A/N: This was written for a contest at the forums for to cleanse the palate after that unfortunate movie. Hope you enjoy.
The directions were scrawled down one skinny arm, alternating fluidly between Korean characters and wobbly, well-meaning English. K rattled off the landmarks in her head: take the portage path, turn off at the tree stump, walk up the hill until you reach the patch of trilliums. Check, check and check. Next, head towards the boulder shaped like a... bear.
There were at least three nearby rocks that could reasonably be described as resembling bears.
K laughed, voice harsh with frustration. Here she was again. Lost. In more ways than she cared to admit.
K was K because she wasn't entirely Kate Nho anymore, hadn't been for a while. Not since she began to remember an iceberg cracking, a temple in ruins, an evening of relieved faces at a palace decked in red... so many images, until the rush of memories petered out, leaving a stunned girl starkly aware of a past life. As Katara, the girl who could command water. But she wasn't Katara either, not really. There were bits, important bits, that were still Kate. So the tenuous compromise was the in-between existence of K.
She continued walking uphill, reasoning that the higher ground could give her a better vantage point on which direction she should take. As her feet carried her onwards and upwards, the trees thinned and then fell away. Eventually the ground followed suit, leaving K standing on the edge of an impressive cliff, a sheer drop to the surface of the lake countless yards beneath her. So far to fall.
Aang was gone. She knew that instinctively from the start, leaving absolutely no room for doubt.
This was not a world that played host to an Avatar, not this world in whose eyes an important element was uranium or plutonium, not water or air. The compounded experience of all of time's Avatars could manipulate earth, air, fire and water on a whim, but K wondered what part it could possibly play faced with a world of plastic.
So unless one of Aang's successors was currently hibernating in another iceberg, Aang was gone. And that hurt, more than she thought it would. She'd already gone through his death once, and now the fates were keeping them apart again.
She rolled the sole of her boot over the edge, kicked at the soil cautiously. Sturdy. The north wind buffeted her slight frame, teasing her with the threat of being thrown from her perch. Unperturbed, K planted her feet wide to brace herself, smirking slightly at the image of the melodramatic figure she must be cutting. Disney classics had played a crucial part in her early education in the English language - she half-expected neon-hued leaves to start swirling around her as she looked out over the water.
Sweat-smeared directions forgotten, K scanned the shoreline for her destination. Right there, just short of the curve of the world, there was a cottage. Just an A-shaped smudge with a dock leading out onto the water. About a forty-five minute walk from where she now stood, if K was any judge of distances. Which she wasn't.
As bad as the loss of Aang had been, Sokka was far worse.
She found Katara's brother in a small Irish town, the winter following her graduation from U of Edinburgh with a double major in Linguistics and Anthropology. Afterwards, she wouldn't be able to explain the forces that led her there, to that empty classroom in a public school in Armagh. A substitute teacher, just barely past due for retirement, was wiping the blackboard clean, clearing more with his expansive gut than with the chalk-brush in his hand.
K cleared her throat and the man looked over. There was no recognition in his expression, nor any in hers. K had told herself firmly that she shouldn't expect a lightning-struck moment where brother and sister would see each other for who they truly were and run into each others' arms, but the reality of the situation was still jarring. K looked into a slack, weary face as dark as exam-season coffee and had to admit that she couldn't see anything of the Sokka she had known.
Nevertheless, when prompted for her purpose she launched into a prepared speech intended to rouse his dormant memories. And it worked, but not in a way K could ever have imagined.
She looked on, confused and helpless, as the face of Mr. Seán Finnerty slowly crumpled into an expression of paralyzing grief, and then, alarmingly, into anger. K finished her tale as quickly as she could, genuinely frightened at the effect her words were having on this man, this once-Sokka.
By the time she gathered her bag to her chest and stumbled out of the room, her jaw and eyes locked shut to prevent her emotion from embarrassing her further, Finnerty hated the sight of her. He hated the memories, and her for forcing them on him. Already thoroughly unhappy with his lot in life, he now had the adventurous life of a Southern Water Tribe warrior to compare to the banality of his persistent existence as a lonely, broke substitute teacher.
With all the optimism she could muster, K still considered it a bridge burned, and a small piece of her heart irreparably broken.
