Chapter Seven: Hell or High Water

When Katara first woke up, she was on a ship. The metal room she was in was shrouded in shadow, but she could feel the waves rocking the vessel. Her body was tied up, making it hard to move, and her mouth was gagged with some dirty rag. She only held consciousness for a few seconds before the darkness consumed her.

When Katara woke up for the second time, she was being carried through a cave. She let out a small groan, trying to collect her thoughts. It was hard to see straight. Everything was fuzzy. Where was she? The last thing she could remember was… a boat? Where was Aang? Why was she here all alone? Why was she tied up? Who had tied her up? Where was Aang?

"Careful with her," she heard a gruff voice say. "She's damaged goods, but important goods."

She tried to say something, but the words wouldn't come out, as she slipped away again…

When Katara woke up for the third time, she scraped together enough resolve to stay up. Blinking open bleary eyes, she was perplexed as to why she felt like she was simultaneously standing and falling over, until she noticed the chains. Her hands and forearms had shoved into metal sleeves, making anything but the slightest of movements with her fingers impossible. Thick iron chains were attached to the end, leading to twin pillars shooting out from the steel floor. Her ankles had been bolted down as well, though the snares keeping them in place were far less heavy duty. Katara was leaning forward, letting gravity take her, but the chains refused to let her fall. She tried to tug on her bindings as her memory came back to her.

The Southern Raiders are here! her inner voice screamed. They blew up the ship, and, and… where did they take me?

"She's awake!" announced a deep voice.

"What?" Katara babbled to no one in particular.

"I'll handle this," said another voice firmly. "No one else in or out, got that?"

"Yes, sir!"

The solid door across from Katara heaved open with an almighty squeal of unoiled hinges, and a figure emerged. It was a man clad in a modified Fire Navy officer's war uniform, with various Raider flairs decorating it alongside a symbol she had never seen before, the head of a roaring lion with fire for a mane.

"Hello, savage," the officer spat, walking closer to her. "Finally joining us in the land of the living?"

"Wh-where am I?" coughed Katara.

"I'm not at liberty to say."

"Why am I here? What do you want from me?"

The Raider grinned. "Young lady, we want nothing from you but your presence."

"My… presence?"

"How else would we draw in the Avatar and the rest of his idiotic friends at their weakest?"

She grimaced. "You don't know what you're doing."

"We know exactly what we're doing."

"I… who are you?"

The Raider paused, then announced, "Of course, where are my manners? My name is General Luzon of the Southern Raiders. I lead the Simha Division."

"Never heard of it," Katara replied.

"I suppose that would be because you and your friends never saw the real war during your gallivanting. We were once part of the Fire Nation Army, and we were the most fearsome division on the front lines. We were the soldiers who took Omashu," Luzon bragged. "We've since joined with the Admiral and the Southern Raiders, to continue the good fight."

The waterbender scowled and looked up at the grizzled general for the first time, staring into his cold, dead eyes. "The war is over," she said hoarsely.

Luzon bent down, his nose mere inches from Katara's, as he said, "I'm aware. We're not delusional. We're not fighting the old war. We're starting a new one."

Her eyes widened in realization, her mind and heart suddenly sprinting together in a two-legged race. "You're insane."

"I'm sure that's what they told you before you embarked on your own 'epic' quest," the general drawled, straightening and strolling back to the door.

"Aang will stop you. We will stop you," she insisted, pulling at her chains.

Luzon just shook his head as he pulled the door open. He turned back to Katara. "And, of course, as an added bonus, we've accomplished the great original task delivered to the Southern Raiders by the Fire Lord: wipe out or capture the benders of the Southern Water Tribe."

The door slammed shut as she yanked and tugged and desperately struggled against her bonds, screaming, "Let me go, you animals! Let me go! Let me go!"

