Toph didn't much like not being able to see, but that only really came up when she was in a situation that blinded her. Walking? No problem, the earth did better than her eyes ever could. Flying? Bully on having a very acute sense of hearing. But when riding in a creaky, cracky wagon that now played host to a dispirited and battered Team Avatar? She was floating in a world of discombobulating sounds and disorientating movements. If avoiding what forces hadn't moved immediately into damage control in Azul hadn't been the utmost of their agenda in fleeing, Toph would have rather gotten off and walked beside the damned wagon. Buuut...
"How is she?" Malu asked.
"How should I know?" Toph answered question with question.
"I was asking him," Malu pointed out. Again, damned if Toph could tell.
"Well, she is grey and unable to awaken. I would account that 'being poorly'," Boomstick answered the question.
"And what about him?" Prince Pouty asked from the cramped corner of the wagon that had been claimed on behalf of the Fire Nation, and colonized by its royal family.
There was a silence, then a rustling as thought dirty fabric being prodded, only barely audible over the clacking of the wheels and the talons of the beast pulling them. "Whatever his problem, he's going to have to get over it," Azula said distantly.
"If there's one thing about this kid that I've learned, is that he's not the best at 'getting over' things," Sokka said.
"Except in the most literal sense," Zuko added. Toph turned so that she was facing vaguely his direction.
"Was that supposed to be a joke?" Toph asked.
"It won't happen again," Zuko said in grumbling tones. The clattering came to a halt as the driver of the cramped and uncomfortable wagon brought the team to a halt, and Toph began to be able to pick out people more precisely. Some she could even 'see' now, due to the coating of dust and debris that nobody'd had a chance to clean off since escaping Azul City. From the looks of things, Aang was sitting limp in along one wall, with Sugar Queen beside him, and Malu on his other side.
"Why are we stopping?" Toph nevertheless had to ask.
"They'll let us in at their own pace," Jegong sent back to the riders of his wagon. Toph nevertheless didn't like the idea of being beholden to people they hadn't met for their lives. She was even less happy of the idea that the most hapless of them – more so even than the glum and torpid Avatar – was the one that got to sit up front. She could hear Sato rise from his seat and move to the ground, grumbling of extreme discomfort all the while.
"You know, all things considered, that could have gone a lot worse," Sokka said from his side of the wagon. Azula, who was in the process of climbing out, stopped with the wood creaking under her.
"And how could you possibly classify what we just went through as something other than an unmitigated disaster?" Azula asked flatly.
"We found Sato," Sokka said simply. There was a silence, then a sigh, before the wood creaked once more, and Azula dropped herself to the dirt. Toph could echo that sentiment; she slugged Sokka in the gut as she passed him.
It felt great to get her toes back into the mud, even if she did have to right her balance a bit, and found herself bouncing from foot to foot because of how cold the wet was. "Are you going to get out, stretch your legs a bit, Aang?" Malu asked from Toph's back.
Aang didn't answer her.
"...alright," Malu said with a sigh. She landed onto the mud with barely a paff, as though she weren't entirely connected to the ground. Typical of her, really. "Huh. Don't see that very often."
"You're pointing this out to the wrong person," Toph reminded Malu.
"What? Oh, right. Blind," Malu shook her head, and turned to Zuko, who had joined them only to lean against one of the high-sides of the wagon. "Gotta say, I've been to the Fire Nation before, but I've never heard of it snowing."
"Neither have I," Zuko said, his tones distracted. Then again, if there was snow in the Fire Nation, Toph figured that he'd had the rights to some distraction. "I've got a question."
"What about?" Malu asked.
"Imbalance. That thing which is currently making the weather insane," Zuko said.
"Amongst other things," Azula gave a comment, before wandering after the Tribesman and the Si Wongi pyromaniac.
"Right. Why would it do this?" he waved around them vaguely.
"It's not. Not intentionally, anyway," Malu said. "Have you ever spent time on a boat?"
"Are you kidding?" Zuko asked, dry as a desert.
"...oh, right. Yeah. So imagine that the world is the water, and Imbalance is the boat. Wherever it goes, it cuts a wake behind it. If it goes faster – does something drastic like they did with the Megalopolis – then the wake becomes stronger," Malu explained. Then, she paused, and tilted her head, rubbing her neck. "...hmm, that doesn't work when you look big picture though... Wake tends to flatten out if you give it time, but what Imbalance does only ever gets worse. Okay. Imagine that the ocean is made out of fabric and Imbalance is still a ship; wherever it goes, it rips the fabric, and..."
"This metaphor has completely gotten completely out of hand, hasn't it?" Toph asked.
"Yeah, a bit," Malu admitted.
"How do you fix it?" Zuko asked.
"A sewing needle and a lot of patience," Malu said.
"I was talking about the world."
"In a way, so was I," Malu said. "But... first you need to get the ship out of the cotton-water so that it doesn't keep ripping up what you're sewing shut."
"You... should... just come up with a new metaphor," Zuko said, and Malu hung her head. Toph started to pace, moving toward the other side of the wagon once more if only because her feet were starting to sting. Gods help her, she was going to have to wear actual footwear, wasn't she?
The horrors never cease.
"So. Not an unmitigated failure, huh?" Toph asked as she sidled up to the unified front that Sokka and Nila were providing against Azula.
"Bah! Don't sneak up on me!"
"I was sneaking the way you draw," Toph chided. She leaned aside, and could sense that Azula was deeply wrapped frustration, atop... huh. That almost felt like 'love-lorn'. But of who, and – this was the really important one – what the hell had happened to put Azula into that kind of state? Toph held in a yawn, and banished that thought from her head. "Without whats-her-alias and her networks of spies, partisans and hidey-holes, we're not exactly much better than we were when we landed on this rock."
"Sato's more than we had when we entered the city. And the earthquake probably put a stop to them making airships... at least for a little while. You've got to learn to take the victories that you can get," Sokka said.
"I agree with the blind one. We could have done a direct invasion for the effort we're putting into subterfuge, and we wouldn't have left ourselves lost and trapped in Azul of all places, trying to get our forces back in order," Azula said with a scowl clear from her tone of voice.
"We're hardly trapped," Toph said. "We could just call the Big Guy, and be out of here."
"...and how would you do that?" Nila asked. "I found many things amongst Azul's trove, but the bison whistle was not among them."
Toph's confident smirk started to decay at a rapid rate. "That's not good," Toph offered the understatement of the century. She blinked a few times, and swung her head, trying to hear for the big, mellow bellows of the big galoot that had bore them the equivalent of twice around the planet already. Nothing but wind and the hiss of frigid drizzle against leaves. "How are we going to find the Big Guy, you know before something eats' 'im?"
"Not so loud," Sokka hushed. He turned briefly toward the wagon, and then back to Toph. "Do you really want Aang to have that to worry about, along with whatever else is bumming him out?"
"I had no idea that the Avatar State could render one catatonic," Azula mentioned. "It could explain how people manage to kill them from time to time."
"Hey! That isn't funny," Sokka snapped. Azula was still for a moment, then she groaned and rubbed her head.
"Right. Of course it isn't," she said, and muttered to herself for a few moments. "Alright. We're on our back foot. How do we change that?"
All turned to Sokka.
"I don't know," Sokka said. "Not yet, anyway."
"You had best discover a solution quickly," Nila said. "I for one do not wish this frigid summer to be my last."
Toph turned away from the three, as she could feel somebody else approaching, if distantly. She moved to the front of the wagon, beside the beasts that she had no real notion of their appearance, other than large and probably scaly. The three who approached did so almost tentatively, but not fearing those that they moved toward, but rather every direction but. In other words, somebody who knew something about living in Azul. As they drew closer, though, the resolution – itself hampered by the mud – began to fine in, and she could 'see' that one of them was... familiar.
"You!" Toph said, pointing a finger at him, when he was within distant conversational range.
"Yes, me!" the waterbender who'd knocked her on her ass in Omashu answered.
"You're not part of the Clan. Who'n the hell does that make you?" Jegong demanded.
"Somebody bored out of his tree," Kori answered, sounding it. "Although I wish I could say that I didn't expect to see your rag-tag troupe coming out of a city that's just taken an earthquake the likes of which Azul hasn't seen in two hundred years, I unfortunately know you a little bit better than that."
"He's a guest," one of the others said, with a more thick version of Jegong's accent. And one which Sokka managed to echo perfectly every time he spoke Huo Jian. "What are you doing here, Jegong? Thought you said you were better than us."
"Didn't say better, just said needed somethin' different," Jegong answered. "I need to talk to the elders. Dara of Bheri has become Oiharau; she's turned her back on Clan and tribe for the leash of the Spider."
"That's a drastic charge," one of the two said. "The Clan of Bheri might not take kindly to you levying it."
"Take us in. It's been too long since I was amongst my people," Jegong said.
"Huh. You'd think they were Tribesmen the way they banter, eh?" Kori said, suddenly standing a lot closer to Toph than she recalled. How the hell did he do that?
"Oiharau? You've finally stumped me. What does that mean?"
"Talk later. Best get to the wagons before the sun rises full," one of them said.
"Why?"
"Summer Solstice," the other answered. He shook his head. "It can be a... a rough day for us."
Chapter 11
The Haunted
It kept cycling through his mind, over and over. It danced before his vision, taunting him. Spiting him. And he couldn't turn away or shut it out...
The man, his back turned. The world, tinged with white. The blade was red. Katara was dying. He was howling, baying for blood like some sort of monster. He cast out his hands, and the flames unmade him. A man was dead, because of the choice that Aang made. Aang chose to kill somebody.
He was a murderer.
If he had the strength, he would have wept over it, tried to find some way to try to cleanse the image from his mind and the stain from his soul. But there was no repairing what he had done. Yes, he was in the Avatar State at the time that it happened, but in his mind, that made no difference, and offered no excuse. He chose to kill a man.
He was a murderer.
"Get up," the voice finally broke through Aang's cycle of self-recrimination and disgust, and he flinched, moving aside so that Azula could lower Katara to the arms of a man waiting below. He hadn't even noticed as the wagon pulled up to the group of others. He hadn't noticed that his backside hurt. He did now, though.
"Is... is she...?" Aang asked, his voice raw still from the roar that had stripped it while his eyes glowed white.
"And finally he speaks," Azula said. She sat down on the edge of the wagon's bed, opposite him. "She's alive. And she'll recover, I'm told. Not many people survive getting their throats slit. Even I didn't manage to pull that one."
