A/N: [Narrating a newsreel] After a close escape from Wan Shi Tong, Aang and his friends think they've safely made it back to the surface world. Unfortunately a quick headcount reveals they're down by two members, both captured by the sandbenders with the help of Shirshu spit darts. Can the team make it out of the desert alive now that it's down to just Aang, Sokka, Toph, Zuko and our narrator Katara?
A hot sweep of midday wind blows across us. Aang closes his eyes, but I think even blinded he would see this moment forever. His head would ring with a silent scream, the one that tells him he's lost his old friend and wasn't even there to help him. "How could you let them take Appa!" he yells at Toph. Now his eyes burn with flames I've never seen in them before.
She erases the one wet streak off her cheek with the back of her hand. "What did you want me to do when the library was sinking and you guys were still inside? I couldn't—"
"You could've come to get us! But you were too busy telling stories with Iroh, weren't you? You weren't even paying enough attention to know someone was coming!"
"Watch it," Toph snaps. "I can't feel vibrations in the sand—too loose. Iroh watched my back so those sandbenders didn't touch me while I had my hands full keeping this library above ground. He dropped three of them before they shot him and Appa full of darts."
"They shot Appa," Aang gasps.
"Stop it, both of you," I say, stepping between them in an attempt at peacemaking. "Toph did everything she could. She saved our lives."
"We're doomed. We're doomed to die out here," Sokka moans from a distance. He's wandered off to survey the endless desert from atop a dune.
The airbender looks hard at the ground, his shoulders shaking like he's been slapped across the face. "That's all you care about, you making it out," he says, his voice a notch lower. "None of you care what's going to happen to Appa."
I lay a hand on his shoulder. "Of course we're all worried. We just need to focus on working together as a team—"
Either Aang doesn't want to listen or he's already in a different place and can't hear me. "I'm going after Appa," he says, throwing his glider into the air.
"Aang, wait!" I shout, but he's already fading into the sky.
"Zuko?" The question belongs to Toph and seems to come from a long way off. I look to where she's standing a few feet from the firebender, who I realize has lapsed into silence. He's staring intently at the ground as if there's something written there the rest of us can't see.
"Where's my uncle?" he asks again, slowly, as if tasting the sound of each word.
Toph's chin drops. "The sandbenders took him away with Appa. It was you guys or them. I couldn't stop them. I'm sorry."
Zuko lifts his hand and looks at his open palm. A small fire starts up inside it. He closes his fist over the flame and hides his face against his two clenched fists. His arms swing wide, spurting fire, and suddenly his knees buckle as if they can't support him any longer. He twists to the ground and huddles against the sands, consumed by the overwhelming pain of sudden loss. A scream rips from his throat, the kind that makes my heart drop inside my chest again. I take a step toward him, but the source of his grief is clear and inconsolable. Appa, a rare sky bison, can be sold for good money on the market. He'll be kept safe at least through the desert. But an old man who is just an extra mouth to feed . . .
"Zuko, we're going to find Appa and your uncle," I say, kneeling beside him. A part of me is trembling because I half-expect him to firebend at any moment and burn through my clothes or face or hair, but the other part knows I need to stay here with one hand on his hand and one arm around his shoulders. I press my nose into the collar of his shirt because I don't know what else to do to stop the pain coursing through his whole body. I try to cover at least a small corner of him with my embrace like a blanket, the kind that tells small children it's going to be okay because you're safe now. You're safe because I'm not going to leave you.
"We're going to do this together and not give up until we find them. I promise," I tell him.
He rocks against me as he pushes up to one knee and moves away, leaving me down on the sand. I tilt my head back and from my perspective, Zuko is framed in the light of the high sun. He looks across the empty desert. A strong breeze blows across his face and then my own. Sokka leads Toph over to where I'm still sitting on the ground. My brother opens his mouth to talk but I rest a finger over my lips to say shh-shh. He helps me up and the three of us stand together while Zuko peers across the desert wastes.
"First we need to find Aang," the firebender says, all the life ripped out of his hollow voice. "That means we'd better start walking."
