damkianna: Fanart of Katara in the Avatar state. (Only Waterbender in the South Pole.)
[personal profile] damkianna
Title: Imagine The Ocean - Book One. This post contains the prologue and Chapters 1-5/13.
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Rating: Somewhere between PG and PG-13.
Characters/Pairing: Hints of Sokka/Suki if you're looking for them. Katara-focused overall. Includes some original characters.
Content Notes/Warnings: Mild amounts of violence in a few places; nothing very graphic. Some spoilers, in a general sense, but this story is quite AU. It won't ruin any specific plot twists.
Summary: Hakoda found the boy in the ice eight days before Kya went into labor. Avatar!Katara AU.
Disclaimer: Places and people you recognize from canon are not mine.
Acknowledgements: More thanks than I can possibly express to my sister, [personal profile] idriya, who was my cheerleader, my beta, and the complementer who produced the gorgeous art that accompanies this story. And, of course, this fic exists in general thanks to the [community profile] ladiesbigbang challenge, and everyone who helped it happen.

Other Notes: I have bent canon a little in some places - okay, maybe a tiny bit more than a little. The largest change is probably the division of the Earth Kingdom; what was one single, continent-wide Earth Kingdom in canon is a loosely-allied collection of Earth Kingdoms of varying sizes in this AU. There has been a year's age-up, in this 'verse; Katara is fifteen, not fourteen, during this book. Also, in addition to the OCs, a number of places and place names in the story are my own invention; if you really want to see the results of the truly ridiculous amount of time I spent thinking about this, the map I made to use for my own reference is here. (This link is to a preview; be warned, the full map image is quite large.) The similarity that exists between many of the chapter titles and related episodes of the show is intentional.





Navigation: Prologue | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five





Prologue: The Boy in the Iceberg

Hakoda found the boy in the ice eight days before Kya went into labor. There was an animal with the boy, too, a sky bison; it looked just like the ones in the wild herds that still flew over the Pole sometimes, except for the part where it had a saddle. It was already dead when Hakoda found them, but the boy was still alive.

He was an Air Nomad; Hakoda could have told that much even without the bison, just seeing the arrow tattoos on his face and hands. But how he ended up frozen in the ice of the South Pole nearly a hundred years after all the other Nomads were massacred was a mystery. And one that would never be solved, since the boy never woke up before slipping away from them in the middle of the night.

Hakoda hoped he didn't mind being given to the sea, Airbender that he was.

*

Their daughter was born six days after the boy died. Kya named her Katara; Kanna had already carved the little ivory tiger seal that would make her a good hunter, and she tucked it under the baby's tongue while she asked the spirits for blessings.

Katara was so quiet under Kanna's hands that Hakoda thought she must have fallen asleep; but when he looked, her eyes were wide open, and she was looking back at him with a sudden awareness that made his arms prickle. She smiled at him, slow and calm and infinitely old - and then blinked, and was suddenly a tiny fussy baby again.

Hakoda swallowed, uncertain, but when Kya looked up at him, he couldn't help but smile. "She's beautiful," he said, and it was true.





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Chapter One: The Avatar Returns

Zuko was practicing his kicks on the main deck when the pair of Fire Navy ships was spotted, coming in on their starboard side and heading for the South Pole.

"Hey!" the lookout hallooed, when one of the other ships was close enough. "Your mission?"

Technically, she wasn't supposed to ask, and the other ship certainly wasn't supposed to answer, given Zuko's status as an exile; but in practice, this far from the Fire Nation, nobody cared.

"The Southern Water Tribe," somebody called back from the closer ship. "Word has it there's still a few benders left; we're taking care of it. Orders from Lord Ozai," and then the ships were pulling past and away, toward the piles of ice in the distance.

Zuko watched them go, and tried not to hate them.

***

"It's not getting away from me this time. Watch and learn, Katara. This is how you catch a fish."

Katara rolled her eyes, and tightened her grip on the globe of water she was bending. "I know how to fish the normal way," she said, "I just want to try-"

"The freak way," Sokka generously filled in for her, smirking at her over his shoulder.

Katara huffed out an irritated breath in reply, and almost missed the whisper-slick brush of a fish against the globe. Another moment, and the fish curved back around and swam right in; Katara yanked on the water around the edge of the globe so that it sped up, flowing suddenly faster around the sphere, and trapping the fish in the stiller water in the middle.

She grinned, triumphant, and lifted the globe out of the water, the fish still inside. "Yeah, well, the freak way works," she said, and slowed the water enough to let the fish flop out into the canoe.

"Cold!" Sokka yelped, as the fish slapped wetly against his ankle, and swung his fishing spear around, sliding the end of the haft under the gasping fish so that he could flick it out of the boat.

"Hey! That was my fish-" Katara started indignantly, and then stopped: either Sokka had flicked the fish at some kind of invisible ice, or something very peculiar had happened, because the fish had just landed in the water with a distinct crunching sound.

"... Did you hear that?" Sokka said, wide-eyed.

Katara nodded, and let the water-globe slip down into the sea in favor of picking up her paddle.

They'd been fishing in a broad space of water between a couple of loose ice floes; the crunch hadn't sounded quite like the collision of ice, it hadn't been loud enough, but if they let shifting ice catch them unawares, they could easily be crushed. Better to know it was nothing than to assume it was and be disastrously wrong.

They paddled toward where the fish had landed, in the general direction of the crunch, and came to rest on the low edge of the nearest floe, behind a little hillock of ice. Sokka was closest, and scrambled up onto the floe, his club clutched in one hand as he peered over the hillock. He went still as soon as he saw whatever it was, and his fingers went tight around his club - probably not just ice shifting, then.

Katara's heart started to pound; she groped around in the bottom of the canoe until she found the handle of her own club, and it was obscurely reassuring to feel the solid weight of it against her fingers. "Sokka?" she whispered, when the silence stretched long.

"Shh," he hissed back, eyes still fixed on the far end of the floe. "It's the Fire Nation."

Katara sucked in a startled breath. The Fire Nation had been raiding their village off and on for decades, but it had been nearly a year since the last time, and the whole tribe had been hoping that meant it was over.

She gripped her club and climbed up onto the floe next to Sokka so that she could see for herself, just in case Sokka was wrong.

But Sokka was right: there were two ships, one still back a ways in the distance and one that had come to a stop against the opposite edge of the floe; and they were both flying Fire Nation flags. Even if they hadn't been, of course, the ships were clearly Fire Nation design, all sharp lines and hard edges. The nearer ship's metal boarding ramp landing on the snow had to have been the source of the crunch. There were soldiers standing in a clump perhaps thirty feet from the ramp, conferring over something and turning to point occasionally - trying to orient themselves, Katara thought, so that they could find the village, and her stomach went tight with fear and dread.

"They're leaving," she murmured, because they were; a few more sharp, declarative arm motions, and the soldiers started filing back toward the ramp.

Sokka's mouth went tight, and he shifted his grip on his club. "Go back," he said; "I'll delay them."

"You'll what?" Katara said.

"Go back and warn them, get everybody out," Sokka said, which wasn't an answer.

"Sokka-"

Sokka turned and looked at her, and his stupid goofy face was actually serious, for once. "You're our only bender," he said. "You need to live."

Katara stared at him. "No," she said - but not fast enough, Sokka was already darting around the side of the hillock and charging across the long flat space of the ice floe, yelling wordlessly. "Sokka!"

The soldiers turned almost as a unit, but only one stepped up to meet Sokka, a lopsided, derisive sort of smile on his face. "What have we here," he said, calm, and sidestepped Sokka's first swing with almost ridiculous ease.

Sokka was probably right, at least in a general sense - the village did need to be warned. But Katara could never leave him to do this alone, and he should have known better than to ask her to.

She darted around the ice formation and started running toward Sokka, who was busy shouting something stupid and brave into the soldier's face. The Fire Nation soldier laughed in reply, and swung his spear at Sokka; Sokka dodged the blow, and got in a pretty good jab with the club, but then the soldier smashed the edge of the spear blade into the side of Sokka's head, and he dropped to the ice, blood spattered down his cheek.

"No!" Katara shouted, stretching out her free hand like she could yank the spear away just by wanting to. She was suddenly blindingly angry, so much so that it made something give somewhere in her chest, and she stopped running, thinking vaguely that she must need to catch her breath. Her club slipped from her fingers, but she didn't grab after it; she knew abruptly, in an odd, distant kind of way, that she didn't need it anymore. She wasn't sure what happened next, except that she felt strange and far away, and there was a lot of light and wind and a sound so loud she could feel it in her bones. And when she came back to herself, the Fire Nation ship had capsized, and the soldiers had been flung back twenty feet across the ice, onto the wrong side of a rapidly widening crack.

Sokka was on the right side, fortunately; his eyes didn't seem willing to stay all the way open, and he had a hand to his head, which was still bleeding copiously. It only took a minute for Katara to half-carry him back to the canoe.

He was almost unconscious when they got there, but Katara splashed a little seawater up to wash some of the blood away, and he startled back to awareness at the sudden cold sting. "You," he said blurrily.

"Shut up," Katara snapped, dashing a little more water over the injury. She wanted to check it over more closely, but he shook her hands away.

"No, you," he said again. "How did you do that? You went all - your eyes, with the glowing, and then you floated-"



"Shush," Katara said, because she couldn't think of anything else. She couldn't deny it when she didn't know what had happened, except that it had felt a little like standing in the middle of a storm; but it was an unsettling new level of freak that she had reached, if Sokka were telling the truth and she had just broken a huge ice floe in half with her mind. Useful, admittedly, given that she had also just sunk an entire Fire Navy ship by herself; but unsettling.

Sokka obediently stopped talking this time, though it was probably more thanks to the head wound than because he had suddenly started listening to Katara. She made him press his hand down tight against the gash, and started paddling them slowly toward home, leaving the capsized ship and the stranded soldiers behind.

*

The sun was still fairly high when they reached the village; they hadn't been expected back until sunset, so Katara wasn't surprised to see Mother running out to meet them.

"What happened?" she cried, catching sight of Sokka's head - he'd kept his hand over it, and that plus the cold had slowed the bleeding, but it still looked awful.

"Fire Nation soldiers," Katara told her, and Mother's face went still and serious. She helped Sokka stay upright with one hand, and took one end of the canoe with the other; and she didn't ask any more questions until they were back inside the village walls.

Gran-Gran was waiting there, and led Sokka away, shaking her head and clucking her tongue, to the healing tent. Katara started to unload the few fish they'd managed to catch before she'd decided to practice her bending and everything had suddenly gone wrong; but Mother caught her arm, and said, "It's all right, we'll get it later. Tell me what happened."

It was only then, looking at Mother's calm, concerned face, that Katara realized her hands were shaking; and suddenly she couldn't go another moment without throwing her arms around her mother's neck, and breathing out harsh and shuddery into her shoulder.

"Tell me what happened," Mother said again, and Katara did.

*

Mother was still for a moment, when Katara was done telling her everything she could remember, and then she suddenly brought her hand to her mouth. "I don't believe it," she said.

Katara blinked. "I don't remember parts," she said a little hesitantly, "but I know it happened, whatever it was-"

Mother laughed, a little breathlessly. "No, no," she said, and suddenly curved her hands around Katara's head and pulled her in, dropping a kiss onto her hair. "It might just be possible - but we should worry about that later," and Mother shook her head as if to clear it. "You said there were two ships?"

Katara nodded.

"Then I think you'll need to bend just a little more, if you aren't worn out," Mother said. "If we're going to be raided by the Fire Nation today, we could stand to have the walls a little higher. The rest can wait."

Whatever it was, it didn't seem to be bad, judging by the smile on Mother's face; Katara felt suddenly about a thousand times better, and when she said, "I can do it," it wasn't the lie she'd feared it might be.

*

Katara pushed the walls higher and thicker - only a foot or two, she wasn't that good a bender yet, but it was enough to satisfy Mother. Then they gathered in the shared igloo, the largest in the village, and all the able-bodied women put on their war-paint. Sokka was supposed to be resting, but he ducked through the door when Mother was halfway through applying Katara's black chin-darts, with the bandage still on his head; and Mother only smiled and handed him the nearest pot of grey paint.

When they were done, all the children were herded in, with Gran-Gran to watch over them, and the women - and Sokka - arranged themselves around the walls. Sokka fitted himself in next to Katara, with Aunt Mitika on the other side, and Katara felt suddenly and fiercely glad they were there.

But the ship didn't come. Cousin Shotora saw a few distant gleams with the brassy sheen that came of sun on metal, instead of on ice or water; but nothing came near the village.

Mother kept them on the walls until sundown, just in case the soldiers were out there waiting for them to let their guard down. But the ship never came, and supper around the fire that night had a hint of cautious celebration to it.

Katara was as glad as anyone that they had evidently escaped the Fire Lord's raiders, at least for the moment. But without the constant low-grade tension of waiting on the walls with club in hand, whatever it was Mother hadn't told her was starting to nag at her. And Mother seemed to realize it, because as soon as they were done eating, she drew Katara aside, away from the fire.

"I know what you did earlier today frightened you a little," Mother began. "But I think - I think it could be the best thing that's happened in my life - in any of our lives." She paused, and then shook her head, like she couldn't quite believe what she was about to say. "I think you are the Avatar - the Avatar returned."



Katara stared at her. Mother certainly seemed to mean it - but how could she? It was ridiculous, to the point of insanity. "But that's - how is that even possible?" she said. "There hasn't been an Avatar in a hundred years, why would it suddenly be me?"

"Actually, there has been - there was," Mother said. "A week before you were born, your father found a boy half-melted out of the ice - an Airbender."

"An Airbender?" Katara said, thrown. She had never heard this story before. "But they were all killed-"

"Except one, at least," Mother said. "I think he was the Avatar; he must have frozen himself trying to stay free of the Fire Lord, and the Fire Lord wiped out the Airbenders in retaliation. But something went wrong; that's when Hakoda found him, and he died." She paused for a moment, and a quick flicker of sadness crossed over her face. "It might have been for the best. He couldn't have been more than fourteen, and his entire nation - dead a hundred years. That would be a terrible thing to wake up to."

Katara would have agreed, but she was too busy sinking down to sit in the snow, mind awhirl. She had been listening to stories of the Avatar all her life, but in her head, the Avatar had always been a strong, wise, competent adult - never a boy who had frozen himself into the sea and could have woken lost and alone; and definitely never herself.

Mother knelt in front of her, and took her hands. "I'm sorry to dump all of this on you at once, but I never thought - I never suspected, until now. Hakoda and I both thought the boy might have been the Avatar, but the reincarnation could just as easily have been in the Northern Tribe; there was no way for anyone to know until today."

"You really think-?" Katara whispered.

Mother tilted her head. "You don't?" she said.

Katara let out a slow breath, and thought about what she could remember - the light, and the wind; the sound of the ice, cracking just because she had wanted it to; and there had been a feeling, too, that she could only touch the edge of in retrospect: a feeling that she could have cracked the rest of the world along with the ice, in that moment, if she had tried.

"... I think I might," she said.

*
Katara was ready to concede that her being the Avatar was at least conceivable by the time she crawled into their family igloo and lay down on her tiger seal skins to go to sleep; but it was still a strange idea, uncomfortable in its presumptuousness and daunting in the assumption of responsibility that went along with it.

So when Sokka came in, flopped down on his own sleeping platform next to hers, and said, "So, what were you and Mother talking about, anyway?" Katara was only too glad to unload some of the confusion on him.

"... Wow," he said, when she was finished. "I would mock you right now, except I saw you do it, and I have to say, I think she's right."

Katara couldn't help but laugh.

"What?" Sokka said.

"I can't believe it," Katara told him, "but you taking this seriously is almost the most convincing thing that's happened today."

"Almost?" Sokka said, voice shrill with mock outrage.

"Well, the part where I broke the iceberg was a big one, too," Katara said.

*

She fell asleep smiling, and feeling calmer than she had all day; but that didn't last for very long. Her thoughts wandered off not into normal dreams, but into an oddly still, grey-toned space that seemed to have been waiting for her - it felt like it had already been there and she had traveled to it, not like her mind had made it up. It was a very odd feeling, and Katara wondered nervously whether cracking the ice had somehow loosened her spirit, and now she was wandering and would never wake up.

Before she could follow that unsettling train of thought much further, though, the space changed from featureless to distinctly misty, and Katara glanced down to find that she now had a visible dream-self, which she thought was a good sign. When she looked up again, there was someone else there, coming toward her out of the fog. Three someones, she realized, as they came closer: a man, a woman, and a boy only a few years younger than Katara herself.

The boy was the one who caught Katara's eye right away, because of the tattoos on his head and hands - Airbender tattoos, she knew, and he was about the same age as the frozen boy Mother had described to her. The man was dressed in Fire Nation robes, red as sunset; and the woman was wearing green along with her white and red face-paint, which had to mean she was from one of the Earth Kingdoms. The last three reincarnations of the Avatar, Katara thought, and as soon as she did, the woman smiled at her.

"That's right," she said, and her voice was cool and soothing. "I am Kyoshi; I was the Avatar four hundred years before you were born."

"I am Roku," the man said, equally calm, when she was done.

Katara thought he might have been about to go on, but then the boy, apparently unable to hold still any longer, bounced forward a step and bowed a little. "And I'm Aang," he said, and then grinned. "Hi!"

Katara couldn't help but smile back. "I guess you already know who I am," she said.
Avatar Kyoshi smiled at her again; this time, it looked sympathetic. "You are the next Avatar," she said.

"I thought you might say that," Katara said. She was surprised at how much of a relief it was to actually know, instead of guessing or assuming.

"We're here to tell you what that means," Aang said confidingly, "since there's nobody to do that for you. Well, nobody who's alive, anyway."

"I do know the stories," Katara offered.

"Then you know the Avatar is the master of all four elements," Avatar Kyoshi said. "You are a relatively strong Waterbender already, but you have not mastered water yet; and you cannot, not as long as you do not have a teacher. You must find someone who can teach you Waterbending, before you can begin studying any other element."

Katara swallowed. "But I'm the only one," she said. "I'm the only bender here."

Avatar Kyoshi gave her a knowing look. "Then you know what you must do," she said.

Katara stared back at her, and wished she could say that she didn't know what Kyoshi meant; but she did, and if she lied, she was pretty sure Kyoshi would know it. "I have to leave."

Kyoshi nodded. "I'm sorry for the necessity of it, but you must master the elements," she said, "and this is the only way."

"No, I'd - I'd have to go anyway, to master the rest," Katara said; which was true, not that it made her feel all that much better. She glanced at Avatar Roku, who was looking solemn but kind of remote, and then at Aang, who looked - well, vaguely ill, to be honest. It was especially odd considering how widely he'd been smiling just a few moments ago, and Katara made an inquiring face at him; but he just shook his head, and then looked away.

"We cannot stay much longer," Avatar Kyoshi said. "But you should know - you are not alone. You are the Avatar; we are always with you."

Katara looked back at her, and felt suddenly able to smile again, if only a little. "Thank you," she said, humbled and grateful at the same time; then suddenly all three Avatars were fading back into the mist, and the last thing Katara saw before she woke was Aang, shooting her one last slightly wobbly smile.

***

The sound was loud and sharp and seemed to come out of nowhere, though that last wasn't especially unusual; the gaps between icebergs tended to channel sound oddly, make it echo and reverberate, and it had happened before that a distant crunch of ice had sounded like it had happened barely a hundred feet away. Zuko turned from where he had been leaning on the rail, thinking - not brooding, no matter what Uncle Iroh said - and looked in the general direction of the sound in time to see the glow of light. His father must have sent at least one blue Firebender along with the ships. Zuko felt a little ten-year-old part of himself quail at the thought that it might be Azula - but, no, or she would have been on deck to taunt him when the ships had passed.

Whatever the explanation for the light, one thing was obvious: they'd found something, whether it was the last Waterbender in the south or just a village they felt like destroying. Long after the light faded away, Zuko kept looking, waiting for a sign of the ships returning.

But it didn't come, not until the next morning. "Ship ahoy!" the lookout shouted, just as Uncle Iroh was pouring their morning tea, and she pointed off into the light morning mist. "Only the one," she added, sounding a little puzzled.

Zuko left his tea, ignoring Uncle Iroh's disapproving click of the tongue, and went to the rail: the ship was out of the mist now, and unless the other was unusually far behind, it was indeed alone.

The deck seemed markedly crowded, and a vague suspicion was starting to form in Zuko's mind even before one of the other ship's officers shouted, "Spare some supplies?"

Zuko glanced at Uncle Iroh.

"Whatever decision you make, I'm sure it will be the right one, Prince Zuko," Uncle Iroh said.

"Of course it will," Zuko snarled, rolling his eyes. Stupid old man. Zuko deliberated for a moment, and then shouted back, "For a price - tell me everything that happened."

"All right," came the response, a moment later.

It was only reasonable, Zuko thought; they would never find out, otherwise. There was no reason for Uncle Iroh to be beaming at him like that.

*

The ship went on its way an hour later, loaded with whatever Zuko's quartermaster had calculated they could spare. Little wonder the officer had agreed to commit the moderately treasonous act of talking to Zuko; sailing back from the South Pole was unpleasant enough without having to keep nearly two ships' worth of soldiers appropriately rationed with one ship's worth of supplies. Lucky for them it had stormed not long ago, and Zuko had plenty of drinking water saved up from the rain barrels.

The officer was Captain Gao; Captain Chang, from the second ship, had gone down with it when it had capsized. Most of the other men and women on it had been rescued, though, and brought under the command of Captain Gao.

Zuko was hard-pressed to contain his glee when Captain Gao told him they had failed to capture the Waterbender, who definitely did exist. True, it wasn't the Avatar, but it was something his father wanted - maybe it would be enough.

"I don't know," Uncle Iroh said, when Captain Gao and her ship were shrinking away in the distance. "I don't think she was telling us everything. Why did they leave, instead of chasing the bender down, when she flipped the other ship?"

"Because they're fools," Zuko said. "Or ashamed of themselves. She must have taken them by surprise, maybe even prepared an ambush, to capsize an entire ship by herself. But if we go in fast enough, she won't have time to set up anything like that again."

"Perhaps," Uncle Iroh said, but he was frowning speculatively as he sipped his tea.

Zuko shook his head; they had no time for Uncle's groundless worrying. They had a bender to find.

***

Mother put Katara and Sokka on the wall for the day, to keep an eye out for the ship in case the raiders changed their minds, and to watch the children while the women went hunting. Katara suspected it was also partly for Sokka's sake; his head was healing up relatively well, with no signs of infection in the wound, but he was still having moments of wooziness. At least if he fell off the wall, he wouldn't drown.

Katara was trying to use the time to patch up a few old tents; but her mind kept wandering off to Kyoshi, and the task of finding a bending teacher, and Aang's suddenly pained face.

The fifth time her hands went still in her lap, Sokka said, "Okay, seriously, what is wrong with you?"

Katara jumped, though thankfully not enough to tip herself off the wall's broad top, and looked up to find Sokka looking back with narrowed eyes. "I, uh," she said thoughtfully. "What?"

"Usually, you can't get enough of a day on the wall," Sokka said. "'Oh, Sokka, I'll get so much done!' 'Oh, Sokka, I've been meaning to finish this for ages!' 'Oh, Sokka, stop shoving me off the wall!' What's going on?" He paused, and squinted at her. "Are you still freaking out about the Avatar thing? Because, really, if you think about it, it's pretty awesome-"

"I have to leave," Katara blurted out, staring down at her needle. "I need to learn how to do everything - I need to go find a Waterbending teacher."

