop them.

Meanwhile, that jerk is still yelling about firebenders, which is a word that grabs people's attention the first time they hear it. People are running out of buildings all over town.

Ronan shoots a wall of flame over his shoulder, an inch over Adam's head. It slams into the nearest building and sets it ablaze, along with the grass by the side of the road and the buildings on either side. Most of the townsfolk gather around to put out the fire. But some of them chase after Adam and Ronan, enough of them that Adam doesn't see any choice but to keep running. He's not inclined to trust a mob to listen to nuances like okay I'm with the guy that set your town on fire, but I'm not with him.

He has to run, but he doesn't have to let Ronan tow him. He jerks his arm again; this time he breaks out of Ronan's grasp.

Ronan uses his newly freed hand to shoot another fireball. It sets the little bridge at the entrance to town aflame. The hunt is brought to a screeching halt while people try to put out enough of the fire that they can cross, and then just enough that the bridge isn't lost.

They run another mile along the road until they're out of sight of the town. Adam doesn't hear anyone chasing them. By then Ronan is slowing, breathing hard in a way that doesn't sound right.

Adam could keep running. The villagers aren't following; if they aren't, they'll surely stop to deal with the actual firebender who actually burned their buildings.

That very practical line of thought melts away in the face of his anger.

"What did you do that for?" he demands. "We could have talked our way out of it if you hadn't attacked anyone!"

"Talking, right. That sounds like a great way to get stoned to death by angry peasants."

"So you burn their homes down, that's supposed to make them less angry?"

"It's supposed to get them off my ass."

"They wouldn't be on your ass if you weren't here, firebender."

"They were after you, firebender." So Ronan noticed that, too. "What did you think that was about?"

Adam can't actually hold still right now -- he's breathing too hard, and shaking from exertion and anger and something that he hates to admit is fear -- but he tries. Tries to stand up straight, to take the shame out of admitting, "I don't know."

Ronan shoves something in his face. It's a piece of parchment, the one he'd torn off the wall in town, and now that Adam can get a good look at it he sees it's a wanted poster. There's a bounty out for a rogue firebender who destroyed a shop and attacked two guards, exactly what Ronan had done in the last town -- but the portrait on the poster is Adam.

"What -- that's not fair!" He looks between the parchment and Ronan, but there's no mistaking it. That face is not in a million years Ronan. "I wasn't the one throwing fireballs around."

"You're the one they got a good look at." Ronan turns the parchment so they can both see it. "They don't even have a description of me, look, they just call me your accomplice."

"I'm sorry if you're jealous of my notoriety. I'm more worried that I'll get arrested the next time I show my face in public."

"It's funny," and Ronan almost sounds thoughtful, if Adam were willing to concede that Ronan were capable of thought. "If I went in alone they never would have known there was a firebender."

Adam turns in disgust and heads back into the long grass. The best he can hope for now is to get lost in the hills. He'd been looking forward to clear dry road.

He can hear Ronan walking behind him. Neither of them speaks.

-

They crash through the wilderness for a few more days, along a line that Adam hopes is parallel to the road. There's no signs of pursuit, not from the people who think he's a thief, not from the people who think he's a firebender, and both of those accusations continue to hurt his head when he thinks about them.

The landscape around them changes, mountains closing in and pushing them back onto the road. It's fine traveling for a day or so. The road is steep and rough, but Adam's fine with that if it means fewer travelers come this way.

Then one day they turn a bend in the road to find the canyon in front of them blocked by a rock slide.

Adam's heart sinks. How much time did he just lose? How much more is he going to lose backtracking, back to people who want to hurt him?

Ronan says "huh," like this is a minor inconvenience at most. He looks at Adam.

Adam looks back at him, mystified.

"So?" Ronan asks. "Are you going to deal with this shit or not?"

Right. Ronan is waiting for the earthbender to clear away the ton of rock ahead of them.

Adam swallows. He is not, ever, going to tell Ronan that he has no more idea how to do that than Ronan does. Which leaves him with exactly one course of action.

He stands up tall and focuses his mind, thinks about nothing except pushing rocks out of the way.

He shoves his hands out in front of him.

Nothing happens.

He tries again. No effect.

His cheeks heat up, and his throat closes around a knot of anger and shame. He tries to remember what he'd seen the earthbenders in his village do, back when there were earthbenders in the village, before the last of them got conscripted to the army and left the village with no defenses, not even the flimsy protection of corrupt guards, just old men and drunks and useless cripple children who think they're better than everyone else --

Ronan makes a noise of disgust. "You can't bend."

"I can."

"Barely," Ronan says, his contempt obvious. "Fuck, you don't know anything, do you?"

"I know things."

"You can't even move one rock, you're a fucking earthbender and you can't move one rock."

"If you would just shut up, I could focus."

Ronan does not shut up. "You flattened me when we met."

"I was under attack," Adam says, "I didn't have much of a choice."

"Oh, is that all," Ronan says, and slides, quick and fluid, into a fighter's stance. His arm swings out toward Adam.

Adam scrambles away, his hands flying up to his face. The movement knocks the sword that's hanging precariously from his belt. It falls away like dead skin. He curls in on himself and turns his body so the blow will land on his side, where he can take it better.

The blow never lands. The world around him is dead silent.

He emerges from his arms and see that Ronan has stopped a mere inch away from striking him.

Everything else -- the rock slide, the pebbles on the ground around them, the earth they're standing on -- is exactly where it was before Ronan attacked. The part of Adam that has a dim, cloudy idea of what earth is supposed to feel like, the part of him that has occasionally forced the earth to move, might as well be dead. The way it was when the guards grabbed him. The way it's been for most of his life.

"Never do that again," he spits at Ronan. He's in no position to make threats. His words come out like poison anyway.

Ronan makes a dismissive noise and pulls up out of his crouch, turns away to look at the rock walls around them.

"We'll have to climb, then." Ronan steps closer to inspect the stone, testing handholds here and there and peering up at the cliff tops fifty feet above them.

Adam needs every second of that inspection to breathe, before he's able to grab the sword and join Ronan at the cliff-face.

This isn't much different from the climbing he'd do out in the mountains where he'd grown up, looking for plants, game, minerals, anything with any value. He'd gotten pretty good at climbing up in the high altitudes, where less brave or less desperate people wouldn't go. This is a longer stretch than he'd like to climb in one shot, but it's nothing he can't do.

He doesn't know if Ronan can do it with his injured arm, but he also doesn't care. He scouts out the best route and starts his ascent.

Ronan waits until he's ten feet up and follows the same path. They both make it to the top unscathed.

-

They spend the rest of the day walking along the side of the ravine, following the road from above. Adam only quits when it gets so dark that he worries he'll take a bad step and fall over the edge.

They didn't talk while they were walking, and they don't talk while they're making camp. It's windy, up in the air without a wall of rock at their backs. Ronan starts three fires that all go out. He settles for fire-blasting some rocks and tucking them around him for warmth. Adam doesn't ask him for any, but he tosses a couple of them at Adam anyway.

It's still too windy in the morning to get a fire going. They shiver through a cold breakfast. Adam sits too close to the edge of the ravine, planning out the day. There's a spot maybe a mile ahead where the drop off is gradual enough to walk; they'll be able to get back to the road without having to climb.

Ronan says, abruptly, "I can teach you."

"I can climb just fine."

"Teach you earthbending," Ronan says, exasperated.

Adam blinks. For the first time in a day he's able to look at Ronan directly. He has to look at Ronan, just to see if that helps him understand the words coming out of his mouth. "What do you know about earthbending?"

"I've seen earthbenders in action."

"In battle, you mean."

Ronan shrugs. "That counts."

Adam looks back over the ridge. "No thanks."

"It's pathetic that you don't know anything."

"So the guy who blows up kettles is going to teach me how to bend?"

"You got any better options?"

Adam doesn't.

"Let's get back down to the road," he says. "I'm freezing."

-

"The most important thing about earthbending," Ronan says, "is being a stubborn asshole, so you should be fine."

"Helpful," Adam says in a monotone. "I was so wrong to think that you wouldn't be a great teacher."

"Look, there's theory to this shit, okay? It's not just throwing elements around. My teacher used to make me read poetry before he'd show me a new form."

Adam smiles, some part of him processing that statement before he's thought it through -- Ronan, kettle-killing Ronan, Sparky, reading a book of poetry by candlelight -- and then he's not just smiling, he's laughing.

"Really?" Adam asks. Ronan looks thoroughly annoyed at being laughed at, which only makes him happier. "Are you going to recite some for me?"

Ronan crosses his arms, which just makes Adam think about what theory there might be behind that gesture, and it takes an act of pure willpower to reign in his amusement.

"Okay," Adam says, serious faced. Ronan has brought him more trouble than good, but he's probably earned a few minutes of sincere attention if that's what he wants. "So what's the theory behind moving a rock?"

"I don't know, I'm not an earthbender," Ronan says. "Be -- a rock. Be rock-like."

"Maybe you should just show me a form."

Ronan doesn't respond right away. He thinks, eyes darting down to the corner of his eye, one hand twitching slightly, and then the other. He's translating something he's only ever seen someone else do, flipping it to fit in his body.

When he does move, it's sure and confident, like he's done this a thousand times before: planting his feet in a wide stance and punching one fist forward.

Adam mimics the gesture. He steps too wide, off-balance, so he shifts his foot in closer before he punches out again.

"No," Ronan says. "The step is part of it. Do it again, all together."

Adam tries again. That one feels better. It's definitely all in one piece.

"Go slower."

Adam does it again, faster. "You didn't go slow."

"I knew what I was doing."

"Did not."

"Just because I can't bend your stupid element doesn't mean I don't know how to step sideways," Ronan says, scathing. "Do it slow."

Adam goes slower, because apparently Ronan's going to be a little shit about this until he does.

"This is stupid," he says, after his third slow run through. "Benders don't move like this."

"Learn how to do it slow first, and then you can speed it up," Ronan says. "You're trying to move boulders, you think they're going to listen to you if you're only kind of right?"

Adam stops and stares at Ronan. "Rocks don't listen. They're not alive."

"See, that's why you can't do anything. You don't even think your element is alive."

That's wrong on so many orders of magnitude that it isn't even worth arguing over. Adam focuses on getting the motion right. He practices over and over again, while Ronan watches and tells him to step wider, drop his shoulder, rotate his wrist, face forward, square his shoulders, never satisfied.

I'm going to learn how to bend and then I'm going to trap him in a pit, Adam thinks, and grins.

"Okay," Ronan says, after an eternity. "Now do it faster."

So much for learning how to do it slow first -- Ronan has just as many corrections for him, if not more. The worst part is that Adam can feel it now, when he isn't right, so he has both voices criticizing him at once.

He almost snaps at Ronan to back off when he reaches out and lifts Adam's elbow up. He knew it was low. He was going to fix it himself. But when his eyes dart over, Ronan's face is completely serious, not mocking or grumpy or patronizing. Adam bites his tongue and tries again.

"Stop." Ronan jogs over to the side of the road and picks up a rock the size of his head. He drops it in the middle of the road, ten feet in front of Adam. "Now move that."

Adam swallows. It's just a rock. It can't do anything.

It could not do anything, and then he'd be a failure.

He has the form down perfect: he moves.

The rock does not.

Ronan doesn't say anything. Adam still feels the need to say "I'm working on it."

