Inspiration: "Growing Up" by Peter Gabriel

"I'm going to kill Aang."

"I think you're going to run into a technical problem there." Though Katara's voice was level, her hands gave her away as they clenched into fists in her lap.

"Did you do this to Aang?"

"Who told you about Aang?"

"Aang did. He said it was time."

"Lien… I'm sorry, we were planning to tell you…"

"Leave me alone!" It was the first time she had ever raised her voice to either of them.

"What are we going to do?" Katara's composure dissolved at last as she buried her face in her hands.

"Did you know?"

"Hey, don't look at me. I think that they should have told you ages ago, but nobody would let me say anything."

Though Nara seemed completely unruffled by the accusations, Lien glared anyway. "You never cared about doing what anyone told you to before," she accused.

"The first time anyone tried to tell you, you freaked out," Nara countered. "For all we knew, you might have gone into the—well, you might have done something violent, and none of us would have been able to stop you. I'd rather not survive having my neck cut up just to get splattered against a wall, thanks."

Lien crossed her arms, and did not answer. Why had Nara felt the need to come with her, anyway? It certainly wasn't to coach her; Lien could now drive the sand sailor well enough by herself to get into town and back without any help. Nara, however, had had other ideas. "You walk into town in a mood like that and you're liable to end up getting knifed in the back. If I don't go with you, one of the others is going to insist anyway. So, it's your choice: me, or Zuko or Katara."

So she'd said nothing, and let Nara climb onto the sand sailor with her, and they'd rode all the way out to the oasis in dead silence. Once they got there, however, Lien realized that she had no idea what she'd been planning to do: her primary thought had been to get away, and she'd only headed for the oasis because other than the desert, there was nowhere else to go… but even the oasis wasn't far away enough. No matter which direction she turned she found herself surrounded by other people, people who tried to get her attention or to sell her things, people gossiping among themselves about the spirits and the light show and the Avatar…

Feeling claustrophobic, she ducked into a deserted alleyway. Nara followed. When it let out into the open desert, Lien doubled over slightly, wrapping her arms around her stomach. Even though she knew there was nothing wrong with her physically, it suddenly seemed like everything hurt.

"So… what are you going to do?"

It was like Nara had been reading her mind. Slowly, Lien found herself sinking down onto the baking hot ground, her fists still pressed into her stomach. "I don't know," she admitted.

She had no idea how long she sat there. It might have been anywhere from a few minutes to more than an hour. Eventually, though, Nara hooked a hand under her arm, and pulled her to her feet. "Well, there's nothing you can do right now, so we might as well go get something to drink."

They sat in the shade of an awning while Lien sipped the fruity concoction that Nara had shoved into her hands. She felt the ice sliding down into her stomach, but didn't taste it at all. All this time… all this time, Katara and Zuko had known, and they had not told her…

"It isn't fair," she muttered, letting her frozen cup sink back into her lap.

"Life's not fair." Nara shrugged, and tugged away a few layers of clothing to reveal the old scar. "You think that this," and Lien did not have to ask what this meant, "was fair? But I didn't have a choice about that, and you don't have a choice about this, so it looks like we're going to have to learn to live with it."

Lien didn't answer. Her fingers tightened around the ice cup. Then, before she could even stop to fathom what she was doing, she stood and threw the remains of her drink out into the street with all the force she could muster, before turning and storming out toward the edge of the oasis.

Here, with no buildings in the way, the endless desert spread out before her, baking in the harsh light of the unrelenting sun. Up until this point, she had always thought it beautiful. Looking at it now, however, she could only see a harsh, uncaring future stretching out before her with no relief in sight.

The sand cared nothing for her or her problems…

With a yell of sudden rage, she dug her feet into the Earth and bore down with her hand.

Sand and tender soil spewed up from the ground in a torrent of rock and dirt. By the time the last of the debris had finished raining down onto her back and into her hair, she was on her hands and knees on the ground, her whole body shaking as tears streamed down her face.

No one could tell her why.

Still shaking, she dug her fingers into the sand. The ground in front of her was a mess, a raw hole of blasted earth with dirt and sand spewed in every direction. At the sight of the destruction she'd wrought, she was hit by a fresh wave of tears, rocking back and forth on the ground as her body shook with sobs.

