Opposites Eventually Attract
Most young people fantasize about their future spouse, and Liang of the Gan Jin was no exception. She would be beautiful, of course, because the callowness of youth is also shallowness, and very few teenaged boys have yet cottoned on to the fact that a woman can be lacking in the looks department and yet have other traits to recommend her. And she would be witty—though not as smart as him, naturally—and a good cook, and fond of flowers.
Mostly, though, she would be neat. That was absolutely non-negotiable. Gan Jin standards for neatness and cleanliness are legendary—a person who bathes three times a day is, in their eyes, only mildly eccentric, and then only because a proper bath takes up time that could be put to use pressing and starching one's clothes. Not for Liang were the daydreams some young men are fond of, where the objet d'amour is running through a field of summer grass with arms outstretched, her hair blowing in the wind like a pennant. Windblown hair is messy.
The Zhang were messy. From the cradle Liang, like every Gan Jin, learned to define the enemy tribe thus. They were messy and dirty and ate with their fingers and blew their noses on their tunics and didn't comb their hair. They were disgusting. If one touched you, you'd have to scrub with lye in order to get clean, and burn your clothes. When he was twelve, he and his friends enjoyed ribbing each other by insinuating that they might marry a variety of animals, such as an ostrich-horse or a cow-pig. But one day when Liang said Ryo would fall in love with a Zhang girl, everyone agreed that he had gone too far.
Liang wasn't even sure if there were any girls, per se, among the Zhang. The closest proximity he ever had with any of the filthy ones was when there had been fighting and his mother went to meet with the Zhang chief to resolve things with a minimum of bloodshed on the one side and slimeshed (his mother's word) on the other, and brought him along for educational purposes. Sometimes on those occasions, the Zhang leader's young child was also in attendance. This child was referred to as "she," but Liang wasn't sure that counted to make "her" a girl exactly. "She" didn't look like any girl he had ever seen. She just looked like another Zhang, which was to say she looked like a heap of dirt.
When Liang was twenty-three, his mother decided he was taking too long to get engaged and picked out a nice Gan Jin woman for him to marry. Her name was Shou, and she was a year older than Liang. He had always assumed his wife would be younger than him, since wives usually were, but her one-year seniority over him didn't bother him. In other respects, she matched the imaginings of his youth pretty closely. She was pretty, and intelligent, and a fair cook (not a great one), and she adored flowers as long as they didn't scatter pollen or leak sap or drop their petals.
As for neatness, she was one of those thrice-a-day bathers. Forget about windblown hair; Shou wouldn't even set foot outside if she didn't trust her pins and lacquer to withstand the breeze. The slightest stain or snagged thread was enough to condemn one of her dresses to the ragbag. And she kept house as fastidiously as she kept her person. By the monomaniacal criteria of the Gan Jin, Shou was a goddess. And Liang, as the man wed to her, was the envy of his peers.
Time passed. Liang's mother retired, and Liang took over as leader of the Gan Jin. Now he and Shou were the First Couple, and came under pressure to produce a few heirs. This was not Shou's idea of a good time. It wasn't the sex she objected to, because she was a healthy adult with the standard set of physical appetites…but she regarded pregnancy and especially childbirth as practically Zhangesque in their inherent uncleanness. It took Liang a lot of coaxing and appeals to her sense of duty before she consented to stop taking her contraceptive herbs.
Unfortunately, as is often the case with couples who think they must get pregnant, Liang and Shou began to treat their lovemaking as a chore—a fun chore, like washing the car on a hot day, but a chore all the same—and that was how the trouble started. It had been a long, hard day of leadership for Liang, and he would just as soon have gone to sleep as soon as he got into bed, but it was Shou's most fertile day and he had an obligation. After all the effort he had expended convincing her to do this like clockwork every month, he couldn't very well not try to knock her up. So he climbed into bed with her, and they undressed each other with wild abandon (since they were Gan Jin, this meant folding each garment neatly before dropping it on the floor), and then they leaned in to kiss, and then Shou pulled away.
"You didn't trim your mustache," she accused him breathlessly.
"I'm sorry, dumpling, but it's been a rough day, and—"
"Rough day or not, that's no excuse for coming to bed all nasty and scruffy! It feels like you're wearing a porcupine-boar on your upper lip!"
