To Honour the moment

Still alive! And doing an internship abroad all summer, so at least my spoken english should get better!

I am already not making sense, and tonight I am to tired to even thank you like I would like to. But thank you so much. I still cannot believe that people keep enjoying this fic despite reading two chapters per year... The part involving Katara was not as subtile as I would have liked it to be: I have some trouble with writing about her, and TrisakAminaw was kind of right to complain about her snarling so much. It's hard to sort her personality out among all the clichés that have been build around her.

The thing is, her relation to Zuko and thus her anger towards him is supposed to be very different from the actual show. She does not fear him. She saw him ill, she saw him recover among them. Now she does not have enough imagination to seriously think he will hurt anyone. He is not an enemy, but he acts like a complete jerk: her anger towards him is both more violent and a lot less serious than in the series. I am not sure I am explaining myself well. I hope you felt some of it in the last chapter. All those differences in the relationships will be addressed at some point anyways, because that's so interesting!

Too long. Special thanks to Avocadolove for beta-reading and to Lunatique for some great discussions. Have a good reading!

Chapter 5: Back where the road collapses (1/3)

He had never flown before.

The chilling wind was gusting up his sleeves and against his chest, as though trying to drag him towards the edge. Great clouds were passing him by, surreally close. The world spread beneath them looked very small in comparison, shining like a field of jewels in the morning light. His every breath lashed against his lungs, felt like his very first. Everything was new, and yet so natural, why, why had he never flown before…

It was a move he should have known his whole life. It felt like, rather than being carried by the motion of six gigantic legs, he had been lifted from the ground by the strength of his inner fire, or by the sunlight bathing his face.

It felt like the white bison could change course and leave him behind: with hardly an effort the firebender would hold himself above the seas, up and free in the morning light. He had spread out his arms, letting the polar wind wrap around him and revive the fire inside his lungs.

"Isn't it great?"

His eyes shot open upon hearing the high-pitched voice, half lost among the whistling of the wind in his ears. At once he found himself staring at the idiotic smile of a kid dressed like a travelling performer, looking at him with eyes too big for his face.

"Kuzon loved flying, too: he said it made him feel closer to the sun. I could spend all my life up here with Appa!"

Zuko's face hardened. The moment was gone. Suddenly self-conscious, he dropped into a sitting position in the far back of the saddle and resumed studying endless expanses of snow with a vengeance.

The air was cold, brisk, but even the exhilaration of speed could no longer soften the crease between his brows.

He was fed up with this kid chattering about his best friend. He hated hearing his stupid, unceasing comparisons between that stranger and himself, all because both were born in the Fire Nation. As though this one coincidence was enough to make him the reincarnation of this Kuzon.

He also hated having to agree with the boy.

Annoyingly enough, the young airbender seemed to have decided he was going to be cheerful all day. Shading his eyes from the snow's brightness with his hand, the boy started examining the glaciers as well. He had not stopped talking.

"Sometimes we would fly several days without resting. We were exhausted after that, right, Appa? What's great about flying is that we can go wherever we like and make friends all around the world! You too must have travelled a great deal on your ship, right? I bet this place isn't one of your favourites: it's way too cold for a firebender. Hey, there are a lot of glaciers over there. Do you want to have a look?"

Zuko nodded without looking at him. He was already leaning over the saddle, as though eager to lose himself among the paths, pits and tunnels of the bluish maze. If he raised his head, he would have to see this encouraging, friendly smile yet again. His hands gripped the leather as if to tear it apart.

If screams and threats could not convince this kid that they were enemies, for Agni's sake, what was he supposed to do?

It would have been simpler, and a lot less humiliating, if he had been able to refuse his help.

A week had passed since his expedition in the rotting remains of his ship. When he had discovered the ghostly reptiles that had eaten into its foundations, and ultimately destroyed it. Zuko had spent all of his days (and most of his nights) looking for his crew. Studying the legends from the Water Tribe had proved fruitless: none of them mentioned monsters that could turn iron into rust. As for the few creatures that had the slightest common traits with his own visions, they haunted tales as varied as they were unlikely:

Vampiric beings hiding in the hunters' shadows and sucking their strength until they collapsed in the snow. Spirits coming with the fog, demanding tribute for a pact made centuries before with an evil god. Cursed by a queen, an unfaithful lover was hunted down to the far reaches of the ocean by a woman whose long neck held the face of a reptile.

None of this helped him much. And he would not stoop so low as to ask the villagers for details. So now he spent his days searching the coasts, hoping his uncle and his crew had found somewhere to take refuge.

