Catalyst

Chapter 4: Cricketflies and Bad Guys

When Katara ran up, Aang froze. She wasn't supposed to be here! He was doing this for her! For all of them, he corrected himself.

Katara wasn't looking at him though. Instead, she had drawn out a line of water from her pouch and sent it over to Azula's...feet? Azula, who was staring at him and was sending a bolt of lightning his way! He needed to move, move, move!

He turned to run. Someone screamed behind him. With a flash of blue light, the lightning bolt's powerful energy crashed into the stone above him and sent large chunks of rock raining down. Even though he was exhausted, with his remaining energy he was able to create a stone dome above him that absorbed the impact of the boulders.

The last pebbles fell and plunked between the boulders until they settled to the ground. While he felt some kind of concern for the person who screamed, it was a distant concern—something Aang felt he could take care of for sure, he just needed to get a little sleep first.

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Katara ignored the still figure lying on the ground in front of her and ran to the pile of stones that held Aang.

Well...she tried to ignore it.

She felt great satisfaction in outsmarting the firebender by using her electricity against her. By pooling the water at her feet, Azula was somehow—Katara still wasn't exactly sure how it worked—affected by the lightning in a similar way as if she had hit herself with a bolt. Katara had seen something similar happen when Sokka decided to ignore an Earth Kingdom villager's advice and swam in a lake while there was a lightning storm going on. Between her brother's experience on the lake and when she saved him stuck on a boat in the middle of a storm, Katara had learned that lightning and bodies of water had an effect on one another.

"Aang! Are you okay? Aang!" She couldn't move the larger rocks but was able to slice them with water. It was hard work but her concern gave her energy she didn't know she had. He wasn't hit with the lightning, at least. He had enough time. Enough time to protect himself, she tried to convince herself.

Finally, she heard some soft groans before a sleepy (and grumpy), "Just a few more minutes, Katara," and she knew he was okay.

"Aang! Can you get out?"

A more awake voice replied, "Yeah. Stand back for a second."

She obeyed and a large patch of rock came out the top of the pile. Aang then jumped out of his self-made rock dome, landed gracefully at its peak, and looked Katara over to see if she was okay before flashing his wonderfully reliable crooked grin. "Still in one piece!"

"Aang!" Katara ran forward and gave him a quick hug, which he eagerly accepted. After a moment, he jerked back. "What's wrong?"

"What happened to her?"

Katara looked back and saw the mark on the ground where the lightningbender stood when she was hit with her own lightning, but there was nobody there. Instead, the girl was leaning against the wall nearby, struggling to keep her feet beneath herself.

"I saw you put water under her but how did it do that to her?"

"You remember Sokka coming out of Swei Lake with his hair every which way, saying something about eelsnakes attacking him?"

"Oh, yeah! That was funny!"

"You will pay! All of you!" panted Azula, her mouth curled in disgust and pain. She brought her one arm forward and sent flames to them but they both jumped back in time to avoid them.

"We should go," urged Katara, grabbing Aang by the hand. "Sokka and Toph are waiting for us."

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