A/N: Sorry about the infrequent updates, but I really don't want to rush into this story. This chapter is actual an agglomeration of a few shorter passages.
Disclaimer: I don't A:TLA; it belongs to Mike, Bryan and Nickelodeon.
Billowing Dust
With a blinding flash and the crackle of arcing lightning, the world turned black.
He thought it would've been on a bed of some sort or a mighty battlefield, meaningful in some way at least. Never had he imagined that it would be on the sole, dusty road cutting through a decrepit slum town in the middle of nowhere by his own niece.
His death.
He should've died at Ba Sing Se with his son, died in payment a hundred times for his sins committed in the name of Honor and The Firelord and the Fire Nation and a hundred other now-faceless entities.
That would've been a memorable end.
He should've died in the Spirit World when he came barging through demanding to see his nephew. Then he could've been together, reunited in death if not life.
He should've died when he came back to confront his brother over the sudden death of his father and disappearance of his sister-in-law and the sudden change in his niece and nephew.
The thoughts running through his head starved his blood of oxygen, and he strained his diaphragm, trying to draw in a breath that had stubbornly refused to enter his throat. Instead he was rewarded with pain, a pain that seemed to writhe and pulsate by itself, twisting his helpless body along with it and dragging it over the pinpricks and needles of burnt nerve endings.
As suddenly as it had come, the pain began to fade into a dull ache and then a mere numbness.
It was true, then, that death was a sweet slumber.
He thought he had mere moments left when he heard the faint pattern of a word being rammed down his ear.
"Uncle!"
Instinctively, he cracked open an eye, parting the darkness as if it were only a curtain hiding the truth behind it.
Zuko.
Sudden strength flooded into him much like alcohol fills the veins with fire. He braced himself and pushed past the pain to take a breath...then again, and again. At the thought of his nephew, he felt a sudden influx of energy like he had never felt before.
Their years together and their years to come inundated him from all sides, their power pulling and pushing him upwards as he gathered ever-greater strength and re-emerged fully conscious from his near-death experience.
Perhaps it was because he had never been so close to death before, but he could feel his heart beating stronger at that moment than it had at any other moment of his life. Soon he could open his mouth to talk, but no words except one came out.
"Zuko."
His heart, so weak only moments ago, seemed to strain with unbridled affection as indescribable, unfathomably deep affection swelled powerfully within him. Even if his nephew chose to hide it most of the time, he knew that his love for him had taken root and blossomed into something mutual and profound.
No matter what, he loved his nephew, and his nephew loved him. Together, they could face the darkness and emerge together intact.
No matter what, they would be together in this life and the next.
Waking up
He didn't know when he first heard her footsteps after that disastrous night. It probably had taken several weeks for his ruptured eardrums to heal. They weren't nearly as obvious as the gaping wound on his back.
For countless hours, he simply laid there in the best room on the ship, as if he were some slowly passing leader of a forgotten army. He wasn't getting worse, but he wasn't getting better and he couldn't even find the energy to open his eyes.
It wasn't the pain or even the knot of blocked energy distorting his chi paths.
He felt tired, as if he were constantly fighting to stay alive and if he was lucky, conscious. The excitable energy that he had once had was gone, blasted to crystal shards by the fatal lightning in the luminescent catacombs beneath the Earth Kingdom capital.
Few, if any thoughts flit through his mind for most of the time. When he had the merest inkling of consciousness, all he could think of was his failure.
His failure in protecting his people from the wrath of the Fire Nation so many years ago - although it seemed like it had been a few months since he had last baked fruit pies with Gyatso or played airball with his airbending friends or raced Appa around the wind-swept spires of the Southern Air Temple.
All turned to bones and dust and ruins.
His failures and near-failures, disasters averted only by the actions of his friends. But when his friends had needed him most, he had failed them.
A thousand mistakes, a hundred thousand lives and uncountable mistakes all weighing down on his young shoulders, crushing and incinerating him into dust and ashes beneath the soles of iron-tipped boots and the flames billowing forth from clenched fists.
Now, another failure to add to an endless list.
Every day, Katara would bring some soup or porridge, never solid food or anything with meat, to his bedside and slowly ladle it into his unresponsive mouth with a small wooden spoon. After he had swallowed what he could, she would flip him over onto his stomach and peel away the tattered remains of his robes to expose the twisted flesh beneath.
A wooden bowl filled with boiled rainwater emerged from behind the cupboard, carried by delicate, shaking fingers and callused palms to be set down on the nightstand. Slowly, she would pull twin tendrils of water with her hands and bring them together right above the wound on his upper back, letting the water run through the burnt skin and torn tissues as a healing balm.
She managed to unblock his chi paths, allowing him to bend...if he only had the energy to do so. As it was, she hadn't even seen him open his eyes yet.
