Author's note: This fic takes place in the period between the Book 2 finale (CoD) and the Book 3 premiere (The Awakening). The plot follows the major events of the ATLA comic, "The Bridge," which is the story of how the Gaang survives the aftermath of CoD by capturing a Fire Nation ship. But this fic is not a retelling of the comic, which only serves as a backdrop to this fic (which also means you don't need to be familiar with the comic to understand this fic).


Without Water

The first thing Katara did when she set foot on her father's ship was to look for water.

"Make sure you always have water on hand," Yagoda had once instructed her. "For without water, a healer's bending is useless."

She had given up Aang to her brother's care when Appa landed them at Chameleon Bay. She didn't want to leave him, not when he was in such a vulnerable state. But she had to leave him if she wanted to save him.

Katara found the barrels of drinking water, half of them already drained dry. The man in blue-dyed furs who was stationed by the barrels—to guard the water, no doubt—glowered when her eyes widened at the sight of liquid glistening between the barrel rims and lids. But before he could utter a word, she had siphoned the water into a bucket and dashed away.

Drinking water had to be rationed until the next rain, and Katara had taken more than her fair share.

Everyone can stand to be a little thirsty, she thought as she ran. Aang needs this water more than any of us do.

Katara ran over the creaking boards of the lower deck, dodging crates and heaps of slouching sackcloth bags, desperately bending every drop that sloshed out back into the bucket. The cleaner the water, the more effective the healing. Seawater could knit together only the most superficial wounds. Boiling and distilling produced water in its purest form. But when one was stuck on a ship fleeing from Fire Nation forces, drinking water was the best she could get.

The sight of Sokka and a knot of people huddling over something on the floor drew her like a beacon. "Coming through," she said briskly, elbowing her way through the group and kneeling beside the body on the floor.

Aang lay prone on an oilskin tarp with his head turned to the side. Someone had stripped off his clothes, leaving him in only his drawers. The raw, meaty gouge in his skin where the flesh had burned away, where lightning had exploded in his back—

Katara took a sudden breath, the gasp of someone drowning. It didn't matter that she had seen his wound already. It was wrong it shouldn't be there it was where he died

Then she noticed what she hadn't seen before, what had been covered by his clothing. Red welts, ropes of seared flesh fanning out from his wound as if the lightning had scattered and invaded the rest of his body.

"Turn him over," someone said.

Her brother and another Water Tribe warrior rolled Aang onto his back. The welts on his back continued onto his torso. They coursed over his chest and down his belly, crimson rivers burned into the pale map of his skin. They merged into a single strand at the hip and snaked down his leg, a ragged scarlet line alongside a smooth stripe of blue. That gruesome path ended where the lightning finally burst out of his body, turning the ball of his foot into a knot of mangled flesh.

The air belowdecks was already stuffy, but now it turned stifling. Her audience pressed in around her, intent on her every move. Water flew from the bucket to encase her hands, hands that shook, hands that covered her patient's chest, hands that could not reach his belly or his back or his arm because someone's elbow was in the way and too many people were blocking her and too many eyes were watching her and too many mouths were breathing her air—

"I need space!" Katara snapped, too loudly, too abruptly, but she didn't care. She shoved against the person kneeling next to her, who might have been Bato or Kuei or another Water Tribe warrior. She was being rude, she was being pushy, but she didn't care.

All she cared about was getting to Aang.

"Everybody out!" her brother bellowed. Sokka herded the onlookers away and hung a walrus pelt between two ropes to serve as a crude partition.

Now Katara finally had room to move. Her hands swiftly skimmed over Aang's body, the glow of the water bathing both of them in cold, blue light.

There are so many burns.

Too many.

She slowed her hands, not to heal, but to probe even deeper. Her hands were her eyes, and she saw Aang through the branching rivers of his chi.

If the sight of his battered body filled her with dread, what she found with her hands made her tremble.

His chi pulsed in time with his heart, the rhythm hesitant, fluttering weakly as if it might stop at any moment. Swollen lungs heaved air in and out, sodden with blood and water—and not the kind she could simply bend away.

In the tense silence that was her companion, a rasping sound ebbed and flowed, strangled and irregular, straining to be heard. The sound of Aang breathing.

He's fighting to breathe. Why didn't I notice this before?

Katara flowed with his chi to where it should have coursed down his arms, strong and unimpeded. But his life energy dammed up in unexpected places—places where his bones had shattered, his muscles shredded by the jagged fragments.

I carried him out of the catacombs. How did I miss his broken bones?

The water shivered as her quaking hands moved to his belly. When she found the bloody pulp of his spleen, the mashed-up tangle of his intestines, a wail tore from her throat—a scream, harsh and guttural, an animal cry of anguish.

"Why didn't I notice any of this?" Katara cried, her body heaving with sobs. The tears flooding down her face dripped from her chin to join the glowing mass of water that covered Aang's body.

But the answer was obvious. The truth sat like a cold weight in her stomach.

Before this moment, she didn't know the horrifying extent of Aang's injuries because she couldn't.

Because she didn't have any water.

"Make sure you always have water on hand," Yagoda had said.

