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The fish lies motionless in Iroh's hands.
For a moment, I cannot understand what I am looking at.
The Spirit Oasis has always felt untouched by the rest of the world. Even with the sounds of battle beyond the walls, even with smoke hanging over the city, this place is supposed to be safe. Sacred.
Tui cannot be dead.
But the white body does not move.
"It's too late," Katara says quietly. "It's dead."
Something inside me goes still.
The moon is gone. The sky above us is empty where its light has always been, and the whole world has been washed in a terrible red. I have looked at the moon every night for as long as I can remember. My father told me its story before I was old enough to understand it. He told me how I had been born silent, how nothing the healers did could make me cry, how he carried me into this oasis and begged the Moon Spirit to save me.
Tui gave me life.
Iroh looks at me; his eyes settle on my hair.
"You have been touched by the Moon Spirit," he says. "Some of its life is in you."
I already know what he means. The answer comes so easily that it frightens me.
"Yes, you're right." I look at the little white body in his hands. "It gave me life. Maybe I can give it back."
"No!" Sokka catches my hand before I can move.
I turn toward him.
"You don't have to do that." His fingers tighten around mine.
For one selfish moment, I want to believe him. I want there to be another way. I want Iroh to tell me I am wrong. I want Katara to heal the little white fish somehow. I want Aang to return and fix everything because he is the Avatar and that is what the Avatar is supposed to do.
I want to stay.
"It's my duty, Sokka."
"I won't let you." His voice breaks around the words. "Your father told me to protect you."
My father.
The thought nearly undoes me. I will never see him again.
I will never walk through the halls of the palace or wake beneath the heavy blankets in my room. I will never hear the children playing in the courtyards below my window. I will never complain about another ceremony or sit beside my father while advisers discuss things I am expected to understand.
Thankfully, I will never become Hahn's wife.
Sadly, I will never become anyone's wife.
There are so many things I will never be.
Then I look at the dead spirit.
There are so many things no one will ever be again if I do nothing.
"I have to do this."
Sokka stares at me. I wish I had more time with him.
It is such a small thought beside everything happening around us, but it hurts more than all the others.
Another walk through the city. Another terrible joke. Another moment where I can pretend I am simply Yue and he is simply Sokka and there isn't a war waiting outside or duties I must fulfil.
His hand is warm around mine.
I let it go.
My fingers slip through his, and I kneel beside Iroh.
Tui is cold when I place my hands around the little body. For a heartbeat, nothing happens.
Then warmth blooms beneath my palms. I close my eyes.
It does not hurt. That surprises me.
I had imagined death before. Everyone has, even if no one admits it. I imagined darkness. Cold. Fear. Instead, I feel warm.
The warmth moves through my hands first, flowing out through my fingertips and into Tui. My arms grow heavy. Then my chest.
My heartbeat slows.
Somewhere nearby, Sokka says my name.
I want to look at him, but my eyes will not open. The warmth keeps leaving me until I can no longer feel my hands or the ground beneath my knees. Sokka says something else, but his voice sounds farther away now, as though he is the one drifting from me instead of the other way around.
I want to tell him not to be afraid, and I want to tell him that I'm not afraid either, though I'm no longer sure whether that is true.
My heart beats once more.
And stops.
There is no darkness.
When I open my eyes again, Sokka is holding me.
No.
Sokka is holding my body.
I stare at the girl in his arms, at her closed eyes and the white hair spilling over his sleeve. She looks peaceful in a way I don't feel, and strangely distant despite being close enough that I could reach out and touch her.
Sokka bends over her. "No," he whispers, his shoulders beginning to shake. "She's gone."
"I'm here, Sokka."
He doesn't hear me.
Something pulls painfully inside me as I reach for him, but my hand passes through his shoulder without touching cloth or skin. I try again, desperate for him to feel me somehow, even as I watch my body begin to disappear from his arms.
"I'm right here."
I should be frightened, but instead I feel lighter than I ever have. The pain is gone, along with the cold and the weight of my body. Even the terrible noise beyond the oasis seems to fade as I drift farther from everything I have ever known.