"Take your time," Ronan says, every word dripping with sarcasm.

Adam turns forward again, face red. He reaches for that place that knows, sometimes, what the earth is. He'd never go so far as to say that the earth is alive, that's stupid, but sometimes he's more...aware of it, of the dust in the air and the solidity under his feet and the strength or weakness of a wall against his back. He focuses on that, the slight heat the road is releasing back up to the sun, the release of tension as his foot lifts up off the road --

-- think you're better than us because you can make pebbles dance around --

His foot lands wrong, twists his ankle, and his arm go wild as he scrambles to catch his balance.

"What the hell was that?" Ronan asks.

"Nothing."

"The rock's not going to bite," Ronan says. "You don't need to flinch -- "

"I know," Adam says. His voice is too heated. It's too loud in his own head for him to listen, to anything. He breathes and tries to quiet it. Swings his foot out. Stomps down. Pushes his fist out --

-- rocks in your head, as stupid as you are --

Center. Stomp. Fist --

-- if I catch you wasting more time --

"Yeah, that's enough," Ronan says, when Adam has gone enough times that his arms are shaking.

"I haven't moved it."

"You're wearing out your shoulder."

"It's my shoulder, what do you care?"

"It's my skin that's going to rot off when you can't bring me my magical flowers."

"You can find your own," Adam says. "You ought to know what they look like by now." He goes again, but nothing happens, and no wonder; he isn't focused at all.

"I like when boys bring my flowers to me, they're more special that way," Ronan says. "Come on, try this one."

Ronan shows him two more forms. Adam practices until his feet scream and his joints crack, until Ronan has already finished setting up camp, right by the side of the road.

Adam thinks about objecting, and then decides he's too tired to care if they get caught. He falls to a seat beside the fire and laughs.

"What?" Ronan asks, annoyed.

"I better get this right before anyone else accuses me of being a firebender."

Ronan rolls his eyes. "Go to sleep."

-

Adam is sore all over the next day, the worst in his shoulder. He lies on the ground with his head resting on a patch of grass for as long as he can. Ronan is building up the campfire in what has become the usual way: spreading out logs along a bare patch of earth, throwing a fireball at them, finding one that wasn't immediately turned to ash, and using it to light the campfire.

Funny, Adam thinks, he can't do anything small, and I can't do anything, except that isn't very funny.

He's still feeling morose when Ronan pours boiling water over some orchids and grinds them up. He's gotten pretty good at that. He hasn't gotten good at applying the salve. His off-hand is awkward over his burned skin, hitting sensitive spots that make him wince. He wraps the bandage too tight, and then too loose. It pains Adam to see something done that badly when there's an alternative.

"I can do that for you," Adam offers.

"No." Blunt, immediate; Ronan doesn't even consider it.

"You can't think that I'm going to kill you now."

"I don't need your pity," Ronan snaps at him.

Adam sits bolt upright, and damn his bad shoulder. "Oh, I'm just supposed to need you."

"You need a miracle."

They don't talk much that day.

-

Buildings come into view just as the sun sets. Adam's joints have only ached more the longer they've walked. He knows there are fates worse than getting chased out of town by vengeful and ill-informed strangers, but he can't think what they are.

He tosses the small amount of money he has at Ronan. "Go buy food. Things that will keep. And a sleeping bag." He's cold already; the air is close and damp.

"I'm not your errand boy."

"No, you're the reason there's a bounty on me."

"I don't need to make it up to you that I saved your stupid life."

"Then do it because it's funny," Adam says, "I don't care why, just do it."

Ronan makes a face, but he takes the money and goes.

The sky gets dark, and the moon comes up, and Ronan doesn't return. Adam wonders if he's been abandoned, if Ronan didn't just take his money and walk straight through town. Or maybe he's sleeping in some nice warm bed, just to stick it to Adam that he's alone in the cold with no fire. Well, damn him if he is, Adam doesn't need some spoiled angry firebender. He digs out a hollow at the base of a tree, out of the wind, and bundles up as best he can in his coat.

He's propped up and ready for a long sleepless night when Ronan finally appears out of the dark. There's a small knot of flame hovering over his hand.

"How many houses did you burn down trying to make that?" Adam asks, as nasty as he can.

Ronan just throws something at him with his non-burning hand. Adam registers large, soft as soon as it hits his chest. Ronan steps close enough to cast some light on him, and he can see that it's a sleeping bag, in a little pack with straps so he can carry it on his back. When he unrolls it there's wrapped packages of food.

There's also a sheath, old but still in good shape, and easily worth more money then Adam had given him.

"What's this?"

Ronan is facing away, busy piling up wood and coaxing his lamplight into it, but he doesn't feign ignorance. "I'm sick of looking at that rusted piece of crap you carry everywhere."

"I didn't pay for this."

"Add it to what you owe me."

"So, nothing," Adam says.

Long after Ronan has fallen asleep, he sits up and slides the sword into the sheath, and then he lies back down, swaddled comfortably in his sleeping bag in the warmth of their campfire.

-

Ronan makes breakfast the next morning while Adam practices his forms. He doesn't correct him, even when Adam feels it go wrong. He looks over his shoulder to check. Ronan isn't even watching.

He's probably waiting for Adam to ask for his help (out stomp punch) because he thinks he's so much better than some pathetic nameless peasant (down twist up) he wants Adam to beg him to graciously descend off his throne and save him (kick step thrust) well, he'll be waiting a long fucking time (out stomp punch) --

The rock in front of him flies backward forty feet and crashes into the side of the mountain.

"Shit," and it's good for Adam's heart to hear Ronan shocked like that, "what the fuck did you do?"

Adam thinks about it. "I think -- I was a stubborn asshole."

"Yeah, but what did you do differently," but he's grinning.

Adam bends the earth right below Ronan's feet. It only rises an inch, but it's enough to knock him off balance and onto his ass.

-

Three weeks after Adam didn't kill Ronan in a cave, they come to a fork in the road. Ba Sing Se is east. Ronan turns west without a moment's thought.

Adam stops at the fork.

He doesn't have enough money to get to the city. Somewhere out there is a poster of his face with a bounty on it. And he can still only bend one out of every three tries, with erratic and unpredictable results.

Ronan stops about ten feet along the road and looks back. "Are you coming or what?"

Adam sends a pebble flying at Ronan's face.

Ronan catches it easily and chucks it down the road ahead of them when Adam catches up to him.

Chapter Text

Adam is as tired as he can ever remember being in his life. The ground underneath him is comfortable, as far as ground goes. He ate an actual dinner. There's a fire near but not too near to him, warm and crackling pleasantly.

And he can't fall asleep because something, somewhere, is chirping.

"Fuck this." Ronan gets up and kicks his leg. "Get up."

As little as Adam enjoys his current situation, he would enjoy finding out how Ronan proposes to solve it even less. "I'm sleeping."

"No you're not," Ronan says, "and you're not going to as long as that fucking noise keeps going."

"It has to stop eventually."

A particularly loud cheep cuts through the night air. Adam swears he can hear the look on Ronan's face. It sounds just like that obnoxious chirping.

He sighs and wriggles out of his sleeping bag.

They stumble through the dark. The thought hey, couldn't we have brought a torch from the fire occurs to Adam precisely at the point where it's too late to go back for one. He thinks about asking Ronan to bend some fire so they can see, and then he considers how dry the surrounding shrubs and grass are. A forest fire would significantly hinder his ability to get any sleep tonight.

At least the chirping is easy to follow. They have to walk further than Adam expected. He thought whatever was making the noise was nearby and loud, but it turns out it's far away and extremely loud. He's beginning to wonder if it might not be a spirit, because surely nothing from the physical world could make that much noise, when they find a nest tilted on its side on the ground.

Ronan squats down and places both hands around the nest. His hands move so slowly that Adam doesn't see what he's doing until he's got the nest nearly upright, and then he steps close enough to see --

One little hatchling, the world's most pathetic raven cat, alone in the nest and chirping like its entire body is nothing but lungs. The only sign of its parents, of any other hatchlings, are a few bloody feathers snagged on the side of the nest. It's enough to give Adam a pretty good idea of what happened to them.

He runs a tired hand across his tired face. "It can't last much longer, right?"

The disgust is clear in Ronan's voice. "Its whole family is dead."

"Yes, hence, it can't last much longer."

"You'd kill a baby just so you can sleep better?"

"No, but right now killing you sounds pretty good."

"You wouldn't last one day without me."

Ronan can't see Adam roll his eyes, but it makes him feel better to know that he did it. Ronan is intent on cupping his hands around the hatchling, lifting it up out of the nest and cradling it to his chest.

"Do you even know how to take care of a baby raven cat?"

"I know not to murder it." Ronan strokes the top of the hatchling's head with one finger, light as a feather. "So I'm ahead of you."

I wasn't going to murder it, I was just going to leave it to die on its own is not a great defense. Adam holds his tongue as they trudge back to camp, even though it takes them twice as long to find their way back.

The hatchling stops chirping en route; it had the privilege of falling asleep against Ronan's solid chest. Adam tries to remember that this silence is a good thing. What was he going to do if it hadn't shut up, leave Ronan and go sleep on his own somewhere in the cold?

He could do that, if he had to, but it would mean that much less time to sleep.

-

Their progress slows to a crawl now that Ronan has to stop every hour to scrounge for things the hatchling will eat. His parenting technique is rather hit-or-miss. For a starving orphan that ought to be dead already, the raven cat is really very picky.

"Just as well we're not trying to get anywhere in particular," Adam says, the fourth time they stop in one morning.

Ronan looks from his baby to Adam with a weird expression on his face. The raven cat bites his finger; he doesn't notice. "We're heading for the Fire Nation colonies on the coast."

Right. Of course Ronan has a plan. Just because he didn't tell Adam what it was doesn't mean he doesn't have one. It would be stranger if he had told Adam. Adam hasn't told Ronan he's heading for Ba Sing Se. Which he is, he's just taking a detour first. To the occupied territories on the coast, way out of his way.

Adam says "oh" for a lack of anything better to say.

Ronan dangles a caterpillar over the raven cat's insatiable beak. "There'll be a ship going back to the Fire Nation somewhere."

Adam hasn't thought about the war lately. They've been avoiding towns and laying low when other travelers pass, so it's been ages since he talked to anyone but Ronan. The war had started to feel small and far away -- but it isn't. And Adam's home may be nothing but burning rubble, but Ronan has his own home that he wants to go back to.

"I hope they let you bring birds on those."

Ronan rolls his eyes. "She can fly."

"She really can't," Adam says, "though at the speed we're going she'll be grown before we get to the coast."

"Don't you have anything better to do than bug me?"

"Not a single thing," but he goes to practice his forms. It takes him a while to find the right headspace.

-

Adam doesn't master his three forms, exactly. Sometimes while he's practicing he can feel the way that they're supposed to be, the purest realest shape of them, and it's always just out of reach. But he gets to a point where Ronan says "not bad" when he practices, and then he gets to a point where he doesn't even think Ronan is making fun of him when he says that.

Ronan shows him two more forms, and the whole humiliating process starts over again. At least he picks up those two faster than the first three.

He waits for Ronan to offer to show him another form.

He gets tired of waiting and asks Ronan outright.

"I'm busy," Ronan snaps during the third interminable raven cat feeding of the day.

