Three Families

by James Golen

Three Families seek the Avatar. Three Families find the Avatar. Three Families use the Avatar. The story of how three sets of siblings are changed by the Avatar, amidst an endless war. AU, Want of A Nail.

45. Boiling Rock

"So how are we going to get in?" one figure, draped in saturated cloaks, asked.

"Through the front door is an unpleasant but simple means," a woman at his side pointed out.

"That sounds like a terrible idea," the one alone of them who wasn't completely soaking wet pointed out. "If we charge in there, people are going to get hurt, or maybe even die. We've got to have a better way in."

"Well, I can fly," one pointed out.

"We're aware," the first woman said flatly. "That doesn't negate the difficulties we shall face once we are in. One alone amidst that horde will be an asking of a death-wish. Doubly so if any view you literally dropping out of the sky.

Another barged into the cave, throwing back the hood of a cloak and staring around the sheltered cave, and those that hid within it. "Have we come up with a plan yet?" Zuko asked.

"We've got three ways in, but only one of them doesn't involve flying," Katara pointed out.

"And one which doesn't involve fighting our way in, as well as out," Sokka added.

"I was referring to being 'captured', you hulking dolt," Nila muttered. Sokka feigned shock and hurt. "But that will have it's own difficulties. I will only be able to bring in one explosive, for example..."

"Always thinking about your bombs, aren't you?" Malu asked.

"Of course," Nila said as though it were elementary. Then again, for her, it probably was. Zuko waved a hand at her, one he hoped was dissuading without being dismissive.

"What we're doing isn't going to need explosives," Zuko said.

"That is not a promise you can make so easily," she pointed out. "There are few situations which cannot be resolved with sufficient amounts of high explosives."

Sokka laughed at that, then got a very concerned look on his face, which honestly brought a chuckle to Zuko. But only one. "Still, I'd like to avoid that if I can manage it," Zuko stressed. He turned to the waterbender. "What was your plan?"

"The prison's surrounded by boiling water, right?" she said, pointing out the obvious.

"Water we can't drain without killing everybody in the prison," Malu repeated what Toph had told her. Zuko knew why: the water was the only think keeping the brutal heat of the volcano at a somewhat manageable level. Between the boiling and the recondensation, a massive amount of heat was dumped harmlessly away. Remove the water, and that place would bake in minutes. And it would take more than minutes to get everybody they wanted out, out.

"So we just walk along the surface," Katara said simply.

"The surface which is almost boiling hot, and threatens to steal the breath even as it burns you to the bone? That surface?" Nila asked, a hand cast toward the exit Zuko had just come through.

"I can keep the water solid even at the boiling point. I've practiced," Katara said. She pointed at Zuko. "As long as you keep the heat from broiling us, I can get us to the prison walls."

"Then I get you over them," Malu said, seeing her part in this.

"Exactly," Zuko said. The problem is there isn't much plan after that..."

"We'll improvise," Sokka said with a shrug. "We're going into this the same way we came to the Fire Nation. And on the whole, that's turned out better than we thought," the Tribesman said. Zuko had to agree, if begrudgingly. Since returning to the Fire Nation, he'd gotten his sister back. Maybe not in the way he'd have liked, entirely, but an Azula which could and did thank him, for all that he'd done to try to help her, an Azula who was strong enough to take care of herself, was worth all of the gold on the Earth. "We get inside, we find out what we can do to stir the pot, and then we get everybody we can out of there."

"Including the Matriarch and Suki," Katara said with a nod, and a look toward Zuko. He could only sigh in annoyance. His problem, and now, he had to undo it. Pity it wasn't nearly so easy as creating it had been. Though, that seemed to be the way of things."

"Alright, we've got... something like a plan," Zuko said. He turned to the airbender. "Can you fly through that steam?"

"I once flew through a firestorm. A bit of steam won't even touch me," she said, before striding toward the door. Zuko looked at those who'd agreed to join him on what might have been as suicide mission. Only the Avatar, Toph, and Azula had declined to come. The first because he was too obvious, the second because her handicap might get her noticed or killed, and the third... Azula just said that this place brought back too many bad memories. It probably helped that she was almost as recognizable as Aang was.

"If we pull this off, we'll essentially be kicking off guerrilla warfare against the Fire Nation. Are you prepared for all that that means?" Zuko asked. The Tribesmen gave stern nods, with cold eyes. Both of them had been at Summavut, and knew what that meant. The Si Wongi shrugged, not really caring about how serious he found it. "Alright. Let's start a war," he said, and not happily.

It was not with eagerness, but with grim resolve, that the teenagers walked out of the cave and turned to face the great pillar of steam which wafted away to the northwest, reaching down and rooting in the crater before them. The prison might as well have been invisible, for all the steam that obscured it. Boiling Rock. The most secure prison in the Fire Nation. And they were going to waltz in, steal all of its prisoners, and bust out again.

"...This is going to end terribly, isn't it?" Zuko asked.

"Welcome to Team Avatar," Sokka said, clapping him on the shoulder as he started his descent.

---

Zhao walked with strident step through the halls of the Royal Palace. Officially, he was a guest here. Well, as of this moment, he didn't consider himself a guest, so much as... well... it's owner. So to put it in a colloquialism, he walked like he owned the place, and people noticed. There were few left to notice, as Ozai'd had a field day sacking if not outright banishing most of the guard, the staff, and the bureaucracy. Akemi's warnings of his madness were evident in the hollow feeling of the halls, if nothing else.

"Are they ready?" Zhao asked idly to Kwan, who walked a pace behind him. The man's droopy, resigned face didn't seem either eager nor outraged that he was a part of this deed. He bore it with the same sort of weariness that he woke up with, and went to sleep with.

"The Children's barracks has been surrounded. Any attempt to break through will be dealt with."

"And what about their castle garrison?" Zhao asked.

"Not contained like the barracks," Kwon admitted. "They'll be trouble."

He shrugged. "Better a little trouble than a lot of it. I have no doubt that an army could defeat a few dozen barely-trained teenagers."

"You were almost beaten by a 'barely trained teenager'," Kwon pointed out, without glee or malice. Just stating a fact. Zhao's smirk faltered somewhat at that. The man was right. He turned his burnt eye toward the man.

"Make sure they're contained. I can't have them undoing what I intend to do today."

"As you command," Kwon said.

"He is slipping into madness further with every passing day," Akemi, who kept stride on his right side, pointed out. "In the past night, he has railed against his daughter when he did not know I was overhearing. He believes that she haunts and judges him."

"As well she should," Zhao said. "Azula is nothing but a boon to the Fire Nation; even in his madness he's aware of what he has cast away."

"If we confront him now..." Akemi said, before pausing. She turned toward him, as though she were trying to gauge him. In fact, she probably was. "He will probably be defensive. He will call for the Children. Unless I can distract him from doing so."

"What do you propose?" Zhao asked, his one remaining eyebrow raising.

"That I do as I said I would," Akemi said. She moved before him, and held a hand out. He came to a halt with his chest at the palm of her hand. "Give me but five minutes. I will have him... ready... for you."

"Of course you will," Zhao said. Akemi bowed her head to him, and then turned, walking to the end of the hall, and through those great doors into the chamber of the Burning Throne. Everything that he had ever done was leading to this moment. He knew that as well as he knew fire, or as well as he knew the face he now wore. The scar had been a warning, one delivered from an invaluable source, never to underestimate one's enemy, nor act with heedless rashness. He'd gotten the brand over his eye by failing both at the same time.

Everything was, nevertheless, falling into place. Those admirals of less-than-sure loyalty to Zhao's cause were being corralled, surrounded, and outgunned by those more trustworthy. Generals were finding their lines of communication cut off. Messengers birds vanished into the clouds never to be seen again – at least, not without a Yu Yan arrow through them. Even as much as Ozai claimed to be the Fire Lord, as of this morning, Zhao was the one running Caldera City.

The minutes ticked by with interminable slowness, but he persevered. Patience was a virtue which had been demanded of him by a firebending master of his – one he had fairly recently killed. How ironic that after his death the truth of his lessons had become clear. Jeong Jeong had warned Zhao that his recklessness and his avarice would be the death of him. Since Zhao had put a leash onto both, he had not only survived past what Azula had prophesied for him, but he now stood poised to protect the Fire Nation from an even greater threat. He knew that the Black Sun Invasion was coming. And with him at the reins of power, instead of this insane idiot, they would not fall; the Avatar wasn't going to bring him low, not on the day of Sozin's Comet, or any time else.

Finally, Zhao began to walk once more. His cadre, those of the firebenders most clear in their vision of what was wrong, and what must be done, came with him. Zhao had no illusions that Ozai was going to step down without a fight. And he needed a symbol that he wasn't an upstart, that he wasn't just another power-maddened noble making a grab. That he had legitimacy. He strode past the threshold, into the chamber of the Burning Throne. Akemi was the faintest outline of a woman, two places to Ozai's left; the blaze which separated he from they licked at the very ceiling.

"What is this?" Ozai demanded, his voice carrying the distance to where Zhao came to a halt, easily two paces ahead of what common courtesy and respect would have dictated. And more shocking to their delicate sensibilities, he did not bow.

"This is the end," Zhao said. "As representative of the Joint Chiefs of War, you have been decided unfit for your post. You will be removed."

There was a long pause, then a burst of uproarious laughter. Ozai rose and strode through the flames which parted as he came. "You cannot be serious. I am ruler of this nation by the provenance of Agni Himself! You are just some commoner who knew how to fight orange haired heretics and waterbenders."

"I did what you couldn't. The people respect that," Zhao said calmly, a smirk growing on his lips. "What they don't respect, is the growing madness manifested in your actions. You are a threat to the security of the Fire Nation. And you will stand down and abdicate your position, or else face the unpleasant consequences."

Ozai's eye twitched, and then he tore forward with both arms, lightning searing into being in the one cycle it took him to do so. The firebenders by Zhao's side parted, darting behind pillars, as Zhao took a quick gauge of where Ozai's bolt would land. Even for entering middle age, Zhao was still quick on his feet. He'd had to be, after so long and so many harsh fights. He bounded forward, and slid under that bolt that streaked over his head close enough to cause those hairs not tied into a phoenix-tail to stand on end, and the crack of it to deafen one ear. Still, Zhao avoided it, and when he came up, it was to his own hands twisting through a motion.

When he stood, it was to lightning at his fingertips.

When he cast out a hand, that lightning had direction.

It streaked out and slammed just past Ozai, not best aimed; Zhao hadn't had much opportunity to train with the skill, since he'd wanted as few as possible to even know he was capable of it. Still, the blast of the bolt hurled Ozai forward, landing him at the base of the dais. He let out a snarl, and tore the ceremonial robes from his back, revealing the muscular form of a warrior above warriors. His hair, dislodged by the rough launch and landing, now dangled down past his shoulders. His eyes glared with untold fury.

"You will die for this treason," Ozai screamed. And then, he started to blast fire forward.

And when it hit, Zhao was ready for it.

---

Chapter 5

Boiling Rock

---

"Where is she?" Katara asked, as she swiped away the sweat which pounded out of her pores with every passing moment, trying to combat the hot, wet air, and obviously not coming close to succeeding. "She's supposed to be up there by now."

"Are you sure you're going to be alright here?" Sokka instead asked Nila, who was starting to mix chemicals together where she sat in a nook of the rock. Nila spared him a glance, and pointed to her eyes.

"Both of these make me an obvious fraud. You might pass for a Hillman, Tribesman, but I could only be Si Wongi."

"So you'll be ready when we need you?"

"Oh, I intend to be," Nila said with a smirk. The smirk went flat and she nodded up toward the walls which rose up into the steam. "There is a need for haste, though. These bombs will surely become less useful as the wet enters them. I would prefer as large a blast as possible, if the need comes."

"You and your explosives," Katara said, shaking her head in a way which clearly said 'typical', but not in words.

"May well be your salvation," Nila continued for her, now refocusing on her chemistry.

"If Malu doesn't show up soon, the beach guard's going to find us," Katara muttered. "One girl can hide. Two and two boys, can't."

"Just have some faith in the airbender. She has shown a reliability in the past," Nila said with an off-hand gesture. Zuko leaned back, and brought the vast expanse of the wall back into view. There was a clattering sound that came down its face, one rattle at a time. Then, Zuko could see it's source. A rope-ladder had been fed down between what seemed to be rows of sarcophogi jutting out of the wall. It tapped to it's full length about four feet short of the ground. Close enough, he figured.

"There's our way in," Zuko said quietly, and beckoned after him. Sokka hesitated to whisper something to Nila, but her answer to him was a sort of amused glare, which got him to shrug as though in falsified innocence. He wasn't long after Zuko and Katara.

"Katara, you go up first," Sokka said.

"What? Why?"

"Because you're the slowest climber and I'd rather all of us be on the roof as short a time as possible," her brother explained. Katara gave a grunt that she understood his reasoning, but didn't appreciate how he'd spelled it out. She nevertheless awkwardly scrambled up the ladder, making about a third of the pace that Zuko knew he could make.

"So... How much of a chance do you figure we have?" Sokka asked.

"Next to zero," Zuko said flatly.

"Really?"

Zuko nodded. "Vanishingly close. So close it's essentially the same thing," he continued.

"...you're never optimistic, are you?" Sokka asked.

"How did you guess?" Zuko answered his question with a question. Agni's blood – and having met her he knew exactly how damaging that could be – but Zuko was slowly turning into his uncle, it seemed like. Sokka had the same wan, unimpressed look on his face by the time Zuko started to ascend after the Tribesman's sister. He started when she was about three quarters up, and mounted the lip only a few seconds after she did. Zuko didn't wonder that Sokka was probably right on his heels. When the two did mount the lip, though, there was a peep of alarm from Katara, which was followed by a yelp of it from Zuko when they both beheld that there was a red armored and bucket-helmeted guard standing in front of them, arms crossed before her chest, glaring.

"...This really isn't what it looks like," Zuko tried.

"Huh. Good to know that these disguises are bulletproof," the guard said with a grin, and tipped up her visor to show the dull grey eyes of the physically older of the two airbenders alive in the current day.

"What proof?" Katara asked.

"Ask Nila," Malu said. She reached down and tossed something to Zuko. "Put that on fast. They won't question guards walking around the way that they would people sneaking."

Zuko could see the point in that, but he sensed that Sokka had a hand in deciding this part of the infiltration. Sure, he let her think she was coming up with it herself, but the Tribesman had a smug look on his face when she did. He pulled the armored pauldrons over his shoulder, and hid his face behind that bucket helm in a matter of less than a minute. In that time, Sokka had likewise joined him on the rooftop.

"Alright. As soon as you're both ready, we can–" Malu began, only to be cut off by an alarm sounding from one of the towers.

"One of the Tribal girls is trying to mount the wall! There's a ladder down the wall!" the cry came out, distant and quiet against the klaxon. That alarm spread to the other towers, excepting the one they were atop, a din against the steam which had Zuko palm his helm.

"It's always something, isn't it?" Zuko said. Sokka froze for a moment, then plunked his helmet on, and tackled his sister.

"Hey! What are you doing?" Katara shouted, struggling against him.

"You're going to have to trust me!" Sokka whispered urgently. "Come on! She's trying to escape!"

Zuko saw his ploy, and joined him, grabbing one of the flailing legs of the waterbender, while Malu caught the other. They were still trying to navigate her flailing self toward the stairwell which lead down into the building when a swarm of guards, all dressed identically to the outfits which Sokka, Malu, Zuko, and unfortunately not Katara wore. They formed a half-circle around the waterbender, and the supposed guards who'd caught her, some with fists forward, others with truncheons in hand.

"Stop resisting or you'll spend a month in the cooler," one of the real guards shouted at them all.

Katara flicked a glance to Sokka, one which Zuko only barely saw. As he pressed in, making it seem like she'd bucked one of her legs in on her chest, he whispered urgently to her, "Don't waterbend, whatever you do. We'll find some way to make this work," Zuko promised. Katara glared at him. And then bit her brother's hand.