For a long time, she could only kneel there weeping, her breath coming in gasps and the rough ground digging into her knees. Eventually, however, the tears had to stop, and there was nothing to do but crawl forward and call to all of the earth that she had displaced, a few final hiccups wrenching out of her as she felt the tender soil and witnessed close-up the damage that she had done.

A slight cough sounded behind her. Looking back, she saw that Nara was standing guard, but pointedly not looking in her direction—probably had been since she'd first stormed away.

There was, however, no more anger left in her after that brief burst of violence. Instead, she only felt emptied out, trapped, and fragile as she stood and brushed her hands off on her clothing.

"What am I going to do?" she asked at last, staring out over the empty landscape and not looking at Nara as Nara didn't look at her.

"Don't look at me." Nara's voice, though still not soft or gentle, carried none of its usual bite. "This isn't exactly my area either."

After they got home that night, Lien went straight to her bedroom without speaking to anyone.

Nara did help, she admitted grudgingly, standing between her and the others and keeping a conversation going long enough for her to slip past and hide behind the privacy of her own door. Even if Nara was doing the distracting by giving everyone else a report on where they'd been and what Lien had done.

…Nara had also been the one to drag her into a tavern and plop a bowl down in front of her and not let her move until she ate, and the one to trail her through the streets of the oasis until even the last stall of the night market had been packed up, and the one to remind her that if they didn't go home on their own, and go soon, it was only a matter of time before three frantic benders came blazing into the oasis looking for them, and did she really want to deal with that on top of everything else?

So no, she couldn't force herself to keep being angry at Nara right now, even though Nara had been just as complicit as everyone else in hiding the truth from her. She wasn't even sure whether she truly was angry at Zuko and Katara—the only thing she knew for sure was that she did not want to see them or hear their excuses.

Three times that night people knocked on her door and asked to come in: Katara, and Zuko, and even Nori. Lien pulled her pillow over her head and pretended to be asleep every time.

The next day she was out before the first morning light, only to find Nara already lounging atop the sand sailor.

"So are we heading out, or what?" Nara asked, covering a yawn while Lien stared.

Lien did not climb aboard, instead crossing her arms where she stood on the sand. "Did they ask you to do this?"

Nara shrugged. "Does it matter?"

Lien opened her mouth to argue, but then bit her lip as she looked back toward the house. Though she wanted to demand that Nara leave her alone, she also knew that that would result in an argument, which would result in a delay, and if they started shouting the others would probably hear it, and she had to get moving as quickly as possible if she wanted to get out of here before Zuko and Xi Wang woke up. So, she clenched her fists but didn't say a word as she climbed aboard, and got the sand sailor moving in stony silence.

The day passed much the same way as the previous one had: blind, aimless wandering through the streets of the oasis, eating or drinking whatever Nara shoved into her hands because it was much easier to concede than to actually talk to each other, seeing and feeling the people moving around her and living a life that she was no longer part of. Though she had once felt at home here, Lien now knew that she was apart, different. Marked.

"You're not going to be able to avoid them forever, you know," Nara remarked as they sat atop the sand sailor on the afternoon of the third day, watching the crowds move past as the sun crept ever closer to the horizon.

Lien did not answer. Instead, she tucked her knees in closer to her chest, staring out into the crowd without really seeing anything that was in front of her. Balance… she was expected to restore balance to the whole world…

"So what are you going to do? And don't tell me you're going to do this every day for the rest of your life. It's exhausting me just trying to keep up with you."

"I don't know," Lien replied miserably, burying her face against her knees. "I don't even know how I'm supposed to—"

"I didn't ask what you're supposed to do," Nara interrupted with a snort. "I'm asking what you're going to do."

"What do you mean?" Her eyes were prickling again. "You're the one who said I didn't have a choice."

"You don't have a choice about what you are!" Nara slapped the surface of the sand sailor so hard that Lien jumped, her head jerking up. "I'm talking about what you're gong to do! Those are two completely different things! Oma and Shu, would you listen to me?

