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The night is hot and airless; the palace compound outside his window has been dark for hours. Zuko still can't sleep. There's one candle left burning low across the room, and he keeps changing his mind, put it out, let it alone, put it out, let it alone. What if he puts it out and he still can't sleep, what then?
He rolls over, irritably, for the thousandth time and almost misses the little waft of breeze from the balcony. But someone's there, black silhouette on black. The shadow moves soundlessly into the room and drops down on Zuko's bed.
"You're still awake," Aang says. The deep voice still surprises Zuko sometimes. Aang is just a curve of skull and broad spread of shoulders in the dim light, but Zuko thinks he can hear him smiling.
"I can't sleep," Zuko says. He sounds peevish and sixteen and he cringes.
"Let me tell you a story," Aang says, and everyone pretty much does what Aang suggests these days, so Zuko prepares to listen.
"This is a story my master Gyatso once told me," Aang begins. "When he had just received his Arrow of Mastery, he told me, he faced his greatest challenge as a monk: he lost his way."
"Wait," Zuko interrupts, "Is this one of those stories with a lesson?"
"Maybe," Aang says, momentarily twelve and mischievous again, "You'll have to wait and see."
"Gyatso was determined to put childish concerns aside and focus on more noble goals," Aang continues, "But delusion can be subtle, and enlightenment elusive..."
"I think I've finally achieved enlightenment!" Gyatso announced. He started to grin and then quickly rearranged his face into something more suitable for this momentous declaration.
When it had hit him, the day before, he hadn't been entirely sure: he'd been weeding in the Temple vegetable garden with Roku, and he was pretty sure that enlightenment was usually reached while meditating, not while weeding. But the sky had been very blue and white and everything had suddenly been very clear. The weeds had never been so weedy, Roku kneeling beside him had never been so Roku, and his mind had quieted entirely, leaving behind a simple feeling of happiness. But it hadn't been a sleepy sort of satisfaction, he'd felt very awake, almost as if he was flying very fast.
The pure mindless moment had faded, letting thought back in, but the feeling had remained, and twenty-four hours later he was pretty sure it was going to stick.
So it was clearly time to share it with Roku.
If Roku would just stop meditating for a moment and pay attention. Gyatso had found him sitting on a low wall, a small breeze dancing in figure-eights around his head. Gyatso recognized it as the sixteenth Airbending meditation, but he didn't feel bad about interrupting; Roku didn't have it quite right anyways.
Of course the enlightened thing to do was probably to give Roku a hint; compassion was one of the hallmarks of enlightenment, after all.
"You'll get rid of that wobble by sharpening the corners," he said, trying to hit the wise and kindly teaching tone used by all the old monks. "Did I mention I've become enlightened?"
Roku cracked open a skeptical eye. "Enlightened? Is this related to other recent accomplishments?" He shut the eye. "It's a lovely arrow, I've never seen one so blue, or, uh, pointy, thank you for stopping by to show it to me... again..."
Gyatso winced a little. He had been just a little bit proud of achieving his mastery before his older friend. But that was before, of course; he was detached from such concerns now.
He sat down on the wall next to Roku, who gave up and let his wobbly breeze collapse with a sigh.
"I've been flying for years, and I know all the fighting forms," Roku said, "I don't see why I can't pin down these last few exercises."
"You were quite close," Gyatso said encouragingly, "You'll be done here before you know it."
Roku frowned and looked away.
"Eager to have me gone?" he asked.
"No, of course not," Gyatso said, "I'm beyond eagerness now, anyways. I'm just sympathetic to your struggle."
Roku looked at him dubiously, then looked away again. "I've been here a while," Roku muttered.
"Seven years," Gyatso tallied, "But time is just an illusion."
"And yet you're never late to dinner."
"Well, actually, I've started fasting after noon, to set aside craving..." He had only just started fasting, but it counted, right?
"Oh, right," Roku agreed, "Your enlightenment. So tell me, how did this, um, manifest?" He swung one leg over the wall and leaned back on his hands, grinning expectantly at Gyatso.
Gyatso felt his own grin trying to sneak back. "I feel this sense of warmth, and this lightness, like I'm Airbending even when I'm not. It's almost... fizzy. I think it's benevolent compassion for all and detachment from worldly concerns."
"Detachment is fizzy?"
Gyatso felt that he was perhaps not explaining this well. "That might be the compassion. It's like this inner peace, anyways, totally free of any sort of selfish craving."
He smiled beatifically at Roku, who squinted suspiciously back at him.
