Work Text:
It doesn’t matter, that the ocean’s waves will carry the warden’s body north, and it doesn’t matter that it’ll most likely wash up on the shores of another Earth Kingdom village infected with Fire all through it’s land, but it’s funny enough, Tyro thinks. Having to face the body of a man held in high regard and honour among his people, beaten and cold and rotten. Nothing more than a rotting corpse of what once was a tyrant, miniature and pathetic as he was.
The warden’s body is a mess of bruises and welts, brutalised and beaten, but it’s not what killed him, and it’s a more than fitting death for a tyrant, drunk off another man’s power. It was the Earth that threw him in the water, but it’s the water that killed him, soaked his lungs like a sponge.
Katara is young, but she has a will like no one else. She is much like the ocean in all its raw, unmitigated power. It was all her will that killed the warden, even if she didn’t hold him under the water and wait for him to drown; she kicked the first stone that tore his little throne to pieces.
She’s young, and reckless and much like his own son, warm and vibrant and still hopeful, still willing to fight because they have not lost all their hope.
Tyro sat on the deck of his floating prison and managed, and it was all he could do to keep the fragile equilibrium, to keep people from crumbling to pieces around them as their home sits on the horizon. Close enough to see, and yet far enough away that none of them could reach it, as their element is ripped away from them. He never fought, and he never thought about how to escape.
It won’t always work, that kind of bullheadedness. In some ways, they were lucky that the Earthbenders on board were skilled enough, fearless enough, strong enough to still stand and fight back. Maybe the rage of the youth infected them all, and reminded them to be furious, that Katara standing up on a pile of coal, young and still baby-faced, holding up a piece of stupid, dusty rock like it would save the world right then and there, screaming at them to fight awoke something inside them. Re-igniting the youthful rage, the will to fight.
Maybe it won’t always work. Maybe that sometimes, people are in so deep, hurt so bad that standing up to raise a fist in front of the face of the people that think they can hold them down, tie them to the metal casings of a prison is not just foolish, but impossible. Maybe it won’t always work, but Tyro thinks, they need more of that. More of that rage.
Even as the Avatar himself stood in front of him, the burdens of a hundred years of blood and death placed on the shoulders of a child younger than Haru; it was not him who freed them, not him who got them to their feet for the first time in too long, but instead the spirit of a young girl, who can still fight, in the face of everything that has happened to those around her. To her.
It should not take the will of a child to make Tyro stand again. But he is standing now, and there is nothing, no soldier nor tyrant that will keep him from his family. He can thank Katara of the Water Tribe for that.