Chapter Text
When she opens her eyes, she sees the moon far up above. It is bright and full and terrifying as it looms above her vision, distant and cold and reaching down with tendrils of pale light.
Ice water crawls over her skin in thin lines, wreathing her wrists and creeping up over her shoulderblades to skate slim, glacial threads over the vulnerable skin of her throat.
Black, shiny cables writhe at the edges of her vision, threatening to engulf her entirely as she stares up and up at the cratered, impassive face of the moon, afraid to twitch her heavy limbs against their cold, familiar constrictions.
This is home, they whisper against her skin. You need not leave us.
Home. Home like the white snows and the perpetual night and day, like the distant howls of strange creatures in the night and the gentle sway of waves and ice beneath her hands. She misses home like a limb. She misses the way it whispered ceaseless nothingness in her ears in a constant, beautiful rumbling tumbling of noise that only she could hear. She misses the way it was black and white and gray and safe and deadly and beautiful.
No delicate blue river or lush green island can compare to the place she was born and brought up in. She could submerge herself in the deepest lake the Kingdom has to offer and never feel the same welcoming rush as she does in the ivory snow and dark water of the bottom of the world.
This is home, the waters murmur against the fragile bones of her wrists. We will protect you here. We will carry you back to where you belong.
Her eyes, halfway to closing, slowly open back up to gaze at the stunning, terrifying blankness far ahead. The moon stares out of a starless night sky like a wound.
Where she belongs?
She has never belonged. She is half of the youngest part of the second youngest generation of a dying people. She is a woman. She is the daughter of the Chief. She is a waterbender. She is the Chieftess. She is a Tribesman. She is a thousand things that cannot be matched by any other around her and a million more that scrape at her skin.
She loves her home, but she has never belonged there. She has never belonged anywhere. She has carved her place out with all of the rest, time and time again as it tried to heal over the empty, gaping wound where those who spoke to the water once burrowed, but she stands with a knife bloodied from her efforts and everyone who stands by the waves and cannot understand its whispers knows it.
This is home, the water pleads as she twitches her fingers. You must stay. There is nothing but pain where you seek to go. Here, we will keep you safe.
She is water, rushing and demanding and destroying. She will not stand to be constrained.
She is water, turned red and pink with blood. She knows pain as an old friend.
She is of the Tribe. She has never been safe.
She snaps her gaze away from the boundless moon and pushes up with a harsh tug of her wrists and a twist of her neck against the ice water bonds that sever with the slightest pressure.
She rises shakily to her feet, palms pressed to the perfect circle of white ice she floats on, counter to the moon, bare skin and thin dress shivering against the frigid darkness that surrounds her completely. There is something black and writhing around where she stands, shining briefly in the moonlight, the light reflected from its slippery skin the only thing segmenting the far onyx horizon from the pitch black sky.
Yes, some part of her crows, some part of her settles. This is the familiar beauty of the place she has been shaped by and molded in turn. Midnight black waters and blinding white frost. She is drunk on it, all over again, as she has been since birth.
She shudders on her lonely white pedestal, over the churning darkness, half in yearning, half in sorrow. She has chosen her duty, after all, and it was not to this. It was not to the whispering waters and comforting contrasts, but to the people who lived in them, so they could survive the next century. She left the place she carved a home for herself in to save the ones who could not bear to leave the alcoves made for them. She’s come this far for their sakes, for the sake of her own conscience. She cannot back down now.
The knife in her hand is bloodied still, but she wields it for them now, and not herself. The places she has carved out for herself must be healing even as she stands miles and miles away from its icy shores, but some part of her knew that even as she turned her back to it and chose to fight fire with bared teeth.
Whatever village she left, it will not be the village she returns to.
Whatever place she had before, she will not fit it any longer.
So, she mourns for that much. But she grits her teeth and presses onward.
She has to.
Oh, child, a tangle of voices sigh, each of their tones traveling down her spine.
She casts aside her grief and rises to her full height, spinning to face this new threat.
One by one, over the inky darkness that threatens to consume her, blue orbs of light form like ghost fire shivering into existence upon the sails of a grand ship.
