masterghandalf

Chapter Seventy-Five

We open with Sokka, perched on the dock warehouse roof at dawn and having trouble sleeping, thinking about the dragon spirit last night and muttering about being crunchy and tasting good with hot sauce. He thinks about how Zuko makes much more sense when you consider that he’s lived his whole life with people trying to kill him, and how the Fire Nation makes much more sense if you imagine a country of people like that about to be overrun by a mob of Aangs. Aang is Sokka’s friend, and Sokka knows that he wants to help people and that when he puts his mind to it, he’s a better person than Sokka is. Sokka himself can’t let things go. He’s reminded of Gran Gran’s stories, and thinks that spirits can forget, but never forgive, because they never change. Aang thinks Hei Bai forgave the villagers, but he didn’t – he just wasn’t mad anymore once he saw the acorn. The Painted Lady didn’t forgive Katara; she just got her river fixed. Temul didn’t forgive the Avatar, she just decided she’d gotten her revenge. And Koh won’t forgive humanity, ever, no matter how Aang tries to talk to him. Sokka wonders how they can get Koh into a place where he’s happy and thinks about what set him off in the first place – Koh thinks of the World Spirit as his parent, and humans killed the Avatar. Even if that Avatar sounds like she deserved it, Koh doesn’t care, and won’t let it go. Suddenly, Sokka wonders if Koh is in this on his own. From what Sokka’s figured out from Temul and talking to the locals, it’s a miracle Asagitatsu hasn’t gone off already, and the only reason it hasn’t is because of Zuko. The only reason Zuko is here is because he was banished, and he was only able to chase Aang across the world because Sokka and Katara found Aang… and since they found him on an ice field under the midnight sun, Sokka thinks Agni is involved too. Humans and dragons are both mortal beings, and Koh hates both of them equally – to save dragons, Agni also has to save humans. But at the same time Sokka doesn’t think the World Spirit would have a problem with Koh’s plot. If humans die out, the World Spirit can’t reincarnate as the Avatar anymore, but there also wouldn’t be a need for the Avatar anymore. If Koh is stopped, things continue fine as they are. The World Spirit has no stake in the outcome. In fact, humanity is suffering right now, and humanity killed it once – all it has to do is sit back and watch, which is what it’s done for the last century. Sokka thinks about how everything’s gone wrong over the last few centuries, how Temul told him about how humans’ lives were shortened, and how Aang went down in a storm, when storm spirits should have left the Avatar alone.

Sokka thinks the World Spirit itself is angry at humanity, and he has no idea how to fix that. He calms himself by thinking of Hakoda, Piandao and Temul, and how they’d all tell him to do the hard stuff first, and the impossible stuff later. First off, he needs to figure out how to make Asagitatsu happy, so it stops being mad at the Avatar; he wishes Gran-Gran was here, and then another voice agrees as Temul appears beside him. Sokka is startled, but she tells him to calm down – this far from the Fire Nation, her powers have limits. Sokka wants to know if something’s wrong back in the Fire Nation or if Aang woke something else up, but as far as Temul knows, he hasn’t, and Asagitatsu won’t bother her so long as she doesn’t bother Asagitatsu’s people. She doesn’t approve of Piandao’s involvement with the White Lotus, but says Shu Jing is fine, as Sokka would know if he paid attention. She has heard rumors, though. Apparently, Azula vanished on the Day of Black Sun – Ozai is furious about that, but Azula has allies and a plan, and that makes her dangerous. She thinks Zuko only lasted as long as he did growing up with her because he’s too stubborn to die. She comments about kin fighting kin, and Sokka realizes she’s talking about the Avatar and Koh as much as Zuko and Azula; Temul admits that she’d happily tattoo the rest of Aang for what he is, what he’s done, and what he might teach any children under his care, but he might be what they need for dealing with Koh, if he’ll stop and think. Sokka thins that the Fire Nation reserves tattoos for its worst criminals, but finds her comments interesting – he says that if she’s saying anything vaguely positive about Aang, they must be in real trouble, but when he turns to face Temul again, she’s gone.

