Chapter 3 – Between Two Waves of the Sea

The next morning Katara healed her own injuries, in the afternoon those of her brother, and through the evening and early night those of the villagers who had been caught in the bombardment. The strange boy came and went from her side, but she didn't have time to talk just yet, and so for the first day back home she'd had in two years she'd spent all but a few minutes of it with her eyes closed concentrating on various injuries, memories she didn't care to retain.

On the second day she awoke late and felt like a stranger in her own hometown. With the cold wind outside blasting through her clothing she realized how acclimated she had become to the mild climate of the Earth Kingdom and that her cold tolerance was ruined. She waved at a distance to her brother, who was energetic enough to be engaged in rebuilding efforts along with the children of the village. The elders and women, meanwhile, were sorting through their possessions and making repairs to equipment and clothing. It was a mercy that they would have summer to recover and were not facing the harshness of winter for another six months. Her stomach growled and she asked where meals were being prepared, then was directed to a partially destroyed igloo with a collapsing roof but enough wall perimeter remaining it to at least block the wind. Tables and cooking equipment had been gathered there.

Sokka dropped in, taking a break from the labor to grab a bite and chat. He saw her mood. "It doesn't matter too much, Katara—everything would have melted over summer anyway." In winter the igloos made from packed snow provided more insulation than the thin tents, but in summer they did not survive, thus they were considered temporary structures to be remade annually. Tents made from driftwood and animal hides were their summer residence. In a distant past they had been nomadic, rotating between seasonal camps, but since the war began they'd abandoned the effort as their population had dropped by the dozens with each attack. For the elderly and the youth it was easier to remain in one place. "Gran-gran says it looks like they'll have a warm summer. Everything would have melted either way in a month or so."

"Well, it's a good thing we had nothing left for them to destroy," she commented bitterly.

"Given the circumstances we got off easy. No one died—in fact, we have one resident more than we started with. That weird kid is still flying around everywhere. He's doing party tricks for the children."

"I wanted to talk to him again now that everyone's injuries are healed. Has he said anything?"

Her brother replied, his mouth full of stew: "Nuh, heg wash wayd—" before his sister smacked him. Momentarily and more politely, he corrected himself, "He was waiting for you to have time. Oh, oh, and that thing came over here, he has this giant hairy monster with horns and six legs." She gave him an incredulous look. "Hey, I thought the same, go see it for yourself. He called it an 'air bison'. Gran-gran said they used to exist before, you know, the Fire Nation decided they shouldn't."

"What in the world did we find? I suppose they just happened to blow in on the breeze just as Captain Jerkface felt like blowing our village up?" As she said so, the strange boy came over and began preparing tea on the hearth-fire. With the kettle filled with snow and set on the grate, he took a seat at the bench next to her. She greeted him and found him smiling and content to watch the siblings eat, not wanting to interrupt their conversation. His orange and yellow outfit was hidden under borrowed fur clothing and, other than a slip of the arrow decoration visible when his hood lifted a bit, he looked like anyone else there.

Sokka, between bites, continued speaking. "About that guy, did you see that scar he had over his eye?" She nodded, and he followed up, "Well, I heard a rumor about a guy with a scar like that, this exiled prince. The Fire Nation kicked him out."

"Oh, so he's Prince Jerkface? Well, I feel so honored. For someone who already got thrown out of his homeland, it sure seems like he's still working for them with enthusiasm."

"Apparently he's on some kind of secret mission, but no one knows what—or didn't. He said he was looking for the Avatar. It didn't sound like he was joking, but he'd have to be mighty stupid to go on a fool's errand like that. The Avatar is dead."

The boy—Aang—spoke up. "Avatar Roku, you mean?"

Sokka replied, "No, the next one. No one knows his name though."

"But why would they think the next Avatar is already dead?" he asked, sounding confused and a little hurt.

"What do you mean 'already?' Anyway, now they've decided the new Avatar must be with the Water Tribe. No wonder they've been attacking us so hard in the past decades."

"I didn't know the Fire Nation was hostile to the Water Tribe," murmured the boy.

Sokka put his bowl down on the table. "Where the heck did you come from?"