But he got tired too fast in this endless snow. He could not recognize the places where the ice was thinner and might not hold his weight. Worse, snowfalls could at any moment cover his tracks and make him lose his way. And then he too would be trapped in this shimmering maze, as large as a land, where even the wind was foreign.

It was a dangerous task, but mostly a boring one. Each day of fruitless exploration resembled the others: in the end everything seemed to merge into one endless ice ribbon, a growing fear that weighed on his shoulders and steps. Two weeks, Agni, how would they ever survive, it was already more than two weeks since they had vanished in this forsaken land…

It was at the end of one of those days that the Avatar had come to him. Too tired to even feel the cold, the young prince had only found the strength to sit against the village's small fortification and listen to the soft whizzing of his breath. All of a sudden a round face with enormous eyes had appeared in front of him. And from that face, grinning childishly from ear to ear, had fallen the absurd proposal:

"It's your crew that you're looking for, right? Why didn't you just ask for help? It will be a lot faster with Appa, and less exhausting. We wanted to go and explore the South pole anyways. We could all go together!"

Zuko had not had the energy to throw fire at him at the time. Yet he had thought he had yelled loud enough to get the kid back to his senses.

And if a small, serious frown had crossed the airbender's face before he ran away, making him seem almost grave, the prince had not bothered to notice.

However, at dawn the next morning, a bison had blocked his way out of the village. The Avatar was facing him, standing firm with his arms crossed over his narrow chest, the same serious expression on his too young face. Strangely enough, he had not seemed so frail in the half light, bothered neither by the biting cold nor by their height difference. His voice had not shaken as he spoke:

"I'm coming with you."

Get out of my way.

"I won't: you need to rescue those men. I will help you."

Your help? Do you think I'm a traitor? I told you, get out of my sight! You are wasting my time!

"But you can't search for them alone! There are too many places you won't be able to reach on foot. And it's way too exhausting: even if you did find your men, you wouldn't be able to bring them to safety. We will need Appa to carry them. It's a lot more important than your treason thing, don't you understand?"

(Zuko would not admit that he was right. He refused to admit it out loud.)

The Avatar had lost his strange confidence during his speech. His fists had clenched, his voice had become thinner, more urgent. Almost a plea, and Zuko hated this more than anything else, the feeling of speaking to a distraught child rather than to his hereditary fiend. He had no time for this. For Agni's sake, what was he supposed to do in such a situation?

Meanwhile the bison, as though feeling his young master's distress, had started to moan softly next to them. The boy had leaned against his enormous breast, and said in a resigned tone:

"It's not like you can keep me from helping them anyways. I will go look for them myself, if I have to. Maybe Katara will come with me, if I ask her. But I think it would be better if you came, instead."

For some reason, it was the prospect of getting the girl involved in all this, her likely reaction if she were to learn that he had put his honour before his men's safety (or maybe worse, if she were to know he had been fighting with the Avatar yet again), that had made him yield in the end, heart aching, pride hurt beyond all measure.

And now there he was, siding with a twelve-year-old enemy who seemed set on clinging to him until it drove him mad, whose strange mount could cover in less than an hour what would have been a whole day of walking. Zuko shook his head.

Call it a truce. He did not want to think about it now.

The bison had come closer to the glaciers spiking the ground. Walls of ice surrounded them, tall and cold, their distorted flanks throwing livid reflections. Zuko did not like the light that fell on them. It became bluish as it went through the icebergs. It appeared unpredictably, coming out of the holes, cracks and tunnels, shining with a somewhat eerie beauty. No one could tell what it might have crossed underground.

Perhaps the Avatar was suffering from the same impression. A shadow crossed his features every time they came near one of those tunnels, as if he too was wondering what could be hidden there, somehow living in the cold. Every time Zuko thought he had spotted footsteps or melted snow among the ice sculptures, and jumped off the saddle to investigate, the boy stopped his mount without a word of protest, but his hands remained tightly clenched on the reins.

"There doesn't seem to be anything in there…"

The prince only frowned in response, a gesture which could not much impress the boy since Zuko was turning his back on him. He took another step inside the cave, his fingers lightly touching the wall, but his carefulness was bitter. Of course there was nothing. Nothing but the halting sound of his breath, the faint wisps of steam coming out of his mouth and the slight crunch of snow under the sole of his boots.

He had liked the sound, when he had taken his first step on the South Pole, but that was a long time ago. Right now it felt almost repulsive, on the contrary, as though something he could not see was creeping under the snow.

He was doing his best not to grip the wall, lest he would melt something, but in Agni's name, what the hell did it matter if there were no clues to be found in this stupid cave! In his rage he nearly punched the wall, but the whole tunnel might collapse on him. His hand was shaking, pale against the pale snow: only the tip of his fingers, darkened by rust, gave some contrast.

