Katara

Katara stood anxiously outside the palace morgue, pacing back and forth across the doorway and trying to calm her mind. After their return from visiting Azula, Zuko had holed himself up in his study until nightfall, leaving Katara with the responsibility of dealing with Ozai. Well, he didn't explicitly tell her to do anything, exactly, but with how much time she'd missed during her capture she felt an itch to do something productive. Besides, one of the members of the royal family should be present for this type of evaluation, and she didn't think it wise to include Zuko. She sent a group of royal guards out into the forest to retrieve Ozai's before sun down, not bothering to explain to them how she knew of its whereabouts. They had returned from their little scavenger hunt late in the evening, far too late to warrant the immediate evaluation by the palace physician. She requested to be told when the physician began the autopsy, so when a palace worker came and whispered the news in her ear over lunch, she sent a message to Aang to meet her at the morgue as soon as his schedule allowed. He was still visiting, thankfully. She didn't know if she could deal with this all alone.

Her frantic pacing was interrupted by the oncoming footsteps that echoed through the halls, light enough for her to recognize them as belong to her flighty airbender.

"Thank you for getting here so quickly," Katara murmured as she welcomed Aang into a warm embrace. Considering how much she had been through, friendly physical contact felt all the more comforting to her. 2 weeks spent in shackles with only the heat from the summer air really reorganized her priorities.

"It's no problem," Aang said with a smile. "So, what are we dealing with here?"

Katara looked at him seriously as she gestured to the door before them. "I've had Ozai's body collected for evaluation. Hopefully, the physician inside will be able to tell us how he died."

"Spirits," Aang muttered.

"Yeah, heavy stuff. But it had to get done, and this will get us one step closer to figuring out what happened in the woods and what the Scarlet Sodality's future plans are."

"Katara, we don't even know if they have a plan. Like you said out there, it didn't look like anyone survived that explosion. Do you really think they would go through all the trouble of freeing Ozai only to kill him off less than 24 hours afterward?"

"I don't know," Katara said despondently, "but this is our only hint right now. We need to take advantage of it."

Swallowing down his discomfort, Aang nodded, and Katara reached for the door handle, pushing it open and revealing the small morgue within the palace walls. The room didn't get much use, what with the few and far between deaths of the royal family members. The air was musty and smelled of dust and decay, and in the center was a stone slab elevated to waist level and housing the body of the former Fire Lord, his face covered with a red, cotton sheet of fabric. The senior palace physician was peering into the open abdomen of the cadaver, obviously not finished with his full-body evaluation. Aang almost gagged at the sight, but Katara looked upon it with grace and strength. She'd seen far more gruesome scenes in the South Pole while growing up. She specifically recalled a time when some poor hunter had unluckily ran into a polar bear dog during mating season, falling victim to the male beast's territorial nature and suffering a deep abdominal laceration that left his entrails splayed for all to see. He barely survived the attack, and Katara could never squash that sight from her memory.

"Ah, Fire Lady Katara," the physician greeted as he scrambled to cover the disgusting sight in front of him, "my apologies, I didn't realize you would come so soon. I called for you thinking you would take your time in visiting me."

Katara waved her hand to signal that he didn't need to continue his panic, gently grabbing the fabric he had hastily thrown over Ozai's abdomen and placing it on the wooden shelf installed in the wall. "Please, no need to apologize. I didn't expect that you would be done. I wanted to partake in this investigation, if you wouldn't mind."

The physician's eyes widened slightly but didn't challenge her as hesitantly retrieved his magnifying glass from the rolling shelves at his side. "Of course not, my Lady. And you must be Avatar Aang, it's truly an honor."

Aang nodded from the far end of the room, too perturbed by the presence of dead body to think about coming closer. "Pleasure to meet you."

"So," Katara said as she settled her hands on the stone slab, "what have you discovered so far?"

"Well, my Lady, to be quite frank, I haven't seen anything quite like this," the physician said as he furrowed his brow, "how did you say you found him?"

"I didn't. We were hoping you could provide us with some answers."

"I understand, but some context would be helpful. Where was he found, for instance?"

At this point, Aang overcame his disgust and stepped closer to the pair, closing the door behind him. "We found Ozai's body within the rubble of a destroyed building deep in the woods outside the city border. He had just been surrendered to the Scarlet Sodality the night before that explosion, as I'm sure you recall."

"Yes, I remember. So you believe this was a murder?"

