Rating: PG, probably; some violent imagery, but nothing especially explicit.
Characters/Pairing: Canon characters who will get considerable focus eventually include Ursa, Kya, Ilah, and Yue. This is the Yue's-mother chapter, and includes original characters - the fic overall will have quite a few of OCs, no doubt.
Summary: Some of the missing and/or dead mothers of Avatar: who they might have been, and things they might have done or never did. Each chapter will be sort of its own five-things fic.
Disclaimer: Places and people you recognize from canon, plus, in this chapter, a couple lines from Thing Two, are not mine.
Acknowledgements: GIANT THANK-YOU to my sister, for the beautiful art (unfortunately, I can't embed it here!) and the constant nagging. And, of course, to the ladiesbigbang challenge on Dreamwidth, for leading me to actually get off my butt and post fic.
Other Notes: The working title of this fic was "March of the Dead Moms"; that should give you a pretty good idea what the theme is. The current title comes from the poem Winding River (1) (曲江二首 (一)) by Du Fu (杜甫), the full line being "Each piece of flying blossom leaves spring the less ..." (The translation I am relying on, for those interested, is available online, so if you Google that line, you can probably find it. My Chinese is ... not very good, so if anything I've said here seems overtly wrong to you, don't hesitate to tell me!) Some of these ficlets are pretty AU; hopefully, it's relatively easy to work out the background of the AUs, but if you have questions, please don't hesitate to ask and/or demand that they be clarified for you!
Posting Schedule: I'm planning on updating this once a week, Sundays; it's possible that may get adjusted to twice a week, depending on how things go, or if one chapter's particularly short.
(One person Yue's mother might have been, and five things she never did.)
One:
"Never fear, we will turn them back," is the last thing Arnook says to her. The bender stationed on the nearest line of battlements catches three fireballs with the wall of ice he raises, but the fourth is a little too high; it skims the top of the wall and curves down, smashing into Arnook's chest.
Atkah screams and sobs and clutches at him until Yugoda and Tiriak drag her away to somewhere safer; later, the only thing she can remember thinking, aside from This can't be happening, is that she's glad Yue isn't there to watch her father's body burn.
.*.
Arnook isn't the only loss. The Fire Nation attack is repelled eventually, but it is devastating: they lose hundreds, and it probably would have been thousands if the Fire Nation force had been larger.
Atkah overrides Master Pakku's objections, and every bender strong enough to be a help works for days to repair the walls, every healer that can be spared paired off with a soldier who can teach them the necessary moves. The non-benders do whatever they can; Atkah sends even Yue around with food for the laboring benders, and then off to spend nearly thirty-six hours straight in the healers' stations, cleaning and changing the bandages on wounds deemed too minor for a bender to deal with. Atkah herself cannot work on the walls, though she itches to try - there is too much still left to coordinate.
Katamik comes to her after four days to tell her that the walls have been restored to their former glory. "Good," Atkah says. "Now make them taller." She is the chief now; she will not let this happen again.
.*.
Master Pakku thinks that the end of the crisis means that everything will go back to normal; this mistaken impression lasts until Atkah interrupts his bending class for the younger boys with Tiriak at her shoulder, and, behind them, a group of seventy-odd other women who showed a particular talent when they were assigned to the walls. "Teach us how to fight with it," Atkah says.
Master Pakku frowns. "Now, listen-" he starts.
Atkah doesn't let him finish. "If you won't teach all of us directly, then I'll order you to teach me, and then teach them myself," Atkah says. "Or I'll find another man who will."
.*.
Katamik is probably a better teacher than Master Pakku would have been, anyway.
.*.
After a few years, the city is thriving again. They have had to expand back into the ice to the northwest twice, and the walls are thicker and taller than ever. The women are all as well-trained as they could hope to be, and Yue is seventeen - old enough to be left in charge, if Katamik and Tiriak are there to advise her.
That is, appropriately enough, when the Avatar comes to them, and tells them about the Day of Black Sun.
.*.
Atkah takes two hundred benders and sails around the eastern coast of the Earth Kingdom. It doesn't take long, with the benders switching off between holding together the icy scow they're all standing on, and propelling the giant wave that carries it.
The Avatar and his group lead them on his sky bison - except for the Southern Tribe girl; she rides with them, on the ice, so that Atkah can spend the trip teaching her bending. Her footwork's not quite as tight as Atkah's, but she's not bad.
.*.
"I need to see the Earth King," Atkah tells the uncooperative man with the peculiar beard.
"So you've said," the uncooperative man says sharply, "but the Earth King is a very busy man-"
"He's not too busy for this," Atkah says.
Two:
"I can see that," Master Pakku says, his disdain only barely concealed. "But our tribe has customs - rules."
Atkah watches the Southern Tribe girl's face tighten with anger, and steps forward before she can say anything. "The same is not true in the South," she says.
The girl's burgeoning anger is replaced with confusion. "No," she says. "No - that's why I came up here in the first place. I'm the last Waterbender; there should be someone to train me, but there isn't," and she shoots a vicious sideways glare at Master Pakku.
"If he won't teach Katara, then - then I won't learn from him," the Avatar says.