"A healer without water is useless," she whispered, finishing her teacher's maxim.

"You're not useless, Katara."

Her brother's voice came from the shadows, where he sat with his back against a barrel. He leaned forward and scooted into the yellow pool of light cast by the whale oil lamp hanging above them.

"If I had water, I could have started healing Aang when we were flying on Appa. I could have healed him. He wouldn't be in such a mess. I could have healed him," Katara said, her words tumbling out pressured and frantic. "The longer you wait, the worse things get. The worse things get, the harder healing becomes. The harder healing becomes—"

She cut off, unable to bring herself to continue that line of thought.

"I didn't have any water," she insisted instead. "I didn't have any water."

"That's because there wasn't any water," Sokka pointed out. "We were flying on Appa."

"There was water!" she snapped. "In the crystal catacombs. We were surrounded by water. I even used the water to escape."

Katara looked down at her hands sheathed in the soft light of the water spread over Aang's belly. So much water, when only moments before, she'd had nothing. But she could have had more. And she could have had it sooner.

Her voice dropped to a murmur. "I could have brought the water in the catacombs with me," she said to herself. "I should have. But I didn't think of it. I don't know why."

"You were trying to escape with Aang, Katara—"

She jerked her head up to glare at Sokka. "Why didn't I bring any water with me? I'm useless without water! I wasn't thinking. I'm so stupid! Useless!"

"Katara, listen to me. You're not useless."

"I should have known better. The lightning killed Aang. Of course he's going to have serious injuries. I should have started healing him earlier. I waited too long. Now he's going to scar. His bones won't heal right. He's going to have a weak heart—"

"Katara."

"—he's bleeding so much inside that I don't know—"

"Katara. Stop. Just stop." Sokka's hand fell on her shoulder. The weight of his hand was strong, reassuring. Steady. "Take a deep breath."

She did as he instructed, but her breath was not so much deep as it was shallow and fast. But it was a breath.

"You saved Aang, Katara."

She shook her head at her brother. "It wasn't me. It was the spirit water—"

"It was you," he said, interrupting before she could spiral again. "The spirit water helped, but the one who brought him back to life was you."

Sokka's eyes bore into her, their normally skeptical blue now filled with awe and hope, even through an undercurrent of worry. "You're far from useless, Katara. You're incredible. And you're the healer that Aang needs."

Katara held his gaze for a long moment. Then she turned back to Aang. She shifted her focus away from examination to healing, and she began to mend his broken body.

Sokka's right. Aang needs a healer, and the only healer around here is me.

I'm going to heal you, Aang, she told him silently. I'm going to heal you with everything I've got.

As the glow of the water intensified, as she channeled chi to his heart—ever so carefully, since the rest of his body had hardly any chi to spare—one question nagged at her:

But will I be enough?


Only after the sun had dawned did Katara notice the blood leaking from Aang's ears.

The bleeding must have been concealed by shadows the previous night and was now laid bare in the white light of morning. It was just a trickle, and the blood had already dried dark and cracked in the ridged recesses of his ears.

Which only panicked Katara more, because that meant the injury had gone untreated for more than half a day.

"Time is of the essence," Yagoda was fond of saying. "Wounds and injuries, sicknesses and ailments, should be treated at the earliest sign possible. Time can be for you or against you. If you want time to be on your side, you need to begin healing early—before it's too late."

Katara scrambled to sit upright—she had fallen asleep next to Aang on the tarp—and quickly drew fresh water from the bucket to cover her hands, which she pressed against his ears.

Both his eardrums had ruptured clean through.

Katara bit back a cry and forced herself to focus, concentrate, not give in to the despair trying to pull her down, down, down. She strained to find pockets of chi that had not yet been drained or damaged.

There—his thyroid and his jaw muscles. They still have some chi left.

I hope to Tui and La that it's enough.

She directed the life energy to flow to his ears and began to mend the shredded membranes of his eardrums. Slowly, slowly…too slowly.

By the time the water was spent, its healing properties too depleted for further use, Katara had only restored a tiny section of his filmy, delicate eardrums. It wasn't enough, not if he was ever going to hear again. The water fell from her hands and collected in a puddle on the oiled tarp beneath Aang's head.

She didn't know if it was because she'd only slept a handful of hours, or because she was stretched beyond her limit. The liquid beneath Aang's head was just water. She knew that. But she couldn't help imagining that Aang was lying in a pool of his own blood.

Katara seized his ears, the two shells within her hands untouched and whole, giving lie to the devastation that lay within. In fact, his face betrayed no clue as to the ruin that his body had become. The only sign was his breathing, which came raspy and shallow through lips slack and pale.

No, that wasn't the only sign.

The other sign was his eyes. They should be open, looking at her as he smiled, soft and gray and full of life. But they remained closed, shuttered against the world.

He's going to wake up, she told herself, willing herself to imagine Aang gazing at her with that lopsided smile of his. I know he will.

He's going to wake up.

He has to.

Katara touched her forehead to Aang's cheek, tucking her nose beneath the lobe of his ear. As her tears dampened his skin, she found herself wishing that tears were all it took to bring him back.