She never spoke.
Day after day, she repeated the same silent routine, but despite her attempts to stay optimistic and upbeat, she became increasingly desperate, frantic even. She didn't know what she was doing half ot the time so she was forced to rely on her instincts; Remembering her scattering of lessons in the North Pole, she wondered if she should've spent more time learning how to heal.
That was only the least of her guilt..
She had almost carelessly thrown away his lifeline in the form of a Spirit Water pendant to the enemy...Zuko. He had somehow finagled his way past her seemingly impenetrable defenses and instilled a sense of pity, of all things, in the usually unsympathetic waterbender.
The life of her best friend and the Savior of the World and her everything for a cosmetic, literally skin-deep treatment of the Prince who hadn't batted an eyelash at helping to kill Aang.
All her best efforts in healing him had been self-rationalized as being the least she could do, and the guilt only continued to gnaw and fester within the deepest recesses of her conscience.
Consumed by guilt, two broken souls stumbled in the dark, a darkness unbroken by the oil lamps dotting the walls or the dancing flames of lit candles.
On the fourth week, with nobody nearby, Katara finally spoke and dared to share her deepest secret.
"Aang, if you can hear me..." she leaned in closer and her voice dropped to a breathy whisper, "I love you."
She didn't know when or how it had happened, but Aang had found a place in her heart equal with, if not outright surpassing, that of her real family. It was a scary and thrilling feeling that she felt something so strongly for someone who had been a total stranger less than a year ago.
Now however, it was mostly scary, as the feeling of actually losing him was still fresh in her mind...and probably would be for a long time.
She sent a lingering gaze at his soft hair that had sprouted up during the preceding weeks, but when there was no reaction to her confession she sighed and began to clean up the empty soup bowl and bend away the water dripping down his back. After one last glance back into the dank room, she closed the door softly and made her way up to the deck to face the swirling storm clouds and relentless wind.
Aang's mind lurched slightly when Katara withdrew the tingling water completely out of his back. It always did and he had almost gotten used to it, especially with his amorphous unconsciousness as a barrier to the sharp pain.
Despite sleeping for several weeks, straight, he wasn't even aware of his own breathing or the push of the mattress against his skin. The only thing he was aware of was the ringing sound of blood rushing through his ears, something that only got marginally better with each passing day. His extreme fatigue, however, remained the same despite the constant healing. It was as if he was only the empty shell of a body and mind, barely alive by the miracle of the spirit water.
The problem, as always, was his energy. It was all gone. His body had healed remarkably, but his mind was elsewhere, not wholly in this world but rather halfway to the next. The energy to sustain it here had already left this world.
Thus, his spark of consciousness began to flicker once more, its fuel already beginning to run dry after mere moments of a tentative lucidity.
But something different happened this time.
"I love you."
The voice that said them mattered as much as the words themselves, but together they became more than a sum of their parts. In his mind, the haze seemed to dissolve in a sudden burst of warm light that startled his mind into having its first conscious thought in almost a month. His first mental image conjured at the thought of love happened to be Katara, and from there the light intensified and grew even brighter.
He was almost overwhelmed by the sudden ache and the deluge of emotions that when he recalled his memories of his time spent with her, which spanned only a few short months but seemingly stretched into the endless horizon.
Walking the beaten-dirt paths that meandered through the river valleys that so often dotted the Earth Kingdom, occasionally finding a nice-looking flower or a scenic view that she might appreciate.
Hiking through the temperate forests along the coastline, laughing as they foraged in the brush for something better than a rock-shaped nut.
Silent against the bleakness of the Si Wong desert and its ubiquitous dust storms, shuffling tiredly along during the relative cool under the midnight moon.
But together despite the odds.
And now she was reaching out for him once again. How could he not return her gesture? Their connection easily transcended the distance between this world and the one he had been drawn towards.
Thoughts of Katara replaced the dreams of his guardian, Gyatso, his long-dead friends and his destroyed nation that seemed to beckon from beyond the veil of death. Before, the love he had felt for them had sustained him in his his halfway point between the two different worlds they now occupied, but with Katara he had something that kept him firmly grounded in this world.
Someone in this world who he could hold dear and rely on.
The love of his people for him had not left the world, even if they had. The Guru had been right.
It was at that moment that he finally let go of them and allowed himself to believe that Katara might love him the same way he loved her. This chance, however small it may have seemed, put his mind at ease. Gyatso and his people were gone, but she wasn't. That alone was enough for him to stay.
He fell into a brief slumber as his mind prepared itself to re-emerge into this world for the first time in a month.
Finally at peace, Aang woke up the next day with no recollection of his rambling thoughts.
Something sweet before this story dives off the deep end.