Chapter Notes: And one pic for this chapter, generously done by, yes, you guessed it, my sister. :D Link is on my profile - enjoy! This half of the chapter was SO MUCH FUN omg.

Chapter Five: Imprisoned (Part 2)

It actually went quite well, Katara thought; the final tally was twelve, and the two who refused only did so because they had younger siblings they didn't want to leave behind if it all went badly. "To be honest, I'd rather go with you," one of them, a boy, said, sighing. "The first time we ever hatch a plan to break into a prison, and I've got to stay behind."

"Yeah, well, next time we'll make sure you get to go," Nayu said, very dry.

There were plenty of fishermen living in Lingsao - or there had been, at least, before the Fire Nation had taken up residence right off the shore. So there were, correspondingly, plenty of boats tied up along the shoreline, though many of them probably hadn't been used in months, if not years.

"We'll take three," Nayu said authoritatively; "that way, if one of them gets sunk, the others will still have a chance," and then, as though she hadn't just said something deeply discomfiting, "and you'll have to go in front, so that we can follow wherever Aang tells you to go."

Aang's expression was serious, but his eyes were alight - because, Katara guessed, this was something he could do that would make a difference. It would be frustrating to anyone, not being able to touch anything or anybody, having only one person in the world who could see or hear you; it had to be even worse for Aang, who wanted so badly to help people, to make things better.

He drifted ahead of them, toward the smoke. The boats followed along behind, Katara's in front; Suki and Sokka were along with her, and Haru, too. Katara sped all three boats along as much as she could without making too much noise.

They stopped when they got closer to the smoky haze, and Aang floated on ahead to look for the prison ship, the blue glow of him slowly overwhelmed by grey as he headed off into the smoke.

The wait reminded Katara of being back in Shinsotsu, except it took a good half-hour this time, and Katara couldn't help but jump at every little splash, thinking each one meant the vast bulk of the prison ship was about to come up behind them. Finally, though, Aang came back, almost breathless - out of pure excitement, since he didn't really need to breathe.

"I found it," he shouted, since he didn't have to worry about attracting attention. "I found it, come on, this way."

They followed him through the smoke; it was like hunting in heavy fog, except it was inching toward midday, and whenever they were not beneath a thick plume, the sun shone down brilliantly.

Aang brought them up toward the stern of the ship, starboard side, having already ascertained that there was a single bored guard in the stern who liked to stare off over the port-side rail. "Here, hang on a second," he told Katara, who made the water under the boats still with a backwards sweep of her arms, and then he flew up the side of the ship and over the rail.

The ship itself was immense - Katara had expected it to be, given that it had to be holding all the prisoners the Fire Nation had taken from Lingsao over three years' time plus enough soldiers to keep that many people under guard, but it was still impressive. It was far larger than Zuko's ship, but also correspondingly less streamlined, and probably quite a bit slower. Still, that didn't make the height of the sides any less daunting; Katara stared up at the imposing wall of iron stretching above her head and couldn't help but swallow nervously.

Aang's translucent head appeared over the rail a moment later. "All right," he shouted down, "it's clear for now. Go ahead and lift somebody up, there's a stack of crates right here to hide behind."

Katara glanced back over her shoulder at Suki, who grinned back. "I take it that means it's time," she said, and shuffled over to the side of the boat on her knees. "Let's do it."

Katara took a deep breath, and concentrated: it was much, much harder to freeze the water here, where it was so warm, but she'd been using her bending so much recently that the effort wasn't nearly as draining as it might have been back at home. Suki stepped out onto the little iceberg, testing it carefully with one foot before she put her full weight on it, and then turned and nodded; Katara sucked in another full breath, and put her whole body into the flowing upward stroke that lifted the ice - and Suki - up the side of the ship.

The tower of ice held perfectly, and above their heads, Suki darted from the top of the ice to the deck of the ship, as easily as she might step across a narrow stream. Katara drew the ice back down carefully, so that there was barely a splash, and allowed herself a small sigh of relief; she'd had brief visions of cracking ice, of Suki's feet sliding out from under her, of any number of other small disasters, in the moments the ice had been rising.

