Chapter Text
A joke died on Sokka’s lips as the boy in the ice fell forwards, clearly dead. Before either he or Katara could do anything, the giant, furry creature that had been curled around him bellowed, a low, grieving sound that made Sokka’s hair stand on end.
“This was the Avatar,” Katara said. “The Avatar’s dead .”
That’s not possible , Sokka thought, before his head cleared and he felt himself begin to panic, questions swirling into each other in his head. How was that boy the Avatar? How was the Avatar dead? Why was the Avatar here ?
To his relief, Sokka was able to catch his sister as she crumpled, her distress breaking through his own confusion. Had she fainted? Sokka turned her around to check her face and had to force himself not to recoil as her eyes shot open and began to glow an unearthly white. The glow spread, and Katara stood up.
This did not make Sokka feel better. She was holding herself strangely, like she was at risk of floating off at any moment. “Katara—” he started and reached out for her. He could have reached for his weapon, but he didn’t. This was his sister . He couldn’t attack her, even if she was freaking him out.
“Who are you?” his sister asked him in a boy’s voice. “Where am I?”
“Katara, this isn’t funny,” Sokka said, even though he knew for a fact he was the one who would make this sort of terrible joke, not her.
Katara shook her head. “I’m not Katara,” she said. “I’m Aang. I’m… oh. Right.” She frowned. “I died, didn’t I? And your sister’s next in the cycle.” Her shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry.”
The glow faded, and Sokka found himself again catching a collapsing Katara.
“What just happened?” Katara asked, with her own voice.
“Katara,” Sokka said, finding himself strangely numb. “I think you’re the Avatar.”
She had already passed out, leaving Sokka by himself with a still snuffling beast, a dead boy, and his unconscious sister.
For one brief, insane moment, he considered lying down in the snow and ice and joining the dead airbender—Aang—and letting all three of them drift away. He shook himself, and the thought dissipated.
“Okay,” he said, mostly to himself. He would bring both corpse and sister to Gran-Gran. She would know what to do. She always knew what to do. “Okay.”
Putting his sister into the boat was easier than picking up the corpse. For such a small boy, Aang’s body was heavy, and the beast did not seem terribly pleased with what Sokka was doing.
“I’m sorry,” Sokka said, feeling foolish. “We need to do something with the body. We can take care of him the water tribe way.” He scuffed his foot along the ice. “I wish I knew how airbenders buried their dead, but I don’t, okay? I’m sorry.”
The beast calmed down. There was that, at least.
At long last he had them both in the boat, and he began the long, solo journey home.
-
Even the children knew what a dead boy looked like, and no one spoke once they realized what Sokka had, or after he returned to the boat to collect the unconscious body of his sister.
“What does this mean?” Gran-gran asked, carefully. She looked so old, just standing there at the entrance to her igloo.
“Katara is the Avatar,” Sokka said. He settled the airbender’s corpse against her igloo. He could have been sleeping. “We have to bury him.”
“Is that his sky-bison?” she asked, and pointed to the beast, which had parked itself outside the small circle of igloos.
“I don’t know,” Sokka said, frustration leaking into his voice. Gran-gran was supposed to know all the answers. She shouldn’t be asking him questions.
“He’s so little,” he said. “Just a kid. All this time, the Avatar’s just been a kid in the ice. And he’s dead.”
“Katara is the Avatar,” Gran-gran said. “You will have to leave us.”
Sokka started backwards. “I can’t ,” he said, and flushed angrily as he heard his own voice crack on the word. “I promised Dad—”
Gran-gran’s hands were smaller than he wanted to think about on Sokka’s shoulders. She smiled thinly. “Your trainees will protect us well enough, I’m sure,” she said, in a way that was meant as both black humor and reassurance. She looked at one of the other igloos. “And we may not train our women to fight, but we know how to hide. You must go North to our sister tribe. Katara must learn the elements, and she cannot learn them here.”
Sokka thought about how, before his growth spurt, he could lean on Gran-gran with almost his full weight, and she would hug him, and he would feel safe. Now, if he tried that, she would fall over. “I’m sorry,” he said, finally.
“Go to your sister,” Gran-gran said. “The women will handle the Avatar—”
“Aang,” Sokka interrupted, realizing he had forgotten to mention the boy’s name . “His name was Aang.”
Gran-gran nodded. “We will handle Aang’s body.” She shook her head. “I hope his spirit does not mind too much that we cannot burn him.”
Sokka thought of glowing eyes. “I think he has bigger problems to worry about.”
Gran-gran laughed. “I suppose you’re right,” she said.
-
Katara woke up groggy but, to Sokka’s immense relief, none the worse for wear. She was also as happy as Sokka had been at Gran-gran’s insistence they leave.
Except, unlike Sokka, when Katara got upset, things happened to the water.
“ What ?” she demanded, and then froze as a wall of ice exploded out of the ground in front of her.
“Katara,” Gran-gran said, sternly. “We have talked about using your bending for remodeling without consulting me.”
Katara started to laugh, but she stopped as she realized what Gran-gran was trying to do. “I can’t leave you!” she insisted. “Not after I just gained the ability to keep you safe .”