We cut to Zuko and Toph as they practice with hot sand. Toph thinks Zuko was too hard on Aang, who was trying to do the right thing and just screwed up. Zuko agrees but thinks that when he or Toph screw up it’s no big deal, while Aang makes huge problems. Toph agrees he has a hard time thinking small, and thinks it comes with being the Avatar. Zuko thinks that if he goes into firebending with that attitude, it’ll blow up in his face, literally. He wonders why Aang has to be so dramatic about everything, and so Toph launches into a caricatured imitation of Katara flirting with him. Zuko is grossed out and asks if Toph really thinks Aang is trying to impress Katara – Toph says people keep telling her Katara is pretty, but Zuko says that Azula, Mai and Ty Lee are pretty, too. Toph wonders if Zuko’s ever wanted to show off for someone, and he admits he hasn’t with bending, though inside he thinks back to the war meeting and how he gave Ozai the excuse he needed to banish the son he didn’t want. Out loud, he wishes Aang had been the one on a ship with Iroh for three years, and privately thinks that Katara’s probably been good for Aang even if she’s bad for him. He wishes he could dump Aang somewhere safe where he could grow up, but that’s’ not an option – he knows the Avatar isn’t supposed to be told who they are until they’re sixteen, but Toph points out that doesn’t change the fact he still needs a firebending teacher. Zuko thinks he’s not good at listening to Fire Nationals, and Toph says Aang’s not good at listening to anyone – she remembers everything he had to go through before he figured out earthbending. Sokka told her that Roku told Aang that he could master the elements in months because he’s done it before, and Zuko is aghast. He thinks Roku meant that Aang didn’t have to worry because the Avatar Spirit already knows all the elements, but Zuko knows the individual Avatars don’t know it until they’ve learned it for themselves. But Roku told a twelve-year-old boy he already knew everything. Out loud, he finally calls Roku an idiot. Toph points out that Roku is his great-grandfather, but Zuko thinks that’s proof it runs in the family – he wonders what Sozin and Azulon were thinking. Were they crazy? Toph thinks they obviously were, considering who they’re talking about. Toph thinks they still need a firebending master and need to get Aang somewhere away from Asagitatsu to train. She suggests Iroh, but Zuko thinks Iroh has his own obligations. You have to trust your teacher, and Aang could never fully trust Iroh. They need someone Aang will respect – an experienced elder and teacher, someone who has already proven willing to break Kyoshi’s decree and go against the Fire Lord… suddenly, Zuko gets an idea.

We cut to Aang at the Northern Air Temple realizing that he made the drowned. He wonders why the Ocean Spirit did something so horrible – people drown all the time, but don’t usually come back as murderous zombies. Katara explains that sometimes storms do make the drowned, and it happens when someone who is dying tries to fight against the ocean. Aang wonders how anyone could not fight when they’re drowning, and Katara says life comes from the ocean, and sometimes you have to accept when it has a right to take it back. Aang thinks that people who aren’t from the Water Tribes don’t come from the ocean, and Katara is disturbed at the implications but thinks they should still respect a great spirit. Aang asks if that means that the Northern Water Tribe shouldn’t fight if Agni decided to wipe them out; Katara says of course not, and that Aang did what he had to, to stop Zhao. Aang can’t believe nobody told him about the drowned and doesn’t think it’s any different from General Fong trying to push him into the Avatar State. Katara says that when it happened, it’s not like they could have stopped him from merging with the Ocean Spirit, and Aang says she wouldn’t have wanted to stop him. Katara says she would have – she hates the Fire Nation, but she’d have done it for Aang’s sake. She didn’t tell him because she didn’t want to hurt him. As for Zuko’s people, they know what’s in the water, and they know the risks. Sometimes people don’t want to be helped, like Hama. Aang says Zuko isn’t like Hama, but Katara thinks he’s worse – more like Sozin, who thought he was doing the right thing. Aang thinks of Kyoshi, too. Katara says that’s not the same, but Aang doesn’t know who’s right and who’s wrong anymore. If stopping the war means more killing like Aang did at the North Pole, maybe he doesn’t want to anymore. Katara asks if it's worse than what Ozai’s going to do, but Aang doesn’t know what Ozai’s going to do – he just knows he’s not going to kill people like that again, and that he needs to learn firebending. Sokka and Toph then arrive and say Aang can’t learn from someone here. Toph says she came up slowly, so she should be fine, and that Zuko has something he needs Aang to hear.

