Her long dark hair fell in waves across her face and her piercing blue eyes peered out on a world she'd grown unused to. Katara hugged her knees, her chin propped up against them, sitting with balance gained from excellence in water bending on the lip of the fountain. The stillness of the air temple was in stark contrast to the loud, bustling ship and the pulsing, whispering ocean. Abandoned. Alone. She didn't like it. She blinked rapidly, and then thought of nothing.
Steps faded in behind her like rain slipping into the consciousness of a sleeping person and then a voice sounded without really sounding. The air was not stirred, and no breath came from the lips of the figure as she spoke.
Katara did not turn to hear the girl. Listless eyes fixed towards the sunset, she listened for another wind to take the phantom back to where it came from. They were eyes fixed toward the sunset in the west, towards another dying day, in the direction that all beings travel when their time has come to end. She was filled with mirth then, because from the west – the far, far west, over the edge of the horizon – no one ever returned, and that was for certain.
No one. She had watched the aging firebender Iroh, after all; seen the shadow of his son, Lu-ten, torturing the old man through his long and trying venture into death as she sat beside him, forever beside him...
Cold fingers, like the tongue of an inching fire, laid their web of ice beneath her skin, and a rogue memory reached her. Sitting by Iroh's side, she had thought that he was not fighting. And as she slipped from her perch to the cold, tile floor; as she surrendered to night that which was his, falling, she thought, through the floor, and into complete and blissful sleep...she knew that if this was death, she would not fight it either.