"-and it means we get to go to the North Pole, too, apparently," Sokka said. "Even better."

"We?" Katara said, startled.

Sokka gave her a look. "Like I'd let you have all your crazy Avatar adventures alone. Please. If you leave, I'm going with you."

Katara stared at him, and then found herself laughing; she should have known, she thought, Sokka hated it when important things happened without him around. "You don't have to," she offered belatedly, but she didn't really mean it, and judging by the sideways glance Sokka shot her, he knew it.

"Yeah, whatever," he said. "You know you want me to come," and he leaned over to jog her companionably with one elbow.

Katara thought about letting it stay the half-joke it was, but it didn't seem right. "I do," she admitted, and elbowed him back. "Thank you."

"You're welcome," Sokka said, briefly serious; and then he grinned. "You're such a sap."

"Oh, shut up," Katara said, giggling, and shoved him off the wall.

*

When the hunting party came back, Katara told Mother everything: the dream, what Kyoshi had said; that she knew now she would have to leave, and that Sokka would be going with her.

Mother listened silently, and as she began to wrap it up, Katara worried that perhaps she was angry. But when Katara was done, she blinked a couple of times, and then said, very softly, "I think you're right - you must go," and Katara realized abruptly that she wasn't angry - only sad.

"Oh, Mother," Katara said, and wished, irrationally, that she had never said anything.

But Mother put on a smile, and pulled Katara close enough to kiss her forehead. "It's all right," she said, "I knew you would have to. I just hoped it wouldn't be this soon, that's all." She turned and motioned to Aunt Mitika and Aunt Tarosha, each of whom, Katara noticed belatedly, had one side of a travois that was heavily loaded. "We brought down a tiger seal today - it should make a fine farewell feast for you."

"Thank you, Mother," Katara said, and hugged her as tightly as she could.

*

They were ready to set out almost first thing the next morning. They couldn't have taken one of the large boats by themselves, even if there had been any left after the men and the women without young children had gone to fight in the Hundred-Year War; but they did get one of the nicer canoes, with space for everything Mother could think to give them.

With everyone helping, it didn't take long at all to pack, and before she was entirely ready for it, Katara was one hug from Mother away from getting in the canoe and leaving her home behind.

Mother drew her in tight, cradling her head in that way that meant Mother was on the edge of crying. "You are the Avatar," Mother murmured into her hair. "I know you don't quite believe it yet, but you will. Take care of your brother, all right?"

"Don't worry, Mother, we'll do our best not to get killed," Sokka said, very reassuringly, and Mother started chuckling too hard to cry properly.

*

The true strangeness of it didn't hit Katara until they were nearly out of the loose ice and close to open water - it was further than either of them had ever gone to fish, even on the days the fish had been at their most elusive.

It was quickest for Katara to bend the water under them and carry the canoe along that way; Sokka had promised to paddle if she got tired, but considering that he was now snoring lightly in the bow, Katara had some doubts about his sincerity.

She was just considering how best to wake him - a wave all over would be the most satisfying, but might get their things wet; a splash in the face would probably be better - when the first fireball roared overhead and crashed, steaming, into the water ahead of them.

Katara ducked reflexively and yanked on the water, pulling the canoe suddenly to the left; the jerking motion woke Sokka, who yelped.

"Hey! What are you-" He cut himself off abruptly, and his eyes went wide. "Katara," he said slowly, "why is there a Fire Nation ship behind us?"

"That'll show you for falling asleep when you ought to be the lookout," Katara shot back. Another fireball came down behind them, close enough for Katara to feel the heat on her back, and she had to turn around to catch the wave of suddenly warmer water before it could swamp the canoe. "Time for you to paddle," she said over her shoulder, and then swung her hands up, pulling the wave higher, into a shield.

It was a Fire Nation ship; Katara couldn't be sure, looking at its blurry, distorted outline through the wall of water, but she thought it was smaller than either of the ships from two days ago. Which was good, in a sense, if the raiders were gone and this ship was only after her, not after the village. On the other hand, she thought wryly, it also meant that she had only been the Avatar for two days, and the Fire Nation was already trying to kill her.

Sokka kept them moving to the left, and a moment later, they rounded the edge of the nearest iceberg. The ship was - at least temporarily - blocked from view, and Katara let the wave-shield tumble back into the sea with a splash.

"So, uh, I don't suppose you feel like glowing and flipping this ship over?" Sokka said, still paddling.

"I don't suppose you feel like getting hit over the head again?" Katara said.

"Well, not really," Sokka conceded, "but if it's that or, you know, death-"

"Maybe we don't have to pick," Katara said thoughtfully, eyeing the water ahead of them. Her first panicked tug had given them a fair amount of momentum, and Sokka had paddled pretty hard; they had nearly rounded half the iceberg, and they were facing back toward the ice field now, not out toward open water. "If we go back in and draw them into a narrow spot, I could pull the ice down-"

"And freeze the water under them, too, freeze them in," Sokka finished, nodding. "It won't hold them forever, but it'll give us time to get away."

The ship was starting to come around the iceberg, so Katara drew another wall of water up - just in time to catch the next fireball, which bounced off and down to fizzle out in the water behind them. Sokka kept paddling, and a few dozen yards further on, they were between two middling-sized cliffs of ice, both taller than the Fire Nation ship, with the ship itself bearing down rapidly on them.

Katara abruptly let the water-wall go, and the ship was close enough now for her to see individual faces on the deck: the focused look on the woman who was lighting the next fireball in the cradle; the hard-faced man who was adjusting the angle of the catapult, on the orders of the shouting boy with the scarred eye. She took a deep breath, and reached out to the top of one iceberg.

"... You're going to pull it down soon, right?" Sokka said.

"I'm working on it," Katara gritted out, straining. It had been warm and sunny the past few days, which she had been counting on, and the ice was soft and loose; but it was more, and further away, than she usually tried to do anything with.

"I'm just saying," Sokka said. "They're almost done with the catapult."

Katara pulled on the ice as hard as she could, forcing her hands sideways against the weight that was resisting her bending, and it gave with a creak and a low rumble of sound, tumbling down over the deck of the ship in a sudden avalanche. A symmetrical movement in the other direction, and the other side gave, too, sliding down into a heap right on top of the catapult.

"Ha-hah!" Sokka shouted, punching one fist into the air, and Katara tried not to feel too pleased - she hadn't even finished yet, she reminded herself.

It was easier to freeze the water around the ship than it had been to bring the ice down, because she didn't have to move it anywhere, only concentrate on it. She was rewarded after a moment by a light crackling sound, as ice formed and thickened around the hull of the ship; and then they were paddling off around the iceberg again, away from the trapped ship, and out onto the open ocean.

***

Zuko put his palms against the heavy fall of ice chunks and loose snow that was pinning him to the deck, and melted it away with a surge of anger. Idiot bender - she had only made things worse for herself in the end-

"A clever trick," Uncle Iroh said, with noticeable admiration; he'd freed himself already, and was now heating the last of the dampness out of his sleeves in a blast of steam. "And good technique, too - kept her elbows up, very nice."

Zuko struggled to his feet and stared over the rail: the canoe was shrinking away into the distance, undoubtedly sped along by the girl's bending - the wake was far more than you'd expect, for a canoe that size. "We have to track her down," he snapped. "Who cares about her technique?"

"You should," Uncle Iroh said, very mildly. "She's not a master - at least, not yet. But she's very powerful. When you underestimate your opponent, only one of you suffers for it; and it is usually not your opponent."

Zuko grimaced, but said nothing. It didn't matter how skilled or powerful a bender the Water Tribe girl was - Zuko would track her down and kill her, and be one step closer to ending his exile.





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Chapter Two: The Southern Air Temple

"You're doing it again," Sokka said, in a long-suffering tone.

Katara blinked. "What?" she said.

Sokka gave her a flat look and pointed to the midday sun. They should have been going essentially right toward it, keeping it a little to the left and letting it fall away further left as it set in the west; but for the fourth time that day, Katara had let her mind wander, and the sun was now on her right. "I know Gran-Gran's map is pretty old," Sokka said, "but I'm pretty sure the Earth Kingdoms haven't relocated to the middle of the ocean."

Katara grimaced in acknowledgement, and let the canoe slow a little, dragging the water under the bow back to the east with a gesture. Sokka was right; there was a little land to the west of them, but it was just the empty islands the Air Nomads had once inhabited - no reason to go there, except the faint outline of mountains on the western horizon kept drawing her eye.

"You're doing it again," Sokka said, exasperated, but Katara interrupted him before he could go on.

"I think we should go to the Southern Air Temple," she said. She wasn't sure why she was saying it, but she was certain nonetheless that it was the truth.

"Oh, definitely," Sokka said, throwing his hands in the air. "The abandoned site of a bloody massacre a century ago - nothing creepy about that. It's the perfect place to do a little sightseeing; especially in the middle of a war that you're presumably supposed to be stopping."

Katara felt herself flush a little, but the strange certainty hadn't left her. "Not for sightseeing - just because we should," she said. "I just feel ... drawn there. I think - I think maybe it's an Avatar thing."

"You realize you can't just say that any time you want to do something weird," Sokka said, but he didn't argue any more; so Katara turned until the sun was off to the right, and kept it there.

She didn't even need the map - well, she wouldn't have anyway, with the peaks of the Air Nomads' islands already visible from where they were, but she felt like she could have steered her way there in the middle of a winter storm. She hardly even had to do anything; it felt like toward the mountains was downhill, and every other direction was just that little bit harder to go in.

Katara pulled on the water a little harder - she figured she might as well, since it was so oddly easy to bend the canoe toward the islands; and in the end, it took them barely an hour and change to reach the island of the Southern Air Temple. The temple was visible from the water, mostly just because its shape was so regular compared to the other peaks; the stone it was built from was the same color as the mountain, and they were too far away to see any actual details.

"Are you sure this is the right one?" Sokka said, squinting up at the temple after they hauled the canoe up onto the dirt. "Because I don't see any paths up."

"I ... don't think there are any," Katara said. "It was an Air Nomad temple; they all had sky bison, remember?"

"Oh, great," Sokka said.

*

They reached the temple before sunset, though not by a lot; the last few hundred feet were especially rocky, and Katara was glad to pull herself over the last rise of stone and find herself looking at the wide flat floor of a balcony.

"That actually wasn't too bad," Sokka admitted, hauling himself up behind her as she climbed over the balcony railing. "Not that I'm looking forward to climbing back down, you understand." He pulled himself up with a hand on the rail, and blinked. "Wow."

Katara had to agree. They had climbed up onto the edge of one of the lower, smaller parts of the temple complex, and it alone was extraordinary. The temple might have been made out of rock, but it was still an Airbender temple; the beauty of it was not in the stones, but in the spaces around and between them. The balcony led up to a wide, shallow-stepped staircase; the large room at the top of the stairs had a soaring arched ceiling that was nothing like the low practical dome of an igloo, and the flare of the roof seemed to defy gravity. The entrance to the room was arched, too, and so were the enormous windows - it barely seemed right to call it a room at all, when it was so open to the air.

It was absolutely lovely; and the beauty of it was even more obvious because it was so sharply contrasted with the lingering signs of past violence that still marked the place. Katara stepped onto the first stair without looking at it, and ending up leaving a smudge of cleanliness where her foot had lifted away some of the sticky layer of soot that covered it - there was a long, fat streak that slashed across several stairs. The walls of the little temple building were smeared with ugly scorch marks. The big room was round, so it didn't really have corners; but there were mounds of ash still piled in spots around the edge where wall met floor, protected from blowing or washing away even after a century.

The wind blew, and where it was caught by the temple buildings and channeled past the windows and spires, it made a low singing hum against the stone. Sokka shivered a little. "Creepy," he proclaimed. "I told you it would be creepy."

"And you were right," Katara said, a little absently - not that it wasn't true, but she was distracted; something that wasn't quite a headache was gathering behind her eyes. For a second, she was gripped by the sudden fear that something was seriously wrong, because her vision went abruptly grey. But it cleared just as fast, and when it did, everything was different.

There were people everywhere, dressed in yellow and orange: monks, calm and smiling, with blue arrows like the ones she'd seen on Aang tattooed on heads and hands; and boys, un-tattooed students, shouting to each other and calling breezes into their hands. The sun was high, the room full of light and noise, sky bison and boys with gliders flying past the windows, and the stones were clean and unscarred by fire.

Katara blinked, and the vision was gone: Sokka was staring at her warily, hands wrapped around her arms, as she had evidently started lurching toward the floor. "If you're going to start glowing and breaking stuff again, tell me," he said, "so that I can get out of the way."

"No, it wasn't that," Katara forced out, straightening her half-folded legs. She felt choked, half-suffocated, but in a completely mundane way, and her eyes were starting to prickle at the corners.

Sokka looked, if possible, even more alarmed. "Uh, Katara?"

She squeezed her damp eyes shut, and tried to make herself take deep breaths. "They were just - there were so many," she whispered, when her throat had loosened. "So many people here; children - and they killed them all-"

Sokka's face had gone serious, when Katara opened her eyes again. "Well, it won't happen again," he said firmly.

Katara thought of their lone little village, all that was left where Mother had told them a city used to be, and of just how long it had been since they'd seen any other clans traveling the ice fields. "Why not?"

"Because of you," Sokka said, the tone of his voice implying that this ludicrous statement was obvious. "That's why you're here."

Katara stared at him, and then shook her head. "How can I - this was Aang's home, and he couldn't save it-"

"Aang? You mean the frozen kid?" Sokka said. "He was stuck in a block of ice at the time. Unless you're planning to get stuck in a block of ice, I think we'll be okay."

Katara couldn't help it; she giggled. It came out a little soggy, but Sokka either didn't notice or didn't care, and just smiled back at her. "Also," he said, still smiling, "I am not climbing back down in the dark, so we're sleeping here, even if it makes you cry."

"You're a terrible brother," Katara said, wiping her eyes, and punched him in the arm.

*

They laid out their sleeping mats in the big round room. It actually wasn't as bad as Katara had thought it might be, to be there in the dark; the lack of light meant that the scorch marks and soot were invisible against the more general darkness of the stone.

But her dreams were initially unpleasant, all about a hive of air and rock - like the temple, but larger - and Katara had to find someone inside. She wasn't sure who, since it seemed to change: for part of the dream it was Mother, and for another part, Father; but whoever it was, they weren't there. No one was there, except for Katara's dream-self, and she rushed from empty room to empty room, anxiety winding ever tighter in her gut.

But then her dream-self hurried into a room that turned out not to be a room, but rather a familiar grey flatness; and Aang was there waiting. This wasn't the comfort it probably ought to have been, as all Katara could later remember thinking was that this was a violation of dream-rules - there wasn't supposed to be anyone there, that was what the whole nightmare was about.

"I knew you'd get here," Aang said, blithely uncaring about the dream-rules he was breaking, and then paused and tapped a finger against his chin. "But I think this'll work better if you wake up."

Katara did, suddenly, and found herself blinking groggily into the darkness, frowning a little. That had been weird even for her dreams, which had admittedly been increasingly odd lately, with all the visitation from dead Avatars.

She blinked again. There was a funny blue light in the room, obviously there but at the same time strangely failing to actually provide illumination. Katara turned her head to look at it, and found herself staring into Aang's face, glowing and blue, two inches from her nose.

"Hi!" Aang said, waving a transparent blue hand.

Katara screamed, and hurled herself away reflexively, rolling from her mat onto the cold stone floor.

"What," Sokka said, coming suddenly awake; he didn't say it like it was a question, more like it was simply the word he'd found in his mouth when he'd been abruptly returned to consciousness, and it had slipped out without his intending it. Katara couldn't see him, but there was a sound like someone fumbling around. "Katara?"

"Aang!" Katara blurted, still wrestling with her startlement. He was still there, blue and shiny and completely see-through.

"The frozen kid?" Sokka said confusedly. "What about him?"

Katara stared at Aang, who showed no signs of fading away, and was looking expectantly back at her. "He - can't see you?" she said, a little faintly.

"Who can't see me?" Sokka said. "If Aang can't see me, that's okay, Katara; he's dead."

"He can't see me," Aang confirmed.

"Seriously," Sokka said, "are you talking in your sleep, or what?"

Katara could see Sokka's face a little, now - the sky was just barely starting to lighten, and her eyes had needed a moment to adjust. He was squinting over at her like he couldn't decide whether he wanted more to figure out what was wrong with her or to go back to sleep.

"Aang's here," she said, after a moment. She could've lied, but she had a feeling that Aang would be around for a while; they might as well have the awkward conversation about whether she'd lost her mind now, instead of later.

Sokka's eyebrows shot up toward his hairline. "I'm sorry, I must have something in my ear," he said slowly. "Could you say that again?"

"Aang's here," Katara dutifully repeated.

"Ah, yes, I did have something in my ear," Sokka said; "it was a piece of crazy. Are you really trying to tell me the Airbender kid who died before you were even born is here right now, talking to you?"

Katara turned back to Aang. "Is there anything you can do to convince him?"

"To convince who?" Sokka said, before Aang could even open his mouth. "Oh - no, I get it, you're talking to him now, right?"

"Yes," Katara said, "I am, so shut up."

"... Yeah, I don't think so," Aang said. "I mean, maybe if I got angry, there'd be a little wind or something."

"Great," Katara said, rubbing her eyes.

"Okay, that's seriously weird," Sokka said. "You really aren't kidding, are you? You genuinely think you're talking to him."

"Because I am," Katara snapped.

"Okay, fine. So why is he here, then?" Sokka asked. He was sitting up now, evidently having given up on sleeping in order to stare at her skeptically.

Katara thought about what she would do if Sokka suddenly started talking to thin air and acting like he was hearing replies, and reminded herself to be patient. She looked back at Aang. "You can hear him, right?" she said, because it seemed only reasonable to check.

"Oh, definitely," Aang said, nodding. "As for why - I'm here to help you."

"To help us?" Katara repeated.

Aang nodded again. "I mean, obviously you'd need me eventually," he said. "You'll have to master Airbending sometime, and you'll need a teacher." Aang's face, normally so sunny, closed down a little; Katara felt the slightest touch of breeze, and remembered what he'd said about getting angry - being upset would probably do it, too, she thought. "I'm - well, the closest thing there is to the only one left, I guess."

"I'm sorry," Katara said, which was ridiculous in the face of the death of Aang's entire people; but it made Aang look a little less pained anyway.

"But there's other things, too," Aang said, pushing past the subject determinedly. "There were a lot of people to help me, when I was the Avatar - tell me things about being the Avatar, and all that. You're a Waterbender, so you have to learn air last; that kind of stuff." He jumped to his intangible feet, and bowed. "I'm here to be your guide."

Katara voiced the suspicion that had been forming in her mind while Aang had been talking. "You drew me here, didn't you?"

"Well, kind of," Aang admitted. "I mean, it wasn't just me - you were supposed to come here."

"So now you're blaming your invisible friend for your inability to stay on course," Sokka said.

"It was him," Katara told him. "I told you it was an Avatar thing."

Sokka sighed. "You're going to be unbearable after this, aren't you?"

Katara grinned at him, and said nothing.

"Here, come on," Aang said, gesturing for her to get up. "There's something you should see, and it might help convince him."

*

Aang led them out and up another length of stairs, toward the rest of the temple complex. Or, well, he led Katara, at least, and she dragged Sokka along behind, despite his grumbling.

"But this is ridiculous," he kept saying, and, once: "If you wanted to take a walk, you could have just told me, you know. You didn't have to invent a creepy invisible ghost friend."

Katara spent a lot of the walk reminding herself to be patient repeatedly, and the rest looking around at each new part of the temple as they passed through it. She hadn't realized just how large the Air Temples were. They had been told the story of Sozin's Massacre many times, of course, but Katara's imagination had always tended toward legions of Fire Nation thugs beating up a handful of monks in a low room that was ... well, suspiciously igloo-sized, when Katara remembered it now. The Southern Air Temple was more like a small city.

The round towers of the temple buildings were interspersed with spaces: plazas, and terraces that might once have held gardens, though they were so overgrown - when they weren't scarred with fire - that it was hard to know for sure. The paths between the different sections of the temple were really more like avenues, they were so wide; wide enough for a fully grown sky bison to pass, it occurred to Katara after a few minutes.

"Airball court," Aang said suddenly, pointing off toward a field made up of uneven blocks and posts, all different sizes and heights. His face went wistful, and Katara was abruptly more sorry, for his sake, than she could stand.

"Tell me about it," she said. "How do you play?"

Unfortunately, she got lost in the explanation almost immediately, though whether that was because the rules were complicated or because Aang's description had more enthusiasm than clarity was anybody's guess.

Sokka didn't bother asking what she was talking about anymore; he turned automatically whenever she spoke, and then rolled his eyes and muttered irritated things under his breath. But it wasn't actually that bad to have the reminder, because it was weirdly hard for Katara to remember that Sokka couldn't see or hear Aang. He was so very plainly there, to her, even if he was also blue and didn't always touch the ground when he walked.

The eastern sky was warming toward gold when they finally reached the door that Aang had evidently been aiming for. "Here it is," Aang said, pleased, and then walked right through the wood and vanished.

Katara stared for a second, and then backed up to look at the door. It wasn't just an ordinary door, she suspected; it was huge, and had a knot of curving metal piping that was probably bigger than she was attached to it. The pipes opened out into a pair of horns at the bottom - and really, Katara thought, it would only make sense for an Air Nomad temple to have locks that could only be opened with Airbending.

She glanced back at Sokka to find him watching her with raised eyebrows. "Your invisible dead friend wanted to show us a door?" he said. "If I'd known that was all, I might have gone back to sleep-"

"Just - hang on a second," Katara said, and a moment later, Aang's head popped back through the door.

"Well?" his floating head said. "Come on!"

"Uh, we can't walk through the door, Aang," Katara reminded him gently. "And I can't - well, I guess I could, but I don't know any Airbending yet. Is there another way in?"

There was, thankfully; a hundred years of weather and perhaps the occasional earthquake without anyone to repair the stone had left a few cracks and gaps in the wall, and one of them was large enough for Katara and Sokka to squeeze through, if they lay on their sides and inched their way in. The main door could be opened from the inside without any bending at all, which Katara did, once she felt her way through the dark and found it; but it was still too early for the weak light to really help much.

Katara waited for her eyes to adjust, and for a moment she thought it was taking even longer than it actually was, because her eyes were expecting to see a back wall not too far away. Then the true dimensions of the room suddenly snapped into place, and she realized it wasn't that her eyes were slow - it was that the room was enormous.

"Is it all just statues?" Sokka said, peering over her shoulder. "What are they of?"

"I don't know," Katara said - which was technically true, but she did have a hunch. The statues were arranged in what looked like a perfect spiral, far enough away from their neighbors on either side for someone to wander between the winding loops easily. Katara stepped up to the closest loop, where the spiral pattern came to an end, and right before the empty space began, there was a familiar face.

"Avatar Roku," Katara said, staring up at him. "And, look, here's Kyoshi." The Earth Kingdom woman was the next statue down. She looked sterner as a statue than she had in Katara's dream; but the headdress and the robes were almost exactly the same, and there were the faintest of lines etched into the stone to mark out the patterns of her face-paint.

"What about this guy?" Sokka said, eyeing the next statue in the line: it was a man, clearly Water Tribe, with a solemn, tired-looking face.

Katara glanced at Aang.

"Kuruk," Aang obligingly supplied. "I used to spend days down here, I was supposed to memorize them all." He made a face.

"Kuruk," Katara repeated. "At least, that's what my invisible dead friend says," she added lightly, unable to resist. Sokka stuck his tongue out at her, unrepentant.

