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junipernight · 2 months

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Yangvik Week Day 6 - Jealousy

"Old Flame"

@yangvikweek2024

At the appointed time and place, the team discretely reconvened in a square at the south end of Caldera City.

Even under her hat and cloak, Kavik could tell that Yangchen was tired when he spotted her across the square. He wondered if that meant the meeting with the Fire Lord Gonryu hadn’t gone well. Then again, even if Fire Lord Gonryu had agreed to the Avatar’s proposal, Kavik knew that it chafed Yangchen that the leaders of the world couldn’t simply do the right thing (or something approximating it) without being coerced, bribed, cajoled, or otherwise convinced.

Kavik swallowed the last bite of his fire bun, dusted his hands off, and casually began to meander in the same direction she was now heading. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Tayagum and Akuudan doing the same, and Jujinta was surely nearby.

Besides Yangchen, none of them had ever been to the fire nation capital before, and the place they were going wasn’t like Yangchen’s usual safehouses; it was the house of a friend, she’d said.

For those reasons, the five of them skipped the acrobatics today, and instead pretended to be ordinary people casually (and separately) walking home from a long day's work. Kavik followed from a distance as Yangchen turned first left, and then right, down street after street. He paused and pretended to admire a stone dragon when two turns were close together, to make sure Akuudan and Tayagum (who were following him at a distance) wouldn’t lose the trail.

Ahead, Yangchen suddenly ducked into a doorway.

Kavik strolled past, not turning his head even a little, and surreptitiously sized up the house the way he would have cased a joint when he was an errand runner in Bin Er. His first impression was that it resembled the mansions of the Shang merchants. Whoever lived here was definitely very wealthy, but the magnolia trees peaking over the wall suggested a scholar or a poet lived inside, rather than a merchant. The architecture was modern, the stone lion-dragons unweathered. Relatively new money. Whoever they were, it was odd that they had chosen to live so far from the palace and the rest of the imperial court.

Kavik walked another couple of blocks, then made a sharp turn. He took a circuitous path back towards the house Yangchen had entered, scaling the wall with a few frozen handholds (which he immediately melted and dried behind him). He shimmied across the roof on his belly, and peered down into the courtyard below. He found himself looking into a garden, filled with lush greenery and zig-zagging paths. Yangchen stood in the middle, in the shade of a weeping willow tree, alone. She had discarded the pieces of her disguise, and her billowing orange robes stood out in bright contrast to her cool surroundings, like sunrise in a mossy forest.

Kavik sidled up to one of the magnolia trees he’d spotted before, and climbed down to join her. A few minutes later, Jujinta jumped down from the roof, and Tayagum and Akuudan descended from the opposite direction soon after. Yingsu brought up the rear.

“So… who’s your friend?” Kavik asked.

There was the sound of wood tapping on flagstone, and then an old woman stepped into view.

The woman was simply but elegantly attired in a summer tunic and pants, with her moon-white hair braided and wrapped over the crown of her head. She didn’t have the hunched over look that so many elders had, but even so, she was still incredibly short.

Yangchen squealed when she saw her. “Akemi!”

Instead of a formal greeting, the Avatar ran up to the old woman, picked her up, and spun them around.

The rest of the team stared in bewilderment. Who is this lady?, Kavik thought.

The old woman laughed and tapped her shoulder with her cane. “Cut that out, I’m too old for your antics.”

Yangchen carefully put the woman down. Side by side, Kavik thought he could detect a faint resemblance. They both had the same oval face and shrewd eyes. Maybe Yangchen had a Fire Nation grangran? It wouldn’t be that surprising if she did. Boma had given him the impression that air nomads got around.

“Everyone, this is Akemi. My wife.”

Her what? Kavik’s jaw dropped.

Out of the corner of his eye, Kavik saw the others bow, but all he could do was stare. Tayagum clapped a hand on his back and bent him into something resembling a bow.

Akemi huffed, but the soft smile didn’t leave her face.

“Avatar Szeto and I were married for 53 years,” she explained.

“See? My wife,” Yangchen insisted.