You can’t stay here, they say in messy chorus. They need you.
The black ocean of writhing tendrils spasms and vibrates like a string plucked loose from an instrument, but it does not make a single sound. These waters do not speak words she doesn’t know or foreign tongues she has yet to piece together, they speak in something she cannot even hear.
She turns in a slow circle, watching the lights form in an unbroken wall around her against the convulsing darkness and the pale light above.
The whole world is black and white, except for her and the press of blue light.
A ragged breath catches in her chest.
“You can’t stay here, love,” comes an achingly familiar voice over her shoulder.
She whirls around to see a light paler than the rest, shivering mist making a vaguely humanoid form around the faint light at its center. It extends its arms just like- just like-
“Mom,” she breathes, and stumbles forward, hand passing straight through her mother’s misty arm. “I-” she chokes out.
The mass around them churns and begins to push and pull, fall and rise, faster and angrier and reaching-
“I know, snowflower. We deserve more than this, but you need to return.”
“Wh- I- I don’t…”
The onyx waters push up, glowing slickly with white moonlight, and snare a single blue light that struggles free and fades into somewhere deeper before the tendrils can try again. A horrible, low moan echoes, making the ice under her feet buck and tremble.
“I don’t want to say goodbye again,” she finally blurts out.
Everything is shaking. The ocean is frenzied, glowing with moonlight, whipping up toward the pale lights that dance over its surface with such surety, but none of that matters. None of that matters. None of it.
“Oh, love,” the pale, misty hand of her mother comes up and waves over her cheek, “I never got to say goodbye either.”
Formless lips ghost over her forehead, and she feels like shattering.
“But before it’s too late-”
Then, her mother’s hand falls away, and winks out as the light in her core fades into something below and a slick black form pushes through where she stood.
For a moment, she stares at the hole of empty, gasping air where her mother was, and the silence around her is deafening as the black ocean cuts its motion and the world around her freezes completely.
For a moment, she hears only her own ragged, half-sobbing breaths and her heartbeat pounding in her ears.
The lights are gone, chased away by the hungry ocean.
It is just her, shaking, trembling, grieving, and the black and white of the waves and moon.
She lets out one keening, desperate, howling wail, like she can call all the ghosts back to this place with all of the pain she has buried deep in her permafrost heart, and it cuts through the silence with no shreds of gentle beauty.
Then, there is sound. There is crushing, awful sound, in answer and in counter and in agreement. There are a thousand screaming voices set free and a thousand desperate calls finally becoming answered. It is the whispers of her home amplified by the factor of all of the dead souls that no longer hear them.
And under it, pressed against her ear, with the saltwater tears sliding down her cheeks and her numb fingers reaching out for long-gone mist, her mother’s voice echoes once more.
“You have always made me proud, Katara. Show them your teeth.”
(She rises)
And her eyes snap open, to see the wall of water coming, to feel the knife held a hair’s breadth away from her throat and the rough rasp of rope around her limbs, to hear the wail of every chained droplet, of every wronged thing finally set free.
Katara snarls low in her chest, feels it tremble and rumble through the ever frozen pain in her core, and makes her mother proud.
-
Tui and La rip their attentions away from him with all of the grace of a rock to the back of the skull, and he nearly stumbles from the suddenness of it. The thickness in his chest and the rushing between his ears lifts, making way for a horribly muddy clarity.
He can perfectly track how he got here. He can remember the thoughts and actions that got him to this point. He cannot understand them as anything more than a murky surety now, though, nor can he replicate his reasons.
Tui and La tried to force his hand and force him to do their will, and he can feel the oily remnants of moonlight scattershot against his veins, marking the hours since the Avatar landed here with a slippery murk of justifications that sit wrongly in his own skull.
If he had the time, if he had the awareness to spend, he would be gagging, spitting whatever sea water and sour bile he has left in him. As it is, all he can do is shut the doors on that particular issue and solidify himself as he is, a burning, itching fractal whose endless limbs are not long enough to reach peace.
The teeth in his mouth are too long and viciously pointed. The nails on his hands are curving dizzyingly and razor sharp. His shoulderblades ache in a familiar way that he cannot name.