"And that's Yangchen," Aang added, indicating the next statue after Kuruk. "She was the last Air Avatar - before me, I mean."

Katara turned her attention to the Air Nomad woman: obviously of a slightly different mold than Aang, as even rendered in stone, her face reflected an ocean-deep calm. "Are they all here?" she asked.

"All the ones we know about," Aang said, nodding, and then suddenly his face underwent some sudden, unpleasant gymnastics.

"What is it?" Katara said.

Aang glanced at her and dredged up a half-smile. "All of them except me," he said, and then huffed out a breath that Katara thought might have been intended to be a laugh. "Not that I did anything," Aang added, looking down at the floor. "Nothing - good, anyway."

"Tell me?" Katara offered quietly.

"What?" Sokka said, glancing away from where he was admiring the winding tattoos of the Fire Nation woman next to Yangchen and giving Katara an inquiring look.

"Shh," she hissed back, and then turned back to Aang.

"I left them," he blurted, as soon as she was looking at him again, and sank to the floor to sit cross-legged, hands linked behind his neck and elbows on his knees. "They were going to - the Avatar's supposed to be neutral, authoritative; not have too many earthly attachments, or else they can be manipulated. But the monk who was responsible for training me - Monk Gyatso, he was-" Aang ground to a halt.

"Like a father?" Katara suggested.

"Well, I don't know; I never knew my father, whoever he was," Aang said quietly, shrugging a little. "But I think so. The Council of Elders said his judgment was clouded because of it - that he couldn't train me anymore." He paused, rubbing a hand over his head. "They were going to send me away."

"So you left," Katara filled in, beginning to see where this was going.

"I left," Aang confirmed. "I was angry, so I left them; there was a storm when I was out over the ocean, and I panicked, I froze myself. And I wasn't there to help them when they needed me; and they all died."

"You can't blame yourself for that," Katara said immediately, because something about the way he said it made it obvious that he was - and quite possibly had been for the majority of the fifteen years it had been since he had died. "You can't blame anyone for that except Sozin: he's the one who had them killed."

Aang shook his head a little. "If I hadn't gone-" he started; but Katara wasn't going to let him keep pursuing that line of thought.

"If you hadn't gone, some of them might have lived," Katara said, "but even the Avatar can't be in a dozen places at once; you could never have saved them all. If Sozin hadn't ordered it, they all would have lived. I think I can tell where the fault lies."

Aang's mouth twisted a little, but he didn't argue; Katara could tell he wasn't convinced, but she was willing to call it a first step, at least.

"Anyway, it'll be fine," she said. "I'll commission one for you."

"What?" Aang said.

"A statue," Katara elaborated. "When I defeat Lord Ozai, I'll commission one for you. Do you want granite? Marble?"

Aang blinked at her for a second, and then began to smile.

"Okay, I only heard half of that supposed conversation," Sokka said. "But did you just talk a ghost through an emotional crisis with bribery?"

*

They kept looking at the Avatar statues for a while, until the sun was fully up; Katara found it oddly comforting. Her whole life, she had been singled out, just a little bit alone, because she had been the only Waterbender in the village - and quite possibly in the whole South Pole. Learning she was the Avatar had set her apart not just from the village but from everybody else in the world. At least when she had only been a Waterbender, she had known there were probably still other Waterbenders in the north.

The dream had helped a little, of course - knowing the previous Avatars were with her all the time, in a certain sense; but with only three of them in front of her, she hadn't realized what a multitude that togetherness encompassed. Now, looking at the vast array of statues, it was obvious.

It was also a little unsettling, though: if Aang had had a statue in the room, his wouldn't have been the only one depicting somebody under the age of twenty. Katara found a girl on the left side of the room who couldn't have been more than eight years old - an Earth Kingdom Avatar, Katara thought, though it was only a guess, since there was no color and the style of her clothing was old enough that Katara couldn't place it easily. She wasn't the only one, either, though she looked like she was probably the youngest.



So when they finally stepped back out into the early morning light, Katara was feeling both comforted and almost somber. She looked out across the ocean, toward the sun, with an odd sense of gravity, and felt suddenly old.

Even more oddly, Sokka seemed to feel it, too, though maybe not to the same extent. The view from the temple really was exceptional - especially now, with the edges of the sky still lingeringly gold and the sea glittering with light; and he paused to look at it, too. "It's beautiful," he observed quietly.

She nodded, and they smiled at each other; and then they turned and followed Aang back around the temple, to gather their things and start the long climb down.

*

"So," Sokka huffed, lowering himself down the face of the last large rock next to the island's shore. "How's your invisible dead friend doing?"

Katara, above him, glanced over at Aang, who was grinning widely. "He, uh. He didn't really have to climb to get down." It was true: Aang seemed to pay some attention to where the ground was, he didn't just bobble haphazardly through the air, but he clearly wasn't able to fall the same way they were. He had strolled down slopes that Katara and Sokka had had to skid down sideways to keep their balance, and had never gotten out of breath. Which Katara supposed made sense, given that he had never really been breathing in the first place.

Sokka stared up at her with outrage, halfway through planting one foot on the more level ground below. "That is so not fair."

Katara laughed, and she could hear Aang snickering behind her. "Well, hey," she said, "if you want to not have to climb things anymore, either, just hold still a minute and let me go get my club."

"Oh, ha ha," Sokka said, making a face, and finished lowering himself to the ground, turning to go look for the cluster of brush they'd pulled the canoe behind. "So the figment of your imagination's really coming with us?" he called back over his shoulder.

"Yeah, he is," Katara said, skidding carefully down the rock.

She landed and turned to find that Sokka had stopped, and was staring at her again; this time, with a sort of perplexed look. "You really are serious about this," he said.

"... Didn't we talk about this already?" Katara said. "Yes, I'm serious; he's there. You believed me before-"

"Uh, correction," Sokka interrupted, raising one hand. "I said okay so we could stop arguing about whether you were crazy. I'm - still thinking about it." He paused for a second, looking briefly uncomfortable, and then said, "You have to admit, it's pretty weird, even for you."

"Thinking about it is good enough for me," Katara told him; and firmly squashed the small, childish part of herself that wanted Sokka to just take her word for it, and was hurt that he couldn't. He was right, it was weird, and if it took him some time to believe her, that was only reasonable.

"He won't take up any space in the canoe, will he?" Sokka said. "I mean, he's intangible, right?"

It was an obvious peace offering, talking like he was willing to go along with it, and Katara smiled at him.

"I don't think I will," Aang said, and drifted down until he was facing Sokka. He stuck out a hand; it went through Sokka's shoulder like there was nothing there, the same way Aang had gone through the door of the Avatar room.

"What?" Sokka said. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

Katara realized that her smile had dissolved into a look somewhere between repulsion and fascination, and tried to straighten out her face. "Uh, no reason," she said. "Don't worry, your leg room is safe."

Sokka narrowed his eyes. "He just walked through me or something, didn't he?" he said. "That is so creepy."

Aang laughed.

They lifted the canoe out from the brush, and checked it over; if some kind of animal had decided to try living in it, or, worse, to chew some holes in it, better to know now than when they were out in the middle of the ocean. The food was fine, as expected, having been wrapped up tight and stowed low to keep the scent off the wind.

Ten minutes' work re-stowing the things they'd taken with them on the climb, and then they were back on the water, Katara in the stern, Sokka in the bow, and Aang in the middle, nonchalantly and quite literally sunk to the waist in their supplies.

"Back on course to the Earth Kingdoms, right?" Sokka said. "No more crazy side trips?"

"Not that I know of," Katara agreed, and bent the water below them forward with a sweep of her hands.

***

Zuko glared at the horizon, and considered punching a fireball at the wall of the bridge.

It had taken a couple of hours to fully unfreeze the ship and get moving again, and not just because they had fewer Firebenders than most ships their size. Part of the tumble of ice had found its way down the stacks and into the boiler room, and the sudden shock of cold had cracked the metal in a dozen places; they were running on two boilers now, instead of five. The bender's canoe had vanished in the meantime, and ever since, they'd been - following them, Zuko insisted to himself, but he knew it was more like aimless wandering in the general direction the canoe had gone.

A moment later, the door of the bridge swung open; Zuko didn't bother looking over, he knew already that it was Mizan.

Zuko's banishment had been rapidly done, and the ship commandeered to remove him had been a new one, without a captain yet assigned. The crew had been thrown together at the last minute, spares and rejects that no one else had wanted; Mizan had been the highest-ranked of them, and had ended up essentially filling the empty captain's position, in practice. She followed Zuko's orders - and Uncle Iroh's, on the rare occasions that he issued any - but Zuko suspected it was mostly because she chose to. The crew was in awe of the Dragon of the West, and deferential toward the exiled prince; but they listened to Mizan.

And now she was standing in the bridge with her arms crossed, staring at Zuko. "There's no sign of them, your highness," she said.

Zuko grimaced a little. Mizan hadn't said it with any particular emphasis, but she reserved "your highness" for those occasions when she was displeased; usually, she just called him "sir".

She paused for a second, and then took a step closer. "Frankly, highness - they're in a canoe. We're in a Fire Navy steamship. Even if we do manage to get anywhere near them by just wandering around like this, they'll see us coming long before we have a chance to spot them; and with that kind of warning in advance, three of our boilers out of commission, and the girl's bending, we'll never be able to catch them."

Zuko whirled around. "It doesn't matter," he said sharply. "We have to keep following them." He couldn't keep waiting for the Avatar to appear; it had been years already, without even a sign. This was the first chance he had had since his exile to win back his honor - he could not bear to let it slip away. "We have to. Stay on course."

Mizan's expression said clearly that she was losing patience with his continued insanity; but she dropped her arms to her sides and executed the bare minimum of a bow. "Yes, your highness."



Zuko slammed his way out of the bridge, still angry, but with an uncomfortable sort of desperation starting to rise up beneath. He was almost relieved to see Uncle Iroh standing by the rail, though he was careful to cover it up with a scowl.

"Prince Zuko," Uncle Iroh said, in the gentle tone that meant he was about to tell Zuko something he knew Zuko probably wouldn't want to hear.

"I can't, Uncle," Zuko interrupted. "I won't stop chasing them. I have to kill that Waterbender."

Uncle Iroh gave him a troubled look, at that; a little hypocritical, Zuko thought, for a retired war general, and told him so.

"I have killed men and women in battle, when they were armed," Uncle Iroh said. "I have never hunted down a pair of children to curry favor. Is your place in your father's hall worth someone's life?"

Zuko glared out at the sea, and didn't answer. How could Uncle Iroh ask such a question? Of course it was. It had to be. A life was the price his father had set - the Avatar's, if not this girl's - and his father was never wrong.

He heard Uncle Iroh sigh. "They must be going to the southern Earth Kingdoms," he said, after a long moment. "They would be fools to sail up straight through Fire Nation waters, and I doubt they will spare the time and effort to go around to the east now. Up behind the front lines is their likeliest route, if they intend to keep going north. If we turn now, we may be able to beat them there; if we cannot, at least they will leave a clear trail. It has been a long time since Waterbenders were common in the south."

Zuko turned to look at him. Uncle Iroh's expression looked tired, and perhaps even a little resigned - but Zuko did not have time to unravel whatever knot was troubling him. "Mizan!"

Mizan swung the bridge door open, and looked out at him attentively. "Highness?"

"Change course," Zuko said. "For the southern Earth Kingdoms."

Mizan bowed - a real one, this time. "Aye, sir," she said.





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Chapter Three: The Warriors of Kyoshi

The day they spotted the island was the third in a row that Katara had had to take off her parka before noon - a nuisance, but another sign that they were heading north.

Sokka, in the bow, was the first to see it, and let out a whoop of delight. "See, I told you there had to be some islands coming up," he said. "The map does not lie."

"Luckily for you," Katara said, "or there wouldn't have been any breakfast tomorrow, and you'd have starved before we could even get a fish to bite." Katara hadn't expected to find herself actively appreciating the fact that Aang couldn't eat, but Sokka had gone through their supplies like a rampaging tiger seal. It was just luck that Mother had saved the otherwise useless currency Gran-Gran had gotten the last time the village had traded with an Earth Kingdom ship. Katara only hoped Earth money hadn't changed much: theirs was at least forty years old.

Katara turned the canoe and bent the water a little harder, and the island began to grow steadily larger; by noon, they were sailing across a small bay and in toward the shoreline.

"Have you ever been here before?" Katara asked Aang, shifting the end of the canoe that she was carrying until she could hold up a quelling finger in Sokka's direction. They'd agreed on that as a signal two days ago, when Katara had gotten tired of getting two simultaneous answers to all her questions. "It was too small to get a name on the map."

"Nope," Aang said. "I used to ride elephant koi in the ocean near here, but that was about as close as I ever got."

They finished stowing the canoe away, and covered it up a little with extra brush, just to be safe.

There was a clear path up the slope from the shore, presumably to a village; the first ten minutes of walking were pleasant, if a little too warm for Katara's taste, but then Sokka started to get twitchy.

"... Are you really that bored already?" Katara said, raising her eyebrows.

Sokka rubbed at the back of his neck, glancing around at the trees nearby with an odd look on his face. "Not - bored," he said shortly.

Katara gave him a closer look; saw the uneasy clenching of his free hand, and the way his eyes kept darting, never settling, and began to feel faintly edgy herself. She liked trees - or what she'd seen of them so far, at least - but right now they seemed dangerously obscuring, and she would have given a lot for the broad flat openness of ice. "Fire Nation, do you think?" she murmured, and wished fervently that they hadn't optimistically left both of their clubs and all their fishing knives in the canoe.

"I doubt it," Sokka said, "I don't hear any clanking."

"I could go look," Aang offered, from Katara's other side. "There's no way they'll hear me," and he bounded off into the trees - right through them, even.

Katara had just lost sight of the last glimmer of blue when she heard Sokka yelp; before she could even turn around, there was a sudden sharp pain at the back of her head, and everything went dark.

*

When Katara came back to herself, the first thing she heard was Aang's voice - "Katara, Katara - come on, wake up," he was saying, low and worried.

Her head was pounding, so she didn't open her eyes right away, knowing that the light would only make it worse. She was in a sitting position, feet tucked under herself, and she could tell without looking that she was tied to something - wood, she thought, feeling the texture against her hands; that was why she had been upright even while she was unconscious.

After a moment, the pounding receded, and Katara blinked a few times to clear her eyes, only to find Aang staring her in the face. Through his head, she could see a group of people, all dressed in green, standing in a clump perhaps twenty or thirty feet away and apparently discussing something amongst themselves. The pole Katara was tied to was in the middle of a large cleared space, and the slope beyond the group of green-clothed people was covered with two rows of houses, leading up to a larger building - a village hall, Katara thought, like the central igloo back home.

"Oh, good," Aang said, and the tight, worried lines of his face relaxed into relief. "I thought maybe they'd hit you too hard. I'm so sorry - I couldn't do anything, I tried but I can't touch them-"

"It's okay," Katara risked whispering. She didn't want to catch the attention of the people who'd captured them just yet, but Aang didn't need any more guilt to pile on himself.

Almost as soon as she'd said it, though, her caution turned worthless, because she heard a loud groan behind her - Sokka, she thought, tied to the other side of the pole; he must have come awake.

One of the people in green turned around - a girl, Katara noticed, and then looked more carefully. They were all girls, everyone in the group, and their faces were painted with the same dramatic red and white paint that Kyoshi had been wearing in Katara's dream.

"Looks like our guests are ready to join us," the first girl said, with a tiny smile; and it could have been frightening, but she didn't say it meanly - just wryly, and a little warily.

"What?" Sokka said grumpily, and then groaned again. "Oh, my head."

Katara craned her head around as far as she could, and caught the barest glimpse of Sokka's ear. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, yeah, you've given me worse practicing with our clubs," Sokka said, and then the girl stopped a few feet away and crouched down to look Katara in the eye, and there was no more time to talk.

"So," the girl said, and reached out to touch the white edge of Katara's blue shirt where it curved over her shoulder. "Water Tribe. It's been a long time since any of you have been here."

"Long enough that we're on opposite sides of the war now?" Katara asked. If the alliance against the Fire Nation had fallen apart in the years since Father had sailed away with the other warriors to aid the northern Earth Kingdoms, that was very, very bad news.

But the girl smiled, a little ruefully. "We're only one little island," she said, "we're not really in the war at all. But the Fire Nation doesn't seem inclined to let us stay out of it, recently; and it's been long enough that we can't be sure whether you're really Water Tribe, or Fire Nation prisoners who've turned spy, or actual Fire Nation citizens who've somehow found a way to turn their eyes blue."

"If I can have one hand free, I can settle your worries as far as that last goes," Katara tried, but before she was even done saying it, the girl was shaking her head.

"And then you could turn out to be Option Two, and freeze us to death, or drown us," she said. "No thanks."

"Well, you're not really giving us a lot of other choices," Sokka said from the other side of the pole, sounding exasperated.

The girl grinned, and then, incongruously, pulled out a fan from her sash, and flared it open - no, not incongruously, Katara realized, seeing the way the outer spokes of the fan glinted. It was iron, with bladed tips - a weapon. "I'm sorry," the girl said, "but I can't put my people in danger just because being tied to a pole is uncomfortable for you."

"Oh, for - look, she's the Avatar, okay?" Sokka said. "Now untie us already."

"Sokka!" Katara hissed, but it was too late - the girl's eyes had already gone wide with sudden interest.

"She's only doing this to us because she thinks we might be Fire Nation," Sokka said, in a tone that Katara knew meant he was rolling his eyes. "She's not going to turn around and sell us out to them."

"A bit of a leap," the girl said, "but true, in this case." She focused her gaze on Katara. "Are you?"

Katara thought about saying she still wasn't sure, but it wouldn't have been accurate; she still didn't feel like the Avatar, but she knew that she was anyway. "Yes," she said.

The girl narrowed her eyes. "Prove it," she said.

"Yeah, that's ... maybe not a great idea," Sokka said.

The girl fluttered her iron fan dismissively. "I don't need a natural disaster," she said. "Just a little proof. You can't be more than sixteen, but it's been a hundred years since anybody saw the Avatar, and he was an Airbender. What happened?"

Katara darted a glance at Aang, who was standing there with his face shuttered; there was no way for the girl to hear him, but it felt strange, and even cruel, to tell such a painful story herself when he was right there. "How about this," she said instead. "You look just like Avatar Kyoshi; she painted her face like that, and the fan - she fought with fans just like that one, too. She-" Katara broke off, startled. There was an end to that sentence, and sentences that came after it, all lined up in Katara's head; nothing she had ever learned before, or heard from anyone, but she knew they were true. "She made this island. I mean, everybody knows that, she made all the islands in the south; but this was where it started, wasn't it? She was here."

It was like being in the Air Temple again, that quick flash of vision back into the way things had been - suddenly Katara was looking at the village with someone else's eyes, and it wasn't just a village on an island she had happened across, it was hers, her house on the top left next to the old hall, her sister across the way and her brother to the right, her childhood friend two more houses down, her daughter playing in the dust-

"She - she lived here," Katara heard herself say, and suddenly she was back, looking the girl in the face again next to a village of strangers. "This was her home, and they would never have given in; Chin would have razed it to the ground, killed them all - definitely Matasuri, and even Koko-"

The girl had been giving her an odd look, and now her eyes went suddenly wide again. "What?"

My daughter, Katara almost said, and caught herself only just in time. "Her daughter - Kyoshi's. And her husband."

"That wasn't in any of the stories Gran-Gran told us," Sokka said, almost accusingly, from the other side of the pole. "How do you know that?"

Katara kept her eyes on the girl, and let her mouth quirk up a little. "I'm the Avatar," she said.

"So you are," the girl agreed, a tinge of awe in her face, and sliced the ropes with a swing of her fan.

*

The girl's name turned out to be Suki, and the village's, Manamota; and by the time Katara and Sokka had shaken the ropes away, introduced themselves, and dusted themselves off, several dozen people had come out of their houses, and murmurs - that included the word "Avatar" - were rippling through the crowd.

"This is my second-in-command, Mikari," Suki said, indicating a girl to her left with a green headdress bound into her black hair; "and this," she continued, turning and raising her voice for the crowd, "is the Avatar herself."

The murmurs turned into outright exclamations, and Katara felt herself flush. Yes, she was the Avatar; but so far, she hadn't done anything but break an ice floe and sink a ship, which didn't seem like a deserving foundation for awe.

"Ayuko, quick, go and get Oyaji-" Suki told another girl, but before she'd even finished saying it, Ayuko had turned to glance over her shoulder.

"I think he's already noticed," she said wryly.

And, sure enough, the crowd was parting for an older man with a fine fur cloak draped over his shoulders. "Chief Oyaji," Suki said, and bowed her head for a moment.

"When you left this morning because a boat had been sighted coming in, I didn't expect you to come back with the Avatar," Oyaji said, and laughed, deep and booming. "And - who are you?"

"Oh, nobody," Sokka said, "just her brother."

Oyaji smiled. "Well, any companion of the Avatar is welcome here. Come," and he began to usher them through the crowd and up the hill, toward the village hall. "Kyoshi's house has been kept, untouched, since the day of her death; you may stay there," he said, and Katara turned her head to glance unthinkingly at the house she knew had been Kyoshi's.

When she looked back, Oyaji was smiling at her. "I see you remember it, Avatar," he said.

"That's seriously kind of spooky," Sokka told her, when they had gone inside and she led him back to the sleeping room without even thinking about it.

She glared at him.

"But helpful," he added quickly, lifting his hands defensively.

Suki and Mikari walked down to the bay shore with them to retrieve the canoe - no point to keeping their things in the bushes when they were staying for a few days, and had a house to themselves to do it in.

"So are you all girls?" Katara asked, on the way down. "I mean, all of you - you know, your group, with the paint and the fans-"

"The Warriors of Kyoshi," Suki supplied. "There are orders of us on all of the islands Kyoshi split from the mainland, but this one is the oldest. This is called Kyoshi Island, because she lived here; and our village has the only order on the island. And yes, all Warriors of Kyoshi are women."

"But you're all sort of ... young, aren't you?" Katara said - awkwardly, but she was curious and there didn't seem to be a better way to ask. "I mean, not that I mind, obviously."

"There was a Fire Nation raid when I was little," Suki said a little flatly, and Katara immediately wished she had kept her mouth shut; no explanation that started that way ever ended well. And, indeed, Suki's next words made Katara flinch: "My father was killed, and my mother almost was; and now I'm the oldest Warrior of Kyoshi on the island."

Katara glanced at her; Suki was older than she was, but not by much, and Mikari might even have been a little younger. "I'm sorry," she said, and tried not to grimace at the inadequacy of it. She felt almost as stupid saying it to Suki as she had saying it to Aang, and glanced over at him to find him looking back with a sympathetic little smile, obviously remembering the same moment.

Suki didn't seem bothered by it, though; she said, "Thank you," and dipped her head a little in acknowledgement. "It was a long time ago - it's a bad memory, but that's all it is, now," she added, as though Katara were the one who deserved comforting.

It took them only a minute to find the canoe and clear the camouflaging branches off of it; they were checking it over to make sure that everything was still in place when Sokka suddenly frowned. "Wait a minute - so we got jumped by a bunch of girls?" he said.

"Thoughtfully put, Sokka," Katara muttered, mostly to herself, and leaned over to make sure her parka had been tucked away securely before she lifted her end of the canoe.

"Yup," Suki said cheerfully, and took the other end before Sokka could, beaming at him as she lifted her half of the canoe one-handed. "I hit you on the head myself."