"I... I killed somebody..." Aang said, his eyes watering slightly.
Azula turned to him, her own eyes somewhere between dismissive and... sympathetic. As odd a combination as eyes could hold. The two warred for a while, before sympathetic won out. "It is seldom easy," Azula said. "And you're not the same after you do it."
Not helping. "How could I do that? I'm an Air Nomad! I'm supposed to..." he didn't know how to summarize how much of a blasphemy this was, how completely he'd failed his people, his creed, and himself.
"The first time I killed somebody... I was barely fifteen years old," Azula said. "I had to kill one of the two best friends I ever had. I told myself it was because she was a traitor, because she was serving the Avatar, because she was at war with the Fire Nation, but every excuse rang hollow. I made the choice, and it haunted me for the three weeks between it and my own death."
"It's not going to get better," Aang said.
"It's not supposed to," Azula said. "The second person I killed... I was twenty one. It was one of Father's silent backers who'd turned traitor, and was working for Zuko and you. He died without a second thought, good or ill. The third... I had trouble with. A lot of people died by my word, but not by my hand. So when I was destitute and on the run with my daughter, I turned to what amounted to robbery to survive. I knew I should kill him, to protect my honor and identity. But..."
"But what?" Aang asked.
"He didn't deserve it," Azula said, shaking her head slowly. "He didn't deserve to die. I put him in a position where he would fight me to the death. If I hadn't, he would have walked away. Ever since then, I weighed lives very differently. The only times I ever felt righteous, justified, and right was when I was doing it for Chiyo."
"That doesn't help very much," Aang said, tucking his legs up to his chest.
"Didn't you hear me? I'm not helping. I'm giving perspective," Azula said. "Everybody has events in their lives that change their perspective. Some are good," she gave a glance out of the wagon, to where Nila and Sokka were being greeted warmly by people almost as dark as they. Referring to their romance, likely. "...others, not so much."
"I was raised to cherish all life, no matter what. And when I saw what he did to Katara, I just..." Aang shook his head, running fingers along the impromptu headband which hid his arrow once more.
"You fought for your family. And when one of them was slain – in your eyes if not in reality – you took an exact vengeance."
"I'm supposed to be better than that," Aang said. "The Avatar is supposed to be better than just killing people who try to stand in my way..."
"No it isn't," Azula said testily. "If there's one thing that the Avatar is, Avatar, it's an iron fist that can at its discretion don a silken glove. It is. It doesn't have a moral leaning or principles, it simply is. And thinking you know better is the height of arrogance."
"You don't understand. I just let it happen! I should have stopped, found some other way..."
"Let it happen?" Azula asked. Then a brow rose. "Oh, you finally found something that made you angry enough to stop holding back?"
"What?" Aang asked.
"Much as you and your pacifist ilk would disagree, anger is every bit as much a part of life as love or... forgiveness," she made the last word sound like some sort of unspeakable dish that she was being forced to swallow. "When we are wronged, we seek restitution. If we didn't feel that anger, that drive to set things right, there would be no justice in this world. None!"
"But... I killed somebody..." Aang said.
"After he killed somebody who you consider family," Azula said with a nod. She flicked an eye which was not entirely sympathetic toward where Katara had been taken to rest. "When Katara killed Chiyo, I never felt more justified to take a life as long as I've lived. When I killed Katara, I could tell that the same was said of you."
Aang didn't have an answer to that. Mostly because it still hurt, turned his stomach, made him feel like a mindless beast instead of a man. Made him feel like he was the last person to try to stop a war.
Azula sighed, and leaned forward. "Your problem, Avatar, is that you don't know how to learn from your mistake."
"What?"
"The second man I killed as the old woman? That was a lesson. One that haunted me, yes, but it taught me. I moved on from the act itself, but kept the lesson that it taught me. You're failing to see the second part. Yes, a man is dead. Yes, he died because of you. That isn't going to change. It's happened. You can't 'unhappen' it. The only thing you can do now is move on. You were a murderer yesterday. Will you be one tomorrow?" she gave a chuckle. "Well, going by what I know of you, Shinji, I'd have to say 'not a chance'."
"What was that?" Aang asked, a spike of confusion cutting through self-loathing.
"You really need to learn to listen better, idiot," she said, but the tone she used was more endearing than scathing. She puffed out a breath. "Move on, or get stuck in the past. And since I'd prefer to see my sixteenth birthday – for a change – you're going to move on if I have to drag you kicking and screaming into it."
It was strange, that somewhere in there, there was actually good advice. "Thanks, Azula..." Aang said. He then paused for a moment. "Who's Shinji?"
Azula gave him a look as she pushed off and started to walk away. "How should I know?"
"You said... never mind," Aang let the question drop. She was right, though. He still felt like a monster, but he had to keep going. The world – and reality itself! – was depending on him. Flawed or not. Killer or not. He couldn't let everybody, everywhere, and everywhen down like that.
It would hurt, but he had to keep going. In a way, it was good that it hurt, Aang decided. That meant that he still knew it was wrong.
"Gotta say, I expected a much worse greeting than this," Sokka said, as one of the local girls in what looked like a pale and shapeless dress handed him some tea to go with his meat-skewer.
"It is utterly baffling," Nila noted. They weren't to the point of shooting her dirty looks, but it was a close thing. Needless to say, Sokka did them both a favor by keeping his Si Wongi girlfriend close; that way, all of the pampering he'd get would spill over to her, and she wouldn't be left in a position where she'd have both hands free to shoot somebody.
"Not so much. They treat us like distant relatives," Ogan's long estranged son piped up, swooping in to lift the tea right out of Sokka's hand before he could drink it.
"Hey! I was about to..." Sokka began, pointing at the young man who might be either Kori or Ked, depending on personal preference. He was cut off when a fresh cup found its way into his hand, blunting his annoyance fairly abruptly. Still, the principle stung a bit. "Fine. This all has me a little concerned. Are they going to drug us and throw us into a volcano to appease their gods?"
"I don't think they have a volcano god," Kori/Ked mused.
"For how frightfully specific that was, I can only assume it has happened to you in the past," Nila said.
"No, but almost. You see, there was this village at the foot of a volcano back in the East Continent, and..." Sokka began.
"Kori, you slippery little toad; are you trying to get me caught?" a woman snapped as she approached the group which for the moment dwindled down to three. Sokka couldn't but sigh, as the coming of the pale and silver-eyed young woman drove all the others into flight like an upset covey of doves.
"Maya, your dulcet tones liven any occasion," Kori said smoothly, and handed that cup of tea that he'd stolen from Sokka toward her. She slapped it away, which drew a groan of dismay from Sokka, of all people. If somebody was going to steal his tea, they might as well drink it! "For the record, the chances of you being 'caught' by your father right now are slim to nil. As I understand it, the earthquake dropped most of his manor on him."
Maya, whomever she was, stared at Kori for a long moment, then shook her head. "No. Nothing kills Montoya Azul that easily."
"I made no claims to his death. Only that he's got a fractured everything and a city that will take months to get back on its feet in any capacity. So calm down, take a breath, and stop glaring at me like you caught me watching you bathe," Kori said idly, as he took a seat on one of the other stools which sat around the fire that Sokka and Nila were quite close to. Maya – Azul, if Sokka understood properly – went damned near apoplectic, which brought out a dry chuckle from Nila of all people. Sokka gave her a look, but she quickly pulled herself back to the stony-faced annoyance which was her usual expression.
"I was not... It's lucky that you..." Maya sputtered, as though unable to come up with a proper recourse for that. She surrendered with a wordless growl to the sky, which hung grey and cold overhead. Kori just looked so smug.
"Azul, stop provoking the guest," one of the older men, his face almost the color and texture of leather said, as he moved into the circle. He, like everybody else, was wearing something pale and shapeless. In fact, the only people who weren't dressing like melting snowballs were Team Avatar, Kori, and this Maya girl. Maya's jaw clenched at being dismissed like that. Then again, if she was the Spider's daughter, even one who hated his guts, she was used to people obeying her. "You've come at a difficult time, my friend... and whomever this particular woman is," he gave an offhand wave toward Nila.
"You would do well to refer to that particular woman by name, Yubokamin," Nila said coldly, and with an edge.
"Yeah, she hasn't done anything to you guys at all. Show at least a bit of courtesy," Kori raised his voice. The man glanced to him, pale eyes staring into very dark blue, before the older man gave a nod.
"Sometimes the young see what the old cannot. It is true that she has done us no ill," he gave a glance to Nila. "But I find myself distracted. If you didn't have somebody so gravely hurt, I'd have urged you to leave camp, to go out into the valley for a few days. At least until the Solstice has come and gone. It's a dark and damnable day to be Ghorkalai, today."
"Why's that?" Sokka asked, leaning forward. Had he heard that right?
"And come to think of it, why's everybody walking around in bags?" Kori added.
"We're watching," the old man said. "And you should watch too. If you see somebody acting out of character, out of sorts. If you see somebody behaving very, very oddly, you must tell us. Our dress can make it hard for them to pick their target, but often enough, they do anyway. As I said, you've picked a bad day to arrive," he rose, striking the non-existent dust from his featureless robe.
"What exactly is going on today? Is somebody going to attack?" Maya asked.
"No... not attack," he said, pausing before he rounded a corner out of sight. He looked out into the horizon. "There's a reason we're the Gohar kalhi."
"They're Ghorkalai because they live in wagons and can't stay still for more than a few months," Maya said with a shake of her head.
"That isn't what he said," Sokka said, now leaning back and looking after the man.
"You must have misheard. As I'm given to understand, Huo Jian is quite different from your Tribal tongue," Maya said.
"No, you're overlooking the obvious," Sokka said. He pointed at Kori "I half expected you to pick up on it in a heartbeat, but then I remembered that you haven't spoken Yqanuac in at least a decade."
"They use Tribal words?" Nila asked. Sokka nodded. "And what did those ones mean?"
Sokka frowned, rubbing his mouth. "There's not a particularly clean way of translating it. I mean, Gohar is kinda a weird thing. Little frozen Nini, and all that..." Kori gave a confused glance behind Sokka's back to Nila, who could only shrug her own ignorance at his ramblings. "But I think the best way to say it would be... something like 'plagued by the Gohar'. He just called his entire people 'the Haunted'."