Sokka went next, and then Haru, and then Nayu's boat drew up nearby, and the third behind it. Katara lifted them all, one after the other; there were brief pauses when Aang called for them, so that guards could pass by without having their attention drawn over, but all in all, it didn't take long before Katara was freezing the empty boats together and then stepping out and lifting herself on the ice.

There were indeed crates by the rail, and a line of barrels nearby that had provided an extra hiding place - they wouldn't for long, of course, but then they weren't going to need long.

"That's the bridge, right over there," Aang said, pointing to the nearby wall, which, along with the rail, created a corridor toward the bow. Katara had to resist the urge to try to yank him down behind the crates; sometimes it was still hard for her to remember that no one else could see him. "The ship's really wide - more of a barge than anything else. The main deck is on the other side of the bridge, in the bow; that's where most of the prisoners are." Aang turned and glanced at her.

"What?" Katara whispered.

"There's smoke and coal dust everywhere, it gets on everything," Aang said, eyeing the clean green cloth of her shirt. "They're going to spot you in a second, you guys are way too clean."

Katara almost laughed; here they were breaking into a floating Fire Nation prison, and after finding the thing and bending their way on board, it was their cleanliness that might have doomed them. But she could see that he was right. The metal around them was streaked with soot, the wooden barrels and crates gone vaguely grey with grime above and beyond the usual crusting of salt, and the armor of the guard who was still loitering around on the port side of the stern was dull with dirt.

The base of the rail had accumulated a little pile of coal dust, probably the result of a wind just strong enough to blow it off the middle of the deck, but not strong enough to actually carry it up past the foot of the rail; Katara touched Sokka's shoulder to catch his attention, and then caught up a handful of soot and tossed it at him. She tried to aim carefully – she didn't want him to give them away by coughing, after all – but there was a fair breeze going, and the soot was very light; a little puff of black burst over the cheek he turned to shield his eyes, and when he turned back around, he was glaring vengefully.

"Aang says we have to blend in," Katara protested in a hiss, holding up her hands.

Sokka nodded, as though he accepted her reasoning, and then snagged a double handful of coal dust. "Then let me help you," he said, bland and disingenuous.

He did give Katara enough time to turn her face away before he threw it, in the end, so she was merciful in her retaliation.

Moderately, anyway.

.*.

After about five minutes of a near-silent but furious soot-fight, the eleven of them who were tangible looked like they had been rolling around in a coal mine, and Aang declared them suitable. Katara passed this on to Sokka, who reluctantly let his newest handful of coal dust go instead of grinding it into her hair the way he had clearly been planning to do.

Aang drifted away for about half a minute, giving the area between them and the prisoners' space on the main deck another look, and then came back, sliding right through a crate to shake his head worriedly. "I don't know about this, Katara," he said. "There's a lot of guards around the prison deck; I don't know how you're going to get in there without getting caught."

Katara gave it a moment's thought, and then nearly laughed. "Well, we're dirty enough now, right?" she said. "We look like the other prisoners?"

"Yeah," Aang said uncertainly.

Katara grinned at him. "So let's get caught."

"Whoa, hey, hang on a second," Sokka hissed from behind her. "I don't like the sound of this plan you're hatching with the dead kid."

"It makes perfect sense," Katara argued. "We're on the ship already – how would we have gotten here? Why would we have come? Twelve – eleven kids, all by themselves? Clearly, we're prisoners who were trying to escape the ship. We get caught, and they'll just toss us in with everybody else, which is exactly what we want anyway."

"No reason to sneak in when we can get them to let us in," Nayu agreed in a murmur from behind Sokka's shoulder.

"I feel like their idea of letting us in is going to be kind of uncomfortable," Sokka observed, but he didn't protest any more after that.

.*.