So he heaved himself out of bed and went into the bathroom to clip back the hair that had grown since the morning's trim. It took him nearly half an hour to achieve the degree of meticulousness that would please Shou, and by that time, as luck would have it, she had fallen asleep, and Liang knew he had no chance of waking her. She slept like a rock—an immaculately tidy rock.
That was the beginning of the end for Liang and Shou. Even though no similar incident ever happened again, that evening was imprinted on both their minds. Shou began to see Liang as the man who couldn't be bothered to shave before making love to her, and Liang began to see Shou as the woman who was too impatient to give him a chance to meet her elevated standards. They hadn't exactly been in love and so couldn't fall out of it, but they couldn't avoid the grim fact that the like was fading. One day, they sat down in orderly fashion and decided it would be best if they split up.
The problem was, Liang had enjoyed being married to Shou. It wasn't just the status of having a trophy wife; she was good company too. In the years they were together her specificities had come to replace the generalities of his adolescent daydreams, and now that he was single again, he still couldn't imagine marrying anyone else.
It didn't help that he didn't know any other women, either within the Gan Jin tribe or outside it.
Well, that wasn't quite true. He knew one. But he didn't think of her as a woman, not if "woman" meant "someone within the realm of possibility for me to marry." She was so far from being marriage material that he had never actually rejected her as marriage material, because in order to do that, he would have had to construct a mental scenario that involved marrying her, and his imagination simply wasn't up to the task. She was just someone to sneer at over a negotiating table—or, these days, someone to ignore while he sneered at her father. He couldn't even remember what she looked like, beyond the typical Zhang accoutrements of grime-caked clothes and hair like a pigeon-rat's nest.
That was why it shocked him so badly the day he marched into the neutral zone, wearing his best uppity expression, and found himself sneering at her again. Her father had died (of abysmal hygiene, no doubt), and she had inherited his position as the chief of the Zhang tribe.
"Missing your woman, I see," she tossed off before he was even seated. "I bet she left you because you folded your napkin the wrong way."
That she opened the negotiations with a cutting remark about his personal life wasn't what hurt. That was only to be expected from the Zhang, who were as free from etiquette as they were besieged by dirt. What stung was that she guessed so close to the mark. It unseated him, and gave her an early edge in the negotiations that ultimately resulted in the Gan Jin pulling up stakes and moving their territory.
At first, Liang was furious with himself. He had failed his people. He had let the Zhang win…and it all went back to the one time he neglected to trim his mustache. If he hadn't already been totally committed to never again slackening in his personal habits, that would have done it. Since he was so committed, his self-loathing had no way to express itself and quickly faded. It helped that in their new territory, the Gan Jin could go weeks without so much as seeing any Zhang, much less skirmishing with them. They started to wonder why they hadn't moved long ago. (Stubbornness was why, but the Gan Jin were not, on the whole, a people given to self-analysis, which might turn up the uncomfortable fact that they had flaws.)
Freed from the presence of their mortal enemies, the Gan Jin entered a new age of peace and prosperity…but human nature being what it is, they had to squabble with somebody, and the only people around were each other. Gan Jin fight as neatly as they do everything else, with rules and restrictions and someone to write up the minutes, and all that organization requires someone to oversee it. So Liang's days were filled with wills and personal-dishevelment lawsuits and the question of whom the peaches belong to if the tree is planted on X's property but the branch extends past the fence and overhangs Y's property. He was left no time for thoughts of remarriage, and eventually realized that he was a confirmed lifelong bachelor. It was an immensely liberating realization, and the problem of who would lead the Gan Jin after him was solved satisfactorily by a reference to the tribal charter.
Years trudged by in this way, until the Gan Jin woke up one morning to find the Zhang camped practically on their doorsteps. Liang strode out to confront the chief, despite the very real risk that, without the safe separation of a negotiating table, he might accidentally touch her and have to scrub with lye and burn his clothes.
She hadn't changed much. She had been a homely, thick-bodied girl and was now a homely, thick-bodied middle-aged woman. Her greasy hair was tied into bunches in various places, as close as a concession to grooming as a Zhang ever got. There was a hog-monkey pelt around her shoulders.
"What are you doing here?" Liang asked her, trying to make his tone burning and icy at the same time. He wasn't too bad at it; he had practiced.
"You Gan Jin may have failed to notice this with your noses stuck up in the air," she replied, "but there's a war going on. The Fire Nation drove us off our land."