The space before him is too full of destruction for him to comprehend.
The Avatar is right there, too focused on his own crisis to see him in the trees. Vulnerable.
The water is rushing forward. This time, there is no Spirit of the moon hanging over him, extending a hand with a chain made of a thousand promises ready to clamp around his wrists.
Once more, his vision tunnels. His mind shrinks with the cold realization that he does not know how to stop this.
Once more, from the murky deep, a hand rises up for him to shake.
-
It is eerie, what passes between all of them in that horrifying split second when the world begins to crumble.
Aang’s staff drops out of his hands as he raises them, spilling out a desperate prayer to the harsh winds of a sky in storm, knocking the blade out of Smellerbee’s hands and sending it spiraling into the rush of water forced a bare inch back by the winds. Sokka’s fan snaps out at his side as he charges forward, extended for Smellerbee’s jugular as the other hand readies itself to claw at the vulnerable skin of her face. Katara swings her leg out blindly as she speaks with everything she can still say, as half-strangled as her movements are, with all of her anger and certainty pouring into the mindless, screaming rush of water.
Jet stumbles back from Katara’s kick, barely keeping his footing as he takes in ragged inhales through the pain in his shoulder and the rasp of his throat. The Duke and Pipsqueak split and sprint for the furthest point away from the water they have just helped unleash. Longshot nocks another arrow, aiming through the thinning mist. Smellerbee ducks away from her ex-captive and pulls another knife from her side to parry Sokka’s fan.
A low, buzzing growl pushes through the air and echoes through the ground, but there is too much chaos for anyone to notice it starting, to notice it building with every passing second as Katara cuts her bindings with razor thin ice and holds back a wall of water four times taller than she is. As Sokka guards her as best as he can. As Aang combines both protection and prevention with reckless fluidity. As Jet searches for an opening while blood drips in a steady line from his arm. As Smellerbee swipes at anyone within reach with every blade she can. As Longshot narrows his focus to flashes of blue. As the Duke and Pipsqueak dodge stray ice and razor winds alike, hurrying through the trees to somewhere slightly less compromising.
As everyone tries to survive.
And for a minute, it seems like it’s working.
Katara cuts herself out of bindings with the methodical efficiency of someone so full of rage they have transcended carelessness to arrive at cold calculation and stands, pushing the water back with relentless argument after argument after impassioned speech. Sokka guards her the whole while, fans whirling and footwork sure in the way so few things are, face drawn and shadowed. Aang whirls with open hands, features set in some form of blankness as he spins prayers and assertions between nimble fingers and on light toes.
Jet laughs, rough and tangled in his raw throat, spinning a sword in his good hand with his eyes trained on Aang. “Waterbender my ass,” he crows, raising his blade only just in time to catch one of Sokka’s fans to scrape along the flat and send him back to Smellerbee. “A hundred years gone, Avatar. A hundred years abandoning us to starve, and here you are, fighting for the Fire Nation.”
With a frustrated growl, Sokka slices another fan in Jet’s direction. Jet doesn’t quite get his sword up in time to block it completely but he does disengage with a twist that sends Sokka’s wrist tingling, leaving a shallow gash along Jet’s forehead that streaks red over half of his face.
Jet laughs, wiping his mouth and cheek with the back of his bloodied hand, voice hoarse, dripping blood and pain and bitter betrayal. “You fucking traitor.”
The water inches backward, pace by pace.
-
The hand has been shaken. The unspoken deal has been reached. This is not the rushing pulse of water, relentless in its attack and unstoppable in its retreat. This is careful patience incarnate, waiting and waiting and soaking scarlet into itself.
Just a few more moments, now.
Nothing good lasts forever.
-
There is a man pushing his way through the trees. The pounding of war in his heart begins to rise, and his steps quicken.
