A/N: Thank you for the follows and feedback. This chapter is definitely grittier than the previous ones. Would love to know your thoughts, hope you like it!
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
—Vyasa, Bhagavad Gita
III. Invasion
Are the hands of a firebender supposed to feel like ice?
Zuko thinks about this a lot, as the incessantly kind Iroh warms his nephew's cold palms. When they aren't pushing the limits with training, they sit like this together on lonelier nights. Far from home and lost at sea, with a crew that grows unhappier the deeper into Southern Water Tribe territory they go.
The teen used to enjoy water, always wished to learn about the tribes that honed an element so different from his own, but he despises the glacial plains now. Other cultures dim in comparison to his search for the Avatar. The world is wide and blue and cold, and Zuko wonders if it is all he'll ever know in his ruined adolescence.
On a misty winter day, jasmine tea has been left to cool on the counter as uncle and nephew squabble for the hundredth time.
"This is not, I repeat, not an extended vacation," the teen emphasizes. "I can feel us getting closer to our goal, you'll see."
"You may have taken me out of retirement," the man replies, teasingly, "but you will never intrude upon my relaxation. A man must have his tea time if he is to face his enemy." He blows a long trail of steam through his nostrils at his nephew's disgruntled face, grinning as the youth brushes it off.
Zuko flexes his body against the rail and leaves his uncle to his board games, the energy draining from his dragon spirit. Ice, ice, and more ice; nothing, nothing, and more nothing. Perhaps these two years really have been a mistake, dragging a fleet of worn soldiers on a quest towards nothingness. With exile fresh in mind and phantom pain where half of his face should be, he ages with damage. The hurt has been internalized rather than understood, the image of a tyrant father hovering over his every move.
But then the blue beam of light shoots into the heavens, the landscape radiating a perceptible, earthly shift. Like balance being restored, breath by breath. The revelation shakes him to the core and thaws his dreams of honor.
"Finally." Amber eyes turn to his uncle with a newfound determination, footsteps light and excited. "Uncle, do you realize what this means?"
The old general peers forlornly at his cards and sighs. "I won't get to finish my game?"
"It means my search... it's about to come to an end."
The prince doesn't know it yet, but as his hands return to their correct temperature, on the other side of the world, a similarly lost soul has a much grimmer vision.
To her, the Avatar is not a cause for celebration, but a reminder of tragedy.
"Press your fingers here, at the heart. Now pedal the other arm into small circles, small. Good, good. Feel the water in the palm draw from the roots. Keep pedaling."
"Arms don't pedal. Some teacher you're turning out to be."
"Well they do in my head, ya insubordinator!" Engi cries.
"That's not even a word."
Wanli rolls her eyes but does as ordered any way. After a year of blending back into swamp life, the girl finds herself at the mercy of Engi's boredom. While she honed her waterbending for combative use long ago, the girl out of time lacked the gentle hand and patience for plantbending. Hence, the two adolescents find themselves practicing atop the hundreds and thousands of stairs circling the thick, ancient trunk of the banyan-grove tree.
However, the moment Wanli channels even the slightest bit of water into a willow sapling, it literally shatters, ribbons of green and brown released from the depths of the underworld. In the background, Engi screams about how she isn't "pedaling hard enough" and "that was my favorite baby tree!"
"I tried. You tried." Wanli brushes her hands together. "I can't plantbend and that's final."
It's the truth, given her dangerous fighting style. Punch, slash, collapse: the same militaristic waterbending that got her son out of prison and saved her from many battles. Unconventional, rigid, murderous. Excellent bloodbending-material. She shakes her head to stop the intrusive thoughts, grounding herself in the moment.
You're not there, she reminds herself for the umpteenth time. You're not there anymore. You finally have a chance at living, don't mess this up. You've been working so hard for this.
"Fine," Engi says. Pouting, she plops herself down and lifts a basket into her lap as her friend swings onto a higher platform for meditation. "I throw in the towel. But this isn't over, young grasshopper. We'll make a master out of you yet."
"Yeah, yeah," Wanli replies. "Sacrifice as many trees as it takes to save your teaching career."
As a comfortable silence settles over the two, she has time to observe her friend. The other waterbender's face has grown more heart-shaped and pleasant in comparison to Wanli's oval one. Even their skin is different, Engi's a fine tan and the latter's an uneven umber. They call Engi pretty down in the village; they call the bloodbender empty behind closed doors. Her pseudo-family pretends like the rumors don't exist, but the worried looks sent her way are hard to miss.
She feels guilty for being fully-loved but only half-there.
"Is there something on my face?" Engi breaks her trance, looping one reed through the other.
"No," Wanli says. "I just think you've gotten exceptionally ugly this past year."
"Ruuude," Engi drawls. "Is that the best you can do?"
"I kid, I kid. You're beautiful, love. What's your skincare routine?"
"Mud and wood frog secretion." The girl pats her face for good measure and turns her nose up in the air. "Works miracles on my boils."