*

Sokka was still grumbling under his breath about girls and fans and unfair advantages the next morning, even after a delicious feast in the common hall, a truly impressive selection of sweet-cakes for dessert, and a good night's sleep.

"I've beaten you up before, you know," Katara told him over their breakfast - a few leftover sweet-cakes. Aang couldn't eat, but he'd come with them anyway, and was sitting in the middle of the table, idly dipping his fingers through the wooden surface.

"Well, yeah, but I've always gotten the chance to beat you up back," he said. "Besides, you're not a girl, you're my sister. You don't count."

Aang laughed; Katara sighed, and licked a few lingering crumbs off her fingers. "So go find her and ask if you can beat her up to make yourself feel better, then," she said.

The training hall of the Warriors of Kyoshi was off behind the village hall, a clean little building with walls of sliding paneling - they were open, today, to let in the pleasant spring air.

Suki and another girl - not Mikari or Ayuko, but Katara did recognize her from the day before - were sparring, fans flaring and clacking against each other; but they slowed to a stop when Katara and Sokka approached.

"This is going to be good," Aang said.

Katara couldn't reply in front of everybody without looking crazy; but she figured she could get away with shooting a small smile at empty air, and did.

"Sorry about yesterday," the girl who wasn't Suki blurted out, shifting her weight anxiously. "We didn't know you were the Avatar."

"Oh, it's fine, don't worry," Katara said, trying to be reassuring. "You wouldn't happen to have a bowl in here, would you?"

"What for?" Sokka said.

"Holding bending water in," she told him. "Might as well get some practice in while you're busy embarrassing yourself."

"Oh, ha ha, that's just hilarious-"

"Embarrassing yourself?" Suki said brightly. "Can I watch?"

"Oh, better than that," Katara said, very dry. Mikari came up with a bowl for her; she took it with a nod of thanks, and settled down in the corner of the room. She'd meant it, about the practice, but she suspected she might end up just sitting there and watching.

"I'm sorry about yesterday, too, if that's why you're here," Suki started off, clearly trying to be diplomatic. "I didn't mean to hurt you-"

"Hurt me?" Sokka said. "You didn't hurt me-"

"Oh, of course not," Suki said, sardonic, "my mistake; I must have been fooled by how you fell unconscious," and she gave Sokka a look of mock apology, diplomacy pushed away by Sokka's annoyance.

"You ambushed us, you had the element of surprise," Sokka snapped.

"All right," Suki said agreeably, and snapped the fan she was holding shut. "You aren't surprised now, right?"

"No!"

She smiled. "So hit me," she said.

"Oh, boy," Aang murmured, from his seat next to Katara.

"Yeah," Katara whispered, and abandoned any pretense of bending, propping her elbows on her knees and her face on her hands, and settling in to watch.

The first punch, Katara could tell Sokka hadn't put much effort into, and Suki could probably tell, too. She put only a little more effort into blocking it, snapping her closed fan against Sokka's shoulder so that the blow went wide.

Sokka staggered back a little, thrown off by the unexpected miss and the impact of the fan, and then pulled his arm back, rolling the struck shoulder a few times. "Lucky," he said, half accusing and half as though to reassure himself.

Suki smiled.

Sokka took a second to arrange himself into the beginnings of an actual stance, and then threw a kick, a little more carefully - but Suki had begun to duck almost the moment his foot had left the floor, and bent low to plant her shoulder against his other leg, shoving him back and using her arm to knock his leg out from under him in a single motion.

Sokka landed hard, and Katara couldn't help but wince a little, even as Aang cheered next to her; but, to his credit, he came up right away with another punch. The first one landed on Suki's shoulder - but the second, Suki let fly past her, and Sokka's momentum carried him right onto the knee she lifted into his stomach.

*

Katara shoved yet another spiky branch out of her way, and wished for the tenth time that she were intangible, too.

"Here, he's right this way!" Aang called from ahead of her, and sped through another bramble bush without so much as slowing down.

"Yeah, thanks," Katara muttered.

Fortunately, the alternate route she found was relatively quick, and a moment later she saw Sokka sitting with his arms around his knees, with Aang hovering, anxious and glowy, a few inches in front of his face.

"What is wrong with you?" Katara demanded. Sokka had gone haring off into the trees behind the training hall as soon as Suki had finished with him, ignoring the hand up that Suki had offered after the last time she'd knocked him down. Katara had followed him readily, but she'd gotten hit in the face with branches, stabbed in the foot with rocks, and scratched everywhere in between with thorns; now that she'd finally caught up to him, she wasn't in an especially understanding mood. Forests were pretty from the outside, but Katara was finding that she didn't much care for walking through them without a path.

Sokka didn't say anything, though - only hunched his shoulders a little higher.

Katara looked at him, and then sighed, and picked her way forward until she could sink down next to him. "Aang's here, by the way," she said.

Sokka shrugged one shoulder.

"You remember everybody who went off with Father - Aunt Pasira, and Tanna, and everyone else. You didn't get weird about that."

"That was different," Sokka insisted. "They were-"

"Warriors?" Katara filled in. "So is Suki." She paused for a moment, but Sokka had gone quiet again.

"Are you sure that's really what he's upset about?" Aang said uncertainly. Katara glanced at him, and he shrugged. "I mean, maybe it's the girl thing, a little; but when you beat him up, it was just practice. This could have been real, if they'd been Fire Nation, and he couldn't do anything about it."

Katara remembered the way Sokka had gone charging out at the soldiers the day she'd broken the iceberg, the way he always turned serious when it came to their village's defense, and realized Aang might well have a point. "She beat me up, too," she said to Sokka after a moment, tingeing her voice with chagrin. "And I'm the Avatar."

Sokka snorted a little; it came out sounding sort of dismissive, but when Katara looked at him, he was smiling. It was squished down into one corner of his mouth, like he didn't really want it to be there, but it was definitely a smile. "Yeah, I suppose she did," he agreed grudgingly.

"Actually, it must have been one of the others," Katara said, "since she hit you."

"Yeah, lucky me; the whack that soldier gave me just barely scabbed over, and now I have a whole new lump," Sokka said, throwing up his hands. But he laughed after, so Katara knew he was all right.

***

Suki liked to get up early, especially in the spring and summer; it was cool and relatively quiet, even once the birds woke up, but still usually light enough to practice without having to worry about stabbing herself in the arm by mistake.

So she was dressed and painted, and had been in the training hall for a couple of hours already when somebody slid one of the wall panels open.



She turned and raised her fans reflexively before she realized it was the Avatar's brother, and quickly lowered them again; she didn't want to fight with him, not if it was just going to make him angry when she won.

But he didn't charge at her, or start throwing punches; or crack a joke, which Suki had figured was the other most likely option. He looked oddly serious - serious, but not upset, and when she raised her eyebrows inquisitively, he went down on his knees on the floor, palms to his thighs, and bowed his head a little. "I apologize for my behavior yesterday," he said quietly, "and I would be honored if you would teach me."

Suki stared at him, startled. The best possibility she'd been imagining was that he would pretend nothing had happened and leave her alone; this was way beyond her expectations. "We don't usually teach boys," she said after a long moment, testing.

"Please consider making an exception," he said, head still bowed, and then broke the formal pose to peek up at her. "Besides, after yesterday, I'm already sort of your student, right?"

She supposed he had a point. "We are the Warriors of Kyoshi - if you want to train with us, you'll have to follow the traditions passed down to us from Kyoshi."

"Of course," Sokka agreed immediately.

Suki grinned.

*

The clothes went on first; Suki figured the risk of getting paint on them was higher with Sokka trying to get them on after than it was with her applying the paint while they were already on. She'd been putting her own war-paint on for years; she hadn't had to worry about accidental drips since she was twelve.

Sokka looked so disgruntled, when they had finally gotten him into the only battle dress that would fit him, that Suki almost laughed. "You're the only boy who's ever had the honor of wearing Kyoshi Warrior dress, you know," she said, pushing on his shoulders until he sat. "You should consider it a privilege."

He only scowled in reply, but Suki thought perhaps he looked less peeved after that.

They had the paints in the training hall, along with the oil undercoat that went underneath and the powder that went over top. Suki knelt, to get the right angle, and then tipped Sokka's chin up with th side of her finger. He swallowed, right then, and her knuckles brushed the skin of his throat, the feeling oddly distracting; she was abruptly glad that she had her own face-paint on, because she could feel a blush rising.

The Avatar came in when she was almost done applying the second dart of red down the side of Sokka's nose. "Looks good," she said, smiling but not mocking. Sokka rolled his eyes without moving his head, but Suki was pretty sure he was secretly pleased.

*

Suki shook her head. "You have the form almost right, but you need to be faster. And plant your foot more evenly, too - putting all your weight to the outside like that is part of what's slowing you down."

Sokka got up and went back into stance, as uncomplaining now as he had been upset the day before; and Suki felt suddenly proud of him. Which was completely irrational, she hadn't even been teaching him for a full day yet, but she couldn't help it.

She knocked him down again, of course; she'd been fighting with iron fans since she was eight. But this time his foot landed well, and the corner of one fan tore Suki's sleeve before he tumbled to the floor.

"Much better," she said, showing him the tear, and then offered him a hand up. "Again."

"You're worse than my mother," he said, almost admiringly, and took it.

The Avatar came in again to tell them there was supper ready; Suki was startled to realize that it had gotten dark, and that at some point, someone had come in and lit the hall lamps without either of them noticing.

"You guys didn't even break for lunch," the Avatar said. "Having too much fun getting beat up, huh?" she added, and laughed when Sokka elbowed her.

"He's doing much better now," Suki said, magnanimous. "A year and change, and he'll be about where I was when I was thirteen."

"... I think that was meant to be a compliment," Sokka said, "so I'm going to say thank you."

"Good idea," the Avatar said, smiling, and then paused, like she'd just thought of something but wasn't sure how to go about saying it.

"What?" Suki prodded, after a moment of silence had gone by.

"Well, you could - you could keep teaching him," the Avatar said - almost timidly, except that was ridiculous, she was the Avatar. "If you came with us."

Suki stared at her, so startled that she stopped walking without entirely intending it. It had been astonishing enough to have the Avatar reappear, after a hundred-year absence, on the shore of her island; to be asked to actually accompany her was more than Suki had ever even daydreamed about. "I - well, I," she stumbled, and then took a breath and made herself get a grip. "Of course, I'm honored to be asked, Avatar - I don't-"

The Avatar laughed. "We'll be here for a couple more days, at least," she said, and reached up to squeeze Suki's shoulder. "There's no hurry; just think about it. And call me Katara, will you?"

*

It took some work to get any proper amount of water back to the house, so Suki had some time to think without much interruption, hauling buckets back and forth from the brook until she had enough to wash her face, and a little extra for the next morning. Mother was cooking, and humming to herself; she had shot Suki a smile the first time she came in the door, but had said nothing.

Of course, why would she, Suki reminded herself, when she had no idea anything interesting had happened today.

She had all her arguments for and against sorted out by the time the basin in the house was full, and was nearly done with her face by the time Mother stopped humming and said, "Had a good day?"

Suki washed the last smears of paint from her chin, and sat back. "The Avatar asked me to go with her."

"Oh," Mother said, startled, and nearly dropped the bowl of rice she was carrying to their low dining table, catching it against her waist at the last second. "Goodness. What did you say?"

"I said I'd be honored, but - well, she gave me some time to think about it," Suki said.

Mother set down the rice, the better to give her an annoyingly knowing look. "You want to go, don't you?"

"Well, of course I'm tempted," Suki said, because she really was. "It would be - extraordinary, to go with her; to see all the things she's going to see, to fight alongside her. But I can't."

"You can't," Mother repeated, in a leading sort of way.

"I have duties, I have responsibilities," Suki said; it came out a little bit more exasperated than she had intended, but she felt silly explaining - surely Mother knew this already. "I'm head of the order, I can't just leave-"

"Mikari's older now than you were when you took charge," Mother pointed out gently. "Granted, the circumstances are a little less dire; but you won't be leaving the Warriors in incompetent hands."

"Well, no - no, of course, Mikari's more than capable," Suki said. She did feel something of a pang when she thought about handing over the First's headdress to Mikari; but she knew herself well enough to be able to tell that that was about losing a place that had been hers for years, not being afraid that Mikari couldn't handle the position.

"And the Avatar - the Avatar's going to stop the war; she's going to save the world. How better can you serve the Warriors, and the rest of us, than by helping her?" Mother shook her head a little. "There is no higher duty than that."

Suki had to admit that this was true; and the dissolution of her reasoning under the assault of Mother's careful logic set off a spike of something a bit like panic in her. "But what about you?" she blurted.

"Oh, Suki," Mother said, fond, and curved her hand over Suki's hair. "I'm glad you worry for me; and if you go, of course I'll miss you. But I'll manage - I did when you were a little girl, and I will again." She gave Suki a look, half stern and half understanding. "If you decide to stay, don't make me the reason."

Suki gazed back at her, and was overwhelmed suddenly with fondness, enough that she had to pinch her eyes shut for a second to keep from bursting into tears or sobbing like a baby or something else ridiculous. "All right," she said, when her throat loosened.

Mother raised her eyebrows inquiringly. "Is that 'all right' as in 'all right, I've perceived your wisdom and I'm going to think about it', or 'all right' as in 'all right, I've perceived your wisdom and I'm going'?"

"All right, I'm going," Suki said, "no wisdom involved," and laughed when Mother narrowed her eyes.

***

Zuko hated leaving his ship - not so much because he felt proprietary over as because it was always so uncomfortable. They had a selection of green-dyed things for when they had to travel in the Earth Kingdoms; it made his face hot with shame to put them on, imagining what his father would say to see him dressing up as an Earth Kingdom peasant - and what Azula would say didn't even bear thinking about.

"Oh, tea," Uncle Iroh said, gazing unabashedly at the tea shop they were passing. "I'll be back later, my love," he told it; "fish first, or the cooks will cry."

Zuko rolled his eyes. "Hurry up, Uncle."

"It never hurt anyone to cultivate a healthy appreciation for tea, you know," Uncle Iroh told him in a patient tone, and then paused in front of a fish vendor's cart. "Ah, look - Zhen and Lao would accept some of these, don't you think?"

"They're fresh from this afternoon's catch," the vendor said coaxingly. "And good timing, too; there won't be any fishing tomorrow."

"No?" Uncle Iroh said absently, examining one of the larger fish. "Why not?"

"Why, everybody'll be off to see the Avatar," the vendor said cheerily.

Zuko had been letting his mind wander, deeply uninterested by the process of buying fish for the cook; but at this, he snapped back to attention. "The Avatar? The Avatar's on this island?" He fixed the fish vendor with an intense glare. "Where?" he demanded.

The vendor didn't have time to do more than blink at him, startled, before Uncle Iroh suddenly stepped between them - planting one heel squarely on Zuko's toes as he did. "You must forgive my nephew," he said to the vendor cheerily. "He has always admired the Avatar; to have a chance to see the Avatar in person thrills him beyond the telling of it - and beyond the bounds of politeness, unfortunately."

The vendor laughed; Zuko very carefully did not pound her head in. "Ah, of course, of course," she said. "Well, the word is that the Avatar has come to the village of Manamota - on the other side of the island, near the Great Bay? We're told she'll be there for at least a few more days; plenty of time to make the trip." Her expression was suddenly touched with a tinge of awe that made Zuko want to sneer. "Imagine it - to see the Avatar with our own eyes, after a hundred years."

"A wonder indeed," Uncle Iroh said, oddly quiet, and then dipped his head. "The thirty largest of these, then, and the best of luck on your journey," and he motioned to the servants who had come with them from the ship to start gathering up the fish.

***

A few people had come into Manamota the night before, staying in the village hall and watching Katara with huge eyes; but Katara hadn't thought much of it, assuming they were friends or relatives of some of the villagers who happened to be passing through. The next morning, though, there were dozens more, gathered in the cleared space that held the post Katara and Sokka had been tied to, and when Katara stepped out of the village hall after eating breakfast, they all went quiet and watched her expectantly.

"What is going on?" Katara muttered - mostly to herself, since Sokka was still busy stuffing his face in the hall, but she knew Aang could hear her.

Aang shrugged, and his mouth was halfway open before Suki said, "They're here to see the Avatar," and walked right through him.

It took a moment for Suki's words to register, partly because Aang was making a really hilarious face, and partly because Suki wasn't alone; there was a woman walking next to her, kind-faced and looking faintly amused, and one of her sleeves was empty.

"This is my mother," Suki said, and Katara remembered what she had said the day they'd arrived: my father was killed, and my mother almost was. If she had thought to doubt it, now she knew better. She had only ever seen one other person lose a limb; Aunt Maziya had succumbed to infection so completely that the Fire Nation raiders might as well have stabbed her, but it had taken several highly unpleasant days for her to die.

"Izumi," the woman said, and bowed. "It is an honor, Avatar."

"Oh - no, really, just call me Katara," Katara said awkwardly. "And - wait, really? All those people-" She turned to look down the hill at the crowd again, and felt her face start to flush.

Suki laughed unhelpfully. "Sometimes you're pretty bad at remembering how important you are," she said. "Imagine - if the Avatar had shown up in your village after a hundred years, how would you feel?"

"Well, actually, the Avatar did show up in our village after a hundred years, if you think about it," Sokka said. "But point taken."

Katara knew what Suki meant. She'd have been stuck somewhere between awestruck and delighted, and she'd probably have followed the Avatar around all day just imagining the possibilities - the Fire Lord, dead; the war, ended; her father and uncles and aunts and friends, all home at last. But despite everything that had happened - her dreams, and Aang showing up, and that funny half-vision that had shown her Manamota through Kyoshi's eyes - some part of Katara still didn't feel like the Avatar. And she really wasn't yet, in a certain sense; she hadn't even mastered Waterbending, let alone the other elements. It felt almost like lying, to present herself to this crowd like she could already save them.

"They only want to see you," Izumi said quietly; when Katara turned to look at her, her expression was assessing, but not unsympathetic. "To know that you exist, that their hopes are no longer unfounded."

But they are unfounded, Katara wanted to say, if those people are expecting a fifteen-year-old who can't even Waterbend properly to end the Hundred-Year War. Except it wasn't really true: they weren't expecting her to do it, they were expecting the person she was trying to become to do it; and the person she was trying to become would be able to.

She took a deep breath; and then Sokka reached out and gripped her shoulder. "Come on," he said. "Time to meet your adoring fans."

*

Katara had touched at least fifty heads, and it was getting hard to keep the continuous murmur of "An honor, Avatar" from blurring into a meaningless buzz. She was pretty sure there were at least twice as many people now as there had been when she'd started going through the crowd, and more were trickling in every few minutes.

"By the time this is over, you're going to be best friends with half the island," Sokka muttered under his breath, and then went still so suddenly that Katara turned toward him with a frown.

"What-" she got out, and then she saw it, too: a great dark smear of smoke rising in the east, the kind that had always meant it was time to put on battle-paint and get on the wall, at home. The kind that came from Fire Nation warships.

"The ship," Sokka said, suddenly breathless, "that last ship, the one we froze - it must have followed us here."

"The one I froze," Katara corrected automatically, and then the first rush of fear passed, and her brain started working again. "We have to get these people out of here, or they're all going to get killed."

The nearest clump of people had all turned and seen the smoke, and there was a growing murmur rising, sharp with an undertone of panic. "Suki," Sokka said; "where's Suki - the Warriors, they can help us move everyone out-", and then the first red-armored figure clanked out from beneath the trees.

***

Suki had gone back to the training hall to practice - that was why she had suited up in the first place. Much as she would have loved to watch Katara stumble through her first real attempt to act like the Avatar, she only had a few more days left with her girls, and she hadn't even told Mikari she was leaving yet.

Besides, she had put all her paint on; it would be a shame to let that go to waste.

She let herself get lost temporarily in the pure pleasure of the exercise. Fighting had always been one of her favorite things to do, mostly because it was just so viscerally enjoyable to know she had the training and the strength to do just about anything she asked of herself.
But eventually it was time to take Mikari aside, and start untying the thongs that held the First Warrior's headdress in place.

"What are you doing?" Mikari said, slow and calm, like she thought Suki might have gone mad.

"The Avatar asked me to go with her, and I - well, I haven't told her yet, but I'm going to." Suki held out the headdress, ignoring the little twinge she felt at giving it up. "I can't be First when I'm not even here."

"Oh, yes you can," Mikari said, backing away and shaking her head. "Keep it, Suki. I'll run the patrols and order everybody around when you're gone, but that's it. You're the First now, and you will be when you get back; you might as well be for all the time in between, too."

"Mikari," Suki said, ready to argue; but that was as far as she could get before the screaming started.

*

At first glance, it was almost impossible to tell what was happening; it could have been pirates, or bandits from the inner hills, or even signs of a tsunami about to come in to the bay. But after a moment Suki caught a glimpse of sunlight on red metal, especially noticeable when the crowd was mostly robed in blue.

She rushed the closest Fire Nation soldier with both fans out and a snarl on her face that probably looked stupid, taking advantage of a temporary gap between clumps of fleeing people to catch him by surprise. Fire Nation armor was good, but not perfect; she jabbed a fan into the gap by his armpit, which probably cracked a couple of ribs, and then ducked down and swiped the other into the back of his knee, knocking him to the ground before he'd even recovered enough to take a swing at her. When he was down, she smashed a fan into his other side, and definitely broke something; he probably wouldn't die, but he wasn't going to feel like getting up for a while, either.

The next soldier was a woman, and Suki didn't get the chance to ambush her, so it took a little bit longer to take her down, and there were actual blows exchanged. Eventually, though, Suki managed to strike her wrist hard enough to make her drop her sword with a curse, and it was all over after that; Suki was just turning to pick out a good number three when she realized the village was on fire.

Sokka wasn't far away from the closest of the two burning houses, and Suki saw with a brief glow of pride that he had a pair of fans in his hands and had just given a resounding thwack to the knee of a young Fire Nation soldier with a wide scar over one eye. Katara was a few steps away, trying to hold off a Firebender with bending water that was rapidly steaming away in the relentless heat. Sokka shouted something Suki couldn't hear, and then Ayuko came around the house and rushed the bender from behind, leaving a long slash from her fan tips along part of his back.

It was fast, so fast Suki couldn't do a thing about it: the Firebender whirled around and sent a whip of flame curling around Ayuko, who raised her fans to shield her eyes and couldn't do anything but scream when the fire flared along her shoulder and neck.

Suki cursed and started running toward her, and almost as quickly skidded to a halt: Sokka was backing away, darting around the Firebender to yank a sobbing Ayuko along with him, and Katara's eyes were glowing blue-white, ridiculously bright even under the sunshine and next to the blazing fire.

"What is she-" Suki got out, as Sokka came sprinting toward her, and then he grabbed her elbow and started pulling her along, too.

"Come on, come on," he was saying, "she's doing her thing, all we have to do is get out of the way," and then he tugged both of them down behind an untouched house on the other side of the village center.

Ayuko had gotten past the initial shock of pain, and her sobs had turned into the slow breaths that would help her keep calm until her wounds could be taken care of. That meant it wasn't serious enough for her to need help right away; so Suki didn't feel guilty about peering back around the corner instead.

Katara wasn't even touching the ground anymore, and there was a localized curl of wind not quite tight enough to be called a globe that was lifting her long braid up behind her; her eyes were still blanked out with blue-white light. The fire had spread to another two houses, and Katara spread out her arms as though to catch the roaring flames up in her hands. Then she suddenly clenched her hands into fists, and the blaze - the entire five-house inferno - was extinguished all at once, with an almost anticlimactic hiss.

