Warning: You can't say I didn't warn you from the beginning, but this chapter contains some disturbing content.


They had just gotten out of one imprisonment, only to be landed right back in another.

Before loading them onto the sand sailors, the sandbenders had searched them and confiscated all of their weapons and valuables—again. Now, Katara's hands were bound behind her back with the very rope she had taken from the Fire Nation airship. They had probably assumed her to be a nonbender—though to be fair, in this situation, for all practical purposes that assumption was not in error. There was absolutely nothing for Katara to fight with.

All of them had been blindfolded for the ride. The steady rise and fall of the sand sailor over the dunes felt much like the motion of a ship at sea, and even though Katara had grown up on the ocean and adapted to such motion long ago, she could hear poor Nori dry retching across from her, and Zuko's rapid breathing to her side—though why he should be bothered, having spent a full three years of his life aboard a ship, Katara couldn't have said.

Then again, motion sickness was currently the least of their worries.

Slowly, trying not to draw attention to herself, Katara leaned over to bump Zuko's shoulder with her own. Whether she was seeking comfort, or seeking to offer it, she couldn't have said. Though he didn't respond overtly, the slow easing of his breathing was answer enough.

Eventually, though she could hardly have said how much time had passed, the motion of the sand sailor came to a halt. They'd barely stopped moving when the blindfold was yanked from her face, and Katara had to squeeze her eyes shut against the sudden glare of the desert sun. She was pulled to her feet and pushed forward before her vision had fully recovered, but the brief glimpses that she managed told her they'd pulled into a camp, the various heavily covered people who were moving among the sparse tents stopping their activities to look at them in surprise before they were hustled along.

Their end destination turned out to be a comparatively larger tent near the center of the encampment. As soon as they'd entered—her vision now little more than a greenish blur after even a few moments in the bright sunlight—Katara was shoved to her knees on the hardened dirt floor.

She looked around frantically as her vision adjusted. She, Zuko, Nori, and Xi Wang had all been made to kneel in a line with their backs to the door. Four of them—there was just enough time for her to panic before another sandbender pushed his way through the tent flap behind them, awkwardly holding a trembling Lien in his arms.

"Father, we caught more Fire Nation spies," the apparent leader of the men explained, drawing her attention back to the front. He'd moved to stand to the side of them, addressing a man who knelt at the center of the tent on a roughly woven rug. Though the man's black beard was streaked with gray, he looked them over with a calculating gaze.

"We're not spies!" Beside her, Zuko tried to rise, only to be shoved to his knees once more. "We told you, we were stranded—"

"Silence." The man did not yell, but his voice carried an unmistakable air of command. "You will be telling us soon enough what you really are." He leaned forward, peering more closely at Nori, Lien, and Katara. "Those three will also stay under guard, for now. Take them away."


The tent they were being kept in now was much smaller, not to mention dark. There was nothing in there with them—no stored food, no decorations, not even a rug. It was only them, kneeling on a floor packed hard by earthbending and surrounded by guards.

At least the sandbenders did not intend to let them die of neglect. Shortly after they'd been marched off to this new location a woman had come in, her eyes (the only part of her visible under the layers of veils she wore) cast to the ground, to give them water, going first to Lien and then to Nori. When she held the waterskin to Katara's lips, she nearly spat it out; the liquid had a tinge both of saltiness and of sweetness, and tasted disgusting, but the guard behind her squeezed her shoulders in a warning grip, and the woman encouraged her with soft murmurs to drink. After she had had her share, Katara found to her surprise that her thirst was slaked.

She resisted the urge to try the same trick she'd used on the airship.

The group of them were worn and weak, Nori, Xi Wang, and Lien unable to fight and possibly unable to run; while she and Zuko working together might be able to overwhelm the guards if they had the element of surprise, Katara wasn't liking their chances. Even if they did manage to escape, they had nowhere to go. Fleeing would put them right back out in the desert with no food or water, and it would only be a matter of time before the sandbenders hunted them down again—and this time, they might not stop at capture.

Briefly, she even considered the idea of taking the woman as a hostage, but then rejected it, disgusted with herself. Even if she could have forced herself to do it, they were still in the middle of the desert, surrounded by sandbenders and surrounded by sand. Whatever they tried, they were not going to get far.