Introductions were made, and then Akemi led the group inside.

***

Tayagum nudged his husband at dinner. Akuudan looked at him questioningly. “Kavik hasn’t stopped pouting since we got here,” he whispered.

Akuudan didn’t need to glance over to see that it was true; he’d noticed earlier in the meal, but hadn’t bothered to unpack the kid’s expression because he’d been too engrossed in a story Akemi was telling about the former Avatar and four volcanoes.

“... but then Szeto bent the lava like it was water, and diverted it away from the town. He invented an entirely new technique on the fly, and saved thousands of people that day.”

“Don’t sell yourself short Keke, I may have stopped the lava, but you were the one who figured out how to appease the spirits. You’ve always been the better diplomat between us.”

Kavik scowled, and pierced a bit of spicy tofu with his chopsticks, much to Tayagum’s amusement.

‘I stopped the lava.’ Akuudan rolled Yangchen’s words around in his head. Not for the first time, he wondered about the nature of the legendary connection Avatars had to their past lives. Before knowing Yangchen, he’d assumed the rumors to be exaggerated, but Yangchen occasionally spoke as if she’d been there. As if she still had the memories of Szeto and others before him. Memories or no, however, Akuudan was sure Yangchen didn’t really think of herself as the same person as Szeto.

All dinner, she’d been hamming up her role as “loving husband” from her seat at the head of the table, singing Akemi’s praises and patting her hand and reheating her tea when it got cold.

Akemi, for her part, seemed to indulge the behavior like a doting grandmother. It seemed to be a long running joke the two of them had crafted. A very sweet one.

“... but I musn’t ramble about the past. Tell me more about your friends. Yingsu - you’re a strapping young woman. Are you and the Avatar companionable?” she waggled her eyebrows.

Kavik dropped his spoon with a loud clatter.

Tayagum choked back a laugh

Yingsu grinned. “You need to get your eyes checked, grandmother. I’m twice her age”

Akemi shrugged. “Well, the Avatar has always had certain preferences.”

The conversation moved on, and Akuudan could see that Kavik was too busy staring at the wall and ruminating to eat his food.

“Are you going to finish that?” He asked. (It was good food, and there was no sense letting it go to waste.)

Kavik frowned, and pushed his bowl across the table.

***

It was weird having a room all to himself. Kavik lay back on the bed with his arms crossed, frowning up at the ceiling.

He couldn’t decode what Akemi had been implying earlier, when she’d made her comment about preferences. It had something to do with Yingsu - but what? Yingsu was a lot of things: taller, older, a fire bender, a woman, very muscular. He was pretty sure Akemi wouldn’t know about the combustion bending, so he could rule that out. It was also more likely to be something that Yingsu and Akemi had in common, or had had in common in Akemi’s youth…

Not that any of this impacted him, directly. He was just looking out for Yangchen. He didn’t want her to get hurt by Yingsu, in either a heartbreak kind of way or an explosive fire-y way.

… they really had been quick to accept Yingsu into the fold. Were they absolutely sure they could trust her? Kavik was pretty sure he had been treated with more suspicion than either Yingsu or Jujinta had been.

A knock interrupted his musings.

He got up and padded over to the door, expecting it to be either Yangchen calling a team meeting, or Jujinta looking for his lost toothbrush again (their stuff frequently got mixed up when they had to pack in a hurry.)

Instead he discovered Akemi at his door.

“I noticed you barely touched your food. Fire nation cuisine can often upset the stomach, if one is unused to the spices. Would you like some ginger?” She asked

“Thank you for the consideration Grandmother, but my stomach is fine,” Kavik said.

“Excellent! Then you can come with me; I need a strong young waterbender to help me in the garden.” She headed down the corridor at a brisk pace, cane clicking, without waiting for a reply. Kavik stared at her retreating back in disbelief.

He raced to catch up to her.

“Do you often garden in the middle of the night?” He asked.

“Yes,” she said matter-of-factly, surprising him. “It’s too hot to do something as stupid as garden during the day.”