"Huh," Roku said, and shut his eyes again decisively. The breeze started looping around his head again - not, Gyatso noticed, any sharper in the corners.
Gyatso walked at a slow, deliberate pace - totally not flipping over the edge of the terrace and zig-zagging through the air above the gardens - back towards the monastery hall. He hadn't even gotten to the part about how he thought Roku must be close to enlightenment also, because he felt the new sense of compassion most strongly in his presence...
"There was another student at the Temple who was finishing his studies around the same time," Aang narrates, and Zuko lets his awareness of the room drop away, so there's nothing but the shadowed ceiling and Aang's voice. "Gyatso was a little ahead of this student in the techniques of Airbending, but in some areas, his friend was wiser..."
"I missed you at dinner tonight."
Gyatso jumped a little, invisibly, he hoped. He had felt the cooling on his skin as the sun had gone down, but he hadn't paid attention to how late it had gotten, and it hadn't occurred to him that Roku might come looking for him after not seeing him all day. Although it was a rare day when they did not see each other.
Gyatso forbore raising an eyelid, he was meditating, but he lifted his chin in acknowledgment.
"And this morning, there was a great valley breeze, I looked for you to go flying but I couldn't find you."
Gyatso felt a pang of disappointment, but it surely wasn't very detached to regret missing out on a good valley breeze. And then he realized: this was compassion for Roku's disappointment over not finding him.
He opened his eyes and turned fully towards Roku. "I'm very sorry," he said, "I was meditating." He inclined his head sadly towards Roku and thought he'd struck just the right balance of sincerity, sorrow, and detachment.
"Right," Roku said, and flopped over on the grass. "I guess I should be too, but something you said yesterday - seven years!"
Gyatso was pretty sure that lying around on the grass did not befit an enlightened monk, but he carefully slipped the upper leg out of his half lotus and extended it in a sympathetic-listening sort of way.
"I've mostly just been taking it day by day - one wind at a time, you know - but," Roku shook his head, "Seven years."
Gyatso smiled encouragingly. Roku's frowny eyebrows were really very endearing, in a benevolent-compassion-for-the-world sort of way of course.
"Sometimes it just adds up on me, you know? Well, you probably don't... you were born to this... but I wasn't! I never thought I was going to be living the monastic life for seven years."
For some reason he couldn't quite name, Gyatso felt vaguely nervous about the way Roku mentioned the monastic life. He exhaled carefully, trying to focus on sending out peaceful energy with his breath.
Roku, un-pacified, looked squarely at Gyatso. "The monastic life, you know? Sometimes it feels like it's just gotten a little too... monastic."
Gyatso flinched a little and folded his leg back into his half-lotus to re-center himself. He looked slightly away, at the middle distance. "Too monastic?" he asked. He aimed for kindly but it came out sort of wavering.
Roku sat up abruptly, facing away from Gyatso. "Loneliness," he said, "Of the body."
Gyatso inhaled sharply and only narrowly escaped a fit of coughing. His ears felt warm. Temporarily behind Roku's view, he blinked quickly and thought not concerned with these things, not concerned with these things.
Roku was hanging his head and Gyatso told himself he couldn't let a moment's discomposure stop him from showing the proper compassion to his friend - Roku was obviously still struggling with cravings of the flesh and that was okay, that was just where he was on the path.
"You, ah, miss the company of women?" he asked delicately.
Roku's long hair hid his face from Gyatso. Gyatso was glad for him: even in the evening dark, he must appreciate the extra cover, he surely must be blushing to be confessing this. "Something like that," he said. "Sometimes I just feel so... frustrated."
Gyatso felt a strange shiver of sympathy. There wasn't very much actual suffering at the Air Temple - this must be how it felt to be moved by its presence. He clearly needed to offer some sort of solace.
"Roku," he started, "You know that renunciation is supposed to be the answer to suffering, not the cause. You don't have to never- "
Roku snorted, sending a strand of his hair flying. "Been trying that. This?" He waved a hand over towards Gyatso. "Just not the same."
Gyatso flushed violently, coughed, and was profoundly glad Roku still wasn't looking at him - for Roku's sake, of course, he would hate to add to another's embarrassment. He cast about mentally for some useful wisdom to offer his friend and was hit by another wave of heat by the thought that popped into his mind.
"Um," he said, "Everything is impermanent, and body is not self, and couldImaybehelpyououtwiththat?"