They darted from behind the crates and barrels to the rear of the bridge, and let themselves get caught by the bored guard on the port side. Katara was pretty sure that their logic was sound, and nobody was going to bother looking around for boats, but if they'd let themselves get spotted at starboard, it wouldn't have taken much for somebody to glance over the side and see the three fishing boats that were still frozen to the ship.

It was actually almost fun; they plastered themselves to the rear wall of the bridge, like they were trying to be stealthy, and crept along in a line. The guard was leaning on the rail, staring out at the water and the mountains beyond, which were faintly visible through the smoke, and humming to himself.

Sokka started to creep out toward him, until Katara caught his arm. "I'm lending our escape attempt some authenticity," he whispered, shaking his elbow free. "If we were really trying to break out of here, we would totally whack that guy."

Katara had to admit that this was probably true, and it also guaranteed that he would notice them, which hadn't been as foregone a conclusion as she had initially been expecting; Sokka ended up having to actually hit him, because he didn't turn around before Sokka made it the entire thirty feet that there were between the rear wall of the bridge and the stern rail. Sokka was gentle about it, since actually succeeding in knocking him out would have sort of defeated the purpose of the whole thing, and the guard hunched under the blow and shouted wordlessly.

"Prisoner escape!" cried the next guard down, and Katara had to be very stern with herself to keep from smiling when a mob of guards came running.

.*.

It wasn't hard to avoid smiling when the guards actually tackled them to the deck; the one who grabbed Katara wasn't very delicate about it, and getting somebody's knee to the spleen didn't exactly make Katara want to laugh. They fought a little, of course, and Suki couldn't seem to help taking the first guard that rushed her down to the deck with a couple jabs, but then she visibly remembered that they needed to lose for their plan to work, and reluctantly left an opening for another guard to knock her feet out from under her.

Finally, they had all let themselves be subdued – except for Aang, of course, who watched, grinning, from halfway through the wall of the bridge – and the guards dragged them toward the bow, and down the steps from the stern deck into the prisoners' enclosure. "No meals for these rats for three days," said a woman at the top of the stairs, who, judging by her armor, was at least a lieutenant; she had a very impressive sneer. "And a whipping if you're caught outside the prison bay or the boiler rooms again. That should teach you a lesson."

The guards shoved them down the stairs, but they weren't nearly as rough as they could have been; there were only a couple of stumbles, and no one fell over. Katara made her expression dispirited and vaguely resentful, instead of triumphant, and was just about to turn and ask Nayu whether they should split up to look for Tashi when someone shouted, "Nayu!"


Shira couldn't believe it; her own daughter was one of the last people she had ever expected to see in here. But there she was, brushing herself off perfunctorily after the guards pushed her in. "Nayu," she said again, hurrying forward, and caught her daughter by the shoulders as she turned to see who had shouted.

"Mother," Nayu said, and grinned at her, as though she hadn't just been arrested and thrown onto the same prison ship Shira had been stuck on for the past three years.

Shira shook her a little; Nayu waited it out with a patient expression that said very clearly that she was humoring her ridiculousness. "What are you doing here? How did they catch you? What were you thinking? Were you thinking?"

"I've missed you, too, Mother," Nayu said, very dry.

"I would rather keep missing you than see you stuck in here," Shira shot back, although she had to admit there was a part of her that was just a little grateful – Nayu had gotten distinctly taller, in three years; her hair was longer, and her face thinner; she didn't look like a child anymore, and it was pleasant to have a chance to see the difference even as it pained her to have missed seeing it happen.

"It's all right, Mother," Nayu said, blithe, "it's all part of our plan. They didn't catch us," and only then did Shira remember there were nearly a dozen of them standing there, not just Nayu. Eight of them, she recognized from the village – and Tyro was going to be so glad to know Haru was still alive, when he came back up from the boilers – but three of them, two girls and a boy, were complete strangers. "We came on purpose," Nayu went on, and Shira put her curiosity on hold so that she could stare at her daughter with the incredulousness that statement deserved.

