The full moon hung high in the sky above the battlefield, lighting up the ruined land and the bodies strewn along the ground. Katara tried to ignore the squelching sound her shoes made as she walked over the blood soaked ground and the dark liquid that pooled around her feet with each step as she picked her way around bodies. Her foot kicked something hard and heavy. She tripped, managed to regain her balance and instinctively spun around to see what had tripped her.
She wished she hadn't.
A severed head rocked back into place, a glassy, dirt covered eye staring up at her. Her stomach lurched.
"Katara! Katara!"
Aang.
Katara whipped around. Aang was just visible from where he was kneeling, leaning around a boulder, waving one arm frantically. He yelled again, and Katara raced toward him, slipping and sliding on patches of ice and charred grass damp with water and blood. She rounded the boulder and stopped.
Aang crouched beside a motionless body, pressing a bloody cloth to the wound on its shoulder. Zuko knelt on the other side, looking grim, and Mai stood several feet off, hand clamped on the shoulder of an ashen-faced Ty Lee.
The body was Azula. Katara couldn't tell if she was breathing.
"Katara," Aang said, looking desperate, "can you heal her?"
Heal her? The request reverberated through her mind.
"Why?"
She ignored the strangled cry that came from Ty Lee, focusing instead on Zuko's scowl and Aang's open mouth.
"What do you mean?" Aang asked.
"This is her fault," Katara said. "Those people fought us so that she could be Fire Lord and start the war again. Why should we help her?"
"This isn't her fault!" Ty Lee said, and Katara turned to glare at her. Ty Lee matched it with one of her own. "She's still insane!"
"I don't see what difference that makes," Katara said coldly.
"Katara, Azula didn't plan this," Aang said, pushing the cloth harder against the wound. "She didn't break herself out of the asylum. They were just using her. Please, Katara."
Katara frowned, shaking her head, but knelt down beside Zuko and reached out to pull the blood-soaked cloth from Aang's hands. She pointedly ignored the blood that dripped from it as she set it beside her.
The wound was deep and the flesh torn more than usual (she had seen several daggers with serrated edges laying about the battle field), but she was sure she could heal it with time.
She reached for her water skin when a thought struck her: I could kill her. She paused, feeling the power of the full moon flow through her, eyes studying the blood that flowed from Azula's wound. Katara flexed her fingers and saw the blood ripple.
I could kill her, and no one would know.
Her fist clenched; she could feel the blood stop flowing, the heart beating and straining to pump the blood despite her influence…how long would she have to hold this? Would it be better to let her bleed out? Katara loosened her fist, twitched her fingers and blood flowed from the wound, faster than before—
Katara gasped, releasing her hold, trembling. Azula groaned softly.
"Katara?" Aang said. "Is something wrong?"
Katara shook her head, uncapped her water skin and gathered water into her trembling hands.
Aang smiled. "Thank you."
She tried to stop the trembling.