waterbenders can / if they will apply themselves / learn the healing arts

[roc_on]

Beila studies waterbending, and when she has the basics (waves, ice, the water whip, other relatively simple forms) she's permitted to specialize in healing.

Later on she'll be able to volunteer at a hospital and get her practice in that way, but to start, her teacher advocates practicing on oneself - just a few times, to get a feel for what one's healing bending is doing on both ends at the same time. This dojo produces more and better healers than most, so Beila's inclined to agree with the practice. It's only a few minor injuries, the teacher will be right there to patch her up if Beila doesn't manage the trick by the end of the lesson, and - it's not like she minds, in the right mindset.

Beila gets this faster relative to other students than she did the ordinary waterbending forms. The teacher says she has a natural aptitude. Over the course of her three-hour lesson she heals several burns (these are the easiest injuries to handle with waterbending) and then moves on to slicing her palm shallowly and then pressing healing water into the cut.

It's almost meditative, almost hypnotic. The teacher is satisfied she doesn't need immediate oversight and has gone to see to another student; Beila loses track of time. She's sitting in the dojo courtyard with her bowls of water (one bloody, one clear) and slicing her hand open again at the time her boyfriend is supposed to pick her up.

Comments

[roc_on]

"I think you're actually the first person to ask about that habit of mine, and now I'm wondering if half the people at school quietly think I'm adopted and keeping my guardians at arm's length or something. Which isn't it at all. It'd be weird and distancing if they called me Daughter and not my name. I don't see why it'd be different the other way around."

[thinklikethis]

"Well... it's different the other way around because people expect you to call your parents Mom and Dad but they don't expect your parents to call you Daughter. So if you're not calling them Mom and Dad, people will feel like there must be some reason you don't do that, and if they don't ask you, the easiest thing to assume is that you're not calling them that because you don't want to call them that - because you don't want to relate them to you that way."

[roc_on]

"Sure, I'm not conforming to the expectation, I get that. I just think the expectation is weird. Ancestor relationships are the only thing we do that to. No one expects me to call you Boyfriend or my friends Friend or if I had a sibling to call them Sister or Brother, but a parent or grandparent gets titled, all the time."

[thinklikethis]

"Maybe it's because ancestor relationships are more important," he suggests. "Theoretically."

[roc_on]

"If I had a sibling I think I could easily be more close to him or her than to my parents," says Beila. "Maybe that's not supposed to be true, for some reason."

[thinklikethis]

"Well, and you might have a lot of sisters or brothers, but you usually only have one mom, two grandmas, and so on."

[roc_on]

"Me and Ranyi are technically descended from Avatar Aang, and this is important because he's famous and the reason there are still any airbenders, and stuff, and there's only one of him, but we don't count the intervening generations and call him some-number-of-greats-Grandfather, we just call him Aang," Beila points out.

[thinklikethis]

"...well, yeah," says Dao. "There's only one Avatar Aang. You probably have a lot of dead great-great-great-and-so-on-grandfathers. But there are a whole bunch of people named Ranyi, probably, and only one of them is your mom. See what I mean?"

[roc_on]

"Lots of them are somebody's mom. Way more people get called Mom than get called Ranyi."

[thinklikethis]

"Only one of them gets called Mom by you," he counters.

[roc_on]

"Okay, but that wouldn't necessarily be the case, if Spirits forbid they divorced and Chali remarried some nice lady, if I liked her enough I might start calling her Mom, at least to her face."

[thinklikethis]

He shrugs. "I guess."