"Mildly disconcerting," Kori noted. "If they weren't just calling themselves something that sounds like Tribal words."
"You are certain of this?" Nila asked him in Altuundili. He didn't know much, but he'd learned some.
"Absolutely," Sokka answered her in the language of the land. It didn't translate cleanly, but in his mind, and his first language, it was clear as day. He'd called them a haunted people.
And that had Sokka, rationalist and realist extraordinaire, worried.
Zuko found himself sitting in a wagon, in silence, watching over a waterbender. He didn't know how they'd gotten there, but there it was. Katara was breathing, but after that, she didn't look well. Having a grisly scar across one's neck tended to have that sort of effect on people. He found himself leaning out the window that opened out of the door, looking at the grey and bleak landscape of Azul, the only place that was trying so hard to kill you that it frequently killed itself by mistake. The wind that pulled at his hair was bitter and cold, like the winds that assailed him in the South Pole, in that last voyage before the entire world went mad.
"Outta my way! Ow! Gods damn it that's cold!" Toph's voice came from around a corner, barging through the uneven arrangement of high-sided wagons that made what amounted to a mobile village, parked on a relatively flat bit of ground up the hills. Speaking of madness... The earthbender barreled into the Wagon's step-up, before lifting her feet and rubbing them with her hands, directly under Zuko's chin.
"You could just wear boots like a normal person," Zuko offered. Toph let out a gack of surprise and hopped away, before letting out another gack of discomfort and hopping back to the step-up, although this time looking inward rather than outward. She was even blushing a bit, probably because somebody'd managed to catch her off guard for a change. Toph didn't like anybody getting the better of her.
"Yeah, well, if I wear boots, I'm pretty much blind!"
"You are blind," Zuko reminded her.
She groaned, and leaned. Then, her face pulled in. "Hey, open the door. I don't feel like freezing my feet off out here!" Zuko acquiesced and let her into the wagon, which was slightly larger than most that plied the roads, but not by much. She got inside quickly, and almost sat on Katara's head, before Zuko caught her and steered her toward a chair. "Ah; so they got you as the Sugar-Queen's royal guard. I figured you'd pawn that off on the airbender."
Zuko chuckled, dryly. "If I could find her. You know, I'm starting to understand why you hate losing so much."
"Anybody with a working brain hates losing. And it always gets worse 'cause once you have some momentum, you tend to keep rolling that way," Toph said. She then leaned forward. "But back there? That was bad. Really bad. Almost as bad as Ba Sing Se."
"Miss Beifong? Where did you go?" Sato called from outside. Zuko sighed, and opened the door once more, tossing a blanket idly over the blind-girl's feet, so that Sato could see where they'd all gathered. The wiry and hapless looking man brightened a bit when he spotted them all, and walked over proudly displaying a pair of dark brown footwear. "Ah! When you started yelping in pain, I thought that you might need something to help keep your feet off the ground. They were more than willing to part with these, although I did have to sell my watch..."
"He does know I'm blind, doesn't he?" Toph asked Zuko.
"I never claim to know what inventors are aware of," Zuko answered. "You do realize that your watch was probably worth about a hundred and fifty sparks, where these boots are probably the work of about eighty pennies."
Sato blinked in confusion, then looked down at the slippers, then back up. "Are... They wouldn't fleece a customer like that, would they?"
"I would, if I thought I could get away with it," Zuko admitted.
"Hell, I'd do it even if I didn't!" Toph added. Sato sagged with a moan. Once again, Zuko was left in utter astonishment at how somebody capable of such miraculous feats of engineering was so utterly and completely helpless when faced with the real world. "Ugh, fine. Leave the clogs. Don't say that I never did you a favor, though."
"Thank you... Wait. Why... I just paid..." Sato began, trying to work out the logic of it.
"Just accept it," Zuko prompted. "And if you see Malu, tell her to come here. I'm not entirely comfortable in this place." Only Toph could make a man getting bilked and giving away something seem like a favor was owed for it. He turned to her. "I assume that Sokka's working on some sort of plan to make up for the fact that we're operating blind, deaf, and mute in Azul right now?"
"Possibly. Or he's drinking tea and getting fawned over. Which doesn't sound like a bad idea..."
"I wouldn't try. Gorks don't get along well with Easterners as a rule."
"What? Why not?"
"You'd need to ask them. And while your doing it, ask them why they bring in Tribesmen like long-lost family. I'd like to hear the answer to that one as well."
"Oooooh. Cultural study," Toph said, rubbing her hands together in honest anticipation. The glee in her smote eyes was clear even to him. It was strange, though; he never thought that Toph cared about anything other than enjoying life's luxuries, and beating the hell out of people.
"Huh."
"What?" Toph demanded.
"It's just not what I would have expected of you."
"Hey, just 'cause I like to pound the snot out of idiots and save the world doesn't mean I don't have hobbies," Toph noted.
"Your hobbies being unearthing little-known trivia about arcane civilizations?" Zuko asked evenly.
"Damned straight."
"You can't do anything normally, can you?" Zuko asked.
"Psh; if I did, I'd be as boring as my dad," she scoffed. She then fell silent, and tilted an ear toward Katara, which had her eyes pointed directly at Zuko. "I can barely hear her breathing. Are they sure she's going to get better?"
"They seem sure. And if anybody knows about recovery from near-complete exsanguination, it'd be the Yubokamin," Zuko noted.
"Yet another question I'm going to have to ask these guys," Toph said, sitting back. When the silence of Zuko's 'not getting it' settled in, she continued. "Why do they bother living in a place this ludicrously deadly?"
"You could ask that same thing to every Azuli, ever. Or any Si Wongi. Or any Tribesman," Zuko said. He slid his back down the wall, and dangled one leg out of the cart toward the ground. "There are days when it seems that the only sane cultures on this planet are my own, and to a lesser extent yours."
"'To a lesser extent' my freezing muddy foot!" Toph snapped. Zuko couldn't help but smirk at that. The smirk turned to mild surprise when Malu leaned around the corner, and rolled her eyes.
"Fiiiinally. You'd be amazed how hard it is to find somebody when you can't fly."
"No, I wouldn't," Zuko said.
"Eh, it ain't that hard," Toph stressed.
"I'm just worried what'll happen today," Malu noted, as she kipped over Zuko, deftly weaved between the supine Katara and the seated Toph, and utterly filled the cluttered wagon-house to capacity.
"Meaning?" Toph asked.
"It's the Solstice," Malu said. Zuko prompted her forward, as he found himself frequently doing today. "The Solstices are the Haunting Days."
Zuko blinked at that for a moment. "That doesn't sound good."
Malu just nodded at that. Some day, he was going to have to get more history out of that airbender, but at the moment, he was stiff, restless, and needed to move. So he rose, and left the earthbender and the airbender to get on each others' nerves, and leave Katara to the slow process of replenishing her own supply of blood.
Yoji lowered the lens from her eye, dropping the unpleasant sight before her when she did so. Watching a significant portion of Caldera City wiped out by magma was not a comfortable experience. But better a significant portion, than every portion. The blast had been clear across the overgrown valleys between the peaks, rousing her from her fitful sleep and bringing her attention to the southeast. But her attention was, at this point, fixating on something a lot closer.
It had been months since she saw snow... and the last time she saw it, she was a lot closer to Summavut than she was now. It fell in fat flakes, which melted almost immediately upon touching the ground. But still they fell. Yoji held out a dark hand, and felt one of them settle onto a fingertip. There was a sort of sting of cold, before the fluff and crystal of it degraded. Sometimes, in an instant. Other times, it sat there for several long seconds before it finally collapsed into a droplet.
She'd done this before. This staring at snow as it dropped off of her fingertips.
But it was long before this year.
Yoji dismissed the uncomfortable thoughts that followed her, and twisted the sphere of fire that she had to keep held in her hand. If she released it for more than a few seconds, it would burn out and leave her cold and in a great deal of trouble. If this was a new technique, it was a terrible one; any firebender who had to bring around a source of fire with them was laughably weak, incompetent, and easily defeated. As an experiment, she cast out a fist once more, a grunt of angry effort behind it. The only result was the flame in her other hand drifting the direction that she'd punched.
"It doesn't matter," Yoji told herself. "All that matters is that I got what I needed."
There was a cold and angry part of her that chewed on that statement. She'd walked away from the crown jewel of the Fire Nation right as it reached outright disaster, and on the task of returning a usurped Fire Lord to his seat of power. By one definition, she was a traitor. By another, incompetent for having let herself get into this position in the first place. And honestly, she wasn't sure which one rankled more.
She moved to the little lean-to tent that she'd set up to sleep under, picking up the encrypted letter that had brought her this far, and would likely send her further. 'The Childless Man waits at the roof of the world.' To most, a meaningless sentence. To Yoji, it gave her target, and destination both. She looked ahead of her. The grey haze of falling snow was turning into the darker grey haze of falling rain, something more familiar to the Fire Nation, and sweeping the direction that she walked. But that meant that she couldn't see what she was already technically starting to mount. The highest mountain in the Fire Nation, itself by a fair margin the second highest peak on the planet.
"If I'm a traitor, I might as well be a competent one," Yoji muttered to herself, a grim expression on her dark-brown face. How long had it been since she just stopped caring about her make-up? She didn't even remember. She slung the sleeping mat onto her back, and pulled the tarp with her, starting to bundle it up even as she walked.
She never noticed how she had spoken the Tribesman's Tongue.
Because she never considered that it, despite all this time, was still her first language.
Aang was starting to get slightly concerned. Even over his desire to mope and hate himself, the spark of Air Nomad curiosity would not let him sit in a corner filled with bile and vitriol. No, he had to go out and walk with the Yubokamin. His heritage demanded it. It was like there were little whispers in the back of his mind, telling him to go out there. Into the public. Aang turned a corner, and walked straight into Nila. Heads clacked, and sent both of them stumbling backward, rubbing an aching brow; Nila's probably hurt a little bit less because she had a headband cushioning the impact of his forehead into hers. She nevertheless shot a baleful eye at him. "You should take greater care in where you walk, airbender," Nila said.
"Oh, cut him a break," Sokka said, before turning to Aang. He spoke with sickly sweet tones "Good to see you up, buddy."
"Yeah..." Aang said distantly. He looked at the others – whom he hadn't walked into – and finally took in what he'd missed before. "Why is everybody dressed the same? I've never heard of these people being so... bland."