But even if her healing could bring him back, if she couldn't heal his ears, he would never be able to hear her voice again. That thought filled her with a grief that almost sank her.

"I'm sorry, Aang," she said, sobbing into his neck. "I'm sorry I didn't think to check your ears yesterday. I'm sorry I didn't know that lightning could tear your eardrums apart. The healers didn't teach me about what lightning can do because they don't know what lightning can do. The North Pole is too cold for lightning storms. And the Northern Water Tribe stayed out of the war, so they hardly ever fought against firebenders, let alone lightningbenders."

After her sobs died down, she closed her eyes and breathed. She breathed in the scent that was Aang—clean and simple and precious, nearly drowned out by the more pressing odors of stale sweat and smoke.

"I hope it's not too late," Katara whispered. "I hope I can heal your ears. Because you need to hear again. The world needs you to hear again, because you're the Avatar.

"I need you to hear again, too. Because…it's you." She slid her hand from his ear to his cheek, cradling his face, holding him against her. "I don't know why, but I can't stand the idea that you might not ever hear my voice again," she said, the last words cracking as she spoke. "I can't stand the thought of living in a world where I can hear your voice, but you can't hear mine."


Healing the wound on Aang's back was the task Katara dreaded the most.

Aang lay before her, front-side down. The oiled tarp that had been his bed on the first night was replaced with caribou hides several days ago. Katara had already taken off his blanket and the wrappings that held his bandages in place. Now she had to remove the bandages themselves.

She tugged at the stiff linen cloth stuck to Aang's back. It took her several tries to pry up the edges, her fingers trembled so much. The cloth strips peeled away in a single matted sheet, their undersides caked with the yellow-gray poultice she'd slathered on to guard against infection.

In the center of his back, the narrow band of blue had been blotted out by a shallow crater of raw flesh ringed by a halo of angry red skin. Even though Katara had spent many hours tending to his lightning burn, laying eyes on that section of scorched tissue still made her sick. The gruesome sight of his wound, however, was not the only reason why her stomach churned.

Open wounds were not new to Katara. She had tended to holes torn into the sides of warriors in the healing huts of the North and the tents of home. She had bandaged gashes in the limbs of farmers when she and her friends passed through Earth Kingdom villages.

But she never dreamed she would see a wound like this on Aang.

How naïve, that belief. For he was the Avatar.

The Avatar would have to fight, and the Avatar would get injured.

And, sometimes, the Avatar's wounds would be grave.

But Katara didn't care that Aang was the Avatar and that the Avatar was bound to get hurt. The wound was wrong. It shouldn't be there. Aang shouldn't have his insides exposed, red and raw and oozing, where a part of him had been scoured away. The blue line of his back severed, where he had once been whole—a break that would never heal, even if the wound itself eventually did.

Her breath shuddered, and she tore her eyes away from Aang's back.

Focus. I need to focus.

The first step in healing was to clean the wound. Katara wet a cloth in clean water and wrung it out. After taking a few measured breaths, she turned back to his wound.

She sponged away clumps of congealed blood and flecks of poultice that hadn't come away with the bandages. Next, she dipped a fresh cloth into a small bowl of baijiu, the astringent fumes of alcohol burning her nose. The liquor was the warrior's companion, a potent remedy for the horrors of battle. Purified alcohol was her preferred antiseptic, but cheap liquor would do in a pinch.

Katara squeezed out the cloth, the baijiu running cool and thin between her fingers, stinging the cracks in her skin. She dabbed at the wound, wincing as she imagined how alcohol on exposed tissue must burn. But she had to clean the wound. This was one of the few times she was thankful that Aang remained asleep.

When she was done, she sheathed her hands in water and covered the wound. The healing water picked up bits of blood and tissue and eventually became too soiled to be of much use. But Katara persisted in healing even after the water's healing properties were almost completely spent, after the blue light of bending had dimmed to a sickly glow.

Normally, she would simply discard the nearly-spent water and continue healing with fresh water. But her source of healing water, the ship's supply of drinking water, was growing dangerously low.

The irony of running out of drinking water while sailing down a river to East Lake was not lost on her. But river water could only be made drinkable by boiling. Boiling meant fire, and fire meant smoke. And smoke meant catching the eye of a Fire Nation lookout.

So for now, the Water Tribe fleet depended on rain to provide water to drink. But no rain had fallen since Katara had first arrived on the ship four days ago.

There was no more water to spare, not even to heal the Avatar. The bucket near Aang's head held what remained of her allotment of precious, clean water. A second bucket by his feet was the receptacle for spent, dirty water.

"Be careful to keep clean water separate from soiled water," Yagoda had taught her. "Keep the vessels clearly marked and far apart so you don't mistake one for the other."

To conserve her clean water, Katara used the bare minimum to heal Aang's wound. If she had more, she could heal him better, faster. But she didn't. So she had to stretch out what she had, which meant she could only heal Aang's wound enough to stay ahead of infection.

He had other injuries, of course, but they could wait—for now. Which worked out to her advantage, because she couldn't spare any water for those injuries. But if something happened, if his insides started to bleed again, she wouldn't have enough—

She didn't want to think about that. She couldn't think about that.