Zuko had never managed to get completely rid of the rotten iron that had settled on his skin back in the ruins of his ship. Despite all his efforts, a few marks always remained, dirty black, embedded in tiny furrows under the nails of his hands and feet where he could not reach them.

It never seemed to fester.

Having some dirt get the better of him annoyed him nonetheless.

"We should go back now," the boy said behind him. "We haven't eaten yet; we won't do a good job of looking for them if we're hungry. Also, we've been searching this area for hours: they probably never went here."

Once again, Zuko did not answer. The careful, reasonable tone the Avatar was using sounded too much like his uncle's advice, and if there was one thing he really did not need at the moment, it was his nation's enemy starting to remind him of his own family.

He was even tempted to completely ignore him and go farther into the cave. Why on earth should he obey that kid anyway? However the tunnel spreading in front of him seemed to grow colder and colder as the minutes passed, darker, a bluish half-light that made him feel like he was getting lost in the bottom of the ocean. The wind snaking along the tunnel was whistling strangely, mocking or plaintive.

And there was no one in there, anyway.

That is why, with all the dignity he could muster, Zuko peeled his hand off the melting wall and turned away from the cave. He went back to the saddle with his head held up high, trying to stifle the vague feeling at the back of his neck, the feeling of being watched.

"I'm not giving up," he said between clenched teeth as the bison ascended above the ice maze. "We haven't searched the coast enough up north. Nor inland. They must be somewhere near, they have to be…"

His eyes did not leave the ground, but sadly it did not keep him from feeling the young airbender's gaze, weighing on him with this stupid sympathy he could not shake off. There was a short silence.

"You want to know what I'm thinking?" the boy said.

He didn't give a damn, but the kid went on without waiting for an answer:

"I think your crew already found a way to leave the South pole."

Zuko whirled around so suddenly he had to grip the saddle to not fall overboard. At first the sea spray whipping his face prevented him from making out the boy's expression. His orange outfit, however, was clearly visible, flapping against the wind in a quiet rustle, like sails in the distance.

He was smiling, a tinier smile than before.

"Yesterday I flew above most of the South pole with Appa. I'm almost sure there was nothing. And you already searched all the coasts around your ship. If they really were lost and had ended up…I mean…even like this, we would have found traces, don't you think? I think they managed to leave."

The silence that followed was heavy and hurt.

"You idiot," Zuko said quietly. "You think I never thought of that? I checked the steamboat inside my ship the very first day. None were missing. What do you think? That they swam all the way to the Earth Kingdom?"

"Look, I'm trying! There could be other places where you can find boats around here. I don't know. I think they survived, and I think they aren't here anymore. I'm the Avatar after all, right? I should be able to sense these kinds of things."

Zuko jumped at his last words. His nails were digging into the saddle without him taking notice. He was looking at those pale blue arrows painted on the boy's forehead, on the back of his hands, intently, as though he was seeing them for the first time. What they meant.

The Avatar. The bridge between the Spirit world and their own.

He tried to breath in deep to quieten the sudden racing of his heart. The air tasted like ice and salt.

"Can you feel it?" he asked at last, his voice hardly more than a breath. "Hear their spirits? Can you tell whether they…whether they are dead or not?"

"No! Not exactly… I should have started my training as the Avatar when I turned sixteen, but…now that I've been frozen a hundred years in this iceberg, there isn't anyone left to teach me. I'm sorry. I don't know how to talk to spirits."

"But still," the monk went on, "if someone had died here recently, especially a firebender in the middle of the South pole… Don't you think his spirit would be angry or afraid? And wouldn't he try to attract our attention if we came near? I can't have missed so many of them. I think I would have noticed at least some of your men, if they were dead."

Zuko shrugged, trying to feel as disdainful as he should towards this blatant amateurism. As if suppositions would be enough to save his uncle from this hellish land…

But despite it all, a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Pale sunlight was pouring on his face. Arms dangling over the saddle, Zuko tilted his head back towards the sun and the highest clouds. The bite of cold was almost bearable, now that he was away from the oppressing shadows of the cave. He closed his eyes.

He had moved to the front of the saddle, at some point in his conversation with the Avatar. He was now barely a yard away from the airbender, and did not feel like moving yet. The kid kept throwing him glances from the corner of his eyes, but even those were not enough to anger him now. Perhaps it was the altitude.

"Actually Zuko, I wanted to thank you."