"They haven't – captured Lingsao, or declared war on the queen, have they?" Shira said, trying to think of any other reason why a prison ship might be preferable to living in the village. It had to be a strain, of course – never bending anything, never even practicing, constantly having to keep your head down in your own village – but a strain wasn't the same thing as prison. The village had food, clean water, no coal shovels, no whippings; no boilers to burn you, no smoke in your lungs; no coal grime to creep into your blisters and strike you with fever. It was nothing like prison at all.

"No, no," Nayu said, shaking her head. "We came to get Tashi – and as many other people as we can, while we're here."

Tashi – yes, of course, Shanmi's older sister, Yunan and Mingti's daughter. They'd dumped her in just this morning. "But how?" Shira said.

Nayu beamed, as though she had almost been hoping Shira would ask. "Mother, I would like to introduce you to the Avatar," she said.


Katara felt her face get hot, but obligingly tried to keep her expression appropriately Avatar-serene as Nayu's mother stared at her.

"And you're sure about this," she said slowly.

Nayu nodded. "Absolutely," she said. "I'm sure."

Her mother's gaze flickered back and forth between the two of them for a moment, and Katara braced herself for more disbelief, and maybe an argument – she even glanced to the side to make sure Aang was still with them, just in case Nayu's mother asked for some kind of demonstration – but after a moment, Nayu's mother started nodding. "All right," she said. "You're sure, and you obviously got on here somehow; that's good enough for me."

Nayu grinned at her, brief and bright, and said, "I thought it might be."

But Nayu's mother had started frowning ever so faintly. "But you're going to have quite a time getting Tashi out," she said. "They like to send new arrests to the boilers – to get them in line, show them how things work here, that kind of thing. She's still below, shoveling."

Katara glanced at Aang, who was smiling already. "Time to do a little more sneaking."


The prison ship was enormous, and much more complicated than any boat Nayu had ever been on before; if she had maybe been harboring a few doubts about Katara's status as the Avatar before, she certainly wasn't now, because Katara was clearly doing something mysterious to find her way around, whether it was following the instructions of a dead Avatar's spirit or not.

Of course, she couldn't do everything herself. Mother started a fight with Tashi's father, both of them careful to open their hands with every blow and land kicks in non-essential places, and Tashi's mother obligingly clutched Shanmi and screamed bloody murder. The sneering lieutenant shouted for the guards to intervene, and after a few moments there was nobody watching the stairs that led belowdecks.

They nearly got caught partway down by more guards rushing up to the main deck - apparently Mother's little fight had blossomed into a proper brawl - but a moment before the tromp of boots got loud enough to serve as a warning, Katara looked up and nodded at nothing, and yanked them all forward and around a corner into a side hall.

It wasn't hard to find the boiler room, in the end; it was nearly all the way to stern, and the heat coming from it, even from the corridor, was incredible. Nayu stared at the immense boilers, and couldn't help thinking that the openings for the coal looked like gaping mouths - like the whole ship was some kind of awful spirit monster, bound to carry them as long as they fed it.

Fortunately for them, aside from the hot red light spilling from the boilers, there wasn't much illumination, and they could flatten themselves against the rear wall, near the piles of coal waiting to be shoveled, without attracting any attention. There were only a few guards left, presumably since so many had gone running up to help subdue everyone who'd gotten drawn into Mother's brawl, and even though Nayu couldn't see their faces clearly, their stances screamed of boredom.

She saw why a moment later, when she took a closer look at a nearby prisoner; the prisoners were chained together, heavy shackles around their ankles so as to keep their hands free for the long-handled coal shovels.

It wasn't hard to spot Tashi; she was one of the younger prisoners, and even after shoveling coal for hours, still distinctly cleaner than most. Unfortunately, she was also a few coal piles away from them, off to the left. There was no way they were going to be able to get to her without attracting attention – at least, not by staying on the floor.

