Not Too Far from the Yew Tree (an ATLA fanfiction)

Somewhere Undiscovered, Somewhere Beautiful

Katara returned to the campsite with a bundle of dried grass as starting fuel. Sokka hadn't spoken of food for three days, Aang hadn't spoken at all, and they all felt shocked by the scale of the assault. They'd had few interactions since leaving the city abandoned to its destruction, saw no other people out of doors at the farming villages they passed, and were bedding down at the base of a hill for the night.

Sokka chipped sparkrocks against the bed of tinder. The campfire took light just as twilight settled through the valley. Nestled between fields which hadn't been tended since the attack, they felt as alone as if they were in a deep forest. Her brother stared into the fire for a long time. Aang and she pulled together something to put into the cooking pot, reluctant to disturb him. When a stew was prepared and heating, he said, with a kind of finality to his tone, "I don't think the earthbenders are what caused that ship to explode."

Neither of them quite knew what he meant in that moment. They shuffled through the motions of dinner and clean-up, then, later, when it was pitch-black with heavy clouds obscuring the moon and stars alike, Katara awoke in the dead silence with a thought bothering her that if it hadn't been the earthbenders, it must have been the other Fire Nation troops. She was aware of things like civil wars and succession struggles having occurred through history, though not in lived memory as the aggressions of the Fire Nation had blotted out all other conflict—they held the monopoly on violence—but she'd been a long time in coming to the realization which had been bothering Sokka for the past days. There was trouble within the foreigners' nation. They had traded one underpowered enemy willing to negotiate for a much larger, more threatening, more capable one. Her brother, more attuned to the subtleties of war than she, had sensed that first. It would be relevent to report to their father and the allied forces, but that report would have to wait as they were half a continent away.

'I'm being merciful, and you should be grateful,' he had said, and she realized he'd been honest then, and the Gao Ling invasion was what a lack of mercy looked like.

She didn't want her father to fight the people who had bombed a city while simultaneously detonating their own ally as he sat helpless in the water, and she didn't want Sokka to join that fight, either, nor Aang. But when they reached Chameleon Bay they would be drafted into doing so eventually and it was out of her power to stop it.

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Zuko limped onto the paddle-like tail of the air bison and was lifted onto the saddle. He took his seat, grateful that the air bison liked him, no matter how mistaken the animal was in that judgement, and went with the bison's whims. It wanted to flee the scene of Gao Ling, which even at distance stung the air with the pollution of a city burned to ash. In flight he found the animal kept low over the treeline, probably from exhaustion, which kept them both more concealed. He looked around at the landlay and reasoned they were heading southeast towards the coast. In an hour they landed about fifteen miles from where they'd taken off. A freshwater stream tumbled out of the forest in a seaside meadow. The air bison began rummaging around in the bushes eating foliage. Zuko slipped from the saddle, landed painfully, and fell to the ground. In the stream he cleaned out his injuries, bracing through the sting, and rinsed the oil contamination from his clothing. The cliffs were high at that location but, along the coastline, varied. An area a mile east declined to sealevel into a beach with a few houses and flimsy wooden fishing docks. He watched, wondering if they knew what had happened at Gao Ling, but didn't see anyone outdoors. They might have evacuated as well.

Wringing his clothes out as best he could, he laid them over a rock and heated the stone up with his palm pressed against it. Carefully elevating the temperature, he could dry the clothing faster by evaporating the water out. He tested the fabric with his fingertip, then gingerly picked it up at the corners and waved out the heat and remaining moisture. It was still warm when he put it on, but didn't smell too bad, though the garments were severely ripped and burned.