A fire national who shied away from the sun? There was something altogether too suspicious about the whole thing. Kavik refused to believe for a moment that Akemi had singled him out to help with simple gardening, even if he couldn’t figure out her real motives yet.

They emerged into a courtyard. In the center was an overgrown pond.

“I need your help with that,” said Akemi, pointing straight at the moonlit pond… and the bobbing, waving white lotus flowers within it.

Kavik’s heart sank.

“The white lotus rises out of the murky depths, and unfurls her many separate petals,” he recited hollowly.

Akemi squinted at him in confusion. “Yangchen didn’t tell me you liked poetry.”

That was not the answering code phrase. But more importantly, “She talked about me to you?”

Akemi’s wrinkled lips quirked. Kavik noticed the smile lines deepen around her eyes. “Maybe. Now let’s get on with it,” she gestured at the pond. “Lift the water out.”

It was Kavik’s turn to be confused. “You want me to take the water out of the pond?”

“Yes.”

“All of it??”

“Yes. My, you ask a lot of questions.”

Kavik thought about asking why, but decided he would find out soon enough. He bent his knees, circled his arms, and lifted.

The water swelled and lifted out of the pond. He kept pushing and pulling until the pond was empty, and the former pond-water was suspended in a loose orb overhead.

He looked at the old fire nation lady, wondering what she wanted him to do now, and nearly dropped the water when he saw her clamber into the empty pond.

In the center, there were three heavy stone baskets, out of which the lotus flowers grew. The plants looked strange and graceless, flopped over with no water to support them. Akemi began to pull and snip at the lotus plants that had crept outside their bounds, collecting them in a bundle. She was apparently unbothered by the mud.

Maybe it was just because they were both old women who asked Kavik to do odd chores, but Akemi reminded Kavik of Mama Ayuneraq. She may not have responded to his overt query, but that could have been a choice. It didn’t prove she wasn’t a member of the Order.

“Tell me—how is she?” Akemi asked him

Kavik chose his words carefully. “She’s better now, ever since that business in Taku ended. But she lost Nu Jian only a few months ago, and the loss has been hard on her.”

“Yes, I’d heard about Nu Jian.” Akemi rested her hands on the rim of a stone basket, and bowed her head. “Grief can be very hard on a person.”

… The difference between Akemi and Ayunerak, is that Ayunerak would have prodded the conversation toward “that business in Taku.”

“Is she eating?” Akemi asked instead.

“Mostly,” said Kavik. “We have to wave the food in front of her face to get her to remember sometimes.”

“Is she sleeping?”

“Barely. She has this terrible tea she drinks that keeps her wired at all hours of the day. I’m tempted to hide it away.”

“Then do it.”

“What?”

“Take the terrible tea away.”

“I can’t just take the Avatar’s tea away from her! She’s not a misbehaving child.”

“Then talk to her about it.”

Kavik focused on bending the pond water. It was easier to carry if he kept it moving, rather than try to hold it gathered in one place. Akemi finished the rest of her task in silence, gathered up the bundle of culled lotus plants, then walked out of the pond, her feet as sure-footed in the black slippery muck as an arctic rabbit’s on hard snow.

“The world will always have more problems than the Avatar can solve. Someone has to prioritize taking care of her.”

Akemi stomped her foot, and the mud peeled off her feet and clothes and flew back into the pond. Kavik blinked.

“You’re an earthbender,” he said.

“And you’re the boy my wife has a crush on,” said Akemi. “Mind you don’t fuck it up a second time.”

#yangvikweek2024 #Yangchen #Kavik #Yangvik #fanfiction #Avatar Szeto #Akemi is an OC btw #I dont usually gravitate towards plots about jealousy #perhaps because i hate love triangles and second hand embarassement #so i had a fun time thinking: how can i subvert expectations and make the most ridiculous possible situation for Kavik to be jealous in #speaking of whom #my boy is suspicious of absolutely everyone in this lol #im using grandmother in this as a title btw. like calling someone aunty #this fic was brought to you in part by: all the ally carter and kiki strike spy heist books i read as a middle grader

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