Get Up Eight: Toph Beifong

Rei Lin Earth Kingdom, 97 AG

I'm . . . not at all surprised when we pick up another person. Zuko seems to be surprised, but then he didn't figure out that Nuan and Samir and I wanted to help him fight the Fire Nation and defend people. And it was us joining him, and not the other way around. And Zuko's good at talking to people and comforting them. We were bound to run into someone who had nowhere better to go, someone who had nothing and no one left in the world.

So, no I'm not surprised when the girl we rescued from a Fire patrol kicks up a fuss when she understands that we mean to leave her in the next village willing to take her in.

"I will not be left behind!" Xia yells at Zuko in the hut that the villagers had let us use for the night. She'd always talked a little louder than necessary, but now she's not even trying to be quiet. "I want to go with you!"

"Why?" Zuko asks. "There are people here willing to take you in! You can be safe here! You don't need to fight!"

"I would not be safe here! Look!" And Xia thrusts her hand out.

Nothing happens. Then Samir's fingers press into my wrist and he tells me -

Fire. She bends fire.

And that makes sense. I imagine that she would be as safe here as Nuan was in the Fire Nation - which is to say; not very and dead at heart for not allowing herself to bend.

"I can't stay here, even if they would accept me knowing I'm deaf, they wouldn't accept a firebender," Xia says, no longer yelling. "You're a firebender Lee. There's no way no one's found out. How did they react?"

And that's-

Being deaf isn't quite like being blind, in a large number of ways, but . . .

People don't like people who are different. My parents tried to protect me from that, but they did it too. And Samir's tugging on my sleeve, and the both of us step forward to stand next to Zuko as he asks, "Why? If you can firebend, why did you leave the colonies?"

"I have family here," Xia says. "I have - none of my family are Fire. We're all Earth as far back as anyone can remember, and sure I was born in the colonies, but I don't know how that made me a firebender."

"It's happening to Fire families too," Nuan says after a moment. "Being born the wrong element. None of my family were Earth, and look at me."

He pulls a chunk of dirt in from outside and holds it suspended between his hands.

"So can I come with you?" Xia asks.

Zuko sighs. "I'll have to ask-"

"It's fine by me," Rei says immediately.

"I'm alright with her coming," Akane says, a second after.

Samir is telling me yes yes yes, and I say, "We're okay with it."

Zuko shifts his weight in an unsatisfied way and sighs, but when he turns back to Xia, it's to tell her, "Alright. You can come with us."

And Xia's only the start.

She settles into the group dynamic fairly quickly, choosing the local spirit from her home town when Zuko asks her what mask she would like. She says that it's some sort of dog with a white stripe down the middle of its mostly black face. She'd picked up some of Samir's sign language while we were finding a place for her to stay, and with the rest of us actively helping her learn it she takes to it like a fish to water.

She also starts teaching Samir and me how to read and write, which makes Zuko flush and mumble something before he joins us. Xia's about his age, but apparently his tutors had focused more on spoken Earth. Xia's parents had turned to writing as a way for Xia to communicate when she didn't feel up to talking, so she'd managed to learn more of the many characters Earth writing used.

The actual adults end up getting drawn into the lessons eventually, squatting down with sticks to draw new symbols in the dirt next to the four of us as we all copy the symbols. Sometimes when they join in, the lessons turn into a competition between Akane and Nuan as they try to see who can remember a greater number of obscure characters from all of the literature they had read.

Xia loves the ostrich camels, but she loves the dog even more.

"I know it's stupid," she says when she first meets the dog, "but they really make me feel safer. I feel like I'm in a spirit tale, one of the good ones where the heroes win."

After her there's Bao, a waterbender who (Nuan tells me under his breath) doesn't look like they're from the Water Tribes. They're probably just around the age people start saying you're an adult and making noises about you settling down. They don't like to talk about their past beyond repeating that they want to be here, with us, when anyone presses.

I don't get the impression that anything bad happened to their home, and they're free enough with their bending - freer than everyone else but Zuko and me - that I don't get the feeling that they had to hide it when they were home. They just want to be with us.

And it's good for us that they do, because as it turns out they're a good cook. Well, that matters less than the fact that they're a better cook than any of the rest of us, a bunch of people who grew up in the Fire Nation and kids who aren't allowed to try. And best of all, they even know how to make my favorite steamed buns over our campfires!

