A/N: Welcome to Necrosis. There will be some dark, unsettling concepts and trauma in this story, due to the nature of bloodbending and how the show has portrayed it.

For those confused about this introduction, I am referencing a scene from The Legend of Korra that does not require any knowledge. It is only to set-up the main character's reincarnation, and her mentioned son will only be used as a plot device to haunt her (though he is indeed an antagonist from TLOK).

Reviews are helpful and encouraging; please be a vocal reader. Thank you for coming on this journey with me!

Disclaimer: I own nothing but my OCs and ideas. Cover art by kelogsloops.

"The axe forgets; the tree remembers."

—African Proverb

I. Choices

Underground Red Lotus Prison, Northern Earth Kingdom. 171 AG.

Wanli knew, from the moment she held that tiny hand in her first life, that it would always end with him. Head on the ground and mouth making room for the blood, the waterbender half-heartedly nurses the hole in her abdomen. Though it hurts no less than last time, she is tired of acting surprised by the same result.

Fists still vibrating from the power of his airbending, her son Zaheer falls to his knees in shock and cradles his mother. The warmth of his arms does little to ease her pain.

"M-mother, why did you interfere?" he asks. "We were so close to the end. So close to eradicating the absolute power. No more living in hiding."

Behind them, the shackled Avatar Korra observes with a mix of horror and pity. She shares a tragic look with Wanli, an unspoken understanding. The two women know the weight of reincarnation like no other: one destined to lose her past lives, and the other to remember her sins forever. Wanli can hear the roar of the girl's heart pump through her brain. The sound is wild and desperate and full of promise, too young to die in some hole in the wall.

With great difficulty, the mother peers into the face of her baby boy, his anguished olive green eyes and the tears splitting a worn face. Wanli can feel his blood, too, torrents of heat flooding his temple and palms.

There is nothing that hurts her more than this: loving an irredeemable man. Motherhood and death are one and the same to her now. The reckoning has come once more.

"You could be… better..." the woman whispers. "But… you never… change."

That makes the two of us.

Wanli is awake long enough to see the moment her son loses his mind, before the familiar screams for forgiveness die with her.

She once trusted time to be linear, proceeding perfectly into eternity like yarn drawn through a loop. But this isn't the first time Wanli is wrong; it won't be the last, either.

It is so cold down in the dark. She always forgets what this sunless world feels like, the pang of hunger for the sky. In the all-encompassing womb of the afterlife, she curls into the fetal position her son left her in. It is the same reaction she had to her first husband after one too many drinks and a lightning backhand.

The sound of water laps at her fragmented conscience, carrying her soul through the motions of memory like the tendrils of a jellyfish. She has lost track of the rebirths now—seventy? eighty?—but the number is irrelevant. Adrift in the ink sea, the mother prays this is the last time she'll have to relive her son's sabotage.

It never gets easier to look at him. Wanli knows the terror he is capable of executing a hundred times over. His anarchist philosophies never change; plotting the death of the Avatar is only the first step.

She blames herself for being a failure. After all, she's the reason why he turns out worse in some of the timelines. Her avoidance of him, the way she'll see him as nothing but a disaster in the making. She's abusive in some lives, and in others, she takes a knife to her throat. The cycle immediately starts all over again when she reaches the climax—fails and dies a thousand different ways—the perpetuity like a broken swing-set.

Sometimes, Wanli gives up entirely and never adopt him; why go to such lengths, when the child wasn't even yours to begin with? But by some cosmic power, they will always be on the same life path.

In every life, he will let her down; in every life, she will disappoint herself even more. And when the light at the end of the tunnel pulses, rupturing the false stillness, Wanli reaches out like she always does and comes out alive.

Foggy Swamp, Southwestern Earth Kingdom. Spring, 98 AG.

Sunshine attacks her eyes from the canopies, streams of gilded heat between shifting leaves. Wishing to sleep for just five more minutes, Wanli rolls to her side and cozies up to a vine. The movement warrants the yawn of a tiger seal. Something mud-baked and putrid reaches her nose, which she scratches irritably.

Oh? This is definitely different. She should be waking up in a cramped room somewhere in Ba Sing Se as a bitter and penniless thirty year-old. At any moment, the cabbage merchant advertises outside her window, shortly smashed in by a rock. Soon, her childhood friend Engi will crawl through the frame with a bag of stolen vegetables. She proceeds to complain about unemployment and Republic City's latest trouble with…

"Yoooo, are ya dead?"

That voice… maybe things haven't changed after all…

"You wish," Wanli mumbles. "We both know who will die first."

"How boring. I thought my arch-nemesis was finally felled, but of course you wouldn't go down like that. Whatever will I do?"

Wait, that voice—!

Wanli startles awake, the itch of bark and mosquito finally registering to her senses. She pulls herself upright but stops short of dropping into the green pool below, legs hanging off the base of the fallen willow. A hand presses into her thigh to steady her. When she follows it up the length of limb and torso, the unmistakable eyes of Engi blink back at her. Only, Wanli's best friend is a teenager again, gap-toothed and full of admiration.

"What are you wearing?" Wanli asks, face pinching.

"The same stuff you are, genius. Latest swamp fashion."

She moves to scan her own body then, expecting to find long legs and fine cotton. Instead, she is met with a child form from dreams of better times. A wooden band keeps her breasts bundled up, while a grass skirt tangles around her lower half, feet bare and tawny in the light. This strange outfit…

"Engi?" The sound of her voice is too young, too soft, too undamaged. It knows nothing of war and losing a child.

"Yes, the one and only," the other girl responds.

"How old are we?"

"Uh, fourteen. Did ya hit your noggin' somewhere? My birthday just happened!"