/ / | \ \

Minutes turned to hours turned to days turned to weeks. Without a window to the sky or people to talk to, time lost all meaning. Katara's initial fear had drained from her. The Raiders didn't torture her. They didn't even really hurt her, except for practically starving her with the meager, force-fed hunks of stale bread and rotting vegetables they called a meal. Bathroom breaks came twice a day, though given how dehydrated she was getting from the meager amount of water they gave her, their need had diminished over the days or weeks or months or years she had been in her metal cell. Her arms and legs were exhausted. All she wanted to do was lie down, but the Raiders refused. When she did get some sleep, it was never for long. So, for however many decades she'd been stuck in that cell, most of her time was spent staring at one of the illuminating braziers in the corner and fighting off delirium.

Is this their plan? Make me slowly go insane until they don't have to worry about me anymore? she wondered.

The most exciting parts of her days had become when she would get water. It was incredibly depressing that that had become the case, but there wasn't much she could do about that. Water was her element, and it gave her new life and some temporary mental clarity every time she was given her three swallows of liquid from a small cup at the end of a stick, attended by no less than four firebenders. Though Katara was growing weaker by the day, she was still a worrisome enough threat to warrant a small army keeping watch.

Every detail of the routine had been memorized by her. First, the door would eke open. Then in would walk two Raiders, one of whom would hold open the door as the other kept an eye on Katara and the remaining pair entered. One held the water at the end of a bronze rod, and, flanked by two of his friends, would walk until he was precisely ten feet away from the waterbender. The rod would then be thrust out, and Katara would drink down the liquid in the small cup at the end of it. All four firebenders would then slowly back out of the room, lock the door, and leave her to her thoughts for an indeterminate length of time.

About a week into this charade—she'd finally managed to pick up on what day it was from overhearing the hushed conversations of the guards outside her cell—Katara decided she'd had enough, and began formulating a plan for the next time water was delivered. Clearly, the Southern Raiders didn't fully understand just how waterbending worked.

The following morning, Katara anticipated the arrival of her water. She steadied her breathing, anxious for what was to come.

"She might be an ice savage, but I can see why she's the Avatar's choice of a whore," laughed one of the firebenders as the door swung open with a thunderous groan.

"Shut the fuck up. You're married, you shouldn't be talking that way," hissed another.

The first bender strode in and held the door, replying, "Ah, what're you gonna do, tell the commander?"

"Both of you be quiet. We're on duty," the third bender ordered, cradling the water-holding device.

Katara was limp in her chains, almost parallel to the floor, staring down through a forest of brown curls. The feet of one of the soldiers appeared at the top of her vision, and the voice belonging to them directed, "Wake up."

The waterbender didn't move, but her pulse still quickened.

"Up! Come on, wake up, you uncivilized savage! It's time for—"

Katara jerked her head up violently, causing the water in the cup to fly out and hit the bender holding it in the chin with the force of an ascending rocket. The other three guards shouted in surprise, igniting their arms with angry tongues of fire, but Katara was unfazed. The water was hers to control. She lurched her head to the right and the liquid followed, hitting her foe in the solar plexus, and sending him flying. The next Raider barely had enough time to throw a fireball before his leg was enwrapped in a watery tentacle and he was lifted in the air, impacting the ceiling and dropping to the ground, unconscious. The last bender took one look at his fallen comrades and fled out the door. Katara willed the water to come to her, forming it into a dangerously sharp blade that thusly cut through her chains. The steel mitts over her hands were shattered when she froze them in ice and smashed them into the pillars she had been tied to.

The entire encounter lasted under a minute.

Katara ran out of her cell and into a hallway. It was entirely constructed of metal, sheets of steel and iron riveted together and interspliced only with ventilation shafts that puffed in cold air and sucked out hot. Her bare feet slapped against the floor as she tore around a corner, only to come face-to-face with a duo of spear-wielding soldiers. They seemed nervous, no doubt having heard stories of the last southern waterbender. She snapped out her liquid like a whip, ricocheting off of the two's helmets and knocking them out in an instant.