"OW! She bit me!" Sokka said, dropping her torso to the floor, and prompting the guards gathered around them to swarm in, grabbing her arms and dumping a bag over her head, before bearing her to the ground. It wasn't as easy as six people subduing one teenage girl should have been. Then again, Katara was a Tribesman. There were other people swearing, some of them nursing bites or bruises from elbows or kicks by the time she was finally to the floor.

"These vermin just don't know when to give up, do they?" one of the guards said. Zuko instantly reached aside for Sokka, pressing him back and reminding him not to do something stupid. The guard turned down to Katara. "Alright. You're going into the cooler for this one."

Katara belted out a stream of Yqanuac profanities which probably would have gotten her killed on the spot had the prison guards known what they meant. As Zuko did, and they didn't, it was all the more embarrassing. Finally, now only requiring four to bring her along, the guards bore her down the stairs. Zuko had almost gotten down, but he and Malu were called short by a squat, broad built man with a trimmed beard which was apparent below the visor of his helm. "That was a good run-down. She didn't even make it down to the shore," the guard-captain – Zuko had to assume, anyway – told them. "I don't know why they keep trying. It's not like the water outside isn't boiling, after all."

"Technically, it's scalding," Malu pointed out.

"I can cook robster in it. The distinction doesn't make much point after that," the guard-captain waved her comment away. Zuko, though leveled a glare at her. She might be blasé about her own life, but damn it all, there was a lot more at stake than that now! She followed Zuko with the wave of guards which descended into the bleak grey iron of the prison facility, and they two parted company of most of them to follow Sokka, Katara, and the guard-captain as he brought them into the part of the facility that Zuko had noted as the hanging sarcophagi. They had a lot of piping associated with them.

"Where are you taking me, you swine?" Katara screamed in her own language. The captain pulled the bag off of her head, and motioned for Sokka to press her to the wall. Sokka hesitated.

"Well? Are you new here or what? Follow my orders," the man said. Sokka swallowed, then slammed his sister cheek-first into the bulkhead. "Good," the man said, and started to play with valves, before sliding open a pair of doors. As the second one opened, a wave of cold fog drifted out of the chamber within. The condensation from the breaths of an unknowable number of prisoners clung to the wall as ice, some dripping down into tendrils which tried to reach for the floor. "Did you know that the Tribesmen here hate the cold almost as much as we do?" he asked Malu.

"I didn't know that," she said. He flicked an eye to her, and she added a belated, "sir."

"Well, it doesn't matter how hot your blood gets. In a place like this, it cools off in a hell of a hurry," he said, and grabbed Katara by the back of her shirt. With his other hand, he undid her arm restraints, then her legs, before pulling her out of Sokka's grip and chucking her like refuse into that refrigerator. "I'll leave you to your shivering, barbarian."

Katara glared at the man as he slammed the inner door shut. Zuko glanced at his retreating back, and whispered into the refrigerator. "Are you going to be alright?"

"This isn't even cold," Katara said, at a quiet mutter, despite pulling her limbs in against the 'not cold'. She gave a look to he and Sokka who looked in. "I'll be fine. Find Suki and the others."

"We'll get you out of there... somehow," Sokka said. He then slid the outer door closed slowly, before he started toward the guard captain. The man turned, as though he knew he was being followed, and pointed a finger at them.

"You, guard that cooler until the Warden arrives," the captain ordered, pointing at Sokka and Malu. He then turned his finger toward Zuko. "You... prepare to let one out."

"Which one?" Zuko asked, hoping that he wasn't expected to know the procedure.

"Everybody's favorite," he said with a smirk, before backing up a few steps and pounding his fist against the outer door of the last door in the hallway. "Wake up, Kanshow. Time to face your... adoring public."

"Go to hell, Kozo," a remarkably familiar voice said from inside. But Zuko couldn't quite place it. All he knew, was that it was from a long time ago.

"You might want to watch your tone with me, Kanshao. You're not the boss of me," he said, before turning and striding toward the door in a huff.

"...not anymore," Kanshao's words came out quietly. Zuko moved to that door, and slid the outer hatch open before peering inside. The man inside was gaunt, his cheeks high and his mouth wide. His eyes were the same sort of pale grey that were common amongst Azuli nobility, and his hair, though long and ratty, had much the same luster that he'd seen on another, fairly recently.

"Well? Are you going to let your former Warden out, or aren't you?" Kanshao Loyo Lah asked dryly, past blued lips, glaring up at Zuko.

---

Smashing through the fire was easy enough, but the troublesome part of it was how when Zhao was on the other side of the fire, Ozai was not. The fire in the trough before the Burning Throne had died completely, so Akemi was clear to be seen. And she gestured simply in one direction. Taking that cue for what it was, Zhao started to race after the fleeing Fire Lord.

"I never knew you were such a coward, Ozai!" Zhao shouted ahead of him.

"I am not a coward, you useless child!" the response came back, which would have confused Zhao had Akemi not briefed him on the content of the man's delusions. The shouted retort was enough to tell Zhao to slide to a stop just before crossing a corner. Because he did, the blast of fire which corkscrewed and twisted down that way didn't do more than warm up his toes. Zhao bounded into the gap that the fire left in it's exodus, and swept his hands around again, before releasing a fresh bolt of stunning, unbelievably powerful lightning. Again, Ozai had to dodge aside, but the blasts were knocking him off of his balance, and knocking the wind from his lungs.

Zhao's smile turned into a dark rictus of brutal glee as he pressed forward, slamming out blasts of fire directly at Ozai's face; few indeed were the people who wouldn't put even more effort into protecting their face than they would their life. The only problem was, Ozai was capable of it. But still, keeping the Fire Lord on the defensive was just as sensible strategy to hold. If Ozai couldn't counterattack, then Zhao had very little need for defense in his strategy. The current-and-soon-to-be-deposed Fire Lord smashed away those bolts of fire, before sweeping 'round a corner and for the moment, out of sight.

Zhao thrust an arm toward a servant's path, and those who were trying to keep up with him took his meaning. "Cut him off before he can reach the Children," Zhao ordered. There were a few scattered affirmatives, but the true testament to his leadership was the barrage of footfalls which immediately pelted for that corridor. Zhao, though, pursued his quarry more directly. He raced round that corner, prepared for an assault to intercept him. Instead, he could see Ozai rounding yet another corner, and not nearly as far ahead as a man of Ozai's physique should have been capable of. Zhao wasn't about to look a gift hound in its teeth, though. He took good fortune when it fell to him.

Zhao's feet beat a hasty trail, skidding to a stop even as they tore the lightning into being, and launched it forward, his plane-flat hand describing a perfect line from one firebender to another. An easy shot, and an inevitable hit. Only when the lightning launched, it struck into a swiftly upthrust block of stone from the floor. The lightning bolt shattered it, as well it should have, but the interference was both annoying and troubling; that meant the Children were already responding.

Zhao was already running when he saw that his bolt was going to be caught, and was bounding the remnants of that rubble by the time the smoke cleared. He launched forward with a firebending empowered knee, which caught the fat earthbender girl in the chest with his armor plated leg. The clang of metal into metal was resounding, but his impact was more than she could take so easily. She was hurled back against the wall of the 'T' intersection, and when Zhao followed up that first smash with a blast of fire directed straight into the center of her chest, he didn't have to look back to know that the earthbender wasn't going to be getting up any time soon. If ever, at all.

"You can't hide behind these little boys and girls forever, Ozai," Zhao shouted. "And you're a coward to even try!"

There was no answer to him, but for the sounds of distant combat. Zhao's conspirators entering the fray against the force of the Children, no doubt. It was a shame that they'd decided to fight him. Zhao was certain, from what he'd seen of the Children, that they'd be useful in his rulership just as they had in Ozai's. If not more so, since Zhao wasn't a complete incompetent. Zhao took that moment of silence to think about where Ozai would be going. The answer fell on him like a roofing shingle after a storm.

"The bunker," Zhao muttered. He swept his arms 'round, and thrust them straight forward, blasting away part of the wall which the fat earthbender was slumped against. A much faster path then having to go around. And his legs started to pump once more, bringing him across the guts of the Royal Palace. Even if he couldn't intercept the coward Fire Lord before he reached them, Zhao was certain that, once cornered, Ozai would crumble quickly. There was only so far a man could run, after all.

---

On the other side of that palace, and drowned under a torrential rain, a firebender was working her forms. She might as well have been on another continent, if not another planet, for all she paid attention of the goings on of the palace, though. Her entire focus, her entire being, was in the movement of flickering flames, in the thrust, the shouts of angry effort. In the firebending.

Every day, it got harder. Some of the more difficult things she'd mastered were now completely beyond her, and she didn't know why. Even some of the simplest of katas, of attacks, were now becoming cripplingly difficult. She let out one last blast, which petered out as her scream did, a dying flame that couldn't have frightened a juvenile wolf-bat, let alone a determined fighter. She growled, and turned away. "There's something wrong. Is it the rain?"

She stared up at the water which fell down into her face, the intensity of it having long ago stripped away most of the paint she tried to hide her racial identity with. Only long white streaks, directly under her eyes, remained. She thought about that notion. The rain did seem especially cold today, much as it had during her thankfully brief stay near Henhiavut. That didn't make a lot of sense to her. Was the cold of the rain interfering with the heat she needed to bend? Or was it the simple thickness of the clouds which was cutting her off from the sun?

She let out another grumble, and cast her hand wide in annoyance. "What is wrong with me! This is supposed to be easy!" she snapped. Then, she looked up, and saw how the light in the contained lanterns danced. Yoji blinked at that sight, then down to her hand. A scowl of confusion turned into suspicion, and she drew that hand toward herself, beckoning from the nearest of the lanterns. The flame, obedient like a trained serpent, cut its way free of the waterproofed paper and drifted toward her, until it rested in a burning globe above her hands.

"This is... odd," she said. She started to experiment, though; if nothing else, Yoji was not lazy nor uninventive when it came to her martial arts. She tried to expand the flame, pump more of her chi into it. That didn't seem to work, though, not the way it should have. The fire simply became more unstable, tearing like some sort of Azuli cutting torch. She abandoned that attempt, and the globe reasserted itself, although this time slightly larger.

"...what if I do this...?" Yoji asked, and she extended her control not simply to pushing power out, but to... tug at it. To pull it like toffee. She grabbed some metaphysical seam in the edge of the flame, and she pulled. She grabbed its equal and its opposite, and pulled on that as well. And as she did, the glob got larger. She could feel the fire flowing out of her, but it wasn't the way she was used to. She wasn't pressing it out. She was giving it somewhere to go, and it was doing the work on its own. "Strange."

She tried to hurl the thing away in a blast, but rather than becoming a column of flame which would sear along the rain soaked stones, it hurled away like she was throwing some sort of burning rock. It slammed into the ground a short distance away, and then promptly exploded, causing some of that rock to fly at random, a chip biting into her ear and causing her to recoil, a hand clapped over it. The dark fingers came back slightly slick, before the rain washed that blood away. It didn't matter. This was something new.

She looked at another candle, and beckoned the flame toward her again. Once again, it obeyed. She placed it into her palm, and then tried to ignite a similar fire over the other. It was more arduous than it should have been. But once it was made... it quickly took on the appearance of the first.

"What does it mean?" Yoji asked. And she turned her back on her Fire Lord, his palace, and her duty to both. Because this needed to be explored, more than anything.

---

Mai stared, her mouth open slightly, at the sight that lay before them. Jet couldn't resist the urge to reach over, and press up on her chin until her mouth closed. Of course, not the smartest action, as she now turned a bit of a glare at him. He let it roll off him like the rain.

"Are you thinking the same thing I'm thinking?" Jet asked with a cheer that he hadn't felt in a very long time. Mai just shook her head, and looked forward once again. The two of them, side by side, looked over the force of peasants, farmers, fishermen, the salt of the earth, as they rampaged through the port city of Hachiman. And oddly enough, rather than being diminished by the town guard cutting them to shreds with impunity, their numbers only swelled when they hit a populated center. Hardly what Mai would have expected. Just about what Jet did.

"...I think we might have gone a bit overboard," Mai offered, blinking lightly, as a mob of Blue Turbans descended onto one hapless Imperial Firebender, beat the hell out of him, tied him up, and threw him into a gutter for later retrieval.

"Isn't this what you wanted?" Jet asked. "The people finally rising up against the Fire Lord?"

"Yes, but..." Mai threw up her hands in confusion. "Everything I know says that this is going to end terribly, for us."

"You should have a bit of faith," Jet said.

"Oh, and you'd be the authority on that?" Mai asked flatly. Jet just shrugged with an easy smile. "This might be a bit out of our control," Mai said further.

"Who said we were controlling it?" Jet asked.

She thumped him in the head. "Because if we don't, they might end up being more a hassle for us than the Fire Lord is, duh," she said.

Jet's smile faded a bit at that. "Yeah, you might be right about that."

Mai just watched the peasant army subverting and overwhelming the garrison, and shook her head. "I'm probably going to have to warn the Avatar about this. I hope you're happy."

"I'm always happy," Jet said with a grin. Mai gave him a look that, were it on Longshot, would have been interpreted as 'if you weren't so pretty, I would smack you'. That just made Jet laugh all the louder.

---

Zuko snapped to attention as a man of obvious rank appeared, walking down the stairs to the coolers with a squad of his lackeys arrayed behind him. He was greying of hair, balding as well, and what hair he did have left was pulled up into a phoenix tail and set with the headress of his position. The well-trimmed beard and mustache twitched with annoyance as he stomped down the stairs, and gave a glance toward Zuko's cooler, before moving past it to the one Katara was now huddled in.

The... warden, most likely... stopped before Katara's cooler, and leaned forward, to view her huddled form on the base of the refrigerator, before he turned a glare to Malu, who was now right beside him. "Where did that savage get those clothes?" he asked, his voice deep and his words drawing out.

"We're not sure... sir," Malu said. "She had them on when we found her."

"I hope you fall into the lake," Katara muttered angrily from the floor in her own native tongue. The Warden turned to her, and glared down.

"If you're going to talk in my presence, you will do so in a civilized language, or else not at all!" he demanded. "Stand up. Look me in the eye, child."

Katara did neither.

"Very well. An escape attempt is a day in the cooler. Insubordination, another day. If you survive both, you can go back to your miscegenated kind," he waved at her vaguely. He pointed at Sokka. "Return in two days. If she lives, let her out. If she doesn't, throw her into the lake."

"Um... yes... sir?"

The warden stopped, and turned, and stalked up to Sokka. Zuko's heart missed a beat, the way the older man glared into Sokka's eyes. He looked him up and down. And then, he reached out to tip up Sokka's visor. Even from across the room, Zuko had to restrain himself from flinching, from doing something that would blow his own cover. The worry proved needless, though, as even as the Warden did so, Sokka pulled his eyes into a nearly-closed squint. "Show me your eyes."

"I am, sir," Sokka said. The Warden stared at him further. "This is as far as they open."

"...you're new here, aren't you?" the Warden asked.

"I haven't been here more than a day. It's been... eventful, sir," Sokka claimed, his almost comedically exaggerated Azuli accent doing everything needed to make him sound like some descendant of a Hillman. The Warden let the visor drop, and Sokka relaxed just a little as the Warden turned away.

"Most days are much more tedious than this one has been," he explained, as though giving grand and dispiriting speeches was a personal hobby of his. "The prison of the Boiling Rock has stood here for twenty years, and never once in that time, has a prisoner walked out of its doors. You stand in what is surely the only impenetrable prison that rests upon this waking Earth," his arms spread wide, as though before a terrified mass. He turned toward Zuko. "We house the most dangerous criminals and fiends that the planet has ever produced; Tribesmen and traitors. One might as well be the other. That one is one of the latter."

"This one?" Zuko asked, pointing at the cell he was beside with feigned confusion. "Who is he supposed to be?"