He looked scared of the brunt tone her brother had taken, and Katara felt bad for him, as whatever circumstance had brought him there must not have been a good one. He answered, "The Southern Air Temple. I was going on Appa to visit a friend in Omashu when we went down in a storm. Then we woke up here."

Sokka, suspicious, replied, "I may have just myself arrived, but it doesn't look like any storm passed, and Omashu is in totally the other direction. You must have been really lost."

Katara asked more tenderly, "Do you live in the Southern Temple? Are there more of you there? Air Nomads, I mean."

"Of course there are."

"That's good to hear," replied Katara. "See, Sokka? There's still some hope. The Fire Nation isn't as great as they claim to be. Even they can be mistaken."

Her brother gave him a long sideways glare. "Uh-huh. I'll believe it when I see it."

"Thank you, by the way," said Katara, now finished with her meal. "You were the one who pulled my brother and me out of the water, right? You saved our lives."

"Glad to help," he said cheerily. "That attack was really crazy, though. I've never seen something like that."

"Well, get used to it," grumbled Sokka. "It's like that everywhere now."

Before the boy could reply, the kettle sounded, and he poured the water off into two clay pots, setting one on a tray intending to take it to someone else. "Here, this one's for you two," he said, then took the other and departed.

"That kid's weird," said Sokka. "It's like he doesn't know anything about the world. He must have been raised in serious isolation."

"I think he's sweet. Anyway, he did save our lives."

"Well, I think he's hiding something," replied her brother, and she knew it wouldn't be easy to dissuade him from his suspicions easily.

#

Zuko awoke to a report of the completion of necessary repairs and that they could depart after restocking provisions. The messenger was perhaps flummoxed that the prince had not already been awake—it was two hours after sunrise, and the prince of the Fire Nation did not sleep in. After dismissing him and dressing, he ate a cold breakfast that had been fresh and ready an hour ago. The eggs tasted terrible and he was reluctant to reheat them with bending, which would probably render them to rubbery charcoal. He had woken in the night for long hours of reminiscing on the encounter at the South Pole, of the boy in Air Nomad clothing, of the waterbending girl with ice levitating at her fingertips and fire in her eyes, and concluded something didn't add up. Whether that something was of use in regaining his station was another matter, but the mystery remained there in the pit of his stomach. They set sail in the afternoon, heading north to the closest colony for mechanical work and reprieve of duty for a week. No firebender enjoyed venturing to the extreme north or south, where ice turned the land inhospitable, the sea hostile, and the sky a dingy white-wash of snow threat and imminent storms. It had always been temperate in Caldera City and hardly ever snowed, let alone had he, in his youth, experienced that kind of bone-aching cold that even made his eyes and teeth hurt.

On deck, staring down at the churning waves jostled out of place from the prow's cutting edge, he saw a deep turquoise-blue, he saw the eyes of that waterbender. If the question were a gamble, if the Avatar had reincarnated to a Water Tribe infant, whether his spirit went to the North Pole or the South, smart money would bet on the North, which was more populous, more accomplished, and still had actual living waterbenders who weren't half-starved children. But his mind lingered on the girl. She was too sharp and too practiced to be from the South, and she and her brother had been in Earth Kingdom clothing as if they'd just made a journey from the continent. Zuko watched the water, trying to see as deeply as he could, but was vanquished by the waves on the surface breaking into short, choppy turbulence by the course of the ship. He went to find his uncle.

Iroh was, strangely, bereft of tea, of paisho boards, and of tsungi-horns alike. Seated on the sunny side of the deck in a carved bamboo chair, the old man was stroking a hand through his beard engaged in much the same pensiveness Zuko had been previously, staring towards the sea. "Uncle. You've never thought the Air Avatar could still be alive, did you?"

"Prince Zuko, in my experience I haven't known many men to live past a hundred."

"The next element in the cycle was water. That's why the previous generation executed all the waterbenders in the South Pole, to suppress the Avatar's reappearance."

"Yes, that was partially the objective, although no one could ever penetrate the North. However, during our lovely vacation to the South Pole, the only waterbender on hand was a fetching young girl. She couldn't have been more than twenty. She was skilled, yes, but nothing like a properly trained waterbending master, let alone like an Avatar."

"I thought not. But then what was that light?"

