AN: So…expecting a screaming mob with pitchforks and burning pitch any second now. Haven't updated this in, oh, a year or so? However! I do have a semi-reasonable explanation: Stranger was having an Avatar drought. Stranger was uninspired. Thus, Stranger didn't write. Then the Avatar came back on the air. Stranger got inspired. Stranger got excited. Stranger went a little crazy…

And so, Stranger is now going to finish up The Night Temple and get stuck into the sequels, featuring everyone's fave NT couple from the number one hit single, The Wolf Bride.

Also, there will be shameless shipping. Zutara, Sukko, or whatever the hell you call 'em, are my mains. You have been duly warned. (On this note, MM, Jonnoda, don't kill me. Please?)

However, on with the show…

The Night Temple 14

Could a body close the mind out?
Stitch a seam across the eye?
If you can be good, you'll live forever
If you're bad, you'll die when you die
Hearing only one true note
On the one and only sound
Unzip my body
Take my heart out…

– Roisin Murphy, "Ramalama" –

Parallel

Lu Ten woke to a small tawny hand lifting stray amounts of fringe from his face. Chiu was sitting on the side of his bed, watching him with soft eyes. He noted she was still in her nightshirt and her hair was unbound, tiny white jade flowers still clinging to its long deep brown coils. He smiled, closed his eyes again and blindly reached for her hand, wrapping it in his own larger one. She made a small sound, and Lu Ten heard rustling and felt the bedclothes shift as she crawled in beside him.

Then there was the sudden unpleasant sensation of her cold feet coming into contact with his warm calves.

He turned his head and gave her a narrow-eyed glower. Chiu grinned back and kissed his cheek. "What? You're always warmer than me…"

"Not the point," he muttered back. They settled after that. Lu Ten found himself dozing as Chiu continued to comb his hair with agile fingers, humming something lilting under her breath.

"Only two months of Crossover left today." For all that it was said casually, he could hear the underlying brittleness. Something was wrong.

For the six or so years they'd been together (it felt like more, but how could one tell, in the Temple, with no seasons or year markers) he had found that bluntness always worked best with Chiu. He found her eyes and searched her face. "What's wrong, Chiu?" he murmured. "What's happened?"

"I never should have agreed to teach her."

The very faintest signs of tears; a sheen on those bluer-than-blue eyes. Lu Ten joined he dots. Katara, she was talking about Katara, about teaching her the old medic's defenses. Doing so had always been a risk. The Water Tribe girl was only fourteen, and empathic to boot. Such a virulent way of killing and protecting was not something she would find natural or pleasant.

But it had to be done. She was a key player in the war, and possibly one of the only water-benders in this day and age capable of learning what Chiu was teaching her…without going on a megalomaniacal power trip.

It was the reason Chiu had been assassinated. And not just her, but all of her teachers and those who knew anything of the medic's defense. In the midst of a distant peacetime, her own people had crippled themselves by wiping out a fifteen year old girl and the techniques that might have saved them in the Hundred Year War.

Lu Ten looked at her now, and wordlessly pulled her to him, letting her weep on his shoulder.

"It'll be alright, bao bei, it'll be alright…"

Complete

"General?"

Iroh looked towards the door to his quarters within the Temple. Iva stood there, resplendent in lavender silk, a dream of a restless sleeper. The shadows cut across her face, rendering one eye violet, one eye gray. There was trouble in her face, in the set of her hands, the treble of her voice.

As always there came the whisper…yew tree girl...do you grow in graveyards…?

Yes, he thought, yes she grows in graveyards. Yet little children cleave to her, and her name is whispered with love by the blessed.

He smiled for her, and she gave him a small smile back as she glided across the room and came to sit beside him. For a time they watched leaves fall in Iroh's little garden full of tea herbs and baby maple trees. It was Iva who broke the silence.

"Iroh," she whispered, voice as soft as silk. "Do you know the story of how Omashu came to be?"

The Old Dragon turned to her, brows raised. "I do," he murmured. "The Cave of Two Lovers, the Tragedy of Oma and Shu."

The Night Daughter nodded. "Their souls came to us, centuries ago, and lay waiting for rebirth as soul-diamonds in the Starred Arch. Sixteen mortal years ago, Shu was reborn, and two years later, Oma followed. Or at least, most of her did. Part of her still haunts the foundations of her city, and I witnessed her rising and falling back there during my trial. She has not fully accepted her rebirth, probably because she does not believe she will find Shu again."

The yew tree girl turned fully to him, two-tonal eyes troubled. "They were born so far apart, remade so different."

Iroh nodded. "Where were they born?" A sneaking suspicion was steadily filling him.

"Shu to the west, Oma to the south."

"The Fire Nation…"

"…and the Southern Water Tribe, yes. Iroh, Katara needs that stubborn piece of herself back. If she doesn't, the madness of learning the medic's defense could kill her."

Iroh tensed. "Then Oma must be found and convinced. You wish me to speak to her?"

Iva nodded her asset.

The General nodded. "I will, but tell me this, Priestess." He turned solemn gold eyes upon her, glinting with protective fire in the dim Autumnal light. "In their first lives they fell. In this are they doomed to fall, to fail?"

The smile that blossomed on the Shadow-bender's face could have replace Agni in his jealous sky, if only for a moment.

"No," she told him, as her shadows curled in wistful shapes across the walls and ceiling, "no, Old Dragon, they are not doomed to fail; they are destined to complete."

Halved

It was like breathing.

Katara stirred, feeling the other press against the wall of her mind.

We are one. We are both. I am waiting.

And, some time later, with a pair of electric emerald eyes boring into her own, down to the bones of her naked soul she heard, We shall find him. We shall…

She woke upon Zuko's bed, the boy himself asleep on the far corner, a guitar in his lap. His hair fell across his eyes, whole and ruined. She saw with strange detail the clarity of his expression in sleep, the elegant shapes that his hands and wrists made as they hung upon the guitar and his right knee.

A single word resounded within her skull and for a moment he wasn't really Zuko...

The word, the word was her goal, her destiny, the patterned filigree that would bind her back together, back into a singular piece of girl.

Omashu.

Oma and Shu.

Near and far away, beneath her city, the spirit stirred and reached and waited.

Sound

In the city of Omashu, known recently as New Ozai, there were two gong towers, one to the east where Agni begins his daily trek, and one to the west where he ends it. They were not tall or particularly graceful spires, for they were created with the original city, by Oma herself in a fit of rage and grief.

Do not be fooled; there is nothing upright or graceful about grieving, especially in those first wrathful moments.

For their origins they were sacred, and so monks of the earthen creed tended them. Since the day of the gong's creation, only one had ever sounded. The one to west, Shu, pealing out his single lonely note, ever waiting for his mate to reply.

But Oma never did.

The gong itself was believed to be faulted in some way, the metal corrupted. But when another was cast and hung, it would not call either. No gong will call from Oma's tower.

Until now.

In 'New Ozai', the eastern tower seemed to shift imperceptivity upon her foundations, as though the earth below were gently lifting her shoulders. The few monks within its walls cried out in shock, then in fear, as the great gong swayed and then began to call on its own, though no blow had been struck.

Eventually it had to be taken down, because it would not cease to give voice, calling and calling and calling across the city to the tower of Shu, and everyone was half afraid he would spontaneously begin calling back.

The gong was pulled down, but even so, the sound remained; a single liquid note, followed by a whisper on the cusp of human hearing…

Katara, Katara, Katara…

AN2: It's plot twisty. Review?