-
Smellerbee’s knife raps across Sokka’s knuckles and bites into his already twinging wrist. He hisses in pain and retaliates as best he can, one fan sliding from his now blood-slick grip as he loops a leg around her ankles and pulls-
Pipsqueak and The Duke lunge out of the forest line, and Aang barely turns in time to intercept them, dodging around The Duke’s own blades and Pipsqueak’s heavy fists. He only just manages to maneuver them around his staff, vulnerable on the forest floor, focused on these new threats and the gut-churning fear of losing another reminder of his culture-
Katara spells her fear and anger and determination across the humid air and into the wall of water, pushing it steadily back and back like a predator back into a cage. She faces it unafraid, with cold, dark eyes and with her back to the distant trees-
-
A thin ray of gold goes flying. Two figures guide the wind away from the sea. A bowstring twangs.
Everything goes to hell quite quickly.
-
The impact registers a second before the pain, but it is a second that crawls and crawls along.
A second that Katara is given to feel true, awful dread. A second that Katara is given to feel true, terrible panic.
Then the agony hits, sharp and excruciating and echoing over her entire torso from a spot high on her shoulder. The scream that leaves her is anything but voluntary. It is torn from her without care, without mercy, without thought.
Her fingers freeze and spasm partway through a rush of syllables, and she buckles to the ground, the feathered shaft of an arrow sprouted from the back of her left shoulder.
The water shakes itself free of its bonds and pushes forward, ready to push past her, ready to consume her if it must as it rallies toward freedom, and she is powerless to stop it.
-
Sokka sees red.
-
The Avatar sees white.
-
The Triple Spirits smile with a mouth full of fangs.
-
Sokka throws himself at Jet with bared teeth as he dares to step between him and his sister, gasping on the ground, hurt, bleeding, burnt to something he can’t recognize, wrapped in furs and given to the sea-
Sokka tears away the sword that threatens him with his already bleeding hand and swings his remaining fan with reckless strength. Jet only barely misses getting his throat cut by dropping to the ground and abandoning his sword entirely.
Any further retaliation is halted by the blaze of white light on the other side of Katara, eerily familiar and awesome in the old sense of the word. A blaze that cuts through the dying mist and slams against the freed water with nothing but sheer, stubborn, seething power that pushes it back with a harsh shove.
The sea has fallen, gasping to the ground, but the tides have turned nonetheless.
“Congratulations,” Sokka says, spinning Jet’s sword into his own bloodied hand, teeth sharp and eyes sharper, “you fucked up.”
Another arrow whistles toward Sokka, but it does not get a chance to hit. The Avatar bats it aside before it can do anything more than shriek through the air. The tree the archer sits in, lying in wait, is torn out of the ground as the earth shakes itself free of every root and winds harsh enough to break bone slam against it.
Sokka deeply appreciates the gesture.
Across from him, across from where Katara has fallen, the Avatar releases a noise of pure rage, and Sokka knows that his sister is in good hands.
He tilts his head and looks down at Jet where he lays, paralyzed on the forest floor. “I’m going to kill you now.”
Jet stares back up, covered in blood, and his eyes are terrified.
There is no grace in this.
Sokka hefts up the sword anyway, with a palm gashed open and a spiralling cut on his wrist that has already covered part of the blade in blood.
There is no glory.
A wolf limping off into the night is a wolf that will come back to kill again. A wolf, docile or dead on the floor, is a wolf that won’t cause trouble.
There is no victory.
Blades flash as Sokka swings his, as Smellerbee screams a denial and flings a knife at his unprotected back.
It’s war. Why would there be?
Everything stands poised on the edge of absolute fucking carnage-
No blows land.
Not as the earth tremors, as it cracks and breaks and splinters.
As the reservoir deepens and the water flows meekly into captivity, where it cannot be unchained.
As rocks shoot from their slumbering places and force blades away from their trajectories.
As the dirt rises and binds ankles and wrists and necks, gags them in thick soil, yanking everything it reaches to the ground in one fell swoop, forcing aborted yells out of their throats and leaving them all to stare helplessly up at the sky or turn their heads to avoid breathing in dirt.
Sokka can only halfway see the Avatar wrestle with its bonds along with all of the others, but every time the earth is cowed enough to creep away, new, bolder soil rises in its place.
For a long while, there is only the breathing of every child splayed out on the forest floor, bloodied and bruised and broken and all fighting for the same side.