The assertion was so absurd it temporarily made the young prince forget all sense of dignity. All he could do was open his eyes wide, astonished, barely making out the Avatar's face among the clouds, head upside down like a complete fool. The airbender went on unperturbed:

"It's true that I was angry at first. Do you remember that time when we spoke together in the tent, while you were ill? I thought you wanted to help me hide, that you understood. And barely a week later you were screaming who I was to the whole village. I wanted them to think I was normal. I didn't want people to act different around me; I didn't want Katara to be different. I was…afraid. But I've been thinking about all this. And also about what you're trying to do for your men."

With those words, the upside down Avatar smiled at him, the corners of his mouth strangely stretching downwards.

"You are doing your best to find them, even if it's hard, even if you have no idea how to do it. Because they need your help. That's how I should have seen things from the start, really: it doesn't matter whether I wanted it or not, I'm still the Avatar. So I guess I'm responsible for the harmony between the elements. I know…I know Katara is counting on me to stop the war. I should never have run away. I wish I could have been as brave as you are, a hundred years ago. I will try to be brave now."

That was both the most flattering and the most unexpected compliment he had gotten for years. At first it made Zuko slightly dizzy, and he kept staring at him dumbly without saying a word. Damn this wind that filled him with oxygen and kept him from getting angry like he wanted. For the situation was, above everything, unbearably ironic: when would this moronic Avatar understand that he was looking for his men just so he could capture and stop him? Yet the boy kept smiling at him with an absurd hope, as though gazing at a lighthouse beacon.

"So…" the airbender said after a while, as the older boy still had not moved, "I guess I really will have to fight against the Fire Nation, right?"

Zuko managed to frown at those words. It was about time.

"You are our enemy. And we have grown much stronger than a hundred years ago, trust me."

"Your enemy. Okay. Still, it's so weird…"

Sudden fear. The boy whirled towards the prince's disfigured face, watching him with an expression which, at last, looked like anxiety.

"Are you going to tell the Fire Nation's army? That I…that the Avatar is alive?"

"No."

And, as the kid was letting out a relieved sigh, he warned:

"I'm the one who will capture you. Until then, no one needs to know you exist."

That did not seem to spoil the airbender's mood in the least. Slightly offended, Zuko straightened up and crossed his arms on his chest. The glaciers they had been searching were disappearing in the horizon. The bison was now flying very close to the shore, where the waves crashing against the ice shaped it into a surreal landscape. Zuko kept his eyes on this endless white, mulishly.

The last thing he wanted was to talk again, but the young monk behind him would not shut up. Zuko was starting to wonder whether all the Air Nomads, hidden at the tops of their impregnable mountains, had been as unbearably talkative as that kid.

"But even if you do that..." he said, "isn't there a risk that I will put the Southern Water Tribe in danger? If the Fire Nation learns that they are hiding me…"

For some reason, this time Zuko could not answer right away. He did not look at him as he said, carefully neutral:

"It's probable."

"Oh…"

At first the monk did not add anything. In the silence that followed Zuko had to fight off the stupid impulse to turn his head, just to see which expression was now showing on the kid's face, in his too big grey eyes.

"What if I leave the village? I can't stay here if I want to save the world anyway. If I leave, will they be safe? Katara, Sokka, everyone?"

"I…I think they will," the prince answered (and why on earth was it suddenly so difficult to find his words? It was ridiculous…) "It is my mission to capture the Avatar. I'm not after them, and I don't… The Fire Nation will know nothing of the help those peasants might have given you. I won't waste my time worrying about every other place you stop by," he added quickly, lest the other boy would actually think he was trying to cover up for an enemy village.

"Great!" the airbender said, suddenly as enthusiastic as if the future had never looked brighter. "So Appa and I will help you find your men, and in exchange you will make sure nothing happens to the Southern Water Tribe. We have a deal!"

And strangely enough, those words lifted his mood, washing off some of the loathing he had felt since dawn, since he had first climbed on the damn bison and accepted the help of the Avatar, the very person he intended to hunt down. Like some honourless coward, ready to beg his own enemies as soon as a difficulty came up…

A deal. The life of his men against the South pole's peasants'. His actions did not seem so shameful in that light. Almost reasonable. Almost clever.

Almost something his uncle would have been proud of.

He gazed at the icebergs lining around the coasts, sparkling in the morning light. The bison seemed to be in form: he was carrying them above the waves with impressive speed, whipping their faces with salty air, stretching its large legs with satisfied grunts. Flames were running down the prince's veins, his skin burning hot against the wind. But he was not ill, any longer. Calmer, Zuko was even able to think about his uncle, his presence, his reassuring smile. He found himself imagining his questions and nods, as his nephew would tell him everything that had happened since their separation, the smell of the jasmine tea the old man would surely force him to drink when everything would be over.

Perhaps he and his men had already found a way to leave the South pole.