"Perhaps just a trick of the sea. Strange things happen at the extremes of a map."

"I saw the light, Uncle; that was no illusion. There was power behind it. It looked like my father's bending, when he's in a particularly bad mood," he said, and turned away from him to rest his elbows on the bannister. The metal was cold beneath him even through his shirt and jacket.

"Perhaps a spirit."

"I doubt it. Nothing happened when we attacked the village—some guardian that spirit would make."

"I don't know, Prince Zuko, but I want to reiterate that finding the Avatar, who has all but vanished from the world for a century, is exceedingly unlikely to be accomplished so easily."

"What has been easy about this journey? I've scoured every inch of the map."

"Not every inch. Besides, we didn't see anyone there who was sufficiently accomplished."

Zuko gazed at the water in thought, still feeling that something significant had been missed. "What about that Air Nomad?"

"True, one of our generals, though not me of course, has had an oversight in his line of duty. However, there is nothing to say that, over the centuries, some Air Nomads didn't descend to the mainland from their lofty temples, perhaps taking some comely Earth Kingdom women to bed, forming a new lineage. This is the first Air Nomad I have heard of anyone seeing. If they exist, there can't be many left."

"Why was he there, though. And in those clothes, thin, unsuited to the conditions. He looked like he was freezing. Like he hadn't planned to be there, and he couldn't have been there long before we arrived."

"A strange coincidence," said Iroh. He heard the older man get up from his seat and come to the railing, but Zuko kept his eyes trained on the surface of the water. "However, my brother will not be moved by a single Air Nomad."

"No, I suppose he wouldn't."

"I know you want to go home as soon as you can, but your journey might be longer than you think."

"I know, Uncle. It's already been long." Despite the reassurance, his mind stuck on the odd coincidence of three anomalies showing up at once—the Air Nomad, the waterbender, and the light—and Zuko had the sentiment that it meant something.

#

That evening Aang huddled close to the firepit at the central igloo-ruin where a cooking grate had been placed. Framed in stones and burning off the fuel of dried seagrass and walrus-whale fat in a foreign aroma, it smelled vaguely culinary and grounded in earth tones. The Southern Water Tribe he knew rivaled the North in glory and advancement, and he hadn't expected to find them only two dozen strong and barely clinging to survival. His bison was content and occupying a shelter they normally used for storage, as it was the only place large enough to accommodate the animal. At first Appa had refused to eat the strange dried seagrass and pruny-things they had offered him, but his hunger had gotten the better of him and he'd acquiesced at last, although Aang had commented his worry that it would upset his stomachs later. Aang, a vegetarian, had his own troubles eating enough when their diet was meat-based, but knowing their state of poverty he didn't want to trouble them with special requests. Having never seen waterbending before, he was interested in Katara, but she was busy and he knew better manners than to trouble her. Besides which, it sounded like the Avatar wasn't someone he wanted to be known as—apparently they thought he was dead. He wondered if Monk Gyatso also thought he was dead and felt like crying.

In the background children were still playing even in the early night. During their winters they became used to living in darkness, and it didn't seem to trouble them in the least. He'd been treated with great kindness even in the wake of their misfortune, but couldn't help them recover and didn't know how to repay them. Katara walked up, finished with her evening chores, and sat nearby him. She had a gentle face and always spoke to him kindly, even if her words were confusing and he sensed there was a fundamental misunderstanding of something between them. "Aang, I've been speaking to people here, and, look," she said softly. "Everyone confirms there hasn't been a storm recently. I'm just still not understanding how you ended up here. I'm not going to interrogate you as a potential enemy spy like my idiot brother tried, but, please, can't you just tell me how you really got here?"

"I told you, I was riding Appa when we were caught in a storm. The next thing I remember, I woke up underwater and saw you." He felt like crying from frustration. "I'm not lying. Just, I know it sounds crazy, but you have to believe me."

"I want to believe you," she said gently, "but your story is far-fetched. Maybe you went off course—read your directions wrong and headed south instead."

"I wouldn't make a mistake like that. I know where I was. I don't know how I ended up here, either, or why everything looks different than I remember."

"Aang, there hasn't been an Air Nomad here to visit us since before the war started. That was a hundred years ago. You can't have been here before. Maybe it was one of the smaller encampments."

