It's snowing.

I can see every beautiful, oh so very beautiful, ice crystal drop. As each snowflake falls from the sky tears fall from my eyes. I wonder if this is the last snow I will see.

I can no longer wipe my tears, but he walks in, and he gently brushes them off my cheeks. He holds my hands with his cold cold hands, and with the most effort I can muster, because he's here, I move my index finger on his palm. He smiles.

In my mind I form the words I cannot say out loud.

I love you.

"Late, late, late!" Katara moaned as she stood in front of her closet. This was her early-morning ritual—the impersonal green numbers of her clock blinking at her and coldly informing her she had only a very few minutes to shower, eat breakfast, and otherwise make herself presentable. Choosing what to wear was her, and possibly 95 of the rest of the female population's, most difficult decision in the day. But today three separate examinations would greet her, and giving up on fashion, Katara plucked a white sweater and blue jeans from the rather minimalistic selection in front of her (must remember to ask Gran-gran to do the laundry) and slipped them on.

A bowl of only lukewarm beef rib soup awaited her downstairs. She took a few hurried bites, hoping to escape before her grandmother would see, but Gran-gran's eyes were much sharper than her age would suggest.

"Katara! You're late again," she clucked. "Even Sokka is finished before you." Katara grimaced at her grandmother in a full-mouthed show of contrition, but Gran-gran Kanna looked her over critically. "You've lost weight," she said decidedly, her mouth settling disapprovingly, tight fine lines etching valleys into her weathered skin.

Katara was a very slim girl to begin with. In her hurry she had hardly noticed anything when she pulled on her clothes, but now inspecting herself she realized that her already 24-inch-waist jeans were slightly baggy. She swallowed quickly. "Gran-gran, it's stress, or something," she said firmly. Her grandmother was the sort to force triple helpings on visitors who were already clearly stuffed, and in fact, on her own grandchildren as well, and Katara well knew her grandmother's somewhat annoying war-cry when either she or her brother Sokka showed even the slightest sign of illness.

Kanna harrumphed and said, "You're not doing one of those smash diets, are you?" Katara shook her head no, refraining from correcting her grandmother (it's crash diet, Gran-gran), and laced up her boots. She did up the buttons of her blue, furred parka and shouldered her bag. Katara embraced her grandmother and placed a kiss on the old cheek. She looked Gran-gran in the eyes that were so similar to her own, and smiled reassuringly, and said, "I'm fine, Gran-gran, if you make my favorite mixed rice I promise I'll eat it all."

Then Katara was out the door, jogging to catch up with her brother who was a blue dot up ahead. "Sokka, wait up!" she called out, her breath forming tiny clouds in the cold winter air. Sokka paused and turned back, well used to this scene, as it played out almost exactly every day. He made a show of inspecting his watch and as Katara neared, said loudly,

"…5, 4, 3, 2, 1….Ah, right on time!" Katara stuck her tongue out at him and then the two resumed walking, quickly, in order to reach their college in time for their first class. "You seriously need a better alarm," Sokka told her. His eyes lit up. "I'll invent one," he said, "which would move after the alarm goes off! And the alarm wouldn't shut off until you get your butt out of the bed and catch it!"

Katara was struck speechless for a moment. "That," she said in a voice made even from shock, "is quite possibly one of the very worst ideas I have ever heard from you, Sokka, and I have heard a lot."

"And why is it so bad? I know you: you set three alarms every night and every morning you just hit snooze and go right back to—"

"Snoozing?" Katara interrupted him. She rubbed her hands together and blew on them for warmth. "Unlike some people, I actually have to study."

Sokka spluttered at this, but before he could say anything they had reached the University of Ba Sing Se. The siblings embraced and then parted, Katara off to read for her first exam, and Sokka on his way to test the device that he had been assigned to build for his engineering class. "Good luck, Katara!" Sokka said. She smiled, and nodded, and then saw her best friend Yue.

The first thing Yue said was, "You're losing weight."

Katara rolled her eyes jokingly. "And you're worse than my Gran-gran," she said to the other girl. "It's just stress. I have three exams today!" Yue warily noticed the classic signs of Katara freaking out, and immediately tried to calm her.

"Calm down, Katara…deep breaths," Yue instructed her friend. Under Yue's cool blue eyes and light voice Katara did begin to relax, although she envied Yue her absolute serenity in any situation. She smiled her thanks and pulled out her organic chemistry book from her bag, her eyes traveling over the diagrams and mechanisms she had already spent hours memorizing.

Yue and Katara walked to their chemistry exam together, trading important facts they thought the professor would be sure to ask, and asking last-minute questions. Katara almost trembled as she and Yue slid into the lecture hall, half full of students feverishly reviewing.