Katara had to concentrate on the here and now. She couldn't let her mind wander into the potential horrors of the future. She dragged her focus back to Aang's wound.

Draw up clean water, heal, discard. Then repeat—draw up, heal, discard. She progressed from the clean bucket on her left to the dirty bucket on her right, then back again to the clean bucket. Left to right, right to left. Back and forth, over and over again.

After several repetitions—Katara did not know how many—she noticed the glow of healing had weakened, even when the water was fresh. Puzzled, she inspected the clean bucket. What she discovered made her stomach lurch.

The clean bucket was no longer clean. It wasn't completely useless, but the fresh, clean water she'd been counting on was now cloudy and soiled.

Katara had done as Yagoda had taught her. She'd kept the clean and dirty buckets separate. But between healing Aang late into the night, tossing restlessly in her sleep, and jolting awake in a cold sweat before dawn, she was exhausted.

And her exhaustion could prove to be fatal. Because at some point, she must have lost track of what she was doing and deposited dirty water into the clean bucket. Not just once, but several times.

Waterbending could do many things, but waterbending could not restore water that had been spent, nor could it make dirty water clean again.

With her clean water contaminated, Katara would use it up much faster than she'd anticipated. And when the water ran out…

A healer without water is useless.

Despair pressed down on her shoulders and crumpled her to the ground. Her hand clawed at her mouth, and she began to cry.


The night after Katara helped sink her own ship was the night Aang's heart just

stopped.

Katara was resting her hand on his chest when it happened. They were alone in his tent near the shore of East Lake—their tent, really, since Katara hadn't left his side since they had fled Ba Sing Se. Not long beforehand, Katara, Sokka, and Toph had helped the other Water Tribe warriors destroy their own boats as part of a daring plan to acquire a new ship—a Fire Nation ship.

Laying a hand on Aang's chest was something Katara found herself doing more and more. More than one week had passed since Aang was struck down in the crystal catacombs. A carpet of stubble now covered his head. By this time, she had stabilized his injuries to the point where he no longer needed constant healing. In the space between healing sessions, in the quiet moments, her hand would drift to his chest, something she did almost without thinking. As if this was where her hand was meant to be.

The rise and fall of his chest and the warmth of his skin comforted Katara, a balm for her bone-weary spirit. His breathing was no longer labored, his skin no longer clammy and pale. But this connection she had with Aang was not wholly reassuring. Even when she was at her most relaxed, a constant tension held her back a little too straight and her fingers a little too taut.

For the steady and even thudding beneath his ribs did not always stay that way. Sometimes his heart fluttered weakly, like the wings of a tiny bird beating against his ribcage. Other times, his heart galloped like he had just sprinted away from a squad of firebenders, even though he hadn't moved from his mat. These unusual rhythms were an aftereffect of the lightning strike, Katara supposed.

But the heart rhythms themselves were not what worried her. It was what came after these rhythms that froze her blood. Because when Aang's heart fluttered or galloped, beating far more quickly than it should, occasionally, very occasionally, the beats would suddenly—

Disappear.

Then just as she inhaled again, a sharp gasp after holding her breath, his heartbeat would come back.

But this time—

This time it didn't.

This time, when Katara sucked in the breath that sheer terror had snatched away, Aang's heart remained silent. She breathed in again, out again.

He didn't come back.

Stamping down the urge to scream, she summoned water from the bucket by Aang's sleeping mat—a heavy rain had come, thankfully, the morning after she'd contaminated her supply—and scrambled to sink her fingers into his chi paths. In the middle of his chest, where his chi should have pulsed with his heart, she found—

Nothing.

Because chi was connected to life, and life was bound to the heart, the chi in the rest of his body flowed slow and sluggish. When that flow inevitably ceased, Aang would cease, too.

Katara had already used up the spirit water from the North Pole. Without the spirit water, she wouldn't be able to bring him back. If Aang died—

"No," she whispered harshly. "You're not going to die."

"When the heart stops, you must flood the heart with chi over and over until it starts beating again," Yagoda had told the class. "But just as important is the breath. Breath and chi are linked. They cannot be separated. So you must also give breath to your patient. For without breath, life is impossible."

Aang's chest had fallen still, no longer moving up and down in a quiet rhythm. His breathing had stopped along with his heart.

Katara wasted no time. She tilted Aang's head back, lifted his chin, and sealed her mouth over his lips.

Give one breath, then channel a burst of chi into his heart.

But before she could pinch his nose shut, before she could breathe life into him, a soft puff of air flitted over her cheek.

And another.

And another.

The air was coming from Aang's nose. He was breathing on his own.

And his heart—it was pumping again, flooding his body with chi and life-giving blood.

Katara lifted her mouth away from his and hovered above him, reveling in the breath puffing from his nose and his lips. Easy, unlabored, mirroring the rhythm of his heart. So unlike the adrenaline-fueled pounding of her own heart.

It was just a pause. She held herself over him, arms trembling. His heart paused, then started back up again before I could do anything. It's just like the little pauses that he's had before.

Except this pause was too long. Way, way too long.