"Why, he was the warden, once," the current warden said, as he walked closer, and leaned to look in at the shivering man in his dark red rags. Zuko glanced past the Warden's back, and saw that Sokka was reaching under his shirt, probably for the boomerang he kept hidden there. It wasn't like he could wander into a prison with a famed Piandao blade, after all. Zuko shook his head sternly and urgently. Sokka pointed at the Warden, and made a few almost impossible to interpret gestures which Zuko vaguely believed amounted to knocking him unconscious, and hiding under him like a pantomime dragon on their way out the door. Zuko just gave Sokka the flattest look he had in his repertoire for suggesting something so idiotic, even if he did so without speaking. The current Warden turned toward Zuko, and the firebender barely managed to turn away from Sokka in time to waive suspicion. "But he was one of the traitorous family, the Loyo Lah's of Azul. They sought to incite chaos and misery, to depose the Fire Lord and place their Coordinator on the Burning Throne."

"That's a lie," the former Warden answered the first's charge.

"Lie or not, it seemed... more poetic, to simply throw him into the prison that he'd spent all of these years building up. Nobody even knows that he's here. Can you think of anything more ironic than that?"

"Yes," Zuko said. The current Warden turned a look at him. "...because that technically wasn't a proper usage of irony."

"What?" the Warden demanded.

"Irony is using wordplay to say one thing but mean its opposite," Zuko pointed out.

"Or, as I was using it, to indicate a reversal of fortunes both diametric and complete," the Warden answered, and Zuko was a bit surprised that his attempt to tweak the man's nose both fell flat, and that he didn't explode into anger as he did. Sokka, standing by Katara's door, palmed his face. "Open the door. It is time for his true punishment to begin."

Zuko looked at the door, then over to the pipes and levers. He closed his eyes, trying to recall what they'd done before throwing Katara into her cooler. And as the steps came back to him, he executed them, one after the other. He had only gotten half way through, when he heard a grunt from behind him. "What?" Zuko asked.

"As usual, they overtrain their recruits for unnecessary tasks. You don't need to turn it off to open its door."

"Oh," Zuko said, and halted, before simply pushing the inner door aside. Kanshao got to his feet silently, glaring at his replacement, who was also the sole reason why he was still alive. Had this new Warden not had such an appreciation of literary tropes, it was obvious, he'd probably have been thrown into the lake rather than into the prison. Despite Kanshao being taller than the man who replaced him, the latter got into Kanshao's face, his fists tight.

"And if I hear any more about you trying to get the Tribesmen in on your little scheme, you'll spend twice as long in there. Are we clear?" the Warden demanded. Kanshao stared at him, not saying a word. The Warden scowled at him, then thrust a finger toward Zuko that he had to dodge aside from so it didn't poke him in the eye. "Guard, bring this worm back outside."

"Yes, sir," Zuko said, taking the back of the tunic's shoulder and pulling one of the only two Loyo Lah's left alive toward the stairwell that he'd descended. The steam and the overcast skies, together, made it almost as dark as night in that open courtyard, which was rounded by cells, and those cells surrounded by walls and a tower. The far tower, only visible by the lanterns which hung from it even now, was the one which caught Zuko's attention for a moment. That one played host to the trolley which bore guards, prisoners, and Tribesmen to and from the site. Well, the latter two didn't have the 'away' part quite as much.

Zuko made a point to not look like he was looking, as he guided Kanshao down the open balconies which ringed the internal walls of the prison. He could see where the guards frequented, spots of good visibility and difficulty of reaching from all but one direction. He could see Tribesmen, almost innumerable below; they all looked to be around his age, some slightly younger, a few slightly older, but one and all in that age bracket. There were a lot of them.

Zuko's distraction was enough that he didn't notice one of the other prisoners leaning against a wall. With a lightning-blow, he drove his fist into Kanshao's gut, causing the man to flinch back with a grunt of pain and escaping wind. Zuko pulled him back, and thrust a finger into the prisoner's face. "Hey! Watch it!"

"Fair game on the Warden," the prisoner said, turning away and sauntering back into his cell. Zuko just glared at him. There were prisons for the very most dangerous of the Fire Nation's population. They were full of murderers, rapists, and all sorts of evil men. But this place? This wasn't a prison. This was a torture chamber. Zuko grabbed Kanshao's shoulder and started to bear him forward again, down the stairs to the level of the courtyard which stood broad and open in the dim light of this false twilight. He finally gave the former Warden a mild shove, to get him moving. His presence here wasn't exactly expected. And because of that, Zuko wasn't sure what his place in the final plan could be, if any.

Kanshao, though, just turned back at him, his eyes focused and scrutinous upon him. "I know who you are," he said, quite quietly. Zuko swallowed, but it didn't reach his face. Despite the near-whiteness of his skin and the mild hypothermia he had to be facing, the former Warden nevertheless broke into a small, almost smug, smirk.

Zuko turned to the Tribesmen, next, and tried to figure out how he was going to approach them, to get them to believe him that he could help them. He backed slowly toward the stairs, his eyes taking in everything before him. But, as it would happen, nothing behind him.

Before Zuko even had a chance to grunt in shock, he felt a loop of cloth zip down past his eyes, and tighten over his throat, even as he was levered off of his footing. The cloth dug in, and his fingers couldn't pull it out to give him the breath to keep conscious, but he knew he had a few seconds before the pressure on his veins was enough to make him black out. Even as he was dragged into a cell, he managed to twist his arms before him, separating the power into its constituent halves. But instead of giving it direction, slamming it out and away from him, he simply let the charge build up in him, focusing it only away from his heart and his brain. When the bolt could stand no longer, it erupted out of his whole body in a shockwave of lightning.

The cloth dropped free of his throat, and he landed on his back, somebody's foot next to his head. He blinked a few times against the blackness which had encroached upon his vision, before pulling in a breath that was long overdue. He pushed, slowly, against the floor until he was half at a sit. That was called to a close when a foot whipped out from the side to catch him right at the bridge of the nose with a sandaled foot. Had he not been wearing the helmet, it would have broken his nose, and probably put him right to sleep. As it was, it merely rung his metaphorical bell, and sent his helmet rolling into a corner.

Zuko rolled aside, and unsteadily rolled to his feet, his fists before him, but with only a fraction of the balance he'd need to deal with any sort of dedicated attacker. Which made it all the more confusing when he found himself faced not with brutes or wrath-crazed Water Tribesmen. No, he was standing opposite an auburn haired girl who was only around his age. A flick of his eyes showed that the woman on the ground looked very much like the girl, if older and greyer. She was only now starting to stir, groaning for the pain of that electrocution. As if she even got the worst half of it; it felt like Zuko's entire skin was on fire. Half way true, even. But the girl, she looked like she was going to put a fist through Zuko's head. Then, her eyes widened, and her stance changed slightly.

"Wait a second," the girl said. "I know you don't I?"

Zuko blinked a few times. And then, a dawning dread filled him. "...you're Suki, aren't you?" he asked.

Suki's blue-grey eyes pulling down into hateful blades was all the answer to that question he needed.

"So, I know this is going to sound a bit crazy, but we could really use..."

Which is when she kicked him in the head. Sort of a good thing; Zuko wasn't sure how he was going to end that sentence. And unconsciousness, for all its obvious penalties, meant that he probably wouldn't have to finish that awkward thought at a later time.

---

Ozai had slowed from a sprint to a forceful stride, his eyes burning even as fire dribbled from his hands, landing with almost oily splats when they hit the ground. Chi wasn't supposed to burn in that fashion, but at the moment, Ozai wasn't exactly the portrait of mental health or proper bending style. He just needed to reach the place where the Children would be waiting for him. And then, he would wipe out Zhao and his upstart rebellion in a twinkling.

"Oh, really?" Azula taunted him, where she leaned with her back against one side of the threshold to his subterranean throne room, his bunker against calamity or worse. "And running away is such a mark of a confident strategist."

"You!" Ozai railed, storming up to her and thrusting the fingers of his burned hand around her throat as though to choke her out. But the instant that they would have caught her or slid through her, Azula was now leaning on the opposite side of the threshold, stifling a yawn poorly behind her hand.

"And here I thought you were supposed to be some kind of firebending phenom," Azula mocked. "Instead, I see only a tiny, terrified man lashing out at the shadows."

"This is your fault," Ozai shouted at her. And even as he did, he could feel the lie of it. His resolve quaked, as he stood there. "If you had just been what I needed, if I only had a strong heir, a powerful firebender, somebody to control the Azuli and the... and the mob... None of this would have happened, if you had just been strong!"

"That's a rationalization and a poor one at that," Azula pointed out. "We're not here because of me. I know that, because you know that. The only one who brought us here, today, is you."

"If you..."

"If I what?" Azula asked. "I was strong enough, if you only had faith. You could have been the beloved Fire Lord, trying to defeat a barbarian horde at the black sands while trying to juggle the poor, pitiful child. It certainly would have made you more sympathetic than you are now," Azula rose, staring him in the eye with the cold, cruel eyes that he had never seen on Azula's face. Childhood malice was nothing compared to the hatred, the scorn, the anger in that look, in those golden eyes, so much like his own. "Instead, you are a thug. Your people see you as a thug, and a crazy one. A leader snaps trying to protect his family and his nation? The people sympathize. A thug snaps? They put him down like a turtle-duck. And everything which has fallen today, has come because of you."

Ozai roared, lashing out with fire at Azula, and only managing to slightly warm up the iron she had been lounging against. A flick of his eyes now saw that she was standing to his side, between where he stood, the door at his back, and the path he had walked to get here. "You are the author of your own fate, Ozai. And you wrote this, from start to finish. You've sewn cruelty, both abroad and under your own roof. You reap, what you see before you," she waved her hands out grandiosely.

"You were..."

"Your daughter," Azula answered for him. "And I didn't deserve to be treated like a broken doll. I didn't deserve to be murdered."

Ozai stared at her. "You're still alive."

"Which doesn't negate the fact that you ordered my death. You did that. You failed the 'sweeping victory over the North'. You banished your children. You exiled your wife, the only woman whom you could call your intellectual equal, out of naked ambition. This wasn't about what was best for the Nation. This was about what was best for you."

Ozai backed away, until his back collided with the black iron doors. She advanced. "You don't know what you're talking about," Ozai spat.

"I know, because you know," Azula said, and she walked him backward through the doors, he retreating and pushing them open as he did. She stayed always a pace away, just outside of a punch, yet too close for his comfort. "Everything which has happened today was because of you. Including this."

Ozai's eye twitched for a second, but Azula began to grandiosely gesture behind him. Ozai slowly turned toward his throne, only to find that, at the moment, it wasn't his. Zhao, that traitorous bastard, sat in his place. A rank of soldiers, red armored and bearing the scarlet flame helms of the Royal Internal Guard – a group which Ozai had in fact banished to the man – flared out behind the upstart general-turned-noble, a wall of solidarity which focused all eyes to a single point, to a single man, with a single burnt eye.

Zhao smirked.

"So you finally grace us with your presence?" Zhao asked both rhetorically and sarcastically. Ozai flicked a glance behind him, but Azula was only shaking her head, disappointment plain on her features.

"What is this?" Ozai asked.

"What you want," Azula said, trailing fingers delicately as spider-webs across his shoulder, before moving past him. "You want this."

"This is a coup d'etat, if that wasn't obvious by now," Zhao answered the question which Ozai had actually voiced. He rose to his feet, and his smirk became a maniac grin, of a man who knew that he held life or death in his hands. It was a look that had come to Ozai's face... often enough... since that night.

"I don't want this," Ozai whispered.

"Oh, but you do," Azula said, coming to a halt between he and Zhao. "You've wanted this for months. Ever since you made that choice. To put your ambition above your family. You wanted this? Well, now you're going to get it."

"What you want doesn't matter very much at this point, Fire Lord," Zhao said, twisting the last into an insult with his tone. He cast a hand toward Ozai. "Take that man into custody, on grounds of inability to rule by way of insanity."

"You can't do this to me," Ozai shouted at Azula, who now took a place sitting on the dais, her legs tucked beneath her, out of the way of the soldiers and the traitor himself. She smirked, then. A smirk so much like her mother's. The smirk of a devious mind, with a devious plan, and no chance for failure.

"And I haven't," Azula said. "You did."

"Take him now," Zhao said with finality. Then, there was fire and explosions, there were screams and roars and howls.

And in the end, there was a silence, but for the ragged breathing of a man completely overwhelmed by the number, the combined power of his former minions. Ozai, knees on his back, face pressed against the stone, could do nothing as he was locked in manacles.

He could do nothing against Azula's disgust, and her look of disappointment.

---

Zuko opened his eyes, and found himself rubbing his throat uncomfortably even as the light slowly turned from indistinct blurs into something a bit more useful. After a moment, and the feeling of none-too-gentle cloth sliding over first degree burns, he remembered why. He'd almost gotten garotted. With a cough, he sat up, only to have himself be pushed back down by something squared into the center of his chest. The blur finally coalesced into the form of a teenaged girl, who sat on a stool, her blue-grey eyes hard as tempered steel. And she was holding him down with what amounted to a rogue chair-leg. Zuko groaned, and let himself fall back down. Of course, things were never easy for him. Zuko was a creature of luck, it seemed. Sometimes spectacularly good, usually unbelievably bad. It seemed to be swinging toward the latter, today.

"Why shouldn't I kill you?" Suki asked him.

"Suki," her mother chastised, from her place leaning against the back wall. The Kyoshi Warrior fell silent, and her mother and Matriarch shook her head. "A better question would be, 'why is the banished Prince here'?"

"That's a bit hard to believe, actually," Zuko said. He tried to sit, only to be jabbed sternly with that chair-leg, which hurt a lot more than it ordinarily would have. She probably knew just where to poke to hit a tender burn. "Stop that!"

"I think I'll keep going, thank you very much. The least you should suffer for taking our sovereignty away should be a bit of torment," Suki said.

"I'm here because the Avatar wants me to be," Zuko said.

"That, I don't believe," Suki said.

"I'm here to break out the political prisoners," Zuko said flatly up at the two women. "I was told to bring you out as well, if I could."

"That has to be the most absurd thing that I've ever heard," the Matriarch said with a shrug.

"You'd never turn against your own Nation. You'd use it against anybody, but turn against it?" Suki shook her head.

"Look, I..." Zuko made to get up, so she clipped him in the ear with her billy-club. It hurt about as much as a blow to the ear should have. If it'd hit the other side, he might not have felt a thing. "Ow! Damn it! You..."

"I what?" Suki asked. She leaned forward. "Just do yourself a favor and admit the truth. We're going to get it out of you anyway. But I guarantee, you're not walking out of that door," with a thumb cast behind them. Zuko could see the perfection of Suki's habitation. He was tucked into the oddball cell which was built to accommodate an awkward corner in the five-sided structure. Thus, there was almost no visibility within it unless one were standing right outside it's door. Now how was he going to get out of this one. He racked his brain for a moment, and that moment was all it took. She'd taken a fire-blast for Sokka half a year ago. So there was probably some lingering feelings there. And even if there weren't, it was a known associate of the Avatar, so...

"Just ask Sokka when he gets here. He'll tell you the same thing," Zuko pointed out, resting his head on his hands cockily. "Of course, he might be annoyed that you slowed down his plan."

"Sokka isn't here," Suki said.

"Yes, he is," Zuko said, before giving a shrug. "There was a bit of a snag with Katara, though. She got found out on our way in. And yet, somehow, they didn't notice that she doesn't look like anybody else in here."

"You'd be surprised," Suki's mother said.

"If you want to talk to him, just go to the coolers."

"You're out of your damned mind," Suki pointed out.

"Probably at this point. Why else would I be working for the Avatar, planning to lead a strike force against my own father after sending it across the Azuli mountains? I mean, that's just crazy!" Zuko agreed.

The Matriarch gave a shrug. "Only lies and fiction have to make sense. Reality is seldom so restricted. But don't think that makes spouting absurdities offers you one iota more trust than that we haven't knocked your teeth in. You still took me away from my people, from her friends, and from our homeland. I'm not inclined to forgive that."

Zuko just nodded. "I can understand that," plainly enough. He looked up at her. "I made a lot of decisions I've come to regret over the last few months."