As soon as the woman finished giving water to Xi Wang, flinching away from the soldier all the while, she handed her waterskin to one of the male guards, who roughly held it to Zuko's lips next. He jerked back automatically, but Katara shook her head. "Don't fight," she whispered. "Just drink."

Once they had all been seen to, the woman left, taking the empty waterskin with her. She also took Lien—Katara balked at first, but the woman kept cajoling her gently with reassuring whispers of "No, no, I will feed her," and Katara had eventually acquiesced. Now, the adults were left with only the guards and their increasingly dark thoughts for company.

"What are they going to do to us now?" Nori whispered. Even in the dark tent, Katara could see her trembling.

"Question us, probably." Xi Wang's face was hard. "It's the only reason I can think of that they've kept us alive."

Still, as time passed they seemed to have been forgotten. The woman brought Lien back—she ran straight to Zuko, who smiled and did his best to make a reassuring gesture with his bound hands, and buried her face in his shirt. Slowly, the light level changed, even the bright sun that seemed determined to sneak its way through every crack and crevice slowly fading out. The tent had dimmed considerably when Zuko let out a sigh. "It's sunset."

"What are they waiting for?" Nori was a wreck, shaking where she sat, her eyes wide and her breathing rapid.

"They'll get to it eventually." Xi Wang, by contrast, was as still as a statue, her eyes fixed on the tent flap. "They're just letting us sweat a bit first." She let out a breath. "It's an effective tactic."

"Not helping," Katara growled. "I don't think they'll touch you," she continued more gently, turning back to Nori. "You're obviously not a fighter, and they don't have you pegged for the mastermind here." Her eyes met Zuko's, briefly, before she had to look away. She couldn't bring herself to say any more.

"Still, we should set watches." Xi Wang hadn't shown any reaction to Katara's scolding, except for perhaps a brief flicker in her eyes. "We don't want them to take us by surprise."

"I agree." Zuko shifted a bit, either trying to get more comfortable or testing the shackles again, she couldn't have said, before giving it up with a sigh. "The rest of you should try to get some sleep. I'll take first watch."


When it did happen, there was almost no warning.

Katara had been sleeping badly, her bound wrists making it difficult to find a comfortable position and her jangling nerves making what rest she did get fretful and unsatisfying, plagued by half-remembered dreams of Aang being consumed in a ball of flame only to turn into Lien at the last second with a final scream of agony, of Zuko being sucked slowly into the floor until only his hand was left, and then even that was gone, disappearing under the sand while Katara still grasped for his fingers. Other dreams, however, disturbed her even more: she would wake up and crawl over to Zuko, only to find him staring lifelessly with his clothes soaked with blood, or find herself alone with Nori and Lien, both of them pale and glassy-eyed with horror and unable to speak of whatever they had witnessed.

Thus, when she was aroused by rustling cloth and the whispers of several people coming into the tent, Katara froze where she was, unable to process whether this was really happening or if she would wake up in a few minutes unharmed but with a sense of relief that was uneasy at best.

It wasn't a dream. The natural light was now completely gone, but as she came more awake she could see that a group of men had entered the tent while they slept, and that two of them had hoisted Zuko to his feet and were pinning his arms behind his back by the flickering orange light of the torch that was held up by a third.

Katara's heart plummeted somewhere down into her stomach. When she moved to stand, however, a fourth man she hadn't noticed before shoved her back down to her knees; meanwhile, Zuko was spun around and marched out between the two guards.

"Don't worry, I'll be okay." It was all he managed to get out before the tent flap closed behind him.

The others, it seemed, had been woken as suddenly as Katara; looking to the side, she saw Nori and Xi Wang sitting up wearing expressions that mirrored her own sense of fear and dismay, and Lien trying to follow the way Zuko had gone.

The girl hadn't been bound—it seemed that the sandbenders at least had some scruples on the treatment of a child—but before she reached the tent flap, one of the guards blocked her way.

"Stay with your mother," was all he said.

With a start, Katara realized that he was referring to her—Lien did look more like her than anyone else here, both of them being from the Water Tribes. "Come here," she said softly, her first thought to keep the girl out of trouble—she had already been exposed to far too much violence in her young life, and Katara had no intention of letting her see more. Thankfully, she did as told, sitting down next to Katara but not close enough to touch.

Zuko, she thought as she squeezed her eyes closed, please be okay.