He gets tired of waiting for Ronan to finish fussing over his hatchling, moving her wings and cooing when she swipes her talons at him and dangling bugs out of reach to make her jump for them, and just offers her food himself.

"Back off." Ronan twists away from Adam. The raven cat can still see the caterpillar in Adam's hand. She hops along Ronan's lap toward Adam and then sits back on her haunches, beak open and begging. "You don't get to murder her."

"I'm not going to kill her," Adam says. "I could help with her if you'd ever ask."

"I'm not asking."

"Fine." Adam is irrationally angry to be denied this thankless task. "Keep her. I was just trying to make things easier for you."

"No, you were trying to make things easier for you."

Anger spikes in him again, all the worse because Ronan is right. "It helps both of us if I know how to bend."

"I don't know any more forms," Ronan snaps, "okay? You're on your own."

Adam glares, and glares, and Ronan isn't even looking at him. He's just waving his fingers over the raven cat's head, letting her peck them. Because that's more important than Adam. That's more important than the fact that he wasted Adam's time, dragged miles and miles out of his way. Ronan could have just said that he didn't know any other earthbending forms, but no, he had to keep Adam in his place, didn't he? He had to make the pathetic nameless peasant beg him for help.

Or else -- he hadn't even done it on purpose, because he'd have to think about Adam's needs in order to do that, and Adam is too far beneath him for such a thing.

Adam turns his back on Ronan and raven cat alike and goes looking for water. He needs to cool down.

-

Adam starts with the forms he knows and works backwards, tries to decipher the logic behind the movements -- why does this motion lead to that effect, why is it a kick here but a punch there, why can he twist that form and it still works but if he doesn't get this one right then nothing happens at all. His data set is too small, though. He can't tell if the connections he's drawing are just coincidence. He suspects that the relationship between form and function isn't limited to logic, anyway.

He tries piecing together what he has figured out into new forms. Mostly, his experiments produce no results.

And sometimes, well.

Adam steps this way and bends that way and sweeps an arm like so -- and the ground around him spins like a wheel, faster and faster, with him as the one solid stationary point and everything within twenty feet of him spinning so fast that he can't even watch it whip around.

The ground stops moving as fast as it started, but everything is shifted. Ronan is on his left instead of his right, knocked onto his back, and the raven cat is crying in panic. The logs of the campfire are knocked all over the place, fortunately unlit.

"What the fuck did you do that for?" Ronan yells, scrambling back up to his feet.

"I was just trying something."

"Trying to get us killed?"

Adam realizes with a pang that us is not you and me, it's me and the raven cat.

"Why not?" he asks, as airy and cruel as he can. "If I already got everything out of you that I can use."

Ronan is breathing hard, his shoulders visibly rising and falling, but he looks as deadly as he ever has. "If you feel like that you can just fuck off."

Adam doesn't move. He feels like a bucket flipped upside down, his insides sloshing out across the ground.

"What?"

Ronan looks -- empty, too, but then he goes hard and cold. "I said you can fuck off."

I can't.

Adam thinks about no campfire and the nights getting colder. About only having to find half his meals, and getting to rest the other half the time while someone else does the work. About the raven cat crying for food every two hours, and how that so reliably marks the passage of time.

He thinks about the sleeping bag that he didn't have when he started out. About the earthbending that's become reliable enough no one could accuse him of being from the Fire Nation. About the road that doesn't lead anywhere he wants to go.

Adam can feed himself. Protect himself. Find his own way to Ba Sing Se.

The only thing he can't do is ask Ronan to let him stay.

Adam grabs his pack and walks off down the road.

-

It takes him an hour to realize that he's still heading west toward the colonies. But he's not going to turn around and have to walk past Ronan, look like an idiot who doesn't know where he's going -- or worse, a loser who's come begging for company. He'll just have to walk fast enough to leave Ronan behind and change routes as soon as he finds a fork in the road.

It's a long, dark, cold night. He gets up as soon as the sun rises and starts walking again. He tries to focus on his surroundings, just for something to pay attention to, but -- he hadn't realized how boring the scenery was around here, all flat open grasslands. It blurs together as he walks, until he has a panicked horrified thought: how long have I been walking?

He forces it down, ignores it, refuses to answer it, and that only makes it louder: how long have I been walking?

He stops in the middle of the road. Feels his heart racing. Lists every sensation in his body, the hunger and the soreness and the fatigue that aren't great enough to have come from more than one bad night's sleep and a few hours of walking. He remembers those hours, even if they were boring. He's fine. Nothing is wrong. He can keep walking now.

He sits on the side of the road.

The sun reaches its high point. He doesn't get up.

Ronan appears along the road.

Adam watches dully as he approaches. It's too late to hide or walk away. If he's spotted Ronan, than Ronan must have spotted him. Trying to avoid him would just look pathetic.

"Here," Ronan says, when he's in arm's reach. He looks the same as ever, which is to say, annoyed. He holds the raven cat out to Adam. "You hold her, I need to piss."

Adam takes her. Ronan wanders off the road before Adam can say anything, before Adam can decide if there's anything to say.

He dangles his arm over the raven cat. She bats at the hem of his sleeve. Her face says that she thinks she's very cunning.

"You're smarter than he is, anyway," Adam murmurs at her, and then decides that's not fair. If Ronan has decided to pretend the last day never happened, maybe he is the smart one, after all.

The raven cat starts cheeping for food just as Ronan returns.

"Aw, what'd you do to her," but it doesn't sound upset.

Adam snorts. "Obviously, I murdered her."

Ronan doesn't insist on taking her back, and Adam doesn't insist on giving her up.

-

The next few days pass without incident, and then Ronan sets three trees and one very alarmed fox ferret ablaze while trying to start their campfire.

Ronan's lack of control stopped being noteworthy a long time ago, but this is a particularly stunning example. After Ronan's lack of sympathy for Adam's bending failures, he's not inclined to let it go.

"Didn't your teacher make you learn any control?" he asks, implying in the question that he already knows the answer is no. "Or was it all just reading poetry?"

"Fire's unstable," Ronan snaps. "This is a little more complicated than making mud pies."

"I figured you'd try after you burned one arm off. If you want to give yourself a matching scar wait until I'm not around."

"I didn't -- "

The statement ends so abruptly that Adam doesn't realize that it has ended. It throws him. Ronan is not the type to censor himself.

"You didn't what?"

"Forget it," Ronan mutters.

Adam runs back through the conversation.

"But who else could have..." The question spills out even as the answer hits him over the head. Ronan was alone when Adam found him, alone and hiding. Adam never thought twice about it. Of course Ronan would hide, when he was alone in enemy territory. Except the Fire Nation's military strategy really didn't depend on individual firebenders with no control, so why had he been alone? Why hadn't he had a whole company of soldiers to set up camp with, to watch his back, to tend to his wounds with real, proper medicine?

"You were attacked by other firebenders?"

Ronan falls completely still, and Adam's right, he's right.

"Why?"

Ronan shrugs, a jerky mess of a movement. "People never need a reason to hate me."

Ronan is rude, short-tempered, snobby, ungrateful, incapable of compromise or admitting error, allergic to saying anything nice -- everything about him inspires hatred, and he flaunts them all. Someone tried to kill him? It would be more surprising if they didn't.

There's horror clogging Adam's throat, which is maybe for the best. If he could have spoken then he would have said I don't hate you.

It's...unsettling.

"I'll make camp," he says instead, "your bird needs you," and he waits until Ronan has walked out of sight to try to pull himself together.

-

"Try it again."

It's easy for Ronan to say. He's not the one who has to keep his concentration despite the rain running down his back and into his eyes and off the tip of his nose. The only shelter for miles around are some lifeless twisted trees, like the entire world is reflecting his mood back on him. They do nothing to block the storm.

Adam knows how to raise up a pillar of rock from the ground. It shouldn't be that hard to adapt the technique, to raise a slab of earth up to form a roof.

And yet here they are.

He doesn't need Ronan to tell him to keep trying. Ronan's only making it worse at this point. Adam is making up this form, so there's nothing to be gained from Ronan watching, except judgment, except knowing there's someone else freezing because Adam can't get this right.

"Whatever," Ronan says, disgusted, after another thirty long, cold minutes that accomplish nothing besides maybe twisting Adam's ankle. "Let's just keep moving." The raven cat squawks in agreement, though she has the least cause to complain. She's bundled inside Ronan's shirt, the warmest and driest and luckiest of them all.

"No." Adam tries again, steps lower this time and hides a grimace. Definitely twisted his ankle.

"This is useless. We might as well keep walking. At least that way we'll get somewhere."

"Do whatever you want," Adam snaps, "I'm not leaving until I've got this."

"Why the hell not?"

"Because I'm not useless!"

Ronan's eyes go wide.

Adam whirls away from him, mortified. That's what he gets, for quitting before he'd finished the job. He just needs to focus. Try harder. Get this right.

His eyes squeeze tight, but he can still make out the sound of footsteps. Ronan's leaving, just like Adam told him to. There's no reason for him to hang around waiting for some useless jerk who yells at him.

A very familiar scream rings out, nearby. By now Adam can recognize the raven cat with his eyes closed. He even recognizes what that sound means; that's a happy scream, a I just drew blood scream.

He opens his eyes, and spots Ronan sitting in the mud on the side of the road. He's got the raven cat on his lap and he's letting her maul his good arm. He looks like someone who's prepared to wait. He looks patient, even though Adam knows he isn't, even though Ronan knows there's no guarantee Adam will ever get this right.

Adam grounds himself. Pushes back against that grounding. Pushes out against it, and a whole shelf of rock lifts up from the ground and hangs in the air for one split second.

It starts to fall before Adam recovers from his surprise, but he knows the feel of it now. He punches out, and the shelf crashes back into the ground at an angle. With a few more fumbling attempts he gets two slabs of rock to jut up out of the ground on either side, forming two walls to block the wind.

And then it's -- okay, small and crooked and cramped, but it's a shelter, one that he made.

He grins at Ronan, a wild lunatic expression.

Ronan rolls his eyes, yeah, you did it, what's the big deal?

Adam moves their stuff under the shelter while Ronan gets the fire going. The wood is so wet that his usual brute force works just fine. They feed the raven cat and then themselves and then the raven cat again, and Adam is warm and full and mostly dry. He feels as good as he can remember feeling.

"Hey," he says to Ronan. "Close your eyes."

Ronan scowls. "No."

"I'm not going to attack you."

"I don't have to be afraid to not want to close my eyes."

Adam gives up arguing and closes his own eyes. Shifts his body until he's in a meditative position, or as close as he can get. It's been a few years since he tried this. The healer in his village had taught it to him as a technique for managing physical pain. She'd said that it could help with other kinds of pain, too, but he'd never had much luck, and he'd stopped trying.

Now, with his eyes shut and his ears open, he feels the earth all around him, the stone floor below him, the packed dirt below that, the mountain surging up from that off in the near distance, the roof and the walls around him that are still vibrating, minutely, from when he'd called to them and they had answered.

"You know what I used to hear when I tried to earthbend?" He asks the question and then waits, breathing with a slow, stone-steady patience. He leaves a space for Ronan, to say no, to ask how would I know, to make a joke.

Ronan does none of those things.

"I would hear my father," Adam continues. "Telling me I was too stupid to get anything right. Telling me I was wasting my time. Telling me I was a waste. I'd hear the ringing in my ear, the time he hit me so hard that I never heard out of it again. And since I was hearing all of that, I couldn't hear the earth."