"No, you said this was your main settlement in the South—I've been here before, but it looked different then. There were grand buildings, and avenues, and great walls enclosing the city, much larger than these. It's like everything has been worn down and erased. But it was only six years ago I made a visit here with the monks."

"That can't be true. I'm sorry," she said, and it sounded like she genuinely meant that. "Are you feeling okay? You were trapped in that ice, I'm worried that maybe you aren't well after all, although I've done what I can for you."

"I know you have." He sunk into thought. "The ice sphere that enclosed Appa and me, you said it didn't look like a normal iceburg, that the surface was swirled and nearly a perfect sphere?"

"That's right. I've never seen ice form that way."

"I don't think it did naturally. It sounds like the ice formed around my airbending. In the storm, I was trying to keep Appa and myself dry, to keep off the rain and the wind—I was using airbending at the time. Maybe I formed an air bubble, and the ice formed around that, from the rain wrapping around us following the shape of my bending."

"That's possible, I guess," she said. "Although I've never met an airbender before—no one has—so I don't know what airbending is really like. But that doesn't explain the other discrepancies."

"I'm telling the truth."

"I believe you, I just don't understand you."

He didn't want to argue and didn't want to upset her, but didn't know how to reconcile what he remembered with what she was saying. Katara had said he had saved her and her brother, but from Aang's perspective she had saved him—when he had awoken from the ice, from the storm he thought would be his end, she was the first person he saw. It was Katara's body, floating in the water, which had felt warm to him and helped recollect himself from his unconscious state, her body heat through that parka and her hair against his cheek. And, in the frozen region confused and feeling a stranger, the siblings had been the ones to welcome him into their home, dress him, feed him, and grant him shelter. He felt obligation and fondness to them, but with every conversation his words caused them confusion and frustration, and he didn't know how to fix that.

That night, wrapped in heavy bedding on a pallet feeling too anxious to sleep, he peeled back the furs and crept out of the shelter. He wandered through the frozen, night-time village, where the ground and sky were equally dark and colorless from the lack of lanterns, and the cold ground crunched beneath the footsteps of the foreign boots on his feet. He checked on Appa, who had been lethargic since awakening, found him resting contentedly in the storage shelter, then proceeded through the village. It wasn't expansive, and before five minutes he had found their grandmother standing outside her makeshift residence, her hands clasped behind her back and her face to the nearly full moon above. The two greeted each other with a nod.

"Is this really the Southern Water Tribe?" he asked, aware of how ridiculous the question would sound.

"Child, I don't think that you're a liar. There are strange things, sometimes, that happen in this world, and I think your plight is one of these anomalies. Sokka told me everything you said earlier regarding the storm, and Katara about what you said it looked like where you visited. You came to us with no knowledge of the war, or just how distantly in the past it was that Roku was alive." Her voice was calm and gentle, but ragged from years of grief and stress. "Sometimes, in the past, when hunters journeyed overland a far, far distance, they would bring back stories of strange beasts preserved in the ice as if still alive, creatures not seen roaming the South Pole since ancient, legendary times. I have never seen these frozen beasts for myself. However, when I heard your story, it reminded me of this phenomenon."

He felt choked in emotion as he made a rapid connection between what she was implying. "I'm human, though—that isn't possible, is it? The ice was just a temporary shelter from the storm, and I was just passed out for a bit. There's no way…"

"Don't be conceited. A human isn't much different from an animal, when you get down to it. Our biological needs are much the same. Now, it's true I've never heard of one of them reviving—"

"But, I mean, even if I was hibernating in the ice for a year or two—"

"No, my child, not for a year or two. You don't seem to know anything about the war, and airbenders haven't been seen since the time of Sozin."

"Please," he begged, not wanting her to state the conclusion.

"Young man, I think you were in that ice longer than a season. I think you were in there, submerged and protected, hidden, for the past hundred years. From where you went down on the way to Omashu, ocean currents, across a century, would have dragged you, locked in that sphere of ice with your bison, down here to the South Pole."