"Aang, what do you know about ghosts?" Sokka asked. Aang blinked at him a few times.
"...boo?" he asked, making a pantomime gesture of a specter. He really wasn't in the mood for these games, today.
Sokka sighed, and tweezed his brow. "I'm serious, Aang. These people are all bent out of shape because they think that ghosts are going to come back from the dead and mess around with 'em," he said.
"Which is impossible, for if even one of every hundred human beings left a ghost, the world would outright collapse under the weight of their accumulated mass, no matter how insignificantly small that mass were," Nila continued.
"So I figure that there's probably some spirit-world stuff that's got them all spooked," Sokka said. Aang let silence linger. "Soooo, are you going to do something about it?"
"I don't know," Aang said, quietly. "Would they even listen to me right now?"
"You are the Avatar. Of course they would," Nila said.
"I just... I don't feel very 'commanding' right now," Aang said, rubbing the back of his neck, where his collar rubbed against the blue band of his tattoo.
Sokka sighed, and propped an arm on Aang's shoulder. "Look, I don't wanna be the guy to put pressure on you. You've got stuff on your mind! Who doesn't?"
"Idiots, as a rule," Nila answered.
"Not the point. These people are scared of something. And if there's anything that being around you has taught me, there's a reason why people are afraid of the dark. Usually 'cause of what lives in it," Sokka said. He pointed at his own chest. "Now if there's a spirit messin' with people, there's nothing that I can do to stop it. Nila, either."
"She goes into the spirit world all the time," Aang said.
"Since Sharif was taken, I have not returned even a once," she said, her tone flat. Oh.
There was a sort of buzzing in Aang's head, one he attributed to a lack of sleep and feeling generally out of sorts after what he'd done. As such, he batted it aside, in a manner nobody else on the planet could. It still buzzed, but Aang pressed on. "Alright. Alright, I'll try to help," he said. He looked around for a few seconds, his brow knitting. "I can't see anything on the surface that would make spirits angry. You're going to need to talk to people. Maybe something happened here that birthed a spirit a long time ago, and they just hadn't gotten rid of it in all that time."
"See? Team Avatar, back on its feet!" Sokka said with a proud pose. Nila just rolled her eyes and palmed her face.
Kori gave a moment to pause as he warmed his hands before the fire. He gave a slight chuckle, then opened his eyes. "I can feel you back there glaring at me," he said.
"It's not the only thing I feel like doing to you," the Prince answered, his tones cold but acidic. He tromped around the other side of the fire and took a seat on an upended bucket, glaring with those burnished gold eyes at the Tribesman before him. "I've learned a long time ago that there's no such thing as coincidence. So explain to me why we managed to find you, despite you having the whole Fire Nation to slither under."
"Fate?" Kori tried. Zuko just stared flatly. "Ah, very well. Although I still choose to blame fate, it was because of my effervescent ward," he cast a hand toward where Maya was sulking. Well, not sulking per se; to the world, she was quietly reading where she sat on the end of a wagon's landing. Kori felt he knew her better by now, "decided that the best place to hide from her father was directly under his nose."
"That's suicidal," Zuko noted.
"As I had told her. But even though she's Azuli, she's also frightfully naïve in some areas," Kori said, prodding at the fire with a stick. "I've half-got her to outright join your side of things. Considering what I've seen in the air of late," a motion around to the last flakes of snow, starting to sweep down in near-horizontal stings rather than fluffy flakes, "I've got plenty of support for your 'the world is ending' idea. And since I'd prefer to live, I guess that means treason with a side-order of blasphemy."
"Blasphemy?"
"I heard about Agni," Kori shrugged. "Never would have seen that of 'her'. Ah, well. I never gave much beyond lip-service to your god anyway. Since she's a spirit, that's probably for the best," he cracked a grin. "Best to not piss off the spirits who already think they've got a latch on me from down south, am I right?"
"I don't think that's how spirits work," Zuko noted.
"Heh, and you'd know," Kori said. He took another breath; this time, when he spoke, he didn't look up. "What about the waterbender? She didn't look well."
"She'll recover," Zuko said.
"Is that hope I hear?" Kori asked. Zuko just shot a reproachful look, and shook his head.
"She's too stubborn to die. If nothing else, she'll hang on until our truce ends, nail me once more with something unspeakably horrible, then die so I can't get revenge," Zuko said, lip curling into a smirk.
"Young love," Kori said with saccharine tone. Zuko didn't seem flustered, though neither amused. He just rolled his eyes and let it go, which debunked one of Kori's theories. The other one was slightly more absurd, which paired the firebender with the blind one. After that... he and the Avatar, maybe? It was hard to tell with those flighty buggers which side of the wall they leaned against. He shelved that idle notion for later. It wouldn't help him now.
"I hope you've got a plan for what you're going to do after stopping Zhao," Kori said. Notably not asking what said precursor plan was. "Because I don't think replacing a monarch is going to upend the weather."
"...we're working on that," Zuko said begrudgingly. He trailed off, with a look over Kori's shoulder. The waterbender turned himself, to note Azula wandering the camp, looking somewhat concerned. "Azula? What's wrong?"
"Nothing, why?" a gray-haired woman to Kori's immediate left answered.
"Not you," Zuko said testily.
"I don't understand. Where is he?" Azula asked, her tones just loud enough to reach the two teenagers. Kori shot Zuko a look, and the two rose as one, following in her wake as she made her way through the wagons and the white-robed denizens thereof. While Zuko was taller, he wasn't a trained waterbender, so he tended to get intercepted by people, while Kori flowed right between them. He got a bead on Azula first, but only because she was wearing red and black to everybody elses' pale.
She wasn't walking like Azula.
"Azula!" Zuko shouted ahead of him. At least two other women turned to look in their direction, but when they noted that he wasn't shouting at them, went back to their business. The Azula in question herself? Didn't register so much as a twitch. Kori moved closer, keeping her from slipping out of sight as she wove through the nest of wagons and lean-tos. He had seen the way Azula walked; it was a small part of what made her who she was. It was purposeful, powerful, and unwavering. The way this girl was walking now spoke to none of those things. She was a lost girl, afraid and confused. He reached her long before Zuko did, and caught her arm.
A gamble. If he did that to Azula, there was a fair chance he'd lose his hand.
Instead, Azula let out a slightly mewling noise, and looked back in concern at him. "No! Let me go, I have to find him!" even her tone of voice didn't sound right.
"This isn't good," Kori noted. He looked back and beckoned, pulling in Zuko as he made the last corner and toward where the other pale-robed people were starting to spread away, watching the two intently... and with a bit of fear.
"Azula, what's going on?" Zuko asked as he reached their side.
"Make him let me go! I have to find him..." Azula begged. Kori made a 'are you hearing this?' motion at her, and Zuko grew even more pale. She tried feebly to pull away from Kori's grasp, but failed utterly. That, too, was a sign that something was wrong. He didn't doubt that Azula was about as strong as Omo used to be; if she didn't want to be grasped, she was damned-well capable of undoing it herself.
"Azula, you're talking like a crazy person," Zuko said.
"Who's Azula?" Azula asked, finally turning to face the two of them. There was something about her face that almost made Kori let go of her then and there. The juvenile nervousness, the powerlessness, the biting of the lip and the glancing up under the brows, not a one of those things spoke to the once-Princess of the Fire Nation.
"It's her," one of the Gorks nearby said. Kori turned to him. "She's the one."
"She's the what?" Kori asked.
"Who? What is your name?" he asked, crowding in on Azula. Zuko made him back away with only his glare. He stammered for a moment, before melting back into the crowd.
"Which one do you think it is?" one of the Gorks asked.
"I hope it isn't Oberashi. I don't want to have to kill a guest," another answered.
"Excuse me?" Kori asked.
"Azula, we're getting out of here," Zuko said, and turned.
Kori's hand clenched shut. The two were now staring at each other, and Azula was nowhere to be seen.
"Oh... that's not good," Kori said with a wince.
"You fools! You drove her off before we could figure out which one she was!" an old and bearded man said, thumping the ground with a cane.
"Drove off... That was my sister!" Zuko shouted. The old man shook his head slowly.
"No. Not today, she isn't," he said. He turned to what was probably his granddaughter, in that she was roughly Kori's age. And a looker, besides. "Azula, go tell the others that we've found one. But we don't know which it is."
"Alright, grandpop," the other Azula said, before moving back through the wall of pale robes, and vanishing from sight.
"What just happened?" Zuko asked, anger giving him a rough edge to his voice.
"If you value her life, you'll look for whoever else is going to get taken," the old man said. "If she's lucky, she's not the one who died that day."
"WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?" Zuko roared.
"The ghosts have your sister now," the old man said. The others began to mutter among themselves, watching nervously where the two young men were standing, but finally allowing themselves to drift inward from the wall that they'd created. The threat, such as it was, was over.
"You know, I'm starting to wonder at the logic of Ozai calling his daughter Azula," Kori noted.
"Don't. Not now," Zuko said.
"She's a princess; there's no reason she couldn't have something more distinctive. Or at least something that you wouldn't find all over half of the continent," Kori noted. Oh, hell, he was doing that thing where he should shut up, and didn't. Probably because this had him seriously freaked out.
"I swear to Agni..." Zuko muttered.
"Something like Kairi... or maybe Rikku? Good names, something that would stay with her when she grew up. And they wouldn't get–"
Kori was cut off when Zuko punched him in the face. Honestly, he kinda welcomed it.
"Whatcha do~in'?" a perky voice drew Aang's attention as he turned away from the most recent of the people he'd 'interviewed'. Malu was walking along after him, if a bit less spritely than she normally did. Then again, considering the reddish stain that still smutted the bottom of one pant-leg, it was astounding she was walking at all.
"Huh? I thought you were looking after Katara?"
"Yeah, I did that for a while. Then Sokka and Nila came in, and they took over," she said.
"Just that fast?"
"Fast? It's been hours," Malu noted. Aang blinked, and looked up into the sky. There wasn't any appreciable difference; it was as gray now as when he started talking to people. Which made it clear why he hadn't noticed the passage of time.
The other reason being he had to distract himself. That niggling little fear, that doubt, that hatred, that tiny voice in the back of his mind would swamp him if he stopped, he was sure of it.
"Seriously, though. What have you been doing since... well, before lunch?"
