a/n: had to replace this chapter due to missing labels on the split POVs. Now you won't suddenly find yourself reading halfway through and wondering why Katara is being referred to as "he".
Disclaimer: I don't own Avatar.
Chapter 2
+Zuko+
"We just want to help you, Zuko."
"Right."
"We just need more information."
"I've given you plenty."
"We just need more information."
"Do I hear an echo in here?"
"Tell me about your friend Katara."
"Again? I've already told you; she has brown hair, blue eyes-"
"No, not that. You said she was a waterbender. That she has special powers."
"How is that going to help you find her?"
"There are 6 billion people out there. We need information."
Zuko stood up, slamming the palms of his hands on the table between them. He looked furious.
"This interrogation is over." He breathed, eyes narrowing dangerously.
The middle-aged man who had been previously introduced as Detective Jones, sat across from Zuko staring politely back at him. It seemed like the questions had gone on for hours in one endless loop but the man still smiled politely. No, that was what Zuko had thought it had been, now it just looked like a mocking smile.
"Very well, Zuko." The detective said, standing up. "Just wait here a moment."
Jones stood and headed toward the door. Zuko sat back down, cursing under his breath. He covered his face with his hands, thinking.
Outside, Jones entered the room right next to the one he had exited. It was well-lit with a computer monitor showing split screens of the same images of the room next door. On on of the monitors, a thermo cam image showed the subject in red and yellow.
"Good news?" he asked the technician who was monitoring another screen filled with graphs and colorcoded bars.
"Soon." the technician answered, gesturing toward the therma cam. "Guy's under a hell of a lot of stress. He'll crack sooner or later. Bad temper though."
The detective chuckled. "Not in my line of work. Sweet as a lamb, actually."
The technician nodded. "Well, I guess it's a good sign that he hasn't chucked his chair yet."
A cellphone vibrated on a nearby table. Detective Jones slid it open and answered.
"The subject's cracking, sir, we're well on our way. Yes. Yes. He hasn't, sir, but he'll talk. Yes sir, I'll keep you posted."
The interrogator ended his call, smiling. It would be the biggest pay-in of his lifetime. And to think that he had ever thought his police interrogations fulfilling. Thank god those days were over.
"Sir! I think you should see this!" The technician called urgently. Jones hastened to join the technician who was typing frantically on his keyboard.
"Good lord" was all the detective managed to say. The screen with four sections were showing the same thing: chaos. Inside the interrogation room, there was a gigantic ball of fire sitting on the floor. Zuko was nowhere in sight.
"We've gotta get him outta there!" Jones shouted as he ran towards the door.
He had barely reached for the handle when the room exploded. One-way mirrors had gone out of fashion after the 2016 hit film 'Cut and Bind'. There had been a scene where the protagonist had smashed the mirror with a chair during a police interrogation which then became so plagiarized in real life that real police stations had to get interior renovations. It was lucky for Detective Jones because instead of being pierced with flying shards of glass, he was knocked off his feet and slammed into the opposite wall. Bleeding from the head, Jones barely saw the human flame sprint past him down the hall.
+Katara+
Aang's pale, pained features swam blurry and distorted before the void. A single pearly tear left a trail down his hollowed cheeks. And then, without warning, the void split open and fire rained down.
"AANG!"
Katara tried to sit up and immediately experienced the sensation of having one's head smashed in repeatedly with a sungi horn. Rolling onto all fours, she retched onto the ground which felt like volcanic rock. But that couldn't be right, could it? All things accounted for, she shouldn't even have a mouth to vomit with and yet she seemed physically uninjured. What was going on?
Head still spinning, Katara forced her eyes open. It was an unusual scene. She was sitting in an alleyway lined with wheeled containers overflowing with black bags. Katara could smell the stench that wasn't from her own pool of sick. The walls on either side of her were the color of red mud, not stone. Where was this place?
Slowly, she got to her feet, taking in her surroundings more carefully. One side of the alleyway was a dead end. On the other end she could hear the bustle of pedestrians and loud honking and rushing sounds.
'Aang,' she thought, taking a step forward. 'I'm coming. Hold on.'
+Avatar World+
No matter how many times he replayed in his mind's eye, it didn't make sense. It might simply have been the fact that it took some time to recover from a death but he did not care. It did not add up.
"I know what I saw." he kept saying stubbornly.
Toph sighed. "I can't argue with what you 'saw' but that volcano did explode. I might be blind but I'm not deaf."