"I don't care what anyone tells you you have to do," Nara continued, voice dropping to an angry whisper after a couple of passerby gave them curious looks. "What matters is what you choose to do. Back in the desert, everyone and their mother thought they could tell me what I had to do if I wanted to stay one of them. I could've stayed with my tribe, but that would have meant spending the rest of my life living a lie, so I chose to leave. So, are you going to try to do what needs doing, or aren't you?"

Lien had no answer… any more than she had an answer for anything else.

That night, she still didn't talk to anybody, but she lay awake in bed thinking long after the last dispirited knock at her door was followed by a set of retreating footsteps.

Did she choose to try and bring the balance that Aang had told her she had to? Her only other option was to run away.

No matter which option she took, she would be facing a yawning abyss of the unknown. If she chose balance, then if what Aang had said was true the whole world would be depending on her to fix it. If she chose to run, she would be facing the whole world completely alone. After their trip through the desert, she thought that she could survive on her own—but she didn't know. She felt so betrayed by Zuko and Katara, but… did she really never want to see them again?

Lien let out a breath as it came to her what she would have to do. Like it or not, she did not have enough information to make her choice, and that would mean talking to someone who did.

"What did you mean?" she whispered into the cold early morning air. "What did you mean when you said that it was the Avatar's job to keep balance?"

Aang looked sad. "In times of peace," he began, "the four nations live together in harmony. Sometimes, however, one nation will become an aggressor."

"So that means that Avatar is supposed to stop them? Phoenix King Ozai… am I going to have to fight him?"

"Unless he has a heart attack tomorrow, I'm afraid so."

"Am I supposed to…" She swallowed. "Am I going to have to kill him?"

She waited for him to lie to her, just like everyone else had lied to her for the past six years, but he didn't. "It's a possibility."

"What if… what if I don't?"

Aang looked at her, and in that moment, even though she was not sure how, she knew that he knew exactly what she'd been thinking. She waited.

"If you refuse your duty as the Avatar," he said slowly, "that is of course a choice you can make. No one will be able to force you otherwise. The world will continue to fall out of balance, because ordinary people don't have the strength to fight back. The Fire Nation will continue to spread its influence; people will continue to die before their time and cultures will continue to be lost—but that option is still open to you.

"Of course, your choice will not break the Avatar cycle. After your death, another Avatar would be born to the next element—and then that person would have the task of restoring balance, as well as having to fix whatever else has happened during your lifetime."

Lien found that she was shivering. She wrapped her arms around herself, her whole body suddenly shaking in the early morning desert chill.

"I'm sorry," she heard Aang saying, as if from a great distance. "The only reason that you got stuck with this job was because I couldn't do mine."

Lien could barely hear him anymore. She was now on her knees in the sand, her hands over her ears as if to block out the truth of what he had said. The sound of her own heartbeat was too loud in the ringing desert silence. The blowing sand and shifting Earth was a cacophony beneath her feet. Something was surging its way through her body, some powerful, primal emotion she didn't have a name for…

"Lien!" Aang was shouting now, she realized, but his words were nearly drowned out by her own pounding heart. "Lien, please listen to me, you have to calm down—"

For the first time in her life, however, Lien wasn't listening to him. For the first time in her life, she didn't want to calm down. In her younger years, the Boy had once been a guide, a protector, a friend in her times of most desperate need. Now, though, he was no longer the Boy, he was Aang: and Aang was fallible, and human, and just as responsible for withholding the truth from her as everyone else. Now, she no longer wanted to hear his voice: she was too caught up in that uncontrollable surge of power.

All of the dunes around her flattened and cracked like glass. Water surged upward from beneath her feet. Compressed sand and water both rose, swirling around her in a deadly dance of jagged edges carried along by the current, the water of her own tears drifting outward to join them…

"Lien! Lien!"

She could not tell who was calling her name. She was not aware of how long they had been shouting. She did not see the bruise on Katara's cheek, or the blood streaming down Zuko's face, or Xi Wang's torn sleeve and the rough abrasions on her arm. The only thing she knew was that the power was leaving her, and that she was falling.

A/N: Ah yes, it's this part. Heroic BSOD for several chapters on end, go! (I hope Lien's behavior here doesn't seem too inconsistent with the rest of her characterization, but she has had quite a shock...)