"Karmic justice," Liang said. "I'm surprised the Fire Nation considers the land fit for human habitation after all these years of you Zhang living there without us to clean up after you. I hope you're not here to beg for hospitality from us."
"Wouldn't dream of it," she retorted. "We're just passing through on our way to Ba Sing Se."
"You didn't have to trespass. You could have circled around our territory."
She extravagantly picked her nose and flicked the booger to one side. "We don't have time for that. Weren't you paying attention? We're on the run from the Fire Nation." She made an ugly grin. "If I were you, I'd start packing—now that we've been here, they'll be showing up any day now."
Liang was almost apoplectic with rage. "You vile piece of trash! You're trying to lead them here on purpose!"
"Don't flatter yourself," she yawned. "We wouldn't waste such a clever strategy on you. But we weren't about to leave you fops sitting pretty after we got uprooted. Now get out of my camp before I breathe on you."
"This hasn't ended, filth!" Liang announced while he was in the process of beating a hasty retreat. "You'll regret telling us about Ba Sing Se…when we arrive there ahead of you!"
Even as he headed back to the settlement, he worried that he was making an empty threat. The time-consuming nature of the Gan Jin's proper lifestyle had been known to leave them at a disadvantage compared to the sloppy, corner-cutting Zhang before. But as it turned out, he hadn't reckoned on his people's ability to self-motivate when given an urgent incentive—not the looming specter of the approaching Fire Nation army, but the opportunity to one-up their hundred-year rivals. He made the evacuation announcement just after breakfast, and by suppertime, every Gan Jin family was kitted out and ready to leave, pending sunrise.
They caught up quickly with the Zhang, whose lead had been handicapped by their preference for lying in mornings. For weeks, the two tribes traveled almost neck and neck, to the consternation of both. Liang had been so certain that his people's organizational efficiency would prove them the clear superiors, but the Zhang's laziness was as much a time-saver as a time-waster, and the Gan Jin found themselves unable to maintain any kind of lead over their hated rivals. His only consolation was that the reverse was also true, and the Zhang chief seemed as affronted by the fact as he was.
Then came the Great Divide.
Liang thought he finally had the chance to leave the Zhang in the dust they loved so much, by sending a fleet-footed young lad ahead to secure the services of the Canyon Guide for the Gan Jin. Without a guide, the Zhang would be forced to camp on the canyon rim and wait for his return, losing at least a day of travel time. But as luck would have it, the Zhang chief had anticipated his maneuver and gotten her people moving early, and the two groups arrived at the rim within minutes of each other…along with a third party consisting of three foreign kids. And one of those kids, as it turned out, was the long-lost Avatar, and when the Avatar tells you to band together with the Zhang for the duration of a perilous canyon crossing, you do it. Especially when the alternative is letting them get ahead by a day or more.
It was a transformative experience, to say the least. Liang had to admit that, whatever else one might say about the Zhang, at least they could hold their own in a battle against a swarm of giant hungry arthropods. And as much as he wanted to gripe that the Zhang were responsible for attracting the canyon crawlers in the first place with their smuggled food, he had to acknowledge that the Gan Jin had brought some in too. But the real surprise came when the Avatar revealed that the two tribes' century-long feud was predicated on what had to be the world's most embarrassing misunderstanding.
Liang wasn't sure he would ever get used to the knowledge that his people's founding patriarch, the exalted Jin Wei, was not a noble pilgrim, but a small child playing a simple ball game.
But then, the Zhang chief (Ran, he found out her name was) had her own set of illusions that had just been roughly dispelled by the Avatar's revelation from the past. With the Gan Jin and Zhang joining forces as the first act in a tentative alliance, the long remaining trip to Ba Sing Se afforded him ample opportunities to speak with her—mostly about the foolishness of their past hostilities and the necessity of cooperating in the future. To Liang's astonishment, Ran proved to be eminently personable when she didn't automatically hate the person she was dealing with. She laughed easily and heartily, unlike Shou who was always too poised to allow herself more than a genteel titter.
When Liang realized that he was drawing a comparison between the filthy, unmannered Zhang chief and his ex-wife, he had to excuse himself from the conversation and stick his head in a pail of cold water.
But, he reflected while toweling himself off, Ran was a woman, wasn't she? An unattractive woman, to be sure, with body odor that could fell a Komodo rhino at fifty paces, but a woman all the same, and his newfound cordiality with her made it possible for him to evaluate her as a woman.