"We're not sure what it was," Katara interjected, "we just know that whatever happened out there, the force of the explosion killed a large number of people that had been inside the building."

"Did you manage to get a close look at any of them?"

Katara looked back at Aang, who simply shook his head. "It was a bit of a shock, to say the least," he explained, "unlike you, we don't typically get a close-up view of someone who's passed."

The physician peered down at the body before him and pinched the corners of the fabric covering Ozai's face, discarding it into the wastebin. He took a small, crystal illuminating a white light that was affixed to the end of a bamboo rod and positioned it close to Ozai's face as he held open one of the cadaver's eyelids. "I only ask because of the way his eyes present. You say the building was destroyed, no? As you can see, his sclera are quite irritated and red, so the surrounding debris would explain that. But what I cannot explain is his eye color. The bright amber color of the iris runs strong within the royal family, and I referenced Ozai's past portraits and birth records to confirm that he indeed possessed the same trait. As of right now, you can see that his eyes are-"

"White," Katara interrupted, "like the moon."

"I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the moon or its cycle, my Lady, but it's unusual to say the least. Not only have I never seen this pale of an eye color, but to have one's eye color change upon death hasn't happened before."

"And you have no possible explanation for this?" Aang asked, finally working up the courage to peer over Katara's shoulder and catch a glimpse of what the physician was referencing.

"No. I've referred to my book of medical teachings and can't find any sort of cause for this phenomena."

Katara couldn't help but stare into Ozai's dead eyes. The only other time she'd seemed such a vibrant white on a person without the aid of makeup was when she met Yue. According to her, the white of her hair was the result of the moon spirit granting her life and instilling a portion of its power inside of her. Before that, her hair had been an obsidian black, just like that of her tribe. So although Katara knew it was possible to change physical appearance with the help of the spirits, this just didn't make sense. The moon spirit had given life, not taken it, so how did that help their current situation?

"Well what about the rest of him? Surely there's some other evidence for his cause of death. Maybe the smoke inhalation?"

The physician reached to his rolling shelves yet again and grabbed his metal set of pliers, bringing them to the incision in Ozai's abdomen and using them to spread the skin further, granting all of them a better view inside. "Take a look at the inner workings, my Lady. What do you notice?"

Katara leaned in close, squinted her eyes as she investigated the tissue inside. It had been long since the blood flow had ceased, so the organs were not longer the flush pink that they should be, and the pocket was dry from the lack of use. Katara had never seen inside a decently expired body; she had seen the organs of a living man as she attempted to stitch him back together, but never the insides of a man long declared dead. It was new territory, and she was unsure of what to look for.

"I see organs?" Katara said almost jokingly, and the physician managed to chuckle. She turned to offer Aang a closer look, but decided against it when she noticed the splotchy green hue of his cheeks.

"You're quite right. I'd be surprised if you didn't," the physician teased.

"What is it you were having me look for?"

The physician raised his crystal light to the abdominal opening and angled it towards the chest. "Let's take a look. Here, you can see the lungs. As expected, they are quite damaged. There are burns in several locations along the interior wall, as you can see from the excised portion I removed just before your arrival. But the damage isn't severe enough to warrant smoke inhalation as the cause of death. It looks as though he died before the smoke could do much harm."

"So did you have me look inside just to prove me wrong?"

"No, my Lady. Take a look here," the physician said calmly as he pointed to a large hunk of flesh beneath the ribs. "That, there, is the liver. At this point in the decaying process - if the timeline you've provided me is correct - it should still be pink and spongy. Instead, it's gray and shriveled, like a sea prune. In fact, all of his organs look similarly shriveled."

"What are you suggesting, exactly?"

The physician set aside his crystal and removed the pliers, thereby closing the incision and blocking off the view. Aang sighed in relief, unsure of how much longer he could have lasted seeing another's internal organs before vomiting.

"What I'm suggesting, my Lady, is that whatever happened at the time of Ozai's death, it wasn't natural. Every ounce of evidence that he was alive and functioning as of 3 days ago has completely vanished. He looks as though he was sucked dry of the life force within him, although I can't begin to explain how."

Katara dwelled on this before an idea came to her. There was a way to find out what remained, but she would need water, and a lot of it.

"Sir, I hope you don't mind, but I'd like to perform a few diagnostic tests of my own"

The physician, albeit confused and slightly worried, bowed in submission to Katara's request. "As you wish. Just… be done by sundown? I have to prepare him for the funeral."

"Of course. Aang, go fetch a few of the royal guards, would you? I need them to bring a copper bath down here, a shallow one."

