A/N: A note on planetary calendars before I move forward. Beta Canum Venaticorum is a star G0V that is hotter and brighter than Sol. As such it's year, within a margin of error, 1.122 times longer than our own world's. As they have no frame of reference for any other planets in other star systems at this point, the years they give are their local years. For instance, Katara roughly halfway through her fifteenth year in her frame of reference, which means she's firmly seventeen in ours. To translate between planetary calendars, give any given characters stated year in canon and multiply it by 1.122. I'm mostly doing this to account for the artistic age trope that had them being drawn as looking older than their stated ages. They are older, in our years at least.
"The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us; visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower;
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,
Like memory of music fled,
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery."
-Percy Bysshe Shelly (August 4, 1792-July 8, 1822), English poet "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"
Chapter Four
Isha ir'Chula t'Neral sat in her office, staring out over the wine-dark waters of the Apnex Sea as chi'Rihan's primary rose over the horizon, dimming the view of her homeworld's moon of ch'Havran. The chairman of the Tal Shiar had spent another sleepless night trying to process the recent series of reverses that romulan intelligence policies had received in the last year. The unexpected debacles that had consumed the two most successful Tal Shiar operations in the history of the Romulan Empire had played a large part in the totally accidental death of her predecessor and the elevation of Isha to the chairmanship of the Tal Shiar and membership on the Continuing Committee.
The first debacle had been admittedly the fault of their own deep cover agent on Vulcan. V'las and his handler had dramatically overestimated the threat to their plans from a small dissident movement well outside the mainstream and had decided to bomb the human embassy and frame the Syrranites as an excuse to eliminate them. It had ended with V'las's government falling, the abortion of the invasion of Andoria, and the rebirth of the original teachings of Surak they'd worked so hard to corrupt when those very same Syrranites took control of the government.
The second plan was more recent but it had been initiated with the goal of complementing the original plan. A Romulan scout mission had detected the planet forty years ago in what the humans on Earth referred to as the Chara system, surprised to discover a population of humans that had apparently been planted there early in their prehistory by unknown aliens for unknown reasons. The Tal Shiar's Predictive Analytics division had long known of Earth and felt that their rise to a regional power on par with the Vulcan Confederation or the Andorian Empire was long inevitable, particularly once it inevitably created some form of political union with the world in the Chara system.
Phase one involved sabotaging the Earth Kingdom's efforts to use its greater population and resources to fend off the Fire Nation. That part of the plan had worked beautifully, and when the time was right, she ordered Crown Prince Iroh's son, Major Prince Lu Ten, to be conveniently killed while making it look like he fell in battle repulsing an attempt to turn his father's flank. Then they sat back and watched as his younger brother Prince Ozai, manipulated the situation to ensure his elder brother was disinherited and he was crowned in his place.
The way her predecessors had planned it, Firelord Ozai was to finally complete the conquest his grandfather had started. Given his egomaniacal, psychopathic personality he'd immediately tear apart Sozin's original dream by reducing the Earth Kingdom and the Water Tribes to worse than second-class citizens under a brutal, genocidal dictatorship. They would then ensure that an Earth vessel would discover the situation. Ozai had been chosen because he was both a committed Fire Nation supremacist and a psychopath. While his grandfather Sozin had at least fooled himself into thinking that his planned conquest of the rest of the world beginning with the "regrettably necessary" extermination of the Air Nomads was a "War of Unification" and that a new human union would rise from the ashes under his dynasty, his grandson had no such delusions. He would do exactly what the Romulan Empire wanted him to do. Make himself master of his world even if that meant ruling over ashes. Any non-Fire Nation survivors would find themselves made second-class citizens. Given the way that United Earth's constitutional and legal provisions were arranged, an armed intervention by Earth and Vulcan would be inevitable. Such an invasion would divert Earth's existing fleet and ground forces and place them on the end of a long supply line, deployed to support conventional and counterinsurgency operations on a planetary surface instead of arrayed to stand off a large-scale conventional engagement in space.