There is nothing but time to hear one another, to make their hot blood simmer away into the cold, shaky aftermath and to feel every ache and pain fresh.
It’s an awful kind of patience.
Then, finally, footsteps echo, soft as fresh grass and heavy as a mountain crumbling.
They halt somewhere between Smellerbee and Sokka, paused carefully in consideration.
There is a gentle rustling of leaves being disturbed. The thin, metallic noise that follows is terrifyingly loud, now that the only sounds are everyone’s pained, panicked breathing and groans.
The steps resume.
The figure passes by Sokka’s field of vision only for a second, but it is enough to stall out the breath in his chest.
It hurts to see it. His mind tries to wrap itself around the physical form of it and he can’t make any of the ends meet where they fracture and spiral and grow into infinite sharp edges.
It is one person, walking smoothly past like the ground beneath them would not dare to impede their progress, a bright green robe untied and falling only below the waist, gray wrapping up the rest except for the uppermost sections, where something has soaked the fabric so thoroughly it seems black. They hold a golden Kyoshi war fan with a pale hand, hiding all of their face but their eyes, one an empty black chasm and the other golden and slit through and surrounded by cracks like parched soil.
At the same time, it is three people, stepping in the same air and never moving at all, shuddering a second before and a second beyond what he has already seen, fabric rustling and silent all at once. The hand held before them is Nation pale and Kingdom dark and nothing but an empty chasm, and Sokka’s own discarded weapon is a fan in the same blink as it is a set of golden fangs that stretch beyond what he can comprehend.
Then it walks right past and Sokka is left to stare up at the rustling canopy of leaves far above.
He can hear it still, though, as it steps past where Sokka knows his sister lies from her thin whimpers every once in a while. As it steps to where the Avatar - not Aang, no, but the thing in him - is trapped and stuck forever breaking ever-renewing bonds.
There is a long pause, as if there is nothing but time in this clearing.
“You can’t protect him from everything.” the voice comes from the thing that has subdued the Avatar, and it is smoke and gentle leaves and grinding rock that makes the earth tremble. “You never could, but you’re still trying, and we still suffer from it.” There’s another pause, echoing loudly in Sokka’s ears. “You may have destroyed yourself to forget, to make us forget, but the past remembers, and the future will always sing of what the past can bear to admit.”
A gentle sigh echoes, making the dirt buck under Sokka’s shoulderblades.
“There has been enough war here. There has been enough battle. There has been enough blood. You will get your fill of massacres another day, but it will not be that of our children then. If it is ever our children, we assure you that you will pay dearly.”
An awful sound comes from Aang’s body. It’s a spitting, terrifying hiss of warning that makes Sokka’s bound limbs lock up on instinct.
The rumble of the ground changes in pitch, something wry and amused. “We cannot harm you, no, but we can hurt the one you wear so carefully. The hunt is not over until we say so. You have more than earned some more time as prey today.”
The Avatar snarls back, a sound that is wrong when Sokka knows it comes from Aang’s throat.
“If you leave now, however, we will be… lenient,” the thing promises, sly and satisfied. “You may have our word on the matter.”
A long silence stretches. A horribly long silence.
Then the thing laughs, a delighted sound, a terrifying tumult of rocks grinding and earth collapsing. “Ours against yours,” it lilts. “Run along, now.”
The bonds release from Sokka and he pushes himself up without hesitation, spitting dirt as he scrambles over to Katara and grabs her uninjured hand. He only dares to look up once Katara wraps her hand in his and squeezes back something close to a reassurance.
The Avatar is standing now, floating a careful suspended inch above the soil, head tilted and eyes blank as it faces against the tripled thing that subdued it. Sokka blinks hard and shakes his head as his mind once more tries to make sense of the creature before him-
And catches sight of the cloth wrapped up around the forearm not holding the fan. Red and blue and green and orange on a pale fabric.
Almost as soon as he notices that, the Avatar inclines its head in a small bow.
Only just barely, almost more disrespectful than nothing would have been, but undeniably a bow.
Sokka watches as the Avatar submits, as the Avatar accepts, and he can do nothing.