The tent that they brought him to was far larger than the one where the others were still imprisoned, the fact that it was largely unadorned seeming only to increase its size. There was no decoration, no hangings or rugs, but Zuko could see a collection of knives laid out on the floor, along with several other wickedly curved and sharpened pieces of metal that he tried not to look at too closely in spite of the fact that they seemed to draw his eyes.

No sooner had they gotten him inside than he was forced to his knees and stripped of his shirt, the hardened sand shackles around his wrists dissolving for only a split second—but now one of the men held his arms in a lock he could not break, and as soon as they were done, the ground rose around him, trapping wrists and ankles alike to hold him in an uncomfortable kneeling position with his hands behind his back.

There was only one possible thing that could come next, and Zuko willed his voice to remain level in spite of the fact that his heart was now pounding so hard against his ribcage it was a wonder the guards couldn't hear it for themselves. "Whatever you want to know, I'll tell it to you willingly."

"Yes, we're quite sure you'll feed us whatever information the Fire Nation wants us to hear. We didn't bring you here to listen to your propaganda." One of the guards moved in front of him, going down on one knee so they were eye to eye. "Problem is, you don't look like one who'll break under physical pain alone." His eyes lingered over the prominent scars on Zuko's face and chest. "So that leaves us with one question: what can we do to get you to talk, and talk truthfully?"

Zuko said nothing, but his pulse quickened even further as another thought occurred to him. If they wouldn't believe anything he said, even under torture, then that left only one other possibility that he could come up with…

The other man must have read the panic in his face, for he only shook his head with an expression of disgust. "And you call us barbaric. We don't harm women—or children, for that matter."

"It seems like you're not going to believe anything I say no matter what." Zuko returned the guard's look glare for glare. "Are you hoping that if you hurt me enough, one of the others will tell you what you want to hear?"

"Perhaps." Choosing to ignore Zuko's sarcasm, he beckoned to the other guard, who placed something into his outstretched hand: a flask, like those the sandbenders used to hold water, but smaller, barely bigger than the span of a large man's open palm. "But I have little more faith in their affection for you than in yours for them." He uncorked it. "We prefer to use methods that are proven to work."

Zuko couldn't help it: he panicked. Unlike before, where he'd only flinched back out of instinct, this time he knew that whatever was in that flask, it was something that he absolutely did not want in his system. As the guard moved toward him, he took a deep breath, and let it out in a stream of flame. When the men jumped to either side with expert reflexes, he channeled his inner fire to his hands and feet instead, willing the flames to break through the earthen shackles.

It wasn't enough. The days of dehydration, starvation, and endless walking had left him weak—too weak to do anything more than heat up the sand that bound him. As the guards recovered the second man swiftly moved behind him and grabbed a fistful of his hair, using his free hand to roughly cup Zuko's jaw. Before he could even begin to resist, his head was yanked back, the mouth of the flask shoved between his teeth, and an acrid liquid poured into his mouth.

Spitting it out was not an option: the man behind him was now holding his jaw closed with one hand, and had the other hand over his nose. Zuko had no choice but to swallow, or choke.

Whatever the liquid was, it burned, searing his throat with a corrosive heat that continued all the way down into his stomach, leaving him with an intensive pain that ate away at him from the inside out. When the man behind him finally released his head, he took the air in a series of deep, painful gasps, every few seconds stopping to retch, gagging again and again as his stomach clenched and heaved spasmodically—but whatever it was he'd been forced to swallow, he couldn't seem to bring it back up no matter how much his body seemed to be desperately trying to do just that.

"What… did you just give me?" His throat was so raw it hurt to speak.

"That's no concern of yours." As the guard spoke, his voice took on a precise, highborn inflection that was completely at odds with the way he had been speaking earlier. "Now, I'll ask you one more time, Zuzu: what were you doing in the desert, and what does the Fire Nation want with the sandbender tribes?"

It's the drug, he thought. This has to be an effect of the drug. Nonetheless, he could not move, could barely speak, and all the fight went out of him at the shock of what he thought he had heard. "What did you call me?" His voice came out in a whisper.

The hand that cracked across his face was wreathed in flame, and even though the contact had been fleeting the fire remained, searing his old wound open anew. Zuko screamed as the blistering heat ate into his face and then spread, burning, across the rest of his body, crackling across his exposed skin like lightning in jolts of agony until it finally burst from his heart, ripping the air around him to pieces and leaving him floating in a burned-out void. There was no air, he couldn't breathe…

Clawed hands reached out to grip his forearm, nails digging into his flesh hard enough to strip skin from muscle, and he fell back to earth hard, the solidified sand abrading skin from his back even as he was pinned in place by something heavy settling atop his chest. Looking up through blurred vision, Zuko saw the horrible confirmation of what he'd already guessed: it was indeed his sister who was now straddling him, pinning his arms to the ground with a grip that left dark bruises and nails sharpened to draw blood, her face uncomfortably close to his own and twisted with rage.