Katara let herself drift toward Aang until their noses touched, drinking in the sweet warmth of his breath. Beneath her water-covered hand, his heart pulsed strong and steady, a reassuring beat that anchored her through the dizzying spiral of terror and panic.

But she didn't bask in her relief for long. She straightened and moved her other hand to his chest and began to divert more chi to his heart. This was what she always did, afterwards. Every single time, after every pause. She didn't know if it helped. She didn't know if she was trying to heal something that could never be fixed. But she had to do something.

The door of her tent rustled, and her brother's head appeared through the flap.

"Good news, Katara! A Fire Nation ship is headed our way, and they'll be sure to spot our wrecked ships by morning," Sokka said brightly. "We'll ambush them tomorrow, after sunset. They won't know what hit 'em. And…" He stopped to take in her tear-stained face and the glow of healing water on Aang's chest. "…we'll need you to be part of the attack force."

Without looking at her brother, Katara shook her head. "Aang needs me," she said. What if his heart stops again, and he doesn't come back? What if I'm not around to do something about it? "I can't leave him."

Sokka watched Katara's hands for a moment, his gaze solemn, before catching her eye. "We can't do this without you, Katara. We need your waterbending if we're going to have any hope of success. If we fail, it's just a matter of time before we're captured, or worse. And that means Aang, too."

Katara clenched her jaw. If Aang's heart stopped for too long, and she wasn't around to heal him, he would die. But her brother was right. Without a new ship—a Fire Nation ship, to be exact—they were sitting turtle ducks. Now that Ba Sing Se had fallen, the Earth Kingdom countryside was crawling with Fire Nation troops. No ship meant either a Fire Nation prison or a permanent home in the ground.

She stared at the water surrounding her hands. The blue light almost seemed to pulse with Aang's heart. "Fine," she said tonelessly. "I guess I have no choice."

After her brother left, Katara let Aang's chi fall away from her hands. The healing water, now completely spent, splashed to the ground, useless. She laid her bare hands across Aang's chest. The calm thump-thump of his heart marched on as if nothing had happened.

"I'm sorry, Aang," she told his unconscious form. "I don't want to go on the mission tomorrow. I don't want to leave you. But I have to do it. And I promise I'll heal your heart as much as I can before then. I just…"

Her voice hitched. She stopped to swallow through the sudden lump in her throat.

"I just hope it will be enough."


The worst part about falling asleep next to Aang was waking up.

Every morning was the same. Katara woke up on her pallet next to Aang's bed to the sound of his breathing. She rolled over with hope swelling in her chest, only to find Aang exactly as she had left him the night before—lying on his back, the blanket draped over him neat and smooth and without a single wrinkle. Her hopes fell, sometimes sinking so low that she simply lay on her thin mattress, her body too heavy to move, her spirit too empty to cry.

The rest of the day was the same as every day that came before. Get up, eventually, and examine Aang's injuries. Note which injuries were improving. Troubleshoot the ones that had unexpectedly worsened. Heal the ones that needed the most attention—which always included the lightning burn on his back.

Turning Aang onto his stomach was like flipping over a sack of rice. Katara tugged at his hips and shoulders as she rolled him over, guiding the weight of his body so that he slumped onto his belly without pinning his arms. She tried not to notice how his head flopped, like he was a lifeless doll. Then he just lay there, head turned to the wall, insensible and unmoving.

After she positioned him, she healed the wound on his back. The captured Fire Nation ship provided everything she needed—a disguise that allowed her and her friends to travel in the open, and more importantly, water. The steam produced by boiling water would not appear unusual when one was already on a steamship.

The fear of running out of water no longer plagued Katara. There was so much clean water that she could bathe in it all day if she wanted to. The water supply would never run low, because the ship was equipped with machinery that could purify lake water in vast quantities—and quickly, too.

Katara had thought that having so much water meant that Aang would heal faster and finally wake up. He did heal faster—his bones, eardrums, and organs had nearly completely mended after she flooded him with clean water, that precious clean water. Even his heart no longer lapsed into unpredictable flutters and terrifying pauses. The red welts on his body, the path of lightning branded into his skin, had faded away. His foot had healed as well, though the burn on his sole was so severe that it had left a scar.

But Aang still didn't open his eyes.

The wound on his back was beginning to close, but the…energy…in that area had hardly changed since the night he was struck down. She didn't know what else to call it, that energy, because it certainly wasn't his chi. Snarled and tangled, the mass of energy spit and crackled as if lightning itself was embedded within his body.

Katara had never encountered anything like it before. At first, she had left the unusual energy alone, afraid that disturbing the twisted mass could have unexpected consequences. She had simply healed the wound burned into his flesh with the more conventional method of redirecting chi.

But the wound was healing too slowly. Even though the burn was large, spanning the space between his shoulder blades, it should not take over two weeks to close. Not when she worked on it for hours every day, submerging her hands in water until they were soft and pale and wrinkled, only to have them crack and bleed when they dried.

It was only after a scar had formed—a puckered, purple-red splotch where there should have been clear, smooth skin—did Katara dare to touch the crackling mass within the wound. They were related, somehow, the slow-healing wound and the knot of energy. That mysterious energy was also why Aang wasn't waking up. She was sure of it. There was no other explanation.