But no, that couldn't be the cabin she was looking for. Too big, too flashy, too close to the road. Besides, going by the directions on her forearm, by now she should be standing...
... right on top of it.
K dropped to her knees and arranged herself so that she was lying face-down on the ground, her chin hanging off the edge of the cliff. If she ignored the very solid feeling of rock beneath her body, she could easily imagine that she was hovering unsupported, far above the lake's surface. On the edges of her vision K could see the water becoming shallower, but she couldn't see any signs of permanent human residence.
She shifted her body forward, keeping her arms braced on the rock to maintain her balance, and bent her torso further over the edge.
Jackpot. On the north side of the cliff's face she could see an old canoe tied securely to a modest wooden dock. From her inverted position she could still read the name of the well-loved vessel, written in permanent marker on the side: The Flying Boar.
With Zuko, she knew to be more careful.
With a loan from her parents, K was able to book a flight to Sydney, Australia. On the bus ride over from her hotel to the children's hospital where Celia Forrester was working as a nurse, she wondered if she would find the former Fire Lord healing tiny burn victims. The symmetry would be fascinating.
She must have spoiled the trick by thinking about it, because when K finally located Ms. Forrester, she was testing a little boy for a urinary tract infection. Kate had been brought up well by good, if inflexible parents, so K hovered patiently until Celia's immediate schedule cleared before hailing her attention. The woman's smile was expectant and full of all-purpose cheer.
Was it on purpose, how little the reincarnations would remind her of their past lives' appearances? Perhaps providence was compensating for a life spent living under that signature scar. Full strawberry-blonde hair and a doll-like complexion seemed to be poking fun at the tormented prince's previous angst.
K's new approach consisted of weaving key phrases through her small talk, looking for clues that Celia might already be aware of her past life. "Honour" featured heavily, of course, as did "fire" and "Avatar" (spectacular 3D, lack-luster plot, was Titanic better?).
Celia's lips pursed in a knowing smile the second time K mentioned "honour". Could this be because she, like Kate, had remembered her past life unprompted, but didn't wish to discuss it explicitly in her place of work? Or could it simply be because K had been following her around, making small talk about camping trips and blockbuster movies for the past half hour in a tone that could reasonably be interpreted as flirtatious?
Celia Forrester was equal parts unfathomable, gorgeous and playfully grouchy. However, it wasn't until Celia teasingly made a comment about how her "fatherlord" was nagging her about unpaid student loans that K knew for absolute certain that she'd found her man. Or woman, as it were. K came away from their first meeting with that reassuring certainty and Celia's number written on her palm.
She decided to stay one extra night down under, "see the sights", before returning home. In the end, she chalked up Celia – who, by-the-by, did not at all mind being called Zuko in certain heated moments – as a work-in-progress.
K got to her feet and brushed the soil and lichen off her front. She considered her options. To get down there she could... but that would take too long. Or she could... but she had no way of knowing whether the path would be clear. She turned back to the edge.
In the months immediately following her enlightenment, K had thrown herself into the rediscovery of waterbending. It didn't come naturally to this body, adapted as it was to world-of-plastic pursuits. Some days she would spend hours on end sitting with her hand extended over a pail of water, driven to tears by frustration as the liquid refused to react.
There was even a period during college during which she resigned herself to the impossibility of regaining her ability.
Now, however.
She stepped off the edge.
Iroh was supposed to be the start of something, some real progress. He turned up in a small village near La Ceiba, Honduras. When K asked around, a huddle of porch-dwelling mothers pointed her in the direction of a boy they called Ernesto.
However, when K asked the boy in hesitant Spanish for his name, the boy replied with precocious matter-of-factness.
"Iroh. And you, you're Katara."
He was a skinny boy, tall for his age – couldn't be more than ten years old – with thin, oddly bleached hair. His feet were bare and filthy, and a limp cigarette hung from his lips. And apparently he was Iroh, with every fibre of his being. There were no bits of Ernesto to reconcile with his past life.
An avalanche of questions followed, Iroh nodding calmly along with an old, warm smile gracing his grimy face. His answers were quiet and as brief as possible; at one point he fell silent altogether, and deftly lit his cigarette with a snap of his fingers, the flame erupting from his fingertips. The questions doubled.