There's another lull in the conversation, still and solid, and then Ronan says:

"All I hear is fire."

Ronan's eyes were shut, but he opens them, as though he can feel Adam's gaze.

"When you bend?" Adam asks.

"All the time."

"From when they burned your arm."

"I don't care about my fucking arm." His voice heats up, fierce and burning. "They killed my family."

"Who did?"

Ronan had adopted the same posture Adam was in, but now his hands curl into fists, and he tenses up, ready to lunge. "Liars," he spits. "They said my father was a traitor. He wasn't. The whole palace is like that, everyone lies and stabs each other in the back to get ahead, or just for fun..."

For a long second there's only the rain, and the crackling of the fire, and Ronan's harsh breathing, loudest of all.

"They executed my whole family, and I couldn't do anything. I wasn't even there. I was stuck in this waste of a country, fighting for an officer who didn't even hesitate to send me back to be executed. Some fucking loyalty." Ronan scrubs a hand across his face. "Fuck them. They can hunt me down and they can capture me and I'll just escape again. I'm going to find out who betrayed my family, and then I'm going to kill them."

Adam is grateful, then, for all the heavy earth around him. It holds him up when he feels too profoundly sad to hold himself up.

"If you never stop burning, you're going to burn out."

Ronan stares into the fire. "I'll burn for as long as it takes."

-

Adam's technique improves. His next shelter has a roof they can sit under without ducking their heads. The one after that has a slanted floor and a raised threshold to keep rain water from seeping in.

Even so, the nights get colder. Ronan doesn't complain. Adam can't tell if that's something about firebenders, if they don't get cold, or if it's something particular to Ronan. He figures it's the latter, just more stubborn pride, which means he can't complain, either.

He suffers in silence, shivering and suppressing his shivering and a thousand miles away from sleep, until Ronan grabs his arm.

"What?" Adam whispers. He doesn't see anything wrong, but -- "Is there a problem?"

"The problem," Ronan says, "is your teeth are chatting so loud I can't fall asleep."

Embarrassment on top of adrenaline on top of the cold is really more than Adam can handle gracefully in the middle of the night. "Oh, sorry if I'm inconveniencing you by freezing to death! Would you rather I just stab myself and get it over with?"

"I'd rather you scoot over." Ronan tugs his arm closer.

For a second Adam's face is hot enough to warm his entire body.

Ronan tugs his arm again, harder.

If Adam couldn't admit that he was cold, he really can't ask you want me to sleep next to you?

He scoots closer to Ronan, until they're lying parallel, a respectable gap between their bodies.

Ronan sighs in obvious irritation and shoves closer to Adam. Their backs press up against each other.

The change is immediate and pleasant, like stepping out of the shade into the sun. Without even meaning to Adam relaxes and leans back into Ronan. He falls asleep before he can feel self-conscious about that.

Ronan sets his sleeping bag next to Adam's the next night, and the night after that.

The storm clears the next day, the temperature picking up as they walk. Adam tells himself over and over that this is a good thing.

They set up camp that night and Ronan sets his sleeping bag out next to Adam's.

It takes Adam a very long time to fall asleep that night.

-

They've been avoiding civilization for weeks, haven't seen any other people for longer than a few minutes passing on the road. So when they see a farm up ahead, Adam stops. There's a few people out working in the fields. The nearest one looks up at them and waves. No one points at Adam or screams or flees in terror.

"What do you think," he asks Ronan, "feel like going into town?"

"Oh hell yes," Ronan says, "I'd trade your ass for a hot bath."

"I'd trade your unbathed ass for a good night's sleep," Adam says.

"I'd trade your cranky ass for some decent food," Ronan retorts.

"I'd give your skinny ass away," Adam says, "I wouldn't even ask for any compensation."

There aren't any wanted posters for firebenders in town, but there are plenty for bandits.

"Too close to the occupied territories," a blacksmith explains. "Fire Nation army passes through here all the time, tramples half the harvest and snatches up the rest. Makes people desperate."

Adam assumes he's exaggerating the danger because he's trying to sell Ronan an expensive sword. They don't have the money, but Ronan looks over all of the weapons on offer, giving them test swings and looking thoughtful.

Adam touches the hilt of his father's sword. His bending isn't so reliable that he'd trust his life to it in a fight, but -- he trusts it more than he trusts this. He's never known how to use the sword, and when he gets right down to it, he doesn't want to know. Seeing Ronan handle these weapons with ease forces him to admit how wrong it's felt, all along, to be carrying this one.

"Would you be interested in buying this?" he asks the blacksmith.

The smith gives it a quick once-over. He does not have to test it to make a decision.

"I'll be honest with you," the blacksmith says. "This is garbage. I'd only buy it to melt it down for scrap."

Adam thinks about his father's sword on fire, burning, melting away, until it didn't exist at all.

"Yeah," he says, "that'd be perfect."

"I can't give you more than a few coins for it."

"That's fine," and he doesn't even haggle.

Ronan is less pleased. "You gotta have some kind of weapon. What if you get in trouble?"

The blacksmith has gone back to his till, so Adam murmurs, "I assume by then you'd have set the trouble on fire and we'd have other problems."

Ronan buys a couple of daggers. When they get back on the road he holds one out to Adam.

"Just take it," he says. "I can't always come rescue you."

"Have you ever rescued me?"

Ronan thrusts the dagger at him again. Adam takes it so the conversation can be over.

-

The dagger might have been a good idea, after all.

There are five bandits Adam can see, but there are arrows flying at them from somewhere, from who knows how many archers, to say nothing of any reserves the bandits might have hidden away in the hills.

Adam holds his own, at first. He trips two bandits with the same spinning earth technique Ronan had unwittingly helped him learn. He catches another one hip deep in a crevice. One of the bandits he'd laid out gets back up, and Adam sends a fist-sized rock hurtling at his face, with a result that looks like a broken nose.

He's practiced his forms so often he can bend without thinking, but it isn't enough. The bandits pick up on his patterns and dodge. He needs something new, but he doesn't have it. This is all he knows, and it isn't enough.

Ronan has better luck with his sword, easily holding off two bandits at the same time, but they pick up on his tricks, too. Soon they pull out of his range, and Adam and Ronan can't retreat, still pinned down by arrows. The bandits are plotting something, talking intensely, except for the one who's still trapped in the earth. His futile attempts to wriggle out might have been funny, if Adam weren't so sure they were in trouble.

He moves closer to Ronan, presses shoulder to shoulder. He can feel it when Ronan shifts his weight, preparing for a kick that will send a sheet of fire flying toward the bandits.

"Get ready to run," Ronan says.

"I'm ready."

Ronan breathes in and centers himself.

A boulder hurtles through the air and knocks over three of the bandits at once.

Ronan throws Adam a confused look.

Adam shakes his head: wasn't me.

"Hey! Jerks!" A girl comes flying forward, not running but riding a wave of rock that rolls along the earth under her. She jumps up, and the earth rumbles along without her, knocks over the last bandit and throws him several feet back. "Get out of here before I make you get out!"

The bandits scramble up and run, even the trapped one finding some previously unknown reservoir of motivation and shooting up out of the crevice.

The earthbender stays on alert for a moment, and then hollers a victory cry. She spins around, her face lit up, and in a mocking voice says, "thanks for showing up."

Adam has a confused second where he thinks she's talking to him, before a new voice behind him says, "You should've waited for us, Blue."

"You should've run faster," the earthbender says, walking up to meet the half-dozen teenagers who just arrived, all of them armed with some kind of weapon. One of them punches the earthbender on the arm. She punches back. They both laugh.

Ronan glowers. He hasn't bothered to sheath his sword. Adam decides that makes it his responsibility to approach the strangers.

"Thanks," he says, "we were in trouble there for a second."

"No problem," one of the newcomers says. "We hate bandits."

"Almost as much as we hate the Fire Nation," another one says.

"It's our responsibility as Earth Kingdom citizens to look out for each other," the one named Blue says.

Adam shifts on his feet. "Still. We appreciate it." He clears his throat. "We should be going now -- "

"Oh, you can't," Blue says, "this is a terrible stretch of road."

"We'll keep our eyes open," Adam says.

"Cool, then you'll get to see it when death comes for you." Blue pantomimes opening her eyes really wide and then getting stabbed in the chest. Her teenage brigade laughs. "We'll come with you."

"Oh, we can't cause you any trouble -- "

"It's no trouble at all! We know a shortcut through the pass, you'll be safer once you're on the other side."

Adam wants to refuse again, but he doesn't dare; too vehement and he'll only make them suspicious. So he says "thanks" and leads the group back down the road to Ronan, who is still glaring and still holding his sword. Blue eyes the sword and nods, impressed.

At least, if they have to have company, they've found a group of violent delinquents. Ronan fits right in.

"I'm Blue," the earthbender says, and proceeds to introduce the rest of her gang, who all, improbably enough, have weirder names then Blue.

And then there's silence.

This is the part where Adam and Ronan introduce themselves.

Except.

Ronan has never asked Adam what his name is.

Adam has mostly been able to ignore this imbalance between them, to forget how rude Ronan was not to have asked, to forget his own guilt about keeping a secret. He can't ignore it now. He wants to pull Ronan to the side and tell him, where no one else will hear. Ronan deserves to know first.

There's no way on earth Adam can do that without looking suspicious. He does not want to look suspicious. He wants to get through this pass and get Ronan away from these fierce watchful eyes.

"That's Ronan," he says. "My name is Adam," and he pretends he doesn't notice Ronan look away.

-

The mountain pass is nice, when there's no one trying to kill them. Blue and her gang chat boisterously, their voices echoing off the stone as they brag about fights they've been in, and mock each other for being slowpokes (Blue to everyone else), and chastise each other for being reckless (everyone else to Blue).

The road turns at one point, sloping down and back on itself. They'd walk twice as far along the switchbacks if they followed that path, all of it through narrow canyons perfect for staging ambushes.

Their new friends have a better idea.

"Who's first?" Blue asks. The next-smallest girl, who's probably three or four years younger than Blue but already has an inch on her, raises a hand and jumps up and down. "All right, hold still."

The girl freezes, hugging herself. Blue stomps and punches up toward the sky, and a chunk of rock under the girl's feet tears itself out of the ground and hurtles up the side of the mountain, lifting her forty feet up. She squeals the whole way, her joyous "eee!" bouncing back and forth along the mountainsides.

"Okay, okay, who's next?" and Blue sends her whole gang up the mountain like that, one at a time.

Adam watches her. He thinks he's got it figured out by the third launch, can feel a steadiness in his bones when he thinks about how to move, but he watches the rest just to be sure.

He looks at Ronan, and sees that Ronan has been watching him watch Blue.

"Trust me not to drop you?" he asks.

"It'd be pretty fucking rude if you did," Ronan says. Some tense part of Adam relaxes. This isn't close to the longest they've gone without talking to each other, but listening to so many other voices made Ronan's silence louder. "Since you still owe me for saving your life and all."

Since Ronan is, in fact, the one who owes him, Adam does not give him any warning. He just sends him flying up the side of the mountain.

For a moment he feels -- weightless, elated, like he was the one who just hurtled up into the sky.

"You're a bender?" Blue asks, excitement spilling out of her.