A fleet that would be less able to maneuver while in the gravity well of a planet and would consequently be crushed, leaving the entirety of human space open to them. This was supposed to be timed to coincide with a successful Vulcan invasion of Andoria. The Romulans on Earth would then "reveal" the truth of their heritage and V'las would "voluntarily" agree to unification. With a minimum of Romulan blood, the Empire would have gained control of the homeworlds and colonies of United Earth, the Vulcan Confederacy, and the Andorian Empire. Most importantly of all, they would finally achieve the Great Charge the founder of the Romulan Star Empire had laid before them a millennium ago, to return to their original homeworld and rescue it from the delusional rantings of an emotionally stunted savant that had driven them all the way out here.
Then it had all come apart. The Avatar, who had somehow put himself in some sort of cryonic stasis, had reemerged, and over the course of the next year, managed to end the war and help Ozai's banished Prince son to reclaim his throne and birthright. As a Romulan she couldn't help but be impressed. No Romulan would have put up with the dishonor inflicted upon him by his own father and sister, she thought. Not that I won't kill him if that's what it takes for our plans to succeed.
Not even a year after that, V'las had been overthrown on Vulcan by the very dissident movement that would have remained a marginal force in Vulcan politics if he'd just left them alone.
The failure of the Raptor Initiative, the code name for the unified plan to conquer Sol, Chara, and Vulcan had led to Admiral Valdore's Long-Range Destabilization Initiative, also with Tal Shiar backing, also a failure. Consequently, her predecessor had died in an…accident and she had ascended to his position, determined to salvage something from the wreckage of the Initiative.
After weeks of analysis, she and her officers and analysts predicted that if they could get the war in the Chara system restarted, the mutual defense provisions of the newborn Coalition could draw all the Coalition militaries into the trap. It would require a larger deployment of ships and forces than initially planned to crush the multinational intervention forces in Chara, but they had the ships to make it work. To guarantee the intervention by Earth that would draw all the others in, they had made the decision to hijack a weapons shipment from Earth in order to hand over to the locals as a "gift from their spirits."
A lot of things could still go wrong, but this constituted the best chance of success without having to slog their way forward through enemies prepared and waiting for them.
The companel on her desk beeped, and she sighed and walked over to it "Yes?"
Her young male secretary's voice filtered through. "I'm sorry to bother you, sir, but Major Dhael is here to see you. She has news about the Initiative."
"Send her in," she said, quickly taking her seat behind her desk.
"Yes, sir," her secretary said
The door slid open to reveal a dark haired woman with green eyes, her lithe body in the brown nondescript tunic and trousers preferred by Tal Shiar department heads.
"Chairman," she said without preamble. "I have news of the Initiative."
Isha gestured for her to continue.
"The Lightning Swords made their first play to assassinate Firelord Zuko," she said matter-of-factly. "It failed."
Isha leaned back in her chair, fixing Dhael with a frozen stare. "How?"
"Someone apparently lost patience and decided they could seize control at their current readiness state if they managed to kill Zuko, causing enough chaos that they could free Azula from confinement and put her back on the throne. The monitoring drone reported picking up weapon's fire consistent with one Earth phase rifle in the palace, as well as the EM signatures indicative of the powers certain of the locals have. One biosign in the palace became unreadable, and all our scans indicate the rifle is in government hands."
The Chairman of the Tal Shiar resisted the urge to fling something across the room. "The veruul were supposed to build a force capable of seizing the capital before attempting to restore Princess Azula to the throne. Now they've willingly sacrificed the element of surprise and gave the enemy a peek at their capabilities."
Dhael cocked her head. "Sir," she said levelly, "the weapons we provided them are far more capable than anything their enemies have. Aside from the bending population no one has the capability to stand against them with anything like even odds. Benders only make up about one to three percent of their population. If it comes to a standup fight they lose."
"Not if they manage to figure out where the weapons are being held. If they do that and manage to achieve surprise, they stand a good chance of being able to capture those weapons. And if they get the manufacturing equipment as well…"
"There's more, sir," Dhael said with a sigh. "The Orion pirates we hired to seize the weapons didn't force their prey far enough from the main shipping lanes. They got off a distress call, and a Trill vessel routed it to Starfleet Command. Enterprise and Columbia have been dispatched to investigate. Worse, the star system they're headed for is only five light-years from Chara."