Zuko was cut off when there was a banging against the door to the cell, and a teenaged Tribesman wearing the same red rag clothing that all of the prisoners did leaned 'round the corner. "Boss of once comes. Maybe he bring the cooler send squad."

Zuko blinked at the Tribesman, since that kid was speaking far worse Yqanuac than even Zuko could. While he wasn't expert, at least he wasn't completely syntactically wrong. "Thank you. Try to keep him busy," Suki replied in that same language, and likewise, better than the Tribesman. That other prisoner nodded, and vanished from the door. Zuko considered the absurdity of a Fire National speaking better Yqanuac than a Tribesman, but the answer fell into his lap pretty quickly.

"Those are the kids that got stolen from the South, aren't they?" Zuko asked.

"Hey, don't change the subject," Suki snapped, but her mother waved a hand.

"They are," she said. Zuko nodded. That explained things. Without somebody to teach them their own language, it would have stayed 'stuck' at around a four-year-old's level, forming the current pidgin-mush that he'd just been witness to.

"If you extend a bit of trust, I can show you," Zuko offered. Suki raised a brow. "You've probably got a knife, since you're in prison and that's a practical given. Keep it to my back as we go. Just give me a few minutes of trust. It will be worth it."

The Matriarch seemed a bit skeptical, but Suki just stared at her cot, then to Zuko. "Alright. You've got five minutes. If I'm not convinced by then, you'll learn how fast a human being can bleed to death."

Zuko took his feet, and while the Matriarch obviously had something to say, she kept mum. Zuko could feel the knife pricking into his side, right between his ribs, just over his liver. Not the most ideal place to be stabbed. Zuko took a fistful of Suki's shirt, and started to pull her out of the cell. The gloom had lightened slightly, as the steam was eternal and sun never completely out. He kept feeling that knife, a reminder of past mistakes and breaches of trust. Not that Suki had extended very much trust toward Zuko. Not that he'd earned it.

The path he took brought the two of them up the administrative building, onto which was built the passenger trolley. At the moment, one of its carts was at the base and still, so there must not have been anybody coming. The path would bring her to where the others had agreed to rendezvous if things got rough; just under the roof-access that they'd entered the prison at. He moved up, releasing his grip on her shirt as the two of them vanished from public view. She didn't move her knife.

Zuko almost let out a sigh of relief when he turned the corner, and there was another guard there. The relief was because she had her helmet tucked under her arm, and her black hair was distinctive in its waviness, against the straight-haired backdrop of most Nationals. Malu turned, and the grey-eyes were the next give away of her mixed, airbender heritage. Luckily, few remembered that. Luckier still, they could be mistaken for Azuli. "Zuko? Thank the spirits. I was starting to wonder if you were ever getting back... Who's this?"

"Malu, this is Suki, leader of the Kyoshi warriors," Zuko said flatly. Suki gave a nod at that, not moving her blade. "Suki, this is Malu, airbender nun from the South Air Temple."

"Airbender? That's impossible. The Avatar is the last airbender," she said.

"Apparently not," Zuko said with a shrug.

"Kyoshi... Didn't you say that you – oh," Malu caught herself with a glance toward Suki. She tugged at her collar. "Man, wouldn't want to be you right now."

"She kicked me in the face," Zuko said, still flatly.

"He deserved it. Why should I believe you when you say she's an a–" Suki began, and Malu answered that question by sweeping the air into a ball, doing a complete circuit of wall, ceiling, wall, and floor before bounding off of it, kicking off of the wall and landing triumphant. The dispursed wind ruffled the clothes of those who were notably not airbenders. "...Okay, that I can believe."

"Sokka's still with his sister," Malu said. "I thought that you were taking a while, so I tried to get an aerial look, but with all this steam..."

"You flew? Are you crazy?" Zuko whispered harshly. "Anybody could have seen you!"

"Nobody saw me. And I wasn't flying. I was... well, walking. I don't know how you guys do it, all that walking around when you don't absolutely positively have to. It must drive you nuts."

Finally, Zuko couldn't feel that blade against his ribs. Suki was still as distrustful as ever, from the look on her face, but she had tucked that shiv away, no longer imminent of use. "Alright. Sokka might be here. But that doesn't mean that we're friends. You still did something unforgivable to my home and my people."

"Yes, I did," Zuko nodded. "And later, if we're not all worse than dead, I'll do something about that."

"Worse than what?" Suki asked.

"Oh," Malu raised a hand, waving it side to side in a vague gesture, "there's this big nasty thing that used to live inside my skin, only now it's out and actually making things worse than they were when they were inside me, and if we don't stop it before the end of summer, he goes like 'blargh!' and then he'll 'om nom nom', and then we're all non-existent."

Zuko blinked a few times in confusion. He leaned toward Suki. "...did you get all of that?"

"Was that a language she was speaking?" Suki asked.

"I'm not sure," Zuko said. Malu rolled her eyes.

"Badness will happen. We try to stop badness. That starts with bringing down his Pop," she pointed at Zuko. Suki nodded. Malu pointed down. "I'll go get Sokka and watch Katara for him. He's the man with the plan, after all."

"Yes. Do that," Suki said, as the airbender kipped past them, put her helmet back on, and descended into the building. Suki turned to him. "Is she always like that?"

"Only when she's anxious, apparently," Zuko said. Suki gave something like a knowing nod. She took a step away. "Two minutes."

"What?" Suki asked.

"You wanted to know how quickly a human can bleed to death. Two minutes," Zuko reiterated. Then, he moved to take a gather of her shirt once more, for when they reentered the public eye. "And don't ask how I know that."

"Fair enough," Suki said, but he could tell, she wasn't quite ready to drop that topic completely. He just hoped that she forgot before he had to get more specific, mostly because it wasn't something he was particularly proud of.

---

Sokka glanced up and down the hallway, confirming that he was in fact alone, before opening both doors to the freezer in which his sister had been thrown. She was kneeling on the floor on a pile of snow – notable since there was no snow when they'd put her in there – and the frozen condensation was nowhere to be seen. "Katara?" Sokka asked. Katara opened her eyes, looking supremely annoyed.

"You just left me in here!" Katara whispered harshly in her native Yqanuac.

"I had to find out of somebody else was supposed to get you out. Turns out, nobody signed for this section tomorrow. Guess who's in charge of the 'cooler'?" he asked. Katara just stared at him. He cocked both thumbs inward. "This guy."

"Yeah, I got that," Katara said, before rising from her place on the floor. With a flick of her hand, she whipped all of the snow that had cushioned her from a frigid base-plate, smearing it against the walls and ceiling before freezing it into place. It didn't look like there had been any appreciable loss of it, but Sokka was certain he could see the bulge of an icicle in the pocket of the clothes she'd been thrown into the cell in.

"More good news," Sokka said, and he held a slim hip-flask toward her. "I found one of these in the confiscation room. Unless they get too friendly, they'll never find it," Sokka said. Katara offered him an honest smile as she stepped out of that freezer, and quickly heaved out her pants so that she could stuff it into her underwear for the time being. She let out a yelp as she did. "Oh, yeah. The confiscation room is right next to the freezers. Kinda chilly."

"You could have warned me!" Katara griped, as she grabbed the outer handle of her former cell and slammed it shut. She glanced at for a moment, though. "Funny thing is, that place kinda reminded me of home."

"...I know what you mean," Sokka answered her, and started to 'escort' her rudely out of the freezer-block. "You know, the way I see it, if we save reality, do you figure Gran Gran will be able to accept that as a proper penance?"

"Are you kidding? Even Uquais would accept that, and he's a jackass!" Katara said.

"Your time in prison is already hardening you to the world, I see," Sokka said. "Less than a day in prison, and you're already talking like a prisoner."

"I am not," Katara complained.

"I'd say you are," Sokka contended.

"Hey? You've gotta bin her shit," a guard said at them as they passed an open door. Sokka sighed, and turned Katara into a side room, which was guarded by that single, bored-looking guard. He'd hoped he wouldn't need to come in here. So much for that. Sokka blocked the line of sight to him for a moment, and made a silent gesture, before turning to the guard.

"We're due to turn loose the runner," Sokka lied.

"Fine. Just make sure you get her clothes," he said, not even looking up from the book he was reading. "Can't have her making another attempt that easily."

Katara offered him a glare – not for the necessity of nudity in public, as that was hardly a problem for a South Water Tribesman, but for not warning her what was coming. Sokka could only shrug. He grabbed a bundle of clothes more suited to a prisoner in this place, and showed her the open-sided booth where strip searches were to take place. In a way, it was good that the guard was so bored and uninterested at the prospect of seeing a woman naked, of any age or ethnicity. It kinda proved Aang's theory about them; they were just people, and they had standards just as anybody else would.

"Malu said that she had a word with Zuko, and she was sending him to meet us," Sokka told her quietly, standing in an impressive pose that his face didn't bare out. Katara just shucked one set of clothing and exchanged it for the other without incident or embarrassment. "She sounded like she had some good news. Also, she checked on Nila. She'll have a bomb big enough to blow down the wall by tonight, and I don't think she's going to stop at just that unless we stop her."

"Um... I was told to talk to somebody here about a prisoner being released today?" Zuko's voice came from Sokka's back. The one in charge just pointed idly, not even looking up from his reading. Zuko gave a nod and a quiet thank you, before turning, and having the golden eyes bug almost out of the helmet they were hiding behind. He turned, stammering and stuttering, apparently unsure even what to do at the moment. Sokka couldn't understand the reaction, until he glanced to his sister and noted that she was not currently wearing pants.

"I should come back some other time," Zuko said.

"Just a strip search. Don't get too excited. And do not get grabby; Tribesmen look to their own pretty strongly," the only real guard in the room said with boredom, before casually turning the page. Katara just rolled her eyes and pulled on the baggy prisoner's pants, which was enough to get Zuko looking back in her direction, even if it was with something of a red face.

"You have no shame," Zuko whispered as he got closer.

"Tribesman," Sokka shrugged with his explanation. Zuko just shook his head, probably at his conception of the insanity of it all. "What's the news from the yard?"

"Malu didn't tell you?" Zuko said. "We found the Matriarch of Kyoshi and her daughter. But there's somebody else we need to consider."

"Who?" Sokka asked.

"The former warden," Zuko said. "If I know my bloodlines right, he'd be Mai's mother's brother. He's one of two of that family that's left. He could be useful."

"How?" Katara asked, as she pulled off her last layer of undershirt. Zuko made a strangled noise and glanced away once more.

"Could you... stop doing that?"

"Would you look at that? Tough, stoic old Zuko's completely undone by a bit of nudity," Katara chided.

"It's not proper!" he hissed.

"Eh, proper's overrated," Sokka said with a shrug. Katara couldn't help but chuckle at Zuko's utter flummoxedness, but she kept it quiet so that the real guard wouldn't suspect. After all, prisoners were not supposed to laugh during an invasive and demeaning search of their person. She strapped the flask to her inner thigh and melted the icicle into it, giving her both ammunition and something to work with for her bending, and turned once again. A glance between siblings, rolling eyes of both.

"You can turn around now," Katara said in Yqanuac, so that the guard wouldn't be privy.

"I'm not sure I want to," Zuko muttered. "Ever, again."

"So the former warden?" Sokka rubbed his chin. "That could be really handy to have in this situation. If we could convince him to go along with our plan, he might know some way out that we haven't figured out. If nothing else, it'll make Nila's minimum bomb-size a lot smaller."

"Like anything would stop her from making a bigger bomb," Katara shook her head.

"Hey, you can do a lot with a bomb," Sokka jumped to her defense. "Like dig up tree stumps. And get rid of squirrel-pidgeons!"

"Get rid of... You're as crazy as your girlfriend," Zuko shook his head.

"Alright. Her things are in the bin," Sokka said loudly enough to be heard, hefting the bin helpfully marked 'confiscated items'.

"Yeah, yeah. Just put it with the others," he waved behind him. Sokka couldn't see where exactly he was supposed to put it all, so he just set the bin amidst a few empty ones, and pocketed his sister's clothing. She'd probably want it back, after all the gruesome time and effort she went through to pick this particular shade of red.

The three moved out onto the balconies, and found that the weather had moved in again. The rain falling down was very, very cold, though. Cold enough that the courtyard was almost empty but for the overhung areas. Sokka blinked a few times in confusion at just how frigid it was. This was the Fire Nation, right? Wasn't everything supposed to be hotter than the fires of Hell? But not the rain, it seemed. There was a cold wind which swirled a twist of fog into the prison, and made everything murky but warmer. Then, the rain seemed to change its character, from thick freezing droplets to a much warmer drizzle by the time they reached the courtyard.

"So what's the new plan?" Katara asked.

"You've got the right uniform and you can speak the language. You should get the Tribesmen together. I'm pretty sure that they'll be big onto escape, if how they treated your escapade is any indicator," Sokka said.

"That's a pretty good plan," Suki's voice was suddenly right beside him, and both he and Katara both let out a startled yelp and flinched away from her. Suki looked mildly damp, like she'd just barely gotten out of that freezing rain, "but if you're looking to bring in the all the Tribesmen, there's one in particular you need to talk to."

"How did you get there?" Sokka asked.

"Kyoshi Warrior secret. No boys allowed," Suki said with a smirk. She looked at Zuko, and that smirk faded. Sokka could see it was because he was smirking, too.

"Who do I need to talk to?" Katara asked.

"Aalo. She's one of the long-timers. Been here most of her life. And when you do, don't talk in Tribal-tongue. They can barely speak it."

"Because nobody taught it to them," Zuko explained to Katara's confused look. "They speak perfect Huo Jian, apparently."

Sokka heard a meaty thwap, the sound of a fist hitting a face, and turned to look across the yard, where one of the guards was shaking a painful hand, and the former Warden stumbled away, clutching his jaw. He said something which was lost to distance, and the two guards walked up to him, leaning in on him even as he kept his back straight. One of them said something, which the former Warden offered what was in Sokka's mind a perfectly timed and cutting rebuke. Pity, that only resulted in him getting smashed in the gut with the end of a truncheon. The former Warden doubled over in pain, finally landing on his hands and knees in the drizzle.

"You don't get to talk to us that way anymore..." the words of the guard came, before his tone shifted enough that Sokka could no longer hear them. He turned to the others, and put a thumb over his shoulder.

"Well, if we're going to bring him in, we'd better do it fast," Sokka said. "Because..."

"You might want to watch the next part," Suki said flatly with a nod past Sokka. He turned, and saw that a couple of the teenaged Tribesmen were moving around the down-struck Warden. One of them leaned down, saying something quietly to him. So he had some of the Tribesmen on his side, too? Sokka was about to give an optimistic shrug when one of them kicked him right in the kidney, and then the others joined, raining down a short flurry of blows at the man, before breaking apart and heading to the various clumps of Tribesmen which were gathered under the overhang, leaving the beaten, bruised former Warden in the courtyard, the rain diluting the blood which very slowly pooled from where he'd probably split his lips open.

"What did they do that for?" Katara asked.

"He's their former warden," Zuko said. "They grew up hating him. Now, he's locked in here with them. They probably couldn't resist the chance for some payback."

"But... that's not right," Katara said.

"Right doesn't have much to do with prisons. There is no 'ought', there only 'is'."

"Who said that?" Suki asked.

"...Uncle," Zuko said quietly. Bitterly.

"Alright. So we've got a couple of people to bring in. We can get the Tribesmen. How do we get the other prisoners? The political ones?"

"Chit Sang," Suki said, motioning to one of the particularly intimidating pieces of humanity which was arrayed in this prison. "Not the longest server, not the strongest. But he's got a way with the prisoners."

"Sway him, sway the prison," Zuko said. He made as though to clap a hand onto Katara's shoulder, but he instantly thought better of it, and cleared his throat. "Alright. Katara, it's up to you to convince the Tribesmen. They wouldn't believe me anyway. I'll deal with Kanshao – since he'd probably know the best and easiest way out of here with all of them. Sokka, you find a way to convince Chit Sang."

"Aw... why do I get the huge scary guy?" Sokka asked.