What had he just said? Roku turned a little bit and Gyatso saw wide, innocent eyes looking back over his shoulder. "Gyatso," he said, and Gyatso felt a sudden urge to look behind himself in the hopes that Roku meant someone else. "What could you - "
His scalp burned. Gyatso hadn't meant to offer, he really hadn't meant to offer, but now that he thought about it, now that Roku was looking at him for some sort of assistance... maybe it was the compassionate thing to do? Wasn't it?
Roku was still looking at him. Gyatso thought the top of his head might be getting close to mastering Firebending.
"It's not a big deal," he said, scooting in quickly behind Roku's back, before he could think about it any more. "I'm not concerned with these things any more, but of course I have compassion for those still suffering."
Roku, mercifully, had turned away when Gyatso had scooted and wasn't staring at him any more. Gyatso reached and put one careful hand on Roku's stomach. If it was shaking, he told himself, it was with the force of his sympathy.
He waited a moment, and Roku put his hand on top of Gyatso's. Gyatso slid his palm down to the hot form below -
"Wait," Zuko breaks in, sitting partway up. "So your master's friend doubted Gyatso's enlightenment, but was struggling with his own meditation, and so Gyatso decided to prove his enlightenment by helping him focus? What does that even mean, helping him focus, and how would that - ?"
"As Gyatso told me, his friend was restless and distracted," Aang answers, and Zuko feels his eyes shut involuntarily; maybe Aang hadn't missed his inattention during the meeting earlier. So much for getting away with it. "He encouraged him to deal with the cause of the distraction," Aang continues. With Zuko's eyes shut, he's suddenly much too close, and Zuko sits up further, thinking about getting up, being somewhere else.
"Hey," Aang says, and his voice is all wry and soothing and things the Avatar's simple confidence isn't when he's making speeches in the Fire Lord's hall. Zuko's eyes fly open and Aang is patting Zuko's pillow. "Give me a chance here, okay?"
Zuko slowly lies back down.
"So Gyatso tried to help his friend focus," Aang resumes. "But he was denying himself the things he normally enjoyed - morning flights, baking cakes for the evening meal, playing bending games with the other monks - and so he was off-balance too..."
Gyatso, for the life of him, could not focus.
He'd tried meditating in the big meditation hall. He'd tried meditating in his quarters. He'd tried meditating under his favorite pavilion, on the steps of his favorite pavilion, on the roof of his favorite pavilion, and four separate places in the gardens. He'd tried walking meditation, chanting meditation, sweeping meditation, and glider meditation, the last somewhat disastrously when he nearly fell into a tree.
He kept thinking about Roku, how he'd been hard in his hand, how he'd groaned, once, quietly, and how he'd curled forward over Gyatso's arm when he'd pulsed wetly into Gyatso's hand... he'd jumped up and walked quickly away, after. Roku must surely want a moment alone, that had been the kind thing to do, to give him one. He'd rinsed his hand off in a rain barrel. It kept flashing through his mind that he should have tast - Gyatso cut himself off right there. He had acted from compassion and any other thoughts were distraction, delusion, something to pull away from. Bad effects came from bad intentions; he'd had good intentions, so it should come back to him good. This little slip in his meditation could only be a blip, just a reminder of the difficulty of walking the path, and not a major setback.
"Walking, right" he told himself, and although it was late and time to be back in his quarters, he tried the walking meditation again - left heel, left toe, right heel, right toe, and the point was not how much faster he could be moving in the air, the point was mindfulness... he kept on, left, right, breathing evenly, trying not to think of Roku, and all at once spotted him up ahead under a tree. The shadow of the tree might have hidden him from the light of the temple lanterns entirely if he had not held a flickering point of flame on one raised fingertip.
Gyatso felt sudden relief that his enlightenment hadn't gotten lost entirely with his meditative focus - he still felt lifted up on his feet at the sight of his friend, warmed by a tingle of compassion. He should have checked in before this.
Roku looked up at him from under his eyebrows as Gyatso approached, and Gyatso's breath stuttered.
"Good - " he cleared his throat. "Good progress on those meditations?"
Roku looked down and folded his hands; the small flame vanished and Gyatso blinked at the afterimage. "Not really," he said in a low voice.
Gyatso sank more heavily onto his feet - "Oh," he said. "Of course it's all the same to me, but I'd hoped I was of some help to you - "
"Oh, it was helpful!" Roku said hastily. "Very helpful, except that it, ah, stirred up memories, from before I came to the Temple..."
"Oh," Gyatso said more cheerfully, "Well, that's desire for you, always breeding more of itself." He sat down next to Roku and settled himself back against the trunk of the tree. "You still miss women, huh?"