So she tried to remove it, the energy that wasn't his, that didn't belong. The first time, she yanked out so much at once that the force of it blasted her across the room. Aang cried out, back arching, body going rigid with spasms. Then he fell still.

Katara lay on the ground, trembling, the strength drained from her body. Not just because the strange energy had whipped back at her when she tried to remove it. Hearing Aang scream in pain, seeing his body seize up like that, all because of something she did—

She couldn't stand it. She didn't have the stomach to continue.

But she had to continue. Because Aang was the Avatar, and Sozin's Comet was coming.

So Katara grit her teeth and forced herself to pull out the energy from his back, one terrible strand after another. Over the next few days, she struggled to extract as much of the energy as she could without causing unnecessary pain. Remove too much, and Aang would grimace and shudder. Take out too little, and she might as well try to empty the ocean drop by drop.

"You are the most talented student that I've had the pleasure of teaching," Yagoda had told her. "Mark my words, you're going to be one of the best healers the world has ever known."

"If I'm such a great healer," Katara muttered, "why can't I get you to wake up?"

As she withdrew her hand from his back, a stream of water followed, carrying within it a shimmering trail. Aang's eyebrows pinched together, the only sign that she had caused him distress.

Katara channeled the water into a waste bucket and covered his back again with fresh water. She pressed her palms through the layer of water until they rested flat on his back, surrounding his wound on either side. "We need you, Aang," she whispered.

Aang didn't reply. His eyelids remained shut, as if he was asleep. His full head of hair was the only indication that his sleep was anything but natural.

"And you—" she said, bringing her hand to hover over the tangled-up energy, that curse, that thing "—you need a healer."

But instead of reaching for the mass crackling inside his back, Katara hesitated.

Am I doing the right thing, trying to remove this energy? Is it even helping?

Or am I only hurting you?

Everyone on the ship had full faith that she could heal Aang, when she was really just floundering in the dark. She had spent the last several days drawing out that cursed energy, hour after hour after hour. Yet there seemed to be just as much left as when she'd first started.

"I thought that once I had enough water, I could heal you right up," Katara told him.

Aang didn't answer, of course. He never did. Not anymore.

"But I was wrong. I can't heal you, not all the way."

His wound stared at her through the water, an angry red stain accusing her of the truth.

Katara's voice shook as she confessed what she had tried to hide, tried to deny. But it was what she had known all along.

"I'm sorry, Aang. Even with all this water, I can't be the healer you need me to be."

The surface of the water rippled with the tears that fell from her eyes. "I'm sorry, Aang," she said, sobs choking up her throat. "I'm sorry."


The hope of the world that rested on Aang's shoulders lay heavy in Katara's hands.

Katara watched Aang as he skidded down a frozen wave of ice, laughing with delight, when Yagoda stepped up next to her.

"The Avatar will always need someone he can depend on. Someone who he can trust to hold his life in their hands," said the old healer.

Using his momentum, Aang slid down a dip in the wave and back up again before careening into the air, riding the air currents to land on top of a totem pole. He whooped with joy and waved to Katara as he called out to her.

The corners of Yagoda's eyes crinkled as she smiled. "That someone is you, Katara."

"He can count on me," Katara said, grinning as she waved back at Aang. "I won't let him down."

Katara had been so confident in her answer to Yagoda. That had only been a few short months ago, just before they'd left the North Pole. But now, as she wrestled with the twisted snarl of energy that kept Aang from waking up, she was failing her promise.

Footsteps approached in the hallway. Sokka stepped through the open doorway and into the room.

"You look like you could use a break, Katara," he said. "It's a beautiful day. Why don't you come up to the deck to get some air?" He held up a dark red cloak just like the one draped around his shoulders. "You'll have to wear this, though, in case we run into any Fire Nation ships."

Even though they had passed through the Fire Nation barricade at the Serpent's Pass several days ago, disguises were still necessary. They wouldn't be in the clear until they crossed West Lake and made it down the river to the Mo Ce Sea.

Aang lay on the bed in front of Katara with healing water coating his back. Though the water surrounding her hands was cool, sweat dampened her underarms and her forehead as she drew out the energy from Aang's wound, taking care to extract not too little, but not too much.

"I'm kind of busy, Sokka."

Her brother sighed. "Katara, you've been working on Aang's back day and night since we took over this ship. I don't think you've even left this room. Come on, a quick break won't hurt anything."

"You don't get it, do you?" she snapped. "It's been three weeks since we escaped from Ba Sing Se, and Aang still hasn't woken up. The world is counting on him to end the war. Unless we can find another healer who can wake him up, he has to count on me."

Sokka took a deep breath, clearly trying to get his exasperation under control. "Listen, Katara. You've done so much for Aang already. You healed his injuries—I know, I know, he still has that wound on his back—but you healed him, and that's already so amazing."

He paused to look her over. Katara knew what he was seeing—the loose strands of hair that had escaped her braid, the dark circles under her eyes.

"You've been cooped up in here for way too long," he said. "Sitting around and worrying about Aang all the time isn't good for you."

