Hi, everyone! I'm a longtime A:tLA fan and this show has been so important to me, so I've finally made the leap and stepped into the world of fanfic for it! As you can probably tell, my ship is Zutara, but I love all the characters and just the positive feel of the show, so I hope that will come through too. Reviews and PMs are so, so welcome and gratefully appreciated!
Katara's breath has not come back to her when it's ripped away by cold, and the end of a scream that started in the mountains of the fire nation now echoes off glaciers and rippling water - and the hollow shell of an iceberg.
She remembers everything.
The Fire Lord reaching into Zuko with hands ablaze.
Ozai's triumphant shout - "my son" - as if this was their proudest moment, a thing of beauty, as if he had been waiting just for this.
Zuko, falling.
Zuko, still and silent and gone.
And the world becoming every colour at once, and the noise, sound and light and movement and the sensation of no time passing, and then the quiet white of Katara's childhood, the stillness and silence of what had once been home.
Sokka tumbles into her and his arms wrap around her from behind, the blood on his face mingling with the tears on hers.
"Katara" he's saying, through the ringing in her ears. "Katara" - and her brother is better than to ask if she's okay - "I don't know what happened, but we're back where we started. Look. It's Aang."
Yes. The glow isn't just inside her head, not only a leftover from that terrifying, beautiful flash. Katara and Sokka are kneeling before an iceberg, and there's a boy in it with arrows on his body, and they're glowing as the Avatar State works to wake Aang up.
Katara slumps against the ice, finished. She's spent and hollow and the cold is just beginning to seep back into her, past her long-lost parka and unravelling mittens, and in her still-warm heart, Zuko is trying to resist the smile that's overtaking his face in the campfire light, his good eye bright and his damaged one crinkling with contentment, and Katara is going to try making jokes more often if this is the reaction she gets.
Her ears have stopped ringing and her vision is clear, but that odd sensation of no time passing still hangs over her. She exists there by the campfire and screaming on a bloodstained mountain, and here by the iceberg. And this is one of her clearest, most important, precious memories, and she knows exactly how it played out, but she can't bring herself to kneel over Aang because time will start moving again and she will have to face it, and she can't do it either way; can't go on alone after what happened on that mountain, can't start over again from nothing, can't save the world knowing where it leads.
Aang finally opens his eyes, and instead of her face, open and alive, he sees a blur of blue and someone he knows, and asks "Sokka?"
They sit in a rough triangle, Katara too slumped and dead-eyed to keep up her side. Sokka clears his throat and Aang exclaims "Appa!" and swivels to free the flying bison from the ice. The animal is clearly too tired to do much, and Katara remembers that too.
"So" Sokka starts "Something oogly is happening" and it would be funny if the right side of his face wasn't still caked in blood. He nods at his own wisdom. "Something very oogly"
Aang nods back sagely. Katara reaches a hand over the side of the ice, tries to summon a trickle of water to wash her brother's face. It seems to take an inhuman amount of effort.
"There are two possibilities" Sokka continues, holding up two fingers as if they might lose track. "One: This is some kind of crazy dream, vision, or otherwise shared hallucination." He folds down one finger, waves the remaining one. "Or two: We've travelled in time or space or some combination of the two, and we're actually back where we started."
The water slides back through Katara's fingers before she can send it at him, pooling and cooling on the ice against her will.
"It doesn't feel like a vision" Aang volunteers. "I mean, I've had a lot of visions, and this sort of makes too much…sense. You sound like you, and this place looks right, and everything is pretty much the way it happened. What would that show us?" He pauses for a moment, moves his hand in front of him experimentally. "Plus, it seems like we can do pretty much whatever we want. That's not usually how it works."
"Okay, so if option one, vision, is off the ice table, that leaves…option two." Sokka seems unable to bring himself to repeat what option two is, though.
Katara's hand moves gently, swirling the cold water around her mitten.
It falls to Aang to say it. "Either we teleported, or we time travelled."
"Is there any history of an Avatar doing either of those? You know, magic secret Avatar powers?"
"I don't think so." Aang pauses, considering. "But if I learnt anything from the Lion Turtles and Avatar Wan, it's that there's no such thing as magic Avatar powers. By achieving balance, the Avatar creates their own power, just like Wan and the Lion Turtles did in the beginning."
"So you're saying, in theory, in really theoretical theory - either is possible?"
"I don't think I can waterbend."
Both boys turn to look at her.
"What?" they exclaim together, whether it's because it's the first time she's spoken since a single whispered "Aang" when he first turned and hugged her, or because it seems like such an unrelated subject. Katara already knows, though, has figured it all out. Her brother the genius and her best friend the Avatar need to catch up, for once.
She raises her hand, tries to call the water, watches it rise, tremble and fall.
"It's not totally gone" Sokka murmurs. "It's like it was when-" and he gets it, too. Like it was when they first found Aang. Like it is now. "Try and firebend, Aang."