But Sokka is still below me, and I cannot leave without saying goodbye.
The thought is enough to bring me back to him.
Suddenly, I am standing in front of him again.
Sokka looks up, and this time, he sees me.
The grief on his face nearly makes me wish I had never turned around.
"Goodbye, Sokka."
I lean toward him, and for one final moment, I remember what it is to have lips. His are warm against mine, but even that sensation is already beginning to fade by the time I pull away.
"I'll always be with you."
I want him to understand what I mean, although I'm not sure I understand it myself.
Then the oasis begins to fall away beneath me, and Sokka grows smaller as I rise.
The city spreads beneath him, surrounded by ice and dark water. I rise higher, but there is no wind against my face. No cold. I cannot feel my feet leaving the ground because I no longer know where my feet are.
Higher.
The red disappears from the world.
Silver spills across the snow.
I look toward the sky.
And for one impossible instant, I wonder where the moon is.
Then I understand.
I am not looking at its light.
The light is coming from me.
For a long moment, I can only marvel at it. Silver stretches farther than my eyes could ever have followed when I was alive, spilling over the ice and settling across rooftops, walls, and canals until Agna Qel'a gleams beneath me. Beyond the city, the ocean stretches toward a horizon I can somehow feel even when I cannot see its end.
There is something different about seeing the world from here. I am impossibly far from it, yet nothing feels truly distant. The moonlight touching the snow feels connected to me. So does the pale shimmer resting upon the water. I do not understand how I can feel any of it when I no longer have hands or skin or even a heartbeat, but the knowledge settles quietly within me, as though some part of me has always known and simply needed to awaken.
Then I become aware of something moving across the ocean.
It is enormous, a towering shape of water and blue-white light standing before Agna Qel'a. Fire Nation ships scatter across the sea before it, but my attention is drawn to the boy suspended within the spirit's glowing form.
Aang.
The recognition that follows is deeper.
La.
I have known the Ocean Spirit's name for as long as I can remember. I have bowed before the oasis where La and Tui circled one another beneath the water. I have heard the priests speak of their eternal balance, of the moon pulling upon the ocean and the ocean answering in turn, but those teachings suddenly feel like descriptions of something that could never be understood through words alone.
Because now I can feel La.
The Ocean Spirit's presence moves beneath me through every wave and current surrounding the city. There are no words within it, nothing I can hear in the way I once heard another person's voice, but I feel its fury nevertheless. It is immense and wounded, pouring through the ocean and through Aang with such force that for an instant I am almost afraid to reach for it.
Yet beneath that fear is something else.
Recognition.
The moon knows the ocean.
I do not know whether that knowledge belonged to Tui or whether it belongs to me now, but reaching toward La feels more natural than anything has since my heart stopped beating. I do not have to decide how to do it. I simply allow my attention to settle upon the water below, and something within me answers.
Aang looks up.
His glowing eyes find the restored moon, and in that same moment I feel La become aware of me.
The connection is immediate.
There is no greeting between us, no voice welcoming me into this strange new existence. There is only the sudden certainty that I am no longer reaching into an endless ocean alone. Something ancient has turned toward me from below, and for the first time since leaving my body in Sokka's arms, I feel known.
I'm here.
I do not know whether La understands the thought itself, but the fury moving through the ocean begins to ease.
The towering spirit grows still. Water spills from its enormous form in shining sheets, falling back into the sea as the shape surrounding Aang slowly dissolves. The Fire Nation ships continue retreating into the darkness, but La no longer follows them.
Relief washes through me as I watch.
The moon has returned, and somehow its return has reached the ocean too.
Below, La carries Aang back toward Agna Qel'a. The water moves through the city with him until it rises against one of the walls and leaves him there safely. The glow disappears from his eyes and tattoos, and when the water slips away from him, he is simply Aang again.
La continues without him.
I follow the movement through the canals, sensing the spirit returning deeper into the city, and a warmth unlike anything I have felt since becoming this settles through me.
I did it.
