A lot of people do. He's not quite so famous yet that the number of fans who want to talk to him after a show is insupportable, and he makes time to give each one a few words and a smile before he leaves.

"I might," he says, flashing a grin. "Depends entirely on the student."

"Because," says the audience member, and her hair rearranges itself with the aid of its weights, "my student is going to be done with me sooner than anyone but me expects."

"Hm." He smiles. "Then if I'm still here, send her to me, and we'll see what we think of each other."

"What if you're not still here?"

He shrugs. "Then you can still send her to me, if she wants to go. I'm not that hard to find."

"All right then."

"Any particular reason why you're asking me, out of all the firebenders in Republic City?"

"All the firebenders in Republic City teach an archaic combat style. It won't suit her, not as a focus," shrugs the earthbender. "She uses air to move, water to heal, earth to build - if all her next teacher thinks fire is good for is destroying she'll set herself against it. You can make it look," she shrugs again, "pretty."

"Fire is pretty," he says. "And dangerous. But that's part of its charm."

"If she finds it charming, she'll do your job for you. The nuns taking 'charge' of her education think she'll need a year or two with my tutelage because she's an 'air Avatar' and mine is the opposed element, but they're wrong. She learns - things that are useful to her, anyway - like she's remembering from yesterday and not decades ago."

"Good to know," says Jun. "I'm starting to like her already."

"You should. Of course, if she doesn't find you charming, she'll drop you like a ratscorpion and find her own teacher. I almost lost her after two days before I figured her out."

"I am," says Jun, "extremely charming."

"And delightful. I saw the posters. I think she'll like you."

He laughs.

"I'll bring her by one of your shows when she's getting antsy with my lessons and send her along to you after. It's possible that if I wish to surprise her about the purpose of the outing I will have to buy a ticket for her boyfriend too."

"I'm not about to argue with that," laughs Jun.

Her company is suitably enthralled!

That they most definitely are.

Beila starts to get up, when the curtain drops.

"Stick around," suggests Lee.

"...Okay." Beila is used to occasional cryptic instructions from Shifu Riko. "That was really something," she says to Dao.

"It seriously was," he agrees. "Wow."

"I'm gonna learn to do that," Beila decides.

"Which part?"

"The bending part. I don't know if I can learn to dance that well, airbending or no airbending, and I don't think I'll be setting perfectly nice costumes on fire or doing any of this on stage, but I will learn the pretty bending."

"That costume has to have been made for that, though, did you see how fast it went up?"

"Made for it or treated with some kind of fuel, yeah," agrees Beila. "He must have spectacular control to walk away from that kind of trick without burns. Or his hair on fire."

"Looks like he got it the hard way," says Dao, shaking his head in amazement. "Did you see those scars?"

"Yeah. Yeah I did." She lets out a breath. "I'm going to have water on hand, when I get to firebending, in case there are accidents."

He shivers. "Good idea."

At this point, Jun comes out in front of the stage - wearing a loose black-and-red embroidered robe, over or instead of the blue shorts - to say hello to the small crowd of fans that have gathered for that purpose.

"Did you want to talk to him or something?" Beila asks Shifu Riko.

"Just sit," laughs Lee.

"...Yes?"

Jun glances between the three of them and laughs.

"You're about to get bored with me," Lee asserts. "Long before anyone expected the air Avatar to be, you're done formally studying earth. Fire's next. I decided to get in with a suggestion before the nuns did."

Beila splutters. "Okay..."

"Why don't you come backstage and we can have a chat?" he suggests. "I'm always thirsty after a show; I need my cup of tea."

"Sure. Why not." Beila wafts to her feet, kisses Dao on the forehead, and follows Jun.

"It's a lot harder than it looks," he says. "Freezing is one of the first things you learn with waterbending, but I couldn't warm a cup of tea until I'd been studying for ten years."

"What're the subcomponents?"

"Subcomponents, meaning...?"

"Are there subskills? Separate things, all of which you have to know to learn to do that? Or does it just require a refinement of control you didn't have for the first decade or something?"

"A little of one, a little of the other," he says. "It helps if you know how to breathe fire first, and breathing fire itself takes some pretty refined control, and then you have to figure out how to put out a tiny, tiny fraction of that kind of heat and aim it precisely enough that it warms your tea instead of your fingers."

"Where'd you start?"

"Believe it or not," he says, "almost ten years of pure classical combat firebending. Which I think is a pretty good foundation no matter what you plan to do afterward, but I don't think everybody needs a decade of it."

"Good, that is way more of my life than I wish to turn over to classical combat firebending."

He laughs.

"Why did Shifu Riko pick you out, did she tell you?"