She was in no way marriage material, obviously, but now he was aware of the fact, when before it had never occurred to him to ask himself the question.
It was turning out to be quite the journey for startling revelations.
He knew the alliance was secure the day Ran rescued him from the ravine. He had gone to gather firewood, a complicated affair for the Gan Jin, who regard the saying "It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it," the way other people regard the saying "I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." He probably should have left the task to someone younger and more agile, but time spent with the Zhang was starting to affect his mind and make him think he had something to prove. So it was Liang who donned the protective apron and gloves and boots and hairnet and trundled the little handcart out into the woods.
And it was Liang who misjudged the ground and tripped over a stone and crunched through a stand of bushes and hurtled down a near-vertical slope into a dry gully and landed badly and turned his ankle. More to the point, it was Liang who didn't do all these things until he was well out of earshot of the campsite, a fact which he discovered from his first, abortive attempt to call for assistance.
The gorge ran on in both directions for as far as he could see in the evening light. The walls were at least fifteen feet high, treacherously steep, and without much in the way of conveniently dangling roots or secure outcroppings of rock. No, all the outcroppings were in the floor of the chasm, making it a dubious prospect to try hiking along it in search of an egress, what with his injured ankle.
Liang carefully stood, putting as little weight as possible on the bad foot, and reached up to prod experimentally at the ravine wall. He froze in horror when this act brought a little shower of earth down upon him; he had not been on speaking terms with the Zhang so long that he could just cheerfully stand by while under assault from dirt! He sank down onto a nearby boulder that was the right size to make a passable chair and pondered what to do.
On the bright side, eventually he would be missed and his tribe would send out search parties. The problem with that was the eventually—it was getting dark and there might be dangerous animals about. Like platypus-bears or even (he shuddered) shirshu! That thought spurred him into another round of calling for help, more urgent than the first.
After a few moments, he heard crashing noises from above, the telltale sign that someone—or something—was pushing through the deceptive shrubs growing on the edge of the gully. He tensed—rescue, or a predator?—and his relief at seeing Ran's homely countenance looming some twenty feet above him was tempered only by embarrassment at being found in his misfortune by a Zhang.
"Is this how you Gan Jin normally gather firewood?" she asked conversationally, swinging something bulky and heavy down off her shoulder with a whump. "Or are you taking a break?"
"I seem to have fallen," he replied, well aware of how ridiculous he sounded making such an obvious statement while sitting in no great discomfort on a rock. "I've twisted my ankle."
"Now why doesn't that surprise me?" she said, not unkindly. "I'll be right down."
She wasn't exaggerating—in the next instant, she sprang down from the brink of the gorge and landed heavily beside him, seeming to take pride in the way her feet gouged the ground. She turned her back to him and lowered herself to one knee.
"Hop on," she said. "I'll get you out of here."
To say that Liang was taken aback would be putting it lightly. Ran's tunic was made of the most crudely dressed leather, and he knew for a fact that she had been wearing it nonstop at least since the day the Zhang turned up in their settlement, and probably months or more before that. If it had ever been washed, that event was lost to history. The stink of dirt and old sweat and new sweat and different kinds of dirt rolling off the woman's torso was almost overpowering at such close quarters. And she expected him to cling to that reeking surface?
"Well?" she prompted, peeking over her shoulder. "What are you waiting for?" She caught sight of his mortified expression and stood up. "Oh, I get it. Mustn't touch a filthy Zhang, eh? And here I thought we were getting to be friends."
"Old prejudices die hard," Liang said sheepishly.
"Look," Ran sighed. "If it bothers you that much, I can go get some of your own tribesmen to fetch you. But it'll take a while, and I know for a fact that there are saber-toothed moose-lions in the area. So what it comes down to is a choice between definitely getting dirty, and possibly getting eaten. It's up to you."
A month ago, before the Great Divide, Liang would certainly have chosen to take his chances with the moose-lions. Since patching things up with the Zhang, however, while he was still firmly of the opinion that there were fates worse than death, coming into physical contact with one of the other tribe was not, a priori, one of them.
"Very well," he sighed. "Take me up."
Ran turned around and crouched again. "Hang on tight."