The Firebender in front of her was smart enough to be backing away, but not smart enough to run; he drew back an arm, instead, and punched a flame at Katara.

Or he tried, at least - she pulled the same trick on the fire blooming around his fist that she had on the houses, and it fizzled out before he even finished the move. Then she started a move of her own, something graceful and long-lined that had a general feel of pull to it.

For a moment after, nothing happened, and the Firebender stepped forward with renewed confidence on his face. But then the trees began to rustle - the trees between Katara and the bay, Suki realized suddenly, and a moment later a huge stream of water came gushing through the leaves.

It wasn't just a random flood; it was contained, caught into a long whiplike shape by the continued movements of Katara's hands, and it curled around the Firebender and knocked his arms out of form.

"She can't stop us all!" shouted the young soldier with the eye-scar, with a look of such avaricious singlemindedness on his face that Suki grimaced. "Get her!"

But he had barely taken a step in Katara's direction when there was a whole series of those rustling splashes, and more water burst through the trees, loops and loops of it. It all merged with the whip Katara was already bending, and with a whirl of her arms, the water - at least a pond's worth, now - curled up into the air behind her. She was still floating, her eyes still glowing, and that close little wind was still whipping her hair and clothes around her; with the huge blade of water curving over her head and her arms poised, ready to drive it forward, she looked distinctly intimidating.

Suki was used to thinking of Katara as good-natured, friendly, maybe a little awkward under all her responsibility; but looking at her now, Suki felt herself shiver. She had always had faith that the Avatar would be able to end the war, but it was somehow different to know that this girl right in front of her was the one who could do it.

There was a still moment, and then Katara brought her arms down, curling them around each other in a motion reminiscent of a cyclone.

"Oh boy," Suki said, and couldn't resist the urge to clap her hands together gleefully.

*

The Fire Nation soldiers fled before the spinning wall of water that Katara sent whirling back toward the bay - and Suki couldn't blame them for it, it was really the only sensible thing to do.

"Go," Ayuko said.

Suki turned to look at her. "Are you sure?" she said.

"It's just my neck, it's not that bad," Ayuko said - a blatant lie, Suki could see how nasty the blistering was; but Ayuko saw her looking, and glared. "It's not good, but it's not like I can't walk myself to the healer's. You should go after her."

Suki wavered, and then gave in. "All right. If - if we don't come back - no, don't give me that look, I don't mean it like that. If we end up leaving now, tell my mother-" She paused, mind suddenly full of half-formed messages. "Tell her I'm sorry to go without saying goodbye," Suki decided at last. "She knows everything else."

*

The bay wasn't far, and Suki and Sokka got to the shore not long after the soldiers - quickly enough that quite a few of them were still boarding their ship, arms raised defensively against the water Katara sent whipping around them.

The Avatar was certainly thorough; she pulled the bay up after the ship like she was shaking out a rug, and the ship barely made it out into the open ocean in time to avoid the worst of the wave. Once the ship was out of sight, though, Katara went down like a sack of potatoes, and Suki was only just quick enough to keep her head from hitting the rock it had been headed for.

"Well," Suki said, staring down at Katara's placid face where it rested against her forearm. "Do that a lot, does she?"

"She is starting to make sort of a habit out of it," Sokka admitted. "Better not push our luck, though; we should get out of here before that ship comes back."

Suki glanced involuntarily at the path that led back home. "But - if they attack the village again-"

She turned to look at Sokka only to see that he was regarding her with a sort of narrow-eyed, assessing expression. "Look, there's a couple things I should probably tell you," he said. "This isn't the first time we've seen this ship - you saw the guy with the scar over his eye, right? It's pretty distinctive, I remember him from last time. He attacked us when we first started sailing north, and Katara froze his ship in the ice so that we could get away. But he's obviously still following us." He paused and gave the far side of the bay a long stare. "Somehow I'm pretty sure he'll be watching for us, and he's not going to bother with Manamota if he knows we've left."

"Good," Suki said decisively; that was a pretty big weight off her mind. "You said a couple of things - what's the other one?"

Sokka grimaced. "Well, there's - there's somebody that we, uh, aren't supposed to leave without."

"Then let's go get - whoever it is," Suki said, quite reasonably. Katara was starting to stir a little, which was good, because she was also starting to get a bit heavy.

"I - can't tell where he is," Sokka said, which made no sense at all, but then Katara made a face and pressed the heel of one hand against her temple, and Suki decided to let it go for the moment.

"It happened again, didn't it," she murmured; Suki nodded, even though it hadn't sounded at all like a question. Katara opened her eyes, peering up at Suki and then flicking over to Sokka, and then, oddly, over to the blank air on Suki's other side. "Are we on the water already, or is that just me?"

"... I think it's just you," Sokka said. "If you're going to throw up, aim away from me, okay?"

"No, no, I'm okay," Katara insisted, and struggled up to a sitting position. "Just a little dizzy."

"Can you bend?" Suki asked, because if she couldn't, that was going to seriously lower their odds of escaping from a steamship - but Katara stretched out a hand and pulled a small ripple of water into a brief globe before letting it splash back into the bay.

"I'm not going to do it all night or anything," she said, "but I'll manage for a while."

Together, they pulled the canoe out from the underbrush where it had been stowed. Suki paused for a moment before she got in. She could swim quite well, but she'd never really been on a boat before; her father had been a farmer, not a fisherman, and even the fishing boats hardly ever left the bay.

"Come on," Sokka said, already settled in the bow, and waved her in.

Suki stepped off the island and into the boat, keeping a hand out to help the Avatar climb in behind her, and wondered how her life had gotten so absurd so quickly.

***

Zuko paced back and forth in the bridge, so angry his hands were starting to smoke. So close - so close. The complexity of the trick the world had played on him almost defied belief: that one idiot Waterbender, the key to his desperate effort to please his father in the Avatar's persistent absence, had turned out to be the Avatar, and this truth had been revealed to him just in time for his troops to flee back to the ship before the Avatar could kill them all. He was still empty-handed, still chasing the same bender; but now he truly understood just how important it was to catch her. He wished for the dozenth time that they had all five boilers running - it was the worst possible time to be stuck limping along on just two.

Uncle Iroh was there, too, with his habitual tea, doing that thing where he conspicuously said nothing and just watched Zuko pace over the top of his cup, eyes knowing. Zuko hated it when he did that.

"A complete waste of time," Zuko spat, after he could no longer take the eyes.

"I wouldn't say that," Uncle Iroh said calmly, contrary as always. "We now know a great deal more than we did."

"Oh, yes, a great deal more about the Avatar who escaped us," Zuko ground out, throwing his hands in the air with small puffs of flame.

"Do not underestimate the power of knowledge, Prince Zuko," Uncle Iroh said maddeningly. "The previous Avatar must have died; we no longer search for an old man with Airbender tattoos, we merely follow the Waterbender we were already tracking. A much simpler task! I would think you would be pleased."

"Pleased? Pleased, that she evaded us again," Zuko shouted. "Yes, of course, I'm overjoyed."

Uncle Iroh gave him a skeptical look. "I would not have guessed that," he said.

Zuko had to stop pacing for a minute, so that he could concentrate fully on resisting the urge to claw his own eyes out. He heard the rustling sound of clothes shifting, and the soft footfalls, so it didn't catch him by surprise when Uncle Iroh's hand landed on his shoulder.

"Always so hard on yourself," Uncle Iroh said, and it sounded oddly sad to Zuko. "Before, we did not know; we were not prepared, and she escaped. Now, we know, and we will be prepared. The power of knowledge, nephew."

Zuko sighed, and pressed his hands against the wall; his palms were cooling now, enough that he could feel the chill of the metal. "Yes, Uncle. Next time, she won't get away," he said, and hoped it was true.





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Chapter Four: Shinsotsu

They sped out of the bay like they were flying, and the steamship, which had nearly vanished around the island in the hurry to get away from Katara's cyclone, was nowhere near catching up; it had fallen back to the far horizon by the time the sun set. But the Avatar State had taken its toll, and Katara slept until Suki shook her awake the next morning.

It took Katara a moment to pry her eyes open enough to see Suki leaning over her, still in her green battle dress, but with her face wiped clean of paint, and wearing an apologetic expression. "I figured it was best not to try to give you a watch last night," she said, sympathetic, "but you've been sleeping for a pretty long time, and - well, the ship's catching up again. The current's been pretty good so far, but us paddling just isn't going to cut it."

Katara felt wretched, groggy and cramped; there was enough space in the canoe for two people to sleep while one sat watch, but only just barely, and it was pure luck that their fourth passenger was intangible, and didn't need to be inside the canoe to keep up with it. But when she looked over her shoulder, past the stern, she could see that Suki was right: the Fire Nation ship was inching closer, the sky to the southwest smudged with coal smoke.

It felt like she bent for weeks, though it was only a few days; she took short breaks to sleep, but Suki and Sokka paddling just wasn't fast enough to keep them away from the ship. To make matters worse, on the fourth day out from Kyoshi Island, they discovered that Sokka had finished off the last of their food when he'd eaten at the beginning of his watch.

"I was hungry," he protested. "I'm a growing boy, okay? Look, here's me, ready and willing to replace it," and he dug his fishing spear out from where it had settled at the bottom of the canoe.

Suki was sitting in the middle, which was good, because otherwise Katara might have thrown herself across the canoe and strangled him. "Somehow I think we probably shouldn't take the time to stop and fish," Suki said, dry. She had evidently taken over map duties from Sokka while Katara had been sleeping, and now she was peering down at the southern continent, eyes flicking from city to city. "Besides, docking in an Earth Kingdom harbor will keep that ship off our backs for a while - they won't dare follow us in, not when they're all by themselves."

Katara felt like she'd spent the past three days looking over her shoulder, but she couldn't help but look again, and thought for a moment that she might cry just from exhaustion and frustration. She had been bending the canoe forward as fast as she could, and for longer than she had ever bent anything before, and it still wasn't enough; the steamship had always crept just a little bit closer every time she checked, and, true to form, it was closer this time, too.

She turned back around at the touch of Suki's hand on her shoulder, and found Suki giving her a understanding, almost fond look. "Even Avatars get tired," Suki said quietly, and then smiled. "Besides, if you could do everything by yourself, there wouldn't have been any reason to ask me to come along." She glanced down at the map again, and said, "Shinsotsu's our best bet, I think - east," and she pointed off to the right, along the faint thin blur of land in the distance. "We've been following the edge of this peninsula for days; we should be able to get to the city by tonight."

They did get to the harbor soon after nightfall, and a good thing it was, too; the Fire Nation ship kept on pulling steadily closer as the sun sank. The early evening was very clear, and they could see Shinsotsu from miles away. The lighthouse was visible first, as a small spot of light low against the darkening sky, and it probably saved their lives; the ship was undoubtedly within catapult range by then, but didn't attack, evidently trying to avoid catching the attention of Shinsotsu's navy.

The wind picked up as the sky darkened, and it would have been a relief to get inside the arms of the harbor even if the steamship hadn't been following them, just to escape the choppy water.

"Ha-ha," Sokka said, punching a fist into the air.

Katara let her arms drop with a sigh, feeling the water slide out of her grip and, for once, not sorry to let it go. "Yeah, you win. Now start paddling."

*

They decided to avoid the actual docks, partly because none of them knew how to dock a boat; Manamota had not had any docks, Aang had never had to land anything but a sky bison, and the ice shelves near the village were the closest Katara and Sokka had ever come. Katara also figured it couldn't hurt to avoid attention as much as possible: another crowd of people eager to meet the Avatar might give the Fire Nation soldiers following them a chance to sneak into the city.

Shinsotsu and its harbor were surrounded by forests, which was good; Suki steered them off to one side of the docks, and they carried the canoe up over the rocky shore and under the trees.

It didn't occur to Katara that there could be other good reasons to keep a low profile until they packed up and started heading for the city. But barely ten minutes into the walk, Suki, in the front, came to a sudden stop, throwing a hand out to keep Sokka from walking blithely on past. "Quiet," she whispered sharply, and sank down into a crouch, yanking Sokka down beside her. Katara blinked, and then dropped; she hadn't noticed anything amiss, but then she'd just finished thoroughly tiring herself out for four days straight.

Suki led them forward, staying low to the ground the whole way. It must have rained not long ago: the ground was soft, which was a nice stroke of luck. Katara was too exhausted to keep track of where she was putting her feet, but the twigs she kept stepping on just sank into the dirt instead of cracking.

"There," Suki murmured, after another minute or two of stealth, and reached back to pull Katara forward until she was looking through the same gap in the undergrowth that Suki was.

Fire Nation soldiers - there was no mistaking it. A whole battalion, unless Katara was seeing double; for a moment, she was half-ready to cry again, thinking the ship had somehow, impossibly, beaten them here even after those four horrible days, but then logic reasserted itself. The ship had fallen back before they'd gotten anywhere near the harbor. This had to be a whole new set of soldiers.

Sokka was frowning through the branches, looking startled and dismayed; but Suki seemed far less surprised.

"I'd hoped they hadn't gotten this far," she muttered, but she sounded more resigned than anything.

"This far?" Sokka hissed. "How have they gotten anywhere near here? The map-"

"Is old," Suki reminded him gently. "The cities are all in about the right place, but - when did you get that thing, anyway? It's only got the three oldest Fire Nation colonies on it. The front's moved just a bit since then," and Suki lifted a hand to convey the purported smallness of the change with thumb and forefinger, voice gone dry and amused.

Katara glanced at Sokka, who was looking back at her with wide eyes. She'd known, of course, that things had changed since the map had been made - had probably changed even in the relatively few years since Father and the other Southern Water Tribe warriors had sailed away. And she'd known she wasn't going to be able to avoid the war, not when she was the one who was supposed to end it. But she had imagined a few peaceful, studious years learning to be the Avatar first; and, more importantly, a relatively straightforward trip to the places she'd have to go to do it. And now it was becoming abundantly clear that "straightforward" was not going to be the right word for this journey.

They managed to skirt around the battalion successfully, though there was one tense moment when Katara's braid got snagged on a branch; she managed not to shout at the sudden harsh yank, but the jerk of motion caught one soldier's eye, and she had to freeze in place for a long moment, hair still caught, before the soldier decided she'd been imagining things.

"Okay, go," Sokka whispered behind her when he had unhooked her hair from the twig, and they crept past the battalion and out onto the road to Shinsotsu with no further close calls.

"We'll be safe when we get to Shinsotsu," Suki assured them. "The Fire Nation does patrols, reconnaissance, that sort of thing, but they haven't actually captured much territory in this area - at least, not that I've heard."

"... How much do you hear, in Manamota?" Sokka asked, skeptical.

Suki pursed her lips and gave him a flat look. "Enough," she said. "There are Warriors of Kyoshi on all the islands, not just Kyoshi Island; and the fishing trade brings us a fair amount of news, too."

Sokka raised his hands defensively. "Okay, okay, just checking. I mean, no matter how little you know, you know more than we do."

"Very true," Suki said equably, and set off down the road.

*

Shinsotsu was walled, and rather impressively so; it was relatively easy to get good walls when you had Earthbenders around to build them, and the Earth Kingdoms were famous for their walled cities. The most famous was Ba Sing Se - Shinsotsu had nothing like that kind of scale, of course, but it was certainly better than anything Katara had managed to put up by herself with ice at home.

They had to pass a guard to get through the gate, and Katara worried briefly that he would demand a reason why they were entering the city; somehow she suspected that "hiding from a Fire Nation warship that's probably lurking just outside the harbor" wouldn't go over very well. She was trying to compose a decent-sounding lie about visiting relatives that would also explain the obviously Water Tribe clothes when they got to the front of the line, and the guard took one look at Suki and grinned.

"A Warrior of Kyoshi, aren't you?" he said. "Don't often see you people without the paint."

"Well, I'm not planning to kill anybody today," Suki said, tone matter-of-fact.

The guard chuckled. "Name's Ryo," he said. "I've got a second cousin down in Namiya; one of her aunts on the other side of the family is in the order down there."

"Well, the next time you get in touch, give her my greetings from Kyoshi Island," Suki said.
"The island itself," Ryo said, sounding moderately awed.

"The village itself," Suki admitted. "I pass her house every day on the way to the training hall."

Ryo shook his head, evidently temporarily speechless; Katara couldn't help but wonder what he'd do if he knew another Avatar was standing right in front of him. "Well, by all means, go on in," he said at last, motioning toward the open gate. "You and your friends - and enjoy your stay."

"I'm sure we will," Suki said, beaming beatifically.

*

"Now this is the life," Sokka said happily, cramming another couple hunks of rice into his mouth as soon as the last word was out of the way.

Suki laughed, but had to admit that he was at least a little bit right. Before they'd gotten here, the closest Suki had ever come to a proper city was occasional visits to other islands; Kyoshi Island was ruled by the mayor of Kyotsu, on the eastern side of the island, and that was really more of a town.

But Shinsotsu was a genuine city. The market alone had probably been the size of the whole of Kyotsu, and they had wandered it for hours. Suki now had several new sets of clothes - "Now I'll have something to wear when I'm washing my battle robes," she had said, satisfied, when they'd gotten them, and Sokka had just about choked - and Katara and Sokka each had a few green things, and a few blue things brought up from the islands that lacked the white accents of Water Tribe clothes. Katara had paid for most of it, insisting that Suki wouldn't have to be buying anything at all if they hadn't left in such a rush; luckily for her, the Earth Kingdoms had to constantly adjust to changing currencies between the lot of them, and the proprietors were willing to take her money even though it was old and odd-shaped.

And now they were sitting on a roof in the business district, eating hot rice and soup and watching the sun set over the ocean. There was nobody in the building now, of course - they were close enough to the city wall to be able to look over it, and the businesses that were open after sundown were bound to be closer to the middle of the city.



Katara set her bowl down and sighed, and then glanced over to the empty air on the side of her where Suki wasn't. "You've been awfully quiet," she said to it, holding up one finger back in Suki's direction.

Suki blinked, and then, truly desperate, turned to Sokka for guidance.

He was grimacing a little, and leaned over to murmur in her ear, "Remember that second thing I never got a chance to tell you?"

"If it was that the new Avatar is crazy," Suki said doubtfully, "I think you probably should have made a bigger effort to squeeze it in somewhere."

Sokka sighed, and glanced past Suki to where Katara was gently saying, "It is?" to nothing at all. "I - don't know what to tell you. She says the last Avatar's following her around - helping her out, teaching her things. And she ... talks to him sometimes, and then tells me things-" Sokka made a small gesture of confusion with both hands. "They sound true; I don't know, I've got no way to check."

"Oh," Katara was saying, looking at the air sympathetically.

Suki took a deep breath, and made herself think about it for a moment. She'd seen Katara touch some part of Kyoshi, back at home; was another Avatar speaking to her really all that ridiculous?

"He's been here before," Katara said, and it took Suki a second to realize she was talking to them again. "Aang, I mean," she clarified, obviously having noticed Suki's confusion. "The last Avatar; he says it's changed a lot."

"Well, it's been at least a hundred years since the last time he saw it," Sokka said, "so I can't say I'm surprised."

"... It has?" Suki said. "I thought you said he was the last Avatar - he must have been an Airbender. If he died in the massacre, then why has it taken so long for another Avatar-" She stopped: Katara was grimacing and shaking her head, ever so minutely. "Oh - uh, he can see me, right?" Suki asked. "And hear me?"

Katara nodded.

Suki followed her glance into the seemingly empty air next to her, and said, "I'm sorry," as sincerely as she could given that she was talking to - well, what looked to her, at least, like nothingness. "That was - thoughtless of me."

"Oh, great; now you're going to start doing it, too," Sokka grumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Suki shot him a look, and then glanced back to where this Avatar Aang was purportedly sitting - and then past it, to a sudden motion beyond the wall. Light from the setting sun, she told herself, except there was nothing in the forest for it to reflect off like that - or there shouldn't have been, at least. She reached out to touch Katara's elbow, and pointed. "Look."

***

Katara looked, and at first, she saw nothing, still reeling a little bit from the sudden zig-zag in conversation. Aang had been quiet all day, and Katara had been too tired to think much of it; now, though, when she finally had a chance to sit back and relax, belly full, knowing she'd sleep somewhere more comfortable than a canoe tonight, she had asked him about it, and stumbled yet again into sensitive territory. She kept forgetting that Aang had spent relatively little time aware during the hundred years it had been since he'd gone out of the world, especially since some of that time had been in the spirit world; to him, it had to feel like it had been only a few years, relatively speaking, since the last time he'd seen Shinsotsu, and yet it had changed enormously.

She had also forgotten that they had never told Suki about Aang. He had been unobtrusive during their flight from Kyoshi Island, and Katara had been concentrating so hard on speeding up the canoe that she probably wouldn't have paid much attention even if he had tried to talk to her, so it hadn't come up.

And now they hadn't even gotten to finish that conversation, because there was something in the trees outside the city wall that Suki evidently found interesting.

Katara let her gaze go uncentered, relaxed, taking in as much area as possible; she knew any sudden movement would catch her eye, and a moment later, it did.

"That?" Katara said.

Suki nodded. "Somebody in the woods, I'd say," she said, and then shifted her arm, pointing further along the wall. "And there's more of them - there, and there, at the very least."

"Man, we have the worst luck ever," Sokka said. "I'll bet you anything it's that battalion from this morning."

Suki looked troubled. "If they're not just patrolling - if they're scouting the walls to plan an attack-" She paused speculatively. "I'd hate to be disrespectful of the - uh, other Avatar, but could he get down there?"

"Wait, really?" Sokka said, eyebrows practically up to his hairline. "Seriously? Our plan is to send Katara's invisible dead friend to check it out for us?"

"Well, if he's not real, then we really don't have to worry about him being seen," Katara snapped, a little bit stung. She knew she'd been asking him to believe a lot of stuff he couldn't be sure of, but she'd thought he was starting to get used to Aang; evidently, she'd been wrong.

"Hey, come on, I didn't mean it like that," Sokka said, and made a big show of looking in approximately Aang's direction. "I believe in you, invisible guy."

"Thanks," Aang said wryly, from Katara's other side.

"He says thanks," Katara passed along, and then looked at Aang. He'd lost the worst of the somber look he'd been wearing when he'd told her about Shinsotsu, though he wasn't quite smiling yet. "What do you think?"

"Looking around for a minute? I think I can handle it," Aang said, and there was the smile. "Back in no time," and he drifted off the roof, over the next two buildings, and through the wall.

*

It took about two minutes for Aang to get back; Katara couldn't help but fill them by imagining all the terrible things the Fire Nation soldiers could be doing right that moment, which made it a bit anticlimactic when Aang floated back through the wall and shouted, "Suki's right, they're scouting the wall." He drifted closer, close enough for Katara to see the troubled look on his face clearly. "They're planning an assault for tomorrow morning - I heard two of them talking about it."

Suki looked at her questioningly, evidently having noticed her sudden turn to the side, and Katara nodded in response. "You were right," she said. "We've got to do something." Sokka was making a face, and she frowned at him. "We have to - I know we were trying to avoid attention, but we can't let this place get attacked because of it."

"No, no, I know," Sokka sighed. "Just - why is it always us?"

"Because we're lucky that way," Suki said, smiling.

*

Shinsotsu was the capital city of the Shinchi Kingdom; like almost all the other capital cities in the Earth Kingdoms, there was a walled palace near the city center. A walled palace with lots of guards.

"Now might be a good time to bust out the Avatar thing," Sokka suggested, but Katara shook her head.