"Because you didn't call dibs on the warden," Suki said. She pushed off of her lean and turned toward the end of the wall. "Let Mom or me know when you're ready to go."

"Mom or I," Zuko corrected, but under his breath. He gave a nod to Sokka, and then moved toward the once-Warden. That left Sokka to swallow his nerves, considerable as they were, and start to consider how he could bring a massive, angry, canned-firebender onto his way of seeing things.

---

The queen of the Tribesmen of Boiling Rock was fairly obvious to anybody with eyes and a brain. Even with the ground still wet, and oddly cold for the time of year, they were already gathering in rings that all faced outward, radiating in toward one who sat slightly higher than the others. Aalo was obviously her father's daughter, and it showed through on her face. Her cheeks were quite high, her cheeks angular, and her jaw coming to something of a point. She also had her father's eyes, and her father's way of using them. Katara was sure that they rested on her for a moment longer than they ought before she let her gaze slide past.

The ranks of Tribesmen shifted subtly so that Katara could move deeper through them without bumping or jostling them, too busy watching the other prisoners to really care about anything other than that Katara had dark skin and blue eyes. This was a community born in blood and fire, and as the Tribes always did, in the bad times they stood together. She made it through the first two ranks, but the third cast her a glance as she moved past it, and the boy gave a somewhat confused look. She noted how he cleared his throat, and the fourth rank closed into a wall, separating Katara from Aalo and her trusted confidantes who sat atop a short section of barely-raised bench.

"Do you...?"

"I don't. Do you think...?"

"She can't be..."

The whispers started to assault Katara from all sides, as the third rank turned as one to face inward, and left Katara trapped in a four-foot strip of no-man's land between the mass of displaced Tribesmen. She glanced fore and back. She'd been spotted, obviously. But what would that mean? Aalo turned to look at her more directly.

"I don't know who you are," Aalo said, her voice half-way between her mother's smokey, oddly deep tones and her father's more nasal sound.

"My name is Katara. I'm here with my brother and..." Katara began in her own language.

"What the shit is she saying?" Aalo cut her off, in Huo Jian. Wow. Suki wasn't joking about them not knowing their own mother tongue. She stood atop her seat, making her tower over Katara handily. The waterbender was sure that she spotted the dull gleam of a blade, made no doubt of stone-scraped metal, palmed in her hand. They were quite the frequent weapon amongst the Tribesmen, and prisoners in general, it seemed.

"Um... My name is Katara, and I..." Katara tried again.

"Do us a favor and shut the hell up," Aalo said. Katara fell silent, her mouth slightly agape as the girl descended down to Katara's level with a hop, and her inner circle moving with her. She stood quite a bit taller than Katara as well. It made sense, as both her mother and father weren't exactly squat, but it was nevertheless inconvenient to have to stare up to talk to somebody. "Djep? You figure they're trying to sneak in a Hillman?"

"I don't know, Aalo. Doesn't look much like an Azuli to me," the wiry-framed Djep said.

"I'm not a Hillman. I'm from the South Water Tribe, just like you are," Katara pressed through to the finish, overriding another order of silence from Aalo. At the end of her words, Katara was openly scoffed at.

"I know every Tribesman in this prison. Unless the North rebels, everybody here, is every Tribesman who I know," she tapped a hard finger into the center of Katara's chest, shoving her back a step and into the grasp of the rank behind her. They just pushed her back up to her feet rudely and ungently. "I don't know you. So you see my problem."

"...not really?" Katara asked. Aalo chuckled lightly, and looked back up to her. There was a flash of movement, and Aalo lashed out, grabbing Katara's shirt and dragging her close. She could feel the prick of that blade against the carotid which pulsed in her neck. She didn't even let out an eep.

"The Warden's trying to break us. That's not going to happen. We're family, now. You can't break my family. So send a message to your boss; we're not going to get pushed around. He might have the walls and the tram, but," Aalo made a descending whistle sound, and tracked that knife-point gently down from where it had first sat, just tickling along Katara's skin, until it sat right at where her neck met her shoulers, "I own the ground."

"That Warden is not my b–" Katara tried, but Aalo just sighed and pushed Katara back once more. Once again, she was dropped rudely onto her feet.

"You know what? I'm going at this from the wrong direction. I don't need to send a messenger; just need to send a message. And you? Your... pretty little cut up face? That's a pretty good message, I think."

"I wouldn't do that," Katara said, her patience and empathy starting to drain away now that she could sense her life in very real danger. Aalo wheeled toward her, her eyes cold and hard. She pointed with her blade.

"And what are you gonna do? Firebend at me? You won't get past the first bolt," Aalo promised.

"Firebend? No. I'm no firebender," Katara said. There was a smile on her face. With her bending she started to reach for the water in her flask. Then, another idea occurred. "I'm the last waterbender of the South Water Tribe."

"You lying bitch," Aalo muttered. Katara only shrugged, and Aalo's expression grew darker as he disbelief was replaced with wrath. "So you're the one they stole us for? I should skin you alive! You did this to us you..."

She was thrusting forward, that blade searing directly toward Katara's eye. She didn't try to get out of its way, though. She just moved her hands.

It was something she didn't understand the first time she did it. The power to move water gave her the power to bend anything with a significant amount of water to her will. Blood, as she had learned from Toph's impalement, was mostly water, and entirely under her control, once she accepted it, understood it, and could feel it. Weeks, even months of contemplation went into that technique, to grasp 'hold of the blood in somebody's body, to use it how you wanted to. And for weeks and even months, she couldn't see what was right in front of her. It took a drowsy accident to realize what it was, and Azula of all damned people to give the two words which put everything into perspective. Two words, a simplistic description of what she was trying to describe. A title.

Blood bending.

Even as that knife drew closer, Katara was twisting her hands, and reaching out with her bending, all that she had learned in her attempt to both heal and harm. She knew that there was a delicacy which was required, as where most of the body was water, that body was also quite fragile, and tearing might occur. But at the same time, there was a sort of grim expectation about her when she did this. She'd never gotten very much practice, but in her heart and her mind, she knew she could do this.

Her hands crooked, and that arm stopped, about a thumb's-width from impaling her eyeball. Aalo's angry hiss died out, as she tried to shrug her way forward, to get just a touch more distance. Katara pressed forward with both hands, and the arm twisted up and back, her hand popping into an open splay and causing the knife to fall to the ground. Every instant Katara held the grasp, though, it was draining. Painfully. Waves of exhaustion pulled at her, but she had to see this through. That meant she had to work fast. The ranks around her backed off and away from their leader and the interloper both, superstition and understandable terror overwhelming their sense of family in the short term. There was only so far one could go for family, she figured. And what Katara now did, forcing Aalo back one more step before causing her to drop to her knees, was enough to do so. Most notably, Aalo was dangling, but her knees didn't quite hit the ground, like she was being dragged by something taller than she was. In a way, it was true.

"What... are you doing to me?" Aalo asked.

"Waterbending," Katara said. "Call off your goons."

"Why? You won't..."

"Because I'm about to let you go and I don't want to get hit by a chair or something," Katara spelled it out plainly. It wasn't because bloodbending was hard or exhausting – though it felt like her stamina was falling out of a bucket without a bottom, trying to do this under the sun; it was actually still easier than some of the high-level healing that she'd done by a fair margin – but rather, just because... well... bloodbending felt creepy.

"What? You're not going to demand something from me before lettin' me walk?" Aalo asked.

"No! Because that'd make me a horrible person," Katara said. She released her grip, her fingers turning from the foul and angry crooks of a malevolent puppet-maker into the smooth lines of a waterbending adept. The last grunt of Aalo sounded as her knees hit the ground, and the men started to murmur again. Katara could feel them deciding to press in once more. Before they did, Aalo held up a hand, forestalling them.

"Alright. Alright," she said, slowly getting to her feet, a cold look in her eyes. "Don't know what that was, but I didn't like it," she said. "Could you do that again?"

"It's not easy in the day. I think it'd be easier at night. And simple under a full moon," Katara said.

"So you can just hijack anybody you want? Why are you in prison, then?" Aalo asked, her arms crossed and her visage suspicious.

"To get you out," Katara said. Aalo blinked a few times. The crowd began to murmur once more at Katara's back, and the ring surrounding the two women. "If you're willing to help us and help yourselves, we can get you off of Boiling Rock."

"And where exactly would we go?" Aalo asked. "I'm not letting my guys become shock-troopers in some war of Northern Aggression."

"I wasn't lying when I said I was from the South. You could go home. Where your families wait a second. War of Northern Aggression?" Katara asked.

"Yeah, the war that the North kicked off against the Fire Nation. Dumbest decision they ever made. At least it's finally over, though."

"Wow... you really don't know what's going on out there, do you?" Katara asked.

"How would we?" Aalo asked, her voice very dry.

"...Will you help us?" Katara asked again.

Aalo looked to Djep, who gave a mild shrug. She looked to another young man, who made an equivocating gesture. "You two are useless," Aalo muttered. She faced Katara. "Fine. My Tribesmen will join the Tribesmen that buggered off to Kyoshi-woman over there," with a vague and dismissive gesture toward Suki's room. She prodded Katara's chest twice more, though. "But if this is a trap, I can promise you, we won't die quietly, and we won't die alone."

"That's about the best news I heard all day," Katara said. "Which shows how my day is going."

"I hear that," Aalo said with a mild nod, having finally found something on which both she and Katara had common ground.

---

On the other side of the prison, in a secluded corner well away from all others, a man was idly prodding what looked to be a spectacular bruise in the making. There was no group which accepted him into its fold, and that stood to reason: He was once the person in charge of the prison, and thus directly responsible for any real or imagined hardship that the prisoners faced under his tenure. Kanshao Loyo Lah was a man of no family and no friends, and every whit of his body language spoke to that. He was on edge, he was coiled tight, and he was ready to explode. Into violence or flight, Zuko couldn't say. It could have been either. It could have been both.

Zuko had only met the man once before. Before the exile, obviously, and before Azula's illness – which presupposed before Ozai's ascent to the Burning Throne. He was but one among many of Mai's distant relatives, ones that Mother had told him he'd better get to know. Looking back, Zuko figured out that it was because there was a political marriage in the works between the Azuli house and the Royal Family; they would soon be part of the Royal Household as much as Zuko or Azula would have been. Funny, how none of that turned out. Funny, how far destiny took them away from what, at that time, must have seemed a foregone conclusion.

"Kanshao," Zuko began.

"You know, with one word, I could have you torn to shreds?" Kanshao said, still prodding his hurts, and finding which ones pained him most. His tone was utterly conversational. "All I'd have to do is say your name to these people, and the Tribesmen in particular would be baying for your blood. You can't even imagine how much these people hate your father, and by extension, you."

"Well, they're in for a bit of a surprise, then," Zuko muttered. "How did you survive? They didn't let any of your family survive, except for one."

Kanshao turned to her. "You're lying. I'm the last of my House."

"Mai survived," Zuko said. Kanshao stared at him, a hard-to-gauge look in his eyes. "I thought you'd be happier to hear that."

"...I don't know what I feel for that news," Kanshao turned to stare across the yard. "How did she get away? How did she survive?"

"Luck," Zuko said, taking a place next to the former warden with his arms behind his back, looking for all viewers as a bored guard looking for trouble. "And a lot of strength."

"I meant how was she not murdered," Kanshao asked flatly.

"She cried, and they couldn't bring themselves to kill a terrified child," Zuko said. He shrugged. "She's almost as good a liar as I am, it turns out. After that, well, she spent the next six years fighting the Fire Nation with some Earth Kingdom terrorists. Not that I blame her."

Kanshao's face slowly turned into something like a warm, if distant smile. "Mai. She always was a bright one. Pity my sister was always a dream-crushing bitch, Agni rest her soul, so she didn't ever get to show it."

"Well, her mother would probably be horrified if she saw her daughter today," Zuko said with a smirk on his lips. Kanshao offered a dry laugh at that as well. There was a silence, as the ranks of Tribesmen rippled across the yard. So Katara was opting away from the subtle? Well, whatever worked. "I think we can help each other."

"With what?" Kanshao asked, his brow furrowing in suspicion as his wide mouth twisted into a scowl.

"What's the fastest way to get out of the Boiling Rock?" Zuko asked.

"Whatever way you got in," he answered.

"Presume that isn't an option," Zuko said.

He shook his head. "You don't get it, child; the Boiling Rock was built from the ground up to be inescapable. Get past the walls, the lake is waiting for you. Try to hijack the trolley, and they cut the lines, which drops you into the lake. Unless you've got a Storm King ship hidden in your back pocket, those are the only ways out. Trust me. In the fourteen years I spent as Warden, there wasn't a single escapee. And the same in the six years I was inside."

"A Storm King ship wouldn't work," Zuko said. The Azuli turned to him in confusion. Zuko gave an equivocating gesture. "The air in its balloon wouldn't be hotter than the air around it, and... well, the Tribesman knows the science better."

"I was joking," Kanshao said.

"I wasn't."

The Azuli stared at him for a moment. "What has happened out there?"

"A lot," Zuko said simply. He frowned across the yard, trying to figure out how they could possibly get this many disparate people to work together long enough to get out. Without killing each other. Or Zuko. Or Katara. Sokka would probably survive; much as he might cry to the opposite, he had to be the most consistently lucky man Zuko'd ever met. Zuko... didn't make a habit of depending on his own. He pulled his attention away from the gruesome prospect of his own horrible murder, and gave a shrug toward the tallest of the buildings, upon which the entrants arrived and those off duty exited. "What if we take the tower and keep them from cutting the cables?"

"Again, not a possibility," Kanshao said. "The cables could be cut from either side, and if the alarm goes off, and a tram starts toward them, their orders are, as they always were, to cut without reprisal. Unless you can take both sides at once, we're dead the moment we reach the prison's wall."

"You're a very up person, you know that?" Zuko muttered sarcastically. And then his face twisted into a fresh scowl. He was spending entirely too much time around Sokka. He sighed and shook his head. "The upper line won't be a problem. We've got somebody who can take care of that."

"And how would you message her? You can't send hawks through the fog."

"He could just talk to me. Hey buddy. Hey former-warden," Malu said as she sauntered up. Kanshao's face took on a very guarded look.

"She's with us," Zuko said simply. He turned to her. "And since when am I 'buddy'?"

"Well, I can't refer to you by your full name, now can I? And now that I think of it, what is your surname, anyway? I mean, you can't just have one name, can you?"

"Why not? You're just Malu," Zuko pointed out.

"...Tuying Fei," she finished. She gave a dramatic bow toward both Zuko and the Warden. "Pleased to be introduced."

"Right. She's our Plum up the sleeve. She'll shut down the cutters on the far side," Zuko said.

"I'm doing what now?"

"Keeping the guys on the other side of the trolley from cutting the cables and turning the cars into cans of flash-boiled prisoner," Zuko said without any real inflection.

"Oh, I can do that. I'll just talk to Nila, and take a couple of her lemons," Malu said, before turning to saunter away.

"You do realize the timing would have to be perfect? And you'd never know when to start?" Kanshao asked.

Zuko shrugged. "She'd be operating on a one minute order lag."

"You'd have to fly to cross the lake that quickly," Kanshao said with annoyance clear in his tone, before he noted how Malu had started grinning in her bucket-like helm. The oldest of the three blinked a few times, then turned to Zuko. "...Did you manage to find a Storm King, as well as their airships, in the last six years?"

"Air Nomad, thank you," Malu said peevishly. And quietly, which was the important part. Kanshao just sat there, stunned. "So, are you going to help?"

"...Since the universe seems to be bending over backward to prove every point I make wrong, I don't see why not," Kanshao said after a long time of thought and staring. A smirk came to his mouth. "And come to think of it, I don't much like the idea of the new Warden inheriting my perfect record. Let him work for his own."

"Good to hear it," Malu said, clapping him on the back, which made him wince in pain. She flinched back quickly. "Oh... right. Sorry."

Zuko nodded, and as Malu walked past him, his eyes narrowed, as a question occurred to him. "Malu?"

"Yeeeup?"

"Does Aang have a surname?"