"Something like that," Roku said. "So the problem is desire?"
"I think really the problem is attachment," Gyatso said. "Desire is just one manifestation of clinging to transient things, you just have to get to the point of letting go." He was aware of Roku's hand lying just an inch away from his, and thought that stroking the back might be an appropriate sympathetic gesture.
Roku flipped his hand over and caught Gyatso's. One finger was still warm from his Firebending.
"So how do I get to the point of letting go?" he asked Gyatso, and Gyatso couldn't tell what that was in his voice, except that his compassionate yearning suddenly swelled within him.
"This is really hard for you, isn't it," he said, and Roku shook his head. "No, you don't have to deny it, look, detachment means that I care about these things. In a totally impersonal kind of way," he clarified. "You're suffering, Roku, I just want to help you, however I can." He was breathing rapidly, deeply, and Roku's breathing was audible too.
"Gyatso," Roku said, and "I really don't mind," Gyatso said, "As an act of kindness," and "Gyatso," Roku said, and "Let me just - " Gyatso said, reaching into Roku's lap, and "Gyatso," Roku said, blocking his hand, and "Of course, you miss women, you want something more than - " Gyatso said, and dodged around Roku's other hand and bent over his lap and closed his lips over the tip of Roku's cock, leaking right through his monastic robe.
Roku went completely still and dropped Gyatso's hands, which he put to good use reaching into Roku's robe -
"I'm not sure I'm following this story," Zuko says, and rolls towards the wall. "I thought Gyatso's friend was the one having trouble meditating, but then Gyatso can't meditate, and does the friend really want these cakes Gyatso keeps baking, or not?" He's pretty sure he's missed something somewhere; he's pretty sure his attention isn't where it's supposed to be. Aang in the one-candle dark is a rumble of voice and a heavy dip of his mattress; Zuko can look up and see the sweep of his collar bones. His big square hands are somewhere in the pool of shadow Zuko's turning his head away from.
"I could go back," Aang offers.
"No, no," Zuko sighs. That isn't what he wants from Aang at all, and the sooner Aang finishes his story the sooner he can get back to failing to go to sleep.
"Okay," Aang agrees, and shifts a little further up on Zuko's bed, his voice low but somehow right in Zuko's ear, some Airbending trick. "So Gyatso was still convinced he'd found the true path to enlightenment..."
Enlightenment, Gyatso thought, was really not so tricky. He was walking rapidly around the Temple grounds, left foot right foot left right left right. The bubble of lightness was with him all the time now, big and bright in his chest and throat. Compassion? He hardly stopped thinking of Roku and the burden of his struggle. Detachment? He'd managed to fast right through the morning and evening both, and here it was sunny again and he felt just fine.
He felt so buoyant he thought his head might float up off his shoulders, full of a sort of brilliant aching for all those still trapped in suffering... there was no self, just this quivering benevolence, and especially no self hard and leaking beneath his robes... he almost went spiralling up into the brilliant sky before he recalled that that might not befit the dignity of an enlightened monk.
Licking his lips was probably not exactly on, either. He couldn't help it - he kept recalling Roku's hands on his scalp and the thrust of him up into his mouth, salty in his throat... he'd felt so embarrassed, that first night, when really it was the most natural thing in the world that he'd want to help his friend. He was generous, of course, being enlightened, he was generous, he'd happily help him as much as he needed while he was still struggling...
This train of thought was cut off when he was slammed unceremoniously into a wall.
"Gyatso," someone growled in his ear. "I have been looking all. over. for. you."
His words were punctuated by little shoves against the wall, which, as an enlightened monk, were absolutely not having any sort of interesting effect on any part of Gyatso.
"I haven't gone anywhere," he said a little breathlessly. He'd helpfully tucked Roku back into his robes and made himself scarce as soon as Roku had finished, that night, and since then he'd been - where was he now? Up against a shed, he realized, in the most remote part of the Temple gardens.
"I swear by your pointy arrow I would bind your feet to the ground, if I knew Earthbending yet," Roku said, and Gyatso could feel him panting on the back of his neck. There was wind swirling around their ankles, gusting up Gyatso's robe and all that compassion inside of him was twisting around...
"Do you," he got out, "Is this - women - "
"Nothing like that," Roku snapped, "What, going to tell me you've got an orifice too?" Gyatso's robes blew up in a sudden blast of air, and there were slick fingers probing at him.
He stopped breathing entirely. He did, in fact, and he would, in fact, and... he spread his legs a little further.