None of us point out that it's technically daytime and that's usually when we sleep because that's when the sun is hottest. Instead we follow his lead and also don't point out the lack of food, of water, that all we have is my half-filled water skin and our collective hope while those two things last. Zuko stays ahead of us and I don't try to overtake him. I think he needs to lead this charge into the desert on his own. To feel like he has control of at least one small thing while the rest of his carefully constructed world falls to pieces.
We plod through the hot sands while the sun peaks to zenith and slowly sinks through the burning sky. I waver between sticking close to Toph and Sokka and walking faster to catch up to Zuko, though I'm not sure he's ready for conversation. I wouldn't have survived exile if it weren't for him, Zuko had said of his uncle.
He's more of a father than my real one, he'd said.
If anyone knows the pain of losing someone in the family, that's me all over. I try to come up with some kind of comforting thing to say, but I should know better than anyone that there aren't enough words in the world for some losses. Sometimes there aren't even enough tears in a lifetime. Zuko won't look at me all day and I bet that's why, to keep me from seeing that he's crying. I wonder if his scarred eye can still shed tears.
"Katara, can I have some water?" Toph calls after some time.
I nod. "Okay, but we have to try to conserve it. It's all we've got." I bend out some water and suspend it in the air between us. I direct some water first into Toph's mouth, then Sokka's, and finally to Momo where he's sitting on my brother's head as a makeshift sun hat. I look to where Zuko has gone on a good distance without us. "Hey, come back!" I shout. "Aren't you thirsty?"
"Keep up!" he yells, not even slightly slowing down.
I grab Toph's hand. "We need to stick together," I mutter to myself, chasing down the firebender with my friends right behind. I let Toph go and run in front of Zuko. "Did you get that? Together. That means no one runs off alone or leaves anyone else behind."
He pulls back his arm as if about to elbow past me, but then he sighs and simply steps around me. "I'm setting the pace," he growls. "Keep up or I will leave you behind."
Sweat beads on my forehead and trickles past my eyes. "Oh, perfect," I grumble. "On top of everything else we get to deal with hothead Zuko again."
"Sparky's just bummed about his uncle," Toph says slowly. "And how much water did you say we could have?"
I take out the ration I was saving for myself. "Just a little more," I tell her, splitting it between her and my brother. I start to offer Zuko a drink again but he's already far up ahead. "Looks like we're going to have to run to keep up."
We travel the rest of the day that way, Sokka and Toph trailing in the rear and me yelling after Zuko to slow down every other minute. He just trudges on ahead and doesn't stop for anything. Eventually it faintly occurs to me that we haven't slept in almost twenty-four hours. And even as it sinks lowers, the sun burns us with a blistering heat.
"Zuko," I call towards nightfall, catching up to him. He shoots me a scathing glare. "We need to stop for a while. We can start again in a few hours, but we can't keep this pace up."
"I'm not stopping until I find my uncle."
"Zuko!" I get in front of him, ready to force him to stop with the weight of my body. "I know we need to find him and Aang and Appa, but we can't do that if we're tired. A few hours of sleep will set us back on track to travel at night when it's cool and rest during the day."
He looks like I've struck him across the mouth or burned him with some terrible insult. "My uncle would never sleep until he found me. I'm not giving up on him."
I throw my arms wide open. "There's a difference between giving up and resting so we can stay strong. I—Sokka. Sokka, what's wrong with you?"
In the ten seconds I looked away, my brother and Toph have both gotten their hands on some green bowls that look like cactus slices. "Try this cactus juice," my brother drawls. "It'll quench 'ya like no other!" He topples over and rolls onto his back, fanning out his arms and legs to make an imprint in the sand. "Who painted the sky purple?" he murmurs in true horror.
"Toph, please tell me you haven't had that yet," I groan, grabbing the slice from her hands and pouring out the juice.
"Aww, come on. I was going to drink that. He says it's the quenchiest," she complains. Her lips look cracked from the heat.
"Wooooooorm. Imma wooooooorm," my brother sings as he wriggles across the sand. From his new perch on Toph's head, Momo buries his nose in his hair and flattens his ears.
Zuko stalks over to my brother. "Get off the ground!" he shouts.
Sokka blinks emptily. "Hey, Zuko set himself on fire!" he says, which probably isn't too far from the truth.
