A/N: The beginning of this story is set in October of 2155, roughly half a year after the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Terra Prime" and the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode "Sozin's Comet," between Azula's defeat and the trip to Ba Sing Se in the final scene. This is a crossover with Star Trek, mostly Star Trek: Enterprise with elements of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. However, because I'm not posting this in the crossover section (where it will languish in obscurity), and I've played around with this concept for a long time, I'm describing all the characters, Star Trek and Avatar alike, canon and noncanon alike, as though they were my own original characters so everyone has a clear idea what everyone clearly looks like.

More than that, though, is a labor of love for me. I've worked on developing it, in one form or another, since I was twenty years old, and I'm glad to be finally revisiting it. So, without further adieu, let's get into it.

"In dreams begin responsibility."

-William Butler Yeats (June 13, 1865-January 28, 1939), Irish poet and legislator.

Chapter One

The Avatar slept.

The wind rustled through the dry, yellow grass as Aang stood in the clearing, staring transfixed at the scene before him. The enormous, dome-shaped mountain jutted out of the white clouds. The sun was setting in the west , and it bathed the entire ice-capped mountain in what appeared to be fire. It's beautiful, he thought. I need to show my friends this. He reached out to grab his staff, to extend its wings, and take off into that glorious sunset back towards…where? His eyes widened as it hit him that he actually had no idea where he was. He wheeled about, looking all around him for the staff that he had carried at his side for a hundred years. There was nothing about him but the yellow grass, and the strange spindly trees that dotted the plain as far as the eye could see off towards the mountain.

Where's my staff? More importantly, where am I?

He took in a sharp breath. Something from the part of him that had lived again and again for forty thousand years whispered in his soul. He was staring at something no Avatar had ever seen, yet there was something familiar about it, as though he had come home.

"You have," a voice said from next to him. He turned to see a dark-skinned girl with curly hair about his age, wearing a thick pelt of dark yellow fur. He stared at her, surprised by her appearance. He'd never seen someone with skin so dark. Her skin was darker than Katara's, darker even than Guru Pathik.

"Who are you?" He asked softly. "Where am I?

She merely smiled and reached out to touch him on the shoulder. Something about this girl told him that she didn't mean him any harm.

The girl who looked like she was barely old enough to bear children said simply, "My son."

Aang woke up, staring up at the ceiling of his room in the Fire Nation palace. He breathed a sigh, as his brain remembered where he was and how he'd gotten here. Five months ago, he had defeated Ozai's final mad play for global dominance. Zuko and Katara had defeated Azula. The war that had wracked the human race for a hundred years was finally over.

The fighting may have been over, but there was still a mess to clean up. Fire Nation colonies that were older than he would have been had he not gotten himself stuck in that iceberg for a hundred years were still in the Earth Kingdom. The people who lived in them considered themselves loyal citizens of the Fire Nation and would certainly resist any attempt to either turn them over to the Earth Kingdom or pull them back to a land that wasn't even certain it had space for them. The archipelagos that had once been considered his long-dead people's sovereign territory had likewise been heavily settled by the Fire Nation. And stretching from the colonies' eastern border all the way to the borders of Ba Sing Se, Omashu, and other major Earth Kingdom states on the eastern part of the continent were occupation forces and the forward bases they operated out of. Forward bases that couldn't just be withdrawn without some arrangement in place to hand them over to the Earth Kingdom It was only in the last few weeks that King Kuei's government had reorganized enough to even begin to explore those problems. A summit in Ba Sing Se was due to be convened for that purpose next month.

A summit he was expected to mediate.

Maybe it was a dream, he thought, a way for me to escape the ball of stress I'm inevitably going to be going through in a few weeks. He had been fervently hoping it would go smoothly and they could go on to their long-planned visit to Ba Sing Se and the Jasmine Dragon even though he knew deep down it was going to be a mess.

For a moment, he wanted nothing more than to throw his thick red and black comforter off, go to Katara's room across the hall, and tell her everything that just happened. Even as he thought it, he knew it would backfire. Great, he thought, as he fell back onto the bed with a groan. Something else that will make Katara see me as barely more than a kid. Bursting into her room at night, going on out about a dream? She's a young, beautiful woman. Why would she be interested in me?