Roku laughed quietly behind him. Gyatso almost turned, and then Roku put one steadying hand on his hip and pressed in close.
Gyatso forced himself to remember his breathing - inhale, exhale. It was that or moan.
Roku slid inside him in one long, hard, stroke - and stopped.
For one long moment Gyatso was caught between Roku and the wall, helplessly - and then Roku slid back, and froze again.
It was so much, it was almost... if he would just move...
Gyatso tried to grind back but sudden wind slapped the bare flesh of his back and legs. It increased in pressure to a gale, and the whole shed trembled with the force of it. Roku was just right there, so close, if he could only move, but the wind might as well have been stone. It was utterly unyielding. He was pinned against the wall. Roku was still there, maddeningly, and Gyatso was going to go insane...
"So, benevolence?" Roku's voice was low and clear under the whine of the wind, which Gyatso realized he was echoing. "Compassion, Gyatso?" He thrust his hips, just a tiny fraction. "Detachment?"
"N-no," Gyatso gasped. "No. Please... please..."
Suddenly there was no wind, and Roku rocked into him again and again until he dissolved into white-blue sparks, and then they were kissing and kissing and kissing.
***
"Okay," Gyatso said later. "I feel really stupid now." He had his head on Roku's shoulder, and was using Airbending to braid little bits of his hair. He felt full of a sort of warm, fizzy lightness that was definitely not enlightenment.
"No, don't," Roku told him, petting his scalp. "I think you were actually right." He made a mock-astonished face and Gyatso poked him.
"My problem was attachment - I've been here so long, I was," he sighed, "All hung up about moving on. At some level, I didn't want to master those last few exercises because it meant leaving."
Gyatso frowned a little. "So now you're... ready to go?"
Roku kissed him on the tip of his arrow.
"Now I'm living in the present moment," he said, "Instead of worrying about loss in the future."
"So that was the present moment?" Gyatso asked.
"This is entirely the present moment," Roku said. "Even as we speak. I was trying to let go by pulling back, but what I needed to do was dive in - " ("Ahem," Gyatso interjects.) "And let myself be immersed in what is."
They entangled hands for a moment.
"Do you think that's going to work for me?" Gyatso asked slowly. "I mean... I clearly have some distance yet to travel to reach enlightenment."
"I have no idea," Roku said. "But hey, you're a Master Airbender, Mr. Very Nice Arrow, you've obviously been doing something right."
Gyatso smiled. "It's a beautiful morning," he said. "Want to go check out that valley breeze?"
"I don't get it," Zuko says.
"Desire is like a candle flame," Aang says. "It can't be extinguished by denying that it burns. That's like... pulling the candle out from under it, you can't separate the burning from the candle like that." He paused. "Well, you or I could, lift a flame off its wick - but not an Air monk. So instead the flame is extinguished when it becomes one with the darkness around it."
"A fire needs air, heat, and fuel," Zuko says, "So if you take away any one of those things - "
"Maybe I didn't tell this story right," Aang sighs. "When Gyatso told me, it was just about how Gyatso stopped being all stuffy and started having fun again, but the way it really happened - "
Zuko is tired, so very tired. And there had been a moment during the story, when the hum of Aang's voice was almost hypnotic, and Aang had been so close, his thigh against Zuko's pillow, and Zuko had almost turned his head and just let himself - but this?
"That's the moral? I need to be less stuffy?"
He's indignant, and probably sounds sixteen again. And he doesn't care. Somewhere during the story, in the monks baking cakes and not baking cakes and having dry dispassionate discussions about whether or not they were detached, somewhere in Aang's voice had namelessly somehow been everything he wanted, and he's wide awake and completely exhausted and just wants Aang to go away and stop sitting there, inches away in the airless dark, not letting him breathe.
Aang, who might once have protested, chuckles.
"No, not at all," he says, and he puts his hand on Zuko's shoulder. For all that he's been practically sitting on Zuko, it's the first that they've actually touched.
Zuko can't think of anything else.
"The point is that sometimes these things turn out to be mutual," Aang says. "Gyatso's desire. Roku's desire. Your desire." He pauses. "My desire."
That was seduction in his voice, Zuko thinks, and lets himself think it.
"The way it really happened," Aang says, bending down, "There weren't so many cakes - "
"Wait," Zuko says, "Was that about Roku? Aang, don't you think that's a little bit - "
"Do you really care right now?" Aang whispers against Zuko's lips.
Across the room, the last candle goes out.