Title: Spirit-Bound

Author: overlithe

Fandom: Avatar: the Last Airbender

Summary: "Time is an illusion." Yue becomes the Moon Spirit and everything changes. Even when it stays the same.

Characters/Pairings: Yue, Sokka, Aang; some references to Sokka/Yue and Sokka/Suki

Prompt: Written for the 7 Chakras Challenge (prompt: thought chakra) at the atlaland comm and prompt 005. Outsides of the fanfic100 comm.

Word Count: 442

Rating: T

Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and concepts created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, and owned by Nickelodeon and various other corporations/people. I'm not making any money and do not intend any copyright or trademark infringement.

Author's Note: Things changed a lot for Yue once she stepped into that Intrinsic Field Subtractor. Er, I meant to say "became the Moon Spirit". ;)

Spirit-Bound

It's winter, deep in sixty days of night. She is an infant lying limp in a pool of spirit-warmed water. Her eyes are closed and so she does not see the moon threading the water and her skin. She feels nothing, but her parents' flesh is knotty with fear.

It's winter, but the sun has begun to bring back dim days of lengthy twilight. She is a sixteen-year-old standing by a pool of spirit-stained water. A dead moon threads the water and her skin. She feels afraid for a moment.

And then she is never afraid again.

:=:

Time is an illusion. She sees snow-rimmed mountains brittle with starlight. She sees them crumble into sand in sea floors where, in a place where light is only the faintest whisper, living beings are a startling, inexplicable red. She sees forests hardened into coal, herds of bones pressed into diamonds.

She sees the snow plains, the seas dappled with frost and the fins of spinytale-whales, the city made of ice. She sees it melt and shift and harden as the shapes of continents change. She feels nothing.

Sometimes she sees Sokka, just as she sees every human under the moonlight, from huts where the air is thick and prickly with beech smoke to palace gardens where night-blooming flowers curl around carved trellises and sigh sandalwood and rosewater. When she sees him, some distant part of her feels him leaning, bright and eager, into her kiss.

Most of her sees only the lines and wrinkles that will appear in what humans call the future, the hair turning grey, then white, muscles and joints stiffening. He's making love to a woman who stains his face and mouth with red and white. He's being laid out in a canoe, covered in polar leopard furs, given back to the sea.

Time is an illusion, but she is sure some passes before she sees only a silver-bright soul buried in flesh that has changed a thousand times and will change a thousand times more.

:=:

She speaks to the Avatar in the shores of a warm land. Her mask bears her old face mostly out of habit. It wavers at the edges, in time with the lapping of the waves.

The Avatar Spirit is starless black, vines and sand, the shine of liquid sunlight. It's still wearing Aang, but she sees all its mortal faces. They ebb and flow, as if answering to her like the sea.

'You have already saved the world,' she says.

While she speaks, galaxies spin placidly through the inky darkness, and dust swirls into black holes.

++The End++