The thought feels almost childish beside everything I have become, but I cannot stop it. I gave back what Tui once gave me. The moon shines again. The Water Tribe has its strength. La's fury has quieted, and the Ocean Spirit is returning home.
Finally, since I touched Tui's lifeless body, I allow myself to believe that the worst is over.
I keep my attention on the ocean long after La disappears into the city.
The water feels different to me now. When I was alive, I could stand at the edge of the ice and watch it stretch farther than I could see, but it had always ended at the limits of my sight. Now I am aware of it far beyond Agna Qel'a, beyond the ships retreating toward the horizon, beyond every shore I have ever known. I cannot see all of it, not exactly, but I can feel its presence beneath my light.
Somewhere within all of that water is La.
The thought fills me with a strange, sudden excitement.
All my life, I have heard the names Tui and La spoken together. The Moon and the Ocean. Push and pull. Two spirits who surrendered immortality together and chose to live in the mortal world, circling one another endlessly beneath the still water of our oasis.
I used to think their existence sounded lonely.
Now I understand that it was anything but.
They had each other.
The thought settles warmly through me as I turn my attention toward the ocean below. I do not know what eternity will feel like yet. I do not even know what tomorrow will feel like. I have been the Moon Spirit for only moments, and there is so much about this existence that I cannot understand.
But I will not have to understand it alone.
La has done this before.
Perhaps that is why I reach for the ocean without fear.
I remember what I felt when La first became aware of me, that ancient presence turning toward my light as though the ocean itself had lifted its gaze. This time, I reach deliberately. I let my awareness travel downward through the silver resting upon the water, searching for that presence beneath it.
When I find La, something within me seems to recognize what to do.
I pull.
The ocean answers.
The sound that comes from it tears through me.
I recoil so violently that the connection breaks at once.
For several moments, I can do nothing but stare down at the water.
I have no heart anymore, yet I feel as though one has seized inside my chest.
It was not a voice. La did not speak my name or form a single word, but I heard the Ocean Spirit as surely as I ever heard Sokka calling after me.
It was a cry.
Not anger. Not the terrible fury I felt while La drove the Fire Nation fleet from our home. This is something else entirely.
Pain pours through it so raw that I almost cannot bear the memory of it. The sound seems too enormous to belong to any one living thing, low enough to tremble through the deepest water and rising until it feels as though every wave beneath me is carrying the same broken note. There is longing inside it, but not the gentle ache of missing someone who will return. La's cry reaches outward with the desperation of something searching for what it already knows is gone.
For an instant, I am back in Sokka's arms, hearing him say that I am gone.
The thought vanishes almost as quickly as it comes.
I look down at the ocean again.
"La?"
My voice feels impossibly small against something so vast.
There is no answer.
The water below me settles beneath my light as though nothing has happened.
I do not understand.
Only moments ago, I felt La's fury quiet when the moon returned. I watched the Ocean Spirit release Aang and return home. I thought La had recognized me. I thought whatever ancient bond existed between Moon and Ocean had simply found me in Tui's place.
Maybe I hurt La.
The possibility fills me with immediate horror.
I have no idea what I am doing. I do not know how strongly the moon is supposed to pull or how Tui once reached for the ocean. Perhaps I reached too quickly. Perhaps I pulled too hard. Perhaps there are rules to this existence that Tui understood after thousands of years and I have inherited none of them.
Still, beneath my confusion, I cannot escape the memory of that sound. There was something inside it that frightened me more than anger would have.
La had not sounded hurt because I pulled too hard.
La had sounded heartbroken.
Maybe I hurt her.
The thought stays with me until I cannot bear not knowing. I have been the Moon Spirit for only moments. Tui had lifetimes to understand the pull of the moon upon the ocean, while I am still learning what it means to exist without a body.
So I reach for La again.
This time, I am careful. I let my awareness settle over the water and draw upon it so gently that the tide below barely stirs.
La cries out.
The sound tears through the ocean just as it did before, deep and terrible enough that instinct begs me to pull away.
I don't.