"I missed lunch?" Aang asked. His stomach grumbled with annoyance at the reminder. He shook his head, and tugged his headband more securely into place. "I'm trying to figure out what could have made the spirits angry here, what's got everybody so afraid. It's like back in Senlin but..."
"But you can't find out anything that would get the spirits all riled up?" Malu chanced. Aang shook his head.
"No, the opposite! There's so many things that happened that I don't know which one's which! And I don't see any real spirits near here!" Aang let out a growl and threw up his hands. "I'm starting to wonder if I'm even doing this right."
"Hey, you're trying to help. That's always worth something," Malu said. "So... Spirits?"
"Yeah."
"Aang, these people talked about ghosts, not spirits."
Aang just stared at her, the look on his face making it obvious that he had no idea what she was getting at.
"Ghosts and spirits are different things," Malu continued, annoyance edging into her voice.
"Really?" Aang asked.
"Didn't you pay attention at all in class?" Malu asked, thunking him on the forehead. Then she rolled her eyes. "Oh, wait; I know you didn't!"
Aang scratched at the back of his neck, not quite able to look her in the eye. "So... what do ghosts do?" Aang asked.
"A lot of stuff that spirits can't. And vice-versa," she said. "But their meanest trick is that they can take a Host whether the guy in question is a shaman or not, or whether they accept or not. They call it Possession, and you should know about this!"
"And what do they do? Besides feeling alive again?"
Malu dragged Aang's collar, and bore him toward the alarmed sounds of people in a somewhat different area of the mobile village. "They don't feel alive. They're not like spirits; they don't grow or evolve or change. They're stuck, and the only road they can take leads either down, or out. When they take over, they pretty much always reenact what made them ghosts in the first place."
"Wait, are you saying that they get their Hosts killed?"
"More often than I'd like," Malu said. She pushed through a throng of pale-robed people, only to have the two of them swept along with another, this of older and hard-eyed members of this people. There was a wariness there, Aang knew. A fear that they didn't want to name.
"What's going on?" Aang asked. One of them, an old and bearded man gave him a look, before continuing to guide the others onward.
"We've found one of the ghosts. But we don't know which it is," he said.
"You found it?" Aang turned to Malu. "That's good, isn't it?"
"Can you exorcise it?" Malu asked.
"Maybe, but we hesitate to; that just makes them angry," the youngest, a woman who was conceivably old enough to be Aang's mother, but not more than that, answered.
"If they get their Hosts killed, what worse could they do?" Aang asked. The nervous glance that the elders shared told Aang that it was probably something quite terrible indeed.
The knot of elders and airbenders burst into a circle clear of bonfires or wagons, one which had an angry Zuko pacing to and fro, while Kori rubbed at his face where he squatted with his back to a wheel. "You there. You saw the ghost depart, yes?" a hard faced man with almost black eyes asked.
"Ghost? That was my sister!" Zuko snapped. Aang's eyes went wide.
"It's inside Azula?" he asked. Zuko gave him an angry nod.
"Where is she? Tell me!" Zuko shouted.
"Calm down. You're not helping anything," Kori placated from his place to one side. From the looks of him, somebody punched him in the face. From the look that Zuko shot him, it was probably the firebender.
"The Tribesman is correct. Unless we know which ghost it is, we remain in dire peril," the black-eyed elder noted. He moved to the firebender. "How did you know that something was amiss with your sister?"
"She was acting meek and submissive and afraid," Kori answered for Zuko. That would have been painfully obvious, as the Azula that Aang knew was none of those three things.
"She didn't know who I was," Zuko said.
"Of course she wouldn't. Those Possessed never remember even their spouses or children when the ghost is upon them," another of the knot of grey-haired men and women noted.
"Where did she go?"
"We don't know," the black-eyed one said, shaking his head. "It is a mystery we have never been able to solve, in the thousands of years we have been Ghorkalai. Where the Hosts go while the ghost prepares itself... We cannot say. And because you drove her off, any danger she's in can fall only on your head!"
Zuko surged toward the elder, but found Malu and Aang both interjecting, catching him before he could do something drastic. While he wasn't insanely angry, as he might have been months ago, it was still clear that if they hadn't have intervened, then Kori wouldn't have been the only dark complected fellow who'd gotten punched in the teeth today. "Zuko, calm down. She's going to be alright," Aang said. Zuko puffed out a breath which sent jets of flame from his nostrils, but otherwise held his ground at that. "You said that she would be following a pattern... What if you know what that pattern is going to be?"
"Then we would be able to prepare for the worst," another elder answered.
"That's putting it lightly, Savir," the woman at his side chuckled darkly. "Sometimes, the only thing we can do is flee. If it were the ghost of Oberashi... he killed a lot of our people before we were able to stop him. Some, we can restrain, like Shahid the broken man, or Abhijita the thrice-mourning. Others we can stop, like the suicide of Tanvi. Others... others are too big to handle, and all we can do is hope the ghosts don't take too many."
Savir nodded. "We need to figure out who the ghost was. You said she seemed meek, yes?"
"More feminine than I've seen her by a half," Kori noted. Zuko gave him another dirty look.
"That rules out Abhijita. Fiery woman," Savir shook his head. "Damn the burning sword! We just don't have enough!"
Aang gave a glance aside, as he could almost sense an approaching presence before it came. Probably a figment of his imagination, but he was looking in the proper direction when Toph barged her way in. "Hey! Twinkletoes; something damn strange is going on here!"
"What happened?" Aang asked, once again batting away that odd sensation in the back of his mind, focusing on the present and the now. Toph scratched her head, and winced a bit.
"That's... a long story."
Earlier:
"No, seriously. We'll be fine," Sokka said.
"Suuuure you will," Toph said with a grin, as she leaned away from the wagon which now held Sokka, Nila, and his torpid sister.
"Hey, don't loo... Listen at us like that," Sokka said. "I mean, my little sister is right there!"
"Would that really stop you?" Toph asked. The mildly aghast stammerings told Toph that she'd managed to hit on one of the few motes of embarrassment that the Tribesman seemed to have in him. "Have fun, and try not to wake the dead!" Toph waved behind her as she started to pad away through the mud. With the boots on her feet, she only had the vaguest sense of where things were. A whisper of a notion where people were moving. The rough idea of where the wagons were sitting, and the fires blazing. It was akin to being blindfolded; she could still get around, but she didn't like it.
She sometimes bounced off of people, each time more annoying than the last. With each, there was a snapped rejoinder which was inhaled at the last second. Even people who didn't like Easterners, as the Gorks supposedly didn't, had more civility than to shout at a blind girl. Much as Toph hated the idea of being swaddled by pity, she also didn't feel like getting into a dozen fist-fights today. That was a 'yesterday' thing. Possibly a 'tomorrow' thing, too, but right now, she figured everybody deserved a chance to catch their breath.
She regretted that decision when somebody barged into her at full speed, knocking her onto her back. "Hey!" she snapped, pointing up at the late-teenager who was barely holding her balance. Odd to see through her palms instead of her feet. "Watch where you're going!"
"Maybe you should watch where you're going," the snide answer came, as the girl gave a haughty pose.
"Not exactly my strong suit," Toph waved a hand in front of useless eyes. She pushed herself up to a sit.
"Well, if you're going to be in my way, you might as well make yourself useful. Where is that useless bint Punya?"
"How the hell should I know? I only arrived here this morning," Toph said. She was about to rise completely when, in the midst of the other's face-palm, Toph's eyes went wide. Mostly because she finally realized where she'd 'seen' this girl before. Talking to the other Tribesman, with a truly remarkable array of weapons hidden on her person. Man, what a bitch she turned out to be.
"She doesn't deserve a tenth of what she has. Shinji is mine! She can't have him!" the girl snapped.
"Hey, don't let me stop you," Toph said. She started to walk away, but then stopped entirely. She turned back, and patted a hand to the dirt. In the two seconds since her last proclamation, to when Toph's hand hit the ground, the girl vanished. Not ran off, not jumped into the air; either would have been readily noticeable by the feel or the sound. No, she just up and vanished. Toph blinked useless eyes for a moment or five, trying to figure what had happened in her brain. The answer kept coming up 'crazy spirit crap'. Toph sighed, rubbed her own head with dirty fingers, heedless to how that filthied her up, and started to stomp toward where Twinkletoes was. This was the kind of thing that really required his special kind of attention, whether he was ready to give it or not.
"Wait, you said that she was looking for Punya, and somebody named Shinji?" Savir pressed when Toph ground to a halt. He gave a glance to the others. Some of them were letting out sighs of relief. Others, shaking their head slowly. Sadly, even.
"Does that mean something to you?" Aang asked.
"Yes. We know who the ghosts are. We just need to find Shinji before they go through with it all."
"Alright, I'm still a bit confused about this whole thing. Who the hell are these melodramatic chowder-heads, and why's everybody scared shitless over them?" Toph asked.
"A ghost is haunting my sister," Zuko said tersely. Aang didn't blame him for terseness. This was apparently a pretty serious problem.
"Ghosts?" Toph asked him. She then turned to the others. "...those things are real?"
"Frightfully so," the grey-bearded elder gave a nod.
"We know who two of the principle players are. Newcomers are both Punya and Trishna," Savir summarized. "We need to find out who Shinji is, and keep him away from anywhere he can get them all killed."
"Look, I can find Azula," Aang offered. "As long as she's not invisible or something..."
"Don't look for your friend. Look for 'Shinji'. When the three are together, that's when everything breaks," Savir prompted. He turned to one of the women who stood close by. "Mridu? Tell the ladies that they're safe for now. Keep an eye on the lads."
"Of course," she gave a nod, then departed through the crowds.
"How will I find Shinji?" Aang asked. "I mean, he could be just about anybody!"
"That's the curse we live under," Savir muttered. He half turned, then stopped, glancing back at him. A wave to the others, saw them heading off without him. "Who are you, outsider lad, who has such an interest in this? A shaman doesn't have any hold over the souls of the dead, any more than I can hold the sky in my hand."
A part of Aang wanted to remove that headband, to finally admit who he was to the world. The rest of him, dug into the dirt and germinated by Zuko, fostered and watered and bore to fruit by Azula, told him not to be such an idiot. Just because these people were polite now, didn't mean they would be if they knew the whole and unvarnished truth. "I just want my friends to be alright."
"So do many. Few claim that they have the power to make it so," Savir told him.