"Can't let a little more dirt stop us now," Suki murmured, and led the way up the nearest hill of coal, staying close to the rear wall of the boiler room.

Nayu agreed with the sentiment, but it was more than just a little more dirt; by the time they had wobbled their way up the first pile, her hands were probably never going to be clean again, and she could practically taste the coal through her fingertips. The chunks of coal shifted under their hands and feet, and there were several close calls when a small coalslide nearly made someone lose their footing. The Fire Nation actually kept the ship's coal in some other bay somewhere, and had mechanized the process of dumping it from there to where the shovelers could reach it, which they discovered halfway up the second pile when a creak of metal from somewhere above them was followed by Suki, Sokka, and Haru abruptly vanishing under a hail of coal.

Nayu only barely managed to keep from yelping in surprise, and quickly knelt down to help the others dig them out. "I am going to be tasting coal all day," Sokka griped when they got him loose.

Suki was calmly practical. "At least now we blend in even better," she said, glancing down at her blackened clothes.

The small valley between that coal pile and the next one over was a perfect spot to stop – fairly close to Tashi, but the coal piles hid them from anybody further off to the side. Nayu crept out toward the boilers as far as she dared, and then took a small piece of coal and tossed it very gently in Tashi's direction.

It rolled to a stop near Tashi's heel, and the next time she stepped back to swing her shovel away from the boiler, she stepped on it. Nayu could see her frown, side-lit by the red-orange blaze of the boiler; she picked it up and turned to throw it back onto a pile, and that was when she spotted them.

She just stared at them for a second, frozen, and then the break in the steady motion of shoveling must have caught someone's attention. "Hey!" shouted a guard Nayu couldn't see, somewhere to their right. "What are you doing?"

"Just – checking my shovel," Tashi lied, tossing the coal chunk away. "I thought the blade might be coming loose."

For a moment it seemed like that would be it, but then Katara, who was behind Nayu, reached forward and grabbed her wrist. "He's coming to check," she hissed, though Nayu couldn't hear any footsteps over the constant shuffle of metal shovels against coal, and the clanking and whooshing of the boilers. The ghost Avatar, she reminded herself.

There was no way they were going to be able to climb away over the coal without getting anybody's attention – not fast enough to get out of there before the guard came near. All they could do was hope that he would stop far enough away that he wouldn't be able to see them; and that hope went out the window the moment he stepped into view, saying, "Nice try – you won't get a break that way, you stupid-"

He must've caught sight of them out of the corner of his eye in the middle of the word; he turned, brows drawing down into a puzzled frown, a moment before Tashi swung her shovel into the back of his head.

He dropped like a sack of potatoes – but not without prompting a lot of shouts and yells from the other guards, and this time, Nayu didn't need the Avatar and her ghost to tell her the soldiers were coming for them.

It only happened because Nayu wasn't thinking straight; they were trapped in the middle of a metal prison with ocean all around them, and so she had absolutely no reason to assume that the foot-stamp and follow-up punch that she aimed at the first guard who came into view would do anything at all. And at first, she didn't even realize that it had. She thought to herself that she was an idiot even as she threw the punch – at nothing but air, of course, because the guard was still a few yards away at best – and she had several moments to wonder sort of absentmindedly why the guard's eyes were widening before the guard threw up her arm and a dozen coal chunks struck it.

Nayu stared at the guard, who had stumbled back a step under the sudden onslaught of flying coal, and then at her hands, smeared with coal dust and looking highly ordinary, as though they hadn't just done something that Nayu would have sworn five minutes ago was completely impossible.

"Well," said the man shackled to Tashi's left, who had been watching with a look of vague resignation before – the resignation was gone now, replaced by a small, speculative smile. "That was interesting."


Before the guards broke and ran for the deck, the Earthbenders downed six more of them with coal, and one of them had the keys to the shackles. In ten minutes, they went from crouching nervously behind a coal pile hoping nobody would see them to charging back up the corridor to the prison deck, a veritable wall of coal in front of them and a whole mob of freed prisoners behind them. Katara could see that the fight Nayu's mother had started was still going, though it was now between the prisoners and the guards who were trying to subdue them.