"It can't be true, I would remember, or I would know, or something," he said, and realized he was crying. "If that's true then everyone I knew, all my friends, my people, all the other Air Nomads, if it's really been a hundred years—"

"They'd be dead." She lowered her gaze from the moon and looked at him as he shivered and sobbed and hid his face in agitation. "Well, come now. I'm not a hundred but I'm pretty close, and yes, most of my friends and family are now dead. It's not unthinkable." As she watched him, she pressed her lips in thought, and then brought a hand to her shoulder, which seemed to be paining her, and worked a massage into her aching joint. "Do you know what other Air Nomad is rumored to have vanished off the face of the world, remaining hidden for the past hundred years, dear boy?" He shook his head with his eyes screwed shut behind the safety of the heavy fur-lined sleeves. "The Avatar. The last Avatar we knew, born to the Air Nomads over a hundred years ago. The same Avatar who has eluded the Fire Nation for all of living memory."

He shook his head insensibly, trying to stifle his crying to not wake up half the village, to not wake up Katara and have her see him in that state. The matron stood patiently, watched him, and placed a hand on his shoulder with all the love and care associated with a mother. "You don't have to decide on a conclusion tonight. It's awfully cold—what a dreadful chill the air has tonight. Go back to sleep. In the morning when you see the sun and you can feel some warmth in your cheeks and nose, then you can decide if my theory is right or not. I'll leave it to you whether you want to tell the others. You've had a terrible burden placed upon you."

As he nodded and withdrew, the old woman, despite her back pain, bowed to him, and he never felt more betrayed by anything. In the tent his body heat had already faded from the sleeping furs and he was greeted by an empty coldness and discomforting silence in the village.

#

When Katara woke up she brushed out her hair and washed up, then detoured to the tent granted to Aang and watched the strange boy still sleeping peacefully. The bottom tip of his blue arrow tattoo was just visible below the hood of the borrowed coat. Hesitantly, Katara reached out her hand and brushed a fingertip over the marking, and was greeted with the warmth of flesh and the subtle breeze of his breath on her wrist. Feeling conflicted between his gentleness and his insensible words, she pulled her hand back and left the tent. Outside it wasn't long before she was offered breakfast and led to the dining hall, where the children who had risen late were eating the last scrapes from the communal pots. Katara took a dish and sat to eat, trying to stave off questions from the children, all curious as to how she'd been in the two years since she'd left home. For Sokka, he'd been gone four, and the memories the children had of him weren't as well impressed. The oldest child of the group hushed them and swept them off to give her a chance to finish eating in peace.

After the meal she went to find her brother. While most of the critical damage to the village had been repaired and the summer tents were brought out early, the field and streets were still pitted with craters from the assault, and were slowly being filled in by children with shovels. One ship had rendered them that much damage in just twenty minutes. Previous generations had faced entire armadas with a dozen such ships and weeks-long sieges. It was no wonder that they had little left after a hundred years of being ground down. The surface of the snow was still flecked in grey ash. She pulled a ten year old boy aside and asked, "Where is Sokka?"

"Hunting," he replied, then pointed towards inland where the ice fields grew wildly distorted like hills and mountains.

She went to find Gran-gran instead. The elderly woman was working on repairs to Sokka's previous clothing, using blue thread to repair the green-toned garments for lack of anything a better match. She had cut away what of the fabric had been burned beyond salvage and was patching in a neutral-colored material. "Ah, Katara. Tell your brother his clothes will look just fine if he gets a new jacket to wear overtop to hide the damage. He said he isn't staying more than a few days."

"He's leaving again?"

"There's nothing here for him, and not for you, either. We're at a critical point in the South Pole. There's no future for the youth here. We can't afford imports anymore without the money you two have been sending home. The need for fur in the Earth Kingdom has declined—they use it as a luxury fabric, not a necessity to survive cold weather, and they're suffering financially from the war as well. Not many people have money to spend on frivolities. The same goes for walrus-whale blubber; they have cheaper fuel sources locally. No other resource we have to sell is worth the cost of the long journey to trade it."

In the afternoon Sokka returned with a tigerseal and the women began preparing and butchering it. Going early in the season was dangerous, but her brother had always been an exceptionally skillfull hunter, and the meat was the best thing the village had to eat in a while. By sunset they were seated with meals. The children crowded the benches and the adults waited for them to finish, but for the trio they took bowls off and sat nearby in the snow to eat, Sokka complaining that he couldn't wait another moment. He'd left before even having breakfast and had to trek seven miles. He plowed into the meat, but Aang had only a few bites while looking conflicted. "Ugh, the monks would be so angry with me if they saw this."

