Lo is a quiet girl.
She isn't bright and happy and light, like the boy who visits her in her dreams, with the bright cloth and the brilliant arrows and the staff that's charred and smoking but somehow still holds him aloft.
She isn't somber and wise, either, like the man who comes far more rarely, eyes the pale gold of dragons and hair the white color of ash and bone.
(Some part of her wonders if she's ever been anything other than unhappy.)
She makes the mistake of asking the boy this, and the laughter fades from his eyes like dew before the sun.
"It wasn't always like this," he tells her, voice echoing the regrets of lifetimes past.
There are others before the old man, a strong woman who holds her sometimes, tells her that there's nothing she can do.
A man dressed in blue and white, riding waves of power she yearns to feel under her hands.
(But all dreams come to an end.)
And when she wakes up in the morning, there's only brown cloth and red blood and broken people as far as the eye can see.
The color and laughter has bled away from their world, like love and safety and fear have as well.
And she whispers, once, to her father, that she can feel the earth.
(The next day they're traveling.)
The boy stands in front of her, and there's none of the laughter that was always present there.
I did this, she thinks miserably. I took that away.
Except- he is her, and there's no other way to feel than bitter, bitter hate.
"You are the Avatar."
The words burn inside her, and she wants to tell him that she knows, and it doesn't matter, because the Fire Nation will raze the world looking for her and they'll never find her, because she's just like everyone else.
But Lo is a quiet girl.
So she nods, and lets his instructions on who to talk to and where to go blur into tears that are locked away tight in her chest.
(She leaves in the middle of the night.)
Her family doesn't know she's left of her own will.
Sometimes, in the twilight of sleep and wakefulness, she tortures herself with that knowledge, that her mother doesn't know and her father will only hope and her sister will never remember.
And then she wakes up, heart pounding like she's pricked her finger on a rose thorn, and those few moments when suddenly the whole world is full ofcolor and life are the only ones that matter.
Each time, it hurts a little bit more to see the world fade back into shades of grey and brown.
(It takes days, months, years.)
They travel over lands barren and bare lands to reach the areas that he says will teach her what she wants to know. It's only when they're alone that he comes out, that he walks beside her each step of the way.
Lo doesn't tell him that she's scared, but then again, she doesn't tell him a lot of things.
Each day when he comes out, now, he looks around them, and when he sees the destruction of the Fire Nation, he gets a little grimmer. The smiles are a little rarer, and his grey eyes look almost haunted.
Lo mourns, quietly, the death of that child, and then thinks about the fact that she isn't mourning the death of a boy who lost his family twice-over, that she isn't mourning that but she is mourning his slumped shoulders and tired, tired eyes.
She laughs, then, quick and harsh and sharp, and it hurts like it hurts to pull out glass slivers in her hands, but it's still a laugh, and she hasn't laughed in years.
It surprises him, she knows, the bitterness of her laughter, but she doesn't stop.
(Where are they going?)
The question haunts her mile upon mile, dogging her footsteps like a shadow. A small part of her wonders why she trusts these people, who might just be part of her imagination, who might- and probably do- not even care that she gave up everything, everything, to come here and do this.
A smaller part fears that she's gone mad.
(Who are we meeting?)
It's in the shadow of their campfire that the words bubble up like the steam from her mother's cookpot, but she bites them back and holds them off with sheer, sheer will. Loss and fear has taught her how to keep her mouth shut, and sheknows, like she knows so many things, that it is just that curiosity that killed her past life.
So instead of speaking, she smiles and goes to wash her hair in the river.
(This should not- could not- exist in their world. But it does.)
In a world of broken families and torn-up love, there's so little good for a person to hold onto. Children grab it, hoard it and latch onto it with all their stubborn tenacity and all their fierce, unbroken strength.
Lo was like that, faced with the horror of an unending tragedy, of a mother burned into ugliness because she rejected a Fire Nation soldier's advances, of a father without hands so he couldn't bend, of countless unnamed tragedies in their life.