Her hog-monkey pelt was the nastiest thing he had ever voluntarily touched, caked with grit and grease and infested with fleas that were probably the direct descendants of the ones that had originally pestered the hog-monkey. But it did make a good handhold, and Ran was an excellent climber, with no qualms about digging her fingers and toes into the crumbly slope of the gully in order to gain purchase. It was only a couple of minutes before they reached the top and Liang gratefully slid off her back, taking care with his injured ankle.
He was revolted at the condition in which he found himself, dappled with powdery soil from the ravine wall and stained with Ran's well-aged body grime, his clothes torn and snagged from his headlong crash through the bushes. He had never been so filthy in his life, and his stomach-turning disgust was mixed with quite a contrary sensation…almost a feeling of wicked, hedonistic delight. He was dirty! Not merely a bit in need of freshening up, but really actually dirty, with dirt! He could feel individual sand grains on his scalp!
"Can you walk?" Ran was asking him.
He gingerly put weight on his bad foot. It wasn't as painful as he had feared. "Yes, I think so."
"Come on back to our camp, and I'll have Chuyi take a look at it."
"Thank you, but that won't be necessary. Besides," he said, locating the handcart, "I have to take this firewood back to our camp."
"I'll send one of the kids back for it," she argued. "I insist that you have that ankle checked out and stay for dinner. We're having moose-lion." She stooped to heft something massive over her shoulder, and Liang realized with no small amount of shock that it was a dead yearling moose-lion. She must have killed it herself. He couldn't imagine someone like, to pick a name at random, Shou performing such a task. Or any of his tribe, for that matter—there were things a Gan Jin simply didn't do, and hunting was about five of them. They bought or bartered for their meat, pre-cooked if possible.
He didn't refuse right away. Most of him was desperate for a bath (with lye, if it came to that). But a tiny, traitorous part of his brain—the same one producing the feeling of guilty pleasure at his grubby state—was curious to see how long he could endure without one, to find out what it would be like to live like a Zhang for one night. Merely getting dirty hadn't killed him yet. Maybe staying that way for a few hours wouldn't, either.
And he did need to have his ankle tended to, and he doubted any of his own people would be too sanguine about touching it as it was.
"Agreed," he said finally. "On one condition."
"What's that?"
"Tomorrow night, you come for dinner at our camp…and wash yourself first."
"Wash myself?" she gaped, scandalized. "But it's only late winter!"
"You needn't be thorough about it," he acceded. "Just chip off the first few layers of dirt and do something to corral your hair. I can give you some soap."
Ran folded her arms, reconsidering. A smile slowly grew on her face. "All right, pretty-boy. You've got yourself a deal. Let's shake on it." She spat phlegmily into her right palm and extended it. Liang gasped, horrorstruck. "Come on—you're one of us tonight, and that means following our customs."
Cringing, feeling like he was committing something akin to treason, Liang dribbled a little saliva into his open hand and allowed Ran to grasp it with her much slimier one.
Supper, as it turned out, was delicious. Ran was a talented cook, handy with spices. It was a necessity, Liang supposed, when you lived such an unhygienic lifestyle—strong spices were a good last resort against disease. That didn't diminish the fact that they were also very tasty. He had expected the moose-lion to be gamy and stringy, but whatever the Zhang used as a tenderizing agent (he was afraid to ask) had done the trick.
They laughed at him when he asked for a napkin.
His ankle wasn't hurting anymore either. Chuyi, the taciturn man who was the closest thing the Zhang had to a doctor, had slapped—Liang should have seen this coming—a hot mud plaster on it and then wrapped it tightly with strips he tore off old rags. If there had been any broken skin, Liang would have been deeply concerned by this procedure, but as it was he couldn't complain. Much.
The next night, of course, the tables were turned. It would be nice to say that Ran cleaned up good, but it wouldn't be true—to the extent that she cleaned up at all, she cleaned up completely mediocre. Her homeliness was genuine, not merely the product of her unkemptness, and she actually looked several years older without the dirt obscuring her facial lines. Her hair was wrestled into a single topknot that stood straight up, rigid with grease that would take more than one casual washing to eradicate.
She was extremely uncomfortable to be eating surrounded by Gan Jin, and they felt no better about having her in their midst. Liang was the only one who wasn't in a hurry for the experience to be over, and he decided he was going to have to give some of the younger folks a stern talking-to regarding the derisive way they were whispering behind their hands and pointing whenever Ran fumbled her chopsticks. She was trying; couldn't they see that? Did they think they could do any better with Zhang customs? He had half a mind to send them over to the other camp for supper!