"How?" she said. "I can't just do the glowing bit on command - and I think it might be a bad idea to do that inside, anyway. And I don't think I'll be able to impress them with my knowledge of past Avatars; this isn't Kyoshi Island, it's been a long time since there was an Avatar from around here." At least a couple thousand years, in point of fact: when Katara let her thoughts wander, she started looking at the city through the eyes of a young man in green who called himself Gaoshun and was bewildered by the lack of open plains where they were standing.

"Fine, fine," Sokka said, "we can be nobodies."

The palace was enormous; the tallest towers were at least as tall as the city lighthouse, curving rooftips dark against the sunset sky, and the courtyards and gardens were clearly huge, since the closest hall was quite a ways away. There were guards stationed all around the wall, and at least a dozen at the main gate.

"We need to speak to the king and queen," Suki said, authoritative, before the guards even had a chance to demand anything. Katara had never been so glad that she had thought to ask Suki to join them as she was at that moment; she and Sokka had never been to a city before, let alone a palace, and neither of them would ever have dared be so insistent.

"Petitioning hours are over," the closest guard said dismissively. "Come back some other time."

"It's urgent," Suki said. "Can't we just-"

The guard gave her a flat look from underneath his helmet. "Recklessly assume whatever's on your mind is more important than anything bothering everybody else who has to wait until tomorrow? You can, but I wouldn't advise it."

Katara grimaced. It was more important, but she was starting to suspect that it wouldn't help to tell him so now; people had probably made up far more impressive lies than "the Fire Nation's going to attack tomorrow" in an attempt to get an audience. "Please," she said.

Clearly, something of her desperation must have come across; the guard stared at her, and then pursed his lips. "There are petitioners' rooms in the palace complex," he said after a moment. "For people who have to travel from the outskirts of the kingdom. If you were willing to wait to speak to them, you could stay there, and you'd get one of the first slots tomorrow morning."

Katara glanced at Suki, and saw the same dismay she was sure was on her own face mirrored on Suki's. The first slot tomorrow morning might be early enough; but then again, it might not, and the city guard would need some time, once they'd been warned, to get into position.

"Okay," Sokka said brightly.

Katara whipped her head around to stare at him. "Sokka-"

He grinned. "The petitioners' rooms will be just fine," he continued, and then bowed to the guard. "Thank you so much for helping us."

The guard's name turned out to be Yutan; he led them through the gate and across the enormous stone courtyard to a set of small buildings off to the side. "Petitioners' quarters," he said. "Someone will come get you tomorrow morning."

Katara waited until they had gotten inside and closed the door to turn to Sokka. "What was that?"

"I would be happy to explain," Sokka said, beaming. "Where are the king and queen? Inside the palace. Where were we, before I executed my genius move? Outside the palace. Where are we now, post-genius move?"

"Inside the palace," Katara admitted, unable to help smiling a little. "All right, fine, it worked. Now what do we do?"

"... I hadn't really gotten that far yet," Sokka said.

***

"You do realize that you'll have to admit that he exists, if this works," Suki whispered to Sokka.

They had changed into their new Earth Kingdom clothes - or, in Suki's case, had traded Kyoshi-style battle robes for more casual dress - so as to blend in a little better, and now they were outside the petitioners' quarters, pressed against the wall and waiting for a whistling guard to pass. Katara was a few feet down, and waiting for the invisible Avatar Aang to tell her when the way was clear.

It had been Katara's idea to use Aang as a lookout to sneak into the actual palace, and Sokka had been unable to argue with the logic of using an undetectable person as their scout. Or, at least, he'd been unable to argue with it without sounding like he thought Aang didn't exist, which wouldn't have gone over well - not ever, and especially not after he'd insisted the opposite just that afternoon.

Sokka sighed. "Yeah, yeah," he murmured back, rolling his eyes. He hesitated afterward, and Suki saw the telltale signs that he was about to say something serious in the tightness around his eyes and the nervous slant of his mouth. "It's not that I think she's lying," he said slowly, "it's - just so hard to believe, you know? I keep forgetting that it's-" and Suki could tell he was fighting not to stick supposedly in there anywhere, "-true."

"Well, after this, you won't have to believe," Suki said practically. "You'll know, one way or the other."

Sokka looked at her, expression unreadable; but then Katara waved them forward, so Suki had no chance to ask what he was thinking.

They crept around the rest of the petitioners' rooms, and then sprinted across a small gap to the cover of a little stand of trees while the nearest guard had her head turned away so that she could scratch her neck. Sokka gave Suki a flat look over his shoulder; she nobly resisted the urge to smirk at him. One point to Aang.

They inched closer to the main palace building, and then had to wait for a while behind the corner of another wall while Aang went to figure out what entrance would be best. Katara had to be getting sick of relaying his every movement back to the two of them, but she did it anyway. Then they all hushed up; there must have been a shift change or something, because several groups of guards went by in as many minutes, in both directions.

Aang must have come back at some point, because the moment the last guard was out of earshot, Katara turned to them and whispered, "Servants' entrance - around the corner, past the big peach tree."

Katara yanked them down once, a moment before a guard turned his head and yelled to someone across the courtyard, and Suki couldn't resist darting a quick glance at Sokka: he was looking at Katara, who was herself watching the guard, with an expression somewhere between rue and awe on his face.

They made it to the servants' entrance without incident, and slipped in and down the nearest hall - and nearly into the arms of a servant who was balancing multiple trays of food. "Oh, good," he said, and shoved the trays in their direction; Katara and Sokka, who were closest to him, had to catch them in self-defense, just to keep them from spilling hot rice everywhere. "They were supposed to send somebody down to get these - just take them to the upper hall, you know the one."

"Indeed we do," Sokka lied, recovering, as he passed one tray back to Suki. "We'll just - go do that now."

"Glad to hear it," the servant said, laughing, and clapped him on the shoulder before turning around to go back the way he had come.

"So, what's Aang got to say about that?" Sokka said, once the servant was gone.

Katara glared at him. "He was behind us, making sure none of the guards outside noticed us coming in," she said. "It's not like he can be in two places at once."

"Oh, yeah, no, of course," Sokka said, "dead and invisible's fine, but in two places at once is totally ridiculous."

Katara's mouth went pinched, but Suki stepped in before she could say anything. "Okay, okay," Suki said, nudging Sokka in the elbow with her tray. "The point is, it all worked out fine, and now we look like we have a reason to be walking around in here, which is a good thing."

"I don't know," Katara said. "I mean, we are supposed to know where we're going - if we accidentally wander off to, oh, the dungeons or something, somebody's probably going to notice we're not supposed to be there."

"Then we'll pick a room, and wait there; you can send Aang out to look for the king and queen's chambers - if that's all right, Avatar Aang," and this Suki directed to the room in general, since she had no idea where he was standing. "Then, when he knows where it is, he can come back and we can go right there."

"He's over here," Katara said, gesturing to the air next to her, "and yeah, that sounds good."

They meandered down the hall a little way, until they found a plain-looking door; Sokka shoved it open with his shoulder, and then went suddenly still. "Oh," he said. "Uh. Beg pardon, your majesties?"

***

Mei looked up from a truly excellent dumpling to see a confused-looking servant boy at the door with a large tray of rice and vegetables, and two serving girls next to him, peering over his shoulders. She was about to excuse him and go on eating, and then she looked a little more closely. His hair was unusual - shaved close on the sides, with the top tied back into a tail - and his eyes distinctly blue; not suspicious in and of themselves, but combined with the fact that his clothes, while the right shade of green, were not the same style as the palace servants' uniforms-

Mei twitched her fingers in toward her palm, and the guard by the door obediently grabbed the boy's upper arm and yanked him into the room.

"Hey," he cried, "what are you doing?" and he tried to push himself back, a handful of rice spilling from his tray.

The short-haired girl behind him was more direct: she dumped the contents of her tray into the hall, and then reversed the motion and slammed the short edge of the tray into the guard's side. She grunted and turned toward her in response, just in time to get the flat of the tray across the head.

"Wait - Suki!" cried the long-haired girl, and grabbed the short-haired girl's arm before she could bring the tray down again. "Stop, stop!"

Suki did, albeit reluctantly - a bit of an unusual move for an assassin, Mei thought, which meant she and Goro probably ought to talk to them, instead of just arresting them. The guard on the other side of the door was not on quite the same page, though, and the moment Suki lowered her tray, he took the opening and jabbed his sword in.

Suki let go of the tray and whipped something - a fan? - out of the cloth at her waist, smacking the sword aside like it was an insect.

"Stop!" the long-haired girl shouted again, raising her arms, and then did a move. A bending move, it looked like, but definitely not Earthbending; water flew in a sudden arc from the hand basin by the wall, and splashed the guard full in the face. He stumbled back, spitting, and Suki lowered her fan as soon as he moved away.

Mei glanced at Goro; he was looking back at her, eyebrows raised. A Waterbender - there hadn't been a Waterbender in Shinsotsu for years, not even just passing through. There hadn't been anybody from either Water Tribe at all, for that matter. They had heard about the fleet of ships that had sailed up to the northern front a few years ago, but that fleet had gone around the Shinchi peninsula - they hadn't come anywhere near Shinsotsu. And that Suki girl had an iron fan; she might not have had the face-paint, but an iron fan meant a Warrior of Kyoshi, more often than not.

"All right, stand down," Goro said, and the other guards stationed around the room, most of whom had started raising their swords, reluctantly relaxed.

"Quite a welcoming committee," the boy snorted, yanking his arm out of the first guard's grip.

"I hope you'll forgive our caution," Mei said, letting her voice go a little dry. "Enough assassination attempts create habits that are hard to break."

"Assassination attempts?" said the girl, exchanging a concerned glance with the boy.

"I did tell you the Fire Nation's been pushing south," Suki said. She had tucked her fan away again, and was watching the guard she'd hit with the tray with a measuring sort of look on her face.

"Well, we're not here to assassinate you," the girl said.

Mei eyed her. "Then why are you here? And, if it's not too much to ask: who are you?"

"Katara," the long-haired girl said. "And this is my brother, Sokka, and our friend, Suki. And we're here to warn you."

***

Katara told them as much as she could without dragging the whole Avatar thing into it; the queen and king were already so suspicious that it didn't seem like a great time to start making claims she wasn't sure how to prove. Fortunately, she could cobble together decent motivation to travel out of Father being on the northern front and herself needing a Waterbending teacher.

When she was done, the king and queen just looked at her for a moment. The queen tapped her chopsticks thoughtfully against the rim of her bowl, and then shook her head, and Katara's heart sank. "We have no way to be certain that you're telling the truth - for all we know, this entire thing is a distraction designed to draw our attention to the northeast wall."

"But I'm a Waterbender," Katara said. "Why would I be helping the Fire Nation?"

"Who better to convince us than a Water Tribe prisoner?" the king said. "Perhaps everything is as you say; or perhaps you're a traitor, or they've paid you, or they have your family and have promised to set them free if you help them trick us."

Katara threw up her hands, and narrowly resisted the urge to scream. "Fleeing from the Fire Nation is why we came to this city in the first place," she cried. "That stupid ship following us-"

"A Fire Nation ship?" the queen said, sitting forward. "Do you know where it is now?"

Katara blinked. "Probably still outside the harbor," she said. "They've been following us since we left the South Pole; I doubt they've given up and sailed away already just because we've been hiding in here for a few hours."

The queen set her chopsticks down, and gave the king a sideways glance. "Possibly another trap," she said, "but much easier to investigate with fewer people than the first one."

The king chuckled, to Katara's surprise; their expressions had been fairly somber, up until this point. "And a short, safe trip, to the city lighthouse," he said. "You want to go see for yourself."

"It's only logical," said the queen, and smiled.

***

Mei did take some precautions: she took three guards with her, and changed out of her formal dinner robes and into a spare guard uniform. It wasn't far at all to the lighthouse, which was out on one of the arms of the natural harbor that made Shinsotsu such a convenient port; all she had to do was show her face to the old keeper, and he let them up.

There were a few hundred stairs at the very least - Mei had never counted them. The boy - Sakka? Sokka? - grumbled under his breath most of the way up, until his sister told him to shut up. Mei grinned to herself, and said nothing.

The lighthouse keeper did have a spyglass at the top, propped up next to the basin that held the great flame. Mei turned away from the fire to let her eyes adjust to the dark as best they could, and she didn't have to scan the sea for long to catch sight of a faint glimmer that wasn't moonlight on the waves, and the dark shape that held it.

"There," Suki said at almost the same moment, pointing out over the water. "Lights - from a cabin, maybe, or the bridge."

Mei took the spyglass from where it rested against the stone, and opened it up. The light was indeed from the bridge, and the angle was perfect; Mei couldn't have asked for better. The spyglass was a good one, too - hardly any warping or bubbling in the glass. Mei could see every face in the ship's bridge almost perfectly.

She looked at them all for a long moment, first checking and double-checking, and then simply staring. By the time she set the spyglass down, she was almost laughing aloud.

"Well?" said the boy impatiently, only to get an elbow in the ribs from his sister.

Mei did let out a laugh then. "Out of all the Fire Navy ships in the world, this is the only one that could have convinced me without a doubt," she said. "Extraordinary." She glanced back at them; she had to shield her eyes from the flame to see their bewildered expressions clearly. "And you didn't even know it," she said, and had to laugh again. "Of course not."

"Why?" said the sister - Katara, if Mei was remembering correctly. "What ship is it?"

"Crown Prince Zuko's ship," Mei said. "Or - well, perhaps not. I don't know what his title is anymore. But that's him; the scar is unmistakable. And General Iroh with him, if I'm not mistaken. I don't know why the Fire Lord would let the Dragon of the West go, but then perhaps it wasn't really up to him."

"And the crown prince's ship convinces you why?" Suki said. "Not that we want you to change your mind."

"Because he's not the crown prince anymore," Mei told them. "His father banished him, four years ago." She watched the beginnings of realization start to dawn across their faces. "No amount of coordination with the Fire Nation could ever get that ship to appear anywhere." She shook her head, and couldn't help but grin. "Congratulations. I believe you."

***

Katara let herself flop back onto the mattress, and stared up at the ceiling. If anyone had told her this morning that by evening, she would be sleeping in a palace after arguing a queen into spying on a prince from the closest lighthouse, she would have laughed herself sick. But here she was.

The moment they had gotten back inside the palace gate, the queen had pulled her borrowed helmet off and snagged a passing guardsman. "Get the captain of the city guard in the front hall," she had ordered him, "as soon as you can."

Katara hadn't been sure what to expect - whether the queen would want them to stay, to tell everything to the captain of the guard, or whether she'd want to keep them out of the way. She'd been trying to decide how hard to push for them to be included, and then the queen had turned around and smiled at her.

"I don't want to put you in any danger you'd rather avoid," she had said, "but I can't help thinking that a Waterbender would be a valuable asset, if there are any Firebenders in that battalion-"

"If you're going to ask her to fight," Suki had interrupted - very calmly, for someone who was overriding a queen, "you'll have to let us, too."

The queen had narrowed her eyes. "You're only-"

"A Warrior of Kyoshi?" Suki had said, yanking one of her fans out of her waistband.

"And your friend?" the queen had said skeptically, glancing at Sokka.

"He's a Warrior of Kyoshi, too," Suki had said.

The queen had looked doubtful. "He is?"

Suki hadn't wavered. "In training."

The queen had agreed eventually, but only on the condition that they allow a servant to show them to some rooms; she had remembered Katara's tale of their extended flight from Zuko, and insisted that if they were going to fight, they be well-rested. To be honest, Katara's eyelids had been drooping a little by that point, so it hadn't been much of a wrench to agree.

And now here she was, a guest in a palace, lying on the biggest bed she had ever seen in her life, looking up at an impressively intricate ceiling.

"So, a prince," Sokka said, from somewhere behind Katara's head. "Suddenly I feel so much more important."

Katara tipped her head back until she could see him, leaning on the doorway of the next room over; the servants had kindly given them an interconnected set of rooms. "A banished one," she said. She couldn't remember most of what had happened during the battle in Manamota, but she remembered the scar-eyed boy - or, at least, she remembered thinking that he looked familiar, and realizing he was the same boy who'd been yelling orders back when they'd frozen the ship into the ice. "Almost makes you feel sorry for him."

"Sorry for him?" Sokka said.

"I said almost," Katara said, rolling her eyes. "He's still Fire Nation, and he's still chasing us; I'm not an idiot. Just - you remember what the queen said."

"About his banishment," Suki filled in from the opposite doorway, when Sokka looked blank. "That it was his father who did it."

"Well, his father's the Fire Lord, he'd have to be the one to issue the order," Sokka argued, but he did look a little discomfited by the thought.

Father had technically had the authority to banish people at home, before he'd left for the northern front; but he'd never used it, as far as Katara knew, and she was having serious trouble imagining the kind of circumstances that would make him use it on her, or on Sokka.

"I guess he could have done something really awful," Katara said, but Suki started shaking her head before the sentence was even out of her mouth.

"The queen said it was at least four years ago," Suki said. "He couldn't have been more than, what, twelve? Thirteen?"

"Maybe he set somebody on fire or something," Sokka suggested. "Although you'd think that would be an afternoon's entertainment, in the Fire Nation."

"I've got a friend in the Fire Nation," Aang said. He was sitting at the foot of the bed, head propped up on his hands; he glanced at Katara when he spoke, and then suddenly grimaced. "Or I - I did, I had one. Kuzon. He must be dead by now."

Katara winced sympathetically, and sat up, holding out the now-habitual first finger to Sokka. "You grew up in the Air Temple, didn't you?" she said. "How'd you meet him?"

"They took me around to visit places," Aang said. "So I'd be familiar with all the nations - I mean, nobody told me that then, but I think that must be why. We'd swap dumplings; he didn't like the vegetable ones, and I don't - didn't - eat meat." He shrugged, a little awkwardly. "I don't know anything about Prince Zuko, I just - he might not be so bad. You never know. That's all."

Katara wished for at least the twentieth time that she could touch him, even if it was only for long enough to pat him on the shoulder.

"What's he say?" Sokka said.

"Just - not to make assumptions," Katara told him, and then made shooing motions with her hands. "Now come on, get out. We need to go to sleep, or we're not going to be any use to anybody tomorrow."

"Okay, okay, fine," Sokka said, and then looked vaguely into the air to Katara's right. "Good night, invisible dead guy. Enjoy creepily watching us sleep."

"He says he doesn't like watching you; you drool," Katara lied, without remorse; it was worth it, to watch Sokka sputter and Aang laugh.

***

They were out on the city wall before the sun came up; Sokka grumbled a little when a servant came to wake them, but it turned out to be for the best. The sky was barely starting to warm from purple to gold when the Fire Nation battalion burst from the trees.

Suki had to admire the guard captain's strategy - Captain Arato was his name, and he had gone the simple, practical route. There were the usual number of guards spaced out along the wall-top, standing at attention; but dozens and dozens more, probably even hundreds, were crammed below the line of the parapet, crunched into sitting positions with their weapons carefully lowered out of sight. Unless the Fire Nation could see through walls, they were unlikely to expect it - Suki guessed that even their worst-case scenario would mostly involve reinforcements being close by, since there just hadn't been enough time for the Fire Nation soldiers to realize their plan had been discovered.

And it really had been a good plan, before Aang had set its doom into motion. The battalion had clearly practiced it, or at least reviewed it, repeatedly; all the Fire Nation soldiers knew exactly where they were supposed to go, and went without hesitation. And the battalion was not alone: there were odd metal contraptions on wheels, gleaming faintly in the low light, with the insignia of the Fire Nation emblazoned on their sides. Not the usual Fire Nation tanks - Suki knew what those looked like, and these weren't the same thing.

"What are those?" Sokka whispered, peering over the bottom of the nearest crenellation as they got closer.

Suki yanked him back down. "I don't know. Probably something to help them get over the wall - but I doubt it matters. The faster they get up here, the faster we beat them."

The function of the machines became abruptly clear when they reached the foot of the city wall. The soldiers of Shinsotsu had started shouting the alarm and running along the wall, keeping up the pretense of being outnumbered, so Suki couldn't hear the machines. But she could feel the way they made the wall shake when they came up against the base, and the series of smaller vibrations that followed, a moment before a metal hook at least twice the size of her head came swinging into the battlement and caught against the stone.

"Well," Sokka said, staring at her through the broad loops of metal. "That answers that - I guess you were right."

"I guess I was," Suki agreed, and then darted up to catch the red-armored woman clambering over the hook in the throat with the side of one fan.

It was almost like a signal - all around her, the soldiers of Shinsotsu burst up from behind the parapet, and the tenor of the yelling changed from a vague approximation of panic to something closer to bloodthirsty.

With the trap sprung, they could stand, and Suki could get a proper look at the machines for the first time. They weren't especially exceptional in concept - in the most basic sense, they were ladders. But they were incredibly well-designed: by the look of things, the tops of the machines had opened to let the ladders unfold from inside, which they had done automatically. At every point where the ladders jointed, there were two collapsible hooks, and as the ladder had extended itself against the wall, those hooks had launched themselves into the stone and then unfolded - the smaller knocks Suki had felt echoing up through the wall. Even if they managed to unhook the anchors at the tops of the ladders, they'd never be able to tip the ladders off the wall. It was very clever, and probably would have caused serious problems if the Fire Nation troops hadn't been so severely outnumbered.

But they were. Captain Arato's relatively simple ploy had been very effective, and the first wave of Fire Nation soldiers was visibly surprised to see them. The woman Suki had jabbed in the throat tumbled forward over the parapet and onto the wall-top, coughing, and Sokka graciously slammed one of his own fans into the back of her head so that Suki could concentrate on the next soldier coming up the ladder. She could see Katara, beyond him, using a whip of water to yank on ankles and wrestle swords out of soldiers' hands.

In the end, they only really fought for about half an hour; the sun had only just risen, the sky blazing with red and gold, when somebody on the ground below began shouting for a retreat, and the ladders started to disengage from the wall. Hooks re-collapsed into joints even as the ladders folded themselves down, back into their wheeled bases, and a moment later their lids clicked shut over them, and they were hauled back into the forest by the fleeing Fire Nation soldiers.

"Man," Sokka said, shaking his head. "We have got to get us some of those."

Suki grinned at him, and then the soldier next to her yelled wordlessly in triumph, lifting her sword into the air, and a moment later they were caught up helplessly in the impromptu celebrations of the city guard.

***

"I can't tell you how grateful I am," the queen said, sounding gracious and regal once again. Katara wouldn't have quite believed she was the same woman who had been pounding an armored fist against the parapet and waving her bloody glaive in the air just that morning, if she hadn't seen it herself. She was back in her royal robes now, hair elegantly pinned, looking like she had never gutted anybody in her life.



"How grateful we both are," the king added, equally composed; like he hadn't been right next to her, knocking all the soldiers who tried to sneak up on her from behind off the wall with a flick of his stave.

"If you ever return here, the guards at the gate will know to admit you," the queen went on. "And if there's anything else we can do for you-"

Katara bit her lip. Her first impulse had been to thank them and say no, but when she gave the matter a moment's thought, there actually was something that came to mind. "Only if it isn't too much trouble," she said.

***

Zuko glared at the horizon. It had been hazy all morning - a contributing factor in Uncle Iroh's endless and irritating comments about the beauty of the sunrise - and the city of Shinsotsu was visible only as a vague, lumpy outline against the sky. But he knew where it was, and he couldn't help narrowing his eyes at it as he paced the deck.