We cut to one of the Mechanist’s workrooms, where Zuko tells Aang he needs a firebending teacher, and it can’t be here. Asagitatsu is dangerous, and it doesn’t matter whose fault it is, it’s just that way. Besides, if Aang stays here, all of Ozai’s most dangerous enemies are in one place and he’ll come for them – Aang needs to keep moving. Aang thinks he means there’s no one here who will teach him, but Zuko corrects that there’s no one who can. Most of the firebenders here are only shielded from the consequences of breaking loyalty because they’re following Zuko, but if he trains Aang, an enemy of the Fire Lord, that could leave them vulnerable. Iroh can’t act directly against his brother, and would Aang trust him if he did? Aang immediately says he would, if it was the right thing to do. Zuko says that’s another reason he can’t train Aang – he thinks Aang is crazy. So, Aang needs a teacher, and Zuko has an idea – someone who already helped him once. He thinks it’s weird Aang hasn’t gone looking for him, and Aang awkwardly admits they only met once, and that was months ago and don’t know what happened to him. Zuko says that’s a lie – Aang saw Fire Sage Shiyu taken away by Zhao. He can’t believe they never tried to find out what happened to him, when he risked his life by breaking loyalty to help them. Aang insists he had other things to deal with and doesn’t think there’s anything he could do anyway. Zuko is disgusted – “busy” isn’t an excuse for not trying to find someone who risked his life to help you against the Fire Lord. Toph seems to agree with him, since debts and contracts are so important in the Earth Kingdom. Zuko thinks that Aang doesn’t care about debts and thinks Toph has made a bargain with someone who always flies off whenever things get hard. Katara thinks Shiyu is dead, and Zuko can’t believe how ignorant she still is after traveling the world. Shiyu is a Fire Sage, which means he has rights, including the right to a trial. It’s been long enough he might have been tried, but the Fire Nation doesn’t kill off master-level firebenders casually. He’s probably in prison.

Aang says he was in prison once and met interesting people there; Zuko is taken aback, and Katara explains that Aang had to stay in prison to prove Kyoshi’s innocence, so Chin village would stop burning Avatar statues. Sokka admits it didn’t work out, since Kyoshi did kill Chin, or close enough. Zuko reminds them they boil people in oil there, and apparently Iroh told him about it in horrifying detail – Aang knows that, but they switched it to community service after he saved them from the Rough Rhinos. Zuko can’t believe Aang is so stupid and reminds him that they boil people in oil there – Aang doesn’t think they really meant to do it and just wanted to scare him, and now they’re not angry anymore. Zuko sarcastically says that’ll make the next person they execute feel so much better. Aang thinks there won’t be a next person – they changed. Zuko tells Aang to go back to Chin village in a year and see if they’ve “changed.” If they have, it costs Aang nothing to check. He wants to keep ranting about Aang’s opinions on the law but decides now isn’t the time. If Shiyu’s alive, he’s in prison, and there are only a few prisons where you can keep a master firebender for long. Zuko can give them information – Mai’s uncle is the warden of the Boiling Rock, and that’s a good bet for where Shiyu ended up. He got even more information about prisons from Iroh. Katara says they don’t have time to look for Shiyu, and Aang explains that Roku told him they have to defeat Ozai before the Comet returns or the world ends. Zuko is startled, but realizes that if it’s the Avatar saying it, that might be true. Aang explains that that’s why he had to talk to Roku at the solstice in the first place, and Toph is angry that Aang never told her any of this. Why didn’t he tell her parents – that might have gotten their attention! Zuko can’t believe Aang has wasted so much time when he knew there was a deadline, though he decides he can’t blame a twelve-year-old with no elders to talk to about it. He thinks about everyone he could have told if he’d known – Iroh, Amaya, Shidan, Shirong, the Wens, etc. – and is amused to note that he’s actually luckier than Aang in one way. Then it occurs to him that maybe the Avatar is lucky, but Aang isn’t – he lost everything. At least Zuko has people who can help him stop the world from ending – even Azula wants to rule the world, not destroy it.