The Avatar summons Aang’s staff to its hands with a gust of wind, and floats toward Sokka and Katara, past where the Bandit Prince stands, twisted and strange with a maw of golden fangs and a series of dark crevices shot through his skull.
As soon as it reaches them, the unearthly, awful glow around Aang breaks and shatters, leaving only an airbender child behind whose eyes are wide with fear and whose feet stumble from their sudden fall. He whirls around and makes an involuntary noise of fear when faced with the ever watching thing with one staring eye and one gaping pit.
“Ours against yours,” it says again. The trembling soil gains another vibration and the voice grows harsh with ash and gravel. “We’ll give you a headstart.”
Cold familiarity trickles down Sokka’s spine.
“We’d start running if we were you, Avatar.”
-
There’s a man waiting outside the Siren, calm as can be. Bo clocked him a few minutes prior and ran to inform Jee, who has the unenviable task of clearing away glory chasers.
“State your purpose,” Jee calls down to the man below, hands pressed to the rail of his ship. Strangers arriving to see the Siren hasn’t gone well before. It’s doubtful it will go well this time either.
The man smiles back, fingers tapping a beat on the strap of the case slung over his back. “I’m looking for shelter. The Dragon of the West will know me.”
“The Dragon of the West isn’t here,” Jee replies. “You’ll have to leave.”
“If I do, I’m fairly sure I’ll be dead before the sun sets,” the man responds. “All I ask for is sanctuary until the Dragon of the West can confirm who I am.”
Jee raises his eyebrows a bit. “Those are some bold claims.”
“I am a rather bold man, by trade if not by nature.”
“And which trade is that?”
“Songsmithing.”
Jee’s eyebrows go up further. “Either that career has gotten deadlier since I last checked, or you have a unique talent for acquiring prospective murderers.”
The minstrel’s smile takes on a tight quality, even from this distance. “Let’s just say there are quite a few people with quite a few titles who would prefer it if I went back to playing the Ballad of Kyoshi, and would prefer it even more if my head was no longer connected to my neck.”
Well, this boat attracts only the most chaotic of misfits, now doesn’t it.
“Come aboard,” Jee invites. “Just know that if you’re lying to us, we know where a very hungry Unagi lives.”
-
Iroh steps into the clearing, heart in his throat, fearing the worst.
Instead he finds the uninjured back of his nephew with five Earth Kingdom children bound to the earth and arrayed before him in various states of injury.
The Avatar and his friends are nowhere to be seen. There is a brand new hole in the ground that certainly looks to be full enough of water to decimate a town, and enough rubble to explain the loud explosion.
None of that explains the way his nephew stands so eerily still.
The humming rumble of war in his chest still thrums, guiding him forward, but he plants his feet and refuses to budge another inch.
“Zuko?” Iroh hazards.
Zuko tilts his head to the left, then to the right. His breathing rasps through the air, all gravel and ashes.
Iroh waits for his nephew to speak, to turn around with his tired eyes and tortured mind. But-
“Dragon of the West,” something that is decidedly not his nephew responds with his nephew’s mouth. It makes the earth tremble under Iroh’s unmoving feet. “We have borne gifts and burdens in your name.” The thing in his nephew’s body turns and splits into three as it does, perpetually caught in the past and future as it moves.
One blank chasm and one bright gold eye meet Iroh’s own. The rest, all golden fangs and soil and dizzying splits between what has been, what is, and what will be, none of it matters. None of it is his nephew.
“Those are heavy loads indeed,” Iroh acknowledges, folding his hands behind his back and latching onto his own wrist with a grip hard enough to bruise. “We have taken much from each other, haven’t we, Sisters? I’d even hazard to say we’ve taken enough.”
The Triple Spirits stare for one long second with one of his nephew’s stolen eyes. Then they laugh, and it makes the earth crack in one long line between them and Iroh. “There is no need for worry, warmonger,” they assure, mouth moving in the shapes of words never said and the ground shaking with sentences never made to be heard. “We couldn’t take this one even if we wanted to.”
Iroh remains carefully still. The song of war pipes gently below his sternum. “Then if we have nothing left that we owe each other,” he suggests, “I would like to have my nephew back.”