Aang raised an eyebrow at her suspiciously. "What are you planning?"

"You'll see. Just trust me."

Quicker than Katara anticipated, a group of royal guards returned, carrying a bath upon their shoulders. It looked as though it were used for children; the edges were only 2 feet deep, but the base was large enough to fit an adult body. Even when it came to bathing the children, the royal family spared no expense. Katara would have preferred a more spiritual environment, perhaps a bath made of stone beneath a full moon, but this would have to do on short notice. When the guards settled the bath in the center of the room, actively avoiding looking upon the body of their former Lord, they scuffled out in a hurry, leaving Aang and Katara alone. She bent a stream of water from a nearby pipe and filled the tub with a foot of water. The liquid was crystal clear, for the palace always had the best quality of everything they could ever need, and the scalloped texture of the bottom of the tub reflected what little light was present in the room. Katara instructed Aang to airbend the body to the tub and he reluctantly agreed. She supposed she could have bloodbent his lifeless form, but the situation was already morbid enough without involving the barbaric form.

When Ozai's body was settled in the tub, the height of the water aligned at the middle of his lithe, depleted frame, Katara sat on her knees and stared down upon him. She was unsure of how to begin. In the past, she'd been able to heal soldiers or workers by sending her healing current throughout their entire chi pathway, melding it with the wounded chi of their own and reinforcing it. This man, however, didn't need healing. He needed evaluation. Once before, and only once, Gran Gran had showed Katara the ancient southern waterbending ways of reviewing a cadaver, survived through scrolls hidden away from Fire Nation view during the war. Through the same technique as healing, Katara could infiltrate the body's chi and travel throughout the systems, looking over the last moments engrained in the body's physical memory. It was much more efficient than the typical autopsy, and she knew that when she sent the palace physician to diagnose Ozai's cause of death. She had hoped, however, that it would be a simple enough answer and she wouldn't need to directly interact with the dead body of her horrific father-in-law.

Tentatively, she raised her hands and hovered them over Ozai's torso, slowly bringing the body of water to a fluorescent glow of aquamarine light. She twirled her wrists, imitating the patterns of Tui and La and sending the water in a spiral pattern around the body's perimeter. She felt her power permeate the skin and begin to enter his chi pathway. Suddenly, like a shock of electricity, Katara flinched with a hypnic jerk and was instantly flooded with the feeling of her body falling into an empty abyss. She pulled away and snapped open her eyes to find that she wasn't actually falling into some foreign darkness, but rather still in the royal palace with solid ground beneath her. Aang rushed to her side, pulling her up from the backwards leans she hadn't realized she had jolted into.

"Are you alright?" Aang asked worriedly.

"Yes, I'm fine," Katara reassured him, "It's just… I've never felt that sensation before."

"We should stop."

"No," she interrupted, "I can continue. I have to continue. Let me try again."

Aang, with a furrow of his brow and a scowl of his lip, stepped away, releasing Katara's arms and allowing her to return them to their position above Ozai's body. Once again, she bent the water into a glowing whirlpool of spiritual energy and pushed into Ozai's system. The falling sensation returned, but this time she fell with it, allowing it to take her wherever she needed to go. As she reached the bottom, she didn't feel any impact; She just noticed that she had stopped falling. Carefully, she bent the energy forward, exploring the unfamiliar cavern and filling it to its edges. When the space kept filling, conforming into that of a long, tubular shape, Katara finally realized where she was: Ozai's chi pathway. With all the strength she could muster, she kept bending and bending until her energy stopped growing in size and felt identically to that of the meridians, extending from groin to scalp and confirming her suspected whereabouts. Only one thing was for certain, which was that she couldn't detect one ounce of Ozai's retired chi.

Carefully, Katara pulled herself out of Ozai's being and settled her palms delicately on her lap, feeling fragile and slightly shaken from her spiritual depletion.

"Well?" Aang asked quietly, as though he didn't really want to hear the answer he knew he would be given. "Did you find anything?"

Katara sat in silence for a moment longer as she pondered what exactly she did just find. "That's just it, Aang. I didn't find anything."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, normally, when one passes, their chi essentially retires within their body. It doesn't have anywhere to go, so it just stops moving and flowing. With my healing, I could manually push it around and explore one's pathway. But Ozai didn't have anything left inside of him. Now, I don't exactly have too much experience handling dead bodies, but this is unlike anything I've read about in the scrolls Gran Gran gave me."

