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The world turns red, and so does the inside of Aang’s head.
Behind him he hears Yue groan.
“Are you okay?”
“I feel feint.”
“I feel it too,” Aang admits. Half of his brain has been knocked out of his head.
He forces his eyes open against the red and sees the snow far below glare bloodshot. In the distance, the sea is black. He lifts his eyes to the only light source in the clear night sky.
The moon is bloodied.
Half his brain is barely hanging onto him.
It’s spiritual. The pain, it’s spiritual.
“The Moon spirit is in trouble,” Aang says, certain of the fact.
He only half listens to Yue’s tale of her birth, her tie to the Moon spirit. Just like only half of his head is with him, and he has only half of his strength.
He feels gutted. He feels short of breath.
(When was the last time Aang was short of breath? Has he ever been?)
He opens his eyes again. The Moon is red. The Ocean is black.
Aang focuses, really focuses on the most basic breathing exercises he ever learned, and by the time he’s bringing Appa in to land, he feels significantly more right in the head.
It’s only a couple of minutes, but he sees how Yue gets worse as he gets better. When they land in the Spirit Oasis, she doesn’t even have the strength to climb off of Appa.
La is frantic in the pond, erratic and uncoordinated and alone, and Aang is only seeing it out of the corner of his eye. His attention is elsewhere.
Without seeing on feeling or knowing anything at all, Aang is gravely certain that the thrashing thing inside the sack is Tui. And it is suffocating – much slower than a mortal fish of that size ever would – covered and blinded from the world, held aloft in the violent hand of a man who sees the body but not what it holds.
It genuinely takes him a few seconds to even recognize the man as Zhao. The rage in his chest is not his own, not entirely.
Zhao sneers, looking at them. He has men at his back. They outnumber them, but with Aang’s breath shaking more and more by the second, he thinks he could take twice this many men by himself. With Katara and Sokka at his side, he’s invincible.
Zhao lifts the sack. “Don’t bother,” he warns, raising his empty hand into a bending fist.
All bravado leaves Aang at once. “Zhao! Don’t.” He drops his staff.
“It’s my destiny,” Zhao says. “To destroy the Moon, and the Water Tribe.”
“Destroying the Moon won’t hurt just the Water Tribe. It will hurt everyone, including you.” Aang keeps his hands open, hardly daring to move. He’s not looking at Zhao’s face, but at his hands. “Without the Moon, everything would fall out of balance. You have no idea what kind of chaos that would unleash on the world!”
“He’s right, Zhao.”
Aang doesn’t turn to see who spoke. Zhao does, and identifies the speaker for Aang’s unmoving eyes.
“General Iroh. Why am I not surprised to discover your treachery?”
“I’m no traitor, Zhao. The Fire Nation needs the Moon, too. We all depend on the balance.”
Zhao levels a disbelieving stare at Iroh. He hasn’t lowered his threatening hands at all.
Iroh lifts his own hands. “Whatever you do to that spirit, I will unleash on you tenfold. Let it go, now!”
Zhao grits his teeth. Stiff with tension he lowers himself to a knee and empties the sack into the pond.
The sheer relief that washes through Aang at seeing Tui’s silverwhite body slip through the water is so overwhelming that he almost doesn’t realize that the world’s turned a healthy silver again. For a moment he thinks it’s his own vision twisting.
He watches Tui and La swim eagerly to each other. They turn to start a circle, push and pulling together as they always have, reunited for eternity.
Light, and heat, and red, and Aang’s body spasming forward without any input from him.
The fire skims the surface of the pond and burns out, having caught nothing.
Caught nothing, but burned, still.
The world goes dark.
There is a void dug out of the middle of Aang’s head. The pain he felt earlier is nowhere – there’s nothing, no suffering making itself known into the part of him that connects with the Spirit World. He lifts his eyes to the sky and finds it featureless.
He hasn’t thought about how much light reflects off of snow in weeks. Since he first got here. He looks back to the earth and finds the world so dark he’s blind.
Fire shoots from the dark – at Zhao, who defends himself and backs away and into the night. The fire is Iroh’s, and it’s so quick, so sure of itself in the blindblack of the moonless night, that Zhao’s men fall like flies around him, crawling hurt after their boss into the night.
Aang observes this passively. There’s nothing in him. His eyes adjust slowly, dragging the details out of the Oasis as painful as pulling teeth.
He isn’t breathing. When was the last time he didn’t?
He has a hard time making out La’s black scales in the lake, but he easily spots Tui’s white ones.
It isn’t moving. Why isn’t it moving?
It’s just floating there, on its side, a patch in its middle darkened.
La is frantic. La is livid.