And just like that, he's back on the ground. "Not really."

"Oh, hell no, don't give me fake modesty. If you can pull that off you're more of a bender than most people with the title."

"I'm not faking anything. I don't know enough to be a real earthbender. I -- I'm mostly self-taught," and Adam is glad that Ronan is already gone, that he doesn't have to look him in the eye while he denies him.

-

They make camp in a nice grassy spot in the shadow of the mountain, where the pass widens out to a valley. Blue's child army runs in every direction, getting in each other's way, getting nothing done. Adam tries to enjoy the noise. This is a reprieve from the last several weeks of solitude. This is companionship. Safety. Society.

Everything is loud, and he can't make out any of the words, and his eyes are drawn over and over again to Ronan, sullen and withdrawn at the edge of camp.

"Is he okay?" Blue asks, coming up to stand by Adam.

"He's fine." Adam smiles at her as best he can. "I think it hurt his pride to get rescued."

It takes them an eternity to get a campfire going. Blue's gang jokes around, with no sign they mind the night air at all. Adam shivers. He catches himself on the verge of asking if everyone can just focus and quit goofing off. It makes him feel old and rude.

"Three firebenders," the second smallest girl is saying, when they finally get a campfire started and Adam can bring himself to join the conversation. "I thought I was a goner -- "

"No way did you ever fight three firebenders," one of her friends scoffs at her.

"I did! There was a whole company of soldiers, searching every building in the village."

"And you fought them off single-handed?"

"Well, I would have," she insists, as her friends boo her, "but my mom made me hide under the bed. That was before my mom died," she adds, as an afterthought.

"What were they searching for?"

"Who knows." The storyteller falls gracelessly backwards onto the ground, facing up toward the stars. "Probably just stealing everything they could get their hands on. You know what the Fire Nation's like."

There's a chorus of agreements: everyone knows what the Fire Nation is like.

Adam doesn't dare look at Ronan.

"You must've seen some shit on the road," and Adam only realizes the question is aimed at him when the kid asking it adds, "you ever get up close to a firebender?"

Adam shrugs. "There were some wanted posters for a firebender in a town we passed a while back, does that count?" and everyone laughs and assures him that no, it doesn't count. They go back to telling their own war stories. They have a lot of them.

Blue makes a proper shelter, when the fire burns low and people are starting to yawn more than they talk. Compared to Adam's little stone huts, this is a palace, airtight and secure and big enough for all of them. Adam watches how she does it, the way he's watched everything that everyone does for the entire day, but he's not truly paying attention.

Ronan rolls out his sleeping back, and Adam -- looks at him, and then takes a spot several feet away.

Ronan turns over on his side and faces away from Adam.

-

"We have an earthbending master."

It took Blue's mob half the morning to get up and make breakfast, but things have finally settled down. Blue snuck up on Adam while he was digging for something the raven cat would deign to eat. He wishes his hands weren't so muddy. He wishes she hadn't caught him so low to the ground.

"I didn't think there were any of those left," he says, standing back up and fighting the urge to wipe his hands off. "Outside of the army, or labor camps."

"He's in hiding. Coordinating resistance against the Fire Nation."

"I can't imagine he'd appreciate you telling people about him, then."

"He would," Blue says. "He can teach you."

Adam opens his mouth. No words come out.

He could learn how to earthbend. He could master these skills, master his own self. He could make his way in the world without relying on anyone.

"Thanks," Adam says, "but I can't."

Blue catches the way his eyes flick over to Ronan. "Hey, I saw your friend's moves. He can come, too."

"Trust me, you don't want us in your resistance."

"No, you know who I don't want in my resistance? Any of these kids." She waves her hand out to encompass her entire gang, all of her friends laughing and eating with their mouths open and playing at killing each other. "They should be at home having fun, having a childhood, instead of running and fighting and waking up every night with nightmares. But this is all that we have. This war has been going on for ninety years. The Avatar is gone. The airbenders are gone. The Water Tribes are dying. The only thing that can stop the Fire Nation from destroying the whole world is us, and it's only going to work if we all stick together and fight back. We need everyone we can get. We need you."

"Maybe," Adam says. "But he needs to get home, and I need him."

Blue stares. He bets she's used to getting a lot more of a reaction to her recruitment pitch.

And then shakes her head and gives up on him. "All right," she says, without meaning it at all. "Maybe we'll meet again someday."

Adam would like that, but he isn't going to do anything to make it happen, so he says nothing and simply bows to her. She bows back to him, and then goes to round up her crew.

Adam returns to the remains of the campfire. Ronan is staring into the embers. Adam picks a stick up off the ground.

"When do you leave?" Ronan asks.

Adam pokes the ashes of the fire. "I don't."

Blue and her kids head out without any proper goodbyes. If Ronan is offended by that he doesn't show it.

When they're alone again Ronan unwraps his arm. The burn looks significantly better than the first time Adam saw it. Just as well; they haven't spotted any moon orchids in ages, and their supply is dwindling.

Ronan boils water and makes the ointment with the ease of practice. Adam feels meditative. He's aware of everything around him, and all of it is familiar, soothing, right: the crackle of the fire, and the scent of the flowers, and the glimpses of Ronan's skin, exposed and raw.

And then Ronan holds the ointment out to Adam, without a word.

Adam takes it from him. He holds his breath as he dips his fingers into the ointment, as he spreads it across Ronan's burn, as he slowly rolls a bandage around his arm.

Ronan nods at him when he's done. That is all of the thanks Adam is ever going to get. He doesn't even mind. He feels like he ought to be the one thanking Ronan, but he can't say why, so he says nothing.

-

The closer they get to the colonies, the more they see signs of the Fire Nation's presence, and the less they hear anyone talking about the Fire Nation. It's a very particular kind of silence. Adam recognizes it: the silence of fear.

They get in and out of towns as fast as they can. It's just as well they're used to getting by on their own.

They pass a company of Fire Nation soldiers one day, traveling away from the colonies and into the Earth Kingdom. The officer at the head of the march yells at Adam and Ronan to get off the road, but it's a perfunctory sort of warning; he hardly even looks at him. The soldiers are sloppy in their marching, chatting with each other while the officer is distracted. One throws an arm over the shoulder of the guy next to him, laughing at some joke. They don't look any older than Adam. They look -- bored, and cheerful, and a bit stuck up in their polished armor. This could be the same company that destroyed Adam's village and he would never know.

Ronan pulls the brim of his hat low over his face.

They don't bend that night. They sleep under the stars, without a fire, and Adam is gladder than ever for the solid heat of Ronan against his back.

-

Adam doesn't like the colonies. He feels like people are watching them. He keeps waiting for a repeat of their first two towns, someone pointing and yelling firebender! Except they wouldn't be pointing at Adam this time, they'd be pointing at Ronan. And it wouldn't be Ronan's job to rescue Adam, it would be Adam's job to rescue Ronan, and if he failed --

Well, he'd just have to succeed, that's all.

He wants to follow Ronan's lead. Ronan is the one who brought them here. But Ronan doesn't take the lead. He shows no sign of knowing where he's going. He walks slower the further into town they get, and his eyes catch on every spot of red decor.

He slows down until he's completely still, in the middle of the road, and it's on the tip of Adam's tongue, we can leave, we can wait, we can come back, except when he stops to say as much the man behind him runs into him.

"Keep out of the street," the man sneers at Adam, "don't you know littering is a crime?"

Ronan snaps back, alert again just when Adam doesn't want him to be. "You want to see a crime -- "

"I'm sorry, sir," Adam says over him, quickly and loudly, "we'll get out of your way." He nudges Ronan aside while shooting him a desperate look, please don't draw attention to us.

"Don't handle me," Ronan snaps at Adam, but he steps out of the street and keeps walking, like he's come awake enough to remember where he's going.

They reach the port. This is the first time Adam has ever seen the ocean, and he can't do more than throw glances at it out of the corner of his eye. There's just too many people: booking passage and bartering for seafood and bringing cargo off ships. Adam twitches every time someone gets close to them. He looks over at Ronan more often than he looks at the ocean, just to check that he's still there, that he hasn't slipped out with the tide. At some point along all those quiet stretches of road he got used to hearing Ronan's footsteps on the road, Ronan's irritated sighs or muttered complaints, the cheeps and screams of the raven cat. He can't hear any of that in the midst of this commotion.

They push on to where the crowds are thinner. It makes them conspicuous. And Ronan goes out of his way to draw attention to them, walking too close to people, staring too intensely at the moored ships.

A sailor covered with muscles and tattoos snaps at them, "what do you think you're doing around here?"

Ronan doesn't answer, so Adam says the first thing he can think of. "We just came in from the countryside," and he casts his eyes down to the side, a peasant who knows his place, "we need work."

The sailor waves them off, rolling his eyes.

Ronan keeps them walking, and they get stopped again, and a third time, until someone points them toward a trader who's looking for hands to help unload his ship. Adam waits for Ronan to object, to say he's too good for this, to do anything. He would love for Ronan to pick a fight with him right now. But he just silently follows Adam.

After a few hours Adam's back is sore and he reeks of salt water and he has a meager handful of coins to show for it. He offers Ronan his share; Ronan doesn't even notice. Adam pockets it quickly instead of leaving his hand out, vulnerable.

They wander down to the very end of the harbor, and at least they blend in now. People look at them and see two peasants trying to grub up enough money to get through another day, and Adam is so grateful that he's nauseous.

Ronan finally say "let's go," and Adam doesn't waste a second turning and leaving.

-

They find a dingy inn on the outskirts of town and rent a room. As soon as they're inside Ronan drops onto the bed, like he's going to sleep, like his heart isn't pounding with a day, two days, weeks of anxious fear.

"Are you going to tell me the plan now?" Adam asks.

"What plan," Ronan mutters up at the ceiling.

"I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you have a plan. Or are you literally just going to sneak onto the warship that's leaving dock tomorrow and hope for the best?"

Ronan jolts upright in bed. Adam's a little disgusted by his surprise. Did he think Adam hadn't noticed all his eavesdropping? "What the fuck do you know about it?"

"Is that seriously as far as you've planned?"

"I have to get back to the Fire Nation, so yeah, that's the first step of my plan."

"Why a warship?" Adam asks. "A civilian ship would be easier to stowaway on."

"It's the only one leaving for the capital tomorrow."

"So wait for something else."

Ronan steps up off the bed and paces. He offers no other answer. What more answer could he give: I'm trapped, I have to move, I have to get out, now.

"Okay," Adam says. "You get back to the capital," if you aren't found hiding on a military transport and executed. "Then what?"

"I figure out who turned on my family, and I kill them."

That is, apparently, the entire plan.

"Okay," Adam says again, slowly, so that he doesn't say any of the thoughts he has about that. They're mostly just variations on the word no. "How do you expect to uncover a secret plot, exactly?"

"Look, the court's not full of genius masterminds. Everyone brags about how they fuck each other over. I bet you half of them know who framed my father. I bet you they think it's funny."

"So you're going to wander around the court that ordered your execution and hope no one recognizes you."

"I'll wear a mask or something," Ronan snaps, "what does it matter?"

"It matters if you get caught!" Adam's heart is hammering in his ears. He can't tell how loud he's being, and he's terrified suddenly of their thin walls, of imagined people in the rooms beside theirs. "You want to sneak into a palace, spy on the most powerful people in the world, assassinate one of them, and get away unscathed, you need to put some thought into this!"