The sudden addition of a crowd of angry benders who finally had something to bend turned the tide in the prisoners' favor almost immediately, and in the end, Katara barely had to do anything. Nayu led the charge forward, and the guards were pummeled with coal before they even had a chance to figure out what was going on. Firebending mostly just set the coal aflame, which essentially meant that the Earthbenders could send fireballs right back at the soldiers. Suki plunged right into the thick of things, and somehow managed to track down the guard she'd had to lose to before, dropping him to the deck with one kick to the head and a satisfied look on her face.

Katara managed to shove her way back to the stairs to the upper deck, and from there, she was able to see everything. She used long, flowing sideways moves to pull water up from the ocean and drop it onto Firebender soldiers who were about to launch flames; usually the sudden drenching was enough to put out whatever fire they'd started to bend, and served to distract them besides.

Nayu's mother and Tashi's parents were fighting their way toward the upper deck, too. Katara graciously helped clear the way, slinging a long whip of water around behind the ankles of the soldiers who rushed them at the same moment that the Earthbenders shot handfuls of coal into their faces; the soldiers could have recovered from one or the other, but both at once was too much, and they all tumbled to the deck. Nayu's mother, Katara noticed with a guilty sort of delight, was not especially careful where she put her feet as she maneuvered over them.

She reached the bridge successfully, Tashi's parents fending off most of the soldiers who came at her with hunks of flying coal; Katara noticed that her hand looked odd, sharp-angled and black, a moment before she sent a punch flying at the metal door to the bridge and left a dent behind. Coal - she had bent it around her hand and her wrist; and another three or four punches with her coal-reinforced hand warped the bridge door far enough that she could open it.

After that, it was all over. The commander of the ship surrendered the bridge almost immediately; Katara guessed by the unsettled look on his face that he had been hoping to remain safely in the bridge and let his soldiers deal with everything, and had not at all been expecting Nayu's mother to break the door down.

Nayu's mother shoved him aside and went for the wheel, and a moment later the great ship began to swing around, smoke and sky and water spinning past the bow until at last they were headed back toward the shore. There were still pockets of guards down on the prisoners' deck who were fighting, but they all seemed to pause at once when the ship began to turn; and a great cry went up from every grimy green-robed Earthbender, a hundred fists bending a hundred celebratory chunks of coal into the air at once.

.*.

"Thank you for coming for me," Tashi told them all, once they were back on shore and safe, with the former prison ship anchored in the bay behind them. She had kept her little sister close the whole way back to Lingsao; Shanmi was bearing it with a layer of exasperated good humor that Katara suspected was covering up quite a bit of relief. "And you," Tashi went on, giving Katara a particularly blinding smile. "They never could have managed it without you."

Katara felt her face heat up a little, and grinned back. "You're welcome," she said, shooting Aang a sideways glance that she hoped communicated that she wasn't trying to take the credit for herself; it just didn't seem like the right moment for - well, for the dead kid talk, as Sokka had so delicately phrased it.

But she shouldn't have worried. Aang smiled, and it was the broad one that looked like it might split a less experienced smiler's cheeks in half; he'd been floating a little further off the ground than usual since they'd left the ship, like the chance to help them make a real difference had literally made him lighter.

"Hey," Sokka said, "credit where credit is due. I got us caught by that one guy."

"Yes, you were indispensable," Suki agreed, a smirk faintly visible around the corners of her mouth. "No one else could possibly have hit him on the head."

"Let's just say it all worked out and we're grateful," Nayu said, laughing. "With all the Earthbenders free, we'll have that garrison out of here in a week." She turned to Katara. "If there's ever anything you need from us, Avatar, just ask, and it will be our pleasure to provide."

Katara reached out to grip her shoulder, and smiled. "I'll let you know."