He wasn't an idiot. Sokka and Suki shared a room next door, and he heard the noises that came from that room at night. He knew, in broad strokes at least, what he and Suki were doing. His body was almost disrespectfully aware of what was going on, as a matter of fact. She's going to want to be with someone she can do that with. That isn't me. Not yet. No, I'm not going to bother her for something that for all I know really is just a vivid stress dream.

Even as he said it, he knew it wasn't true. The Avatar was supposed to be the bridge between the human world and the world of the spirits. If anything counted as a vision from those spirits, it was that. And, like most visions the spirits sent, it was almost infuriatingly cryptic. Which meant in addition to having to address the thorny ball of problems facing humanity, and his own love life, such as it was it, he had a mystery.

"The Katara of a year ago would probably have gutted me like a fish and pushed me off the Western Air Temple if she heard me say it," Katara said idly, nursing her goblet of rice wine as she sat in the dark red upholstered chair facing Zuko. "But I'm going to miss the Fire Nation. You have a beautiful country, Zuko." Katara still couldn't quite believe it. She was halfway through her fifteenth year. She had grown her entire life in the shadow of unending war. A war that had taken away her mother, then separated her from her father, and then finally almost came for her.

She was still amazed that she and her brother, of all people, worked with the Avatar everyone had thought dead for a hundred years, alongside friends they'd made all over the world, to finally end it. One of those friends, though she wouldn't have believed it possible only a year ago, was sitting across from her.

"The Katara of a year ago would probably have gutted me like a fish and shoved me out of the Western Air Temple," The fair-skinned man pointed out before sipping his own goblet of rice wine. "I just hope the faith you and the Avatar have shown me pays off and this summit works out."

"It will," Katara said reassuringly. Zuko, Aang, Mai, and herself, had been in chambers with Zuko's privy council all day working out some form of policy position for the Fire Nation to start the negotiations from. Aang and Mai had been tired out by everything and had elected to go to bed early, and Zuko, the man who surprisingly had grown into her closest friend after Aang, had decided to invite her to have a quick drink with him before turning in herself. "Our four nations have been at war for a hundred years. They're tired of it Zuko, they want it to end."

"I wouldn't be so sure of that," Zuko grimaced. "There are more than a few people in Ba Sing Se and Omashu calling on King Kuei to conscript every man and woman of military age in Ba Sing Se and go on the offensive, to 'drive the murdering bastards into the sea' no matter what the Avatar wants."

"I understand how they feel," Katara said guardedly. I wanted to wipe this place off the map a year ago myself, she thought shamefully. "But I doubt there are enough of them to cause a problem."

"They don't have to be," Zuko pointed out. "There just have to be enough of them in the right positions to risk undoing everything Aang's worked for. That's just the Earth Kingdom. I have my own hardliners to deal with. Men and women who feel that anything short of the Fire Nation flag flying over Ba Sing Se means that hundreds of thousands of Fire Nation servicemen and women died for nothing, including the forty thousand men and women who perished when Aang and the Moon Spirit destroyed our fleet before the walls of the Northern capital. I can't say I don't understand where they're coming from either. I've served in that military since I was eleven years old, so did Azula. For that matter, my mother was in uniform when she met my father. I was trained to achieve decision whenever possible because anything less usually means I let men and women I'm responsible for die in vain."

"Aang will put a stop to any rogue agents threatening the peace process. From any quarter."
"But, as my sister gave us dramatic proof of last year, being the Avatar doesn't make you immortal," Zuko shot back, leaning back in his chair. "All it would take is one lucky shot to condemn us to another generation of war."

"And if he dies in the Avatar state we'll be on our own for good," Katara continued, unwilling to think about the possibility of her best friend dying in her arms. Again. "No wonder you wanted to drink with me."

"If Kuei's hardliners seize power," Zuko began, grimacing in distaste. "I have three options. Option one, I can let Aang go in and attempt to bring them down. That's the Avatar's proper function, and the one I would most like to let happen. He'll go all Avatar State on them, the Order of the White Lotus will reassume control of Ba Sing Se, and we'll try this again after they put Kuei back or find his legal heir."

"And if he fails…or dies?" Katara asked, taking a hard swig of rice wine to wash the lump out of her throat.

