A/N This is a remake of a fanfiction I wrote back when I was 11. Gods, was I cringy then. I planned the whole thing with my friends and their OC's, all that middle school jazz. I've been obsessing over it at the back of my mind lately so here's hoping I do it some justice 11 years later. To enjoy it (if it is at all possible to be enjoyed) I suggest being knowledgeable in the events of Naruto Pt. 1 and most of the Avatar: Last Airbender series. Will edit the summary when I can think of something better.

That being said, I do not own the Naruto or A:TLA franchises.

PS: Guys, if you ever read this, sorry for cutting your OC's out. It's been a long time and I reinvented the whole thing differently.

A high, keening sob carries on the wind, ebbing and flowing over the smoke and ice, barely audible through the droves of flurried sleet–

"Mama...Mama, please...please don't leave me..."

The hunched little figure is so small and pathetic, shivering in the blizzard despite the thick coat. The sobbing continues as the child clings desperately to the remnants of her mother's broken body. Footsteps suddenly approach from behind, crunching frighteningly close through the wartorn snow.

The sobbing ceases in an instant as the fur-lined head turns ever so slightly. Eyes widen. "F-Fire Nation...!" She whirls around, assumes a fighting stance. "Stay away!"

"Last I checked, little girls weren't allowed to waterbend here," the intruder speaks. He is big and tall and armored. His face is hidden in the wind.

"I don't care!" She throws off her gloves without hesitation. "I won't let you touch Mama!"

He strides forward anyway, unafraid. She freezes, suddenly hesitant, and watches as he kneels by her mother's body. His hands reach beneath the dead woman's hood to turn the cold cheeks upward. He stares awhile at the face, the lifeless eyes glazed and skyward.

Realization settles in – he has touched her Mama. Her little voice cracks as she shrieks at him with renewed determination, "I said, s-stay away!"

The man raises his head, bringing up an armored wrist in time to block the elemental attack, hot and searing..."Fire." He snatches up the wrist of her still-smoking hand and pierces her with the intensity of his burning amber eyes. "You're a firebender."

"Let me go!" the child wails, thrashing in his grasp.

"The Water Tribe is no place for a firebender."

"Koda! Koda!" But no Koda comes. She is dragged away helplessly. "Let me go! Mama!"

"Your mother is dead. You are coming with me now."

"No!"

"You will do exactly as I say..." He turns those angry eyes on her again. "...because I am your father."

And then the curtains are thrust aside, the blinding sunrays flashing gold through the blizzard and melting that horrible, angry face into an amorphous blob. The disastrous scene of snowy warfare recedes back into memory and becomes nothing more as her eyes crack open to the calm serenity of her bedroom.

"Young mistress, it's time for you to wake up."

Not that nightmare again...

The headmistress was giving her yearly graduation speech in that typical droning, nasally tone of hers, but nothing bothered Fan more than having to endure that coupled with the restlessness of having had the nightmare. It had already ruined her entire morning; four years since, and she couldn't seem to get it out of her head.

"...as you all become the bright beacons of hope for the future of the Fire Nation, the young shoots of bamboo that will bring our country to greatness..."

"Psst," a voice hissed to her right. Fan turned to the girl next to her. "Her topknot flame is upside-down."

"Ch-Chuni," Fan hissed back, suppressing a giggle.

"What? Can't you see it?"

"I see it! Shh!"

"...made possible by all your families, and their loyal service to the Fire Lord; dedicate yourselves thus, and you will be greatly rewarded..."

"I think she needs to be less cranky," Chuni interjected. "Maybe then she wouldn't look half as constipated."

"Chuni!"

"...and now, we turn to the students who have shown excellence time and again throughout their studies. This year, we are proud to present an award of honor sponsored by the Royal Family. Honor their name and thank your ancestors should you be chosen, for an award like this is equivalent to praise from the Fire Lord himself. Please come up to receive it when your name is called."

A younger woman with a scroll unfurled it and began to read the names one by one. The awards started with the first years, the youngest of all the girls, and slowly worked their way up to the fourth years.

"–Leung Chuni–"

Chuni gasped and gripped Fan's forearm involuntarily. After an excited exchange of glances, she exited the aisle, and Fan could tell that she was fighting the urge to sprint to the dais.

"–Zhao Fan–"

Fan snapped back to awareness, eyes wide with surprise, and made her way to the dais as well.

"I can't believe it! Mother's going to be sooooo proud!" Chuni's eyes sparkled as she squealed in delight. "Father will have to buy me a new swallowgale now! Or even two! Isn't this great, Fan?"