The firebender breaths deeply and lets it out, in and out and in and out, all to the tune of Sokka shouting wooooooorm, wooooooorm and flailing around on the sand. Suddenly Zuko turns away and breaths out a single flume of fire. "Fine," he chokes out as if that word is a death sentence on all of us. "Since you fools aren't capable of anything we can stop for an hour. But that's it, one hour. Get some sleep or don't, whatever you want."
Toph flops right over on top of Sokka. She's asleep in an instance and my brother, trapped under her weight, is soon to follow. The sun falls away behind the dunes, finally allowing the cooling touch of night to pass over the desert. I walk to the top of a sandy hill and look across the wastes. Somewhere out there Aang is probably curled up in a shaking ball, crying for his lost friend. If there was some certain way to find him, any way, I wouldn't stop walking until I did. But walking on blindly when we were all exhausted was stupid. My body's shaking, it's so desperate for sleep.
After a while I walk back to where my friends are and notice that Zuko has sat down a good twenty feet from the others. Because he thinks no one is watching, he's allowed himself to bury his head in his arms. His body is shaking, too, probably from sobs.
"Zuko," I say softly, going over to sit beside him.
He bristles but doesn't look up. "Leave," he growls, the cutting word warning me to back off.
"I won't," I say, and I mean it.
"Leave. Please, Katara," he begs. His voice breaks on my name. "I need to be alone right now." His fists are shaking and I'm sure they're about to burn with a sudden fire, flames that will reflect on his face and eyes and tears. I know this, but I also know something else.
Looking back over your life, I think every person will easily pick out at least ten dozen moments when he or she was at a fork that didn't look like a fork at the time. It looked like a simple one-way decision when it was happening, but later you look back and point and say yes, this is the moment when things could have been different. Right here, right at this moment, because this wasn't just another moment but the moment. The one that could have changed everything.
Such times are common as dirt when you look back in hindsight, but to realize something like that right when you are experiencing it is a very rare thing. To understand you are experiencing the moment is a spirit-given wisdom, because in realizing a moment is happening you have an important power: to decide. I know, right now, that I can choose to walk away and lie with Toph and Sokka and Momo. But there is another choice, and I know the spirits mean for me to lean my face down against Zuko's back and grab hold of his shirt with my fingers. I hold on and don't let go even when I feel him turn his burning eyes on me. Not even when his hand comes suddenly at my face. I stare right into Zuko's shirt and don't even flinch, ready for his fist to leave a mark across my cheek. I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid. And even if I am, I'll never give up on a person who needs me as Zuko needs me right now.
But instead of flames, his fingers gently come to rest on the curve of my jaw. The shock of his calm touch leaves me with a harder impact than could a slap with a hand bathed in fire, and I look up.
The darkness of early evening is softened up by moonlight spilled everywhere. It pours into his hair and bathes it slightly silver. It pales his scar so it looks a little more like it's a normal part of his face, which it's slowly becoming for me. Zuko turns to face me properly so we're both sitting there looking at each other with just the span of his arm to bridge the gap. He doesn't say anything but doesn't move his hand away, either. It's like he's contemplating the long road that brought us together to this place.
"We're going to find your uncle," I say. "We're going to get all of our friends back."
When he finally lets go it's to lie down on his back in the sand. He looks up at the sky and I take that as my cue to go. I get up, but his hand on my ankle stops me.
"Katara," he says, a little life restored to his whisper. "You . . . don't actually have to leave." As much of a plea as I can expect.
I check to make sure Sokka and Toph are still curled together a small distance away. Then I lie down beside him, the two of us not actually touching but close enough that if I close my eyes I can pretend I feel the heat radiating off him. The absolute heat of his determination to find his uncle. To find Appa. To find Aang.
All of the stars look down on us from above, older than any of us here looking up. Older even than the dunes and the sands. They are like tiny dots, the ones you connect when you look back on your life from a distant future. But here is the funny thing about connecting the dots: you can only do that after all the pieces have fallen into place. There's no predicting how the dots will match up looking forward, so the thing to do in life is just to trust that they'll all connect somehow. Lying here with Zuko so close, I close my eyes and trust that despite our dwindling supplies the dots will connect just right.