She glared at him. "I'm not just sitting around and worrying!"

"You know what I mean. There's no way you're spending every single moment healing Aang. I know you care about him, but sometimes you have to step away for a bit."

Katara didn't say anything. She drew out another strand of energy, biting her lip at Aang's slight grimace, then plunged her hands back into the water covering his wound. She could barely feel it, but it was there. His heartbeat. The thudding was muffled—trying to detect his heartbeat from the back wasn't easy to do—but it was enough for her to tell that his heart was beating faster than before.

"This twisted energy in his back is the reason he's not waking up. It has to be," she said. "I keep trying to remove it. But every time I do, his heart starts to race. The more I pull out, the faster it goes. When his heart goes too fast—and it always goes too fast, at some point—I have to stop what I'm doing and heal his heart to slow it down."

Katara let her hands rest on Aang's back, the faint pulse of his heart stuttering against her palms. "I don't know if I'm making things better or making things worse."

Her hands lay on either side of his wound, framing the puckered, angry scar between them. A sight that haunted her when she closed her eyes, a reality that consumed her when she awoke.

"What if I can't heal him, Sokka?" she said in a small voice.

Admitting her doubt released a dam, and all the terror and grief and anguish that she'd been too exhausted, too numb to feel, that she'd kept stuffed down inside—all of that swelled up and over and the suffocating weight of it almost drowned her.

The sobs that racked her body almost smothered her voice, but her deepest fear still rose to the surface and made itself heard:

"What if…what if he doesn't wake up?"

Sokka wound an awkward arm around Katara's shoulders and held her as she cried—long, wrenching sobs, all her hope and all her despair pouring out until she was hollowed out inside.

When her tears finally dried, Katara leaned against her brother, too drained to feel anything but empty. They sat together on the edge of Aang's bed, watching the steel-plated walls.

Sokka was the one who spoke first. "I wonder…" he began.

"Wonder what?" Katara mumbled, only vaguely interested in what he was about to say.

"I wonder if you can heal Aang…without water."

Katara sat up straight and stared at her brother. "What are you talking about? I can't heal Aang without water. I'm useless without water!"

"'I'm useless without water,'" Sokka said, repeating her words and giving her a curious look. "Why do you keep saying that?"

"It's something that Yagoda taught us. She would say it over and over, because it's the most basic and most important rule of healing. 'Make sure you always have water on hand, because a healer is useless without water.'"

He frowned. "Are you sure that's what she said?"

"Of course I'm sure! Why wouldn't I be sure?"

Sokka shrugged. "I don't know Yagoda, but it sounds odd for a master healer to say that healers are useless when they don't have any water."

Katara crossed her arms, miffed that he had the nerve to question her. "Odd or not, it's what she said," she huffed.

He held up a hand to fend off her indignation. "All right, all right. You don't have to get mad at me."

Then he turned to study Aang, who still lay prone on the bed. His face grew thoughtful. "Whenever Aang goes into the Avatar state and goes berserk, you're the only one who can calm him down. You're the only one who can bring him out of it."

Katara nodded, but she didn't see his point.

"Aang was in the Avatar state when Azula shot him with lightning, right?" Sokka went on. "What if he's trapped, somehow?"

"Trapped? In the Avatar state?" She blinked in confusion. "But he's not in the Avatar state. His arrows aren't glowing."

"Maybe it's like a reverse Avatar state or something."

"What?" Katara scratched the side of her head. "That doesn't even make sense."

"Hey, I'm just throwing ideas out there," her brother said with a shrug. "But what I'm trying to get at is that maybe the kind of healing Aang needs has nothing to do with bending."

She held her hands in her lap, palms down. Red patches of dry skin covered the back of her hands, and cracks lined her knuckles. "I can't do anything more with conventional healing," she said. "The only way to get that knot of energy out is to bend it out—"

Sokka stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. "That's not what I'm talking about."

Katara wrinkled her brow, irritation beginning to layer on top of her confusion. "Then what are you talking about?"

A beat of silence passed before Sokka answered. "Aang may be the Avatar, but he's our family, too. We all love him, Katara, and we're all worried about him. But…" His eyes grew unusually serious. "…no one loves him like you do."

His words knocked the air out of her. She was only dimly aware that his answer didn't seem to address her question.

"I think that's why you're able to bring him out of the Avatar state. Maybe you can bring him out of this, too."

Just when Katara had started to breathe again, Sokka's words froze the breath inside her lungs.

Her shock at his suggestion must have shown on her face, because Sokka waved his hands frantically and said, "I'm not saying that you can magically wake him up or anything. But maybe…maybe what he needs has nothing to do with water or bending."

Katara frowned, perplexed. She mulled over her brother's words, but she still couldn't quite pick out what he meant.

Sokka didn't seem interested in explaining, either. He abruptly stood up, arched his back, and stretched. "I'm gonna head up to the deck. Dad needs me to look at the piping system." He headed to the doorway, but halted before stepping over the threshold. "Think about what I said. Okay?"

Katara nodded. Then he disappeared down the hallway.

After Sokka was gone, Katara carefully wiped off Aang's back, dressed him in clean bandages, and rolled him onto his back.