Fan looked down at the bright orange badge gleaming on her sash and nodded. "I never thought I'd actually get an award!"

"What will your father get you, Fan? Isn't he coming home in a few days for his promotion?"

At the mention of her father, Fan's smile vanished. "Um, well...I'll have to see..."

"Aw," Chuni pouted. "That's no fun. It must be difficult having a military father, huh?"

"Sort of."

"But don't worry!" Chuni was quick to quip. "I've got something that'll really make our families proud. Even your father will have to spoil you once he knows."

Fan paused to give her a curious, almost suspicious, glance. "What did you do this time...?"

She dug into her satchel and gave Fan a conspiratorial smile. "You didn't hear this from me, all right? I got this from a hawker down on Wuyang Lane..." She produced a thin, yellowed scroll and handed it to Fan with a whisper. "It contains the secret to redirecting lightning."

Fan let out a gasp as she handled the scroll, but fought to keep her awe down. Capped with rusted metallic ends, the roll of aged parchment weighed ominously in her hand. To think it might contain the coveted secret of the greatest firebenders in all the nation – "It might not even be real," she pointed out a moment later, deflated. "Hawkers will say anything to sell their wares."

"But how will you know if you don't try?" Chuni argued. "It looks pretty real to me. And you've always wanted to redirect lightning – don't you want to be as cool as Princess Azula?"

Fan bit down on her lower lip. The thought was tempting, she had to admit. It was every Royal Fire Academy student's dream to reach the heights of talent such as Princess Azula, who was renowned throughout the nation as a prodigy. Her skill was such that her fire burned blue, hotter than any fire most benders could generate. But most of all was the legendary lightning redirection technique, one of the most dangerous and rarest skills of all, yet something the princess managed to master at their age.

Fan reached a tentative hand for the seal and pried it open. With a prompting glance from Chuni, she unfurled the page and unrolled the scroll...

"Huh?" Fan gasped in bafflement. "What are these?"

An illustration of a human profile covered in blue lines, nonsensical hand gestures, a giant ellipse in the middle framed like a mirror, strange curly characters interspersed with regular ones – and upon further reading, it appeared as if those characters were archaic. Nothing that made any sense whatsoever.

"I was hoping you'd figure it out," explained Chuni, meeting Fan's confused gaze.

"Just because I do well on written exams doesn't mean I can read ancient text..."

"I know, I know! But it's worth a shot, isn't it? We have all of our break to figure it out."

Typical Chuni...always doing things before thinking them through. "Okay, fine," she relented. "I guess I'll try."

Chuni squealed again and gripped Fan in a fervent hug. "I knew you'd come through for me! Don't forget to tell me when you figure it out. Then we can be lightning sisters!"

Fan laughed and hugged her back. "All right, all right! I'll head over to your house the moment I have it done."

She stuffed the scroll into her own satchel as they pulled themselves apart. Sending Chuni an energetic wave, Fan made her way down the courtyard to the gates where the carriages were waiting.

Dinner that night was quiet, as always. Lady Yan sat at the head in Father's absence, sipping elegantly at her soup. Baojun and Xiuhua sat pompously on her right, while Fan ate directly across from Baojun, eyes focused on some distant point on the table.

"I heard you graduated this year with special honors," Lady Yan finally spoke, patting her mouth daintily with a napkin. A half-bowed servant slid in to take away her bowl, and as she laid the napkin neatly back on the table, a small dessert plate of fruit replaced the soup. "Father will be very pleased."

"Thank you, Mother," Fan replied with a nod.

"I have a new tunic laid out for you for the promotion ceremony," Lady Yan went on. "You should pin the badge to the sash." Turning to Baojun and Xiuhua, she smiled sweetly. "Are you all done with your soup, dears? I had the cook make your favorite sweet dumplings tonight. I've heard many great things from your firebending tutor, Jun. And Hua, you deserve it for the progress you've made this year in the Academy."

"Thank you, Mother," Baojun smiled back, eagerly handing his bowl away to another servant.

"Yes, sweet dumplings! You really know how to treat us, Mother," Xiuhua chimed in happily.

Fan rested her spoon against her bowl's edge and pushed away from the table. "If I may be excused, Mother – I am rather tired today."

"Of course," Lady Yan agreed absentmindedly, eyes focused on the other children. "You may go."

Fan bowed briefly before making her way down the halls of the manor. Once she reached her bedroom, she closed the door behind her and slid to her feet. Mother. The word felt so ironic, attached to Lady Yan. Fan picked the badge from her sash and held it up to her eye. It's been four years to that day...or so she estimated. The day I lost Mama...Who'd have thought she'd be accepting awards from Fire Nation academies today?