He apologized to her afterward, while walking her back to her tribe.
"Don't worry about it," she dismissed the issue. "If that's the worst that ever happens to me at the hands of you fops, I'll consider myself lucky. Thanks for having me over. The past couple of nights have been…enlightening."
"Thank you for the fortuitous rescue yesterday," said Liang. "And the, er, medical care." He had discarded Chuyi's grungy dressing almost immediately upon returning to his own camp the previous evening, but that was because it wouldn't have survived his bath anyway. Really. In any case, his ankle was sorting itself out rapidly and he didn't think he would have any difficulty walking by the time they broke camp.
"Any time," smiled Ran. "You know something? I like it better like this, with our peoples getting along instead of hating each other. We may not be bosom buddies just yet, but like you said, old prejudices die hard."
"I think I prefer it this way also," said Liang. "We could never have afforded to continue being hostile to one another, not with a true enemy on the horizon."
Ran made a wry face. "I just hope that doesn't mean we'll all backslide once we reach Ba Sing Se."
"Madam, a Gan Jin never backslides. We occasionally revive bygone practices, but we never backslide."
"Silly me," she laughed. "Well, in that case, I hope you don't revive the bygone practice of fighting us at every opportunity after we get to the capital."
"Somehow, I don't think we'll be tempted to," said Liang.
It wasn't until he was almost back at the Gan Jin camp that he suddenly realized what was going on. The insight slammed into his consciousness like a charging porcupine-boar, leaving behind barbed quills of shock and self-doubt.
First he had eaten dinner with her people, enduring their slings and arrows of ridicule. Then she had eaten dinner with his people, and likewise suffered their scorn…for which he was prepared to reprimand them, defending her. And to top it all off, he had walked her home. Well, back to her camp, but it was as good as "home" for the purpose.
Holding back a scream, Liang found a pail of cold water and stuck his head into it.
Later, he rationalized the mounting incidents away as diplomacy. Yes, that's what it was. Diplomacy. Two political leaders openly displaying an amiable relationship as a tangible demonstration to their respective peoples that they were united as allies. Yes, of course.
Or something like that.
In any case, it certainly wasn't dating.
They never made it to Ba Sing Se—not for any tragic reason, but because the self-important stuffed-shirt bureaucrats at the Full Moon Bay ferry station refused to issue them any passports.
"We don't just give out passports to anyone who demands them," was the reasoning delivered down the nose of a bored-looking clerk. "Without proper identification, how do we know you're not subversives or Fire Nation spies?"
"Do we look like Fire Nation spies to you?" Ran snapped.
"Dear lady," said the clerk in a tone clearly indicating that he considered her neither, "if I were to describe in any detail what you and your people look like to me, I would be fired for conduct unbecoming a representative of the city of Ba Sing Se. Suffice it to say that your mere presence in the city would violate any number of regulations controlling air pollution. As for the rest of you, no bona fide refugees would ever be as neat and clean as you are. Now get out of here before I call Security. NEXT!"
Reactions among both tribes to this turn of events ranged from the merely crestfallen to the despairing. "We came all this way for nothing!" was the prevailing sentiment, often followed up with "Now we'll never be safe from the Fire Nation!" Liang resisted the urge to knock together the heads of the worst offenders and suggested the two groups hold a joint brainstorming session.
They situated themselves, vengefully, beside the road leading up to the ferry station, so that other refugees couldn't help but overhear their predicament. No passersby seemed any less inclined to settle in Ba Sing Se as a result, but they felt better for doing it. And it brought the side benefit that they were able to eliminate several of the cities proposed as alternate destinations when it turned out that some of the migrants were from those places. Convenient, but it was chilling to realize just how successful the Fire Nation's war of conquest was becoming, and it made the necessity of finding a safe haven all the more urgent. But where could they go, when the gates of the Earth Kingdom's one totally dependable sanctuary were closed to them?
"Wait a minute," Ran said at one point. "How do we know Ba Sing Se is the only totally dependable sanctuary?"