When K finally stopped to take a breath, a soccer ball seized the opportunity to bounce by. A knot of children followed closely behind, leaping enthusiastically after their prize. Instantly distracted, Iroh turned aside and ran after the ball, not bothering to say goodbye. K smiled, satisfied, as Iroh disappeared seamlessly into the crowd of children. She had what she came for. Let the old soul play.
She got the contact information officially applicable to Ernesto Marquez from a volunteer lodge nearby. For the duration of her stay in the village, she never saw the boy again. A month later, K sent along a letter and money to the address she'd been given. She had plans, plans for a reunion between uncle and nephew, plans to study the art of bending together.
Iroh was supposed to be the start of something.
She got a letter back from the volunteer organization. Ernesto Marquez had died of malnutrition, the day after her flight home.
Iroh may not have been the start of something, but he wasn't the end of it either.
As her body tilted forwards, gravity starting to take hold, K drove the heel of her palm skywards. A tendril of water erupted from the lake's surface, shot up to meet the falling traveller, snaked around her leg and pulled her slowly, gently downwards.
Her landing in the lake below was no more graceful than a duck's, but it was much better than anything she could have accomplished two months after Iroh's passing, when water first started responding to her intent. It would improve with further practice, too, she knew. It was rough work, and vastly more difficult to learn the second time around, but the rewards were incomparable.
A wave spat K onto the dock at the base of the cliff. She coughed up a lungful of lake water, hands on thighs, and squinted up at the cabin. It wasn't much to look at, and K hardly dared to jinx herself, but she couldn't help hoping that this was the pot of gold at the end of a very itchy, sweaty, treacherous rainbow.
Her most recent trip was an afterthought, and a bad idea from start to finish.
An orderly referred her to a woman sitting over by the window, staring out over the yard, her back to the rest of the room. All the woman was to her fellow patients was a mass of blonde, flyaway hair and a too-large smock hanging over shivering shoulders.
That was as close as K got, before the guilt and fear curling in her stomach stopped her in her tracks. She left without even glimpsing her former foe's face. Easier to assume, she felt, that Azula was mentally unsalvageable in any lifetime.
There was no answer at the cabin door. K walked in anyway.
The inhabitants had either moved here very recently, or they had the unusual inclination to live out of cardboard boxes. There were opened boxes everywhere, and the corner opposite the door was stacked to the ceiling with thick, musty books and piles of paper.
The building, if you could call it that, was very bare-bones. Insulated walls of plywood. No electricity. There was a table and two chairs in the middle of the room, and two foam mattresses lying on the floor. That was the beginning and end of personal comforts, as far as K could tell. She walked over to the pile of compounded literature and browsed the contents, fingertips dancing over mismatched encyclopedia volumes and sliding down cracked spines. Books on modern art, spirituality, welding, landscaping, martial arts, piles of sheet music, medical journals, old newspapers. And here, a box of photographs.
K took one photo off the top and turned it over. In black marker it read "me & jenny mt marcy". The picture showed a young woman with a gummy smile and long, russet hair, and young man with a stubbled face worn rough by the elements and creased by the laugh lines of a man who knew complete happiness. They were sitting on a rock, arms slung around each other and beaming. K estimated that they were both in their late twenties, and that neither of them considered personal hygiene to be a high priority.
As she wondered which of the pair was Toph, her eyes were drawn to their feet. The woman was wearing runners – which was, incidentally, pretty impractical for a hike up the tallest mountain in New York state. The man, however, was barefoot, with a pair of hiking boots sitting beside him, thick socks stuffed down the ankles. She tapped the man's face and smirked. Toph's spirit persisted.
Further investigation lead K to a small closet-like space built off the main building, with the entry around the back of the cabin. She entered and a cord hanging from the ceiling hit her in the face. A quick fumble and a tug and light flooded the small space.
Metal. Sheets of metal, thick as her thumb. Iron bars, railway spikes, even what looked like a piece of a ship's hull. Each bent in some way, distorted beyond what was achievable by human hands without a synthetic heat source. On one there was a hand print, on another a pair of footprints. At the focal point of the room there was a thick metal sheet leaning against the wall like an easel. There was a symbol carved into the surface with deep, fluid strokes. A small square within a larger circle. Earth Kingdom.
K grinned. Now this was the start of something.
end.