On Freedom
Diana, it turned out, was serious about the job — serious enough to join them on his ship. He did not like the fact that she was there, and he made no effort to hide it.
"This is ridiculous," she seethed, stuffing the packing plastic into a makeshift pillow. "Can I at least have a blanket?"
"Sure," he replied cheerfully, "if someone's willing to lend you one."
After a long pause, finally, Aang walked forward, holding out his blanket. Jet scowled, but Diana beamed. "Thank you, ah," she said, looking at him expectantly.
"Aaron," Jet answered for him, and Aang nodded.
"I am pleased to meet you," he said, holding out his hand to shake. Diana smiled warmly and shook it.
"I'm Diana."
"Or Phoebe," Sokka said, and Jet grinned. Aang looked confused.
"We're going with Diana," she said bluntly, and then turned to Jet. "I can help with the planning stages, you don't have to confine me to — "
"Nope," he replied sharply, turning on his heel and marching out of the room. They had cleared most of the junk — excluding the ruined mule, for sentimental reasons, and because he thought there might be some worth left to salvage from it — from the cargo bay where Diana would be sleeping for the duration of her stay, but the whole back wall was warped and torn in places and required fixing in the worst way. He and Bee would have to do some work on it while they were en route to Hama's skyplex, but the real heavy lifting would have to wait for Toph to wake up.
His crew followed him, picking through the rubble and filing through the hole that had once been the door (it had been jammed in the chaos; Pipsqueak and Longshot had torn it out over the three days it had taken them to get to Beaumonde, and left the jagged doorway) into the dining room. "Who is she?" Aang asked, trotting up next to him like an adorable tattooed puppy.
"A bad woman," he replied, "and I want you to stay away from her."
"She didn't seem so bad," Aang said, looking behind him almost hopefully, and Jet felt queasy. Since when did twelve-year-olds have sex dri — oh, wait, he had been twelve once. Aang was right at that age where sex was curious and forbidden and even more impossibly alluring than ever before (or ever again, really), and Diana oozed sex. He'd have to warn Katara to keep a close eye on him, make sure he didn't get in over his head with the con woman. He doubted that even Aang's spectacularly good puppy-dog eyes would convince her to treat him like a human being.
"She is, trust me," Sokka said fervently, laying a hand on his shoulder. "Remember our talk the other day?" Aang nodded. "Okay, she? Is the exact type of woman I want you to stay far, far away from."
"Do I want to know what this talk was about?" he asked, and Aang shook his head.
"Um," Sokka coughed pointedly. "Things."
"Yeah, keep that to yourself," he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee in a feeble attempt to quell his nicotine jitters. "So, what's the plan?"
Around the table, his crew lounged, and he didn't fail to notice the empty chair — Toph's favorite, a metal thing that she kept just the right distance away from the wall to lean back against it and prop her feet up.
"Shoot everything that moves?" Pipsqueak suggested, and he raised an eyebrow. "What? I didn't think our plan was gonna be that complicated."
On the Providence-class Destroyer Iago
Azula seethed as the two green-clad men led her into the ship. Those — those people in Parliament had sent their own man to meddle in her affairs? Death, she thought, was rather too good for them.
Providence-class ships were much smaller than the Tower-class, but they were longer and made for more complicated movement through the ship. They had been crafted as the homes of strike forces, meant to go into enemy territory, so they were made with the assumption of being boarded in mind — a necessary risk that they took by going behind enemy lines — which left them with twisting halls and confusing turns, dead ends and staircases that lead to nothing.
They were designed for the type of person who was paranoid to a fault and regularly expected the worst, but had mostly fallen into disuse after the war; Parliament only broke them out now for special, secret missions.