Bao apparently chooses a red oni mask that Samir claims looks nothing like Zuko's mask of Ryung.

With an extra four people on top of those we'd planned for a year ago, supplies are stretched a little thin. Not necessarily food, right now we're still managing to scavenge enough and we trade wood and herbs and medicinal plants we gathered from the forest for what we can't find. But we need more tents and more sleeping rolls - proper sleeping rolls that aren't just a pile of extra clothes.

Samir reminds Zuko quietly that there's all of the supplies from his tribe that we'd left behind. We'd packed them up neatly and some of them might have been taken by other tribes passing through the seasonal caves, but most of them would still be there. Zuko turns us south towards the caves.

And on the way there, we pick up Na, a stubborn woman who marches up to us after we save her from a group of Fire Nation soldiers who are likely supposed to be guarding the Fire caravan on the horizon from Earth Kingdom soldiers. She can't bend, but she knows how to dodge, and she's got a mean right hook.

And then there's Aditi of the Racoon Mouse Ramlah tribe when we arrive at the seasonal caves, who'd been looking for Shiel, her cousin from Samir's tribe. She'd traveled from her tribe to try to discover what had happened when the Wolf Coyotes didn't show up at their usual fall location. When she hears about what happened to Samir's tribe, and what we're doing, she joins us.

And then there's Lei, and then there's Mohan, and then there's He, and then there's Fu . . .

Some of them join because they have nowhere else to go, like Xia had. Others just . . . join.

And the more people who join, the more obvious it gets that Zuko's the one in charge here. He doesn't seem to notice it, but as more and more decisions need to get made, it gets more and more obvious that the adults aren't really the ones making them.

When someone new comes in, it's Zuko who has final say in whether or not they stay. It's Zuko who plans where we're going next and Zuko who plans out our fights with patrols from the Fire Nation and more rarely the Earth Kingdoms. It's Zuko who figures out ways for us to make money and ways to help Bao stretch the food we have to make ends meet.

Rei and Akane . . . they're not bad at talking to people, and Rei's even pretty good at ordering people around. The thing is, both of them just hit a limit after interacting with people for a while after which they just get grumpier and grumpier and start saying anything they think will make people go away, which is not very helpful.

And Nuan's pretty good at delegating tasks and getting us from point A to point B in a plan, but not so much at coming up with point A and B. Everyone learns to be quiet when he calls Zuko Lu Ten rather than Lee.

And when other adults come into our group - the Kamikaze they call us, the spirits who sweep through patrols like the wind - they come into this settled dynamic. They listen to Zuko or they leave.

The group stabilizes at around twenty people around three months after we pick up Xia. It fluctuates a bit as people join and leave, but people get tired of traveling when they're offered a place in the villages we pass or they've taken the revenge they wanted on some group of Fire Nation soldiers that aren't even the ones who first hurt them or they decide that they actually don't want to fight or they get tired of following a teenager's orders - their reasons vary.

Xia stays, and so do most of the other firebenders we pick up.

The airbenders usually stay as well. Like Akane, most of them don't think they had Air ancestors, and unlike Akane most had neither freedom to bend nor anything or anyone to learn from before they joined us.

It's the nonbenders, waterbenders, and earthbenders who come and go. They can all blend in.

(And the fact that waterbenders can blend in is something I notice Zuko realize, then promptly ignore in favor of more important things, like how to get enough food for all of us. I don't ignore it though.

All Nuan can tell me is that they don't look like they're of the Tiqqiq people of the Northern Water Tribe or of Imiq peoples from the Southern Water Tribes.

Samir tells me that they may not look like whatever Nuan thinks a waterbender should look like, but most of them do have blue eyes. Which is . . . he then had to explain to me exactly why that matters. Apparently, eye color has a tendency to align with element. Apparently that's not always certain because you will also sometimes get cases like Rei and Nuan who have Fire brown eyes to go along with their earthbending.

Whatever.

I keep watching them through the earth. And they're good at hiding. Akane doesn't walk like an airbender because she'd trained her airbending, she walks like an airbender because she is one. The waterbenders manage to move almost like earthbenders even when they're actively bending.)

For those who stay, there's the unspoken requirement that they must learn Samir's sign language. He's not the only one who only uses it - once she's learned it well enough, Xia mostly drops speaking out loud. And we get other people who can't speak or don't want to speak or just don't speak sometimes, and the signs are useful for when we need to communicate silently while we're ambushing a patrol.