"People are going there from all over the Earth Kingdom, maybe the whole world!" lamented a Gan Jin woman. "The Fire Nation is everywhere! Only the fabled walls of—"
"Yeah, yeah, we all know about the fabled walls," Ran interrupted, drawing a gasp of indignation from the woman. "But if there's one thing we should be learning from all these people swarming into Ba Sing Se, it's that cities aren't just refuges, they're also targets. Maybe walls aren't the answer. Maybe we would do better to try hiding from the Fire Nation—finding a secluded, uninhabited place to settle, where they won't think to look for us."
"An intriguing idea," said Liang. "But how would we find such a place?"
"We'd have to be lucky, of course," said Ran. "But in the meantime, we could stay safe enough by keeping on the move and staying out of the Fire Nation's way. That is, if you prissy Gan Jin think you can survive an indefinite road trip." She winked as she said this last—tradition practically demanded that the two tribes continue to rib each other even in their alliance, but the sting was largely taken out of it.
The longer they discussed it, the better the idea seemed…if for no other reason than that it was an idea, and one that didn't rely on the munificence of outsiders, but only on the determination, fortitude, and good fortune of the Gan Jin and Zhang themselves. Liang assigned several of his people to planning subcommittees, eliciting snorts of amusement from the Zhang…until Ran made few of them participate too. "This is one thing we can't be slipshod about," she told them when they protested. "Now go contribute like good citizens. And no threatening to get dirt on the Gan Jin unless they deserve it."
Liang found himself alone with Ran, the rest of their respective tribes having bustled off. "I must thank you for rallying your people to this task," he said. "I know you are not used to doing anything with much organization."
"We'll learn," she said. "Just like you'll learn not to be afraid to get your hands dirty…right? There's no clean way to found a permanent community, you know."
"I am aware, yes," he said dryly. "I have not forgotten how you Zhang drove us out of our ancestral territory…how long ago was it? Twenty years?"
"Closer to twenty-five by now," Ran mused. "If you haven't forgotten…have you forgiven?"
"Dear lady," said Liang, consciously using the same phrasing as the snotty civil servant at the ferry station, but with sincerity, "I abandoned any ill will I once felt toward you or your tribe that day you rescued me from the gorge. It was such an eloquent statement of camaraderie on your part that I could do no less."
Ran blinked. "Really? I thought I was just lending a hand to someone too pathetic to help himself. If I'd known it was that big a deal to you, I would have milked more out of it," she deadpanned. "Anyway, I'd better go see about rustling up some dinner. You're welcome to drop in, of course."
"I think I shall have to pass this time," said Liang. "Chances are, my leadership skills are going to be required in our camp before long. But thank you."
"Any time…as long as the offer goes both ways, of course." She made as though to clap him fraternally on the back, then stopped before her hand actually made contact. "Oops. Can't have your pristine clothes getting smudged, now, can we?" She settled for making an almost casual bow before heading off toward the Zhang camp, stealing periodic glances at him over her shoulder.
Liang watched her go, no longer even bothering to quell the fondness welling up within him. For the first time, he found it something of a pity that she wasn't marriage material—for even if they both were amenable to the idea as individuals, their tribes definitely would not react well to such a development. They still maintained separate camps, for goodness' sake! That would have to change once they found a place to settle, but for now the Gan Jin and the Zhang preferred to cooperate without mingling. Old prejudices did indeed die hard.
But when they did, it was a spectacular death indeed, if Liang himself was any indication. Ran wasn't remotely pretty—just the opposite—and she didn't seem to care about flowers, and she was if anything too smart, and she was a Zhang. But on the other hand, she was a great cook, as well as being a fine leader and warrior, and a steadfast ally. She wasn't marriage material, for various reasons, but, Liang wondered, would it be going too far to hope that she might yet prove to be romance material? He decided almost at once that it would not.
For one thing, he could be certain that Ran would never reject him for failing to trim his mustache.
That just left the question of whether or not she might be persuaded to trim hers.
END
Author's Notes: As originally intended, this story was going to alternate between "Liang's" viewpoint and "Ran's," but having begun in Liang's head, I found it so much fun that I stayed there. It's probably a good thing, since I've always found it more effective in a short story to stick with one voice throughout.
Why did I write this? Because I get a kick out of crack pairings, and this was one I hadn't seen done before. I'm actually surprised by that, since there is so much potential for Odd Couple-style humor between these two. I guess they get overlooked because they're not young and pretty.
On that note, I make no apology for any disturbing images I may have put into your head. Old and ugly people deserve love too.
—Karalora