Disclaimer: Don't own Avatar or anything related to it. Which actually may not even apply to this fic, this time around. But there's definitely something in here owned by Michael Di Martino, Bryan Konietzko, and Nickelodeon. If you're bored at work or school, you are more than welcome to comb the fic looking for it.
He was crying and she was numb. She'd been numb nearly since she dropped her mother's hand three days before, her parents swallowed in a sea of stinking bodies and broken hopes.
Sure, there had been tears at first. The same kind of tears that now made trails down her little brother's face. But then there was just numbness, and she embraced it with all the strength remaining in her twelve-year-old heart. He needed her now, after all. And Mom had said not to cry.
They had wandered the ferry dock the night they were lost, huddling close to each other for warmth and protection. And every pair of empty eyes skimmed over the two lost children, looking for the things that they had lost, too. But no one was missing them.
Food off the street, nights in wood piles that radiated heat, and only the elephant-rats seemed to notice they existed at all. Every day, they would renew their search. Every day, it had been fruitless, and a knot burned next to hunger in her stomach.
Maybe they've left on the ferry for the Fire Nation. Maybe they're at Gran's house, waiting.
"I hurt," the boy had sobbed that first day, holding his own stomach, and her heart broke for him.
"I hurt," the boy sobbed the second day, and she just wanted him to shut up. She was hungry, too. And scared, and tired, but she wasn't allowed to cry. So instead of sadness, she had anger.
Anger for the tiny thing that clung to her even as he begged for their mother. Anger that she was thrown in this situation, barely more than a child herself, and that her mother had said that she couldn't cry.
So much anger that the day she found the numbness, she had told her sniffling brother that they would head home on the ferry in the morning. She assured him that when they were with Gran, Mom and Dad would be there, too. They were looking for them on the ferry.
He was too sad to care. But she knew it wasn't him she was trying to console.
And as they stumbled through the sea of bodies just as they had three days before, she still searched vainly for two familiar faces. Just as before, numb, uncaring faces were all she found. Trailing behind her, her brother tugged tiredly on her hand, his tears now reduced to hiccups.
How sweaty his hand had become, both sticking and sliding against her palm. How grateful she would be just to breathe, and cry, and feel warm again. Even without thinking, she felt her grip on him loosen, felt his sweaty fingers slip out of hers. It would only take seconds to lose him, and then there would be no reason left to feel anything at all.
"Sissy," her brother mumbled, so low that she could barely hear him in the crowd, "I miss Mommy."
Clutching his hand even tighter, she began to cry.
A/N: Something about children suffering just kills me. So I invite more tender-hearted readers, such as myself, to believe that she and her brother found their parents either just before boarding the ferry or just after arriving at their grandmother's. And there were hugs and kisses and rainbows.
ETA in mention of the Fire Nation. It's small, but the narrator's 12, lost, and hungry. She wouldn't even think about it. Rest assured, though, this occurs during the mass exodus back to the Fire Nation.