He should have guessed what was happening when the canoe had changed course, but they had been so close to catching up, since the engineer had finally gotten them up to three boilers, instead of two. He supposed he had been hoping they'd corner the boat before it could get to Shinsotsu's harbor. But they hadn't, and now they were stuck sitting out here, waiting for that stupid little canoe to come out again. It was more frustrating than ever; the Avatar herself had been so close, so nearly within his grasp. But his ship alone couldn't take on the entire royal navy of an Earth Kingdom, no matter how much he might wish otherwise. Earth Kingdoms' ships were not exactly high quality, but there would be dozens to Zuko's one - not good odds, no matter how poor the Shinsotsu ships' construction. So they waited.

When the cry went up from the lookout, Zuko whirled on his heel, chest momentarily gone light with relief. But the shape that was crossing the sea toward them from Shinsotsu was not a canoe, nor even a single ship, which might have been given to the Avatar as a replacement.

It was a fleet. At least half a dozen ships, and there were bound to be more behind them, if the Avatar had mobilized the city against him.

"I think it would be inadvisable to remain here, Prince Zuko," Uncle Iroh said, ludicrously calm, eyeing the approaching fleet assessingly.

"Insightful as always, Uncle," Zuko ground out.

Mizan emerged from the bridge, glanced at the ships, and then raised her eyebrows at Zuko. "I feel the urgency of our situation invites candor, sir," she said. "I'm going to have to think very hard about following any order except 'run like hell' right now."

Zuko looked at the fleet; at Shinsotsu, still barely visible in the distance, where the Avatar, the solution to every problem that currently plagued him, no doubt sat laughing at this very moment; at Uncle Iroh, who, for once, said nothing, and simply looked at him sympathetically. He clenched his fists, and resisted the urge to punch flame at everything in sight. "Evasive maneuvers, Mizan," he forced out, trying to keep his voice reasonably even, and partially succeeding.

"A wise choice, sir," said Mizan, and ducked back into the bridge.

***

"You didn't have to send so many," Katara said apologetically, but the queen waved a hand dismissively.

"Nonsense, it was only fifteen," she said. "It wouldn't even have been that many, but I wanted to be sure he'd be out of your way. They've got orders to keep chasing him until they get to the end of the peninsula; if you head northwest, you'll be well on your way by the time he can start following you again."

"Seriously," Sokka said. "We appreciate this so much."

Katara laughed. "Well, you won't in a minute," she told him. "Now that Zuko's ship isn't on our tail anymore, I get to rest - and you get to paddle."

"... I should have known there'd be a catch," Sokka said.





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Chapter Five: Imprisoned

Katara sighed and leaned back in the canoe. It had been days since Shinsotsu, without a single sign of Zuko's ship, and the difference it made was extraordinary. They were still going to have to stop for supplies in another day or two, but only because the collection of fruit and vegetables they'd gotten in Shinsotsu was running low - they had plenty of fish, and they'd have been able to stop whenever they wanted to hunt for more.

Honestly, Katara and Sokka by themselves probably would've kept going on fish alone for a while longer, but Suki was insistent, and Katara couldn't say she minded. The fruit was all Earth Kingdom stuff - no sea prunes, which was a shame; but it was pretty good anyway.

They were still sailing steadily north, and it was getting hotter and hotter; Katara found herself extremely grateful for the new clothes they'd bought in Shinsotsu, because some of the shirts were blissfully sleeveless.

Suki mocked her readily for it, of course. "It's not even really summer yet, you know," she said, more than once. "It can get so much hotter than this - you really have no idea, do you?"

Katara had a hard time imagining anything hotter than the weather was already; she felt like she was wearing a parka all the time, even when she only had one of her sleeveless shirts on. She was just glad they were out on the water, so that she could dunk her feet whenever she wanted.

They turned the canoe in toward shore, and kept an eye out for a village - that was the only reason they noticed the smoke as soon as they did.

Katara saw it first, since Sokka and Suki were busy paddling, and kept her eyes on it while she reached for Suki's shoulder. "A Fire Nation ship?" she said, heart starting to speed up. She wasn't looking forward to running again; it had been bad enough the first time.

"I could go look at it," Aang offered. He was bobbing beside the canoe, as he had been all morning, effortless and intangible as always.

But Suki - though, of course, she hadn't heard him - was shaking her head. "I don't think so," she said. "Look at it: it's not moving. Well, I suppose it could be coming straight toward us," she amended, "but I doubt it."

"Perfect," Sokka said. "Looks like we know where we're going."

Katara whipped her head around to stare at him. "Nothing puts out smoke like that but Fire Nation machines, even if it's not a ship. And you want to go toward it?"

Sokka shrugged. "It's not on shore, whatever it is," he said. "Just look at it, it's out in the water. Which means there probably is something else on shore - a town, a supply point, whatever. It wouldn't be there if there weren't something around. I mean, weren't we keeping an eye out for signs of a place to stop not thirty seconds ago?"

Katara glanced at Suki, who had paused in her paddling and was looking thoughtful. "That is a good point," she admitted. "And we've all got Earth Kingdom clothes now - as long as we're careful, and you don't Waterbend anything where people can see you, I don't see why we couldn't stop by long enough to buy a few non-fish things." Katara's nervousness must have been showing on her face, because Suki looked at her carefully and then put a hand on her wrist. "Look, we're stuck traveling up the war front, unless you really think now is the time to sail back and go around the entire continent instead. We're not going to be able to avoid the Fire Nation all the time, especially since Zuko's probably going to catch up to us eventually."

"And if we have to pick a place to run into them, this really isn't that bad," Katara finished for her, nodding reluctantly. "If they're keeping something right off the shore, then there probably won't be too many soldiers on land, and we're not planning to be here for very long."

"There you go," Sokka said, and grinned. "What could go wrong?"

Suki glanced at Katara, expression full of mock worry. "Suddenly I've changed my mind," she said, and neatly dodged the paddle end that Sokka aimed at her in joking retaliation.

*

They decided to leave the canoe a fair distance away - it was clearly of Water Tribe design, so it wouldn't really help them blend in if anyone spotted it. They carried it up the shore and into the forest, a task which was considerably easier with three, and Sokka carved a little curving Southern Tribe mark into the nearest tree to help them find it again later.

Being on the water wasn't bad; no obstructions meant the breeze was pretty good, and the water itself hadn't warmed up as much as the weather had. But being under trees again, in the shade, was even better. They still made her feel a little too closed in for true comfort, but Katara was starting to understand why people kept the things around, instead of just making them all into ships.

It was quiet in the forest, aside from the occasional chirping of birds - quiet enough that when the faint thumping started somewhere off ahead of them, it was perfectly audible.

"It's too regular to be a rockslide," Suki said, frowning at the trees in front of them like she was expecting them to agree with her.

"Then it must be something else," Sokka said reasonably.

"Here," Aang said, and sped off into the forest. "Sounds like it's this way!"

It was something else, as it turned out. They crept through the trees, pausing occasionally to put an ear to the ground and make sure they were still going in the right direction, and eventually climbed a small rise next to what looked like a seasonable streambed. It was late enough in the spring for it to be dry now, but the water had left a lot of bare rock exposed before it had dried up, and clustered on the space of rock and earth were at least a dozen people, arranged in a vague half-circle.

"Like this," said the girl standing apart from the half-circle, and slammed her foot down against the stone; a hunk of rock burst out of the ground as if in response. She had both arms tucked close, hands curled into fists, and she punched one out away from her before the rock could drop back to earth. The chunk of stone flew out and away from the half-circle, the same direction as her fist, until she relaxed her stance a moment later and let it drop. "Make sure you plant your foot evenly, just like you're raising a boulder normally. You have to be fast, too - it works the best if you can keep the boulder in the air."

"Earthbenders," Suki murmured, as the people in the streambed nodded and spread out. "I wonder why they're practicing out here-"

"Well, let's ask," Sokka said, not bothering to keep his voice low, and then stood and shouted, "Hey!"

It was almost eerie - every single face below them turned toward them at once, and they all wore the same expression of startlement and fear. "Quick - run!" cried the girl who had been issuing the instructions, and they all began sprinting up the streambed.

"No - hey, wait," Sokka tried, but it was too late; they were gone, the girl and a long-haired boy who had been standing near her bringing up the rear.

Sokka grabbed Katara's arm and started skidding down the bank into the streambed, Suki following after. But the girl clearly heard them do it; she glanced over her shoulder at them, and then paused just long enough to shove one palm out to her right. The bank near her trembled and then collapsed into the streambed, filling it with rubble, and the girl disappeared from view.

Sokka thumped to a stop on the bare rock at the bottom of the streambed, frowning. "Well. That was weird. We didn't all go colorblind and then accidentally dress in red, right?"

"If we had, how could we tell?" Suki asked dryly, coming to a stop a few steps away. She gazed down the streambed at the collapsed bank, and then shook her head. "Well, if they're from the same village we're trying to find, then I bet we'll find out why they ran sooner or later; and if they aren't, we won't, and there's nothing we can do about it."

"How can you stand being so practical?" Sokka said.

"It makes you sad inside," Suki said promptly, "and that brings me joy." She grinned. "Now let's go."

*

There was indeed a village by the coast. It was a town called Lingsao that belonged to the Earth Kingdom of Lannang, which Katara gleaned from a combination of eavesdropping and a quick examination of the map - Lingsao wasn't labeled, but there was a tiny dot in about the right place, and the borders of the Kingdom of Lannang had apparently been creeping out toward it sixty or seventy years ago. It wasn't quite on the shore, and they couldn't see the ocean from the major road that went through it, but the haze of smoke Katara had noticed that morning was clearly visible in the sky to the south.

"Maybe there aren't any Fire Nation soldiers at all," Suki said, sounding a little bewildered; there were no red-armored figures visible anywhere in Lingsao's generous marketplace, and they definitely hadn't passed any coming in.

"Or maybe they're only on the coast," Sokka suggested. "If this place is neutral, and the Fire Nation keeps a war camp by the shore, maybe they only come here to trade."

It certainly did seem plausible, though the effects, if that's what they were, were a little unsettling. The market was oddly quiet, considering its size, and there was a certain tight wariness to everyone's expressions; no one was crying their wares, and Katara could see very few smiles. Aang wore a discomfited expression on his blue-tinged face, and Katara could understand why. But there was a fine selection of food on display, so Katara resolved not to worry about it.

That resolution lasted for about thirty seconds: Katara glanced up from a tray of bamboo shoots to see a distinctly familiar girl closing in from the side. A moment later, and the four of them were surrounded by girls and boys Katara recognized as the Earthbenders from the forest, and practically herded off the main road and into a cramped little space between two nearby houses.

"Hey," Sokka started indignantly, but a shove from behind got him into the little alley before he could finish kicking up a fuss. Katara would have hushed him, if it hadn't; clearly the Earthbenders from the forest lived here, and Katara doubted anybody in Lingsao would take the side of a few random strangers against a dozen of their own people.

The girl who'd been instructing everyone earlier was behind them, and she yanked Sokka around by his shirt and glared at him. The crowd had, obviously, passed right through Aang, but he had followed them in, and was anxiously wringing his hands, clearly upset that he could do nothing to help. Suki, who had no such restrictions, whirled, clearly trying to decide whether to take a fan to her or just punch her, and Katara caught her arm before she could do either.

The girl ignored them, using the fistful she had of his shirt to shake Sokka a little. "Listen," she hissed into his face, "I don't know who you think you are, but I promise you, if you breathe one word about what we were doing-"

"What?" Suki said, blinking, the look of carefully-calculated retribution turning into a look of confusion. "You mean the Earthbe-"

"Shut up," the girl snapped, rounding on Suki, and the two boys closest to the main road turned to scan the street nervously. "I'm serious, I will crush you like a date-plum. You know I could do it."

"Okay, hold on," Sokka said. "Everybody just take a deep breath." He peeled the girl's hand off of his shirt with one hand, holding the other hand out in a conciliatory gesture. "We saw you guys earlier. You clearly don't want anybody to know-"

"The brilliance of your insight is blinding me," the girl said acidly.

"So, okay, we promise not to tell," Sokka went on. "Satisfied?"

"Yeah, right - how are we supposed to be sure you won't run off to the garrison the second we let you go?" the girl said.

"The garrison?" Katara said, with a sinking feeling. She'd been hoping the simple answer - a war camp and occasional trading - would turn out to be the true one; clearly, it was not to be.

The girl turned to her, eyes narrowed in suspicion. "The Fire Nation as good as owns this village," she said. "Not officially; they don't want to draw the queen's armies out of Sennang. But the garrison's about two steps away, and they patrol up and down the main road whenever they want - including the part that runs through Lingsao."

"Okay," Sokka said slowly. "But what does that have to do with the - uh." He glanced in the direction of the main road, and cleared his throat. "Rockpunching?"

The girl stared at them all for a moment. "You're not from around here, I take it," she said after a minute.

"Not really, no," Suki admitted.

The girl looked them over again, and then sighed. "All right," she said. "You had better come with us."

"Right, of course," Sokka said, rolling his eyes. "After all, you've been so friendly and welcoming so far. Why not?"

The girl crossed her arms. "I'm Nayu, this is Lingsao, and we should probably get out of here before a patrol comes by," she said.

"... Can we at least finish buying food first?" Suki said plaintively.

*

Nayu grudgingly let them head back toward the main road, though she sent four of the other benders ahead of them - two in each direction along the road, as lookouts. "You wouldn't go tell them about us of your own free will," she said, "but if you get snatched, well. I wouldn't blame you for choosing to get a bunch of strangers in trouble rather than get chucked in prison."

Katara wanted to protest - she honestly didn't know whether she'd choose prison over exposing the group of benders, but she'd definitely choose having to figure out how to break out of prison over exposing the group of benders - but she suspected that Nayu wouldn't believe her.

They went back to the market stands and loaded themselves up with just enough fruit and vegetables to keep Suki happy. Despite Sokka's earlier irritation, they were actually lucky she was so practical; it was still only spring, so the selection was unimpressive and there were no dried foods available, which meant they had to keep an eye on the weight of the stuff.

It didn't take long for Suki to declare herself satisfied, and Katara was just about to let herself be pleased with how well everything had worked out when the lookout ahead and to the left, a girl named Tashi, yelled, "Let go of me!"

Katara was about to drop her armload of food and race up to help her when the long-haired boy from earlier, who had introduced himself as Haru, grabbed her elbow. When she looked back at him questioningly, he shook his head. "Don't," he said, "it'll only provoke them. They don't like it when a crowd gathers - even when it's people they think aren't benders. They probably won't bother arresting anybody when it's just Tashi alone. Just wait."

Katara reminded herself that this was Haru's village, he'd know better than she would; so she pressed her lips together tightly and made herself wait.

Tashi wasn't far away, and Katara could see her clearly from where she was standing. This obviously wasn't the first time something like this had happened, because Tashi clearly knew better than to expect anyone to come for her. She didn't even look in their direction - or that of the other lookout on that end of the road, for that matter, a boy who had assumed a pose of sullen disinterest.

There was a small group of Fire Nation soldiers - perhaps a dozen, but they surveyed the street arrogantly, as though there were a hundred of them. One of them had Tashi by the wrist, and was looking down at her smugly.

"Watch where you're going next time, girl," the soldier said, smirking a little, and let go of her arm - right before he swung his spear around and knocked Tashi's legs out from under her.

Tashi tumbled to the ground, landing on her side, and for a moment, her face was turned toward Katara: in that instant, she lost the frightened and unhappy expression she had assumed, and instead looked vividly, murderously angry. But she shuttered the look away again, and started scrambling to her feet, saying breathlessly, "Sorry - sorry, please-"

"All right, all right, get out of here," the soldier said, already turning away. "But you'll be arrested if you interfere with a patrol again."

Tashi didn't bother answering; she just darted away, and Nayu turned to give Katara a look that said they would soon be doing the same. "Come on," she muttered, "before they come our way," and headed off into an alley.

*

She led them back away from the main road, their path weaving between houses until they reached a small, wooded hill on the edge of Lingsao. "The Fire Nation's been here for three years," she explained over her shoulder as they stepped into the shade. "They never really attacked Lingsao – just killed most of the people they found on their first patrol, which happened to be right in the middle of the village." She paused for a second, and her expression went cool. "That's when my father died."

Katara was loath to drag out yet another inadequate "I'm sorry", but she had no idea what else to say; Suki, though, just reached forward and let her hand rest on Nayu's shoulder for a moment. "My father died that way, too," she said – not self-pitying, just matter-of-fact; sharing a hurt.

Nayu gave her a small nod of acknowledgement, eyes serious, and then sighed. "Ever since then, it's been unsafe to – rockpunch," she said, with a wry look at Sokka as she used his epithet. "It's as good as banned, even if they can't technically make the laws around here; they just say that anybody who bends where Fire Nation soldiers can see them was attacking without provocation." Nayu shook her head, expression disgusted. "That's the reasoning they used to imprison everybody who resisted when they first showed up."

"Imprison?" Katara said, glancing back down at the village – and the haze of smoke beyond.

When she looked forward again, Nayu and Haru were both nodding; Haru was the one who spoke this time. "That's where they keep them," he said. "It's a prison ship. They keep it moving all the time, so it's never anywhere long enough for us to get them out."

"And that's if there were enough of us left to try," Tashi cut in, shaking her head. "They've taken all of the best benders that we had."

"We're just about all that's left," Nayu said. "Except for the ones who have too much to lose to risk practicing in the forest."

"You don't have too much to lose?" Katara said.

Nayu smiled, thin and strained. "They killed my father," she said, "but my mother was one of the best benders in Lingsao; she was one of the first people they put on that prison ship."

*

There was a small house in a clearing part of the way up the hill – where Nayu's family had once lived, Nayu revealed, which meant that it was now essentially hers alone. Katara couldn't imagine what it would be like to live completely alone, and clearly Nayu hadn't enjoyed it very much, because she had started sharing it with other kids whose parents had been arrested or killed; at least half of the other Earthbenders in the group lived there with her. "I got lucky," Nayu explained; "a lot of the houses in the middle of the village have gotten set on fire when the patrols come through." Haru was one of the ones who didn't live there: his father had been arrested for bending, but his mother wasn't a bender, and hadn't been arrested or killed.

"Yet," Tashi added, cynical. "Mine were both benders – both arrested." She paused, and then said, "Along with my little sister," in such an offhand tone that Katara knew right away that that was the thought that still pained her the most.

"So," Nayu said, once they were all gathered in the main room of the house. "If you're not from around here, and you didn't know what was going on, why are you here?"

"Just resupplying," Katara said, because that was the truth.

Nayu crossed her arms, eyes narrowing. "Okay, fine. Where are you going, then, if you're not from around here but it was the best place for you to buy supplies?"

Katara paused – she knew it would probably make whatever she said sound like a lie, but she needed a second to think. She wasn't afraid that any of the Earthbenders would go to the Fire Nation over her; the part where they'd threatened her to keep her from going to the Fire Nation over them had pretty much settled her worries on that score. But she wasn't sure how readily they would believe her, and things could get very uncomfortable if they didn't. "We're going north," she said at last. "Me and my brother, we're from the Southern Water Tribe. I'm the only Waterbender in my village, so I'm going to the North Pole to find a Waterbending master who can teach me all the things I can't figure out by myself." So that I can become a fully-realized Avatar and end the War by defeating the Fire Lord, she chose not to add.

"And her?" Nayu prodded, tilting her head toward Suki.

"A friend," Katara said. "We visited her when we passed Kyoshi Island, and she decided to tag along."

Nayu watched her closely for a moment, and Katara made sure to keep her face blank and guileless. Finally, Nayu huffed out a breath. "Fine," she said, "keep your secret. You're not going to report us; that's all I really care about. If you really are a Waterbender, you shouldn't stay long." She let one corner of her mouth quirk up. "I don't think they'll be much happier about streamkicking than they are about rockpunching."

*

They stayed the night; the sun had been sinking steadily while they had followed Nayu up the hill, and it was close enough to evening that nobody wanted to start the long walk back through the forest to the canoe. Night among the trees on the hillside was pleasantly cool, and Katara fell asleep feeling reasonably comfortable for the first time all day.

The next morning, Katara could see that Haru had been right about the prison ship. It must have moved the day before, but by the time the smoke rose high enough to see, it had dispersed too much to be any use in pinpointing the ship's location; over the course of a few hours, it was impossible to tell whether the ship had moved, or to where. But the haze of smoke had been smearing the sky to the southwest at sunset the day before, and by morning, it had shifted over to the southeast.

Sokka woke late, and spent a good portion of breakfast bemoaning the lack of sea prunes, which was part of the reason they were still there when Haru came sprinting in and said breathlessly, "Tashi's been arrested."

Nayu sprang up from where she had been sitting on the floor, and said, "What? Where?"

"I told her not to do it," Haru said, "that it might be a trap; but she wouldn't listen to me-"

"Stop," Nayu said firmly, and put her hands on his shoulders. "Tell me exactly what happened."

***

Tashi resisted the urge to punch a boulder into each Fire Nation soldier's stupid smug face, and stepped into the boat. She hated boats, hated leaving comfortable rock and earth behind; but she wasn't going to let these idiots know it, so she kept her face blank and smooth.

She'd known Haru was probably right as soon as he'd said it was a trap - rockslides happened, of course, but they weren't all that common, not even in the rocky foothills around Lingsao. But just because it had been a trap, that didn't mean the old man pinned under the stones hadn't really been pinned. The Fire Nation had pulled tricks like this before, and they tended not to be terribly concerned with what happened to their bait; they had been as likely as not to just leave him there to die, if Tashi hadn't gone for it.

So she had; she'd Earthbent the rocks up and away from him, and let the soldiers who just happened to be patrolling in the area right then take her away for it.



It could be worse, she thought, as the Fire Nation boat began pulling away from shore. At least now she might have a chance to figure out whether Mother, Father, and Shanmi were still alive, which was more than she'd had when she had been safely on shore. And if they weren't, well. She wouldn't have to resist the urge to crush people's faces in anymore. That would be a relief.

***

"And they took her away," Haru finished. "They must be down to the sea by now; they've probably loaded her on the boat already. We're never going to be able to get her out of there."

"We might," Nayu said, but she was frowning unhappily, and Katara had the impression that she wasn't sure she was telling the truth.

"How?" said another girl sitting nearby. "It's always moving, we're never going to be able to find it. And there'll be so many soldiers on it. There's only eleven - well, ten of us, now."

Katara glanced at Suki, who had put down her rice, and then over at Aang, who was floating by the window with a distinctly serious expression on his translucent face. "Fourteen," Katara said. "I think we can help you."

"Fourt-" Sokka began, frowning at her, and then got a peculiar expression on his face. "Oh. Uh, Katara, are you - sure about this?"

"He can help," Katara said, "and you know he can, unless you've already forgotten last time-"

"Okay, wait," Nayu said, holding her hands up palm out. "Fourteen? He? What am I missing, here?"

Sokka glared at Katara halfheartedly for a moment, and then gave up, shaking his head. "Okay, fine, bring on the dead kid talk."

*

Nayu stared at her, brow furrowed. "So he was the Avatar before you, and now he ... follows you from the spirit world, and no one else can see him?"

Katara nodded, but it was Suki who said, unexpectedly, "Exactly."

Nayu turned to look at her. "You believe this?" she said.

"No," Suki said, very calm, "I don't have to. I know that it's true. Not quite the same thing." Nayu quirked an eyebrow at her, but Suki went on, undaunted. "I know she's the Avatar; she saved my entire village from the Fire Nation, she stopped all the fires at once just by closing her hands. And I know Aang is there, because he helped us save Shinsotsu last week. He spied on the Fire Nation for us, and everything he told us was true."