Atkah looks at him, at the determination writ large over his young face. Well, she thinks, that settles it. They cannot let the Avatar go untaught; what are Northern customs when weighed against the fate of the world?
"My grandmother was Akkaya," she says. "She came here from the South."
Master Pakku gives her a look that clearly asks why she is bothering them all with this irrelevant fact, but the girl's face speaks of recognition. "She was Gran-Gran's oldest cousin," she says slowly. "And a master Waterbender."
"So she was," Atkah agrees, and there, yes; Master Pakku's eyebrows are beginning to draw down into a frown. "My mother was a bender also, and so am I." She meets Master Pakku's suddenly thunderous gaze with a steady stare. "I can teach you what you need to know," she tells the girl, and smiles.
Three:
Arnook gives Sokka kind of an assessing look, but Sokka's weirdly not nervous; if there's one thing he knows, it's what Fire Nation troop uniforms look like. "My wife is in charge of this mission," Arnook says after a moment, pointing to the woman who introduced herself earlier as Atkah. "If you would tell her what you know, I would ... greatly appreciate it."
.*.
Atkah's patient and attentive in a way that reminds Sokka of Yue, which is a little weird. He'd say he's always tried to avoid thinking about his crushes while advising their mothers on the details of covert military operations, except this is the first time he's ever had to worry about it.
She listens, is the point, and a few hours later, all of their captured uniforms have been modified.
.*.
It's surprisingly easy for them to sneak onto the Fire Nation ships - maybe it speaks to how crazy this plan is, that nobody's expecting them to try it. Sokka nearly gets impaled once, when a Fire Nation soldier comes suddenly around a corner, but this guy named Hahn whacks him in the temple with the haft of his pike, so it all turns out okay.
.*.
Zhao is up on the command deck with an older guy who looks kind of familiar; Sokka peers around the corner to make sure that it's him, and then nods to Atkah, because it is. It's strange - the older guy must see Atkah as soon as she springs out from where she's flattened against the wall, and there's - well, okay, it's only maybe a second between her first movement and when she drags Zhao down to the deck, but he doesn't even start to yell.
Zhao does, but Atkah already has him by that point. Sokka and Hahn and everybody take down the soldiers who come at the sound of the shout, and by the time they turn around, Atkah has heaved Zhao's unconscious body over the side, and has a knife to Older Guy's throat. "Show us how to steer the ship," she says, and Sokka can't quite keep from smiling when Older Guy nods and leads them to the bridge.
Four:
Atkah is looking for Yue when she runs into the scarred boy who has the Avatar slung across his back. Nearing a battle is a bad time to realize you don't know where your daughter is; she can't come up with a reason why Yue might have gone to the Spirit Oasis, but she's looked everywhere else, and she thought it couldn't hurt to check.
The boy looks startled for a second, and then his face goes grim, and he curls up one fist and punches a ball of flame at her.
A Firebender, Atkah thinks, ducking; how did he get so far into the city? The fighting's barely even started, there's no way the Fire Nation has already broken through the walls. This boy must not be under General Zhao's command - but who would be crazy enough to break into the city and kidnap the Avatar alone?
She can't bend for anything but healing, she doesn't know how; but she does have her pike, and she swings the haft around so that it knocks the boy's feet out from under him. He tumbles to the ground, landing right on the Avatar - Atkah hopes the Avatar will forgive her for that.
Five:
"Wait," Atkah blurts out, and takes the fish from Yue's hands - she tries to be careful, but her hands are shaking a little with the nearness of her daughter's sacrifice, still not fully averted. The moon has gone red above them, but not black; the koi is bloody but still twitching against her fingers. "Quickly," she says, and she's not sure to whom, "get everyone you can find, hurry-"
The Southern girl, Katara, doesn't even move for the entrance to the Oasis; she just throws one hand into the air, and a jet of water follows the motion, darting up high enough that it's probably visible even to the Fire Nation ships out on the ocean.
A moment later, Tiriak skids in, boots scraping against the ice, just as Atkah is stepping into the water.
"Here, quickly," Atkah cries, and Tiriak rushes into the pool without a moment's hesitation, hands already glowing blue. Kirima follows her a moment later, and Chulyin, and Putyuk; someone is shouting, probably explaining to them, but Atkah cannot spare the concentration to listen, when she is already so busy trying to put the koi back together.
It's lucky that they're in the Oasis; the spirit water here is stronger, and something about it pulls them all closer together, makes it easier to coordinate. Putyuk is keeping the koi surrounded with water, so that it cannot die gasping while they are working; Chulyin is pressing the blood back so that Tiriaq and Kirima can repair the flesh in the deepest part of the burn; and Atkah knows it all without asking. She herself can feel the spirit fish's heart, through her bending, and she holds the pulse steady when it would try to speed up out of shock, or slow down from exhaustion.
It feels like hours, but it must only be minutes before Tui arches, sudden and vigorous, and flops out of the circle of hands and back into the pool. Atkah staggers back, as drained as though she had been the one burned; it is her own daughter's hands which catch her and steady her, Yue disregarding the water and plunging right into the pool to hold her up.
She looks at her daughter's face, and at the moon in the sky beyond - bright and full again, as though nothing ever happened - and lets out a long sigh of relief. If she never has another day like this in her life, it will be too soon.