"Of course he does. Heck, Aang is technically an abbreviation," Malu said.

"And what's his full name?" Zuko asked. Malu glanced left and right, before whispering it to him. Zuko's brow rose at that. "That's dignified enough; why doesn't he use it?"

Malu could only shrug her ignorance.

---

The gust of wind reaching into the sweltering cranny was the warning that Malu was approaching. For that reason alone, Nila didn't hurl a white-phosphorus lemon at the intruder the instant that the footfalls crunched against the crushed glass she scattered near the entrance. No matter how delicate one's footfall, it was never gentle enough to not disturb glass. "I am getting bored, and perhaps a bit concerned at your lack of progress," Nila said, continuing to fill up a melon with a mixture of explosive and extremely irritating compounds. It would join at least four of its brethren on a shelf-like projection of rock which was currently piled high with both fruit-based and more conventional explosives. She'd even worked up a few special surprises, if the need called for it.

"Hey, Nila. Just had a talk with Zuko up top. He's got the Warden in, but I'm going to need some of your bombs."

"To what exact purpose?" Nila asked, casting a glance at her red armored friend.

"Make some people stop cutting a steel wire, by whatever means necessary. You know, without killing them."

Nila nodded, and then pulled out two metal-encased toruses, each lined with a squish, barely-solid form of blasting jelly she was pretty sure she invented. "Chain cutters," she said, setting them before Malu. She pulled another great block, this one a satchel with a clear 'danger' sign printed onto its base. "Door breaching charge. Point the bottom toward the door," she ordered. She then pulled a bag of lemons and dumped them gently out, before scooping some back in, chasing them with two melons. "...and for disabling manpower? Pepper grease, gleese-oil for stench, and just a hint of Layman's Lye to make it that much harder to get off. Don't breath it in. And do not get it on your face."

Malu looked up past the devices granted her, and spotted the big one. "Oh my gods! What is that thing?"

"If I am needed to destroy the prison wall, this is what shall do it," Nila said, patting the ceramic jug that contained the massive charge. "It can be detonated right where it sits and provide that effect."

"Really?" Malu asked, obviously nervous around that much bomb.

Nila shrugged. "There is a small chance that it could set off a catastrophic eruption in the volcano."

"Small?" Malu asked.

"Almost incalculably so," Nila reassured her, or tried to and failed, to be more precise. She turned back toward her work, delicately pouring the explosive into the neutralizing goop which made the highly volatile substance able to be thrown about with wild abandon. When the last drop fell into the greenish slime, she turned back. "And tell me, has the Tribesman made an ass of himself and gotten captured?"

"Sokka? No. His sister did, though."

She shook her head mildly. "Oh, the trials and travails of having a fool for a sibling; that is one thing he and I share."

"I wouldn't call her a fool. I'd say she's as smart as anybody would need to be," Malu turned to her, her brow drawn down.

"...that sounded somewhat like an insult," Nila pointed out. Malu simply shrugged. She hefted the bag full of bombs. "One thing?"

"What is it?"

"...don't let him know I worried about him," Nila said quietly. Malu obviously delighted in her misery, as that was obviously a subject of great merriment to the airbender. It just brought a fresh scowl to the bomb-smith's face. She grumbled. "I'd tell you to die in a hole, but at the moment, that's not a good option."

"I love you too, Nila," Malu said, crunching over the glass on her way out, a hand waved over her head in fare-well. Nila just shook her head, and got back to work. There were too many variables in this plan. And she intended to solve them in the most permanent of fashions; explosively.

---

Sokka, unlike the others, had a hell of a challenge ahead of him. Prisoners were one thing, massive potentially firebending prisoners who'd believe his story about as well as if he'd declared himself an airbender due to his disguise, they were quite the other. Of course, if he called himself an airbender, they'd probably force him to prove it by throwing him off of the roof.

The prisoners were milling with greater numbers as the rain gave out completely, to be replaced with the hot-wet of the Boiling Rock's steam being blown at random – and sometimes back into the crater from which it spawned – which was apparently a much more usual condition for the prison. Then again, the only ones who'd apparently ever faced the kind of cold that Sokka briefly felt on his way in were those who tried to desert during the fighting against Summavut.

The cold stayed on Sokka's mind. It wasn't the first time he'd felt a cold wind in the Fire Nation. Of course, it'd been explained to him that the Fire Nation was hardly the place it had been at the start of the World War. Instead of a place of rife agriculture growing up toward a merciless sun, churning smoke to try to cut the glare as they dug deep into the mountains for their iron and gold, it was a place of perpetual near-darkness, dampness, and noise. Whatever happened to whomever counted him/herself as the patron of the Fire Nation, was obviously something of a doozy.

He took a calming breath, and sidled up to the side of the man who had to be easily as tall as Bato, which meant he was in the running for the tallest person that Sokka'd ever seen. But unlike Bato, this man was built wide in the shoulders, wide in the jaw, and short in the hair. Sokka forced himself to a stop beside this massive and intimidating piece of humanity, and tried to summon the courage to say the words, to offer the plan.

"You're not really a guard, are you?" Chit Sang asked immediately, after giving Sokka no more than a cursory glance.

"What? No! I mean yes! Of course I'm a guard. I'm all kinds of guard!" Sokka tried to say, thrown in an instant by his question.

"You're with the new Tribeswoman and the one who stands like a nobleman, aren't you?" Chit Sang further asked.

"Um, well, that's one way of..." Sokka said.

"And you've got a plan that you need the assistance of the old-timers, don't you?" Chit Sang completed.

"Uhhhhh... Yes?" Sokka said meekly.

"Prison break?" Chit Sang asked.

"...yeah..." Sokka said.

"Good. We're in," Chit Sang answered. Sokka leaned back.

"What? Just like that?"

Chit sang didn't answer him. He just finished picking his teeth with that toothpick, and flicked it away, before walking back toward his crowd. "Hey! We're gonna start a riot!"

"Not yet!" Sokka blurted urgently. Chit Sang paused, glanced back at him, and then thrust a finger at Sokka.

"...when he says so," Chit Sang finished. Well, Sokka thought, that was a lot easier than it could have been.

---

Two guards met on the balcony which overlooked the prison-yard. While the group below didn't look any different than it had a few hours ago, there was a different sense to those in the know to them. Like they had as one decided to stop staring at each other, and then started looking very, very hard at the people who were containing them. It made most of the guards nervous.

"Hey, new guy," a woman in the armor said. "You notice something down there with the inmates?"

"What should I notice?" Zuko asked, playing the naivety expected of him to the hilt.

"Just... keep an eye out on them. They seem more restless than usual," she said, before walking on. Zuko sighed, and looked out over the masses. It was about a minute later when a new guard approached him. This was the one Zuko was rather hoping he'd be able to find. Sokka came to a sauntering stop near him.

"We've got the scariest of them with us," Sokka said.

"Good. That's all of them," Zuko said. He gave a nod down toward Suki's den in the corner. "They're talking right now. Coming up with a plan."

"What? I had a plan! It was a good plan!" Sokka sounded mildly insulted.

"Gotta say, buddy, it had a few holes in it," Malu added, somehow managing to appear behind the two of them and loop an arm 'round each of their necks. "And for the record, your girlfriend has some scary hobbies, Sokka."

Sokka sighed, and rubbed his eyes through the helmet. "How big of a bomb?" he asked in the sort of dull, grudging interest of somebody who'd had to ask that question enough times to become numb to it.

"Make a volcano erupt big," Malu said. "So... yeah, we better get this done quickly before she invents a bomb that can set the air on fire."

"Wouldn't put it past her," Zuko said with a shrug, pulling himself out of Malu's grasp. "She's got a lot more firebender in her than most firebenders I know."

"Aw, you're just jealous that I got a girlfriend before you did," Sokka chided.

"Hey! I had plenty of girlfriends," Zuko snapped, before realizing how immature that sounded. He growled and turned toward the prison once again. "Maybe you should be paying more attention to the plan and less on your relationship? It might make this work a bit better."

"I can multitask, don't you worry," Sokka said. He glanced back to Malu, and gently pushed her back. Zuko caught a glimpse of Katara approaching, and gave her a spot to lean against the back wall, out of sight from those below. "Hey, sis. Heard you got into a knife-fight with Bato's daughter. How'd that go for you?"

"You know, there's some really scary things that waterbending can do," Katara said simply, the look on her face somewhere between bemused and quietly concerned. She shook her head. "That doesn't matter. They're all talking. So what's the next step?"

Asked to her brother, of course. Zuko scowled. "Why do you always depend upon him for plans?"

"Because Sokka's our 'Idea Guy'," Katara answered.

"Yeah, and thanks a lot for putting all the pressure on me," Sokka said with eyes rolling in his helmet.

"He's also our 'Sarcasm Guy'," Katara offered.

"That part, I don't mind," Sokka said, rubbing his chin. He turned to the airbender. "Is everything in place?"

"Pretty much. Do you want me to bring Nila in?"

"No, take her with you," Sokka said. "She'll probably be a lot more help on the outside fighting in, than on the inside fighting out."

"Gonna have to disagree with you there," Zuko said. "You said no deaths, and she's the best way to get that... even if she does use bombs as her favorite weapon."

"Yup, my girlfriend creates bombs that don't kill people."

Zuko sighed. Sokka seemed entirely too happy with that statement.

"When can we start?" Zuko pressed.

"Soon," Sokka said. Suki slipped out of the room and began to navigate the prisoners heading toward them. "Alright, sooner than soon."

"I'll go bring in Nila," Malu said. Zuko gave her a nod, and she started to bound up the stairs to the rooftop where she made her 'trips' to the shore. With that much steam, it was like a bank of pea-soup fog all the time. Painful, but very good at hiding what one didn't want seen.

The infiltrators waited as the Kyoshi native came up to meet them. She didn't look very happy, but then again, Zuko was here, so she had a pretty good reason to not be happy. "We've got a plan."

"What is it?" Zuko asked after she stayed silent a bit too long.

"We walk out the front door," she said. All stared at her.

"That's a terrible plan!" Katara said.

"That's a brilliant plan!" Sokka said over her, almost at the same time. "Think about it: Every iota of engineering is devoted to keeping people from devising a sneaky way out of the prison. While the security at the gate is disgustingly high, it's only one layer deep! Instead of having to try to outplan whoever built this place and all of the contingencies that they put into place, we only need to deal with what they considered both the easiest and the worst possible avenue for escape!"

"Whoa, calm down," Suki said, a smirk on her face. She turned a glance toward his sister. "Does he always get this excited over plans?"

"You should see how excited he gets over sarcasm," Zuko offered. Suki chuckled for half a second before she remembered that she hated Zuko. Still, worth it. Sokka waved the jibes away.

"There are only forty five guards, and almost two hundred inmates. They'll have firebenders in raised positions, but we have bombs to blow them out of their pillboxes! It's foolproof!"

A cold wind blue in, ruffling those edges of their uniforms – guard and prisoner both – as it passed. They all shuddered, Zuko included, at that sudden chill that departed as soon as it arrived. "You just had to say that, didn't you?" Zuko asked.

Sokka hung his head. "I really make it too easy, don't I?" he asked quietly.

"You really do," Suki offered, elbowing him lightly as she moved toward the stairs. They all took that as their cue to get into their positions. Sokka, though, only made it half way down the hall, before his shoulders hitched, he fell still, and silent.

"Oh god no!" Sokka said in utter horror.

"What is it? What's wrong?" Katara asked, instantly in caring team-mother mode.

"That crazy fortune-teller from Makapu! I just realized she was right!" Sokka said, utter disgust on his face. Zuko could see why, if not how. Katara, though, was confounded, and shot a glance toward Zuko, before sighing with relief. Zuko felt very out of place in this conversation. And uncomfortable with what that same mystic had said to him.

His choice would decide who lived and who died; which family was made whole, and which one torn apart. At the time, it was just showmanship. Now... now he was concerned.

---

The pieces were in place. Everybody knew their parts. While fully half of the plan depended on the actions of an airbender, who was herself a half-mile away, they were as ready as they'd ever be for the escape of the century. Thus it was that Sokka found himself hauling Nila up onto the roof, and quickly pressing a helm and pair of gloves into her hands. She gave him a raised brow, and handed off her own armament for her disguise. "You were taking far longer than necessary," Nila said.

"Hey, you try galvanizing a prison population into an army. See how well you do," Sokka said defensively.

"That was a joke," Nila said. Sokka wasn't laughing. And he almost jumped out of his skin when he heard a cough behind him. While it turned out to be Zuko, Sokka still clutched at his heart.

"Tui La, Zuko! You almost gave me a heart attack!" Sokka said.

"Suki's downstairs. Are those the bombs?" Nila nodded to Zuk's question, and pointed out which one was to be handed out. Zuko nevertheless paused, looking somewhat uncomfortable. "Does this seem like the best idea to you, Sokka? I mean using bombs to release prisoners is hardly..."

"Honorable?" Sokka guessed.

"Sensible," Zuko said flatly.

"It is easy to fight when you are winning. So stop complaining of the difficulties and strive to make the fight easy," Nila said, pressing a bag of bombs into Zuko's hand, before sliding on her gloves and helmet. Still, any who actually looked through the visor would know her for a counterfeit in a heartbeat. "Tribesman, a word?"

"Sokka," Sokka said.

"Only in private," Nila muttered. Sokka did as he was told, though, and moved to keep up with Nila as she descended several yards ahead of Zuko. "I have lit the long fuse for the bomb under the trolley tower; we shall only have one half of an hour to make this escape, before it detonates and brings the building down. Needless to say, we only have one attempt; if we are captured, our deaths are almost certain."

"You're in a good mood today, I notice," Sokka chuckled.

"I slept on the dirt," she answered him.

"Well, you woke up on the wrong side of the dirt this morning," Sokka jibed. Nila only gave a tiny snort, but it was less derision and more heavily subdued mirth. "Anything else you wanted to talk about?"

"...perhaps," Nila said. She gestured off of their path, and he followed her into the currently vacant cell which was just beside the stairwell. When Sokka entered the room, he shrugged toward her.

"So, what was it that you w–" Sokka began to ask, and was cut off when speech became impossible by way of intervening foreign lips. His eyes shot wide, and while he didn't fight the embrace and the kiss that went with it, he was nevertheless startled and confused by it. When Nila pulled away after what he felt was a far-too-short time, he stood dumbly against the wall. Sokka raised a finger. "...what was that?"

"To remind you not to die," Nila said with a little smile on her face, something awkward and uncomfortable but entirely genuine. However it did not last; Nila, Sokka had learned, would only allow herself to be a normal young woman for so long at a time. Then, she went back into a mode which could only be described as Nila. Sokka followed his girlfriend out of the prison cell, feeling quite a bit better, not about his chances, but life in general. They reached the bottom of the stairs behind Zuko, who turned in surprise to see them both on his tail instead of waiting for him.

"Where did you two go?" Zuko asked.

"Unimportant," Nila waved his question away utterly. Suki, who was the fourth of those present, seemed somewhat confused by Nila's appearance. And Nila noticed that. "What do you want?"

"That accent is Si Wongi. What's one of your kind doing here?"

"Your accent pins you as a native of Kyoshi Island," Nila said dryly. "And I could ask you the exact same question."

"Ladies, let's keep on track here," Sokka tried to intervene, but both of them shot him a look which made him swallow his words, and damned near swallow his tongue. Yeesh. So that was the girl he ended up with in some other reality? Honestly, not too bad, but a part of him was a bit alarmed that he apparently had some sort of multiverse-spanning predilection towards forming romantic relationships with dangerous women.

Life had been so much simpler last year.

"So you are she who would have been his paramour?" Nila asked. Suki raised a brow.

"Who? Sokka?"

"Indeed. I suggest against it," Nila said.

"Ooookay," Suki said. Nila nodded, and then tossed the Kyoshi Warrior a couple of discolored lemons. "Wait a second. They said you were making weapons! These are fruit!"

"Throw them hard enough, and you'll see how much of a weapon they really are," Sokka said. Nila, though, shook her head and indicated a ring of metal which had been jammed into the end of it.