Aang is livid.
How could he? How dare he?
He walks to the inner curve of the pond unaware of his own limbs. His friends walk with him as Iroh kneels by the water.
He exhales, a breath so warm Aang knows it to be bending, yet it doesn’t so much as smoke . Iroh reaches gentle hands into the water, and Aang lets him. La lets him. When have those hands ever hurt a Spirit?
Iroh stands up with Tui in his hands. It’s completely limp.
“There’s no hope now,” Yue gasps. “It’s over.”
It’s over.
The Moon is gone. The Moon is dead.
Aang doesn’t have the space of mind to think about the consequences. No waterbending. No balance. Chaos, violence, the end of the world. Aang thinks about none of those things, because the void in the middle of Aang’s head fills with the one thing that could possibly fill it. It chokes him from the inside.
How dare they?
“No,” Aang says, and something Else speaks with him, “It’s not over.”
He steps into the water. Fully aware of himself, too aware of every sacred thing around him, he puts his hands together.
Use me, Aang calls out into the dense anger-grief in the middle of his head. Use me, take my strength.
La circles around his feet once, twice in the water, coming to float in front of him. For the first time in eternity, it, too, stops swimming.
Use my power, La calls. Bring it into the world. Give me your strength.
Give me your power, Aang pleads.
How dare they?
And the Spirit of the Ocean takes Aang’s body.
He and It spread.
The ice is solid, manmade into shapes no spirit has ever touched, but there’s water everywhere. There is Ocean everywhere. It and He spread everywhere.
It is only a small part of It that ever touched Tui’s mortal body. The grief strikes so bright around the body of He, the anger pulls so high the body of It. It lifts Him up with more power than any human body should handle, and He guides It with more solid strength than any spirit should know of.
How dare they? How could they?
It reaches further than either of their mortal bodies can afford to raise. It gives Him the power to reach too, and He’s careful to ask for that guidance only for them. He picks out who they are, for It, for even the most mortal spirit doesn’t know all about the mortal world.
Men and women fall to their knees before He and It, and He and It do not hurt those ones. Men and women raise weapons and bending against He and It, and they are wiped from existence.
How dare they? How dare they? The same fire that took away Its precious partner, Its other half, the push to Its pull since time ever was, they dare raise it against It and Him? What is coming to them will be slow and cold and will kill them from inside. They should have a thousand deaths, and it still will not be enough.
They run. Scamper back to the scabs of metal floating in the reaches of It that He doesn’t have the strength to reach without hurting Himself.
It lowers Its grief-striken core, holding Him, to Its reaching body. He and It flood to the edge of man’s reach and further still, out to the vastness of It. Here, It doesn’t have to aim. Here, It only needs Him to tell It how to hurt them.
It has no value for counting, but even if It did, It wouldn’t bother to count how many of those screeching vessels stand before It. It lifts up the grief of He, the water from the pond that housed It and Its partner. He shapes the fury of It up into a body that He can guide.
He and It grieve.
He and It are livid.
He guides Its reach into devastating forms. The vessels scarp under the attack, and still it is not enough.
Nothing will ever be enough.
It pushes Its grief forward, after the vessels. In His anger, He pushed them far out of His and Its reach.
Not far enough. Never enough again.
He lends His eyes to It, to see them, infuriating even as they retreat.
The sea turns blue.
The Ocean lifts Aang’s eyes to the sky, bright enough to blind him with a full Moon.
The world is blue and bright with snow glare.
Tui is alive, then. Alive again, and there is no void, no anger-grief in the middle of Aang’s head.
It’s alright, La calls. I return you your strength.
I return you your power, Aang agrees.
The body collapses without the anger holding it up. The water dulls without the grief to strike it.
The Ocean brings Aang to the edge of the city, the edge of man’s reach – without his guidance, that’s about all La can recognize.
Aang sways without La’s support. He closes his eyes. His head is his own again, but the strength he lent to the grief of a spirit more ancient than speech itself is weakened from overuse. He clutches his dizzy head and falls to his knees.
The Ocean is a healthy deep blue. The Fire Nation is too far to see more than the smoke from their ships.
Aang turns around.
The ice glares that bright silver white that Aang will never be able to associate again with anything other that the feeling in his chest right now. It should be relief, he thinks. Mostly he feels the distinct absence of the grief, the anger, the power.
That’s a good thing. No mortal should ever hold that much in them. Not even the Avatar.
He sees the glowing body of the Spirit of the Ocean flood its way up the watery steps of Agna Quel’a. It stops only for a moment, and then the glow of it is gone.
There’s no doubt in Aang’s mind about what the last of La’s anger was spent on.