Chapter Text
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Prologue
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It’s a slow build.
A fire-branded young woman on a porch surrounded by fireflies. (She understands, she says.)
A hopeful expecting couple willingly sharing what little they have over a campfire. (He pities, he says.)
An optimistic and angry little boy watching him admiringly in a field of sunflowers. (He idolizes, his mother says.)
But he fails them all.
He steals the scarred woman’s ostrich horse. He leaves the couple to fend for themselves on a dangerous road. He lights up the small town with flames and burns the negative in the little boy’s eyes.
And maybe he’s just tired. That’s what he tells himself as he heads off into the sunset, over dunes, leaving a glaring town in his wake, the smoke rising over the still smoldering remains of his life before.
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It’s a slow build.
“Katara, where’s the food?” Her brother. (He’s never known who else to ask.)
“Yeah, yeah, Sugar Queen, I heard you the first time.” Toph. (She’s rebelling against the structure she’s always chafed under. Silently, Katara understands.)
“C’mon, Katara, why can’t we have a little fun?” Aang. (No one has ever told him no, because why would you tell the Avatar no?)
In every sentence, she hears the unspoken ‘Mom’. It starts to rub her raw, blisters bubbling up under her skin.
So when Aang gets mad at Toph over something she had no control of, Katara bites her tongue and tries to soothe the hurt before he storms off. When Toph complains of the heat and the hunger, she digs into her bag for the crumbs of their food and pulls some of the bending water from her diminishing supplies. And when Sokka eats a random cactus and becomes a walking menace rather than any help, she can’t tell if she wants to cry or scream.
When they finally stop, when they can carry on no longer, and the other two sleep, Katara feels the rupture. The blister breaking, the cold realization washing from the wound, the needle tenderness.
It’s no surprise, as she sat staring blankly across the dunes of endless sand, that figures would begin to appear on the horizon.
It’s the first bit of hope she has had in days. She’s on her feet before she even realizes it.
The first dune she crests, it’s slow and painful.
The second, she finds a burst of energy. The figures start to clear.
The third, she can recognize them.
In her rational mind, it starts sounding a warning. Because it can’t be them.
It can’t be Dad. It can’t be Gran Gran. It can’t be– “Mom?”
She feels so cold, even though the sand feels hot under her boots. Funny how sand can crunch like snow…
She’s not watching her feet when the toe of her trailing foot catches something hard. Momentum, the angle of the dune, and her own worn and tired mind and body, fail her. Head over heels, she plummets.
A hard thud echoes through her skull, proceeded quickly by darkness.
When her friends wake, they look, they search.
When Aang finally returns to them, they all search.
Eventually, they all have to count her for lost. Eventually, they have to let their tears of loss, of dreams gone, fall, dry.
Under the clear sky, hard blue skies fade into amethyst, sapphire, and pinprick stars.