"Beating drums made you soft enough to play with frogs, huh?" Wanli asks.
"You're clearly as hard-headed as the day we arrived."
"Punk."
"Grub."
Wanli bursts into laughter, unrehearsed for once. Some things will never change. "That's a new one."
"I have to catch up to you somehow." Engi shrugs.
I have hundreds of years over you, the other girl mentally muses. Don't take it to heart.
"Plantbending is uncommon and creative," she actually says. "Takes a special kind of care and prowess."
"Finally, some respect around here!" Engi dips her head in a bow, adding a flower to her own hair. "Thank you, thank you. One gold piece per autograph."
For the next hour, they work on their individual tasks of creating and training. Peacemaker, warmonger: the contrast is stark, but fails to separate the childhood friends. They were cut from the same blue cloth, a cold continent away.
"Do you miss it?" Engi sets down her finished basket. The sunlight has shifted into a mute lemon, the day beginning to break down. "The North?"
Wanli clasps her hands together, as if in prayer, dark eyes opened to stare ahead and deliberate her response. She knows their current world of foliage and scales more than she remembers her homeland of ice and fur. It used to come as a surprise, the idea that she could no longer picture where she'd been born or the faces of dead siblings and birth parents gone off to war. The spirits that once led her into the snowfall to make angels also evaded her memory.
No spirits will come to her now; they must know she has strayed from the light.
"I can't miss a place I no longer know," Wanli finally says. Engi nods in understanding, knees folded up and face buried in her skirts.
"I wonder if we can ever go back," she says.
"Maybe when we're olde—"
Boom! The bark beneath their legs trembles, the earth shaking violently a split second later. From a distance, likely right upon the great ocean, a column of light splits the clouds down the middle, puncturing the skies with an array of color. Wanli slowly stands, eyes wide with both elation and fear.
"The Avatar is back," she says, unconsciously. "Was he supposed to come back so soon?"
Engi gives her the most mystified look of her life, until the smell of smoke wafts up the world tree in plumes of fury. Without prompting, the girls roll on all fours and peer over the edge, where a group of soldiers, clad in maroon armor and skeletal masks, move around the roots in unwelcome droves. Their helmets bear great red horns Wanli thought she'd never see again.
"Fire Nation," the waterbenders whisper together. With shared looks of anxiety, they slink lower and lower down the platforms while the firebenders march further into the swamp, following them in the shadows.
They shouldn't be here in the winter, Wanli thinks, counting about thirty troops. This is looking uglier by the second.
The Fire Nation would never risk the swamp and its unknown depths, at least not this early in the game. How did they know to get this far? A chill runs down her spine at the idea of the world changing even more; she hasn't even gotten used to this reincarnation yet.
"Nationalist scum," Engi hisses, moving to draw some vines to her core. Her features sharpen in unfamiliar anger. "We have to do something, they're moving in the direction of the village."
Wanli grabs the girl's hand and tugs her into a cluster of leaves; a soldier nearly saw them. "We're outnumbered. Maybe we should return to the village and start evacuating people first."
I'm afraid, goes unsaid. I don't want to get involved and lose everything I've built.
"No, we got this!" Engi reassures, cornflower excitement in her gaze. "Finally some real action in this place."
"Engi." Wanli wants to scream, but nothing comes out of her mouth. To help her people, like any sane person would, or just let the Fire Nation run its course and take the nearest ship to Ba Sing Se? To not alter the future again?
"I don't understand why you're hesitating," Engi states. "This is our new home."
That's why I'm afraid.
Deep down, Wanli knows this is a terrible idea, but can't help the rush of adrenaline in her blood. She lets it bubble to the surface and breathe passion into her veins.
This year has certainly been too quiet, the insanity inside insinuates. A little fight won't hurt.
"We have to split them up first," she finally says. "Do you see the glade up ahead?" She points and her friend nods enthusiastically. "If you lift those trees back there, they'll become a blockade. Close them in. I'll improvise from there."
"Gotcha." Engi shoots her a conspiratory grin. "It's showtime, sister."
Push and pull, push and pull. The plantbender stretches her arms fully and retracts everything in the same movement. As she kneads the air like a roller on dough, the tupelo trees* begin to squeeze together. The soldiers cry out in alarm when the trunks finally meet halfway, a great mass of chlorophyll pinched at the roots.
In the confusion, Wanli leaps off the platform, landing near one unsuspecting man. Half-turned and half-stepped back, she sweeps her leg out into a fluid quarter circle, and like she predicted, he and the other soldiers instinctively throw fire punches at the distraction. She extinguishes them with a projectile of liquid and pulls her hands towards her chest with great effort, conjuring the storm.
"We've been barricaded in!" a soldier alerts. "Look out!"
When they look back, the squadron is met with a green wave that pours over them, slamming some unfortunate souls against the wooden wall and carrying others around it, where they lie paralyzed in the reeds and pebbles.
"Ambush! Fire at will!"