"Because I'm pretty," he says innocently.

"I don't know about bored, but I've wandered through one or two firebending dojos and they seem to set straw dummies on fire more than they do anything else. I'm not, like, allergic to straw."

"Right," he says. "Whereas with me, well, I understand that firebending is so much more than that. And now so do you."

"Shifu Riko's smart."

"I can tell."

"Where would you start me?" inquires Beila lightly.

"Classical combat firebending until you've picked up the theory," he says. "Then, who knows. Depends what you want to learn."

"Before Shifu Riko brought me here I was leaning towards trying an industrial school, actually. Industry does productive things with the fire."

"I know industrial," he shrugs. "But if you ever want to do anything but industrial, I wouldn't start you there."

"Well, yeah, now I want to do arty stuff."

"I can teach you arty stuff," he says. "All the arty stuff your heart desires."

"Excellent."

He grins. "It's a deal. When do you want to start?"

"Does tomorrow sound good? It sounds like Shifu Riko's done with me, at least unless I come up with some kind of specific question for her."

"Tomorrow sounds fine," he says. "If you come by sometime in the afternoon, I'll show you my practice room."

"It's by the stage?"

"Under it, actually," he laughs. "In the basement."

"Cool. I'll be here after lunch, then."

"I'll see you then."

Beila wafts to her feet again, waves, and sees herself out.

"Well, I'm going to start with classical combat firebending, but after that I can learn arty stuff."

"Hooray for arty stuff!" he says.

"Yep!" Kiss.

"On Jun? He has to be at least twenty years older than us."

"So?"

She laughs. "Okay then. For somebody pushing forty I guess he's crushable. You just telling me for my information?"

"Well, I mean, I'm not planning to dash backstage and ask if he wants to make out with me," he laughs.

"Yes, that would be very weird."

"Whiiiiich isn't to say I haven't thought about it."

"You may think about anything you like. As always."

"You have fun," laughs Beila, and she whistles for her bird.

"I will."

He's waiting for her just inside.

"Hello, Shifu Jun," says Beila.

She follows where he leads.

Down she sits on one of the stools, hands folded on her knees.

"Yes. Not that I was, say, annoyed with Shifu Riko for taking me to your show as a 'celebration' without explaining the ulterior motive, but if it's going to be something I spend lots of effort on, absolutely."

"I figured," he says. "So I'll explain. Have you ever thought about why the four kinds of bending developed the way they did? Why there are such specific styles of movement associated with the original combat disciplines, and why they all stayed more or less constant for thousands of years?"

"I think it must have something to do with how the elements themselves move. If I want to bend sand, I can use a lot of loosely adapted waterbending forms -" She uncaps her sand bottle, pulls out half the sand and conducts it in a loop around herself and back into the bottle. "Even though that's earthbending, and a waterbender besides me couldn't do it. And metalbending's different still, although it's not so much like anything else I'm familiar with."

"I noticed you have a sink down here. I hope it won't come in handy, but." She shrugs.

"How many firebending students never do it even once?"

"Depends what you mean by 'set yourself on fire'," he says. "A blister or two is pretty much unavoidable, and I've seen some accidents with loose clothing, but I don't remember seeing anyone's actual body parts going up in actual flames. At least not that they did to themselves. Sparring accidents are another matter."

"It'd be a good idea," he agrees. "Something that flaps around less. At least you don't have long flappy sleeves, though, those are the worst. Long flappy pants are almost as bad, but they're not as common."

"Okay, I'll go on a shopping trip tonight then."

"But you can probably survive one lesson without lighting up your shirt," he says. "Might want to ditch the cape just to be safe."

"Yeah, sure." Beila shucks the top layer.

"I'm - always airbending," says Beila. "I can barely walk without airbending. As in I go two steps and then I fall over."

"Yeah, guess so. It never came up with water or earth - they're heavier, I guess, not so easily perturbed by a little wind to stabilize me."

"Yeah. But fire, well - fire moves. So," he says, "try that again - you can step back a little closer to the sink first if you want, I won't laugh - and this time, pay attention to both elements, and try not to let them conspire against your shirt. It's a perfectly nice shirt and doesn't deserve to catch fire."

Beila steps closer to the sink, refills her bottle, throws the punch a few times at full speed without fire to get a closer look at what she's doing with the air, and then - tries again. A modest little tongue of flame, which does not deviate from its path, is produced.

"I was keeping it underpowered in case I was wrong about how the air interacted," says Beila. And she does it again. With more force.

"In the sense that I know the difference between how I punch fire and how I punch air, now. But that's not much. Why is it a bad habit?"

"Okay. Maybe I should just do this wading in the ocean or something when I'm practicing on my own."