"Why did you take it away from me?" she repeated. Tears of rage were now sliding down her face, and as she spoke she drove her knee into the spot right below his ribcage, hard, and he could not answer, could do nothing but gasp desperately for the breath that had been knocked from his lungs.

"Well?" The fingers of one of her hands were knotted in his hair, yanking his head up so he was forced to look her in the eye, the other gripping his arm even tighter and driving her nails still deeper into his flesh. No: the nails were lengthening, piercing deep into his arm and growing longer, longer, until all he could see of them were the slight bulges that snaked their way underneath his skin. "What were you doing in the desert? I'm waiting for an answer!"

"No choice… had no choice." Zuko had barely gotten his breath back, his throat felt torn, and it was agony for him to speak above a whisper. "Stranded… in the desert… stranded…"

"Not good enough." The snarl of rage had grown even more pronounced, and all at once the sharpened, elongated claws tore their way back out of his arm, ripping up through muscle and skin and leaving him moaning in agony. Before the first shock of pain had even faded a hand, still slick with his blood, grabbed a fistful of his hair once more, and his head was yanked up to look this time into his father's face. Flames and blue lightning were crackling entwined around his free hand. "I want answers, and I want them now!"

"I wasn't spying, I was—"

Before he could finish speaking, however, the hand slammed into his chest. White-hot agony shot through his body, and Zuko could only scream.


It was several agonizing minutes of waiting and listening before they heard the first cry of pain.

Katara felt her entire body stiffen. Zuko didn't scream—not when he was in the throes of his worst nightmares, not when she'd debrided his lightning burns, not even that time they'd run afoul of a group of archers and he'd ended up pinned to a tree by an arrow straight through his hand, and she'd had to yank it out in order to free him. Whatever he was enduring now, it must have been excruciating beyond belief to make him cry out like that.

"What are you doing to him?" Katara attempted to leap to her feet, only to be held down once more by the guard; she continued to struggle, slamming her head back into his face. The man fell back from her, hands covering his nose and blood gushing from between his fingers, but now two more men were coming to relieve him, and though Katara lurched from side to side and lashed out with her feet in her attempts to jerk out of their grasp, they soon had their arms wrapped around her shoulders and her legs pinned in a pool of hardened sand. "We—are—not—your—enemy!" she gritted out in the midst of her struggles. "If you'd just listen—"

"What does the Fire Nation want with our tribes?"

"I told you, I—don't—know!"

"We're escaped prisoners of the Fire Nation." Nori was now crying in earnest, flinching at each scream as though she were the one being hurt. "We don't know anything else, I swear!"

"You have no resources that are of interest to the Fire Nation," Xi Wang cut in. "What do you think we could possibly want with so much sand?"

"Lies!" The guard who held Katara from behind was growing visibly angry now, his fingers digging into her shoulders. "We have captured three Fire Nation spies within the past year! What does the Fire Nation military want with our benders?"

"I was never privy to that information!" Xi Wang's voice was growing markedly heated. "I don't know what the Fire Nation does with the earthbenders it captures, but we have nothing to do with it!"

Lien, meanwhile, was shaking. She had fallen back from Katara's side when the latter had begun her struggles, and was now on her hands and knees in the farthest corner of the tent, crying dry sobs with her hands over her ears. Katara could not go to her; the guards still held her firmly in place. Nori was scooting over and looked like she was about to try and offer some comfort, but the child seemed deaf to everything but Zuko's screams. Yet another cry of pain reached their ears… Lien flinched violently, squeezing her eyes closed… tears were streaming down her face… he screamed again, her eyes flew open once more, and this time they were glowing white.

Oh no

Whenever Aang had lost control and gone into the Avatar State, it had been accompanied by powerful, swirling gusts of wind, and subconsciously, Katara was expecting the same thing to happen here. Instead, Lien drew water.