People get hurt sometimes. It's just something that's going to happen when you fight. We very quickly figure out what works best for the different kinds of wounds people get.

Zuko's rainbow fire ironically works the best on burns and infections. Oh, he can heal other types of wounds, otherwise Samir wouldn't be here, but burns and infections go the fastest. Rei mutters something about sympathy and fevers when we notice this. This would have been very convenient, if not for the fact him using his rainbow fire looks very much like he's setting the person he's healing on fire.

Rei figures out just how easy it is for her to heal broken bones with her earthbending early on, even when I think her healing training would have warned her that the bone was shattered beyond saving. She has to call me in to help her with the smaller bone fragments and with the reconstruction of the almost-honeycomb structure of parts of the bone. She figures out other ways to use her earthbending to heal people, especially after she examines Zuko's rainbow fire and determines that using your bending to heal has a lot more to do with chi manipulation than it does with your actual element.

But broken bones . . . no one else can heal broken bones like she can after she figures out the trick. Most of the earthbenders who wander in and out of the group don't stay long enough to learn how to heal. Those who do, we tell that the healing of bones is a very tricky process - which it actually is, given the complicated structure - and that we won't teach them without a lot more training.

And I stay very carefully away from people's bones when I bend the earth around me, terrified of the ideas that come to me.

When we can get Bao or another waterbender to heal people, they're the best at healing. Bao murmurs something about the many fluids that a human body is made up of, but watching them work, I'm more than half convinced that a good deal of their ability to heal so well comes from practice and training. The waterbenders we get have all had training from someone who knows what they're doing.

It's the difference between Samir's airbending and Akane's. Even though Akane has a good 14 years on him, Samir knows more by sheer dint of having a teacher who knew what they were doing when Akane had to fumble through making up her own routines on scraps of information.

(The waterbenders we get have training and we keep finding more of them and most of them don't know each other. They know how to hide, but they also know how to bend, and they bend without any of the hesitance that Akane has. It's the difference between Akane looking over her shoulder and Samir knowing someone will cover for him.)

Given Rei's insistence that healing has more to do with chi manipulation than bending, theoretically Akane and Samir and the rest of the airbenders and even perhaps the nonbenders could learn how to heal. On a more practical level, Samir mutters about his parents warning him away from trying to use his bending on people because it's very easy to suffocate them before raising his voice and saying that all of the people we have would need more training before they should try.

And of course, besides the bending-healing, we have Rei and her skill as an actual doctor.

And people get hurt sometimes. It's what happens when you fight. I knew this when Samir and I brought the masks to Zuko. I knew this before, when I dreamed of the feeling of blood on my hands and thought that the next time I fell asleep I would be alone. Samir had needed something to do and I couldn't think of anything else.

So I knew we could get hurt. I knew Samir could get hurt again, much as I tried to keep him away from the fighting.

And-

I'm avoiding the point.

The point is, one day, while we're fighting a group of Fire soldiers who were supposed to be guarding a caravan, who are harassing a group of travelers, one of the soldiers shoots a desperate fireball at Zuko's back. I don't quite catch what happens, I'm busy protecting Rei where she's hunched over someone washing out a stab wound so they don't get infected. I have to keep shifting my walls to move the heated earth away so that we don't bake.

And Nuan steps in front of the fireball. I catch the flash of his arms pulling up a wall before my attention is jerked away by a soldier closer to me, but he must have been too late because his cry of pain joins the sounds of battle.

It's not enough to draw anyone's attention away, which feels like a failure later on, but in the heat of battle, what's one more scream?

Most of us aren't hurt in the aftermath of the battle. Rei starts stitching up the stab wound after she's packed it with bandages to make sure the shallower parts don't heal before the deeper parts and possibly trap in contaminants. It's only after she's made sure her patient will be fine until she has the time to settles down and get into the right headspace to try healing them the other way that she leaves them and makes her way over to her cousin.

Bao (our only waterbender at the moment) is kneeling by Nuan's side, keeping a layer of clean water over the burns without the glow that would indicate healing. Zuko is crouched on Nuan's other side next to Akane, who's silently picking something off of Nuan with what feels like tweezers, and Samir, who's just holding Nuan's hand. Rei's dog prowls a circle around the lot of them, keeping the other benders Rei had taught how to heal away.