"What could you tell me about those people... Those ghosts, I mean?"
"And for that matter, are you serious? Maya Azul got Possessed by a ghost?" Kori asked.
"What, didn't see that coming?" Toph asked.
Kori was about to say something when he halted, cracked a smirk, and flashed a look to her. "Well, actually, I did note that I once claimed that she would both be the end of me, and haunt me for the rest of my days. So yes, this is actually somewhat in keeping for her."
"Maya Azul?" Zuko asked. "You have a strange way with people, Tribesman."
"And you don't have much of one at all," he answered back.
"I'm surprised that you're not more worried about her... considering," Zuko said.
"Considering what?"
"I thought you two were..."
"Her and I? Do you take me for a masochist? She tried to feed me to an Anomolokia!"
"Pity she failed."
"Her words exactly," Kori muttered darkly.
Aang started to ignore the rest, and turned his attention squarely on the one who seemed like he knew what he was talking about. "Elder Savir, can I ask you how you know so much about ghosts?"
"Because we've been plagued by them since the Monolith and... some even say... before," Savir moved away from the throng, past the wagons and to the edge of a defile which looked down over yet more wagons, and beyond them, the fog-filled valleys. "Nobody ever tells why cultures only seem to last so long, before something else takes their place. The Monolith lasted... decades, centuries maybe? No stories tell. The Storm Kings, from inception to destruction, might have lasted two millennia, but only for the last few centuries claimed any rulership beyond of their own kin and kith. The Tribesmen... Hard to say. Perhaps they're oldest of all, but they've always had their gods living among them, sheltering them from the worst that the universe deigns to throw," Savir looked up. "But us... we've been almost the same from the beginning. Sometimes others came or went, but we remain. Our stories are our blood, and that blood pumps even now. One day, there will be a single Ghorkalai, crippled and alone, barren and childless, but as long as she tells our stories, my people can never die. I fear that is our curse. That our stories, good or bad, never die."
"So the ghosts keep coming back, because you remember them?" Aang asked. He pulled at his hair in confused frustration "Then why don't you just stop telling them!"
"You don't understand, outsider. Without our stories, our history, we are nothing. Clan and Tribe are nothing if you don't know what they mean," Savir said. And then he gave a shrug. "Besides, for centuries, we never had too much a problem with the ghosts. Sometimes they would come, yes, but that was a thing once in a lifetime. A story untold returning to remind us of it. Oberashi and his genocide. The sad fate of the star of the morning. The bad stories define us every bit as much as the good."
"But you're bringing this on yourselves," Aang said. Then he paused. "Wait, you said..."
"If this is the price for being who we are, I will gladly pay it. If the ghosts take me next year, hurl my fragile form off of a cliff or lay me onto a bonfire, I would accept it even then. It. Is. Who. We. Are."
"Elder Savir, you said that this used to be really infrequent, when these ghosts would show up, right?" Aang asked. Savir nodded. "When did that change? Was it about sixty years ago, when the clouds came?"
"No... not quite," Savir said. "The ghosts returned as they did... perhaps ten years before the rains."
A quiet horror settled into Aang's gut. Was there nothing that Imbalance didn't touch? Was there no catastrophe or malady for which it wasn't, in some way, responsible? It seemed everywhere Aang looked, there was just more sign of its corruption. He could barely look to the horizon, toward the City of Azul, without flinching back; the traces and lingerings of the Megalopolis seared at Aang's senses like an odor so foul that it boiled the skin.
"If you stopped telling these stories completely, the ghosts would leave you alone in time, but you would lose who you are to have that freedom," Aang summarized. Savir nodded. "I don't know if the price is too high. I think it is... but I'm not you."
"Indeed. Wise indeed to consider it, though. Most call us 'backward', 'foolish', because we care what came before us," Savir said. "The Earth Kingdoms... They have their own ghosts, but they are more subtle, I think. Anything old whispers into the future. Other times, they scream. The Ghorkalai are used to screaming."
Aang gave a solemn nod. "And Punya and Trisha? What were they?"
Savir sighed, and looked ahead. "That was a time long ago. Before the Fire Nation and the Storm Kings were at war. A Shinzoan man pulled the attention of one of our... nobility, you might say, and her handmaiden as well. He found the lady morally repulsive, and courted the maiden. The lady didn't take the snub well."
"Not well?" Aang asked. There were a few ideas of how 'not well' it was; extremely specific ideas.
"She put the maiden to death," Savir said. Exactly what Aang expected him to answer. "Punya escaped the attempt on her life, but Trisha took things into her own hands. Shinji and Punya died. Trisha... she lost her mind, and joined them not long after. These are the stories that my people hold close to our heart, these cautionary tales. Against vanity and greed, against lust and pride. And we are again reminded the cost of those lessons."
Aang looked behind him, to the hills that rose yet higher, their face forming a sheer cliff-wall that the mobile village had butted against. A glance back to Savir. "If I stop them from dying... will they be alright?"
"Yes. Possibly. It won't be easy," Savir said. "The Broken Lover haunting has never been stopped before. Its players never appear where we could save them," Savir looked Aang in the eye, and clapped a hand down on his shoulder. "If you really want to help your friends, to stop this tragedy, find Shinji, and keep him safe. Do that, and perhaps this day will be far kinder than we've had in quite a while."
Hisui turned when her brother gave a grunt of concern, to where the Si Wongi youth had spent the last day or so in a catatonic state. "I think he's waking up," Hai noted. Hisui, though, felt a need to check that more personally. His breathing had become uneven, and his eyes fluttered somewhat. Not to say that having open eyes was any sign of consciousness; he barely seemed conscious with eyes wide open, as she recalled. Hisui felt a hand on her shoulder, carefully edging her back from over the bed she leaned. Like many places in the Crater District, the shifting of the volcano had struck hard; the roof overhead was very slap-dash and leaked... regardless of the fact that they were in one of the outbuildings of the Royal Palace. When nature was roused in anger, it didn't care what blood it spilled so long as blood was, in fact, spilled. "Might want to be a bit more careful, there. We don't know what he's capable of."
"He got out of a Death Ring. That's already one impossibility," Hisui noted. "Hey. Are you awake?"
"...ow."
That was probably the most expected answer in the history of answers, really. "You did something pretty spectacular back there. I don't know how you did it, but you did. Much as Qin likes to strut around like he owns the place, I'm pretty sure it was you, me, and Hai who saved Caldera City."
"...I had to stop them. They were going to bring the final darkness... if I didn't stop them," Sharif said slurringly, his eyes still not opened, as he rubbed the new Death Ring which held him in place. After all, just because he'd saved her life, didn't mean they could trust him.
"I'm getting the feeling that he's his old, helpless self again," Hai noted.
Hisui ignored her brother for the moment. "Considering the act of service you've done to the Fire Nation... and the fact that you were wanted by the previous administration and not this one, I'm pretty sure that the state can accept something of a 'work release' for you if you're willing to offer your aid."
"I..." Sharif began. Then, his eyes snapped open. While there was a distance to his vision still, one that looked beyond wherever they lingered, there was an edge of focus to it as well. He was looking at Hisui, and through her, at the same time. "You are... more important than I thought."
"Flatterer," Hisui said dryly.
"I thought there was no place at all for you. But you felt the void. The void heeded your call. That was not supposed to... to happen. The void don't listen to anybody. Nobody can see them..."
"I saw them well enough once you started to pull them in," Hisui said.
"What is he saying?" Hai asked. Hisui gave him the ten second version, which had him frowning, but nodding. "Ask him what those spirits were... and why I can't find any more of them?"
Hisui did exactly that. "He does not know. They are void. They are, and aren't."
"They're like Imbalance, aren't they?" Hisui asked. Sharif vigorously shook his head.
"No! They are nothing like Imbalance. They are... yes, that is it; they are. The Imbalance, it's Shards? They are not," Sharif said.
"So they're opposites. Which would explain why they vanished when you killed that thing. Collide a spirit with its antispirit, both are annihilated," Hisui said. Sharif shook his head, but then halted, stared past her, then turned to her again.
"That is... something like the way of it, yes," a nod this time. "Where am I?"
"Still in the city... for now," Hisui said. Hai continued to pace, until he almost bumped into Maryah, which caused him to let out a hiss of alarm and bound back. How she'd gotten there was beyond anybody's guess.
"I was wondering where you two went," Maryah stated, idly walking a knife along the backs of her fingers. "Bad enough that the Children can't do squat against an exploding volcano, two of 'em are nowhere to be found."
"Four, actually," Hai noted. "Is something wrong?"
"What? Why do you assume that?" Maryah asked.
"Because you never contact us when everything's alright," Hai said.
"And I can't just visit because we're coworkers?" Maryah asked. Hai just gave her a flat look. She rolled her eyes and turned, spotting the Easterner. "Well... What's going on here?"
"Long story," Hai said.
"No it isn't. This former prisoner saved the lives of thousands upon thousands of people by killing the thing which was making the volcano explode," Hisui countered. "I need you to take a look at something. Are you going to come of your own power, or do we have to carry you?"
"Look at what?" Sharif slowly got to his feet, unsteady though he was. He looked at Hai, then at Maryah, and blinked a few times, before offering a quiet 'huh'. But for all the confusion that put on the face of both, he didn't elaborate beyond that. Hisui pulled him toward a window. She puffed out a breath, and opened the World Eyes. She could tell that Sharif was doing likewise. He blinked dully as he looked over the Crater District as Hisui did, but it wasn't the dull of lack of comprehension. Not this time. "That is strange. Strange, but not unexpected. I thought that might be its goal."
"What?" Hisui pressed.
"What are they looking at?" Maryah asked.
"It's a shaman thing," Hai told her.
"You're just cutting me off from seeing the interesting parts. Why don't you bring me into the Spirit World like last time?" Maryah asked, crossing her arms before her chest. Hai sucked air between his teeth with a wince.
"I don't think so," he said. She raised a delicate brow at him. "The Outer Sphere is... a bit hazardous right now."
That was putting it lightly.
The city existed on two layers. One eye saw things as they stood in the Inner Sphere, the Mortal world. Buildings cracked or leaning. Some burned down. Others resolute despite the destruction around them. But to the other eye, the one which saw beyond the veil into the place which existed just outside the normal, the regular and the everyday, there was much, much more. Great rents tore across the structures, the ground, and the sky. They stood like inflamed and infected wounds, even seeming to pulse ever so slightly to an alien heartbeat. In some places, fires burned still out there, their spirits igniting themselves into conflagration against non-existent gasses or things stranger still. Animals in spirit form, blue and spectral, walked the streets confused. They were, a many of them, like nothing anybody present had ever seen before, or thought able to exist.