Gran-gran shook her head. “You have learned nothing ,” she said, her voice cracking with a mixture of anger and sorrow. “You need training you cannot find in our village. I love you, Katara, but if the Fire Nation takes everything, there will be no more safety.”
Katara opened her mouth to protest, then closed it. Slumping against her newly formed ice wall, she looked up at the sky, where the waxing crescent moon was already visible despite the sun. “I don’t want to be the Avatar,” she said.
Gran-gran pulled her into a tight hug. Only Sokka saw her expression. “I don’t think anyone wants to be the Avatar, dear,” she said. “It falls to you to find the strength to bear that weight.”
-
Zuko had brought the Wani south because he was running out of places to look. It was for that reason only he was in the right place to see the brilliant blue light split the clouds, interrupting one of Uncle’s ridiculous jam sessions. He would only understand how lucky he was much, much later.
“There!” he said. “The Avatar is there!”
His crew, numbed by a thousand false starts, did not exactly hop to it, but they still obeyed him. They were loyal, as any Fire Nation sailor ought to be.
He had reasons for his confidence. He’d never seen anything like it before, but he’d read about how the Avatar’s power could light up the darkness like day and slaughter thousands. The Avatar was of the spirit world as much as he was human.
“It is a shame the Fire Nation destroyed the Southern Water Tribes so thoroughly,” Iroh said, stroking his beard thoughtfully. “I would have liked to see the dances.”
Zuko glared at him. “They were a threat to us,” he said. Uncle Iroh didn’t seem to understand that sort of thing, interested only in his teas and pai-sho games. “And to themselves. They refused to be civilized.”
Uncle hummed thoughtfully in response. “I suppose,” he said. “And ours is a great civilization, after all.”
Zuko nodded angrily and stalked away from where his uncle was now gazing out over the water to the bow of the ship. He was needed at the bow, or at least he was needed somewhere else .
-
The boy was crying, face pressed into his knees.
Katara looked around the strange, stone room for an adult, and found none. There also seemed to be no doors or windows, and yet a blue light suffused the air, letting her see clearly.
Seeing no other alternative, Katara approached the crying boy. He was smaller than her, too small for the blue tattoos that criss crossed his body. “Hi,” she said, softly. “I’m Katara. Are you okay?”
The boy looked up at her, and she had to force herself not to take a step backwards. Grief had made his face a horror. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
“It’s okay,” Katara soothed. “I’m sure it’s not your fault.”
He shook his head angrily. “It is!” he said. “I ran away and died, and everything’s gone wrong.” He grabbed Katara’s hands with painful strength. “You have to fix it,” he demanded. “Everything I broke. You have to fix it, and soon, before they burn everything.”
Before Katara could reply, or even process what he had said, both the room and the boy burst into flames. He screamed.
It was only as the flames reached her that she remembered. This was Aang, her past life, the boy in the iceberg, the last airbender, and he was dead.
-
Katara woke up screaming. Sokka reached for a weapon that was not there and rushed to her side, recoiling only when a flailing hand smacked him in the face. “Katara!” He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Katara, you’re safe!”
“I know how to make the bison fly!” was the first thing she said as she opened eyes that were the wrong color for just the briefest moment. “We have to— burning , Sokka, they’ll burn everything.”
Every remaining child in the tribe had nightmares of the Fire Nation, though Sokka would never admit that he still had them, and it seemed that Katara’s had combined with whatever spiritual weirdness came from being the Avatar.
“Please tell me it’s not an airbender thing,” Sokka said, trying weakly to make it into a joke.
Katara shook her head. “It’s yip-yip ,” she said, her expression perfectly grave. “That makes him fly.”
Sokka found himself laughing so hard he almost doubled over, his breaths coming out in heaving, choking gasps.
“ Fuck ,” he said, before immediately covering his mouth and checking Gran-Gran wasn’t around to reprimand him, even though she was the one he’d learned the words from.
Katara smiled weakly. “It is a little silly, I guess,” she said.
Sokka shook his head. “It makes sense,” he forced out between gasps. “It’s not something you’d say normally, so you’re not going to have it taking off on you unexpectedly. Still… I needed that.” He straightened. “You know what this means, right?”
She nodded. Their last excuse for why they couldn’t leave home was gone, and today might be the last day they saw home ever again. Water Tribe members who left never came home again, and Sokka couldn’t think of himself as an exception.
-
The ship, when it arrived, was like a scar on the horizon, growing bigger and more awful with every moment.
“Go!” Gran-gran insisted. “Now, before they find you.” They had spent their day gathering meagre provisions, a process extended by both Sokka’s and Katara’s fervent insistence they not endanger the tribe’s food supplies with their preparations. Now, they had a bag full of sea jerky, what Earth Kingdom coins the women could find, and two octopus-seal skins full of fresh water. It was nowhere near enough, but they would be flying over the ocean. There would be fish.
“No!” Katara insisted. “Not without Sokka, and I don’t—”
Her brother had already disappeared, their father’s old pack and weapons with him.