"This is going to be a crazy exam," Katara heard the girl behind her moan. "Professor Pathik is crazy enough to begin with." At that moment the professor himself walked in carrying a very thick packet of rainbow-colored exams. His usual narrow suit clashed with the beat-up sneakers he always wore, and he began to distribute the exams. Yue squeezed her hand. The exam that Katara received was bright pink; Yue's yellow.

Question 1, Katara read silently to herself. Propose a series of reagents to synthesize acetylsalicylate from ethyl acetate and acetic acid. She took a deep breath, calmed her nerves, and began to write.

…

After three exams, Katara was utterly exhausted. That night at dinner, conversing and laughing with her small family, she reached for a piece of pork with her chopsticks, and completely missed. The tips of the chopsticks instead clinked unhappily, emptily, upon the porcelain plate.

"What's with that?" Sokka asked, snickering. Katara tried again, this time more successfully, and slowly chewed the meat.

Gran-gran said sharply, "Are you ill? I'll give you a good dosage of the red medicine after dinner." Sokka continued to chuckle, but Katara inwardly groaned. Gran-gran's traditional, herbal red medicine was one of the most disgusting things she had ever had the displeasure of ingesting, and as far as she could tell it never worked.

"I'm just tired," Katara protested. Sokka had once more become engrossed in his food, although Katara was uncomfortably aware of Gran-gran still observing her. She gave another smile, genuinely affectionate for both her brother and grandmother, and continued to eat completely normally.

Katara had few memories of her mother, only a window of warmth and light in a past darkened by the passing of time. On her twelfth birthday, Gran-gran had given Katara her mother's necklace, a pale blue stone pendant on a darker blue silk band. Back then, sometimes even now, Katara would lie in bed at night, two fingers absentmindedly on the pendant, and imagine how it would have looked on her mother's neck.

Her father had always said, with a strange look on his face, as though one eye was sad and lonely, the other proud and loving, that Katara looked almost exactly like her mother. But then Hakoda had left one day on one of his embassy missions for the government and had never come back. Only a phone call from the embassy, a pleasant educated man's voice over the cold telephone wires, informing Kanna that her son had been killed in an attack on the embassy, was their last tie to Hakoda.

That had been when Katara was ten years old, Sokka twelve, both of them too young to be orphaned, and at the same time too old to not understand. That's when Gran-gran had moved in, her weeping over, her mourning shrouded in her heart. She took good care of the two siblings, a strict disciplinarian but who never hesitated to show her love, and now, ten years later, the pain of her father's and mother's passing had lessened to an occasional twinge when she saw whole, complete families strolling outside on a spring day.

…

A few days later, Katara could hardly breathe as her trembling fingers typed the address to access the university's website. Yue sighed good-naturedly behind her. "Katara, chill," she commanded. Her lyrical voice caught the attention of quite a few young males in the area, who paused and let their eyes wander down her lithe slender form and beautiful face. She remained completely oblivious to them and instead focused on her friend. "You know you've done well." She kept up a constant stream of encouragement in this vein until Katara finally made it to where the grades were posted.

Organic chemistry: 94

Physics: 89

Cellular biology: 92

Katara sighed deeply, shudderingly, her shoulders quivering. "Yueeeee," she complained, "I failed."

"You, Katara, are the only smart girl in this school who is dumb enough to think that an 89 in a calculus-based physics class is failing, and that an A is failing in two of the hardest subjects in the entire course! You can't do better than an A," Yue said.

Katara shook her head. "I know, it's just…." She sighed. It was hard for her to believe she could have achieved something really good, although in her heart she knew she had passed well.

That was why, later, Katara in a much improved mood happily ate ice cream with Yue after classes were over. Despite the freezing cold outside she enjoyed the way the thick sweet dessert coated her tongue, the false green coloring for pistachio transforming her mouth temporarily into an alien's.

"Two more years," Yue said, sipping thoughtfully on her milkshake. "Then we're done with University of Ba Sing Se."

"And then graduate school, and then work," Katara reminded her. She smiled. "But I'm looking forward to it. Yue, we have our whole lives in front of us. Everybody's just waiting for us to go out there and make our mark with them." Yue grinned as well, noisily finished off her milkshake, and stood up. She and Katara walked arm-in-arm down the winter streets, happily talking of future plans.

…

Over the next week or so, small things happened to Katara which she took little note of, although Gran-gran's maternal extinct captured each one and carefully analyzed it. One day at dinner, when Sokka asked her to pass the salt shaker, her hand completely missed it by two inches to the left, and her fingers curled around empty space. Sokka was too busy eating to notice, and Katara merely shook it off as a temporary moment of clumsiness.