Engi's laughter hits the air, and like a black widow casting its line down, she wraps a vine around the neck of a female firebender and pulls, hard. The woman goes crashing unpleasantly into the ground as Wanli plays dirty and throws mud into another guy's eyes.
"You take left, I take right?" Engi suggests again.
"You're right, so I left," Wanli answers.
"All right, show-off. Fireball approaching fast!"
The girls keep the battle going long enough to let their momentum establish, moving dually in their circle as the remaining ten soldiers dance to their death tango. While the long-ranged Engi whips out from a distance, rarely using the water at her feet but rather drawing from her speciality in the wildlife, Wanli fights up close and personal.
She probably broke a jaw on the last strike, dredging the river water into her palm and raising it to the opponent's mouth, only to impact the bone with ice at the last second. The waterbender thinks, distantly, that the sounds of combat suit her more than festival ones; it brings a feral smile to her face, one that takes away her spiritual fatigue.
"Ungh!"
"Gah!"
Wanli kicks the last female firebender so hard in the cheek, the head nearly flies off with the teeth.
"Forget that one!" a tall man cries. "All remaining troops, advance on the plant user!"
And like that, the team magic ends. Wanli looks up in alarm as three men convene on Engi, standing toe to toe and spreading a thick wave of fire over the water and plants. They respectively boil and crumble, the girl biting back a pained cry, cornered. The river dries up at her feet, draining her of the last potential escape route.
The tallest soldier kicks at Engi's head, and when she dodges, he brings down his fire-bladed fists. The plantbender's next dodge becomes the greatest mistake for everyone there. A ringlet of red and orange flies out from behind the man, who has long ducked now, drawn from the breath of a second firebender. Engi can only close her eyes and wait for it to connect.
But it never does. She blinks back the tears; like a geyser, Wanli has absorbed the impact in front of her. Immediately, the smell of burning flesh assaults the area.
"W-Wanli!"
The said youth sports a sizzling wound spreading from the left side of her jawline to the right crease of her collarbone, wrinkled and raw and permanent. Feeling everything and nothing all at once, Wanli sets two trembling fingers to the injury and scoops up the dribbling blood spotting her chestplate. There is less pain and more of an ugly, giddy sensation, like a key has been turned between her ribs and opens a forbidden door.
"You…" She points calmly at the soldier—no, the boy—and steadies her breath. It almost comes out in frozen stalagmites between her teeth.
They will wish they were under it, her demons say. They will wish they were dead, too.
Wanli raises the same hand and waves deliberately, confidently. Like the animals in the graveyard, the human loses control of his body, screaming and twisting in the confines of his veins. His boots barely touch the water, legs kicking and convulsing. The remaining soldiers watch on in terror, too astonished by the witchcraft to move. Engi can barely fill her lungs with air, pressing herself into the corner.
Circle, circle, little fire-man. Twist and turn!
The skull mask slips from his face, revealing a fear-stricken expression, brown eyes pleading for dear life. He fails to utter a sound as Wanli suspends him in air and straightens her fingers. Someone tries to lunge at her, to take her down by the knees, but she simply knocks her head in the same direction, the indirect command sending the person flying with a sharp gush!
Just like we practiced, the voices urge. You can do this. What is one soldier's life?
"P-Please!" One soldier falls onto her knees. "He's only following orders!"
"He's got a family!" another one shouts.
Oh, they've simply ruined the moment now, asking Wanli to tap into a conscience that isn't there. Doesn't want to be there, not when the blood is so dense and alive.
"And he hurt mine," she says, mostly to herself. "Besides, he chose to be a fighter, just like I choose… this."
Wanli steps forward, seeing a familiarly distorted version of herself in her victim's gaze. Finally, she accepts the other side, closing the fist and slamming it into her free palm. Hesitation, no more.
A sickening crunch resounds; the man's spine has been effectively cracked under the pressure. The agony is endless, felt in the hearts of all present. Even in innocent Engi, who never found compassion for firebenders until then. Wanli drops the newly disabled soldier, both strangely uplifted and ready to vomit. The bile fails to rise though, just as the man fails to die.
Run, run, run away. The footsteps grow farther and farther away, less life to be aware of, less life to be taken. Distantly, she follows their bodily fluid too until it fully disappears from the vicinity. Long after the firebenders have collected their troops and escaped the bloodbender, after the sun begins to fall from its golden throne, the girls remain in the dreadful silence of the swamp.
Wanli makes the first move towards her friend, whose face has refused to shift from its horror. In a ragdoll-like trance, the former brings a ball of water between her hands and to Engi's cheek, where a long gash begins to heal in an ephemeral glow; all the while, the flinching patient stares at the other girl's blistering burn. She can almost feel it herself, neglected and carved into bone. Her heart pounds in her ears, surely producing cold, rancid blood, as an irrevocable shiver runs through her system.
At the end of the process, Wanli stands against the setting sun, expression shadowed and unknown, and never looks back.
*tupelo: type of swamp tree.