"Then there's option two," Zuko said, anxiety starting to creep into his voice, despite the effects of the spirits in his cup. "I can use my forces to support the Order of the White Lotus in retaking Ba Sing Se, again, and reestablishing a provisional government, again. Then we try the diplomatic route again as I just mentioned."

"That would be the best of the remaining two," Katara pointed out. "Actually, not having to do this at all would be ideal. Option three?" Even as she said it, she knew what option three would be. The option if Aang was killed and the White Lotus was either taken out by the hardliners beforehand or failed to resolve the situation.

"The…unilateral option. I resume operations in the Earth Kingdom. I'd like to have Water Tribe and Omashu support if that were to happen but I'm willing to go it alone if I must. I force the hardliner's surrender, hand control of Ba Sing Se over to Bumi, assuming the hardliners didn't manage to kill him…but I'll have no choice but to leave a significant amount of forces beyond the colonies for the foreseeable future."

Katara leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. We're all fervently hoping none of that is necessary. She shook off the images of Aang in her arms in the catacombs under Ba Sing Se.

"Speaking of the colonies, many of the hardliners in the Earth Kingdom are not going to be satisfied with anything less than you handing all of them over."

"The people of those colonies have known no other life than being provinces of the Fire Nation," Zuko said, more than a trace of vehemence on his voice. "They consider themselves my subjects. I cannot and will not just hand them over to the Earth Kingdom without so much as consulting the people who actually live there on the subject. The resentment from everyone involved will only fester, and in twenty years or so when everyone's recovered enough, we may have an even worse war on our hands."

"And Kyoshi?"

Kyoshi, they both knew, was a special case. Suki and the Kyoshi Warriors homeland had been a quiet backwater for generations even before the war, ever since Avatar Kyoshi had divided it from the Earth Kingdom mainland to protect her home from Chin the Conqueror. Due to its proximity to the Air Nomad temples and the Fire Nation it had culturally more in common with them than the Earth Kingdom mainland. More than a few Kyoshi Islanders had Fire Nation ancestry. In fact, the Fire Nation military prior to the war had been the main anti-piracy force in the region, clashing regularly with raiders from the lawless areas from the Southern Earth Kingdom. Zuko's raid on Kyoshi while in pursuit of the Avatar had bought their island to the Fire Nation's attention earlier than it might have been, but they hadn't been so foolish as to think they'd be ignored (as much by their own government than by the Fire Nation) forever.

Indeed, only a few weeks after Zuko has returned home in triumph from Ba Sing Se, Ozai had formally signed off on the occupation of Kyoshi. However, Ozai didn't consider it any great priority in the grand scheme of things, focused as he was on ingesting the mainland. As a result, he had left the annexation to the Southern Command, which by that point was mainly a reserve force that didn't have any great proportion of supremacist hardliners. By the time Ozai had been deposed, he hadn't even gotten around to appointing a civilian governor to run it. Zuko, tasked with finding somewhere to begin to help the world recover, and feeling guilty for his actions there during the war, had appointed a provisional governor and carried out a concerted effort to help rebuild the village he'd destroyed. As well as improve the island's infrastructure more broadly. He'd intended it to be a gesture of peace and was planning on handing the island back to Ba Sing Se, to show everyone how the Fire Nation could benefit the rest of the world with her engineers and scientists, not her soldiers.

The locals, however, had been used to being neglected by the government in Ba Sing Se. As such, they had responded positively to a central government that took their concerns seriously. As opposed to Ba Sing Se's general policy of only paying attention to them long enough to appoint some incompetent governor who was too well-connected to just fire before leaving them alone until the time came to appoint another incompetent layabout to replace the previous one. This being opposed to Zuko's plans to help rebuild the Earth Kingdom and end the second-class status of the colonies, including Kyoshi. Where Kyoshi was going to end up had never been in doubt.

"As for Kyoshi," Zuko said, nodding, "they will almost certainly sign off on transferring sovereignty over the island. They never had the resources to support it when there wasn't a war, and it'll reduce their strategic burden. I just hope that-"

A loud sound of…something whistled through the air, three times in rapid succession, followed immediately by a scream of pain from right outside the door.

Zuko and Katara bolted to their feet and ran towards the door, bursting through it, to find the body of one of the Kyoshi Warriors sprawled out on the hallway floor. Her lacquered green armor had been melted into slag by some terrific heat, her face was a burnt red, and she stared back at her with lifeless brown eyes.

