Sokka put a hand on Toph's shoulder, not to guide her but to steady himself. Even during their own war, he had never seen so much fire and destruction.
Thick smoke filled the air, and bodies covered the ground, flesh burnt and armor warped. He tried not to be sick as he led her across the battlefield, stepping carefully around the corpses.
He couldn't see out to the water, and didn't know how the ships had fared. He only caught glimpses of the city ramparts through plumes of smoke, but couldn't be sure if he saw movement.
Was Katara alive? Or Zuko? Or anyone?
He heard coughing, and ran for it, beginning to cough himself. He used his spare hand to cover his mouth and thought of how useful airbending would be right then.
"You... you are alive!" Tyrande said, on her knees on the ground. She was ashy but unharmed, as were several sentinels around her.
"How did you survive?!" he asked.
"Elune..." The elf stopped to cough again. "The light of Elune protected us, but... I could not save us all."
"We have to find the others."
"I know." She and the other elves stood. "Are you hurt?"
"Toph is," he said before Toph could disagree.
"I will do what I can." Tyrande set a hand on Toph, and began to chant in the Night Elven language a prayer to Elune. A pure white light emanated at her touch, and the severity of Toph's injury lessened, but did not disappear completely.
"Thanks," Toph said quietly.
"I'm going to look for Katara," Sokka said, before quickly walking away to do just that. Toph kept his pace, even as he hurried into a jog, and then a run, bolting through the city toward the beach.
The artillery looked no better than the infantry. Splintered ballistae lay mingled with charred soldiers. His pulse raced as he frantically ran among the bodies, looking for a mane of long brown hair and praying for movement if he found it.
"Wait! Sokka!" Toph yelled as he left her. "Katara ran into the water, she was going after the boats!"
He waded out into the water immediately, feet sliding on the silty shore as it sloped steeply into the sea. Toph waited at the water's edge, as he swam out to the ships.
Both airships had fallen, all four balloons detonated, their hulls smashed into the sea vessels below. Fire lit them all, a roaring blaze that turned the water golden and the sky black around them. Sokka heard screaming Horde soldiers, splashing, burning, shouting.
"Katara!" he called. Panic choked his voice; his fear made him sound like a child. It made him feel like a child.
He reached the wreckage, huge, looming, burning above him, all five ships turned into a conglomerate, mangled mass. He pulled himself forward on floating timbers and barrels, ducked under iron framing and ashen sails. The few living orcs he passed ignored him, intent on their own survival.
In the narrow space between an airship and a half-capsized warship, he saw the hem of Katara's red skirt before it disappeared under the water. She did not swim; she sank.
He gulped in air and dived after her, plunging into near total darkness. Only flickers of occasional firelight pierced the depths shadowed by the ships, like lightning through the clouds.
He grabbed her foot and swam up again, but where he'd dived no longer had a surface, as the airship had sunk and tilted to occupy the space. His lungs burned as he searched along the wood and metal for a place to breach.
He finally surfaced through a window to the airship's gun deck, and pulled Katara onto one of the beams so he could hold her right-side up. She was unconscious, or barely conscious, and blood ran down her face from a wound he couldn't locate yet.
The airship was fully sideways and sinking quickly. Water surged up through the windows, and the fire-weakened wood began to splinter under the weight of the ship's iron framework. Sokka wrapped one arm around Katara's waist and half-climbed, half-swam through the deck for the windows on the opposite side. Cold, dark water frothed around him.
He emerged starboard amidst a flurry of embers, muscles aching. "Come on Katara, wake up..." He couldn't bend the water away, he couldn't heal her!
The airship creaked loudly as it settled into the sea. Only the remains of its balloons, laying over top of the warship, kept it afloat for now.
Sokka could barely see the shore through the smoke and diminishing sunlight. The ship shuddered beneath him. Katara continued to bleed, and he saw the gash on her head. Could he swim her to the shore and find one of the priestesses in time?
He quickly unwound the cloth from his wrist and wrapped it around her head, trying ineffectually to stymie the blood flow. He knew nothing about healing; he always saw it as something for girls and grannies to learn, while the men did the fighting. He only vaguely knew about treating hypothermia, that was all. He realized he'd always taken Katara's skill for granted - always assumed she'd be there to take care of him, and after she learned healing, he'd always assumed she'd be around to do that, too. It never occurred to him that someday she'd be disabled and he'd be left helpless.
The makeshift bandaging didn't seem to do any good, and he could hear the rattling in her lungs when she breathed. She'd inhaled a lot of water already, but he didn't know how to treat that, either. She did. She knew everything he needed to know right now!
"Katara! Come on, breathe, throw up the water!" He pounded a fist on her chest, reckless with panic, trying to wake her up, or force the water out, or anything. "You have to wake up and heal yourself!
"This would be a great time to suddenly find out I'm a waterbender!" In desperation, he mimicked waterbending hand motions, trying to imagine the fluid rising out of her lungs. Nothing happened. "Katara, come on, we've still got a world to save, remember? We've got to take out the Fire Lord! You're not supposed to die yet! Didn't that oracle say you'd have grandchildren first? Well she was right about everything else, wasn't she?!" He shook his sister by the shoulders, his voice rising and cracking. "This isn't how it's supposed to happen, we don't even belong here! Wake up! Wake up!"