The ship cracked the ice with its weight. Unlike the old fire nation vessel trapped in the ice, this one seemed almost alive. With a scream of abused metal, the bow transformed into a ramp.
Only one of the firebenders who made their way down the ramp did not wear a mask. To Katara’s surprise, he didn’t look much older than Sokka.
“Sokka, wait!”
Apparent age meant nothing. He would only be on that ship if he were a master, and it would not take a master to defeat her brother in combat.
Sokka, made up like their last memory of Father, did not listen. Howling, he ran at the firebender boy, only to find himself thrown back onto the ice. The firebender had not even needed to summon his flame.
“That’s it ?” the boy demanded. He sounded exasperated.
“You took everyone else from us,” Sokka hissed. Katara was surprised he could talk at all. “I’m all that’s left.”
The fire nation wouldn’t know Katara was a waterbender. They would have the element of surprise.
“You’re harboring the Avatar,” the boy said. This didn’t follow from what Sokka had said, but he wasn’t even looking at him anymore. He was looking at Katara, the only other person not sheltering inside an igloo. “Don’t bother lying, I can see the flying bison.”
Appa had refused to be moved somewhere less visible from where he had plopped himself down against a pile of packed ice. He breathed noisily in the firebenders’ direction, ruffling the boy’s topknot.
“The Avatar’s dead ,” Katara lied. She thought of the boy in the ice. She wasn’t entirely wrong.
“Don’t lie to me!” The boy was getting angrier. Katara took a step towards Sokka. Her emotions made ice climb and water fall. This firebender’s anger would get her brother burned. “It’s not going to work.”
“I’m not lying,” Katara said. “He was in the ice. His spiritual energy must have run out keeping him alive. He’s dead.” She dipped her head in genuine grief. “I can show you.”
This seemed to take the firebender aback. “ What .”
Katara made it to Sokka, who looked like he wanted to keep throwing himself at an entire Fire Nation ship until he died or it somehow worked. “We buried him two days ago. Bodies take a long time to rot here. You’ll recognize him.”
This was clearly not how the firebender had expected events to proceed. “Great,” he said. “This means I’ll have to go North, won’t I, and see if any of the waterbenders glow funny.” He looked deeply irritated at the prospect.
“I don’t think you’ll need to do that,” Katara said, softly. She had never been a great liar. She’d never really needed to exercise the skill. Hopefully, she’d pull this one off. “When I mean dead, I mean dead . I don’t think there’s an Avatar anymore.”
“ What .”
Sparks flared between the prince’s fingers.
“Prince Zuko.” An old man Katara had not noticed placed his hand heavily on Zuko’s shoulder, and the prince’s flame went out. “She speaks the truth.”
He met Katara’s eyes and nodded once, so small she was the only one to see it.
-
The water tribe girl glowed blue like the ocean in moonlight. She was the Avatar, Iroh had no doubt of it, and he also understood completely why she would lie, albeit uncomfortably, to Zuko. Iroh could have, if he wanted to, called her out.
He chose not to. This quest had taken too much from Zuko already, and perhaps, now, he would give himself a moment to rest.
Iroh’s hopes were squashed almost immediately, as small as they were. His brother had filled his children with poison, and Zuko was still under the mistaken impression that the Fire Lord would take him back once he succeeded.
“I don’t believe you,” Zuko said. “If you’re trying to protect the Northern Water Tribe, don’t bother.” He shook off Iroh’s hand. “Everyone, back on board, we’re leaving.”
Iroh saw the girl relax.
Each choice Iroh made was treason, now, if Ozai had anything to say about it. What was yet another betrayal of the Fire Nation, after all this time?
Zuko would discover the truth, of that Iroh was certain. He was clever when he was not stubborn. For now, Iroh would buy the girl time, time she desperately needed before her newfound abilities would help her save anyone other than herself.
The Avatar was only so powerful as her technique, after all. Iroh could only hope that she would live long enough that Iroh would have the chance to teach her firebending himself.
-
Zuko couldn’t sleep that night.
He hated himself for it, because the things that prevented him from sleeping were never strategy meetings but nightmares and doubts and all the sort of thing that had gotten him exiled in the first place, but that didn’t change his restlessness. It was like his skin was itching, or someone had lit a very slow fire in his thoughts and it was just out of reach.
The Avatar was dead. The Avatar was also a child, but the Avatar was dead. Only the last Avatar of course, because there was no way the water tribe girl had not been lying, but still, the person he’d been hunting for years now was just... gone.
The new one had to be water. Not the Southern Water Tribe, that was one village full of frightened children and sad old women, but no wonder the North had been staying out of the war, if they had the Avatar.
“Coward,” he muttered to no one.
Smacking his pillow, he firmly did not think about the other reason he could not sleep. The Water Tribe girl and her stupid defiance, her willingness to stand up to firebenders in armor, the grace of her bending, her eyes--
He punched the pillow again. He was so tired , why couldn’t he just fall asleep?
She had the dead Avatar’s bison. She was obviously going to go north with her brother and find the avatar, but that didn’t mean he had to follow her.
Why, then, did Zuko find himself almost wanting to?