Firebend. Katara's eyes close on their own, heavy and dead, so she only hears Aang move and then a grunt and a muttered "Hey…!" as, she thinks, nothing happens. She forces her eyes open to see him stood at the end of a basic firebending form, concentration etched, nothing in front of his hands but air.
"You can't do it because you never learned" she chokes out. It's not a dream. They haven't spirited away and left Toph alone before a Fire Nation army. They don't even know Toph.
Sokka nods, unwashed blood still on his face, mouth twisted, eyes huge and hopeful. Katara thinks suddenly, here in the everlasting ice, of Princess Yue, and it lasts a fraction of a second before she's at the Spirit Oasis, facing a boy who just won't give up, and then her own voice says "it's from the Spirit Oasis" inside her head and she's touching his face and everything around her is shimmering. Except it hasn't happened yet, now will never happen.
"You can't do it because you haven't learned yet." Sokka amends, and they're all looking at one another now, properly, in a way that makes Katara realise they'd been avoiding each other's gazes before, the uncertainty and the battle before and the loss hanging too heavy over them. Aang laughs, giddy and childlike again, and she realises that he was losing his fight to Ozai, that the fate of the world had swung against the Avatar, and that's why Zuko, reckless, irresponsible, brave, had thrown himself before his father. Except he didn't, not now.
"I get another chance." Aang's voice bubbles. "We all get another chance, to do it better. I didn't lose. We just get to start again."
They can't be sure until they get back to the village, Sokka says.
Katara can't be sure for another half-day at least after that, the timeline blurring in her mind, but she says nothing. They'd arrived at the village, played with the children, gone penguin sledding, and then found the ship and sent up that flare, and then they'd come back to the village and -
Their home rises to meet them, such as it is, and Sokka cheers, hollers. Aang is beaming. Katara is exhausted. And there at the front of the little blue cluster that is her entire culture, stands- "Gran-Gran!" Sokka all but shrieks, running to sweep her up and spin her around.
The old woman looks bemused, and their situation begins to unspool as Katara realises that from Gran-Gran's perspective, she saw Sokka and Katara this morning.
Katara has missed her so, so much, and has clamped the feeling down into some hidden chamber of her heart, so tight and far she didn't even realise. She clamps down on her actual Gran-Gran the same way, arms that are younger and weaker than she remembers locking around Kanna and trying to squeeze life into her.
In the first real indication that things are going to be different this time, Aang and Katara shut up and let Sokka handle things.
They go with we just found this boy in the ice and but wait he's the Avatar (Aang gives a private, relatively sensible airbendng demonstration and Katara throws in an earnest "I believe Aang can save the world" for old times' sake) and then Sokka spins some line about how he was captured by the Fire Nation and taken aboard the Crown Prince's own ship ("Zuko? Is that his name? I think that's it but I'm not, you know, sure…") and was able to escape when they hit a storm. They have a plan, Sokka assures Gran-Gran (and this is the first Katara's hearing about it) to lure the Prince's lone ship away from the village and use Aang's air, Katara's water, and Sokka's general brilliance to take it down from the inside.
("I want us together" Aang had said quietly on the long, still ride to the village on Appa's back. "I need my masters and I need…I want us.")
Sokka insists on carrying the flare all the way from the broken ship to his chosen patch of ice (identical to all the other ice, as far as Katara can see). He insists on setting it off himself too, even though Aang could do it with airbending from a much safer distance.
"Jump around" Katara says, the deadness in her voice battling with what should be lively words. "Do some tricks to make sure he sees you."
Aang duitifully summons up his air scooter and circles round them before commencing a wild series of flips and swoops over the siblings' heads.
"Yeah" Sokka drawls. "It would be just terrible if we put in all this effort and then didn't get captured by the Fire Nation and taken prisoner and dragged from our home and everything we've ever known."
("That's a terrible plan" Gran-Gran had opined when Sokka had finished.
"No, it's not!" her brother protested. "All my plans are genius!" and Katara thinks, not yet.)
She focuses on the orange blur that is Aang against the blue sky as he cartwheels across his glider, robe billowing. "Come on, Zuko" Sokka mutters, and above them, Aang actually waves his arms towards the open sea, hey, look this way.
For the first time in this new world, Katara smiles.
Turns out, this patch of ice is not the same as any other and works perfectly. One day, she will stop needing to remind herself that her idiot brother is a genius.
The ship sees the Avatar. They see the ship even as it draws close through the navigable passage from the West, but when Aang lands next to Sokka and Katara they're hidden by the thick ledge of ice and safe from the Fire Navy's barrage of distance weapons.
She hears Sokka's series of shaky exhales, when the ship makes for them instead of the village, when Aang lands, when a lone fireball sails over their heads and no more follow. He's done his part, for now.
Hers is just about to begin.
The ramp descends, and she recognises the feel of him in the blackness even before she can make out a familiar shape, then a familiar walk, then a no-longer-so-familiar arrogant expression.
There stands Prince Zuko of the Fire Nation, flanked by guards, backed by soliders, at the front of his deadly ship, looking murderous and fierce.
Aang beams. Sokka chuckles. Katara breathes.
Here they go.