Isha groaned in disgust, slamming her hand on her ornate wooden table. "Orions. You get what you pay for," Isha said, even as her mind reeled at yet another setback looming in the future of this operation. They had at most three or four weeks to have a newly reinvigorated Fire Nation full speed into war. But building an army capable of doing that even with modern weapons was unlikely in that amount of time. If Zuko's government survived, which seemed likely at this point, it was possible that it would become convinced that Earth was responsible for the weapons ending up in their dissident's hands. Even as she thought it, though, she knew she shouldn't count on it. The humans displayed a remarkable facility for diplomacy. Given the chance they just might be able to talk fast enough to convince the locals they had a common enemy. And if that happened…
If that happens, we may have just handed Earth the largest population of humans off their homeworld. Strategically positioned, with ample stocks of dilithium. Nothing compared to Coridan but enough to significantly reduce their dependence on Coridanite dilithium. Unlike us and our distant brothers they won't even have to coerce them into reunification, especially if the locals realize they've been manipulated by unknown enemy aliens for decades.
"We need a new plan."
"I've had a few thoughts in that area myself," Dhael said, a predatory smile appearing on her face. "Waging wars of liberation and suppressing dissident rebels is not the only thing militaries are used for. In many cases of natural disaster, it's often the military that has the organizational structure and the resources to intervene efficiently. And with all those third-party freighters and ships we're going to have moving in and out of the system, it wouldn't take much for an accident to happen. Accidents involving warp ships in orbit of inhabited planets can be devastating. The planetary magnetic field will deflect and trap most of the radiation, but the wreckage falling on their cities…"
Isha smiled at the thought. The head of her Coalition Affairs Desk had always possessed one of the most devious minds she'd ever encountered. More than that, she was right, a disaster on that scale would be enough to convince Earth and Vulcan to send as many ships as they possibly could to the aid of the human's brothers and sisters on that world, stripping their defenses on their other worlds to a minimum and leaving the ships responding exposed and vulnerable.
"I like it, Dhael," she said. "Make it happen. Jolan'tru."
Dhael stood up, a small smile on her face. "Jolan'tru, Chairman"
Katara's attention was drifting as she looked over her report. It had been three days since she'd sent Aang to the Southern Air Temple, and she found herself daydreaming. About the two brief kisses they'd shared. She felt her lips idly. Aang had not been the first guy she'd kissed. Though she was sure Sokka didn't know it, that honor hadn't even fallen to Jet. Jet had however been the best kisser she'd ever encountered. At least until she and Zuko had lain together in that rock shelter.
She was infuriatingly unsure how she felt about him. He was cute, but he was clearly…still a boy. There were signs of the man he was growing into, but he hadn't quite grown into his own feet yet.
"My Lady?" A deep male voice said from the broad double-doors to her office, and she looked up at the young lieutenant who commanded her guard detachment, who had definitely grown into his own feet a long time ago. He was a broad chested, well-muscled young man, with a sharp, well-defined face on a head with brown hair that he kept just slightly longer than regulation technically allowed for
"Yes, Lieutenant Chan?"
The officer held up a stack of scrolls. "More reports ready for your review, My Lady."
Katara sighed and leaned back in her chair, a richly upholstered chair that used to belong to Ozai that Zuko gave her so at least she could be comfortable while she was chained to a desk helping to run his kingdom. She looked at him levelly. And at least my guard commander's easier on the eyes than most of the officials I have to deal with.
Second Lieutenant Chan was the son of Admiral Chan, the officer her father had faked orders from allowing them to enter Fire Nation territory; the incident had embarrassed the distinguished Admiral, who'd been on leave badgering his newly commissioned son over the parties he had a tendency to throw in his beach house. Fortunately, as dissolute as he tended to be in his personal life, , he was a model officer on the job. He was also from Ember Island, the title to which Zuko had also granted her by way of recognition of her service.
The position was in part a way of apologizing to Chan for ransacking his beach house. It would help further his career as well as allow him to have sustained contact with a beautiful woman. It also allowed her sustained contact with a handsome man…which may have been Zuko's way of apologizing to her for the inconvenience of being chained to a desk.
"The latest intelligence reports ready for your review, milady," he said formally, bringing her out of her reverie.
Katara smiled as he set the reports down on her desk. "You know, Lieutenant, I have pages for this sort of thing."