"This is strange," Sharif offered the understatement of the century.
"Strange? This is well beyond strange!" Hisui said.
"Is that some kind of fish-dog?" Hai asked, as one of the long-tusked, compound eyed things loped along with much more aplomb than most of the other beasts and clouds of spirits that traversed the Outer Sphere. Maryah, at his side, could only offer a baffled shrug.
"The wounds are raw. There are no void here. Is no void. I..." Sharif shook his head, then looked out again. "I cannot think. It is too loud."
"You've got to know how to fix this."
Sharif stared out, and blinked a few times. When he turned to her, his gaze was once again as distant as it ever was. "Time. Time that we do not have."
"So what? We wait until all those cuts go away?"
"No. Yes."
"Oh, don't start with that," Hisui moaned.
"If we wait, the world dies. If we heal the wounds, the world lives. We must wait for the wounds to heal. And cannot wait, for they never will," Sharif said resolutely.
"You've got a hell of a talent for contradiction, Easterner."
Sharif continued to stare out, but Hisui started thinking. The way this guy talked was extremely specific and contextually literal. He could say that the rain would fall tomorrow, and that the rain would not fall tomorrow, and both would be right, as long as tomorrow, at some point, it stopped raining. That made figuring out what he meant a task built for headaches and rage. But there was no other way forward, except through the words of a brain-damaged guy from the desert.
"Is he doing that 'yes/no' thing again?" Hai asked.
"What?" Maryah asked. Hai summed it up quickly, which had the Azuli Child palming her face. "I don't see why you don't just stab him until he gives you a straight answer."
"It wouldn't help. This is as direct as he can give... annoyingly enough," Hisui said. She rubbed at her temple for a moment. "Alright. So you're saying that the Outer Sphere will recover in time, but the amount of time that it'll take to recover is more than we can afford to wait, right?"
"Yes," Sharif said.
"Why?"
"The Shards," Sharif said. Hisui looked out onto the pandemonium.
"Will they do this again?" she asked, worry clear in her tone.
"Yes. I don't know."
A growl, until she remembered to run this through extreme-literalism-mode. They could, but he didn't know if they would. "If they do this again, would it be as destruc... No, better question. Could they cause more destruction than this if we don't stop them?"
"Yes."
"How much?" she asked.
"Everything," Sharif answered. Hisui stared at him. "If Imbalance is not stopped, there will be nothing. Not Spirit, not flesh. Not death. Not even oblivion... not really. Nothing at all."
Hisui took in a breath, and spared a glance to her brother. "This isn't going to be big on pride," she said.
"You're not..."
"We kinda have to," Hisui answered her brother. She turned to Sharif. "Can you help us stop Imbalance?"
"Yes. No."
"You can... you can help, but you don't know if we can beat it?" she hazarded.
"No. I can help, but we will fail. Without the Avatar, there is no hope. With him... there is very little," Sharif said. Hisui's eyes widened. Sharif pointed to the shifty looking cow-thing that plodded down the street. "That is very far from home..."
"What is it, Sis?" Hai asked.
She turned and put her back to the wall, letting the World Eyes close. Maryah, who like Hisui's brother was not privy to the conversation, looked on with expectation bordering on impatience. "We've... got a problem," she said.
"What kind of problem?" Hai asked.
"The kind of problem where the only way we survive is by committing High Treason," Hisui said with a wince. Maryah reacted by raising an eyebrow, and nothing more. Hai leaned back.
"What are you talking about?"
Hisui puffed out a breath, and thought about how she was going to phrase this. After all, there was a strong chance that, sibling or no, Hai might just haul Hisui away in chains. And as for Maryah? Hisui was just shocked that she'd managed to talk as long as she had without the Azuli Child stabbing her. She looked to the shaman from Si Wong. "Hey. Hey! Tell me something. Did this weather come because of Imbalance?" she demanded.
"Yes," Sharif said. Hisui waited for the 'no' that she was fairly sure was bound to follow. But it didn't.
"Really?" she asked. "No back and forth, just yes, the reason why the Fire Nation's been swamped for decades is because of this spirit of Imbalance?"
"It is not a spirit of imbalance. It is Imbalance Itself. It is something..." he gestured vaguely, as though trying to summon a word that he didn't know. "Different."
Hai gave a mildly annoyed gesture to hurry up, and she was fairly certain that he was losing his patience at a prodigious rate. "Alright. The weather? The rains? They're here because of something called Imbalance. Yes, I know how mockable that sounds, Maryah," Hisui cut her off before she could snark. "But I'm pretty sure that's why it's snowing right now, here. There's something big, nasty, and dangerous, and it's not going to rest until it's destroyed pretty much everything. They almost made the volcano explode, and they could do it again at any time, unless we do something to stop it."
"Well, that means we do something. I don't see where treason enters into it," Hai noted.
"Hai, Sharif here managed to kill one of them, and that was with our help; after he did, he spent the next day in a coma. I saw dozens of those things. There may be hundreds more!" Hisui said, gesturing toward Sharif. "We need a shaman with a lot more power than him. And he's eight times the shaman that we are alone, three times the shaman we are when we work together! There's only..."
"I don't like where you're going with this," Hai crossed his arms before his chest, his narrow jaw tensing.
"The Avatar is afraid. He doesn't know enough," Sharif said, with an idle tone, as he stared west out the window. "He... he doesn't have enough to win."
Hisui turned a look from the Easterner to her brother. "The only way we win this, is with the Avatar's help."
"And there's the treason," Hai said. He sighed. "You don't make being a brother easy, you know that?"
Maryah gave a shrug. "I fail to see how this is a problem. We use the Avatar to save the world, then knock him down when we're done. Besides, throwing him at Zhao can't do anything but help us."
"You do have a point," Hai said. Hisui, though, felt a bit of uncertainty. She'd seen too much in the last few months to think that they could simply toss the Avatar away when they were done with him. He'd sent the two of them to a place beyond all mortal reckoning, a place beyond imagining. A place that they barely made it back from in their two respective pieces. And worse, he'd done so with almost no effort and with contemptuous ease.
"Let's face it; back when Mother was alive, she always said 'don't stare at the horizon only to trip over your own feet'," Hisui pointed out. "There's no point planning for next year if we die next week."
At that as well, Hai could only nod.
"I hope he is ready to fight. The equinox is coming. And it... it the Imbalance... It gets stronger every day. I..." Sharif shook his head, unable to come up with an end to his rambling.
"And there, we have a time-limit," she said quietly. "If we can't stop the thing that's doing all this," Hisui gestured around, to the cold rain that fell into the streets of Caldera City, "by the autumn equinox... that's it. Poof. We're done."
"Well? What are you waiting for?" Maryah asked. "Oh, right. The Avatar is an enemy of the Fire Lord, past and present, and if he has any sense he'll be staying as far away from us as possible. That's going to make things supremely easy."
"Not as far as you'd think," Hai said. He lifted up a book with a stained cover, one that she herself had copied at the Mad Forges. Azula's notebook of prophecies. "It says in here that he's going to join an attack on the city during the Day of Black Sun. It also says that he's going to lose. So we have a where, and a when," he gave out a scoff, and shook his head. "I can't believe I'm actually considering this but... if we really need the Avatar, that's probably the only chance we have to recruit him, barring some sort of miracle."
"It'll have to do," Hisui said. For everybodys' sake, it would have to do.
When Aang landed from his final bound, up the sheer cliff that overlooked the encampment of Yubokamin, his mind was racing. A lot of it was worry. Azula was in trouble. Danger, even, from something that Aang had almost no control over or means to fight. But a part of it was spinning in a different direction, one of distrust and confusion. That part made little sense to Aang, so he ignored it, again doing what should have been impossible.
"Come on, Azula... where are you?" he asked, as he looked down at the culture below him. The wagons were all drab from a distance, as their bright, colorful touches vanished with distance. The sea of pale robes was quickly being broken up, as women began to don bright scarlet dresses, or in fact clothes of almost any hue whatsoever. He was sure that he could see what looked like Tribesmen's vests and Earth Kingdom hanboks amongst the women, as well as the more expected Fire Nation variety. "Gods... Why is nothing ever easy?"
His mind continued to spin, but as it spun, it distracted him from what he'd have been doing now if his friends weren't in mortal danger; moping. The fact was, Azula's advice was on the money. He didn't have time to sulk and hate himself. Not if he wanted the people he cared about to be safe. Katara was safe, now. That was something to be celebrated, not commiserated. Yes, it came at a terrible price, but whether the price ought be paid or not was irrelevant, to the fact that Aang had paid it. Or rather, forced another to pay it in his stead. There was no time to weep and wail. There never was.
But it hurt, even then. Aang was glad that it did. That meant that he still knew that the price paid could be altogether too high. It let him know that he still knew what evil could feel like. It let him know that, while he was the Avatar, and thus essentially a Demigod – answerable to nobody but himself – he was still human.
"Shinji? Is that you?" Azula's voice came from behind Aang. His eyes widened, and he turned to see her there, standing with him near the top of that upthrust of rock. There was no easy way to this platform; it was something that could only be reached by somebody like Aang... somebody who could fly.
"Azula?" Aang asked. He held up his hands toward her. "Just... just stay right there. Everything's going to be alright."
"Shinji, I was so afraid," Azula said, her eyes welling with tears as she began to move toward him. "They said that you'd betrayed me but I know in my heart they were lying."
She then faltered, coming to a halt near Aang. "...They did lie... didn't they?"
Aang had a confused moment, as something once again tried to grasp ahold of him, to make him play a part that he wasn't aware of or willing to play. Again he brushed it aside, and did what he thought was the right thing to do. "Uh, yes! Yes, of course they were lying... my, uh... friend?"
"I knew that you'd never do something like that," Azula said, her tones bright and hopeful, as she finished the distance and pulled Aang close to her in a hug. It wasn't one that he'd expect from her, though. For all he knew she was a physically powerful woman, this wasn't a tenth of her strength. She was hugging like somebody far weaker than she was. And he was fairly certain that Azula would never lay her head on a shoulder like that. Much as he enjoyed it... anyway...