He laughs. "That's one option."

"Man, if I had started anywhere in the Cycle that had me doing fire before water, I would be so scared to work with this," laughs Beila, shaking her head. "Without a healer on hand, anyway."

"Good thing you didn't, then, isn't it?"

"Yes. Especially since I need air to do anything else." She tries the punch again, full power, carefully confining her helpful winds as close to her arm as can be so they don't disturb the flame.

"Very nice," Jun approves. "That was almost three feet. Try it again."

Again, and again.

"You're spreading out," he observes. "See how the flame gets much wider by the end? Try to narrow it down."

Beila tries three times in quick succession.

"Well, I am supposed to be a prodigy," laughs Beila, and she does it again, and again, switching hands each time.

"Considering that you've been working with an extra element this whole time, I am very impressed," he says. "Pay attention, now. Can you feel the difference between a strike that goes narrow and one that goes wide?"

"Something I'm doing with my arm or something I'm doing with my brain?"

"More your brain than your arm, but more the element than either," he says. "It'll be something you're doing with your brain when you learn how to control it. Right now it's doing its own thing, and your job is to figure out what that is."

"...Rephrase that?"

"You're producing fire, and right now, the behaviour of that fire is not completely up to you," he says. "There's some chance involved. But you should be able to feel the difference, even though it's not strictly speaking something that you're doing - it's something the fire is doing, and you're influencing it. That's a pretty important difference, and it's one a lot of firebenders miss. But once you understand it well enough, you should be able to control it much better than you are now. Does that make more sense?"

"I think so. Is this like how Shifu Riko always talked about listening to the earth, or more like being generally aware of air pressure and movement before I do significant airbending... or is that question useless because I'm the only one who does more than one thing on this list?"

"All right..." She repeats the punch a few times, then adjust stance, punches some air, pulls a little sand from her sandbottle and moves it around and puts it back - "Not like either thing, anyway, it's its own thing."

"Fire usually is."

"Yeah, like - in both the case of air and the case of earth, if I don't do anything to them, they continue existing - the fire is taking advantage of existing but if it has nothing to catch on it will just dissipate -" She fire-punches again, paying close attention to that dissipation-tendency.

"Yeah," nods Jun. "And you don't create air or earth. Or water. You're just moving around what's already there. If you consider firebending just in terms of the obvious, visible flame, it's very different from any of the other three that way."

"Yeah, they all have their unique properties -" She tries again. "Although all the master practitioners argue for theirs having the most or the most important unique properties."

"And I am no exception," Jun says cheerfully. "Are you feeling the fire yet?"

"Yeah. I can tell when it's peaked and starting to fall apart."

"That's a good start," he says. "Keep going."

Punch punch punch - "What else am I supposed to be picking up on?"

"I usually leave this one until later," he says, "because it's the point at which my students tend to call me a crackpot and run away, but I think you can handle it. See if you can tell how the fire is going to spread before it leaves your body."

Beila frowns, muses, sets up a punch, controls her winds - throws the punch, forms a prediction the instant before the fire goes at near-random -

Beila repeats herself, noting successes and failures and partial cases of each, and what she predicated each guess on, trying both arms.

It gradually becomes apparent that Jun is right - there is an extremely subtle sensation of energy in motion before the flame itself appears, and the character of that original flow predicts the character of the result. But just knowing it's there doesn't make it easy to read, or even easy to pick up on in the first place.

"I can tell it's there," agrees Beila. "It's incredibly faint, though."

"Yeah. Well, now you know. And you're going to have to get comfy with it if you want to learn how to bend lightning, at least from me. But you don't need to be reading it perfectly anytime soon."

"I'd like to learn lightning, yeah. All the niche stuff - Shifu Riko couldn't teach me much about metal but my dad says when I've learned fire he'll put me in a police course on it."

"In my utterly non-humble opinion, the industrials are way too casual about lightning," says Jun. "If I teach it to you, I'm going to do it properly."

"Properly meaning?"

"Meaning, you don't throw lightning around until you understand how it works."

"Do I get meteorology textbooks or do you mean something else?"

"Something else," he laughs. "I mean understand it the way I do, the way a firebender does - from the inside. Ideally, I don't even teach you how to throw your first bolt. I explain how it works, when you're at the point where you'd understand the explanation, and then you figure out how to adapt what you already know to create lightning instead of fire. It's much, much safer that way, because you're controlling it from the beginning, with full knowledge of what you're doing."

"Interesting," says Beila. "You realize in my case there's some risk I will be remembering things - I have to learn most stuff from scratch, but there is a very real sense in which I've learned to toss lightning a few dozen times before, and I've made leaps that surprised past teachers a couple times. I'm not sure you can count on that setup to render me able to do it only when I have all the preliminaries - I don't plan to be irresponsible, but there's not as much built-in constraint on the order in which I learn things as there is with plain firebenders."