"I know, milady," he said, cheekily. "But she was passing by my office and I decided to be the soul of nobility and courtesy as an officer should be and take them to you myself. And if that allowed me to spend a moment alone with a beautiful noblewoman then so much the better."
Katara's face flushed, and she saw the smug smirk on his face that said, point to me. "You're cute," she said smiling, "so I'll let you get away with that."
His face flushed, and she openly smirked. Point to me.
He smiled, one of those slow easy smiles that had been making her either want to throw something or tackle him to the ground and kiss him. He turned to leave as she hastily reorganized the pile of documents on her desk
"Stay," Katara said a touch too quickly, suddenly wishing she was in her sarong again. "You might as well escort me to my meeting with the Firelord now."
"Of course, milady First Councilor," Chan said formally. He gestured magnanimously for the door.
Half an hour later Katara was sipping rice wine from her cup as she and Zuko sat in high-backed chairs across from each other in his far more spacious chambers as they finished going over the latest intelligence reports.
"So, nothing new," Zuko grumbled after a moment, setting the last document down on the small wooden table. "At least nothing decisive."
Katara sighed, resisting the urge to smash her fist into Zuko's five hundred year old tea table. She was getting frustrated with the lack of progress too. Relax, will you? You've had to go longer without any answers before. Maybe I'm just worried about Aang.
"You're worried about Aang," Zuko said, and it wasn't a question. "It's written all over your face."
Katara took a bigger swig of her wine. "I should have gone with him."
"I wish I could have gone with him," Zuko gushed feelingly. "Come to think of it, Mai's getting so bored I'm starting to think she would have gone with him. Everytime I've thought of sending you after him, the thought's been tempered by the fact if you'd gone with him I would have had half a dozen of the more ambitious nobles in the government in my office declaring that the Lord of Ember Island abandoned her post and demanding that I appoint a new one even after I explained that I sent her on a mission."
Katara breathed out a huff, blowing a lock of hair out of her eyes. "Believe me I know. It's why I didn't go. Not a few times over this past week I've thought of offering to hold down the fort if you wanted to go after him. Then I snap out of my delusions and realize I would have had a civil war on my hands if you'd up and left me to run this whole show on my own. And I'm not even sure I'm joking at this point."
Zuko grunted, conceding the point but not the issue. "Well there's no point talking about what we didn't do. What I'm more concerned about is what's happening between you and Chan."
Katara's face flushed. Damn it, Zuko, not you too. "There's nothing between me and Chan."
Zuko smiled, a broad one that reached his eyes, as he prepared to indulge in what seemed to be his favorite pastime of teasing her. "Then why do the servants have a pool going about when they're going to find him sneaking out of your chambers before sunrise?"
"Believe me," Katara said feelingly, "part of me would like nothing better than to have him in my bed. But it would give those same critics more ammunition. Plus," she swallowed the lump in her throat. "There is Aang. I don't know how I feel about him, and I know I'm not in love with Chan."
"No one said you have to be," Zuko said. "You'd hardly be the first noblewoman to work out her sexual frustrations with an attractive young officer."
Katara's eyes flashed, as she remembered the parade of courts-martial for the men and women who butchered what would become Ty's command and she dug her fingernails into her chair. "So what? I should order him into my bed like those two-legged animals Azula unleashed onto the Rock? You know, the ones who we just finished executing for the same crimes?"
"Those were prisoners," Zuko pointed out. "Prisoners the local garrison, men and women both, were treating as toys for their amusement. Chan is an officer and he's in the military chain of command that runs through me, not you."
"I'm in the military chain of command," Katara pointed out. "I issue directives to the War Minister and the First Lord of Admiralty all the time."
"They are the civilian heads of the Army and the Navy," Zuko reminded her. "You issue broad orders to carry out Our policies. They have the authority to issue orders directly to uniformed officers in accordance with those policies, and that's only because I ordered it. You don't. If Chan were one of the pages or one of those civilian department heads then I may have a problem. As it stands, I never meant for this position lock you in a straitjacket preventing you from having any sort of personal or romantic relationships with anyone whatsoever."