"Listen, we're not safe up here," Aang said, slowly pushing himself out of the embrace. He gave a glance behind him. "I mean, a wrong step and we're all eggs off a... well, a cliff," he scratched at his hair. "Man, I really need to work on that 'making up a metaphor' thing."
"I'm not sure what you mean, my love. I'm safe now, Shinji. Nothing could hurt me with you so close at hand. You're stronger than any man I've ever known," Azula said with a little smile and a distant look in her eyes. Yeah, he was going to stop mentally referring to her as Azula, he decided. Mostly because doing that was causing entirely too much mental dissonance.
"Of course," he said, nevertheless, trying to put some suave into a voice which was scarcely prepared for it; puberty might have struck early with the Avatar, but not that early. "I am a big, macho man, right? Oooooh yeeeeah," he even tried to flex his arms. Not-Azula giggled. Yup, not her by a longshot. "So... ah... why were you so afraid again? I'm kinda in the dark about all this background-y stuff."
"I... Oh my... I thought that she'd turned you against me. But she hasn't spoken to you at all?" Not-Azula asked. There was a flinch, as Azula's face tightened into a fearful rictus. Eyes opened once more, but this time, the burnished gold shifted immediately to Aang, and her expression wasn't one of simpering subservience, but terror, leavened by power. "You! I need hel..." and with those few words uttered, her face became placid and love-struck once more.
"Azula! I know you're in there!" Aang shouted.
"Who's Azula?" Not-Azula asked.
"Look, we're just going to go down to the others. I'll keep you safe. Nothing's going to happen to you, I promise," Aang said with a calming motion. Not-Azula pulled Aang close, such that his face mashed quite pleasantly if a little surprisingly into her bosom.
"Of course you won't. You're my hero... my savior..." Not-Azula crooned.
Aang seriously considered whether he should pull away or not.
"I'm going to hate myself later for this," he said, before pushing her away gently, just to arm's length. Hormones would have to wait. "Alright. I'm Shinji, your savior. And your... What, lover?"
"Of course you are, Shinji."
"Right," Aang said. "Now we just need to..."
"YOU!" a shriek came from Aang's back. Where once there was nothing but rock and scree, now stood another young woman, perhaps a year older than Azula. This one had a much more lithe build, a woman developed for agility, flexibility, and speed, rather than the raw and undeniable power of Azula. This would have to be Maya Azul. "Punya, you worthless bitch! How DARE you show your face again!"
Not-Azula slowly back-stepped until Aang was in front of her, shielding her from Maya. Or whoever Maya was supposed to be. The whirring of a ghost in the recesses of Aang's mind made another grab, but was batted aside as easily as ever. "You have to protect me, Shinji! She tried to have me killed!" Not-Azula – Punya, as it happened to be – whispered in fear into his ear.
"Right... Uh... Stop right there!" Aang trailed off, and glanced at 'Punya'. "What was her name again?"
"How can you not know Trishna of Cán?" Punya asked.
"It must have slipped my mind," Aang was practically buzzing. "Just stay right there Trishna. I'm sure there's something we can do to sort this out reasonably..."
"Reasonably? Are you insane? That girl is beneath you!"
"In more ways than one, you sour bitch!" Punya sniped back, such vitriol pouring from her that for a moment Aang thought that they'd gone back to the Azula/Katara hatred that had plagued half of a year.
"Ladies, please! Shouting and – attempted murder, really? – killing each other isn't going to solve anything. What happened in the past is in the past; you can't undo it, you can't change it, but you have the power to make the future something different. Something better!" Aang pleaded. 'Trishna's face screwed up in confusion and disgust... then there was a break. Sallow and bug-eyed panic etched her features, just for a fraction of a second.
"What's going on? I can't–" Maya – and Aang was fairly certain it was indeed Maya – said, before her features turned from fear back into hatred. "I gave you everything you are, Punya, and I have the power to take it away from you."
"Shinji... what do we do?" Punya asked.
"Just stay calm. Everybody, stay calm!" Aang was now trying to keep both of them in his sight, and that focus was a shield that kept something rebounding away from controlling him, and making him play an unthinking part in all of this. "Trishna, you can't hate Punya for what she's done. It wasn't a choice that she made alone."
"She seduced you away from me!" Trishna screamed.
"He was never yours to begin with!" Punya countered, pulling close behind Aang. Stay focused, Avatar, he coached himself.
"And Punya, the more you taunt Trishna about this, the angrier she's going to get. Even if you weren't in the wrong to begin with, you're making yourself into somebody worth hating," Aang continued. The look on Azula's face was one of unmitigated shock.
"I don't understand. I thought you loved... me..." she whispered, eyes brimming now with tears.
"Right now, we can't talk about that. We have to talk about..." Aang turned. "...where's Trishna?"
The answer came in the form of a shriek, one that barreled into the side of Azula and drove her away from Aang. Oh, now that just wasn't fair! She'd outright appeared at a charge from Aang's blindspot! The tackle drove Azula closer and closer to the edge. Aang sprang toward them as well, but even as he reached a point that he might be able to reach 'Trishna', she was already hurling 'Punya' off a cliff. The look on Azula's face, the one that Punya put there...
There was a white fuzz intruding on his vision as he slammed the air away from him; the bow wave of his sudden acceleration slammed Trishna back and away from the cliff's edge, while Aang surged downward. Azula flailed, screaming as she plummeted. No, Punya plummeted. Aang knew full well that Azula could have saved herself. Sadly, Azula wasn't the one in control right now. There was a final crack as he reached her, and scooped all the air that he'd pushed ahead of him into a scoop, one so full of water simply from the humidity that he could twist it into a slide of ice. His catch was pathetically awkward, not the manful relief that he'd imagined he might do. But skating first down, then swiftly leveling off above the level of the wagons.
The water ran out as they were almost racing perpendicular to the ground. Aang's feet went out from under him as well, but he already twisted in the air, one arm sweeping up and back, shifting the clay into a viscous mud, something a lot softer than rocks. The two of them landed hard with Aang taking the effort to cushion the blow with his airbending, and failing that, his body; they skipped off of the muck as they went. The sparse crowd swiftly ducked aside, hurling themselves away if need be, to give the two a path to land. The second landing was rougher, but they didn't leave the earth again, though the two did roll muddy over each other. When Aang came to a stop, he was every bit as covered in brown as Azula was, and she was anything but clean. He breathed deeply, trying to shake off the terror, the anger that had overtaken him when everything he'd done turned out to be pointless. Pointless, no longer.
Punya stared up at him, her eyes shining, even as what he assumed were happy tears cut lines in the grime. "You saved me Shinji. I knew you would," she whispered to him. A tired smile came to Aang's face.
"Of course I did. I always protect the people I care about," he said. She pulled closer to him, her lips sinking into his, even as his eyes went extremely wide. Oh gods. Azula was kissing him. What was he supposed to do? Oh, right. The thing with the lips and the tongue. Wow. If only Jugdesh was alive; Aang owed him both an enormous apology, and a massive amount of thanks.
It came to a stop sooner than Aang would have liked it – as it ended at all, in point of fact – when the beautiful woman in his arms went rock solid. Aang pulled back from her embrace, and saw that Azula was blinking in confusion. The two of them stared at each other from mere inches apart.
Then, she shoved him so hard that he slid five feet, into the side of a wheel. "What the hell are you doing?" Azula shouted, as she pushed herself to a sit, glaring at him.
"Saving your life!"
"With your mouth?" Azula snapped. She shook her head with a snarl and rose. Only then did she look down at herself. "Oh, you must be... What did you do?"
"She's... alive?" one of the adults around them said. "It's a miracle."
"It's not a miracle. It's waterbending," an older, female voice said matter-of-factly. "I'd stake my life on it."
Aang kipped up to his own feet. "You're okay... that's good," he said. He was still a bit lightheaded from the fact that... Yup, Aang had a make-out session with the Crown Princess of the Fire Nation. A part of Aang knew that he'd set aside this day to be miserable, but right now, he just didn't have it in him. He blinked a few times, then turned his gaze upward, to the cliff that had overlooked them all.
"Um... How did I get up here?" Maya Azul asked from the edge of the cliff. "And how do I get down?"
Azula was stomping away, shaking her head and muttering under her breath. Aang, though, couldn't help but smile, even as he started to manually clamber up to her. Somehow... this turned out to be a pretty good day.
In most cases, when somebody said that somebody 'had steam coming out of their ears', it was just a euphemism for being angry beyond any lesser description. However, when said about somebody like Princess Azula, it was a literal fact. Wet ground cracked dry as she stormed past, ignoring the Yubokamin who had broken out into celebration around her; the Haunting had come and gone, and for six more months, they were free. She ignored also the Tribesman who had crippled her with contemptuous ease on two separate occasions, as he sat back and was fawned over by happy, brightly dressed Ghorkalai. She even managed to ignore the smart one and his explosion obsessed other half, who were trying to move through the party which had erupted out of relative thin air. As it was, there was only two things on her mind. First, and most annoying, was that she'd lost control of herself again.
At least, Azula found some consolation within, she wasn't beating on the walls of her own consciousness, watching as an simpering twit flounced and did absurdities. She had no recollection of what happened when the ghost was upon her. For all she knew, she was walking away from the Avatar after giving him some well-thought-out and useful advise, and the next thing... was in fact the other thing that was on her mind.
"That... If I didn't need him alive, I'd kill him!" Azula hissed. Yes, that was more like it. Azula was angry. That was the way it was supposed to be. "He... That little peasant... How dare he?"
Worst of all, she actually kind of liked it.
"There will be a reckoning for this, Avatar. I swear it!" Azula nevertheless declared. If only because, for all her years, she hadn't completely mastered her pride.
And fortunately, despite all her years, there was still a part of her that was a teenager... and she liked the way that this – in all its insanity, confusion, and destruction – felt.
Princess Azula cut through the crowds, her eyes on the ground. Partly because she didn't want anybody to look her in the eye. And partly, because she would not allow anybody to see her blush.
Things were so much easier when she just wanted to kill him.
Well, I'd have to say that yanking the proverbial chain on the title pairing for fifty chapters is long enough. Hell of a run, though. Pity she has so much denial about it though. That's the downside of having the experiences of a sixty-year old, but at the same time, the perspective, underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hormonal-ness of being a teenager.
Fun.
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