A/N: I wrote this years ago to go along with my Asami-centric fic, "As Ummi," and yesterday I looked back and thought, "that was good, I should at least share it."
I don't own Avatar.
This is more than a little speculative, just sewing up some links between "Legend of Aang" and "Legend of Korra."
000
Asami and Korra looked for Koh the Face-Stealer in the Spirit World, but didn't find him. Where could he have gone?
(Like the cycle of the seasons, the Avatar will be born again…)
Somewhere in Ba Sing Se, a little girl, three and a half years old now, lies on her back and she cries. She's at a daycare, but the daycare is overcrowded, and there are too many children and not enough matrons. The baby girl sobs because her mother is working in a factory, working twelve hours in a day, and even though the mother loves her dearer than diamonds, love won't pay the rent and it won't put food on the table, so Mommy works, and so the baby goes to the nursery, and so the baby screams because she is alone.
No one arrives to soothe her. But the girl opens her eyes and stops, because there's a strange face above her, a face of a white mask with big black eyes. The girl just stares. She does not scream in fear, nor does she weep, or screech. She doesn't even smile. She just studies the intruder.
Does any other child see? No… no one else cries, no one else looks.
The intruder coos. "Poor, lost little grub. Left all alone. You don't even have any past selves to comfort you. But don't worry, Uncle Koh is here. I'll look after you. I'll teach you all you need to know. Blood recognizes blood—" he reaches out a long claw, and the little girl grabs it, and he smiles – "and don't you know, Vaatu was my papa? Oh, yes, in the days before the Moon let the Ocean even kiss her hand… Hush, little grub. Sleep now. I'll look after you. Little Avatar of Vaatu. Little scream in the city of walls and secrets."
000
The coin flips...
000
(Harmonic Convergence changed everything.)
The Avatar and her love walked into the Spirit Portal together, hand in hand, and the light around them shifted, turned brilliant white. As they left this world and entered the other, something else crossed over, going the other way. For a spirit, it was hardly visible – a fat little centipede, the size of a cockroach.
It crawled.
It made its way but slowly across the vast crater around the Spirit Portal. It kept its face – if it had one – bowed to the ground. After what felt like an eternity – several turns of the Sun and Moon – the little thing reached concrete, and brick, and human creation. It lurched about.
At one point, it stopped to rest on a root, one of the spirit vines. A grasshopper chanced to alight beside it. The grasshopper reached out, its antennae twitching with curiosity.
The centipede-creature leapt; there was a kerfuffle and a shrill, tiny grasshopper scream. No other creature even heard. The grasshopper hobbled away, blind, without antennae or eyes or mouth. The centipede crawled away – was it just satiety, or was the thing a little bigger than before? Nonsense; that can only be an overactive imagination at work.
The centipede-spirit moved on, experimentally waving its antennae. Someone listening very closely might have heard it chortling, in a mandible-voice: "The first, the first, the first. I thirst, I thirst, I thirst…"