Coming to a fork in the road, Katara peeled left, enraged voices and boots on metal following her. An unwitting Raider had his windpipe crushed as a water whip flattened him against the wall. Katara paused briefly to grab the canteen from his waist before running off again, leaving the soldier behind, hacking and wheezing and thoroughly confused. She emptied the container and let it join the ring of water she had spinning around her shoulders.

At some point, the metal beneath her gave way to stone, and ornate carvings began to grace the walls, though they'd been graffitied over with Southern Raider signage—an artistic tragedy, but helpful in directing Katara to a way out. She huffed and puffed, hovering on the edge of fatigue, but she pressed on, following the arrow on the wall that screamed ROOF in block letters. The waterbender ran across a staircase and took the steps two at a time, flying to the top. She burst through a steel door that had been haphazardly wedged into a stone passageway and exploded out into the light.

A strangely… blue light?

"What in the name of all that's sacred…" gasped Katara as she looked straight up.

The sky was gone. It had been replaced by another wild blue yonder—the ocean. At least, that's all that she could imagine it could be. The teal water stretched as far as the eye could see, though the sun still shone through, casting a mottled azure shade on everything. As Katara's eyes moved down, she saw something perhaps even more amazing than the sea above: a city. She stood at the top of a titanic building overlooking an expansive ancient metropolis. Aang and Zuko had told her no shortage of stories about the forgotten home of the original firebenders, and this was exactly how she had imagined that might look, but with a distinctly aquatic flavor.

"Magnificent, isn't it?" called a voice Katara had grown all too familiar with. She turned to see General Luzon materialize from the staircase she had just climbed, a half-dozen Raiders in tow.

Wide eyed and terrified, Katara said nothing.

"I suppose you're wondering where we are, and I can't very well keep you from knowing when you've seen all this," he remarked, spreading his arms wide.

"Sir," one of the grunts interrupted, "are you sure we should-"

"Silence! I call the shots! I think that the savage deserves to know where she is, so she might see how far her people have fallen."

"My people…?" Katara said, frowning.

Luzon nodded. "Yes, your people. We stand in the center of the lost city of Aegium—lost, that is, until we rediscovered it. This is the center of the forgotten civilization of the Central Water Tribe—better known as the Aquatic Empire."

"That's just a fairytale!" Katara protested. "It's a parable decrying greed and the lust for power and war and—"

"Then where are we standing right now? This was the beating heart of a ruthless empire, before your people squandered it all and scrambled for your snow huts. The Water Tribes are the pathetic scraps of a great nation! A nation you savages are not fit to call yourselves the successors to!"

"I wouldn't concern yourself with nationalism right now, General Luzon," she shot back, her chest heaving. "You all just made a big mistake."

Katara punched up at the air, grasping for the ocean hundreds of yards above, but the water would not move. Frantically, she tried again, demanding that the rapids heed her commands, but the sea refused.

"Oh, now that's not going to work," the officer sneered. "The lunar towers throughout the city are much too powerful for a single waterbender to overcome."

"The what?"

"You think the water is holding itself up?" scoffed Luzon. "There are towers dispersed throughout this city which use the power of the moon channeled by the Temple of Duality."

Katara took a step back, brandishing her water whip. "You're not going to put me back in that cell. I won't let you."

"No, I suppose we can't put you back in that cell, considering you escaped so easily. A smaller one with increased security will do, though we'll have to see what the Admiral wants."

With a guttural roar, Katara leapt forward, slicing the air with her whip. Luzon easily stepped back, the water missing by a mile, and retaliated with his own fire blast that boiled the weapon into hot air. To his surprise, Katara pulled more water from seemingly nowhere, and turned it into a handful of ice daggers that she threw at the general and his men. One of them pierced the armor of a bender, and at the sign of blood Luzon yelled, "Enough! Do it now!"

There was the sound of someone sprinting at full speed, and Katara whirled around just in time to see a figure in tight black wrappings flying towards her, the butt of their sword aimed at her temple.

And she was out like a light.