I hold on.
The longer I listen, the more certain I become that I have misunderstood. There is pain in La's cry, but I am not causing it. This is older than my touch, deeper than anything I could have done in the few moments since becoming the moon.
It is grief.
The realization opens something between us, and suddenly there are impressions inside the sound that do not belong to me.
Two ancient presences descending together.
Two small bodies slipping into the same sacred water, one white and one black.
Circling.
Always circling.
The images pass through me like fragments of a dream, but I understand what they mean. Tui and La did not simply exist beside one another because the world required a Moon and an Ocean. They chose this together. Long before I was born, long before my father carried his dying daughter into their oasis, they surrendered what they had been and entered the mortal world side by side.
Together.
La's cry shudders through me again, and this time I hear the emptiness inside it.
I turn my attention toward the Spirit Oasis.
Moonlight spills across the familiar pool, pale and quiet, illuminating the place where I have seen the spirits countless times throughout my life.
A black koi moves beneath the surface.
It completes a slow circle through the water, curves around the place where another body should follow, and continues alone.
There is no white fish.
For the first time, I understand what I have done.
I restored the moon.
I did not bring Tui back.
I watch La make another slow circle through the oasis, passing through the empty place where Tui should be, and something inside my new existence begins to ache.
My attention drifts away from the water and finds Sokka.
He has not gone far. From here, he should be impossibly small, but distance does not seem to mean what it once did. I can still see the grief on his face. Only moments ago, he was holding my body in his arms, begging me not to leave him, and I had been so consumed by what I needed to do that I had not understood what my choice would ask of him.
I understand now.
La searches for Tui because Tui is gone.
Sokka looks for me because I am gone.
The difference is that I chose to leave him. Tui never had that choice.
For me, death had been warm. It had carried me upward into something vast and beautiful, taken away the cold and fear and given me a purpose greater than the life I left behind. For Sokka, there had been no light waiting on the other side of it. There had only been a girl disappearing from his arms.
My father will learn that his daughter is dead. My people will mourn their princess. There will be an empty room in the palace and places at tables where everyone will remember I once sat. Life will continue around the spaces I have left behind, just as La continues circling the empty space beside her.
I thought becoming something eternal meant I had left death behind.
Instead, I have only crossed to the other side of it.
I look down at La again, still swimming alone beneath my light, and this time her grief does not feel ancient or unknowable.
It feels terribly familiar.
I reach for La again.
Her cry rises through the ocean the instant our connection forms, so full of anguish that every instinct tells me to retreat. I don't. I let it pass through me, let myself feel the terrible emptiness beneath it, and keep my hold on the water no matter how much it hurts.
"I know," I whisper. "I understand now."
La cannot answer me with words, but the grief trembling through the ocean is answer enough.
"I know I'm not her."
The words hurt more than I expect them to.
"Tui chose this life with you. She came into this world with you, and she swam beside you for longer than I can even imagine. I can't give that back to you, and I won't ask you to pretend that I can."
Another cry rolls through the water. It is softer than the first, but no less broken, and I remain with it.
I carry Tui's power now. Her light is mine, her pull upon the ocean is mine, but her memories are not. I did not spend centuries circling La beneath the water. I do not know the history they shared or all the countless things that passed silently between them.
I will not take Tui's place in La's heart simply because I have taken her place in the sky.
"I'm Yue," I tell her. "And I don't know what I'm doing."
If I could laugh, I think I might. I have been the moon for mere moments, and somehow eternity has already been placed before me. I do not understand every current beneath my light or how strongly I am meant to pull. I don't know what it will feel like to watch centuries pass, because part of me still cannot comprehend that I will never grow another day older.
"I miss Sokka," I admit. "And my father. I want to go home, even though I know I can't." It is trivial compared to La's loss, but it's true.
The ocean trembles beneath me.
"Neither of us chose this."
La did not choose to lose Tui. I chose to give my life, but I did not choose the hand that made it necessary. Neither of us can return to what existed before tonight.
Tui is gone.
My human life is gone.
We are what remain.