But she had bred warmth into her shell, like saplings cracking through a field's surface, tentative and poking and so very easily killed, but so very easily overlooked as well. She held onto the beauty in her life, collecting rocks that were bluer than the clearest sky, or looping flowers into chains that held back her hair,knowing in that small bit inside of her that this-wasn't-right but find-what-you-can and hold-it-tight.
(She's asleep when she's found.)
Fire blazes around her, and she yelps back, feeling Aang's cool warmth dissipate like smoke from a fire.
She tries not to think of the squeezing hand around her chest as a betrayal.
The man who steps out, though, isn't a bender. It's the one behind him who is, and she doesn't even think how she knows.
She's moving before all that.
Turn and dip and move, and the earth rumbles ominously before he's locked in a vise, and she's leaping back before the attack of the first man.
He's good, and she has only so much space to move in without being burned herself, so she's almost dancing from side to side, tossing little bits of earth at him because she doesn't want to kill him and her first instinct was to use earth instead of water which she's better at but doesn't have so much of.
She's getting desperate, and then the man finally, finally, trips, and she's sure she's home-free.
Lo's scooping up her dagger- it's really just a sharp rock, but it's sharpened and can cut things so she's pretty sure it's fine- and some supplies and is running out the circle before someone else sees the flames when something shifts under her feet, and she falls end-over-end.
The last thought she has before the world fades into darkness is I'm-too-late.
(Never stop running.)
"What are we supposed to do about her?" The question is quiet and careful, and Lo knows just from that that they don't know she's awake. They wouldn't be talking like this in front of her if they knew.
A woman answers the question, though, and the rough-scarred melody of her voice hurts to hear. "Nothing. She's just a child."
"Yeah. A child who just managed to find us." Another man this time, lighter yet deeper at the same time. "We'll have to do something about that."
"Shut it, Sokka." The woman's voice again, and suddenly her heart is beating somewhere in her throat because there's-absolutely-no-way but this-is-happening, and I'm-never-this-lucky.
Never this lucky. The refrain pounds in her head, and she knows it to be true. But hope drums a tattoo onto her palms, and all she wants is to put her head down and breathe.
(Who am I?)
She's up and facing them all, and suddenly she doesn't know who to take out first. Except- the little boy pounds at her from behind walls of sudden strength, and she knows how much these people mean to him.
They've changed, though, from what he remembers- what she remembers. There are nightmares in their eyes, and blood drips from their hands, and there's a terrible, terrible weight on their shoulders.
A small- very, very small- part of her wants to ask them who they are.
Instead, she meets each person's gaze, and takes a deep breath. Reaching inward, she calls up Aang, pulls him through a suddenly fierce current, and into the real world. When he appears, the rough-scarred woman's face goes white, and the others' look so stunned Lo snickers despite the seriousness of the situation.
And he tilts his head to the side, and smiles, and it's a slow, sad smile, and Lo hurts inside to see it. She wants Aang to be free, life the wind, except there isn't any freedom in their world, and he can't live in his own past forever.
"I'm back." It's all he says, and then he's gone, like leaves before a windstorm, and this time Lo doesn't feel any betrayal but the truth- she has to face this on her own.
So she steps up, and swallows hard, feeling the fear threatening to swallow her up. She meets their eyes this time, and there isn't any pain or rejection there, and even though there's a whisper in her head of it's only a matter of time she pushes it away and let's herself drown in hope, for the first time in her short, short life.
It hurts, a lot, but it feels good, too, and she smiles. It's a slow smile, and it's tinged with the sadness and grief of her past lives, touched with remorse, too, over how much they've lost and how it is her fault that the war isn't ended yet.
"Will you help me?"
Ummmmm... Okay. This one just came out of, quite literally, no where. I was helping my cousin study for SATs when one of the questions talked about mortality, which then took me on a whole spiral, effectively leaving me here.
It's angsty and sad, and it made me feel whole levels of vulnerable I didn't think I could feel. If the Fire Nation did win, and Aang was killed, to what lengths would they go to kill the next Avatar? This one, by the way, is the next Avatar after Aang- Lo is born to a Swampbender mother and Earth Kingdom father.
Hope you enjoyed it!
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- Dialux