Then, more common, were her stumblings. The usual morning jog to campus had her almost fall, although Sokka caught hold of her. Her familiar thudding footsteps down the stairs as she hurried to eat breakfast suddenly slurred as she fell and slid down on her back. "I'm not getting enough sleep," she said to her grandmother when questioned. "I'm in a hurry." Gran-gran didn't say what she thought: For the past two years you've been in a hurry, you've not had enough sleep. You've never been this clumsy.

Finally, one morning a little over a week after her exam results had come out, Katara ran to her university as usual on a clear day. Barely a few strides in, however, she tripped over seemingly nothing and fell on her face, her chin slashed open and blood quickly seeping from the cut.

"Katara!" Sokka yelled when he realized his sister was on the ground, her thin back trembling with the sobs of pain. Gran-gran hobbled out of the house and made her way to where Katara remained sitting, passers-by giving them concerned looks and the occasional, "Are you okay?"

"We need to go to the hospital," Gran-gran said grimly. "That cut needs stitches. Can you lift her, Sokka?" He nodded and picked up his sister, whose crying stopped in a combination of cold and necessity.

"God I'm so sorry, Katara," he muttered to her as he carried his sister (she's a lot lighter than I expected, he thought) to the car. "It's my fault—I should've waited for you—I would've caught you like I did the last time." He paused, frowning slightly, his guilt subsiding for a moment. "The last time, that was hardly a week ago. You seem to be falling a lot lately."

Katara's front was stained with blood, but when they reached the emergency room and the triage nurse had cleaned her up to prep for the surgeon, she assured Katara, Sokka, and Kanna that it wasn't that terrible. "The human body loves drama!" she informed them cheerfully. "It always looks worse than it really is." She paused. "Well, usually. But in this case—it's not so bad!"

A few minutes later, another triage nurse came to take Katara to the suture room. "Come on," she said. In contrast to the first nurse, this one had a bored, cynical expression in her dark eyes which also clearly translated into her voice. Her nametag read Mai. Katara gave a small smile to her brother and grandmother and obediently followed the nurse, who looked not much older than Katara herself.

In suture room 3 Katara sat on the bed and pressed a gauze pad to her cut. After only a couple minutes the door opened, a rotund stomach entering first, slightly before a kind-looking face which looked to be about the same age as Gran-gran's. But the doctor's air of affability and calm, quiet confidence reassured Katara and she smiled.

He smiled right back and then settled on a stool in front of her, and introduced himself as Dr. Iroh. "You're a pretty girl, aren't you," he said conversationally, as he brushed stinging antiseptic over the wound. "Do not worry, my dear, this will not leave a scar." Within a very short while, the entire time Dr. Iroh keeping up a stream of one-sided pleasantries Katara could not answer, he had finished. His thick fingers had felt cool and experienced on her skin, and a gauze bandage decorated the left side of her face.

"Now let's go back to the waiting room, and I will talk to your mother…" Dr. Iroh paused at the look on Katara's face.

"Grandmother," she corrected him thickly through the local anesthesia they had used. He nodded, averting his eyes from hers in a show of sympathy, and led her out of the suture room.

Dr. Iroh shook hands with Kanna, and said, "Now I see where your granddaughter inherited her looks from." Kanna harrumphed, her favorite gesture, and said,

"How is she?"

The doctor chuckled. "She'll be just fine, there won't even be a scar. She should just be a little more careful in the future, right?"

Katara nodded and smiled self-deprecatingly, one side of her face still tingling from the effects of anesthesia.

Kanna looked hard at the doctor. "Shouldn't you take some brain scans, make sure everything really is okay?"

Dr. Iroh read much in Kanna's eyes, and he nodded slowly. "Although I doubt her skull was fractured, it is better to err on the side of caution." He beckoned to Katara. "I'm sorry, my dear, but we will just take some pictures of your brain. Simply a precaution," he added quickly. Mai stepped out from the doctor's side and with another bored "Come on" led Katara to the imaging center.

"Perhaps you ought to come with me," Dr. Iroh said to Kanna. She murmured to Sokka to stay put, and although his eyebrows drew together mutinously he nodded.

Once they reached Dr. Iroh's office, he closed the door, and said, "What is this about? You have some question about Katara's health?"

Kanna nodded, her aged knotted hands clasping together. "Lately she's been having problems she's never had before, that no one should have. She's been losing weight without meaning to. Stumbles far too often…falls down the stairs. Sometimes when she reaches for things she misses them completely. And today, when she fell…" she looked up at the doctor. "Usually, Doctor, when people fall, they will put their hands out to break their fall, right?" Dr. Iroh nodded, and Kanna continued, "But Katara, her hands were ungrazed. Completely. She just fell right onto her chin."