They had coaxed Appa into swimming to the nearest port near the shore but Appa had been in no state to fly. His foot had been badly burned and without the help of Katara, there was no way to heal him. Luckily the nearest farmer had allowed them nurse him in a hay barn where they, with the help of the village doctor, managed to patch him up.
Toph and Sokka, unable to contact the Fire Palace which was far off on another island, they had taken to sitting around the flying bison. Sokka had brought up the subject of the the flash of light he had seen just after the explosion when he had been certain that Toph had stopped crying. Toph, however, was not convinced.
"Look, we can't just sit here and do nothing!" Sokka said, a little louder than he had meant. He immediately looked appologetically at Toph before he realized his mistake. Toph didn't miss a beat.
"Well, I'm glad you're memory is fully intact. That really makes your story believable." she said sarcastically.
+Aang+
Smoke... or was it mist?
Aang looked around the place. He had been here before, he knew it. But the spirit world he remembered had never been this cold, had it? His breath came out in shivering gasps of fog.
"H-hello?"
No one answered.
"Hello?" He tried once more. "Roku? Anyone?"
A slight rustling noise came from his right. He jumped. There was so much mist that he could not see what was making the noise.
"Who's there?" he asked, betraying a trace of fear in his voice.
The rustling noise came again, louder this time and with a sense of foreboding, Aang got into his fighting stance. Whatever was coming, he could take it.
"Meow."
Aang almost fell flat on his face. As he leapt two feet into the air preparing to attack, he stopped in midair, staring down into the yellow eyes of white cat. He floated back down again, not taking his eyes off of this strange yet oddly welcoming feline.
"Mew." The cat purred, rubbing itself along Aang's legs as though he had always been its favorite master. Aang hestitated before stooping down to stroke its furry head.
The mist seemed to thin and Aang, staring curiously down at the cat, wondered if this animal had something to do with it. It was strange for the cat to suddenly appear out of the mist. As far as the young Avatar could recall, he had never seen a cat in the spirit world up to this point. If this was the spirit world, anyway.
Plop. Plop. Plop.
Aang looked up, astonished, to see rain, actual rain, falling from the white nothingness above him. It started drizzling but then immiedately escalated into a downpour. The cat began yowling fretfully.
"Come on, buddy. Let's get you out of here." Aang muttered, scooping up the white mass of fur.
It was apparent to him at once that there was nowhere to hide. The mist seemed endless and whenever he tried to waterbend the rain out his eyes, he couldn't do it. The cat was now squirming in his hands, scratching at his clothes. Aang kept running, desperately trying to see through the rain and the darkening sky. Soon, it was impossible to tell which way was up or down. Aang just stood there, soaking to the skin and trying to keep a grip on the writhing, spitting cat.
"No!"
Hands wet from the continuing rain, he dropped the cat. He felt it slip between his legs with a splash, fleeing into the blackness. It was only then that Aang realized that he was ankle deep in rainwater and it was rising at an alarming speed. He tried jumping but he could only jump as much as any other 13 year old boy. He tried to waterbend but it was no use.
"HELP!" he shouted, calling into the deafening roar of the downpour. "SOMEBODY!"
He was now waist deep in water. He waded to his left and then to his right.
"Anybody..." Aang wfhispered. He couldn't shout anymore. The water had reached his lips...
+Katara+
If anyone had ever told her that she would be wandering through an enormous city made of metal after experiencing a volcano explosion, she would have pinned them to the nearest wall with a couple of ice spears and that would have been the end of that. However, she couldn't solve the problem as easily when she was actually wandering through enormous city made mostly of metal and she was weak from having tried to save herself and the Fire Lord from certain death.
"Hey, move it, retard!" An angry man shouted as he shoved Katara to one side. Katara only caught a glimpse of his crisp business suit before he was swallowed by the streaming crowd. Katara was too tired to feel angry or indignant.
After an hour of being pushed along the jam-packed streets and being called everything from 'dumbass' to 'Joel Shumacher'(whoever that was), Katara found refuge at a place called "President J. Rowen National Park". She sat on an empty bench, kicking away an empty can of beer on the ground. The grey sky could never have looked so gloomy. It almost reminded her of Mai before she had started dating Zuko.
Katara hung her head. Not only had she wasted valuable time with strangely dressed people in this heartless city, she had also failed to find Zuko. Zuko, who had so generously answered a stupid, stupid request, could probably be anywhere. It was a nightmare. What if he had ended up in the ocean? Did he know how to swim?
Hundreds of thoughts swirling in her mind, the waterbender lay down on bench, feeling the wave of fatigue roll over her. Maybe a little rest would help...