"You need to eat something, Aang."

Sokka, with a dismissive hand gesture, commented, "Hey, it's eat meat or eat nothing. We don't exactly have peach orchards and rice terraces down here." However, he looked troubled as he stared down at the braised tigerseal, prodding it with his chopsticks. "We should have more in the storehouses than there is, though. I've been sending money back so everyone can buy rice and dried provisions, at least."

"The money stopped arriving a year after you left," said Katara. "Everyone thought you were dead."

"What? I've been sending money the entire four years I've been away working. If you didn't get it, where did it go?"

The girl set her bowl down angrily. "If you had come back to check in on us, you would have known we weren't receiving it. Do you know what it's like to think your only brother is dead? It's bad enough Dad is gone and we haven't heard from him very often, but then you left, too."

Sokka, his face softening, put a hand on her shoulder. "Look, I'm sorry. I was just trying to work as hard as I could and provide for you all. My job didn't exactly hand out vacation packages. To come back for a visit I would have had to quit, and who knows if I could have found another position."

"What were you doing?" She sniffled. "I went to look for you but I couldn't find you anywhere. I've been looking for you for two years. You weren't at the fishing town you said you would be, and I checked the whole coast and no one had seen you."

"The fishing work didn't pay enough. I went inland, to a mine. They always need hands there, and the pay was three times as much as working the fishing boats. I was only on the coast for a few weeks."

"You should have sent word home."

"I did. At least, I thought I did. Just like I thought I was sending the money back." He took up his bowl again with a scowl. "So for three years I've been sending money and it hasn't reached home. Ugh, I was sending so much, too! What a waste. I could have bought new boots, and maybe a matching bag."

Aang, quiet until then, asked, "So where did the money go, then? It must have been taken by someone."

Sokka sloshed the meat around in the wooden bowl, stabbing at it angrily. "I bet the foreman was dipping his fingers into the funds. That absolute jerk. Just wait until I see him again—he's getting a boomerang and a half for this." He looked up and met eyes with his sister, who looked troubled. "Well, should I go back, though? He's already been misappropriating my wages, apparently, and now we have an Air Nomad who popped out of the ice like a blade of grass in spring."

"Actually, there's something your grandmother said about that," he replied. "She thinks I was locked in that ice the entire time this war has been going on, and I'm having difficulty disproving that. It makes too much sense—it would explain everything."

"Maybe it is true," said Sokka. "Though you and that shaggy monster seem pretty healthy for having been popsicles for a century."

"Appa's not a monster, he's just a big boy." Aang sat his dish down onto the snow beside him, looking wracked in guilt for having eaten the body of an animal. Sokka, pointing to it curiously, was met by Aang's dismissal that he didn't want any more, and the young man took the discarded meal up and added the remaining portion to his own bowl, to which his sister glared fiercely at him. "It's okay, I'm not really hungry. Maybe I could eat that dried seagrass you gave Appa."

"Even he didn't seem to like it, so I doubt you would," replied Sokka.

"Listen," said Aang softly. "I want to go back to the air temple and check. I only just saw everyone, it was just a week ago for me. Now everyone is telling me I've been gone for a lifetime, and it's hard to process. Maybe I'll believe it if I see it."

"That might not be a good idea," Katara said gently. "The Air Nomads didn't just disappear. The Fire Nation did to them what you saw that ship do, only a bigger scale. No one has seen an Air Nomad since then. They say they're all gone."

"I know, but I need to see for myself. I'm going to take Appa and leave tomorrow."

"You shouldn't go alone," said Katara. "Not for something like that. I'll go with you."

"And I'll go, too," added Sokka. "I've been working my butt off four years now, and you know, I could use a vacation. Plus if there are any firebenders still lurking there, I want to give them a taste of Boomerang. Maybe the Fire Nation has been stealing all the money I was sending home!"

"Uh, I think that was your boss," said Katara, to which her brother shrugged, not worried about the distinction.