"I can get to them, all right?"

All of the air disappears from the room.

"And getting away?" Adam asks.

Ronan gives no answer.

"If you get caught they'll kill you."

"So?"

Adam's heart is so sick he can't give an answer. Ronan isn't expecting one. He's just pacing, endlessly, like nothing is changing, like nothing ever changes, just back and forth, back and forth.

"Okay," Adam says. "Walk me through the plan again. How are you getting on the ship?"

"The officers won't board the ship until it's ready to leave." Ronan pulls his sword half out of its sheath. His fist is tight around the hilt. "I stole this from one of the officers in my company, when I escaped. It has his family crest on it. I'll just pretend that I'm him and I need a ride." Adam notes, with a miserable sort of relief, that Ronan actually has given this step of the plan some kind of thought.

The relief vanishes a moment later when Ronan adds, "as long as no one on board has met him it'll be fine."

That isn't one problem, it's a spotlight pointing at a whole string of problems, problems that Ronan won't acknowledge and Adam can't overlook.

And if Ronan won't listen -- then there's only one choice that Adam can make.

"Okay, you'll pose as your old officer," Adam says. "But who am I supposed to be?"

"What?"

"How am I getting on the ship?"

"You can't -- " Ronan finally stops pacing, like the air just vanished for him, too. "You can't come with me."

"If I owe you, then I have to," Adam says. "And if you owe me, then you don't get to tell me where I can go."

"You're not even from the Fire Nation. You're an earthbender, you're the enemy. They'll send you to a labor camp."

"Some of us can actually hide our bending."

"Do you know what they do in those labor camps?" Ronan demands. "They'll beat you and starve you and make you work until you can't even move, and then they'll kill you."

"So?"

Ronan stares at him.

Adam looks back at him, calm.

"Do you want to die?" Ronan asks.

"No. I don't." He knows what living feels like now, how wonderful and terrible it is, and he doesn't want to stop.

"Then why the hell would you go?"

Adam breathes. "Because otherwise you'll die alone."

"It doesn't matter." Ronan's face burns red, and his voice creeps louder and louder. Adam finds that he's only very distantly worried about being overheard. It's hard to think about anyone outside this room, now.

"I think it does matter."

"I don't care what you think!" Ronan shouts. "No one cares about you, you're useless, you wouldn't even know how to bend if it wasn't for me. I don't need your help. I don't. Need. You."

"Okay. I'm still going."

Ronan just stands in place. Adam has never seen him so still. He isn't pacing or yelling or fighting. And Ronan when he isn't fighting anything is just...lost.

In a small voice, he says, "they killed my family."

"I know," Adam says. "But they shouldn't get to kill you, too."

Ronan hangs suspended for one more moment, and then he crashes. His fists come up and hit Adam's chest, no real force, just a token protest, the need to hit something because the real target is too big, out of reach. He collapses against Adam, his face pressed to Adam's chest. Horrible sounds escape from him like an animal dying.

Adam wraps an arm around Ronan, but it isn't enough, it isn't even close. He wraps both arms around Ronan, presses his face against the top of Ronan's head, and holds on as tight as he can while in his arms Ronan's heart breaks.

They stand like that for a long time, a fierce tight knot of misery. Ronan knocks out eventually, falling still and silent and leaning all his weight on Adam like there isn't enough strength left in him even to stand. Adam shuffles them toward the bed, though Ronan collapses mostly on top of him instead of the mattress. Adam doesn't try to move him. He isn't very comfortable, but there's no way he's falling asleep tonight, anyway. He's too sad, too full of Ronan's pain, and he's still a bit worried that if Ronan wakes up while he's out, he'll sneak away.

But Ronan doesn't wake up until dawn. His stirring brings Adam up out of an uneasy trance, full of fear and flame and increasingly feeble plans for getting them both to the Fire Nation.

Ronan looks at the sunlight creeping through their window, and then he rolls over and shuts his eyes, lays in bed next to Adam until the light has moved across the floor and his ship is long gone.

-

Ronan doesn't reply when Adam suggests heading back east. Adam's not sure he heard. He's staring at the Fire Nation insignia on a banner across the street from them. Adam's about to repeat himself when Ronan shuts his eyes and nods. They head east.

For two days Ronan just -- exists. He doesn't talk much, and when he does he doesn't have anything to say, so Adam stops asking him questions. He doesn't bend. He doesn't pay any attention to the other travelers they pass on the road. The only thing he does is feed the raven cat, who is perfectly capable of finding her own food at this point but still eats from Ronan's hand, like she knows he needs that even if she doesn't.

The third night, tucked away in a cave out of sight of the road, Ronan stacks up wood for a fire and cups his hands together.

A tiny spark of flame springs to life cupped in his palms. He crouches low and and coaxes it gently into the kindling.

"I'm going to see if I can find anything." Adam heads out into the night. As soon as he's ought of sight he collapses against the rock face and buries his face in his hands. His heart is beating out of control. His lungs are empty, and he can't breathe enough to fill them. He squeezes his eyes shut around the fact that Ronan was going to die, the whole time, Ronan was trying to die.

-

"We might want to go into a town, soon."

Adam hates to bring it up, hates to do anything to risk what semblance of peace Ronan has, but in the last two days they've been eating about as well as the raven cat, and if Adam knows how to be hungry he also knows his limits.

Ronan doesn't say anything. He pulls his sword from its sheath and slashes it through the air in front of him, violently.

Adam breathes in. Hesitates. Forces himself to speak anyway.

"You should get rid of that. If it can be traced."

Ronan stops in the middle of the road. And then, with no warning, swings the sword out in front of him.

A sheet of flame hurtles through the air, leaving a scar of burnt grass across the landscape

"Or don't," Adam says. "It was just a suggestion."

"I don't..."

Adam tries to give Ronan space, he tries, but he's been giving Ronan so much space; he's terrified that Ronan needs more than he can give.

"Don't what?" he prods, as gently as he can.

Ronan stares out over the ash, and the small fires still burning through the grass. He rips the sheath off his belt and throws it out across the field, throws the sword a moment later. It lands twenty feet off the road, a glint of metal bright in the ash.

Ronan walks off down the road.

Adam doesn't like leaving the sword there. It feels too easy to find, too easy to track, too easy to tie back to them. But Ronan is walking away, not pausing, and the best thing to do is to put distance between them and anything that could give away who Ronan is. If they can get away from the sword, from the colonies, from the war, then maybe Adam can hide Ronan somewhere that he'll be safe.

There's a heavy sense of doom around Adam that tells him that Ronan will be as easy to hide as a sword in a field of ash.

-

Ronan's bending grows increasingly erratic after that. Sometimes he'll manage a perfectly controlled burn. Sometimes a single spark will explode into a firestorm. Sometimes his bending comes out when he isn't trying to bend at all.

"You must have felt something before that happened." Adam raises his voice over the crackling of a tree burning. They abandoned the road days ago: too risky, too visible. He hopes they're far enough away from other people that no one will come investigate the stream of smoke rising into the air. "Even if you can't stop it from happening, if you can at least tell -- "

"Sorry I'm not dead on the inside like you." Ronan's eyes reflect the light of the fire back at Adam, surround him with flame on all sides. "It's so easy to be perfect when you're never angry."

"I am angry," Adam snaps. "I'm just not a coward who uses that as an excuse to give up on everything."

That's too far, and he knows it, and Ronan knows it. He needs to take it back.

There's no apology he can get out. His mouth is full of smoke, as sour as sea air.

Ronan storms off into the night.

Adam lowers himself slowly to the ground, in the circle of light the burning tree gives off.

He's still sitting up when Ronan comes back. He hadn't felt tired enough to go to sleep, and then suddenly he'd been too tired to lay out his sleeping bag. Ronan is soaking wet, for reasons Adam can't guess. He doesn't try to dry himself off, just sits next to Adam. Adam leans against him, ignoring the cold and the patch of water spreading across his sleeve and the cold under his ear when he rests his head on Ronan's shoulder.

-

They're navigating some rough terrain, slanted ground and loose rocks, when Adam slips.

He loses his footing in between one second and the next, and it surprises a sound out of him. Ronan whirls around to see what's wrong. Adam starts to catching himself at the same time that Ronan throws out a hand to try to grab him.

A lash of fire whips through the air and slams into the side of Adam's head.

He falls, no catching himself this time, and lands on his hands and knees on rough broken shale. His palms slice open, but he's barely aware of that over the pain exploding out of his ear. It's his deaf ear, at least. That's not much of a silver lining, not when he reaches up and touches the burnt skin around the shell of his ear, over his cheekbone, feels another bolt of pain shoot through him.

The last thing he wants to do is get back up and keep moving, but he's used to pushing through his body's objections. He forces his eyes open. His blurry eyes take in the sight of Ronan, one hand still reaching out to help him, frozen in horror.

He shoves himself back up onto his feet and stumbles past Ronan without a word.

He can't speak to Ronan for the rest of the day. He can't even look at Ronan. It doesn't help that whenever he tries to, Ronan is visibly wracked with guilt.

There's a long night where Adam can't sleep, his ear burning and the rest of him freezing from no shelter and no one to lie beside.

In the morning, Ronan breaks their long silence.

"If I don't..." he trails off.

Adam waits him out.

"If I stay. I can't keep losing control."

That isn't the end either, but this time waiting doesn't bring anything else. "Yeah," Adam says.

Ronan breathes out, hard, and Adam knows he's going to say yes before he even knows what the question is.

"Can you show me that breathing thing again?"

-

They meditate. At first it's more dangerous than bending. Ronan gets easily frustrated, or bored, or stuck, and that has a way of ending in explosions. Adam learns very quickly how to pull rock walls up out of the earth, but he has no such defense against Ronan's words. He tries to let them go without comment. He mostly succeeds.

The problem is, Ronan wants to be better now. Slight improvement is just another failure. Every loss of control makes him feel like a child, or worse.

"I had better control than this when I was four years old!" Ronan shouts. "How can it just be gone?"

"I don't know," Adam says. "I'm sorry, okay? I'm just making this up, I don't have any answers. I should have known better than to think I could help you when I'm a failure, too."

The frustration on Ronan's face melts away. The expression that replaces it is -- uncertain, and hard to look at. "You're not a failure. You're wonderful."

"I didn't mean as a bender," Adam says. "I meant as a person."

"Yeah," Ronan says, "that's what I meant, too."

"I'm not, though." His voice comes out quiet and low; his throat is dry, and his face goes hot in a way that has nothing to do with the pain radiating off his slowly healing ear.

"I don't know if my mother is alive." His eyes shut, like he can keep himself from seeing the truth of what he's saying. "That's the kind of person I am. I didn't bother to find out what happened to her. I came back from the mountains and the village was destroyed and my father was dead and...I felt guilty. Because I wasn't there, and that made it my fault. But I -- "

His hands clench into fists, fighting to keep this in, fighting to get it out.

"I was relieved. That he was gone. But I couldn't think that, that's horrible, so I just...didn't think anymore. I went away. I left the village and I left my head somehow and I just...went away. I don't remember anything until I found you."

He waits for Ronan to tell him that he's a bad person. He waits for Ronan to tell him that he isn't. He thinks that would be worse, somehow.

Ronan says, "I keep thinking that if I had been there, I could have saved them."