Speaking of which, there was the matter of the scroll. She got back to her feet, tossed the badge onto the bed, and pulled her satchel from its wall hook to retrieve the ancient parchment. She spread it out on the floor and studied it in all its strange glory.

"How does anyone even fit their hand like that?" she wondered aloud, and tried to mimic one of the gestures. It was a strange entanglement of the extended fingers in a cross pattern, some fingers held vertical and some horizontal. She angled her wrists this way and that, but couldn't seem to replicate the picture. "Why would this even be necessary for redirecting lightning?" She squinted at the old characters and tried to read the ones that weren't so alien. "Ox seal...? Cha...kura? What?"

Moving onto a different section of text, she discerned – however vaguely – that something called "chakura" should be used in the seals, which were to be performed in the order they were drawn before saying an incantation that she couldn't even read.

This is so weird. She re-rolled the scroll and stuffed it back into her satchel. I'll try again later.

"Later" proved to be late into the night, where she sat frustrated in her night robe trying to decipher the characters on the scroll using a textbook on old literature from the Academy. Success was hard to come by, and Fan suspected it would take longer than the typical break between school years to understand the scroll completely.

So this is 'elemental', she assumed, pointing at a cluster of three characters, and this is supposed to be...a really old word for 'bridge'...

She let out a yawn and rubbed her eyes. Her efforts had been focused in deciphering the incantation; there were other blocks of texts but she'd stopped bothering, as those were mostly made of the strange curly characters. A pity, for if they meant anything, she wouldn't be able to know. Just four more characters to go. She readjusted the positioning of her candle and continued working, one hand on the textbook and another on the scroll.

Somewhere along the way, she had blacked out on her desk. She only realized it when she awoke to a baritone "Hmm" uttered behind her, deep and familiar. "Fa...Father?" She raised her sleepy head and turned around. "O-Oh, Father! You've returned!"

Fan quickly jumped off her chair to stand at attention. As she did so, she realized her father was reading the strange scroll and clenched a nervous fist.

"Favorable winds carried the ship home early," he explained as he straightened. "And I hear you've earned a badge at the Academy. Very good, Fan. That is what I expect of you to make our family proud."

"Thank you, Father," she accepted with a bow of her head.

"Do you see the potential that would have been wasted had I left you in that place?"

Fan swallowed. "Yes, Father."

"Good." He nodded, and his eyes wandered over to her desk again. "It seems you're still studying. What is it this time?"

Fan felt her heart skip a beat as she thought of what to say. "It's some old literature Chuni and I decided to study together," she lied. "She picked it out from her family's library. I, um...I volunteered to read it first."

She almost expected some sort of frowning interrogation, but he never gave it. "You can continue that in the morning," he stated. "Get some rest."

Fan sighed in relief after he left the room. Perhaps it was a good thing he was a military father, after all. If he'd known what the scroll truly said, the surprise would be ruined–

But then again, neither did she.

"What's that?"

"Xiuhua!" Fan gasped as she jolted in her seat. "Didn't I tell you to knock before entering my room?"

"You've been in there for hours," Xiuhua groaned, leaning against the desk. "The school year is over and you're still studying? Gosh, you're so boring."

Fan blushed in embarrassment as she untangled her fingers from yet another attempt to replicate the hand signs. "What do you want this time? You usually don't come into my room for nothing."

"I want to see your badge."

"No, Xiuhua, I have to keep it spotless for the ceremony."

"So what? I'm not gonna spoil it or anything."

"The last time I handed something for you to 'see', you lost it."

"Did not!"

"Did too, and Mother got upset at me for–"

"Hua!" Baojun's voice echoed from the hallway. "Mother wants us down in the tearoom! Father's home early!"

Xiuhua's demeanor changed almost instantly. "Father's home?" she screamed back, and ran out the room. "Why didn't you tell me sooner!?"

Fan opened her mouth to say something, decided against it, and turned back to the scroll. Two years my junior, and she acts like she's my upperclassman. To top it off, Baojun was a cold and arrogant older brother who enjoyed bossing them both. It would have given her a lot of satisfaction to reveal that she knew Father had come home first, but there was nothing to be gained in acting as though she held Father's favor. Lady Yan had proved time and again that that was a bad idea.

Guess I'll go too, Fan decided, closing the scroll.

She arrived at the tearoom to find Father sitting next to a beaming Lady Yan, their children seated on either side of them. "Ah, Fan," Lady Yan said as her eyes wandered to the girl in the doorway. "You're late."

"Sorry, Mother," she apologized with a bow and headed over to a seat by Baojun. "I was–"

"She was reading some sort of weird scroll," Xiuhua tattled.