Nayu blinked. "You three - four - have had a pretty interesting time of it, haven't you?" she observed.

"You could say that, yeah," Sokka said, tone heavy with the weight of the understatement.

"So he's here right now?" Nayu said, eyes darting around the room.

"Over there," Katara said, pointing to the window. The conversation might get a little old, but there was a small, gleeful part of her that she suspected would never get tired of introducing people to Aang, just for the looks they got on their faces.

Nayu gazed at what must have looked to her like empty space for nearly a full minute, and then finally sighed. "Well, I want to get Tashi back more than I want to not believe you; but I can't make anyone else break into a prison on the say-so of an invisible person if they're not willing to risk it," she said.

Haru bit his lip, clearly at least a little uncertain; but then he sucked in a breath, and said, "I will," very firmly.

"Okay," Nayu said, "that makes - um, six. Time to ask everybody else."

*

It actually went quite well, Katara thought; the final tally was twelve, and the two who refused only did so because they had younger siblings they didn't want to leave behind if it all went badly. "To be honest, I'd rather go with you," one of them, a boy, said, sighing. "The first time we ever hatch a plan to break into a prison, and I've got to stay behind."

"Yeah, well, next time we'll make sure you get to go," Nayu said, very dry.

There were plenty of fishermen living in Lingsao - or there had been, at least, before the Fire Nation had taken up residence right off the shore. So there were, correspondingly, plenty of boats tied up along the shoreline, though many of them probably hadn't been used in months, if not years.

"We'll take three," Nayu said authoritatively; "that way, if one of them gets sunk, the others will still have a chance," and then, as though she hadn't just said something deeply discomfiting, "and you'll have to go in front, so that we can follow wherever Aang tells you to go."

Aang's expression was serious, but his eyes were alight - because, Katara guessed, this was something he could do that would make a difference. It would be frustrating to anyone, not being able to touch anything or anybody, having only one person in the world who could see or hear you; it had to be even worse for Aang, who wanted so badly to help people, to make things better.

He drifted ahead of them, toward the smoke. The boats followed along behind, Katara's in front; Suki and Sokka were along with her, and Haru, too. Katara sped all three boats along as much as she could without making too much noise.

They stopped when they got closer to the smoky haze, and Aang floated on ahead to look for the prison ship, the blue glow of him slowly overwhelmed by grey as he headed off into the smoke.

The wait reminded Katara of being back in Shinsotsu, except it took a good half-hour this time, and Katara couldn't help but jump at every little splash, thinking each one meant the vast bulk of the prison ship was about to come up behind them. Finally, though, Aang came back, almost breathless - out of pure excitement, since he didn't really need to breathe.

"I found it," he shouted, since he didn't have to worry about attracting attention. "I found it, come on, this way."

They followed him through the smoke; it was like hunting in heavy fog, except it was inching toward midday, and whenever they were not beneath a thick plume, the sun shone down brilliantly.

Aang brought them up toward the stern of the ship, starboard side, having already ascertained that there was a single bored guard in the stern who liked to stare off over the port-side rail. "Here, hang on a second," he told Katara, who made the water under the boats still with a backwards sweep of her arms, and then he flew up the side of the ship and over the rail.

The ship itself was immense - Katara had expected it to be, given that it had to be holding all the prisoners the Fire Nation had taken from Lingsao over three years' time plus enough soldiers to keep that many people under guard, but it was still impressive. It was far larger than Zuko's ship, but also correspondingly less streamlined, and probably quite a bit slower. Still, that didn't make the height of the sides any less daunting; Katara stared up at the imposing wall of iron stretching above her head and couldn't help but swallow nervously.

Aang's translucent head appeared over the rail a moment later. "All right," he shouted down, "it's clear for now. Go ahead and lift somebody up, there's a stack of crates right here to hide behind."

Katara glanced back over her shoulder at Suki, who grinned back. "I take it that means it's time," she said, and shuffled over to the side of the boat on her knees. "Let's do it."

Katara took a deep breath, and concentrated: it was much, much harder to freeze the water here, where it was so warm, but she'd been using her bending so much recently that the effort wasn't nearly as draining as it might have been back at home. Suki stepped out onto the little iceberg, testing it carefully with one foot before she put her full weight on it, and then turned and nodded; Katara sucked in another full breath, and put her whole body into the flowing upward stroke that lifted the ice - and Suki - up the side of the ship.

The tower of ice held perfectly, and above their heads, Suki darted from the top of the ice to the deck of the ship, as easily as she might step across a narrow stream. Katara drew the ice back down carefully, so that there was barely a splash, and allowed herself a small sigh of relief; she'd had brief visions of cracking ice, of Suki's feet sliding out from under her, of any number of other small disasters, in the moments the ice had been rising.

Sokka went next, and then Haru, and then Nayu's boat drew up nearby, and the third behind it. Katara lifted them all, one after the other; there were brief pauses when Aang called for them, so that guards could pass by without having their attention drawn over, but all in all, it didn't take long before Katara was freezing the empty boats together and then stepping out and lifting herself on the ice.

There were indeed crates by the rail, and a line of barrels nearby that had provided an extra hiding place - they wouldn't for long, of course, but then they weren't going to need long.

"That's the bridge, right over there," Aang said, pointing to the nearby wall, which, along with the rail, created a corridor toward the bow. Katara had to resist the urge to try to yank him down behind the crates; sometimes it was still hard for her to remember that no one else could see him. "The ship's really wide - more of a barge than anything else. The main deck is on the other side of the bridge, in the bow; that's where most of the prisoners are." Aang turned and glanced at her.

"What?" Katara whispered.

"There's smoke and coal dust everywhere, it gets on everything," Aang said, eyeing the clean green cloth of her shirt. "They're going to spot you in a second, you guys are way too clean."

Katara almost laughed; here they were breaking into a floating Fire Nation prison, and after finding the thing and bending their way on board, it was their cleanliness that might have doomed them. But she could see that he was right. The metal around them was streaked with soot, the wooden barrels and crates gone vaguely grey with grime above and beyond the usual crusting of salt, and the armor of the guard who was still loitering around on the port side of the stern was dull with dirt.

The base of the rail had accumulated a little pile of coal dust, probably the result of a wind just strong enough to blow it off the middle of the deck, but not strong enough to actually carry it up past the foot of the rail; Katara touched Sokka's shoulder to catch his attention, and then caught up a handful of soot and tossed it at him. She tried to aim carefully – she didn't want him to give them away by coughing, after all – but there was a fair breeze going, and the soot was very light; a little puff of black burst over the cheek he turned to shield his eyes, and when he turned back around, he was glaring vengefully.

"Aang says we have to blend in," Katara protested in a hiss, holding up her hands.

Sokka nodded, as though he accepted her reasoning, and then snagged a double handful of coal dust. "Then let me help you," he said, bland and disingenuous.

He did give Katara enough time to turn her face away before he threw it, in the end, so she was merciful in her retaliation.

Moderately, anyway.

*

After about five minutes of a near-silent but furious soot-fight, the eleven of them who were tangible looked like they had been rolling around in a coal mine, and Aang declared them suitable. Katara passed this on to Sokka, who reluctantly let his newest handful of coal dust go instead of grinding it into her hair the way he had clearly been planning to do.

Aang drifted away for about half a minute, giving the area between them and the prisoners' space on the main deck another look, and then came back, sliding right through a crate to shake his head worriedly. "I don't know about this, Katara," he said. "There's a lot of guards around the prison deck; I don't know how you're going to get in there without getting caught."

Katara gave it a moment's thought, and then nearly laughed. "Well, we're dirty enough now, right?" she said. "We look like the other prisoners?"

"Yeah," Aang said uncertainly.

Katara grinned at him. "So let's get caught."

"Whoa, hey, hang on a second," Sokka hissed from behind her. "I don't like the sound of this plan you're hatching with the dead kid."

"It makes perfect sense," Katara argued. "We're on the ship already – how would we have gotten here? Why would we have come? Twelve – eleven kids, all by themselves? Clearly, we're prisoners who were trying to escape the ship. We get caught, and they'll just toss us in with everybody else, which is exactly what we want anyway."

"No reason to sneak in when we can get them to let us in," Nayu agreed in a murmur from behind Sokka's shoulder.

"I feel like their idea of letting us in is going to be kind of uncomfortable," Sokka observed, but he didn't protest any more after that.

*

They darted from behind the crates and barrels to the rear of the bridge, and let themselves get caught by the bored guard on the port side. Katara was pretty sure that their logic was sound, and nobody was going to bother looking around for boats, but if they'd let themselves get spotted at starboard, it wouldn't have taken much for somebody to glance over the side and see the three fishing boats that were still frozen to the ship.

It was actually almost fun; they plastered themselves to the rear wall of the bridge, like they were trying to be stealthy, and crept along in a line. The guard was leaning on the rail, staring out at the water and the mountains beyond, which were faintly visible through the smoke, and humming to himself.

Sokka started to creep out toward him, until Katara caught his arm. "I'm lending our escape attempt some authenticity," he whispered, shaking his elbow free. "If we were really trying to break out of here, we would totally whack that guy."

Katara had to admit that this was probably true, and it also guaranteed that he would notice them, which hadn't been as foregone a conclusion as she had initially been expecting; Sokka ended up having to actually hit him, because he didn't turn around before Sokka made it the entire thirty feet that there were between the rear wall of the bridge and the stern rail. Sokka was gentle about it, since actually succeeding in knocking him out would have sort of defeated the purpose of the whole thing, and the guard hunched under the blow and shouted wordlessly.

"Prisoner escape!" cried the next guard down, and Katara had to be very stern with herself to keep from smiling when a mob of guards came running.

*

It wasn't hard to avoid smiling when the guards actually tackled them to the deck; the one who grabbed Katara wasn't very delicate about it, and getting somebody's knee to the spleen didn't exactly make Katara want to laugh. They fought a little, of course, and Suki couldn't seem to help taking the first guard that rushed her down to the deck with a couple jabs, but then she visibly remembered that they needed to lose for their plan to work, and reluctantly left an opening for another guard to knock her feet out from under her.

Finally, they had all let themselves be subdued – except for Aang, of course, who watched, grinning, from halfway through the wall of the bridge – and the guards dragged them toward the bow, and down the steps from the stern deck into the prisoners' enclosure. "No meals for these rats for three days," said a woman at the top of the stairs, who, judging by her armor, was at least a lieutenant; she had a very impressive sneer. "And a whipping if you're caught outside the prison bay or the boiler rooms again. That should teach you a lesson."

The guards shoved them down the stairs, but they weren't nearly as rough as they could have been; there were only a couple of stumbles, and no one fell over. Katara made her expression dispirited and vaguely resentful, instead of triumphant, and was just about to turn and ask Nayu whether they should split up to look for Tashi when someone shouted, "Nayu!"

***

Shira couldn't believe it; her own daughter was one of the last people she had ever expected to see in here. But there she was, brushing herself off perfunctorily after the guards pushed her in. "Nayu," she said again, hurrying forward, and caught her daughter by the shoulders as she turned to see who had shouted.

"Mother," Nayu said, and grinned at her, as though she hadn't just been arrested and thrown onto the same prison ship Shira had been stuck on for the past three years.

Shira shook her a little; Nayu waited it out with a patient expression that said very clearly that she was humoring her ridiculousness. "What are you doing here? How did they catch you? What were you thinking? Were you thinking?"

"I've missed you, too, Mother," Nayu said, very dry.

"I would rather keep missing you than see you stuck in here," Shira shot back, although she had to admit there was a part of her that was just a little grateful – Nayu had gotten distinctly taller, in three years; her hair was longer, and her face thinner; she didn't look like a child anymore, and it was pleasant to have a chance to see the difference even as it pained her to have missed seeing it happen.

"It's all right, Mother," Nayu said, blithe, "it's all part of our plan. They didn't catch us," and only then did Shira remember there were nearly a dozen of them standing there, not just Nayu. Eight of them, she recognized from the village – and Tyro was going to be so glad to know Haru was still alive, when he came back up from the boilers – but three of them, two girls and a boy, were complete strangers. "We came on purpose," Nayu went on, and Shira put her curiosity on hold so that she could stare at her daughter with the incredulousness that statement deserved.

"They haven't – captured Lingsao, or declared war on the queen, have they?" Shira said, trying to think of any other reason why a prison ship might be preferable to living in the village. It had to be a strain, of course – never bending anything, never even practicing, constantly having to keep your head down in your own village – but a strain wasn't the same thing as prison. The village had food, clean water, no coal shovels, no whippings; no boilers to burn you, no smoke in your lungs; no coal grime to creep into your blisters and strike you with fever. It was nothing like prison at all.

"No, no," Nayu said, shaking her head. "We came to get Tashi – and as many other people as we can, while we're here."

Tashi – yes, of course, Shanmi's older sister, Yunan and Mingti's daughter. They'd dumped her in just this morning. "But how?" Shira said.

Nayu beamed, as though she had almost been hoping Shira would ask. "Mother, I would like to introduce you to the Avatar," she said.

***

Katara felt her face get hot, but obligingly tried to keep her expression appropriately Avatar-serene as Nayu's mother stared at her.

"And you're sure about this," she said slowly.

Nayu nodded. "Absolutely," she said. "I'm sure."

Her mother's gaze flickered back and forth between the two of them for a moment, and Katara braced herself for more disbelief, and maybe an argument – she even glanced to the side to make sure Aang was still with them, just in case Nayu's mother asked for some kind of demonstration – but after a moment, Nayu's mother started nodding. "All right," she said. "You're sure, and you obviously got on here somehow; that's good enough for me."

Nayu grinned at her, brief and bright, and said, "I thought it might be."

But Nayu's mother had started frowning ever so faintly. "But you're going to have quite a time getting Tashi out," she said. "They like to send new arrests to the boilers – to get them in line, show them how things work here, that kind of thing. She's still below, shoveling."

Katara glanced at Aang, who was smiling already. "Time to do a little more sneaking."

***

The prison ship was enormous, and much more complicated than any boat Nayu had ever been on before; if she had maybe been harboring a few doubts about Katara's status as the Avatar before, she certainly wasn't now, because Katara was clearly doing something mysterious to find her way around, whether it was following the instructions of a dead Avatar's spirit or not.

Of course, she couldn't do everything herself. Mother started a fight with Tashi's father, both of them careful to open their hands with every blow and land kicks in non-essential places, and Tashi's mother obligingly clutched Shanmi and screamed bloody murder. The sneering lieutenant shouted for the guards to intervene, and after a few moments there was nobody watching the stairs that led belowdecks.

They nearly got caught partway down by more guards rushing up to the main deck - apparently Mother's little fight had blossomed into a proper brawl - but a moment before the tromp of boots got loud enough to serve as a warning, Katara looked up and nodded at nothing, and yanked them all forward and around a corner into a side hall.

It wasn't hard to find the boiler room, in the end; it was nearly all the way to stern, and the heat coming from it, even from the corridor, was incredible. Nayu stared at the immense boilers, and couldn't help thinking that the openings for the coal looked like gaping mouths - like the whole ship was some kind of awful spirit monster, bound to carry them as long as they fed it.

Fortunately for them, aside from the hot red light spilling from the boilers, there wasn't much illumination, and they could flatten themselves against the rear wall, near the piles of coal waiting to be shoveled, without attracting any attention. There were only a few guards left, presumably since so many had gone running up to help subdue everyone who'd gotten drawn into Mother's brawl, and even though Nayu couldn't see their faces clearly, their stances screamed of boredom.

She saw why a moment later, when she took a closer look at a nearby prisoner; the prisoners were chained together, heavy shackles around their ankles so as to keep their hands free for the long-handled coal shovels.

It wasn't hard to spot Tashi; she was one of the younger prisoners, and even after shoveling coal for hours, still distinctly cleaner than most. Unfortunately, she was also a few coal piles away from them, off to the left. There was no way they were going to be able to get to her without attracting attention – at least, not by staying on the floor.

"Can't let a little more dirt stop us now," Suki murmured, and led the way up the nearest hill of coal, staying close to the rear wall of the boiler room.

Nayu agreed with the sentiment, but it was more than just a little more dirt; by the time they had wobbled their way up the first pile, her hands were probably never going to be clean again, and she could practically taste the coal through her fingertips. The chunks of coal shifted under their hands and feet, and there were several close calls when a small coalslide nearly made someone lose their footing. The Fire Nation actually kept the ship's coal in some other bay somewhere, and had mechanized the process of dumping it from there to where the shovelers could reach it, which they discovered halfway up the second pile when a creak of metal from somewhere above them was followed by Suki, Sokka, and Haru abruptly vanishing under a hail of coal.

Nayu only barely managed to keep from yelping in surprise, and quickly knelt down to help the others dig them out. "I am going to be tasting coal all day," Sokka griped when they got him loose.

Suki was calmly practical. "At least now we blend in even better," she said, glancing down at her blackened clothes.

The small valley between that coal pile and the next one over was a perfect spot to stop – fairly close to Tashi, but the coal piles hid them from anybody further off to the side. Nayu crept out toward the boilers as far as she dared, and then took a small piece of coal and tossed it very gently in Tashi's direction.

It rolled to a stop near Tashi's heel, and the next time she stepped back to swing her shovel away from the boiler, she stepped on it. Nayu could see her frown, side-lit by the red-orange blaze of the boiler; she picked it up and turned to throw it back onto a pile, and that was when she spotted them.

She just stared at them for a second, frozen, and then the break in the steady motion of shoveling must have caught someone's attention. "Hey!" shouted a guard Nayu couldn't see, somewhere to their right. "What are you doing?"

"Just – checking my shovel," Tashi lied, tossing the coal chunk away. "I thought the blade might be coming loose."

For a moment it seemed like that would be it, but then Katara, who was behind Nayu, reached forward and grabbed her wrist. "He's coming to check," she hissed, though Nayu couldn't hear any footsteps over the constant shuffle of metal shovels against coal, and the clanking and whooshing of the boilers. The ghost Avatar, she reminded herself.

There was no way they were going to be able to climb away over the coal without getting anybody's attention – not fast enough to get out of there before the guard came near. All they could do was hope that he would stop far enough away that he wouldn't be able to see them; and that hope went out the window the moment he stepped into view, saying, "Nice try – you won't get a break that way, you stupid-"

He must've caught sight of them out of the corner of his eye in the middle of the word; he turned, brows drawing down into a puzzled frown, a moment before Tashi swung her shovel into the back of his head.

He dropped like a sack of potatoes – but not without prompting a lot of shouts and yells from the other guards, and this time, Nayu didn't need the Avatar and her ghost to tell her the soldiers were coming for them.

It only happened because Nayu wasn't thinking straight; they were trapped in the middle of a metal prison with ocean all around them, and so she had absolutely no reason to assume that the foot-stamp and follow-up punch that she aimed at the first guard who came into view would do anything at all. And at first, she didn't even realize that it had. She thought to herself that she was an idiot even as she threw the punch – at nothing but air, of course, because the guard was still a few yards away at best – and she had several moments to wonder sort of absentmindedly why the guard's eyes were widening before the guard threw up her arm and a dozen coal chunks struck it.

Nayu stared at the guard, who had stumbled back a step under the sudden onslaught of flying coal, and then at her hands, smeared with coal dust and looking highly ordinary, as though they hadn't just done something that Nayu would have sworn five minutes ago was completely impossible.

"Well," said the man shackled to Tashi's left, who had been watching with a look of vague resignation before – the resignation was gone now, replaced by a small, speculative smile. "That was interesting."

***

Before the guards broke and ran for the deck, the Earthbenders downed six more of them with coal, and one of them had the keys to the shackles. In ten minutes, they went from crouching nervously behind a coal pile hoping nobody would see them to charging back up the corridor to the prison deck, a veritable wall of coal in front of them and a whole mob of freed prisoners behind them. Katara could see that the fight Nayu's mother had started was still going, though it was now between the prisoners and the guards who were trying to subdue them.

The sudden addition of a crowd of angry benders who finally had something to bend turned the tide in the prisoners' favor almost immediately, and in the end, Katara barely had to do anything. Nayu led the charge forward, and the guards were pummeled with coal before they even had a chance to figure out what was going on. Firebending mostly just set the coal aflame, which essentially meant that the Earthbenders could send fireballs right back at the soldiers. Suki plunged right into the thick of things, and somehow managed to track down the guard she'd had to lose to before, dropping him to the deck with one kick to the head and a satisfied look on her face.

Katara managed to shove her way back to the stairs to the upper deck, and from there, she was able to see everything. She used long, flowing sideways moves to pull water up from the ocean and drop it onto Firebender soldiers who were about to launch flames; usually the sudden drenching was enough to put out whatever fire they'd started to bend, and served to distract them besides.

Nayu's mother and Tashi's parents were fighting their way toward the upper deck, too. Katara graciously helped clear the way, slinging a long whip of water around behind the ankles of the soldiers who rushed them at the same moment that the Earthbenders shot handfuls of coal into their faces; the soldiers could have recovered from one or the other, but both at once was too much, and they all tumbled to the deck. Nayu's mother, Katara noticed with a guilty sort of delight, was not especially careful where she put her feet as she maneuvered over them.

She reached the bridge successfully, Tashi's parents fending off most of the soldiers who came at her with hunks of flying coal; Katara noticed that her hand looked odd, sharp-angled and black, a moment before she sent a punch flying at the metal door to the bridge and left a dent behind. Coal - she had bent it around her hand and her wrist; and another three or four punches with her coal-reinforced hand warped the bridge door far enough that she could open it.

After that, it was all over. The commander of the ship surrendered the bridge almost immediately; Katara guessed by the unsettled look on his face that he had been hoping to remain safely in the bridge and let his soldiers deal with everything, and had not at all been expecting Nayu's mother to break the door down.

Nayu's mother shoved him aside and went for the wheel, and a moment later the great ship began to swing around, smoke and sky and water spinning past the bow until at last they were headed back toward the shore. There were still pockets of guards down on the prisoners' deck who were fighting, but they all seemed to pause at once when the ship began to turn; and a great cry went up from every grimy green-robed Earthbender, a hundred fists bending a hundred celebratory chunks of coal into the air at once.

*

"Thank you for coming for me," Tashi told them all, once they were back on shore and safe, with the former prison ship anchored in the bay behind them. She had kept her little sister close the whole way back to Lingsao; Shanmi was bearing it with a layer of exasperated good humor that Katara suspected was covering up quite a bit of relief. "And you," Tashi went on, giving Katara a particularly blinding smile. "They never could have managed it without you."

Katara felt her face heat up a little, and grinned back. "You're welcome," she said, shooting Aang a sideways glance that she hoped communicated that she wasn't trying to take the credit for herself; it just didn't seem like the right moment for - well, for the dead kid talk, as Sokka had so delicately phrased it.

But she shouldn't have worried. Aang smiled, and it was the broad one that looked like it might split a less experienced smiler's cheeks in half; he'd been floating a little further off the ground than usual since they'd left the ship, like the chance to help them make a real difference had literally made him lighter.

"Hey," Sokka said, "credit where credit is due. I got us caught by that one guy."

"Yes, you were indispensable," Suki agreed, a smirk faintly visible around the corners of her mouth. "No one else could possibly have hit him on the head."

"Let's just say it all worked out and we're grateful," Nayu said, laughing. "With all the Earthbenders free, we'll have that garrison out of here in a week." She turned to Katara. "If there's ever anything you need from us, Avatar, just ask, and it will be our pleasure to provide."

Katara reached out to grip her shoulder, and smiled. "I'll let you know."





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'tis not so deep as a well

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