"It is not a matter of throwing strongly, but of a timed explosive. Pull this out, and throw it immediately; you will have between two and five seconds before it explodes."

"That's a lot of margin for error," Suki said.

"You wanted a bomb in a lemon. I work with the difficulties that the universe bestows," Nila said. She glanced over to the former Warden, who was talking to all of Suki's mother, Aalo and Chit Sang near the center of the yard. "I will give these to those who need them; mostly the Tribesmen, I would think."

Sokka nodded, and waved Nila to her task. Suki watched her leave. "So... that's your girlfriend?" she asked.

"Yup," Sokka said.

"And she's like that all of the time?" Suki asked.

"Yup," Sokka said.

"Actually, she's on her best behavior right now. She's usually worse," Zuko pointed out.

"Really?" Suki asked.

"...yup," Sokka admitted, begrudgingly.

"That's rough, buddy," Suki said, giving Sokka a light shove. He gifted her with a wry glare, and she laughed at it.

"Let's just break out of prison already? I'm sick of getting picked at," Sokka muttered.

"But you make it so easy!" Suki said after him as he stormed away toward where his sister was talking to who was obviously their distant cousins at best, an countrymen at worst. If nothing else, he'd stop getting mocked for choices he didn't even make! Behind his back, Suki leaned toward Zuko, who was simply shaking his head. "Is there more to this plan that you haven't told me because Sokka might mess it up?"

"Sokka came up with the plan. And his plans tend to work," Zuko pointed out, if not enthusiastically. Suki gaped at him.

"Really?" she asked. Zuko shrugged. "...We're all doomed, aren't we?"

"So I keep saying."

---

Malu landed and spun her staff into it's pole form, before hiding it behind a couple of rocks. It was a hard enough thing to get around on airbending alone – not in terms of distance but rather in terms of stamina – but making it so much more needlessly complicated was that she was currently in a land which would recognize her kind, if as a Storm King, upon sight if she showed that thing. That meant she had to walk around like an earthbender. Not like she hadn't done that before, though; most of her trip with Nila was like that.

The bag of bombs she kept over her shoulder. A guard carrying a bag was not suspicious, whereas a guard hefting a cultural artifact like the airbender glider staff most certainly would. The far side of the trolley from the Boiling Rock was a much smaller affair than the prison it lead to. There was just the single tower in which the mechanism to run the cables was housed, with an Aerie above it for messenger hawks, and a small, squat barracks beside for those prison guards which preferred not to cross the boiling lake every day to get to work. The steam was blowing south, which wasn't to Malu's best advantage, but she would take what she could get. That Aerie was Malu's first target.

After a glance to make sure she wasn't being watched, she swept herself up to the higher floor with a gust, and dived down through the hawk's escape hatch in the roof, barely making it through past the shutter they doubtless used to keep the rain out when it deluged. She twisted as she zipped down through the cacophony of caged hawks, which all noted her entrance with a chorus of alarmed cries. She landed easily enough, even springing to stride away from her landing, but froze with a 'gack' sound when that was to face a man who was dressed as she was, sans helmet, in the process of turning toward her.

"Augh! You scared the hell out of me. You could have been a Storm King or something," the falconer said, patting his chest. Malu mentally wiped the sweat from her figurative brow. But she had to unwipe it, as the man's face drew down into confusion. "Wait a second. How'd you get in here?"

Malu looked past him, to the direction he was standing before; the sole and only door out of the Aerie stood there, locked and barred. "...would you believe that I'm unbelievably sneaky?" she tried.

"...Storm King," he said, his eyes going to the only other place she could have entered from, and making exactly the right assumption although with the wrong terminology. "STORM KING!"

"Sorry about this," Malu said, even as she rushed toward him, kipping over him as he tried to swing his chair at her. Taking his back, she lined up her shot, and almost of it's own volition, her fist which was on the guard's spine opened, and jabbed hard up with two fingers straight into the spot behind the man's jaw. He made a descending moaning sound, and dropped to the floor, his eyes rolled up and his mouth drooling. "Ooh... I thought I'd forgotten how to do that," she said. She shrugged. Maybe her run-in with Pathik had done more than just cleanse her soul; it had also refreshed her on the airbender martial art of Dim Mak. She wasn't going to gripe, though; now, she knew that somebody would eventually open the door and send the message that needed sending. Small increases in chaos, that was what Sokka called them. Ten thousand and ten thousand grains of rice on an Ostrich Horse's back, until the last one was enough to break it's back.

Malu moved to the door and rotated the lock, making sure it was still in the shut position, before snapping off the key, and wedging a spike into the door-bar to hold it in place. The guard inside would probably wake up in a half-hour or so, but it'd be tricky for him to get out, and he wouldn't get in the way. She glanced up, and gauged her jump, before bounding from toe-hold to toe-hold, up the stack of ascending falcon cages, until she caught the lip of the hatch and pulled herself through it. A quick slide to the ground, and she was sauntering toward the barracks. She glanced inside, but couldn't see anybody at first glance. She shrugged, and headed toward the tower.

The door to the tower was likewise shut. Malu sighed, shifting the bag of bombs on her shoulder so it didn't dig in quite as aggravatingly. She pondered. What should she do to sneak in? There were no hatches for easy entry, here. And all of the windows were only about a hand'sbreadth wide, and reinforced with that black iron that they used so often. Well, why not try the obvious?

Malu knocked on the door. There was a moment of wait, and then with a metal shunk, a slider opened at just above Malu's eye-level, and dark brown stared down at her. "We're not due a shift change for three hours. What's wrong?"

"Something's got to get down to the prison. Warden's orders," Malu said, stabbing wildly in the dark as it were. Those eyes narrowed, which gave her the impression that her stab hadn't exactly hit.

"The Warden sends all orders for incoming through me. All of them."

"Well, maybe he missed one," Malu said, trying to sound impatient and annoyed. Hoping she didn't come off as afraid, which she was. And as she did, she set down the bag, and lifted up one of Nila's bombs that was made of hard metal, hiding it behind her back.

"That uniform doesn't fit you very well," the guard said. Then, another metal shunk, and she groaned, as the man continued. "We've got an infiltrator outside! Call for a lockdown!"

"Why is it never easy?" Malu asked, splatting the sticky side of the 'shaped charge' that Nila was so proud about onto the door right where the lock would be. She pulled the tab, and it started to hiss, which was Malu's indication to take a long step back, and bring her bombs with her. She looped the bag over one shoulder, and leaned forward on her toes 'round the corner, as the hissing grew quiet.

Then, a blast which was more in keeping with that first stick of explosive that Malu had seen from Nila than her usual diversions, which sent a streak of displaced metal flying away from the door, but as Malu rounded that bound, she could see that it had torn the door off of one hinge and embedded it open into the wall it stood beside. Malu dove through the door, managing to duck under a sword-slash and above a fiery kick from a firebender in the same motion. She twisted in the air, hurling a grapefruit into that room. As it flew, there was an insistent tug, as the 'pin' was yanked out. She continued to flip through the air, before landing on a twisting ball of air, the scooter that Aang had invented a century ago.

She shot through the halls, banking through the machinery room to avoid a firebender who'd leapt in front of the door to block her way. She tossed a lemon behind her as she did, and then took her scooter up a wall, then back down across the super-heated metal of the piping from the furnaces. The firebender, who'd followed after her, was caught with a blast of noxious pepper grease, and the impact of it drove him from his feet to writhe in pain on the ground. If she hadn't known that the damage was never permanent – though in Nila's words, the shame might be – she'd never have even though to using this thing. It seemed like a really mean way of taking somebody down.

She'd actually reached the door when the grapefruit she'd hurled before went off. Nila wasn't kidding about the unreliable fuses. The vast cloud of foul and stinging erupted out, engulfing the two men who'd gotten out of the room only to not quite move far enough. Nila shot through that door she'd been aiming for in the first place, and her scooter brought her at break-neck speed up the stairs, banked off a wall, and deposited her into the center of a room full of controls, and about a half-dozen armored guards.

Malu hurled her second grapefruit at the man who was trying to activate the alarm; the impact of being brained with a melon was enough to make him fail in his attempt. But the others, not so focused on spreading word but rather defending themselves, turned to attack. One hurled a spear at Malu's face, which she bent out of the way of. It was the fire of the others which was a greater problem.

Malu ducked and weaved through the fire, placing herself always between two of the people arrayed against her so that one couldn't dare attack without hitting another; that still left her open to more attack than she liked to think about. Fortunately, she didn't have to think about it, because she was too focused on grabbing hold of every pin of the lemons she had left. She twisted another ball of air under a toe, but this time, instead of using it to zip around the room, she locked it into place, and used it to spin wildly, and allowed centrifugal force to send lemons careening to all points, some even bounding off of firebender heads in the process. Then, the last one hurled, she dropped, and hurled her arms wide. The firebenders took one step in, to launch a coordinated strike on her.

Then the grapefruit exploded, causing half of the people to be engulfed in horrible burning smoke. Like the crackling of fireworks, the others went off, filling the room right from floor to ceiling with that noxious gas. Malu twisted the air into a tight ball, the one spot which wouldn't be choking and wheezing, and locked herself to the ground. The room, outside of her protective shell, went utterly dark.

---

Hotaro was, in terms of being able to stop a fight, not much of a prison guard. It was fortunate, then, that he wasn't ever used to that effect. Unlike Katsuke, the broad and bearded bully that he was, Hotaro had an education, and a notable lack of sadism. He had a mind for numbers, logistics, and more important than that, he had a head for money. So when he found something off in the numbers, it raised his hackles, and dare say his alarms, rather quickly.

He rose from his table, and began to briskly walk toward the Warden's office, the evidence of his discovery in hand. The other guards didn't get in his way. They had their jobs, he had his. And since his job was making sure that they got paid for their jobs, he was afforded a bit of courtesy not usually afforded to a rail-thin, greasy haired man needing thick spectacles to see at all could usually expect. He halted at the Warden's door, and then flipped up his paperwork, as though to make sure that he was absolutely sure. As though there were a doubt: Hotaro never forgot numbers. They remained as they always did, and the proof of them was troubling.

He knocked timidly on the door. One of the other guards, a woman who Hotaro had never gotten the courage to ask out in all of the five years she'd worked here, sighed and rolled her eyes. "You'll never get his attention like that. You got to put some shoulder into it," she said, giving the door a side-armed bang-bang which echoed down the hallways. Then, with a chuckle, she continued walking.

"Who is banging at my door like some kind of lunatic?" the Warden demanded from within, and Hotaro wilted. While he was shown unusual courtesy, there were still... pranks. Hotaro opened the door and slipped inside, finding the Warden sitting as he usually did, behind a mountain of reports. "Oh, you. What is it now, has somebody misplaced a spoon?"

"Far worse than that, I'm afraid," Hotaro said. He was aware that his obsessive counting and recounting of the stocks, provisions, and pennies could be frustrating, but it made for more money in everybody's pocket at the end of the year. And it prevented a lot of trouble. "The laundry stocks came back from yesterday; we are short three uniforms, and one was found in an odd place."

"Uniforms?" the Warden asked, his deep voice querulous.

"Armor and helmets as well. One set was recovered near the coolers, but still. Three," Hotaro pressed his point. The Warden blinked. "Somebody stole those uniforms!"

"Is that so?" the Warden asked, annoyance in his tone, but not at the accountant, fortunately. "There must be more, or you would have simply sent me a memo."

"There is," Hotaro said, and he held forward the headcount manifest from the previous night. The Warden's brow rose, but he didn't seem to see what Hotaro did. "Look at the number of prisoners!"

"Don't tell me that one has escaped," the Warden warned, in the same tone he'd used before tossing Ketsuke's predecessor over a railing in a fit of pique.

"Worse. There's one more than there should be," Hotaro said. Now, the Warden simply looked baffled, for a long moment. Hotaro rubbed his eyes, displacing his glasses as he did so. "We have infiltrators inside the prison!"

"What? Alert the guards! I will find these intruders at once!" the Warden declared. There was another knock on the door, though. "What is it! I am busy!"

"There was a delivery, Warden," an Azuli accented voice said outside the door.

"It will have to wait!" the Warden shouted.

"I'm afraid it's rather urgent," a woman added, but with an odd tone to her words.

"Well, out with it? What is it?" the Warden asked as he pulled the armored pauldrons into place, as Hotaro stepped aside and out of the way. The door creaked open again, and a young woman stepped into the doorway. Hotaro's eyes shot wide, when they beheld the daughter of the Kyoshi Matriarch standing in the threshold, grinning. She had fruit in her hands. Citrus. Not from the local stockpiles, that was certain.

"You look like you could use a snack," Suki of Kyoshi said brightly in strongly accented Huo Jian, before hurling both into the room, and slamming the door shut. Hotaro and the Warden both turned to face the discolored lemons on the floor, confused as to what the hell had just happened. As it was, Hotaro's near-blindness finally ended as a benefit to him; while the burning, stinking gas that was erupted through the room by the explosion still seared at his skin, at least it didn't get into his eyes.

---

The prison was oddly quiet, for all that there was essentially a riot going on. Chit Sang had a way of controlling his long-serving ilk which Sokka wasn't sure whether he should be impressed by or afraid of. He once again found himself idly wondering what exactly the hulking firebender had been before he'd come to the Boiling Rock, but this was hardly the time to ask those sorts of questions. Suki sauntered back into Sokka's path, grinning broadly. Zuko followed shortly after her, and they fell in behind the massing wall of prisoners, Tribesmen, and the Si Wongi who'd provided bombs to both.

"I've wanted to do that for six months," Suki said, quite happy with herself.

"I feel bad for his accountant," Zuko said.

"Really?"

"How many people go to work counting coin and get a bomb exploded in their face? Must have been a shock to him," Zuko offered with a shrug. Sokka, though, had to kip ahead slightly, so that he was ahead of the main tumult of angry soon-to-be-emancipated people. Mostly because he still had his armor on, and he was one of three whom he could count on under that function.

Zuko and Nila moved to join him, and Sokka waved the crowd to a halt before turning a corner. Aalo snapped an order which went back through her people. Chit Sang just stood in front of his, put his hands on his fists, and glared at them as though daring them to push past. Needless to say, they didn't. "This is the main choke-point. They have two pillboxes flanking the stairs up, and a third built into the trolley-tower," Kanshao pointed out. "The two over the stairs absolutely have to go down, or they'll bathe us in fire before we can even get a glance on them. The third can afford to be left up. Better if it were taken out, but not as critical."

"Alright," Sokka said. He nodded from his girlfriend to the firebender in the red armor of the Boiling Rock prison's guards. "When I say so, you sprint like somebody's trying to kill you. You two take the one on the left. I'll get the one on the right."

"Why would we..." Nila asked.

"Because we're running from the riot," Zuko grasped Sokka's meaning, which gave Nila a very annoyed look, but fortunately, not directed at Sokka. He pointed from Nila to Sokka. "You should go with him. I can take the bunker on my own. You two... well, I know how your luck tends to go."

Nila was silent a moment, then turned to Sokka. "He is not wrong."

"Alright. Ready?"

"Bombs prepared," Nila said. Zuko simply nodded. Sokka gave one last look behind them, and called out to Chit Sang and Aalo. "Give us one minute, then you storm up those stairs behind the firebenders. There's no reason not to brute force this, if Malu's done her part."

"It's about time that somebody taught that fool not to consider himself infallible because of somebody else's work," Kanshao said, but of what, Sokka wasn't immediately sure. Sokka tapped Nila, and she took off. Sokka waited exactly one second, before tearing off after her. He probably should have ran first, because Nila outstripped him so completely that by the time he reached the bottom of that stairwell, she was already vanishing up into the 'plaza' at the top of the trolley-tower out of his line of sight. She was quick, in a great many things, Sokka noted. He powered up the stairs, Zuko following a moment later, and he broke toward the red armored girl who was just ducking through the door which had been opened for her.

"They're behind us!"