Adam opens his eyes to see Ronan scrubbing a hand across his wet face.

"I know it wouldn't have made a difference," he says, fast, like Adam would challenge him. "It's not like one stupid kid can do anything. All that'd be different is I'd be dead too. But it feels like it's my fault for not being there."

Adam breathes out with a shudder.

"Sometimes I wake up and I forget they're dead. I can hear their voices before I open my eyes. I hear my mom teasing my brother for sleeping late, or I hear my father practicing his bending. And then I open my eyes and they're gone again. Like I killed them by being alive to remember that they're dead."

"Yeah," Adam says. "I know that feeling."

They stay up late, swapping details of their dead families back and forth. It's grotesque and morbid and nothing like centering mind-clearing meditation. Adam sleeps soundlessly for ten hours straight, one arm wrapped around Ronan to ground him when he wakes up.

-

Ronan keeps offering details here and there, after that.

My mother used to sing that song, when Adam whistles a bit of melody, half-forgotten, and Ronan jumps right in where he leaves off.

My brother loved animals, after the raven cat tears his pillow to shreds and he just throws stuffing at her, unperterbed.

My father told me that fire should be used to create, not to destroy.

"But you joined the military." It's indelicate, but Adam can't help it; the more he knows Ronan, the less he can believe that he was ever a soldier.

"I hated it at court," Ronan says. "I hated the other nobles so much, and I thought that was my way out. Go fight in the Earth Kingdom, retire off in the country somewhere, maybe get a farm." He pets the raven cat until she snaps at his fingers and takes off, annoyed with the attention. "My brother had a fancy position working for a general. He told me I wasn't cut out for the military. That I should do everyone a favor and give up. I told him that just because he had a medal it didn't make up for not having a soul. Fuck." Ronan hits his fist against his forehead. "That was the last time I saw him."

"I'm sorry," Adam says. "You don't have to tell me."

Ronan's fist uncurls, tension seeping away.

"It helps," he says. "That someone else knows them."

-

It does seem to help. There are fewer explosions, fewer nights that Ronan snarls at him or storms off to be alone or slashes at things with his dagger.

Fewer, but not none.

They risk a town in the hopes of eating something other than burnt fish. Not ten minutes later they're running for their lives. Adam looks over his shoulder, wincing at the fire spreading through town, and then he catches Ronan's eye. He expects him to look angry, or guilty, or hurt.

He's grinning ear to ear.

"Just like old times!" he yells at Adam.

It's been so long since Adam saw that smile. He wants to brush his thumb over the corner of Ronan's mouth.

-

Ronan starts to have opinions about where they go and what they do. His opinions are mostly that everything Adam picks is stupid. Worse, he's right. Adam had been so overwhelmed, he hadn't made a conscious choice. He'd steered them toward Ba Sing Se just because it was the first place he thought of.

"Your plan is to go to the biggest city in the kingdom, where we're going to be surrounded by people every second of the day, and try to blend in?" Ronan places his hand over his heart, a mockery of devotion. "Aw, you do have faith in me."

Adam can still feel all of those eyes on them in the colonies, crawling over his skin. Even if Ronan could control his bending, there's no way they're going to a city. "All right, do you have a better idea?"

Ronan makes a face. "Where do people go in this crappy kingdom of yours?"

"I don't know," Adam says. "I've never gone anywhere."

"You've walked across half the continent," Ronan says, "or does our time together mean nothing to you?"

Adam ought to respond to that with some cutting remark, snark back and save face, but the only thought in his head is kiss him, kiss him, kiss him.

It's a thought he's having to ignore a lot, lately.

When Ronan scolds the raven cat for picking a fight with an eel swan that's twice her size, looks to Adam for back up, "you tell her, she listens to you" --

Kiss him.

When they wake up curled around each other and Ronan stretches with his whole body, warm and alive --

Kiss him.

When Ronan triumphantly snatches up the first moon orchids they've seen in weeks and dabs ointment carefully on Adam's ear, on the pain that Adam has been resolutely ignoring --

Kiss him, touch him, pull him close, taste his mouth, feel his heartbeat.

He loses that fight one unremarkable day on an empty stretch of road. Ronan has been tossing seeds up into the air, and the raven cat has been swooping for them and missing. She finally catches one and Ronan laughs in delight. Adam is so happy to see him happy that he leans forward and covers Ronan's mouth with his before he's even thought about it.

He just has long enough to think oh, and then a shock hits his cheek and runs through him, alarming, just shy of painful.

He retreats.

Ronan is frozen, his eyes wide open and one hand up in front of his face. For a second there are the remnants of blue lightning dancing between his fingers. Adam didn't know firebenders could do that.

His heart is beating weirdly and his body is tingling and his breath has stopped, and he can't tell what parts of that are from the shock and which are from the kiss.

"I'm sorry," he says finally. "I shouldn't have done that."

"Yeah, well." Ronan lowers his hand, fast, and shoves it behind his back. "I shouldn't have thrown a lightning bolt in your face."

Adam feels cold. He knew he shouldn't kiss Ronan, but there had still been a hope, hadn't there, that maybe he could and it wouldn't end so badly. But he was right the first time, and now he has to live with this horrible ache inside him.

He forces lightness into his voice. "I guess that makes us even."

"No," Ronan says. "We're not even."

The cold burrows into Adam's heart.

Ronan reaches a hand out for him and then stops. He stares at his hand, in the space in between them, and Adam can see him thinking about lightning and fire and scars.

Ronan drops his hand and steps forward, instead, so their bodies are almost, almost touching. His eyes run all over Adam's face, and then his eyes flutter shut and he lowers his face. He's moving so carefully. Adam feels like he's been waiting an entire lifetime for this kiss.

He doesn't mind the wait. Their lips touch and warmth runs through him, fire that doesn't destroy but creates.

***

Chapter Text

"Pardon me, I'm looking for a healer? They told us in the village there was one who lived out here."

"You found him." Adam turns and squints his eyes against the sunlight streaming in. The guy in the doorway doesn't look hurt or sick; he looks, if anything, nauseatingly healthy, clear skin and well fed and glowing with wholesome energy. "Can I help you?"

"Yes! Oh, I'm so glad we found you, my friend had an accident on the road." He steps inside, followed closely behind by another two men, both of them large and tough-looking. One of them is clutching his arm to his body.

Adam guides him to the table. "What happened here?"

His eyes flick over to the first man before he says anything. "Fell on it. I think it's twisted."

He examines the wrist; it looks sprained, nothing worse. "Well, I can wrap it properly and give you something for the swelling, something for the pain if it's bad. It'll take care of itself with a couple days' rest."

"Don't need painkillers," he says, but the first man declares "nonsense, you should take care of yourself" like that settles it.

The first guy introduces himself as Gan and asks an increasingly bemused Adam a dozen questions, following him around as he grabs things from his medical kit and puts a pot of tea on.

"What is that for?" Gan asks, as Adam pours the tea.

He holds out a cup for him. "I thought you might be thirsty from talking so much."

Gan laughs in an embarrassed sort of way. His traveling companions make eye contract behind his back, but they don't join in the teasing.

"This is going to take a few minutes," Adam says, "you're welcome to have a seat," and the second silent traveler waits for Gan to sit before taking a seat of his own.

Adam pulls together the ingredients for a salve; the stuff doesn't keep well, he makes it when there's a need. Gan puts on a pair of actual glasses, pulls them out of a little pocket that looks like it was designed specifically to house the small fragile things, and inspects each of the herbs Adam is using. He recognizes one of them, although the name he calls it is one that Adam has never seen used outside of the occasional reference book.

Adam finishes wrapping his quiet patient's wrist and offers them all more tea, "unless you need to get back to town."

"Why don't you go on ahead," Gan says to his two companions, who visibly hesitate. "I will make my own way back," he adds, in a very officious way, and they leave.

"I'm not keeping you?" Adam asks.

"I was enjoying the tea. And the conversation. Not everyone is willing to entertain a stranger's questions."

"Well, you ask a lot of them."

"I'm a curious person," Gan says. "I hope I'm not overstepping."

"No, I'm curious too. Although if you ask anyone in the village they'd say that I'm weird, not curious."

"There may have been some comments about your living situation," Gan says airily. "I would hate to sow discord among neighbors."

"It's all right. I am weird."

"Why live so far from anyone else though? Wouldn't it be safer in the village?"

That might be an obscure threat, maybe, but Adam doesn't think that's his game. He just can't figure out what his game is.

"I like the space," he says, vague, and then Opal slinks into the room through the back door. She tracks in mud, but that's easy enough to clean, and at least she used a door this time and not a window.

"Opal," he says, more for Gan's benefit; he doesn't think he noticed her come in. "We have a guest."

"Hello, Miss Opal," Gansey says, more formal than Adam has ever heard anyone speak to a six-year-old. It's lost on her, anyway. She just stares at him in perfect silence.

"Don't be offended," Adam tells Gan. "She doesn't like to speak to strangers." He signs to Opal in the language they'd spent the last painstaking year learning, the one that's still the only one she uses most of the time: tell Sparky there's Fire Nation here.

Opal doesn't visibly respond. She tends to either not react or to overreact. The prospect of a Fire Nation visitor just makes her stare at Adam for a moment and then duck back out of the house.

"Your daughter?"

Adam half-smiles, not a yes or a no. "I found her wandering by the side of the road."

"You were generous to take her in. I've seen a lot of orphans while I've been traveling, some of them haven't been so lucky."

"I figured one orphan should look out for another."

"I'm sorry for your loss." Gan's eyes catch on his burnt ear and then flick away. Adam knows what he looks like to people, the kind of assumptions they make. He never bothers to correct them. It's useful, at times. And he doesn't see the point: he has scars, even if they aren't the ones people notice.

"We all lost someone in the war," he says. "Wouldn't you say?"

"I was...luckier than most," Gan answers, slowly, wrapped up in some thought.

"Really? The war didn't reach you all the way in the Fire Nation?"

Gan's mouth drops.

Adam enjoys a moment of superiority. "No one here talks like you. Or wears glasses on the road. Or travels with bodyguards."

Gan does not look any less surprised. "But then -- if you knew -- why didn't you throw me out?"

"I'm also a curious person," Adam says. "And if a rich man from the Fire Nation comes to my village, in disguise, I want to know why."

"I'm afraid it's worse than that," Gan says, sounding defeated. Adam raises an eyebrow, outwardly calm still. "I'm a rich noble."

"Oh, much worse," Adam says.

Gan smiles, a rueful expression.

"The war did reach us in the Fire Nation," he says, low and serious. "We have our orphans, too. But the real damage was to our minds. Or maybe I mean our souls. We spent a hundred years telling ourselves that we were the greatest civilization in the world, and that everyone else was below us. That sort of thinking isn't easy to unlearn even if you want to. There's still so much propaganda that it's hard to find the truth even if you're looking for it. And most people aren't looking."

"You think you'll find it out here?"

"I think I have a better chance than if I don't try. Or if I tell everyone who I am and let them show me some sanitized version of the situation because that's what they think I want to see."

In the last ten years of Adam's experience, the risk is less that no one would be honest with Gan and more that they'd run him out of town. And the war may be over, but people are slow to forgive. On the other hand, people do like money and power, and neither sycophants nor angry mobs are terribly reliable sources of information.

