Forged In Fire || ATLA

Missing

"I love the way you understand, the way you love, the way you were when no one was looking, that you were beautiful and you were worth it all, you were everything I needed. You captured my attention, did I mention I think you're beautiful, darling? If I could tell you now I'd tell you how the world is dark now that you're missing now that you're missing." - for KING & COUNTRY

Sokkas Master

🌊⛰️🔥🌪

The boy wasn't half bad when he got back on his feet. Piandao could see that as he watched Sokka and Fat dance back and forth across the practice ring outside the estate. His student held his own well enough against his considerably older and larger opponent, parrying strikes as they came but never quite gaining any real footing to turn the tides in his direction. With good reflexes, steady hips, and a strong arm, the son of the Southern Water Tribe's Chief seemed to almost perfectly fit the picture Pakku had painted in his letters after a botched attempt to destroy the moon.

Piandao scowled at the man that came to mind. He wanted to allow himself to think or speak the wannabe destroyer's name. He wanted to curse the late Admiral and blame him for the spilled blood of an innocent man. He wanted to condemn Zhao's deplorable soul to an eternity possibly more miserable than that of Ozai himself, but Piandao couldn't. After all, he had been the one to introduce the White Lotus to a bright-eyed, still-innocent Sukomo Kenshin when he was a year younger than the boy mourning his daughter. It almost hadn't been. Both Kenshin and Zhao had shown their own prowesses but in the end, the Admiral went to Jeong Jeong and Sukomo came to him. Piandao still feared he would look down one day and see the blood of his former student on his hands. He nearly had the day that he learned that Sukomo's little girl was the Akira reborn. Philosophical or not, it wasn't fair that the General died without knowing that.

The Order of the White Lotus had spent a hundred years hoping and praying for the miraculous return of either Avatar or Akira and the fact that one had been right under their noses for sixteen years just wasn't fair. Piandao himself had trained Aelita Kenshin during a stint of long months that her father was away. He spent time teaching and admiring her the way he supposed a grandfather or an uncle would without ever knowing who she was or what she could be. Dammit, it just seemed too cruel to think about now, especially knowing she was alive and alone and likely not well.

Roshi claimed while in Ba Sing Se the boy looked to be in love so that Piandao guessed the knowledge of Aelita's current state was what left his student so sad and shaken. He blindly assumed that Sokka and his friends were slowly making their way to Caldera, biding their time until the eclipse, allowing the Akira to get in close and lure the crown into a false sense of security. He sympathetically pegged Sokka's decision to stop and train under him as a temporary distraction interlaced with a genuine desire for learning. After all, he had no reason to think otherwise. Correspondences between he and the Grand Lotus had been few and far between in the weeks since Iroh's arrest and even then, the tapped-out messages sent with woodpecker moths were vague.

'The sun needs the moon just as the earth needs the skies.'

Piandao took the message for the way he interpreted it, even if the part of him that kicked himself in the ass for not requesting guardianship of Aelita after Sukomo's death wanted to do nothing more than offer her his aid now. Instead, they would let the children fight as they planned. He flinched when Fat connected the meat of his wooden sword with Sokka's ribs. Seventeen or not, his student was still just a boy, but the Lotus would stand back as he and his friends walked into an ambush the Fire Lord knew was coming because failure was the best opportunity to begin again. So for now, Piandao would do what he did best - teach and observe and just maybe pass a judgment on character that Sukomo himself should have been the one to do.