The Three Sisters tut, in sharp sounds that echo like bone dice rolled against a cliffside. They spread their hands, one of which holds a gold war fan and the other of which drips a sudden and endless stream of loose dirt like any other would blood from a mortal wound. “We never said all of our debts are paid, oh Dragon.”
“Then what is left to pay?” Iroh questions, voice already halfway to bitter and ready to take that final plunge. “What war debts are still owed between us?”
He regrets the question as soon as he says it. What war debts does he not have? What awful weights has he not carried? What blood hasn’t he spilled?
He is the Dragon of the West. He did not come upon that title without scarlet snared through his teeth and wings caked in gore.
“You took our children,” The Triple Spirits respond, remarkably calm. “You took our lands in the name of war.” The dirt spilling from one quartz pale palm gathers in the air as though there is an hourglass Iroh cannot see, invisibly suspended. “So we took your child. So we led you astray from your lands.” The war fan glimmers in the light like a dead man’s open eyes. “Those debts are settled, yes, but one still remains.”
Iroh does not flinch, but his mind does race. The reminder of Lu Ten is a sharp one, but not unsurprising. The idea, however, that the Triple Spirits keep him from his Nation, however - that is new. It makes more sense than he cares to admit.
Zuko has others to guide him now, has had them for quite a while, and yet Iroh never even tried to run any messages or missions in the ancestral lands of the Fire Nation. Even now, he can feel his mind make feeble excuses as to why he should never return. The Spirits work in subtle, awful ways sometimes. In others, they are blunt and painfully obvious. Both methods have been levelled against him already.
“Which?” Iroh asks hoarsely.
The lower half of Zuko’s face twists as the Three Sisters make it into a smile made of jagged mountain peaks. “We kept your son alive until he could meet with his destiny. Until he could meet with you, warmonger. Now you must repay five of our children with the same. You must guard them and send them down the crossroads path to their purpose.”
Iroh almost laughs, for all that every mention of Lu Ten, of the boy with war in his heart he met in a dirty alleyway and called his blood, aches like a knife between the ribs. “I am no prophet, Sisters,” he says. “I cannot know when to spur them on toward greater purpose. I will fail them.”
The smile of the Three Sisters twists even further in on itself. “Then you must work very hard to ensure that you do not,” they state. “This is your debt to pay. This is your payment. You cannot run from it now, warmonger.”
And with that, the Three Sisters sink down and out of this plane of existence, folding in on one another in a terrifying dance that he cannot look at.
And with that, Zuko crumples to the ground, and Iroh is left as the last man standing on the battlefield, with an echo of war humming in his chest.
-
Aang plots a course as best as he can for the nearest town where they can find a healer, hands shaking and eyes refusing to focus as he listens to Katara’s muffled screams while Sokka applies pressure.
He wants to throw up, but he needs to keep his hands as clean as possible. Sokka will need help with Katara and with his own bleeding arm.
Katara makes another awful sound, and then, through heavy, heaving gasps, says, “I- I saw her, Sokka.” He can taste her anguish on the breeze, and not all of it is from the arrow still buried in her shoulder. “I saw mom.”
For a second, his eyes flicker away from the maps held in his trembling hands to the bloodied handprint staining Appa’s white fur.
Then he flicks the reins, steers Appa towards Minato, steels his nerves, and turns around to help.
-
When General Iroh returns with a cart full of teenaged bodies, Jee braces himself for the worst.
Thankfully, the Prince is uninjured except for the usual tearing that happens with his overstrained scar tissue and the second intense possession in as many months. The other five are new, and are, on average, in much worse shape. They also don’t seem to be waking up very much either, but the General seems largely unsurprised by that, so Jee won’t call it a problem just yet.
Only after the new arrivals have been situated and the General gets up from his nephew’s side to make tea does Jee bring up their new guest.
The General’s hands still on the teapot briefly. Then he turns and gestures for Jee to lead the way.
-
“Sorry for not messaging ahead,” Gan says with a slight wince. “It was either this or swimming away from the militia. Care for a game of Pai Sho?”
Iroh sighs heavily.