Suddenly, he remembers that Aang met Makoto in the Capital on the Day of Black Sun, but she’s not here now – Asagitatsu would sense her. So, what’s she doing that’s more important than hunting the Avatar? He’s distracted as Katara tells him that they had to keep moving because they were being chased by him, and Zuko thinks he wasn’t chasing them after the North Pole. Sokka says they got this far in half a year and asks if Zuko could have done better in their position. He says it depends on if he’d managed to not throw them all overboard or not – he thinks this is why Roku was okay with Aang getting involved in the war, when Avatars aren’t supposed to do that. People who get killed fighting the Avatar can turn into the undead, after all. Aang says no one told him – Zuko admits he didn’t know, but he should have asked someone, though he knows Aang was desperate and did a desperate thing. He thinks there are plenty of shamans at the North Pole who could have warned them against letting the Avatar fight the fleet. Sokka admits he has a point; Katara protests, and Sokka reminds her that they were going to marry Yue to a guy she didn’t like, for the greater good of their tribe. He asks Zuko where that sort of thinking stops, and Zuko says it doesn’t – just ask Sozin. Katara says they’re not like that, and Zuko says everyone’s like that. Everyone can do horrible things, then tell themselves they’re justified. But there’s always another way. Aang says he couldn’t let Zhao destroy the Northern Water Tribe, and Zuko says he'll have to live with that, and the fact that he made Koh a lot more powerful. Zuko realizes that the war and Koh are part of the same problem, and so that means he may have to swallow his pride and work with Aang. Aang can’t believe he made Koh stronger, so Zuko explains that Koh is supposed to swallow up decay and corruption to purify other spirits, but there’s a lot more of that going around right now than normal, so Koh has become much more powerful than he should be. He wants humans dead, and he’s working with Makoto, who didn’t follow them here. Katara says she dropped Makoto into the ocean, and Zuko says he did that too, but it didn’t stop her – if she let her prey escape, it’s because she’s doing something more important, something that’s part of Koh’s plans, and probably something Ozai thinks is his plan. They have to stop Ozai before the Comet, and so Zuko thinks that whatever Koh is planning, that’s when it’ll go down. They’ll need help to find Shiyu in time, so Zuko reluctantly admits he’ll have to come with them.

We end with an author note. A/N: Given the justice systems Katara's seen in canon, you can't really blame her for thinking there was nothing they could do to help Shiyu. Just look at a few examples: Chin Village, Ba Sing Se as it was run by Long Feng, and the Fire Nation school where Aang was threatened with being sent to the mines for misbehavior. That doesn't even count the nightmare of what happened to Hama. Katara's got every reason to believe Fire Nation "justice" is cruel, brutal, and fast. Zuko was raised to be one of the people dealing out justice - meaning he knows, in theory, how it's supposed to work. His exposure to the actual results has been... well, limited.

MG’s Thoughts

Ugh, this chapter. Where to start? First off, we have a lot about spirits. And, Sokka, I have to wonder if you’ve gotten the terms “forgive” and “forget” scrambled a bit here. All the examples you give show spirits being will to let bygones be bygones so long as they’re appeased properly, but that they’ll remember what was done to them forever – that makes it sound like they will forgive but won’t forget, which is the opposite of what you’re arguing (and “getting Koh back in his happy place so he’ll stop trying to destroy the world” isn’t exactly how I’d describe the way the problem gets resolved at the end of the fic…). Worse is the idea that the Avatar Spirit itself is hostile to humanity and that’s what’s causing a lot of the recent problems. And… huh? In canon, the Avatar Spirit isn’t really presented as a separate being from the Avatar, more something that’s in their subconscious and comes out with the Avatar State, and even though this fic was started before the canonical origin of the Avatar was revealed (I don’t know if this specific chapter was written before “Beginnings” aired or not) one would still think that the fact that the Avatar Spirit chose to not only be born but continually reborn as a human, and took on the role of a guardian of humanity and bridge between humans and spirits, would suggest this is a spirit with a strong investment in humanity. Oh, and we also get the idea that the Avatar shouldn’t fight in wars, which comes completely out of nowhere and just makes me think of The Last Airbender and its asinine assertion that the Avatar isn’t allowed to hurt anyone (on the other hand, it also provides yet another reason why Koizilla was The Worst, in a way that conveniently lets Zuko off the hook for all the people he killed). And apparently the Northern Water Tribe is just full of shamans who could have explained this to Aang if he asked… shamans we’ve literally never seen nor heard of before this chapter.