Dr. Iroh had become more and more serious, the twinkle dying from his eye, as he heard Kanna catalogue her daughter's symptoms. "I won't say anything until I see the brain scans," he said slowly. "What does she say about all this? Does she notice?"

Kanna nodded. "When I ask, all she says is that she's tired, she hasn't had enough sleep. That she's stressed, or in a hurry."

The doctor leaned back in his chair and stroked his white beard. "That could be a possibility," he admitted. "But I want to wait for the images to come back. Even then, this sounds like a neurological issue. If I see anything strange I will refer you to another doctor who can help you more than I can."

Half an hour later Mai knocked on Dr. Iroh's door holding a large manila envelope. "The images," she said flatly. "The patient is in the waiting room with her brother." Dr. Iroh nodded his thanks to her, and as he pulled out the images the sheets made loud, ominous noises like thunder.

He clipped up the sheets on the illuminating board and switched on the light, observing them carefully. "On the left side you see a normal brain," he said. "And on the right, Katara's. These lighter areas show activity." He pointed to a specific picture of the normal brain, and to the corresponding picture on Katara's side. "As you can see, it appears that in the brain stem, the normal brain is experiencing more activity than in Katara's."

Kanna sunk back down into her seat. "I'm no doctor," she said, "but even I know that doesn't sound right, not normal."

Dr. Iroh hastened to her, saying, "But neither am I a neurologist. I'm an ER doctor." He took a pad of paper and a pen from his desk and scribbled something on it, then handed the top sheet to Kanna. "He's a good, young doctor. Works upstairs in neurology. I believe you should take these image to him."

Kanna narrowed her eyes at the doctor's typical messy writing before deciphering the few characters which spelled the name of the neurologist. She thanked Dr. Iroh and returned to the waiting room, clutching the envelope which held her granddaughter's health.

"Is it all right, Gran-gran?" Katara said anxiously. "Honestly, my head feels fine, I don't think that I injured it."

Kanna looked into Katara's and Sokka's matching blue eyes which were now shaded with a slight bit of apprehension, and she smiled normally, hiding the nervousness of her heart. "These things are hard to tell," she said. "I'm an old woman with many of my own health problems, so I know. Sokka, you go on ahead. Katara and I are going to go see a different doctor."

Immediately Sokka's eyes rapidly looked from his sister to his grandmother and back again. "Why are you seeing a different doctor? What's wrong?"

"Probably nothing," Katara said. "Go on, Sokka, it's okay. You know Gran-gran can be overprotective sometimes," she whispered. Louder, she continued, "Sokka, go. And it's not your fault! Although if you do feel guilty you could buy me a Cadbury's Fruit and Nut—"

"Or I'll just get going," Sokka said jokingly, embracing his sister tightly. "I'm really sorry," he said again, but she shrugged him off, and lightly pushed his back.

"There is nothing wrong, right, Gran-gran?" Katara said as she accompanied the older woman up a flight of stairs. Kanna grunted, her lungs already tired.

"That's what we are going to see about," she panted. Katara, now feeling a stab of guilt, suggested that perhaps they should have used the elevator, but Kanna waved off the suggestion. "Besides, we are already here," she said. This area of the hospital was far different from the ER, Katara noticed. They had stopped in front of a closed white door on which no decoration hung, contrary to the holiday paraphernalia which adorned the surrounding doors and hallway. Kanna double checked the name etched onto the brass plate against the slip of paper she held in her hand.

Kanna knocked firmly on the door and it opened readily.

"Hello. I am the neurologist, Dr. Zuko."

A/N: Hello everyone! Thank you for reading the first chapter of this story. Clearly, this is an AU taking place in modern time with the characters either college-age or post-college. I was so inspired I wrote this all in one sitting! I hope you all enjoyed. I've always wanted to write a story like this—in fact, I have many half-finished first chapters lurking around on probably every computer we own or have owned, all with this same theme. But the direct impetus for this story came from rewatching 1 LITRE OF TEARS, a most excellent J-drama. For those who have seen it—I know my story could never compare to the real Aya's, and it won't even come close to a direct copy. For those who have not—what are you doing? You must see! This ought to be required viewing for everyone. But caution: heavy drama up ahead. If you don't cry at least 1 litre of tears—per episode—then you must be well-nigh heartless, or at least Grinch-esque.

Again thanks for reading, and Happy Holidays everyone!

So stay tuned for the next chapter: Zuko's a doctor, whaaaaaa? And is Katara just stressed, or is it something more sinister? Will any ships set sail? We've met Iroh, Sokka, Yue, and Mai, which other familiar faces will we meet?