markofthebrave | [ Action, Accidental Video, Voice ] .054

[Today, after the typical Saturday late morning house-cleaning and laundry doing, Katara heads into town. She's got grocery shopping to do, true, but she has another more specific destination in mind: The Flower Shop. You guys carry seeds for trees, right?

Thus armed, she will head back home, ~~steal~~ borrow one of Sokka's canoes, and head up to the nearest lake. Once there, she intends to use Faren to plant and strengthen the tree seeds in order to replace the tree she dessicated in her last spar with Shikamaru. She may even give into the urge to jump into the lake and go for a swim.]

[Accidental video:]

[In fact, regardless of whether or not there's company there for her to plant the tree or go swimming, the urge to just jump into the lake is one she is going to give into. The fact that it is an urge, though, prompts her to be less than careful as she strips off her waterskin, belt, and pouch which holds her journal, causing it to jostle opened as it lands on the ground. Fortunately, the fates are kinder to her than they could have been and the video function is not pointing directly at her. Just enough, though, to see her back as she shimmies out of her overtunic before Katara steps out of the camera completely. There will shortly be the sound of a loud SPLASH. And then the video just records the sky and perhaps a loud "EEP." That water is cold. This will probably be a very short swim.

Later, at home and over a cup of tea, she sets up a voice message.]

[Private: to Robin]

Hey, the experiment's over. When do you want to come over for dinner?

[If you hoped she would forget, masked man, your hopes were in vain!

As always, feel free to bump at her in town, on her way out of it, or even at home or the lake!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

...Yeah. [She just...feels bad. She didn't even know Yue back home. Did she really have a right to keep something that was only meant to be a placeholder in the first place?] Still...do you think I should tell him I have it? I don't want him to think I'm keeping it from him, or anything.

I don't think he'd think that. [She frowns a little in concern.] What do you want to do?

...I don't know. I'm just...

[Sick of feeling helpless.] At least she's back with her people, right? So that's good.

[Tell her about it, she's been here for two years.

But oh. Oh, Toph. Way to unknowingly twist the knife.]

...she'll be back with her people for a little while. Didn't we ever tell you about the siege for the North Pole?

No, not really. You guys never really told me much about what happened before I showed up.

[...She can't imagine it was really very exciting without her.]

[...] It's kind of a long story. Let's sit down.

[On the bed. You do MAKE the bed, don't you Toph?]

[...It's partially made. What? She just doesn't see the point in wasting time on something she's just going to mess up again that very night.]

...Right. Okay. [She hops on the bed and sits.]

[Katara's not sure where to start. Usually, if she tells this story at all it's to strangers, but... she can't quite bring herself to take up the story-teller cadence and treat Toph as if she was talking about strangers. So she starts in the middle.]

We'd only been in the North Pole for a few weeks before the Fire Nation found us. Aang and I had been practicing our waterbending night and day, [her, perhaps, more than Aang. ~~much more~~.] and Sokka trained with their warriors and spent time with Yue. They were the ones who saw the signs first - black snow. The soot from their navy always reached our shores first before the raids back home, and it wasn't any different in the North Pole. Sokka and Yue had time to warn Chief Arnook, but even with the forewarning we weren't expecting so many ships... they stretched out as far as the eye could see... there were hundreds of them Toph. They'd brought a whole fleet. This wasn't just a raid. They planned on decimating the whole North Pole.

[And she pauses for a breath, and to collect her thoughts.]

...Fire must be a pretty effective weapon in a place made of ice, huh? But you guys won. I know that, at least.

[So...why does it seem like there's more to tell?] ...How'd you actually beat them?

You're getting ahead of the story. It's not going to make sense if I tell it out of order.

[She pauses for a moment to properly backtrack.]

The fleet was led by Admiral Zhao. He'd been pursuing us for months, trying to get Aang. Zuko wasn't with him. I'm not sure of the details, but I think that Zhao wanted to make it so that Zuko could never go home again. [Frown.] He wanted the honor of capturing the Avatar himself. But he came prepared. I think that he was the one that Wan Shi Tong said had burned down the Fire Nation section in the library, and he was the one who discovered the hiding place of the moon and ocean spirits.

[She pauses to glance down for a moment, and then she continues.] We managed to hold them off for the first day. They wouldn't attack us at night, knowing that our power increased with the moon. Aang must have destroyed dozens of ships, but... there were still so many out there. It didn't look good.

We decided to try and contact the spirits. Yue took us to the most sacred place in the North Pole so that Aang could meditate there. It was an Oasis. [A quick smile.] You would have loved it, Toph. It was the most amazing thing. Real dirt, real earth, warmth and growing things in the middle of the North Pole. Aang meditated, and I was going to stay there to guard him.

[Her expression and tone once again takes on shadows of loss.] That's when Zuko showed up. How he got there, I don't know. We fought, Yue ran to get help, and I won. Or at least, I thought I did. I had him trapped, iced to a wall... but then the sun rose. He attacked me when my back was turned. He took Aang.

[Her hands clench.] We went after them. There was a blizzard outside, and by the time we found them and brought them back to the city, Zhao had found the Oasis.

[She sits quietly and listens. The library. An oasis (dirt in an ice city, you bet she'd love it!). Doing everything they could but still being outmatched by the Fire Nation. And she doesn't especially like hearing about Zuko stealing Aang--jerk. She'll punch him for that one later.

She tilts her head upwards slightly.]

You saved Zuko, too? Even when he was your enemy? Sheesh, you guys really are a big bunch of softies. [Of course, her voice is unusually tender and admiring when she says this. It's part of the reason why she likes you guys.]

So...what did Zhao do at the Oasis? That sounds like bad news.

It was Aang's idea. He insisted. [She hadn't said a thing for or against, but after taking Aang? She probably would have left him there without a second thought. And she knows what a polar blizzard will do to a person knocked unconscious.

She shakes her head and moves forward. It's strange to think of it still being Zuko she would have careless left to die, Zuko who had continuously sought after them to bring Aang back to the Fire Nation.]

When we found Zhao at the Oasis, we were too late to stop him. He was there with a company of soldiers, and he'd found what he was looking for. In the Oasis there were two koi fish, always circling each other. One was light, the other dark, and they were the earthly forms of the moon and the ocean spirits, Twi and La. [She swallows, as this is getting hard to say.] He captured the moon spirit. He put her in a bag and the moon went dark. My bending - all the bending of the waterbenders went away. As the firebenders get their power from the sun, we get ours from the moon, and it was gone. It was horrible, but it wasn't over yet.

Iroh showed up. He demanded that Zhao return the moon spirit back to the pool. He swore that whatever Zhao did to the moon spirit, he'd return upon Zhao's head a hundred fold. And Zhao swore and called Iroh a traitor and spoke about his destiny... but you could see that he was scared of Iroh. And for a minute, we thought that he'd do it, that he'd put the moon spirit back in the pool... but he didn't. He burned the moon spirit, killing it.

[Toph hangs onto the story word by word. She knows everything turns out okay. She knows what. But how could the waterbenders get their bending back after losing their source? How could they--]

So...what happened?

[ Action, Accidental Video, Voice ] .054

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