Aang looked at her with confused concern before he sat adjacent to her on the stone floor, knees grazing the side of the copper bath that held the deceased man before them. He sat directly in front of Ozai's head, unsettled by the sight but persevering anyway. Katara watched intently as Aang positioned a palm over Ozai's sternum and the other over his forehead. He went into an intense focus and Katara noticed an overwhelming spiritual aura radiating off of his skin, shortly followed by the illumination of his tattoos. His eyes were closed, but Katara knew that underneath his eyes were glowing a similar blue. She sat, observing his technique and listening to the hum of the energy throughout the room as she wondered what ancient Avatar wisdom he could be employing at that very moment.

Katara almost fell back flat on the floor when Aang suddenly lurched away from the tub in a violent gasp of breath. "Aang!" She yelped. His expression was wide-eyed and panicked, shining with the beads of sweat that had formed on his temple. Despite the breathing techniques he mastered from his people, he was panting heavily, and it looked as though he had just been through hours of physical combat with a worthy opponent. "Aang, talk to me, what happened?"

Aang grabbed Katara's wrist, startling tremor reverberating through his body translated itself onto her arm, and she could tell that whatever just happened had shaken Aang to the core. His silver eyes latched onto her as she anxiously awaited an explanation.

"I know what happened here."

Katara tried to assist Aang to his feet, but he dismissively pulled his arm away, instead opting to straighten his torso as he remained cross-legged on the ground.

"The lion turtle, when it granted me the knowledge of energybending, it gave me so much more than that. Centuries of memories came gushing in. I don't think he meant for it to happen, but it did." He reached once more for Katara' wrist, as if he were emphasizing the importance of his next words. "Katara, they stopped granting the power of energybending for a reason, and a really good one at that. Do you remember what I said, about needing to be rooted within one's self before even attempting to energybend?"

"I mean, yeah, but what does-"

"I can't explain it, but when I peered into Ozai's body, his body's memories, I felt this overwhelming sense of power and, similarly, depletion. It reminded me of the lion turtle's memories. I remember - well, rather, the lion turtle remembers - that when people, soft and pliable people, would try to manipulate someone's bending, they couldn't withstand the force of their counterpart's life energy. It literally overwhelmed their system, like an engine overheating."

"You mean like an explosion?" Katara asked, recognizing where Aang was headed.

"Exactly."

"Are you saying the explosion that caused Ozai's death…?"

"Someone tried to energybend, but instead of succeeding, they released Ozai's life force from his physical form. By maneuvering the chi pathway, whoever did this had to to first get inside, leaving an entry site. I can only guess that Ozai's chi escaped through that opening when the explosion happened."

Katara pressed her palms to her eyes. All of this new information, although she was glad to finally have some sort of answer, was emotionally inundating her. "So, Ozai's life force is just, what, floating around the goddamn atmosphere? Are we going to need to go on a spirit hunt?"

Aang just shook his head. "One's life force is a delicate thing. It can't survive long with a corporeal host. It would have needed to latch onto a nearby body with a similar genetic makeup."

Katara's eyes dilated as she thought on what Aang just said. "Does that mean Zuko is infected with Ozai's chi?"

"I don't think so. When I say a life force is delicate, I mean that it can die in a matter of seconds. We didn't get there quick enough for Zuko to become its new host."

She breathed a sigh of relief, although the uncertainty of what happened still plagued her. "Are you certain that Ozai's life force is just gone? Dead?"

"Like the body before us," Aang said flatly, "but that's not what worries me. Someone out there knows how to energybend. That's a big deal, Katara! They can grant someone, anyone, bending, and if that power gets into the wrong hands…"

"Aang, you saw the site yourself. No one could have survived that explosion. Whoever tried and failed to restore Ozai's bending is burnt to a crisp."

Aang shuddered at the jarring bluntness of Katara's words. "Then how did they learn? There has to be a teacher somewhere. A true master wouldn't have failed like this."

He was probably right. Whoever took this task was obviously ill-prepared and unaware of the catastrophic consequences of energybending. Now, they were dead. Although that was one less person to worry about, now they had a bigger task of finding the master. This student couldn't have learned from a lion turtle, otherwise they would have been as knowledgeable and wise as Aang. Someone out there, probably hidden away within the depths of this world, was an energybending master that took on an improper pupil, much like when Aang first tried to learn firebending. Katara knew they had to find him, and quickly, before any other pupils could surface and try to change the course of the world as they now knew it.