"Katara!"

Zuko's warning caused her to jerk her eyes up from the burned corpse of the Kyoshi Warrior. She yanked herself out of the way, right as a woman dressed head to toe in black, and wearing a black mask, pointed a strange looking weapon at her. It was curved, with a stock, unlike any crossbow she'd ever seen resting against her shoulder. She pulled the trigger, and a blue burst of light smashed into the doorframe where she'd been standing only seconds before.

Instinct took over, and Katara slid into a waterbender's stance, freezing the water in the skin into an icicle. Zuko's instincts were in top form as well and he sent blasts of fire down the corridor to cover her. Their assailant scrambled back down the corridor and into the corner. From her new position, she fired back, more blue lights coming down range at them. Katara ducked around the corner back into the room, as more shots dug themselves into the wall. Zuko, having taken cover in the empty bedroom down the corridor, continued to fire back.

Katara bit out a frustrated curse. She couldn't range on their opponent without exposing herself to whatever that weapon was. Zuko was the only one at an angle on which he could fire at her from cover. A clomping of feet running down stairs pulled her attention from the fight in the doorway. She looked behind her to see Mai heading for the doorjamb opposite hers. Her knives, curved and weighted for throwing, were in her hands as she ran down the stairs.

"What's going on?" She asked as blue and orange blasts continued to crisscross down the corridor.

"What do you think is going on?!" Katara shouted back. "We're under attack and I can't get to her without exposing myself to whatever she's shooting at us!"

"The entrance to the servant's passage is on the other side of the room. If you two keep her distracted I can-,"

She never finished the thought. The unmistakable sound of onrushing air told everyone that Aang had entered the field. From the high-pitched surprise yelp, Katara surmised that Aang had pushed whoever their assailant was out of her cover. Sensing her chance, Katara burst out of the room to see whoever it was that was attacking them firing back down the corridor towards what could only be Aang.

Her eyes widened at the memory of Azula shooting Aang in the back and almost without thinking she slid her water back out of its skin. It hardened into an icicle even as it flowed sinuously in front of her and she sent it unerringly under her exposed left shoulder with a meaty thud.

Her assailant jerked sharply to the right, her weapon clattered to the floor out of her suddenly weak hands as she made to staunch the thick flow of sticky dark arterial blood spurting out onto the wooden floor. In seconds her frantic pawing grew weaker and weaker and she slumped to the floor, her eyes unfocused.

The sound of running filled the adjoining corridor as Aang tore into view, shock and horror in his eyes as he flung himself on his knees before her body. Katara just stood there, rooted to the floor, stunned into silence by the enormity of what she had done. She could only watch as Aang first grabbed her wrist, then put two fingers to feel for the pulse at her neck. He looked up at her in undisguised shock and horror.

"You killed her," he said in a hoarse whisper, as if he couldn't quite believe it.

"It was either her or you, Aang," Katara heard someone that sounded a lot like herself respond. Even as a voice keened and wailed in her head. I've killed in battle before, she thought, trying and failing to shake it off. But that was an intellectual thing. Scout balloons knocked out of the sky or shards of ice shot at Fire Nation soldiers on cliffsides a quarter mile away.

It was nothing at all like watching a young woman no more than seven or ten years older than she was collapse in a heap to the floor only a few feet from her, pawing at herself in a useless attempt to keep her own blood in. A person who was only there because she herself put her there.

She didn't know how she managed to shake herself out of her fugue, but somehow, she managed to force herself to walk towards the body on the floor. She picked up the strange weapon gingerly, unwilling to accidentally shoot one of those blue pulses and risk accidentally killing Aang herself. It was vaguely similar to a crossbow, but aside from the fact it was meant to be fired by a nonbending soldier that was the similarities ended. It was constructed out of some sort of black metal but that was where the similarities between whatever this thing was and a crossbow ended. There was a hole in the end, and the stock was two widely separated pieces of the same material that was used in the rest of it.

"What is it?" Aang asked, voice still trembling.

Katara handled it slowly as she looked it over, unable to take her eyes off it, the smell of burnt flesh filling her nostrils again as the dead young woman behind her continued to smolder.

"I have no idea."

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