"–studying," Fan finished.

Lady Yan pursed her lips, but luckily for Fan, that was all she deigned to do. She turned to her husband instead and smiled at him. "Tell us of the victory that earned you the promotion," she urged.

Father cracked a smile, a rare occasion that meant good tidings. "The Earth Kingdom vessel was coming up on our aft, trying to push us between two crags..."

They listened, enraptured, to his harrowing tale of the naval battle that took place off the northwestern Earth Kingdom coast. His ship had been separated from the rest of the fleet, but managed to turn the tide against the Earth Kingdom's in an expert maneuver that pushed the Earth vessel instead into the crags. That left the Earth fleet formation open for a piercing breakthrough, and the rest was followed by naval jargon Fan could not really understand, but she couldn't help feeling some budding admiration as Father finished his tale.

"Commander Zhao," Baojun murmured thoughtfully. "That's how they'll announce you from now on."

"My father is a Commander now!" Xiuhua cheered.

"Naval Commander," Baojun corrected matter-of-factly.

Father smiled again. "And it won't stop there. Just watch, children; from Captain, to Commander, and soon...Admiral." His eyes glimmered fervently at the last word, deep amber like flickering fire, and he rested a hand on Baojun's shoulder. "This is what greatness looks like. This is how you succeed...though you may start small, you push, and push, until you've grown from a simple flame into a raging wildfire. That is how all the great people in our nation did it –" His eyes swept over the three of them. "– and I expect for you to do the same."

"Yes, Father," they chimed in unison, although Fan wondered what that had meant for Mama.

The next few days passed in a flurry of activity. With the ceremony looming close, it was essential to Lady Yan that everything was absolutely perfect, because this time Father would receive the appointment from the Fire Lord himself. The role of Commander came along with taking charge of a strategic naval base at the southwestern edge of the Earth Kingdom; Father would be away from home for long periods of time again, but it was a great responsibility to shoulder, and the ceremony would reflect that gravity.

Fan had less time to study the scroll as a result, occupied as she was by the preparations. But before she would retire for the night, she would sneak in a little studying, if it could be helped. The incantation was more or less done, although Fan was rather uncertain on the translations of one or two characters. She had some of the easier hand signs down, but still couldn't wrap her hands around the more complex ones.

The day of the ceremony finally came. Fan put on the tunic Lady Yan gave her, tied the sash, and pinned the Academy's badge to it. As she looked herself over in the mirror, she adjusted her clothing accordingly and reached for a hair tie.

Wait...I think the index finger shouldn't be as bent for that sign as I thought...

She paused at the mirror and turned back to look at her bed, where the scroll lay open on the surface of her blankets. Frowning, she paced over to it, knowing full well that the ceremony was far more important. But it was such a nagging thought that she feared forgetting it in the midst of the service and losing it forever.

Okay, so the fingers go like this...She enclosed her hands around each other again for the umpteenth time. But this time her heart raced as she locked her index finger in the right position. I think this works for the next sign, too! She tried it out, adjusting her index finger yet again, and felt like jumping for joy when it matched the picture perfectly.

The remaining hand signs seemed to flow perfectly from there. It was as if she had struck gold. Fan held her breath as she went back to the first hand sign and performed them in succession. When she finally reached the last one, she fought to keep her hands from shaking in excitement as she read out the incantation.

"Elemental Veil, Bridging Souls Technique."

A flash seemed to pass through the mirror illustrated on the scroll. Before Fan could get a closer look, a bright beam of light shot out from the mirror and suddenly flashed through the entire room. She yelped in surprise and shielded her eyes, and her ears were filled with the roaring of a great wind. Terrified, she screamed for help, but her voice was drowned out by the noisy gusts. When a servant ran in to see what the commotion was about...

...she had vanished.

Notes

Supposing the scroll contains a mixture of hiragana and kanji, Fan's reading of 'jutsu' as 'technique' is due to the incantation being purely kanji and the fact that she is reading as someone with a more Chinese understanding of characters; plus, jutsu means technique/skill. I also think (but don't know, so don't quote me on it) that Chinese readers have some difficulty completely understanding kanji. I could be completely wrong either way, but will go with the openness of a fictional world or two.

Also, I'm aware of Fan's origin indicating that the Fire Nation made recent attempts to invade the Northern Water Tribe. While the wiki says the last time Northern warriors recovered Fire Nation armor was 85 years previous to the Gaang's arrival, I will assume for the sake of the fic that they made two more after a dry spell but were repulsed (one at her conception, another eight years later), which will be the buildup to the resulting siege at the end of ATLA season 1.