He lay unmoving, a lifeless shell—his head lolled to the side, his arms sprawled askew, his legs didn't quite line up with his body. Instead of a boy resting on a bed of dark crimson, Aang looked like a broken doll lying on sheets soaked with blood.

Katara crouched over him, letting her head fall into the space between his neck and his shoulder and clenched a fistful of the red sheets in her hand. She would have cried, but she no longer had any tears left to shed.

After that wave of grief faded away, she lifted her head. She was so close to Aang's face that if he opened his eyes, she would have a hard time explaining to him what she was doing. But his eyes remained closed, the fringes of his eyelashes like dark lines that sealed them shut. He had grown pale over the weeks, and the shock of black hair that had grown in made him look…different. Like someone she didn't know. The only part of him that was still Aang was the blue arrow that graced his forehead. For even his face no longer belonged to him—a motionless, unchanging blank. Katara was starting to forget what he looked like when he smiled.

She took his head between her hands, fanning her fingers through his hair. "Please wake up, Aang," she said softly. "Please wake up."

His eyes didn't open. She didn't expect them to.

She stroked her thumb over his temple. "We need you to come back to us." Her voice lowered to a whisper. "I need you to come back."

"No one loves him like you do," her brother had said.

Katara kissed Aang between the eyebrows, a slow and gentle touch of her lips to the soft blue of his arrow. Then she held him, leaning their foreheads together, feeling his breath graze over her skin, that warm reassurance that he had not completely left this world. She still wasn't sure of what to make of her brother's words, but she was beginning to understand.

She lay down on the bed next to Aang with their faces turned toward each other. Her fingers brushed the tip of his arrow, then floated down his nose and hovered over his lips. The lips that had smiled and laughed, that had spoken precious words that she treasured in her heart. She had felt the pressure of his lips against hers in the Cave of the Two Lovers, and again for a terrifying moment when his heart had stopped just days ago.

Katara wondered if she would ever feel their lips joined together again, and she found herself wishing that perhaps someday, she could.

Her fingers drifted down further and settled over his neck. His pulse beneath her fingertips bounded strong and fast—not dangerously so, but faster than it should. She remembered, earlier, that his heartbeat had quickened while she was pulling the energy out of his wound. Normally, she would have reordered the chi paths in his heart right after she was done with his back, but Sokka's surprise visit had thrown her off her routine.

The galloping of Aang's pulse was a jarring reminder of the task she had left unfinished. The weight of her responsibility pressed down on her, heavy and relentless, crushing the tenderness she had just begun to allow herself to feel.

What am I doing? Why am I lying here, wondering what it means to love Aang, when I should be healing him?

But instead of rising to resume the work of healing Aang, Katara could not bring herself to move. She had never been close to Aang like this before. In the last three weeks, she had constantly touched him—dressed and undressed him, changed his bandages, rolled him and moved him, held him upright against her as she bent liquid food down his throat. But she had never touched him the way she was doing now, with her arm draped across his chest and her hand cradling his neck.

And she discovered that lying next to Aang, touching him just to be close to him, was the first time since the crystal catacombs that she was able to rest.

Somehow, Aang must have felt the difference in her touch, because his racing pulse started to slow.

"Maybe the kind of healing Aang needs has nothing to do with bending. Maybe you can heal him without water."

Katara moved her fingers from his neck and reached down for his hand. She brought his palm to his chest and held him there, her fingers filling the spaces between his. Though the thudding of his heart was quieter through their joined hands, the impulse was strong enough that she could feel his heart slowing, slowing, slowing, until its beat was calm and even, like the rhythmic rise and lull of a ship as it rocked on ocean waves.

Maybe Sokka was onto something, after all. Maybe she could heal Aang without bending.

Without bending…

Her teacher's words came to her then, as clear as when she had first heard them spoken.

"Make sure you always have water on hand," Yagoda had said. "For without water, a healer's bending is useless."

Katara wasn't useless without water. Her bending was useless without water.

For even without water, she was still a healer. Even without water, she could still heal Aang.

And Aang, in turn, began to heal her.

Katara closed her eyes. The beat of his heart mirrored hers, his steady rhythm a counterpoint to her own. She lay next to Aang, the closeness they shared enveloping her, stealing over her skin and wrapping around her. Her muscles loosened, and the stiffness in her shoulders melted away.

Aang still hadn't woken up. The twisted energy in his back hadn't gone away. But for the first time in weeks, Katara felt at peace.

After some time, she lifted her hand away from Aang's and sat up. The glow from the candle on the low table near the bed was warm, almost cozy. The redness of the sheets was more like rust and less like blood. Four walls of dark metal bounded the space that was Aang's room, which suddenly felt too familiar and too small.

Sokka was right. Taking a break would be good for her. It was a beautiful day, and she should get some air.

Katara laid Aang's hand back down by his side. It was probably her imagination, but he looked like he was merely asleep, as if he had just closed his eyes to get some rest. She leaned over to kiss his forehead once more, then walked out to join Sokka and the others on the main deck.

Shortly after she left, for the first time in three weeks, Aang's eyes fluttered open.