I reach a little deeper into the water, careful not to demand anything from her.
"If you'll have me, I can learn."
La's grief continues to move through me, but I no longer need it to stop.
"I can't swim beside you the way she did. I'm up here now, and you're down there. But I can be here. I can learn when to pull and when to let go. I can learn how to listen when you answer."
I look across the world beneath my light and try to imagine how many nights are waiting for us. A hundred years means something to me. A thousand barely does. Eternity is only a word I was taught by people who expected to die.
Perhaps someday I will understand it.
"For however long there is an ocean beneath me, you won't have to face it alone."
La cries again.
I stay.
Kingdoms may rise beneath us and disappear. Generations will be born beneath my light without ever knowing the girl I used to be. A hundred years may pass, and then a thousand more, and perhaps La will still miss Tui with the same ache she carries tonight.
If she does, I will still be here.
I do not ask her to stop searching. I do not ask her to forget the white fish who once circled beside her or to make room for me where Tui used to be.
I simply hold on while she grieves.
La cries again, and I listen.
The sorrow rises through the ocean until it reaches me, carrying the same terrible longing as before. I feel La searching through our connection, reaching for the spirit who should be waiting on the other side of it, and when she finds only me, the grief swells until the water itself seems to mourn with her.
I stay.
Another cry comes, deep enough to tremble through waters far beyond the Northern Tribe. I let it pass through me without pulling away, and when another follows, I remain for that one too.
Eventually, something begins to change.
The cries do not stop, but they lose the desperate edge that made them feel like searching. Each vibration stretches longer through the water and fades more gently than the one before it, until La no longer seems to be calling into the emptiness and waiting for Tui to answer.
She simply feels me there.
I let my moonlight settle across the ocean and reach down through it, not trying to fill the place Tui left behind, but offering the only thing I can; myself.
The water shifts beneath me. Without thinking, I pull.
This time, La answers.
Far from the oasis, beyond the ice and beyond anywhere I have ever traveled, the ocean swells toward a distant shore. Water creeps slowly over the sand, reaches as far as my pull will carry it, and then slides gently home again.
For the first time, I understand the tide.
It is not the moon commanding the ocean.
It is one reaching for the other and being answered.
We try again.
I pull too strongly at first, and the ocean rises farther than I intend. I ease my hold, feeling for La instead of trying to control her, and the water settles before answering me with a gentler swell.
Slowly, we find something resembling a rhythm.
I pull, and La rises. I release, and she retreats. Each time, I understand her a little better, and I think she begins to understand me too.
It is not what she had with Tui. They had centuries to learn one another, while La and I have had only minutes.
But we are not trying to recreate what was lost.
The tide rises again beneath my light, then slips quietly back toward the sea, and I finally understand that beginning something new does not require forgetting what came before.
The world grows quiet beneath me.
For a while, I simply watch it. My light stretches across the snow and ice, over distant mountains and farther still, touching places Yue of the Northern Water Tribe would never have lived long enough to see.
Before I let myself look away, I find Sokka one last time.
I still love him.
Perhaps I always will.
The thought no longer makes me reach desperately toward the world below. I let myself miss him instead. I let myself remember his terrible jokes and the warmth of his hand around mine, and I hope that someday he will remember those things without remembering only how it felt to lose me.
Then I turn back toward the oasis.
La swims beneath my light, one black body moving slowly through the water. The white koi does not return. Nothing I have done tonight changes that, and nothing ever will.
But when La turns, moonlight catches across her scales.
I feel her in the oasis and in the ocean beyond it, through every current and tide beneath me. The terrible cry that first tore through our connection is still there, but it has changed. What reaches me now is deeper and softer, a low vibration carried through the water.
It is not happiness. Not yet.
It is grief that has finally found somewhere peaceful to rest.
I listen to the gentle sound for a long time before I realize something strange.
I am humming too.
I do not know which of us begins the next push or pull.
Maybe it doesn't matter.
I reach for the ocean, and La rises to meet me.
Moon above.
Ocean below.
The tide comes in.