That meant they were using one of their best — an Operative — and, judging by the stoic men who were leading her in, she was dealing with Long Feng. Although, technically, he didn't have a name, Azula made it a point to know everything that could threaten her, and that meant knowing all of the tools the Parliament might use if (and when) they turned on her. Long Feng had been scooped up by the Alliance somewhere around the age of seven and had spent the last forty years training, learning, and occasionally stamping out pockets of rebellion in Alliance lands. The exact details of his education had stubbornly eluded her, but she knew enough to know he was dangerous.
He was also their best; Parliament was afraid of the Avatar, and they were right to fear — like everyone else, she had heard the whispers of rebellion sweeping the border planets in the wake of Zhao's crushing defeat at the Water Tribe. Right now, they were only whispers, but in a system that was still reeling from the recent civil war and whose economy still hadn't adjusted properly to peace, whispers were deadly as knives and grew like weeds.
Azula agreed with that, but found their methods asinine. The Avatar had to be stopped, yes, but so did the Outer Rim; the Avatar was little more than a catalyst, the right element introduced at the right time to cause an uproar, and removing him would do nothing about the circumstances that had led to the Water Tribe's rebellion in the first place. Parliament thought killing him would suffice, but they were wrong — and, frankly, idiotic to think so. The adage about the snake dying when the head was cut off was a blatant lie.
No, the Outer Rim was more like a cockroach: even without a head, it would continue to survive, until it finally starved to death. Killing the Avatar might solve the problem eventually — but would more likely turn him into a martyr, or, at best, hold the war off for another few years, until the spirit reincarnated and the cycle continued. Getting rid of the Avatar wasn't the answer.
Azula had a better idea in mind to bring the Outer Rim to heel, one which had lain in wait for years and was ideal for her purposes.
And she didn't need an Operative complicating matters.
In the Spirit World
"Iroh!" Aang shouted. The wind swept over the fields where they had lain him to rest, but he didn't see anyone or anything. He sighed, and continued to walk through the snow, hoping to find the old man, or at least a few answers to some lingering questions. "Iroh!" he yelled again.
"He will not come," a voice from behind him said. He whirled around - standing there, glowing blue against the snow like Roku had, was an Air Nomad woman. She folded her hands into her sleeves. "He has reincarnated. Walk with me," she said sharply, and turned, then walked right off the side of the planet. He followed her, and they landed on another world, a beautiful one near the sparkling white sun. It was surreal, to be able to walk between planets that he knew were millions of miles apart in reality, but that seemed to be just one of the many quirks of this evolving spirit world.
"I thought he might have," he said finally, "but I wanted to talk to him, so I..." he trailed off, biting his lip. The woman led him through a forest until they came to a temple, which looked vaguely Air Nomad in construction, and he thought of the religion Mai had spoken of — was this a Buddhist temple?
"This is not one of our temples," she told him, as though reading his thoughts, "but the parishioners here share many of our philosophies. You have much to learn, Avatar Aang," she said gravely, sitting cross-legged in front of an altar of a cheerful-looking fat man who reminded him vaguely of Iroh. "I am Avatar Yangchen," she explained. "What did you seek in the spirit world?"
"I wanted to know about the Avatar Spirit," he answered immediately, reverently; he'd heard stories about Yangchen. "How do I control it?"
"You must learn to unlock all of your chakras," she replied. "You cannot do that within the spirit world."
"Who do I talk to?" he asked eagerly, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Hardly anyone still remembers that the Avatar even exists, let alone how to control the spirit..."
"As I said," Yangchen began, "the parishioners of this religion follow many of our philosophies. They may know the answer."
"Thank you," he replied, bowing to her. Something still tugged at his thoughts, a worry that wouldn't go away. "Avatar Yangchen..." he started uncertainly.
"Yes?" she asked, and he took a deep breath even though he didn't strictly have to breathe in the spirit world.
"What's gonna happen to the Avatar Spirit when I die?" he asked, almost as one long word. "Will it just find someone else? But the Water Tribe barely exists anymore, and the Earth Kingdom is gone... and nobody bends anymore, and..." She held up a hand to stop him.