Miniature geysers burst from the ground from reservoirs that Katara had not been able to sense at all, and several more streams of water came slicing through the walls of the tent from she knew not where. Moisture was stripped from her skin, her eyes, and even the inside of her mouth, making her feel like she'd dunked her face into a bucket of sand; Nori's tears were lifted right from the surface of her face to join in the swirling maelstrom of liquid. Katara had thought the air was dry before, but now it became truly desiccated as every last particle of water was squeezed out. Her lips cracked open and then bled, and even as she watched a drop of blood did not fall, but was also sucked toward the panicked, terrified six-year-old Avatar who was right at the center of the chaos, and Katara knew in her gut that if she were allowed to continue, she wouldn't stop there…

She turned to the guard who still held her shoulders (though his grip had loosened considerably), who was watching the scene unfolding before him with an expression of unadulterated horror. "Let me loose right now if you want to live!"

In response, the guard only blinked, his eyes never leaving the Avatar. "But what can you—"

"DO IT!"

That seemed to break the man out of his stupor, and even as the ground released her feet he was kneeling down behind her to cut the rope that bound her wrists. Katara barely noticed the inscription on the blade that set her free.

Ignoring the pins and needles that prickled up and down her legs when she stood, Katara made her way over to the panicked child. Lien was now surrounded by several streams of water that swirled around her in an interlacing series of rings, and anyone trying to get to her would take the risk of being severely concussed at best, and sliced in half at worst.

Katara stepped forward.

Though she would never be a match for the Avatar in raw strength, Katara still had the advantage of experience and finesse. She stepped forward and to the side as she moved in and among and through the jets of water, redirecting one around herself when it came too close to colliding with her head; though by all logic her rerouting should have sent it smashing straight through the tent wall, it instead changed course and came streaming back to join its fellows.

Katara was already moving, bending away more water around her so that she could walk, could keep going forward. She was nearly within arm's reach of the girl when she tried to redirect a stream of water out of her way, only to find that it refused to budge, and all of her concentration was taken up with trying to keep any of the others from skewering her: the force of their bending had become matched, and she could move no farther.

"Please," she yelled over the rushing of the water and the roaring in her own ears. "I know that right now, you're really upset and scared. I've felt the same way—I do feel the same way—but you have to calm down." As she spoke, her own tears began to fall, only to be swept up with the rest of the water. "Please, Lien—!"

The child's eyes widened briefly before fading from white back to blue, and then slipping closed. Katara caught her as she fell, and the water fell all around them, and she held Lien tight against her chest, sobbing into the child's hair as the stunned spectators gathered all around the ruined tent and mud soaked into her knees.

"It's going to be okay," she whispered. "I promise, it's going to be okay."

Zuko and I… we're your family now.


When exactly it stopped, he couldn't have said—every wound he'd received still throbbed and ached, and an entirely different, wrenching agony had all the while been slowly spreading from his stomach to the rest of his insides, searing through him more severely with each passing minute. Eventually, however (longer than it should have taken him, since his head was still far from clear), he realized that no new pains were being inflicted. His sister was gone… and so was Ozai.

When someone touched him unexpectedly, he flinched away. "It's okay, it's okay, it's only me." Looking up through his blurred vision, Zuko couldn't have said whether the face above him was brown and blue-eyed, or pale-skinned and kind, with a gentle smile and light golden eyes.

"It's okay," she repeated. "Try to relax." A hand lightly touched his abdomen; he saw her grimace, and then something inside of him pulled, liquid coming up from inside of him and back out through his mouth.

It burned worse coming up than it had going down, seeming to blister his throat from his mouth all the way back down to his stomach. As the last of it came up, Zuko turned his head to the side and began to retch, his stomach heaving again and again even though there was nothing left to bring up. She (he still couldn't place quite who she was) was holding his head, gently rubbing a hand over the one part of his back that didn't hurt as she whispered the same mantra over and over again.

"It's going to be okay. It's going to be okay. It's going to be okay."

Those were the last words he heard before darkness took him.


A/N: Yay cliffhanger. Because I'm evil like that. Album hint for this chapter is that Track 11 is instrumental.

Speaking of which, if anyone wants to try guessing the album, this is your last chance. I'm not going to make any promises as to the update schedule, but I'll plan to release the next chapter sometime around July 18th, so all of the entries have to be in by then.

The Avatar confirmation scene is something I've had in my head almost from the very beginning. I had more fun with it than I probably should have, especially when it came to pushing waterbending to its absolute limits.