That makes something else in my gut clench because Samir doesn't like holding hands with other people. He doesn't like not being able to speak.

This isn't the worst wound we've seen since we started fighting, but surprisingly enough, it's the worst one that the six of us have had since Zuko rescued Samir.

Akane offers Rei the tweezers as she sits down, and Rei takes over the task of removing something - probably burnt in cloth- as I settle behind her and resist the urge to call up a wall behind me.

"Why did you do that?" Zuko asks abruptly, his hands echoing his words. It's a habit we'd picked up for Xia, and we all do it without thinking now. "You don't have to protect me anymore, I'm not - I'm not a prince anymore. I'm not Lu Ten."

"Lee," Akane says quietly, casting a glance over at Bao as they keep the water on Nuan's chest.

Bao stares back at her flatly.

Akane pauses, then changes tracks. "Nuan isn't exactly-"

"I can speak for myself," Nuan mumbles, eyes fluttering open. I can feel him trembling intermittently, jerkily stopping every few moments before he begins again, like he's trying to hide it.

"Why?" Zuko demands.

"Just wanted to protect you," Nuan says, closing his eyes again.

"I'm not your prince, Nuan. You don't have to protect me anymore. I can take care of myself."

Nuan snorts, then hisses as the movement jars his wound, and Rei puts her hand on his shoulder to keep him from trying to hunch over.

"Samir, go get my box and a pot," she says.

Samir squeezes Nuan's hand, then goes.

"Who cares about princes," Nuan gasps when the spasm of pain passes. "You're my little brother. And don't tell me that's just a story we tell other people, I watched you grow up. I care about you, you idiot."

Zuko rears back, but before he can go anywhere, Rei reaches out to grab his shoulder. Behind Zuko, the dog is growling a low warning. And then Zuko jerks again, staring at a spot behind me where I can feel no one, not even bothering to hide it like he has before.

"Nuan. Are you alright with Lee healing you?" she asks, not looking at Zuko.

"Of course," Nuan says as Samir settles down next to Rei, carefully setting down a pot of steaming water, then letting her ease her medicine cabinet off of his back.

When she's done, Samir reaches for my hand, squeezing out the question - are you alright?

Not injured, I tell him, which is not quite the answer he wants by the way his fingers tighten, but it's all I can give him.

He tells me: the bender who'd sent the fireball at Zuko must have been desperate because the fire had been hot enough to burn through all of the layers of cloth we wear to protect us from fire.

He tells me: the burn is better than it would have been if he hadn't been wearing the cloth. Despite all of the charred cloth, Nuan's skin isn't charred, and his skin is a healthy - well, not healthy, but safer red with blisters rather than white.

"Lee," Rei says, not looking at Zuko as she takes a series of bottles out of her cabinet.

Zuko takes a deep breath, then settles himself down next to Nuan again. The dog begins pacing again once he's settled, keeping the outside world away for just a little while longer.

"Lord Agni of the Burning Sun," he begins, like he always does when he's called upon to heal, and Bao draws back the water they've been covering Nuan's burn in.

Zuko's fire changes so fast now, but he finishes the prayer as he runs his hands over the burn on Nuan's chest. Samir tracks his progress for me. Even with the practice he's been getting and the lessons about how chi flows in the body, it takes Zuko two slow agonizing passes to mostly heal Nuan's burn, through ten repetitions of his prayer.

Samir tells me all that remains is a thin, filmy layer of dead skin that peels away under the pressure of Zuko's fingers and reveals pale skin, even paler than Nuan had been before he managed his slight tan.

I've heard Rei talk about this before. The pale skin seems to be a side effect of Zuko's healing - the wound he healed would be gone, but so would the skin pigment around the wound. The pale patches aren't quite scars - the skin is just as flexible as normal skin - they're just pale. The skin on those patches feels odd. It took me a few tries to figure out where the edges of the pale patches were when Samir first guided my fingers to one. They're ever so slightly smoother than the surrounding skin.

We've all got a few smooth patches.

With that done, Zuko sits back, and he shakes his hands out like he's hoping we won't notice them trembling.

"I need to go," he says, backing away. "There's I need to make sure everyone else is alright."

He turns on his heel and flees.

Title from the saying "Fall down seven times, get up eight", which the internet says is a Japanese proverb.
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