"I just mean that I can't be like, 'Oh, I could do it now, therefore I must know what I'm doing with it', I'll have to actually talk it over with you first."

"Yes," he says dryly. "That would be the plan. I don't want to teach you lightning until I'm sure you understand the element well enough to come up with it by yourself and I'm sure your control is good enough to handle it well from the start. That applies regardless of whether or not you come up with the technique independently while we're working on the foundations."

"Okay, then we're on the same page there."

"Good!"

Beila throws another punch, watching for the discreet twist of energy down her arm.

Jun nods approvingly.

Eventually, Jun has to prepare for his show, and Beila goes home to change into a non-scorched shirt, then calls Dao to ask if he has any opinions on clothes at all because she needs to get some snugger-fitting ones for firebending.

"...I am probably not the person to ask," he says. "But I could try! I guess! Why don't you ask Jun? He makes all his own costumes, did you know that?"

"I didn't know that. Anyway, I want to have at least one suitable outfit when I go in tomorrow, and he ended the lesson because he had to get ready for his show. I don't necessarily need help, just, my opinions on clothes are pretty negligible, so if you had any I could just use yours. I can also just use a shopkeeper's."

"Probably more convenient to use the shopkeeper's," says Dao. "Unless you want your firebending practice clothes to be stuff I think you look hot in. Which, I don't know, maybe you do."

"It wouldn't hurt. It's not like the new clothes will be inappropriate for applications that aren't firebending, so I'll probably wind up wearing them a lot once I have them."

"Then I will totally go clothes shopping with you," he says magnanimously.

"Awesome. I can come pick you up, we can grab dinner, we can look for something suitably practical, maybe I can wear colors other than red and yellow and orange for a while."

"Sounds like a plan!"

Off Beila goes. She's at his apartment a few minutes later.

He greets her with a hug and a kiss.

Clothes shops! They sell clothes. Of this he is aware.

Beila enlists a salesperson, who steers her to a section, and she picks out some okay things and tries them on for Dao's inspection.

Dao has opinions! He shares these opinions with her.

She narrows down the selection based on fit and Dao's opinion, and walks out of the store with two new outfits in a bag. "Maybe I'll even get recognized less for a while," she says optimistically. "I don't mind it all the time, but just going about my business it can get weird."

"Yeah, maybe," says Dao. He squeezes her hand.

Squeeze! "So apparently the fact that I'm sort of perpetually airbending interacts kinda badly with fire in a way it didn't with water or earth."

"...Wow," he says, "yeah, I can imagine. Are you okay? You didn't—?" He checks visible areas for damage.

"I'm fine," she says, pecking his temple, because it's sweet that he's worried even though they've just been through an entire shopping trip and this is the first she's mentioned it. "Scorched my sleeve, put it out right away, didn't even need to heal myself. I have to split my attention not to get the wind near the fire, but I can do it and there were no further accidents."

"And it'll be a while before I have enough comfort with it to play with that sort of thing on purpose," she murmurs.

Mmm kisses. They should get all the way to somebody's house before there are too many more of those, probably.

"Let's go back to mine?" she murmurs.

"Yes. Great idea," says Dao.

And he kisses her again.

Good. There should be kissing going on here and now.

There really should.

Lots of it!

Lots and lots and lots. And various related activities. Including, if Beila is so inclined, pulling her hair.

Yes. There should be hair-pulling. Also maybe biting.

Biting is also available!

Good. He is her favorite.

He aims to please!

He's very, very good at it.

Awesome. He is so pleased about that.

Good, 'cause she also aims to please.

She is also pretty damn good at it!

Ooh, stray hands. Dao approves of those.

Good, 'cause if he didn't it would have to stop!

There will be no stopping on his account. At least not anytime soon.

Beila's mouth may be temporarily diverted from nibbling and kissing, especially if at least one of the stray hands is his, because mouths are also useful for making sounds. Appreciative soft breathy sounds.

Oh, sounds. He is so very, very fond of her sounds. He should let his hands stray more often if the result is going to involve sounds.

She can produce more sounds! Lots more. She has not nearly exhausted her repertoire.

Dao is the most appreciative of audiences.

Whimper.

Whimpers and squirms and also whines, way in the back of her throat, that would probably embarrass her in any other state of mind.

Well, now Dao is squirming too. Just a little.

Just a little?

Maaaybe more than a little.

Nibble nibble whine.

Squirm squirm whimper squirm.

Beila makes all the best sounds. That is just a fact.