Fishing for Yin
by Araeph
Summary: The Fire Nation learns what it means to live without the Moon.
[For Zutara Week, Day 1: Happenstance.]
Prologue
It burned through the northern sky, an echo of the fire that would race across the heavens on the hated day of Sozin. The thickset wall of ice did not collapse; it shattered out the back, exploding into a rain of missiles that rained down on the water tribe men.
Sokka had said to go inside. But Yue couldn't bear to leave her people.
Every day of her young existence, the princess had been sheltered by the mighty arms of her father, by the master of water, by the spirits who had made her cry with life. But today, even Tui and La were encircled by danger as they felt the balance of the world about to shift. Like a breath of arctic air, their protection blew across her forehead, held her face in a cold parental grasp, and was gone. For the first time, she wasn't safe. For the first time, she had broken free of everything.
"Yue! Stop! I promised your father I'd protect you!"
The princess stole one look back at the clumsy, brave young man who had not yet let his intelligence win out over his kind foolishness. (She hoped it never would.)
A memory welled up before her eyes of Sokka standing before her father. The chief, reaching out to touch the foreheads of the young men; the red pigment dripping in front of their eyes. The vision subsided, only to reveal an angry reality that pelted her on all sides: snow piled on ash, fur-hooded men prying open merciless armor; the gray, red, and black perfect imprints that the tank treads left on snow.
She raised her head and looked over the whole city. For every waterway visible to the naked eye, Yue envisioned one, two, three branches off of it—the entire network of water, hers, mapped in her mind even before her first moon time. She knew Sokka well enough by now to have picked up on his gift for reading maps. But with his eyes on her, he would easily lose his way. She pressed her lips together, gave him a firm look of good-bye, and threaded her way through a doorway, onto a walkway crowded with people who were bundled together in their panic.
In the streets, everyone was suffering. On the canals, there was no princess; only two pairs of hands that could help. Yue gathered up a screaming child, hushed a woman driven out of her wits by the sight of her husband's body, and rushed them both to safety. She glanced back; Sokka had just caught sight of her again. Time to vanish back under a snowy arch and lose him.
She made it off the bridge, only to hear a deep, long hiss that bloomed into a roar, and then a world of driving, unbearable light.
The cannonball died abruptly when it hit the bridge, steaming itself out and causing the whole structure to slide sideways. But the heat it carried with it had left a wake of devastation.
That day, the Water Tribe learned that even the princess's white hair could turn black.
Sokka dropped to his knees in shame at not being able to save her—her and his mother. The failure was one and the same.
Zhao, who thought he had conquered, slew the spirit of the moon.
The Avatar came.
The ocean rose up.
Up, up, up!—La gathered the power of the waves. They rose in the west as the pitiless sun rose in the east.
The sky turned white with the morning, hours later. But by then, Katara was no longer a waterbender. And Prince Zuko no longer had a nation to return to.