He slapped her hard across the face; her head lolled and she didn't respond. His heart beat hard in his chest, his hands shook, his throat and eyes burned. He pulled her up against him, wrapping his arms around her. He felt her temperature ebb away, her breathing slow.
"What were you even doing out here? Why do you always have to be a hero?" He gripped her tightly.
Looking up, he tried vainly to catch glimpses of either moon in the sky, but all he saw was smoke and broken masts. "I know I've only been here a month, and I'm not an elf, but I could really use your help right now. I promise I'll - I don't know, I'll help out with this war, and tell people how great you are, and...
"Don't let her die. Moon spirit - Elune - whoever you are, don't let her die."
The ocean breeze parted the smoke like curtains briefly. The white moon shone down. Sokka's hands shone in response.
Snowy moonlight spread from him to Katara, enveloping her head to toe. It felt cool as a night breeze, calming and soothing, and for a moment Sokka closed his eyes and felt like he was in his mother's arms again.
The light reached a peak and then faded with a gentle whisper. Katara coughed and sputtered, water falling from her mouth all at once. She took a deep breath, her airways clear, and lifted her head to look at Sokka in confusion. "What happened?"
"You got knocked out and -" The hull of the ship suddenly plunged into the water fully. "No time to explain!"
They stood as the water came up to their ankles. She needed no prodding to waterbend, creating a path of ice all the way to the shore. They ran across it, Sokka feeling buoyant with relief and disbelief.
He turned his head up to look at the moon, now clearly visible, and mouthed the word, "Thanks."
When they arrived, they found Toph moving injured soldiers up the beach with conveyor belts of stone. "Hey," she said. "I could feel which one's hearts were still beating. Sweet, huh?"
"Toph, you're alive!" Katara said.
"Yeah, so are you! What even happened out there?"
"I- it's hard to remember. I was swimming out there and suddenly that dragon..."
"Deathwing."
"Everything was exploding and on fire and the airships fell and something hit me on the head," Katara said, reaching up to touch her scalp. Blood still slicked her hair, and Sokka's wrist-wrappings were still there, but the wound was gone without a trace. "I don't remember healing myself."
"You didn't," Sokka said. "I did. Or Elune did. Whatever! The important thing is you're alive."
"Well whoever's got the healing juice had better use it on these soldiers," Toph said. "I can't stitch them up with rocks."
Katara nodded, and lifted seawater over to begin healing the soldiers. She moved quickly and easily, as if nothing had happened to her at all.
Sokka looked at his hands. The light hadn't come from him, but it had moved through him, like pouring water through a funnel. Could he do it again?
He knelt down by a burned soldier and put his hands on the man's shoulders, concentrating on what he'd thought and felt earlier - a desire to act, to reverse harm, to help, though it lacked the same edge of desperation. What he didn't need to trick himself into feeling was belief. He knew Elune was real.
It was hard to believe that just this morning he had found it hard to believe.
Katara looked over and gasped in shock when she saw the white light spread from his hands over the burns and relieve them. They weren't entirely healed, but at least stabilized.
"How did you do that?!" she said.
Sokka smiled sheepishly. "Well, I've been studying their moon goddess here..."
"That's amazing!"
"I missed it, what happened?" Toph said.
"He used bending to heal someone!"
"I told you," he said.
"I didn't - well, no offense, but..."
"Hey, I get it. But now I'm not just the boomerang and meat guy! Now I can do stuff too! Magic stuff!"
"Wait, so you're telling me you can just learn new types of bending here?" Toph said.
"It's not really bending, it's a whole different kind of magic," Sokka said. "But basically? Yeah."
She mused on this a moment, then slapped a hand on her chest. "The greatest earthbender alive doesn't need any fancy-schmancy new magic. It would only detract from my natural greatness."
After partially healing one more person, Sokka's magic had noticeably waned, and he wasn't sure he could do much more. "Hey Katara, you feel alright, right?"
"I'm wet and cold, but that's nothing new. Why?"
"I'm going to look for Zuko and any other survivors."
"I'll come with," Toph said.
While Katara continued to heal - her powers seriously boosted by the presence of two full moons - they set off through Theramore, toward the walls where Zuko had gone with the ranged support.
Many of the walls and towers had been destroyed. Piles of rubble filled the streets, and Sokka felt glad that the general populace had already evacuated beforehand. "Feel any more heartbeats?"
Toph stopped to concentrate, digging her toes into the dirt. "That way!" She pointed ahead, and they ran forward to a collapsed stone wall. She wasted no time in digging it out, flinging boulders aside.
A groan came from underneath.
"Zuko!" they both exclaimed at once, and pulled him from the rubble.
He was burned, not mortally, but either way Sokka lacked the energy to heal anymore. "Toph, get Katara. I'll look for Tyrande," he said. He was glad for the moons that night, and the boon they gave to both waterbenders and priests.
Toph ran back to the beach without question.
"You'll be okay, it's not that bad," Sokka said. "Don't go anywhere."
Zuko nodded weakly. Sokka ran for where he last saw Tyrande and the other living elves; he found her on the ravaged battlefield still, tending what very few survivors they had found. Of the combined forces that had met today, only handfuls lived, and most of them only barely.
"High Priestess - " he called.
He stopped when she turned and he saw the intensely mournful expressions on all of their faces. They stood over a large body, a blackened silhouette.
Tyrande drew herself up and announced in a steady voice, "King Varian is dead."