A/N: This is a theory fic. Well, of a sort. It's rather strange and kind of sad; but I have had the idea in my head for a long time now, and I have finally have decided to write it. Enjoy.

Disclaimer: I don't own Avatar: The Last Airbender. Nick does. Or something such as that.

Broken Spirit

It occurred about a year after the end of the Great War, when the world was a shambles; people were growing poor from paying for the long century's warfare, people were rebuilding their torched cities, people were crying and weeping and grieving still for their dead. The peaceful era that many had dreamed of during the war never came; the Avatar had died in the Last Battle, the most terrible of all battles during the war, where the waters ran red and the cities of Fire were flooded with blood. Recovery after the war had taken a long time, and still had not completely finished; really, the world never will recover from such a blow, I think. But that is not the point. The point is that the world was so lost that there was no one to search for the new Avatar. Many even believed the cycle was at long last broken, for the last of the Air Nomads had died.

The people were right, to a point. The death of the last Airbender had messed up the cycle—something had happened to the Spirit. But we did not know it at first. What we only knew was that a young infant son of a Waterbender and Earthbender had set fire to his parents' home by breathing. People refused to believe it at first, but soon it became apparent that the youngling was the next Avatar. And so the Earth King of Omashu, the greatest Earthbender in the world, took the small family under his wing (figuratively speaking, of course) and taught the next Avatar how to Earthbend.

Now, the Avatar was named Jin and had a twin sister called Yin. Yin had learned to Waterbend as Jin mastered Earthbending, that much was true. But there was something wrong with Yin. Yin was sometimes a shy, quiet young girl; other times, she was an adventurous young woman with an unbreakable spirit; and still other times, she was an angry, vengeful person who would harm another person without a second thought, and her eyes would glow eerily as she exacted her perfect revenge; and yet still other times, she had an unearthly air about her and her eyes were filled with nothing but sadness, as though she understood terrible things that no one could ever dream of.

Jin was no better. He learned quickly and was eager to move on, but he never spoke a single word. He showed his emotions through his eyes. Sometimes his eyes sparkled with enthusiasm and other times they glistened with fury; and still yet other times, they were the calmest, wisest eyes that I had ever and still now have ever seen.

I, of course, was not a very important person; I had lost my family in the Great War and so I worked for Jin and Yin's parents at no charge. It was an honor, I told them, to serve the Avatar.

But enough of me. You must understand, there was something terribly wrong with both Jin and Yin. I convinced Jin's parents to let a Healer see the twins; though they were young, I could tell there was something wrong; something had happened during their birth.

What was found shocked us all.

Yin was declared to have a sort of disease in which she lost herself sometimes—that is, she had more than one spirit inside of her and all her spirits clashed and that is why she was not really one person, but four or five different people—she was schizophrenic. And Jin was found to be quite similar to what Yin was except that it was not quite the same story for him. Jin suffered from a terrible illness—he was partially insane, but still at times he retained his sanity, when his eyes had that enthusiastic sparkle in them. And he was also declared mute.

But what was also found out shocked not only us, but the world.

The Healer had somehow found out that Yin was also the Avatar—when Yin had been angered, her eyes had glowed and a great wind had sent the Healer crashing to the ground.

It confused me greatly and I did not understand at first. Two Avatars? That is not possible. There is only one Avatar.

But then, after thinking about it a few seconds, I finally understood: the Avatar Spirit had split in two; one half of the Spirit was in Jin, and the other half was in Yin.

The thought that the Spirit had torn in two horrified me beyond belief. When the last of the Air Nomads died, the cycle had broken—of a sort. The Avatar was—or the Avatars were, to put it rightly, I suppose—two people instead of one; and both the Avatars were mad, completely mad. The Spilt of the Spirit had been too much, and it messed with Jin and Yin's souls, destroying them from the inside out.

Even if both Avatars, or rather, Half-Avatars, were insane, I would still look out for them. One does not lose faith in something that timeless so easily, you see. The world had depended upon the Avatar Spirit thousands of times before, and I still trusted myself to believe in the Avatar Spirit again.

You know, it was said that the Avatar Spirit was the Spirit of the World. Perhaps that is what our world has come to—it is so infested with evils and wrongs and war that it has torn right in two, that it has finally been through too much. Some people speculate that the Spirit will split again once Jin and Yin die, this time into four pieces. And some say simply that once Jin and Yin die, the world will die with them.

But I still have faith in them. I helped raise them and look over them as they trained under the greatest Masters in the world, and I helped restrain them when they went into mad rampages, to prevent them from harming themselves. I have served the Avatar Spirit without a waver in faith for twelve years; and now Jin and Yin are of age, and still they are insane, and still they suffer. With every blow the world takes, those two take the blows as well. They become weaker still every day, and I secretly fear for them. Jin and Yin are the only shining light left in the world now, and even they are growing dimmer by the day. Is there no hope for the world? Is there no chance of survival?

I can only wonder and ask myself questions that no one can answer. There is only one thing that can reveal the answer, and that is not even the great Avatar Spirit. All I can do is hope and serve the Half-Avatars and pray to the Spirits that this world will live, that it will not die.

Shall the world survive, O Spirits?

Even I know that only time will tell.