Then… Sozin’s Comet. First off, the Gaang weren’t just farting around randomly wasting time – they always had a clear mission, even before learning about the Comet. First, get Aang to the North Pole to find a waterbending master. Then, find an earthbending master. Then go to the library for intel on the Fire Nation, then we spent the second half of Book Two and the first half of Book Three preparing for and executing the invasion (which was supposed to take Ozai out well before the Comet) and then find Aang a firebending teacher. For another, is it just me or is Zuko acting hurt that Aang never told him about the Comet, even though in Embers especially there’s no reason Aang would have? And speaking of telling people – how come he never told Toph? We never see when that happened in canon, but since Toph is never surprised about the Comet, I assumed the others filled her in shortly after she joined up. And, uh, does Toph really think that “the potential end of the world” would motivate her extremely overprotective parents to let her go adventuring with the Avatar? I think it would be more likely to do the exact opposite, and just make them more insistent about trying to force Master Yu on him instead. But really, this just seems to be a continuation of an idea we’ve seen before, that Vathara seems to assume if we didn’t see a particular conversation play out in canon, it can’t have happened, even if logically it would have. And on the topic of the Comet and deadlines – Roku didn’t tell Aang he already knew all the elements. He told him he knew he was capable of mastering all the elements because he’d done that exact thing in previous lives; that’s different. And Aang’s immediate reaction, seen in “The Waterbending Scroll,” wasn’t to be reassured that he already knew everything he needed to – it was to panic because he was reminded how much he didn’t know, and how little time he had to learn it!

And… Shiyu. On the one hand, bringing Shiyu back to have him as Aang’s firebending master is rather clever (especially since Jeong Jeong would be the more obvious choice… weirdly, no one brings him up here at all). On the other hand, I have issues with how it’s done. First off, Fire Nation justice. Now, personally, since we last saw Shiyu being hauled off to face Ozai, I’d always assumed he was executed (though apparently the comics later confirmed he survived) and I can’t fault Katara for thinking the same thing. And I’ll note that even though the AN confirms that Katara had no reason to assume otherwise… the fic proper still casts her as an ignorant barbarian (the exact term Zuko thinks of her as) for not knowing. Now, personally, I’d assume that even if Shiyu is legally entitled to a trial and even the Fire Lord can’t waive it, he’s still a “heretic” Fire Sage, and I’d think Ozai would be more likely to have him quietly killed in a way that looks like an accident before giving him a platform to speak (but who ever heard of a dictator paying lip service to the law while quietly disposing of an inconvenient person on the side…). But, while the AN implies that Zuko is more familiar with how the law is supposed to work in the Fire Nation rather than how it actually does… he’s still completely right as to what happened to Shiyu. As for Chin village, I’ve noted this before, but I’m quite sure the Gaang knew exactly what could have happened to them there and were just relieved to have gotten out alive (though I’d think that if they actually had tried to force Aang into the pot, it’d have triggered the Avatar State in self-defense, so it’s probably safest for everyone they didn’t). But somehow, I have a suspicion that if Aang had explicitly forced them to give up their execution methods on-screen, the fic would instead be saying that boiling people in oil is in fact absolutely vital to Chin village’s spiritual wellbeing, and Aang was just being a high-handed Air Nomad refusing to judge them by their own values by making them stop. Because no matter what Aang does, he can’t win. On the other hand, let’s be real… Chin village doesn’t just boil people in oil. We saw their wheel – they have all sorts of creative ways of killing people! 😉

Finally… this chapter also demonstrates part of why I feel the threat of Ozai and the Fire Nation gets marginalized as the fic goes on. Because if Ozai’s plan is really Makoto’s plan, which is really Koh’s plan… it doesn’t really make it feel like Ozai is the one we need to stop to fix things, does it? He’s multiple steps removed from the root of the problem! And, uh… did the fic really imply that Yue having an arranged marriage, which is simply following her tribe’s long-standing custom, is somehow on the same continuum as Sozin starting the war and committing genocide? Huh?