Katara sighed, leaning back in her chair as she thought of Zuko's words. "Maybe so," he said, after a moment. "But Aang-,"
"The choice is yours not Aang's," Zuko said, standing up. "If you really feel you are ready to commit to being with Aang then do it. If you don't really want to be with anyone right now than do that. If you just want to tumble a cute young officer who's clearly into you then do that. Whatever you choose I'll back you all the way as I have always done." Zuko's face softened, and his voice took on a more pleading tone. "Katara, you are forceful and decisive in every other aspect of your life. You kept the tattered remnants of your civilization alive for over a year before my ship first appeared on the horizon. Be that decisive here. Believe me, you'll be a lot happier, and it will piss off your critics when they realize they're not putting you on the defensive anymore."
Katara, face flushed yet again, but with embarrassment this time, finished off her rice wine with a large swig and got up. "You know, Zuko, I hate it when you're right. That being said, I hope Aang finds something when he gets there in what, seven days?"
"Give or take, yeah," Zuko nodded. "Me too."
Stay safe, Aang, she thought.
The blue-green spires of the Southern Air Temple jutted up out of the clouds, standing in stark contrast to the two snow-capped points of the two highest peaks of the Patola Mountain Range at either side of them. between the two mountains looming ever closer, as Aang tightened his grip on Appa's reigns. For a moment, he closed his eyes and let the memories flood over him. Memories of playing with his friends, of being first taught airbending by Monk Gyatso; of the day when, unbeknownst to him, he'd been identified as the Avatar. He'd ran away when he'd first overheard that. Only to end up caught in that storm and frozen in an iceberg for a hundred years while the world fell into ruin around him.
"You okay, Aang?" Sokka's voice said from his right, jolting him out of his musings.
"Yeah, Sokka," Aang asked. "It's just...hard to be back here."
"I know," Sokka said. "You've been pretty quiet the last week and a half."
"Sokka," Suki cut in from behind him, "he's coming to the place where he learned of the extermination of his people on the basis of strange visions. I wouldn't want to be here either."
"No offense Aang," Toph said from behind her, from where she was no doubt clinging with white-knuckled fear to Appa's fur, "but I actually want to be there. If only because I want to feel ground under my feet again."
"Don't worry we'll be landing soon enough," Aang said, twisting Appa's reigns to nudge him into a descent.
Suki crawled over to him across Appa's back, to sit at his left. "Do you think we'll find whatever it is we're looking for?" She asked softly after a moment.
"I don't know, Suki," he said, "I don't know."
Half an hour later, Aang walked across the cool stone floor of the Inner Sanctum, looking around him at the statues of his predecessors, arranged by their place in the Avatar Cycle, all the way up to the vast domed chamber's ceiling. Momo chirped on his shoulder, and he smiled, remembering how he and Sokka had Momo through the corridor a lifetime ago. He'd chased him a third of the way down the side of the mountain that day…and what he found when he stopped would haunt him until it was his turn to have a statue in this very room.
He looked up at the regal, imposing statue of Avatar Roku, his illustrious Fire Nation predecessor who had died twelve years before Sozin began his war. Who's rebirth as himself triggered the extermination of his people in a bid to kill him before he could come into his own power. "What would you do about something like what we're facing now?"
The tall, imposing statue of a bearded man didn't answer back of course, and he didn't exactly have time to go into the Avatar State right now to ask him directly.
"Aang?" Sokka asked, his voice echoing off the cavernous rooms walls? "Everything here looks exactly like it did earlier in the year."
"It is supposed to be hidden," Suki pointed out.
"Let's just keep looking and-,"
"Guys!" Toph shouted, her bright, sharp voice echoing through the chamber. "I've got something!"
A shiver of excitement ran down Aang's spine. "Where?!" Aang asked, unable to suppress the eagerness on his voice.
The fiery earthbender called out, her voice echoing off the walls. "Center of the room!"
Aang angled around Roku's statue and bounded towards where Toph was standing. She was standing, rock-still in the center of the winding row of statutes.
"There's a chamber," Toph said, staring straight ahead at the seemingly unremarkable patch of gray stone wall, "right behind that wall." She pointed between the statues of an Earth Avatar and a Fire Avatar. "It's a small chamber. And there's something in it. A box, from what I can tell. It isn't a very big box," she said, putting one hand above her head and one hand below her chest. "About yea big?"
Suki's lips pursed in a low whistle, impressed. "I really wish I could learn how to do that."