"The Avatar Spirit is a World Spirit, Avatar Aang," she replied. "I suspect, from what the Spirit World is experiencing, when you die, it will splinter and find someone in each world."
"So there will be..." he began slowly, trying to think of how many worlds there were, "a lot of Avatars? How will they learn bending?"
"How will you?" she challenged, and he sat back hard on his tailbone. "The path opens to those who search for it," she continued, raising an eyebrow severely. "The power will be stretched thinner," she added, "but unless I am gravely mistaken, you are the last sole Avatar."
He thought about that for a long moment, then looked at her forlornly. "What do I do?" he whispered. "I'm just one person. How do I take care of an entire solar system?"
Yangchen finally smiled. "You will do what you have always done, Avatar Aang, and you will solve this problem as we have all solved it. Remember," she told him seriously, as he faded back into his body on the ship, "you are not alone."
He opened his eyes to see Katara smiling at him, a bowl of water in hand.
"Ready to practice?" she asked, and he grinned.
On Iago
Long Feng hated Princess Azula.
"I look forward to working with you," he lied smoothly. Azula was an excellent leader, a tactical genius, and downright deadly in ways that weren't supposed to even exist anymore — she was every kind of perfect on the surface, but she was dangerous to him and to the Alliance. Her lust for power was going to spell trouble for them, and soon. "I assure you that you will have my complete support. We're after the same thing here, after all," he told her, smiling, and finished the sentence in his head — in theory. It was safer to assume that the princess always had something up her sleeve.
"You as well," she replied warmly. If he didn't know better, he'd think that she was the picture of kindness, openness, and grace. He thanked all the gods he'd ever heard of that he'd thought to do research on the royal family before deployment, or he might not have known to fear the princess. "To the Alliance," she said, raising her glass. "And to a prosperous future."
"To the Alliance," he repeated, raising his to toast, and waited for her to drink before he did.
"So," she began, taking a seat at the banquet table opposite him, "what is your plan to take on the Avatar?"
He bit his tongue. The last thing he wanted was to tell her, but if he didn't, he would have to answer to his superiors for shunning royalty — and, oh, how his superiors fawned over Princess Azula, called her the shining light that would bring stability to the Alliance. He valiantly tried not to sneer; Azula would bring stability, certainly, but then, so had Xiang Yu. "I hadn't settled on one yet," he answered. "Perhaps my lady had something?"
She smiled, and he tried not to sweat under her intense eyes. "I've had a few ideas," she replied, lounging in her chair, looking completely at ease. "I haven't had a chance to fully flesh them all out yet, but there are a few things, swirling about in my head," she said, waving a hand idly, her smile congenial, perfectly-formed like it had been painted onto her face.
Azula did have a plan, she just didn't want him to know about it. And he had no way of finding out unless she'd been stupid enough to tell her underlings about it — which she wasn't. He'd just have to wait for her to make her first move, but knowing Azula, that first move could easily be checkmate. "Well, we should discuss some of those possibilities," he suggested, and made a show of noticing suddenly that neither of them had touched their food. "Are you not hungry, milady?"
"I ate on my ship," she replied, without taking her eyes off of him. "And that sounds like a capital idea, mister..."
"I have no name," he said immediately. "What sort of ideas did you have in mind?"
"Well, we know that he's traveling with a Firefly-class transport ship," she said, shrugging. "Why don't we start by putting a call for all captains of Firefly-class vessels to register with my ship — or yours," she added quickly, "so that we can weed out the ones who are unwilling to cooperate."
"That may not be a good idea," he replied slowly. "Fireflies are known for being smuggling ships, with... unpredictable crews."
"All the better," she said abruptly, clapping her hands like this was decided. "We can arrest anyone who refuses, and we'll even have good reason to do it. Fewer scumbags in the air."
On Freedom
As if Jet wasn't already having a bad day (what the gui was the princess doing, calling all Fireflies in to be registered?), Haru made it worse when he walked up to the bridge, face pale and drawn.
"Toph is awake," was all he said.