"Is it really going to help?" Adam asks.

"Everything's unsettled," Gan says, "anything could change. If anything is going to change, now's the time. And I am, after all, a rich noble. I might as well use that for something."

Adam finds himself smiling, albeit in a skeptical sort of way. There's a part of him that doesn't really believe anything is going to change, even with the war over. There's a part of him that can't really care, has spent too long avoiding the war to start thinking about it now that it's over. And there's a part of him that's unconvinced, that's waiting for this to go bad; it's a part of himself that never really goes away, although he's not paying it any more attention than usual. He doesn't believe Gan yet, but he thinks that he might eventually.

Gan sighs dramatically. "But maybe I'm just wasting my time, if I'm so easy to identify."

"You should try saying you're from Ba Sing Se," Adam suggests. "People in the country will believe anything about people from the city."

Gan gives him an appraising look. For someone with such an idealistic mission, he's not a fool. He's spotted Adam's wariness. "Are you sure you want to help me disguise myself more effectively?"

"They told you I was weird, remember?"

Gan stays until it gets out, asking Adam endless questions about the Earth Kingdom -- "it is something of a relief to dispose of pretense" -- and answering Adam's own, more careful questions about the Fire Nation. Adam can't dispose of pretense, but he's too curious to hear a second opinion on this place he's never been, an opinion with less, or at least different, bias. And it's a small risk; he hasn't mentioned Ronan once, and Gan will leave soon without even knowing a third person lives here.

"It gets dark so early around here," Gan says, "I still haven't gotten used to it. Would you mind starting a fire?"

Adam is about to suggest Gan head into town for the night, when he hears Ronan behind him say, "allow me," a moment before a fireball sails across the room and lands in the fireplace.

Gan jerks away from the fire and turns to the doorway. For a second he looks like he's going to say something, but when his mouth opens no sound comes out. He doesn't leap up and attack Ronan, which is the main thing Adam cares about. And Ronan doesn't look worried by him, has proceeded into the room and kicked off his dirty boots. Opal slips in behind him just before the door shuts.

"Opal was supposed to warn you about our guest."

"She did."

"You were supposed to stay away," Adam says, reproachfully.

"And you're not supposed to call me Sparky." Ronan he drops his tools down by the fire place. "Hello, Gansey."

Gan finds his words. "You're alive!"

Ronan rolls his eyes at Adam. "Can you tell he went to all the finest schools in the Fire Nation?"

"They said you were dead!"

"Wishful thinking."

"But -- you're alive." Gansey stares. "And you never came back?"

"What, and get executed?"

"You could have gotten in touch with me. I could have figured something out. You could have come home."

Ronan has been moving around the room, stripping off his coat, shooing Opal away from the fire, doing everything except looking at Gansey. He does that now.

"I am home."

Adam steps quietly out the door to the courtyard. He doesn't think they'll notice him leaving. He doesn't think they'll care if they do. And maybe he should stay, take advantage of the fact that somehow Ronan's best friend from all his childhood stories just happened to wander into their life, but he can't actually bear to be in that room.

He sits down on a stone bench and breathes in the twilight air. He never knew. He never noticed, that all along there was a little voice whispering to him that Ronan would leave someday. He can only hear it now that it's fallen silent.

It will be a relief, eventually. Right now he feels unbalanced.

He opens his eyes. Opal snuck outside at some point. He didn't hear her. She's getting worryingly good at going places without anyone noticing. At least tonight all she's doing is chasing lightning bugs around the pond.

Adam watches with a faint smile as she ducks low for fireflies in the weeds, jumps after ones flying above her head, swings her foot out like there's any chance of kicking a flying insect the size of her fingernail --

And then Adam sits at alert, straining not to jump to his feet, because the spark of light that just shot across the courtyard had nothing to do with fireflies.

"Opal?" he calls softly, keeping his voice easy. It doesn't fool her; she falls completely still, facing away from him. "Can you do that again?"

She doesn't move.

He sits waiting on the bench.

With no warning at all she swings in a circle and lashes out a foot at him. The flame that she produces only travels about a foot before it vanishes. He still figures they have to have a talk sooner rather than later about not aiming at people's faces.

But even sooner:

"How long have you been able to do that?"

Opal shakes her head: no, no, no.

"Can you tell me, please? I'm not mad."

She points at him as she nods furiously, over and over: yes, yes you are.

"I'm really not mad, Opal. Why would I be mad?"

Her motions are jerky, too fast; he can't catch all of it, but he sees it when she says fire is bad, fire people are bad people.

"Do you think Ronan is a bad person?"

She tucks her hands under her arms, a mulish silence.

He gets up from the bench and steps close, squats near her but not so near he could touch her. "Opal, I can't imagine how scary and hard this has been for you, but it doesn't have to be scary and hard anymore. You're not a bad person and we're not going to be mad at you because of who you are. We want to help you."

She signs to him: make it stop, please.

Adam has to swallow down his own pain before he can deal with hers. "I'm sorry, Opal, it doesn't work like that. It's a part of you and you need to learn how to use it," and she's already shaking her head again, furiously. "I know you don't want to. I know that it can feel hard and scary and like everything would be better if it just stopped. But I promise you it's not a bad thing and it won't hurt you as long as you learn how to use it. If you do that then you never have to use it again if you don't want to," but he hopes so fiercely that she will. That she doesn't keep hating herself because someone taught her to. "But if you don't learn how to use it first it can come out when you don't want it to. That used to happen to Ronan and it was very dangerous. We had to live alone where there was no one around who could get hurt."

Opal says, in a voice that breaks Adam's heart, "I have to go away again?"

"No," Adam is saying before he can even think, "no, no, never, I promise," except if this is going to be anything like Ronan relearning his control, they may very well be running away, sooner rather than later. "If you ever have to leave, Ronan and I will come with you. We won't leave you, not because of your bending, not because of anything."

Opal steps forward and lets him hug her. Her arms loop around Adam's neck, clinging too tight to be comfortable. He picks her up and sits back on the bench. Sometimes she's so fierce she seems much bigger than she really is, but right now she's a lost little girl.

"I'm so lucky," he murmurs against the top of her head, "to have two firebenders that I love so much."

Opal buries her face in his shirt. He runs a hand up and down her back until she falls asleep oh him. It's all he can do to not fall asleep, too. It's been an emotional day.

He lifts her up gently and carries her inside. Ronan and Gansey are still sitting in front of the fire, turned in toward each other with an intense sort of energy. They fall silent when he enters the room, stay silent when he holds a finger up to his lips. He takes Opal to her room and puts her to bed, smooths out the blankets and opens her window a crack, the way she likes it to be when she's sleeping.

He doesn't feel like talking right now. He goes to his own room and falls into bed. The conversation picks up again in the next room, a low indistinct hum over the crackle of the fire. It lulls him to sleep.

He wakes up when Ronan comes to bed.

"Go back to sleep."

"Don't want to," Adam mumbles. Ronan nips at his shoulder. He rolls over in bed so he can see Ronan when he blinks his eyes open. "Did you have a good time catching up?"

There's something very clearly weighing on his mind, and because he's Ronan, he doesn't hide it or dance around it or build up to it. "Gansey wants me to go back to the Fire Nation with him."

"Is that safe?"

"He says it's different now. Or it could be."

"Do you want to go?"

Ronan says, too quick to have considered it, "this is home."

Adam taps Ronan's chest, over his heart. "This is home," because that was what got him through long lean lonely months hiding in lifeless wilderness while Ronan got enough control to pass as an Earth Kingdom citizen. That was what got him through every time that someone found out Ronan's secret and they had to run away and start over somewhere new.

Ronan smiles at him, and he says "stupid," but in a very soft way.

"You know I'd go with you, right?"

"You've had to leave a lot of places because of me. It's not fair."

"I get to decide what's fair for me. If you want to go, then I do too."

Ronan's face goes dark as he actually considers the idea.

"I never got the impression you missed it, that much," Adam says, after a long silence. "Not the actual place."

"I hated it there. The only things I ever liked about the Fire Nation are gone. Except Gansey," he says, like an afterthought. Adam can't imagine how hard this is for him; Ronan always talked about Gansey the way he talked about his family, like he was dead, too. Like he had to think of him as gone since there was no way to get him back, not across a war and an ocean and a death warrant.

"It's okay if you miss him. He's here now."

"Not for long." Ronan sighs. Adam rests his chin on Ronan's chest and feels it fall and rise. "He's surveying the whole kingdom, and he wants to get out to the colonies by the end of the year. It's a fucking mess out there, the Fire Lord ordered everyone to pull out but most of them don't want to. Most of them were born there, they don't give a shit about the Fire Nation. Half the Earth Kingdom citizens want the land back, and half of them like how things are. Some of them have families. It's a fucking mess."

Adam has more sympathy than he would have expected for that, for people who don't want to go back to the place they're supposed to belong to, for people who like the messy thing they've found for themselves.

He says, "I think we can handle a bit of a mess."

Ronan squints at him. "You hated the colonies."

"I didn't really give them a fair shot. I had other things on my mind," he says, dryly. "You should get more time with your friend. I'd like more time with him, I've never met anyone who knew you."

"You'd really leave," Ronan says, tentative.

"If you go, yeah. And I think it could be good for Opal. We can find her a firebending teacher."

It takes Ronan a couple of seconds to process. Adam watches with counterfeit innocence as Ronan's face goes through a dozen separate looks of confusion and surprise.

"What?"

"I caught her shooting off sparks in the courtyard."

Ronan sits bolt upright, knocking Adam off of him. Adam stretches out on his back along the bed and grins up at him, half-laughing. "When was this?"

"Tonight, while you were in with Gansey."

"And you didn't say anything?" Ronan demands.

"We were talking about you. I didn't want to be rude."

"Rude my ass, you just wanted to catch me off guard."

"I don't get very many chances to surprise you, can you blame me?"

"Yes," Ronan says hotly, and Adam laughs outright at that. "How is that even possible?"

The smile fades off his face. "I don't know. She didn't say. I've been thinking about how a child with Fire Nation ancestry could have ended up alone in the Earth Kingdom. No matter how I spin it it doesn't make for a very nice story."

"She's got us, it's a nice story now." Ronan lies back down next to Adam, nuzzles at his shoulder for a second before stopping abruptly. "Wait, why do we need to find her a teacher? I can teach her."

"Okay," Adam agrees, "and then I can help her unlearn half of what you teach her."

"Asshole."

Adam steals a kiss. "You'll be a great teacher. She's lucky to have you."

"Damn right," Ronan grumbles, mollified.

"But I think she needs to meet other people like her. She's..." he hesitates, and then settles on the word "afraid," and trusts that Ronan will hear all of the things that he means.

Ronan studies him. "She's lucky to have you, too."

Adam's face burns. Ronan runs a thumb lightly over one cheekbone. When his hand falls away Adam buries his face in Ronan's neck.

"I've decided," he says, muffled but authoritative. "I want to go to the colonies. And you have to take us because you still owe me."

"Oh, no way in hell, you owe me," Ronan says, like Adam knew he would, "so you have to come with me and Opal and Gansey to the colonies."

Adam doesn't really know that they'll be happy there. They've been so many places and they've never found anywhere they fit; he's never been able to hope that such place existed, but -- maybe now he's ready to.

"All right," Adam says, "fair's fair," and he kisses Ronan, warm and easy.