"I know how awesome I am," Toph responded, a cheeky smile on her face.
"How do we get in there?" Aang asked, trembling with barely suppressed excitement.
Toph cocked her head and tapped her feet lightly on the ground. "That's what I thought," she said after a moment before crossing the floor and pressing her foot firmly down on one of the stone blocks. With a loud runbling groan that echoed through the chamber, the entire stone section of wall slid away.
Aang's eyes widened at what he saw on the stone pedestal sitting in the middle of the small chamber.
"Well that's…anticlimactic," Sokka deadpanned.
Sitting on the pedestal in the plain, unadorned chamber was a simple wooden box secured by an equally plain brass buckle. Aang walked across the stone floor and stood in front of it. Reaching out with trembling hands, he unclasped the buckle, and the box tilted open slightly, only to jerk his hand back in shock. A glowing green light flickered from inside the box. Aang exhaled in shock and stepped back, gripping his staff. His friends tensed behind him, Sokka and Suki's hands went for hilts of their swords, and Toph slid into an Earthbender's stance.
"What is it?"
"I don't know," Aang said, walking towards the box again. He slid the box open all the way. and stood transfixed by the glowing green hourglass that seemed to be made of living crystal turning on its own inside
"It's so beau-,"
The hourglass pulsed, filling the room with green light.
Aang found himself staring down a sun-drenched plain of light green grass, gazing at a strange creature. It was enormous, with four long, spindly legs supporting its body. But that wasn't the strangest thing about it, no; that was the incredibly long neck topped with a small head decorated with two knobby horns that was contentedly chewing on leaves.
He turned to maneuver his glider staff under him so he could take flight only to huff in shock. Instead of the trusty glider staff he'd carried with him his entire life, there was a spear. It was a thick one, with a heavy haft and a thick leaf-shaped blade made of some gray stone.
Then he looked at the hands holding the spear. The skin was dark, so dark as to be just a shade lighter than pitch. Also his center of gravity was off and- Aang wheeled about, dropping his spear, and looked down at the puddle of water he was standing beside, crumpling to his knees in shock. The face staring back at him was a man, clearly decades older than he was. He had dark brown eyes, widened in shock, set in a dark-skinned face. His black curls were neither as straight nor as smooth as the hair that had briefly grown on his head for those few months in the run-up to the invasion.
What the-and then Aang was gone.
N'chala rose from where he kneeled and picked up his spear, turning to face the prey. He raised his spear over his shoulder. He had done this so many times before in his life. Once he threw, the great animal would be wounded, it would run, and he and his brothers would chase it. Chase it until it grew weak and died from its wound. He arched his hand back, when a shadow covered the ground. A strange thrumming sound that seemed to emanate from the very bones of the soil itself surrounded him. He looked up to see…something hovering in the sky above him, like no cloud he'd ever seen, blotting out the sun.
He felt a tingle down his spine as a burst of light filled his world.
Aang shook himself and stared wildly around the room as his brain caught up to where, and who, he was. He heard the ragged breathing of everyone else around him as he grabbed his staff and used it to pull himself up. Sokka staggered to his feet, breathing heavily even as he turned to help Suki.
"What," Sokka asked breathily, blue eyes wide as plates. "Was that?"
A high-pitched groaning sound from behind them caused to turn around to see Toph curled up in a ball on the floor. Her black hair was matted by sweat against her fair skin, her cloudy eyes wide. "Toph," Aang said soothingly, as the three of them ran over and crouched beside her prostrate form. "Toph it's okay, it's over."
"We need to get her out of here," Sokka said anxiously as he cradled the barely conscious girl in his arms.
Toph groaned and writhed in Sokka's grip. "Sokka?"
"Toph!" Sokka said happily, visibly grinning even as he sagged in relief. "Are you okay?"
Toph nodded, visibly swallowing. "I…think so. I think I…saw? Like you guys? But what did I see?"
Aang walked over to the box containing the strange, glowing crystal and clasped it shut. He walked over to Sokka, who by that point had let a still unsteady Toph back down, and pushed the whatever-it-was into his arms. Sokka took it gingerly, not wanting it to spill open again and cause another vision. "I'm not sure," Aang said softly, his lower lip trembling.