"Who are?" the guard at that door asked, as Sokka ran full-tilt at him. Sokka hurled himself through the door, crashing to the ground on his side. Notably, the side which didn't have a noxious lemon hidden under his armor. "Agni's Blood, what's going on down there? I can't see any of the prisoners..."

"It's a riot," Sokka said. Nila simply stood, her hands on her knees, as though she were hopelessly out of breath. It was more that doing so made people think not to talk to her, and so she wouldn't have to look anybody in the eye; both would have been dead give-aways. "They're coming up the stairs. They got the Warden and... that other guy. The little fella," Sokka waved, as though trying to call forth his name that was lost on the tip of his tongue.

"Hotaro? Damn!" he said, he pulled Sokka up to his feet. "That little guy padded my purse for years. How far behind you are they?"

"Not far," Sokka said. He nodded, and turned to shout into a brass horn built into the wall. "All guards! We've got a riot! Prepare for a firebath!"

Sokka nodded, and waved the 'able-bodied' firebender ahead of him. Then, Sokka gave Nila a smirk. "I can't believe he bought it," Sokka whispered in Tianxia.

"His money is not yet in our purse," Nila reminded him, and then started to follow, keeping her eyes hooded. Sokka had a bit more leeway in that department. Sokka followed the sound of several people running through the short hallway, to a sort of overlook which had murder-holes built into the floor. Sokka and Nila both surreptitiously pulled out their explosives, and started to move closer.

"I don't hear them," that guard from the door said. "Where are they?"

"I don't know! They were right behind me... unless they got distrac–" Sokka said, running through what he'd prepared to say, but was cut off by a blast of flame from the other bunker, just visible from this one so that both overlapped the run-up and the stairwell. Oh, damn it, Zuko. Couldn't you have lied a little bit better? "Oh, that can't be good."

"What's going on over there?" the guard said, as even Sokka could see Zuko launching firebending attacks inside the bunker across from them. The guards on this side, though, were looking increasingly disturbed. But undeniably distracted. "I think they've got an infiltrator over there! You there, make sure he..."

He turned, just as Sokka and Nila both casually lobbed their citrus bombs to the edge of that bunker, right in front of everybody's toes, before the two of them ducked back through the door. Nila had the gall to give a condescending farewell-wave before she slammed the door shut, and slapped a different kind of device onto the hinge. After pulling something, the metal started to turn bright red, then to white, and then melted down the edge, locking the door shut with its own former mass. "What was that?"

"Distillation of volatile alum," Nila said, pushing Sokka back, as the tiny amount she'd used was now causing an appreciable amount of heat even at that range. "And white-phosphorus to ignite. Don't look directly at it next time."

"There's going to be a next time?" Sokka asked, a little perturbed by that. "Is there anything you can't destroy?"

"My mother's sense of smug hubris," Nila answered him without missing a beat. Sokka had to give a nod at that, for if there was anything that needed destroying, it was probably that.

The two regressed through the bunker, and had just opened the door when the roar of the firebenders coming up the stairs sounded, and the bunker on the far side started to blast flame toward them. But Chit Sang and his fellow prisoners all bent furiously, creating a brilliant shield which deflected that conflagration away from them, as they pressed forward against it. Without the cross-fire to roast them, they only had to focus on one direction, and because of that, made steady if slow progress.

There was a swelling in the ranks, as every time a prisoner got exhausted, a fresh one would take his place. Firebenders, it was obvious, didn't train for stamina. But this wasn't that. This was a great mass moving forward within that human ram of fire, pressing forward. Sokka could see that the mass moving now was all of dark complexion and bearing the lighter build of adolescents. The fire deflecting in every direction continued to pour out, but now, Sokka could see the origin points of each fan of flame. And so could Chit Sang's firebenders. With a might heave, clumping themselves together into five knots, they hurled the fire which was directed at them off and to the side, clearing the sky directly above them.

And that sky was filled with Tribesmen. In a great and surprisingly synchronized assault, the young Tribesmen, bearing what were likely the last of the bombs doled out, were boosted up onto the shoulders of the firebenders, whence they launched themselves into the air with remarkable simultaneity. As one, four arms cocked back, one of them Aalo herself, and then all four launched their cargo, before landing into the gaps in the firebending directed at them, flattening their backs against the wall right under the slit. There were two seconds of further firebending, before the first one went off. A second later, two more, and the third one a few seconds after that, and the great grey-green cloud of greasy pepper and stench began to roll out of the bunker. The hostile firebending stopped completely.

"Alright! Everybody into the trolley! This'll take two trips!" Chit Sang shouted. "First come, first out!"

"But..." one of the firebenders said.

"First come. First out," Chit Sang reminded him, sternly. The smaller man swallowed nervously, and nodded, as a mixture of National and Tribesman piled onto the tram together. Zuko staggered out of the bunker, a rictus of pain on his face and the left half of his face covered in grease, no doubt burning the hell out of his eye. Katara broke away from her kin to reach his side.

"What happened to you?"

"The bomb went off on my belt," Zuko muttered. He pointed to his extremely tender-looking eye. "Would you mind?"

"Not with that attitude," Katara said. Zuko glared at her. "I was joking."

"My eye feels like it's on fire," Zuko said through grit teeth. Katara just shrugged, and reached up. An arm of the steam flying over head broke away from its path and drifted to her hand, before condensing into water which she used to scrape away the goop and sooth the eye under it.

"Is that a load? Good," Sokka said. He tapped Nila on the shoulder. "Now."

Nila pulled another device from under her armor, and held it up and toward where the tower would be on the far side. Then, with a pull, there came an ear-splitting shriek as the fire-work blasted up and out of the tube in her hand, dropping black ashes behind it as it went. A groan of machinery, and the trolley started to move, slightly more than half of the prison's population aboard it. Needless to say, it moved much slower than it usually would.

Sokka was about to offer a sarcastic comment to Zuko, when he beheld one of the firebenders approaching the two of them, looking somewhat singed and extremely angry. "Zuko! Behind you!"

Zuko turned, and was able to shield himself from the fireblast which had almost blindsided him. It did send him crashing to the floor, though. Katara missed not an instant, though, and with a massive swing of her arms, a great gout of the steam congealed into water, spinning around her in a ring. The firebender turned a fresh assault on her, but she lashed her water through it, deadening the fire easily, before slamming that surge into his chest and driving him back against the wall of the bunker. A twist of her hands, and the water which had been crushing him turned to ice, leaving him pinned and locked in place. Katara dusted off her hands. "Anybody else?"

"I'd hope not. For their sake," Zuko said. And at that, Sokka couldn't help but laugh.

---

Aang was getting restless. That would be obvious to anybody who knew him, and oddly enough, Azula could now count herself amongst that number. How strange, that twice in two lifetimes, he was the same way to the slightest. Meanwhile, three times in three lives, Azula couldn't have been more different. "They'll be there, right?" he asked.

"Oh, stop your belly-aching, Twinkletoes," Toph said, her legs kicked up onto the rim of the bison's howdah. Azula, flying aboard the Avatar's bison. Oh, how the wonders never ceased. "As long as Brain and Sparky are in charge, they'll be fine."

"And if the airbender girl has taken control? Or the one obsessed with bombs?" Azula asked.

"Hope that it isn't the latter," Toph said, as she picked at her teeth. "I don't know if the world could with stand the explosion she'd use to get them out."

"Guys, can we stop talking about explosions?" Aang asked, as they moved closer to the steaming volcano. The beast let out a low grumble, which the Avatar responded to with the kind of cooing that Azula would have reserved for her infants if she was any kind of mother worthy of having them. "I mean, I know how dangerous those things can be. Can you imagine what would happen if one..."

The Avatar was cut off when there was a horrid blast, followed by the crashing of stone. Azula leaned out of the saddle, and beheld that the back half of the Boiling Rock prison was collapsing in the aftermath of an explosion, rendering the prison useless for the foreseeable future. A part of Azula had to wonder if the bomb was intended to be that potent, though. Aang's gaping shock was enough to cause Azula to laugh.

"What the hell was that? What just happened?" Toph asked, now curled in close and clutching the rail, her useless eyes wide.

"The Tribesman is doomed," Azula summarized. Toph shot a glare somewhere to Azula's left. "Take us down."

"You heard her, Appa. Down we go," Aang said, but he was still stunned in his voice. The rumbling of the collapsing building honestly reminded Azula of her ill-begun civil war; the sound of explosions was a frequent source of nightmares while she was a new mother. Not because of any threat to her children, but because every explosion meant that her dreams were moving a little bit further from any possible reality. The last bombing attack, which ended her dreams of seizing the Burning Throne for herself came when Chiyo was three years old. The answer Azula gave to her daughter's question made her a bit sick to remember. The bison moved away from the hottest, core part of the steam funnel, and then descended toward it's far side.

Unlike the now obliterated prison behind, the towers before them still stood tall and proud, and notably had an airbender squatting easily atop an Aerie roof. Aang brought the bison lower, and Malu kipped over, standing next to Aang and holding to the beast's horn.

"Worked like a charm," she said.

"One of Sokka's plans worked like a charm? The universe really must be ending," Azula said dryly. Toph laughed outright at that.

"I didn't see you doing a whole lot to help out," Malu fired back. She vaulted to the far side of the beast and pointed down the slope. "Anyway, the prisoners are all down there. They'll need another ship to get them all out of here, though. That one's not big enough for a quarter of them if you stack 'em like logs."

"Then the first thing we do is assign Suki and her... mother," Azula remembered her 'favorite prisoner's mother having died a decade before the two of them met. The little differences were what hurt her brain the most; the vast ones were easily teased out into this life or that life, but the little ones? They blended together, "to getting a freighter to get them to the mainland. But until then, we should have them relocated to that island," she pointed into the grey distance, mounted by fog.

"What island?" Malu asked.

"There is an island there," Azula said, as even she realized that she couldn't see what she was pointing at. "It's of decent size, and even slightly less treacherous than your usual Azuli landmass."

"That sounds good," Aang said. The beast began to surge down and forward again, until they passed a cropping of stones. The moment they broached that barrier, the veritable community of prisoners below came into sight. Aang directed his beast to land near the Tribesman and his explosive obsessed paramour, who were talking to the woman of the hour, as it were.

"You're here! We've got a bit of a problem," Sokka said, motioning to the sheer number of them.

"I've got it covered. Suki? Got a second?" Malu asked, and bounded down to talk to the girl.

The first hand which was held toward the rail was her brother's, and she hauled him into the howdah easily. Almost too easily. Roughly two thirds of who she once had been were far, far weaker than she was right now. After all, what need of muscle when fire does it's own work? As he ascended the rail, though, Azula had just a twinge of confusion, as there was a distinct redness covering his left eye, growing more stark and terrible the closer it got to his eye. Then, she saw that the eye was bloodshot, and gave a glance toward Nila. Just a coincidence, brought about by careless explosive use. "I suppose you've learned your lesson not to play with bombs?" Azula asked.

"I don't even get the benefit of the doubt with you, do I?" Zuko asked.

"I know you too well," Azula pointed out. When she turned, she let out a grunt of surprise when she noted that Aang was now sitting in the saddle directly beside her. She was going to have to attach a bell to that airbender; he moved around too quickly and too silently otherwise.

"Well, that's the first step," Aang said. "How do we do the next one?"

"I'm not exactly sure," Zuko said, obviously trying very hard not to rub his pepper-burned eye. "But I know that we're going to have to go to the mainland to do it."

"Oh, great. So we're going to have to wander the most lethal place on Earth on foot, with almost no idea where exactly we're going? And I thought my plans were bad," Sokka interjected as he entered the howdah. A moment later, he hauled Nila up behind him.

"It's not that we don't know where we're going, it's that we're not exactly sure where to find who we're looking for," Zuko pointed out. "He's a friend of Gwen's, older, and he's got a lot of interesting toys he can turn against Ozai that he can muster very, very fast. A bit... squirrely, though."

"Oh. So the city instead of the wildlife," Sokka said.

"I would account it of roughly equivalent danger," Nila said with apparent perfect seriousness. There was one thing that Azula had no preparation for; never had she any memories of this one's being alive. Thus, it was hard for Azula to get a read on her. Hard, but not impossible. She'd just actually have to try.

"I guess I'm sitting this one out, too?" Aang asked, fidgitting with the headband which kept the blue arrow upon his brow covered. His hair, quickly growing in blackly, was doing a fine job of obscuring the rest of it.

"No, you can pass as a local better than some of us," Sokka said, rubbing an imaginary beard. He started to grin. "I think I have an idea that might make this a bit easier."

"Does it concern anybody else that this might have been perhaps too easy?" Azula finally gave word to her worry, cutting off Sokka before he could launch into whatever oddball idea he had in mind.

"We've had a rough run. I figure the universe decided we deserved to have a win in there at some point," Malu said with a shrug as she and Suki bounded and clambered into the saddle, respectively. Malu, too, had no place in Azula's memories of the times before. Probably because, without that monstrous being's interference, she'd have died of old-age by now.

"...and it was all just a dream?" Toph offered.

"It's not funny twice, Toph," Sokka said flatly.

---

Kori shook off the rain which had saturated his supposedly 'waterproof' cloak with a grunt. The waterfall had begun once again, as the stream couldn't hold the water in its banks and spilled it down into the canyon in the most dramatic way possible. Well, that was one more job done: even if he wasn't throwing in with the Avatar – which was a probability in his mind – there were still things which one did not do. Taking children from their parents was one of them.

In retrospect, it made Kori wonder if Yoji might just remember more about her own early-childhood than she wanted anybody else to believe.

He gave a quick look around the quiet, damp and cold of the Western Air Temple. Obviously, they'd taken to some distant and more well-hidden place to make camp, since Kori had located them so effortlessly last time. Prudent. His head swung a little further, and then his opinion ratcheted down about twelve notches as he saw light flickering in one of the upper tower rooms. So much for that notion.

With a sigh, and his cloak now draped over his arm so it wouldn't soak his entire body, he made his way up toward the highest level. He'd thought they were smarter than that. There were a lot of things that he had to do, but at the moment, he was somewhat spoiled for choice. Paralyzed for choice, more like. The options, if simplified to the point of stupidity, were to either remain by Yoji's side, try to bring her away from those who abused her, make a fairly long-shot assassination attempt on Ozai, or aid the Avatar's group directly. Realistically, the most optimum was probably a combination of those four, but at the moment, he couldn't quite figure out how to not get killed doing all of them.

He entered the tower and began the ascent to the higher levels. Yoji... that was the biggest problem. He'd come to peace with the notion that she wasn't his blood sister, but years of family didn't evaporate so quickly. It was one of the things which made him wish that they hadn't left Omo in Ba Sing Se. Honestly, he deserved a proper funeral if nothing else. It would have given Yoji some closure; she'd been closer to him than anybody outside of Kori himself. And losing him... threw her.

He turned off of the stairwell and toward the room which flickered with the faint red of a fire out of sight. "Well, I dealt with something which honestly should have been taken care of a damned long time ago," Kori said. "So now, I need a bit of..."

Kori trailed off as he entered the room, and noted that there was a bedroll and backpack in the corner; both were notably not belonging to anything that the Avatar's retinue brought with them. He'd checked before talking to them, as was prudent. He blinked in confusion, but the confusion turned to a mildly disappointed sigh as he felt a blade slide under his chin.

"Don't move," the young woman's voice said. Kori glanced down at the fore-canted knife under his neck. "You don't belong here, Hillman."

"You're half right," Kori said with his usual shit-eating grin. "But then again, I'm pretty sure neither do you."

"What do you want?"

"To talk to some people. Obviously they've left," Kori said. That was annoying as hell; Azula's prophecy didn't tell where they went next. He honestly regretted not asking her more about those while he had a chance. Doubly so when they started proving inaccurate. "Which makes me wonder what you're doing here."

"Is that any business of yours?" she asked him, and the blade pulled a bit tighter, starting to bite into the skin of his neck.

"Might be..." he turned his head slightly, looking into bright grey eyes. "It would certainly explain why Maya Azul was so far from home."

From the look on her face, that might have been the wrong thing to say.

---

Leave a review