Katara... KATARAAAAAAAAA!!
Katara jerked her head up so quickly, she cricked her neck. As luck would have it, this turned out to be a good thing. At the exact moment that Katara had heard that shrill, agonizing scream in her head, a bullet had came whizzing at her head. Instead of lodging into her skull, the bullet missed her by millimeters and hit the back of the bench which splintered. Startled screams of passersby told Katara at once that this was not something to stare curiously at. It might not have been a weapon she recognized but it was a weapon and this meant a battle.
Quick as a flash, Katara darted off the bench and snuck behind it. After another missed bullet drove into the bench, Katara made a mad dash to the nearest tree. More shots and then...
"Come out, Katara."
Had she not recently been attacked, Katara would have stuck her head out in a mixture of relief and gratitude for someone having called her by her given name. Unfortunately, the gravelly voice was obviously the enemy and she had no intentions of dying right then.
"Come out with your hands on your head. We won't hurt you."
'Fat chance.' Katara thought, hatred boiling in the pit of her stomach. 'How stupid do they think I am?'
The second the thought rose to her mind, she registered how stupid she really was. Why had she not considered the fact that there might be chance that she was less than welcome in this foreign land? What had she been thinking when she had chosen to sleep in a public place where anyone and everyone could see her? Why had she not taken any time to find water?
Her numb fingers found her belt. Her water skin was not there. She had lost it on Mt. Fudiyu some time during the commotion and had not realized up to that point.
She heard a metallic clicking noises behind her. The grass beneath her feet squelched. It was time.
"Fire!"
The minute Katara's foot stepped outside the her hiding spot, a dozen or so bullets came flying in her direction.
Splash!
Katara jumped at the last possible second, shooting upward on an arc of water. The bullets shattered on contact with Katara's bridge as it turned to solid ice. The waterbender somersaulted as she landed, drawing up a fresh sheet of instantly freezing water. The next couple of bullets smashed the ice but Katara had already fled.
"AFTER HER!!" the male voice shouted and a stampede of footsteps could be heard but Katara did not look back.
Running as though the ground was splitting apart right behind her, Katara hurtled through the park, pounding the pavement beneath her.
President J. Rowen Park had been built during the president's short time in office before being booted barely two years later for bribery and as one fashion magazine put it, "stupidest hairstyle America has ever seen". The park had one main feature and that was the lake in the middle. People used to fish in the lake before a rumor circulated that the mayor had secretly dumped chemical waste into its depths. Katara had no time to consider if the lake was poisoned as she jumped in, breaking the glassy smooth surface.
The team of men stopped in their tracks, aiming their rifles at the rippling body of water. The leader motioned the others to stand at ease and stepped forward. The lake was so murky to see into.
"What the hell-" The leader muttered as the middle of the pool started boiling violently.
BOOM!
It was as though a hurricane had hit. The middle of the pool shot upward with Katara barely visible at the top. Waves crashed into the shocked looking men. Ice spears flew in every direction, pinning a fleeing sniper into the nearest tree but the scruff of his neck. And then-
How long had it been, really, that she had felt this angry? Perhaps she had felt this venomous hatred when she had found out her mother had been murdered. Or perhaps the time Zuko had deceived her in the crystal caves. But in all truth there was nothing compared to what was pumping in her veins, teaching her to create chaos. Katara's arms flew up in a sort of slash over her head and gravity seemed to have become obsolete. In seconds, she was surrounded by a circular wall of water, sloshing and spiraling around her.
The leader, coughing spluttering from swallowing a mouthful of lake water looked up at the chaotic scene.
"Good god" was all he could mouth as the wall, comprising of every last drop of water that had filled the lake, became one single circular wave and was launched into every direction.
+Clivian+
"Impressive." Clivian murmured, gazing into the monitor as though it contained all his prized possessions. "Most impressive."
Through his headset he heard a familiar gruff voice say, "Sir, we've lost track of target."
Still gazing at the live feed of the wreckage at Lake Rowen, he answered calmly, "Well, then. Go find her, Mr. Salwink. And remember to send your best."
+Katara+
Panting and soaking, the waterbender ran even though her side felt like a knife was wedged between her ribs. But there was no stopping. If she stopped, she would be killed by who knew what other terrible forces this world held. There was no question, not a sliver of doubt anymore that this was not her world. Not Aang's.
"Hey."
Katara, too exhausted to even cry, wheeled around to face her new assailant when she stopped, dumbfounded.
It was Zuko.