"Fourteen, fourteen…" Wanli repeats to herself. "That means… we're in the Foggy Swamp Tribe?"

"Huh, I've never heard you willingly call it that before." Engi flashes her a concerned look. She flippantly gestures to the humid environment around them. "Yes, this is our wonderful 'second' home. Leaf hats. Fish bone stew. Insects."

"Have we been here for a year?"

"I guess? Not that time really exists here. How were you keeping count?"

What is going on? Why is she in her childhood landscape, talking to a small Engi so casually? Could she have really hit her head somehow in the afterlife? Where could she have even hit it? She is supposed to be making to-do lists and plotting significant events leading up to the adoption and development of her son. Something went gone terribly wrong with this reincarnation.

A thought occurs through the confusion. "Has the Fire Nation passed through yet?"

"No," Engi says. "Hey, why are you asking that? And what do you mean by yet? You're scaring me now. I'm taking you to Old Man Huu for a check-up, pronto."

"Unexpected development," Wanli says under her breath, lost in her own headspace. "I shouldn't be this far back, there's just no way."

The pseudo-immortal is overcome with a sense of dread, gaze growing scared and unfocused. She brings a thumb up to her mouth to bite down, the blossoming blood a familiar taste in an unfamiliar world.

This isn't the starting point. This isn't where she's supposed to be. Could this be a new timeline? A new test from the universe?

Her best friend looks upon the scene in mild distress and waves a very helpful hand across her face. "Hey, are you really not okay? Was it something I said?"

It takes a few moments for the fog to pass, before Wanli jumps up from the toppled tree trunk. She scans for something in the distance, some sign that this could be a trick or dream. The sudden movement sends Engi over the edge and into the swamp water below with a sploosh.

"Pft, bah! What in the— Warning, please, before you go into one of your weird modes!"

Words of apology or explanation go stale in Wanli's mouth. As if for the first time, she views the enormous roots of the banyan-grove tree spilling into the wet earth. For a split second, she sees its spiritual center glow in broad daylight, pulsing like an organ. And somehow, that is enough to tell her that fate has changed its course; that perhaps, this is her break for freedom.

She begins to laugh, choking up as she does so and reaching a fever pitch. Her heartbeat thrums in her ears to a migraine-provoking ring that seems to grow louder and louder with every breath.

I can actually die now, she thinks. I can actually die in peace.

"This can't be real," she says, voice rising. "You spirits and the games you play with us. You give me Zahreer, then you make him rotten, then take him away from me. Ha ha ha, not this time—!"

Her physical state catches up to her through the hysteria. Wanli dramatically falls from her perch, right next to a shell-shocked Engi.

"A-are you really dead now? Hey…"

The next time Wanli wakes up, the smell of swamp herbs grounds her existence in this new life, along with the lopsided grin of her adoptive parent Huu. They are in the village now, under the roof of his hut beside the main river. She almost tears up at the nostalgic patchwork ceiling, the mismatched furniture, but swallows deeply to stop the onslaught of emotions.

With a wave of his hand, Huu brings over some freshly minced muck to feed her from a boiling cauldron. His waterbending reminds her of a root: deep, careful, and living in the past.

"Heyo, little Wiyo," he coos, happy to see her gag reflex kick in. She downs the food anyway, masking the equal cringe and excitement at being called her childhood nickname Wiyo. It sounds like a separate person, someone gone off to war and never retrieved. The little girl she'll never be again. "If you've got enough energy to choke on the daily special, I'd say you're ready to join the real world."

"How long was I out?" Wanli asks.

"Half a day, gave Engi quite the scare." Suddenly, Huu squints and looks her straight in the eye. She makes no move to back up; he can practically smell fear. "You're politer than usual, did ya see a Fire Nation soldier or something?"

Wanli pushes the leaf blanket from her body to sit up. If she remembers correctly, she and her Northern water tribe companion had been adopted into marshland territory. Orphaned, their poor relatives sent the pair to live with their distant kin, leaving the children to fend for themselves as refugees in a foreign, unkind land.

The girls hadn't taken the change all that well, not until their twenties, when the world was slowly piecing itself back together after the end of Fire Lord Ozai's reign. Even then, they felt no need to return to the North Pole; they would've torn it down themselves if not for the newfound peace with the South, the more compassionate clan.

"You're overthinking, pops." Wanli motions for a cup of water, practically inhaling it as soon as the container reaches her hands. "I've never been better."

Worse, her mind counters. What if they know you're a fake? What if they find out what you can do? What you would do for the future?

The last question stops her in her tracks. What future? The one she's re-lived all these years, or the one of her own making? What is she going to do without a definitive purpose? Without her child?

"If you say so." Huu breaks her thoughts with a sooty hand, running it down her braids, eyes gleaming something fond. "Don't push yourself. I don't want my apprentice to fall apart before she finishes the great art of boat crafting."

She smiles for what feels like the first time in ages, remembering just how calm life was before the war became imminent and irrevocable. Before she learned the fastest way to kill a person was through their own body.

The frown sets in like a deep, sudden bout of food poisoning. "It's not good to be back," Wanli says, without thinking.

"Oddball," the old man jests, seemingly having heard nothing unexplainable. It's just Wiyo being Wiyo. "Care for seconds?"

On the other side of the world, a boy around the same age loses the battle of his life and feels his heart burn away just as quickly as the skin on his face. The image of his father, basked in fire and shadow, will be forever ingrained into his eyelids. Family becomes an abstract concept on his way to the healers, who have never seen such a terrible mauling of skin.

But he would do anything to be part of a family again—even the one that ruined him. That's why he goes on this fruitless journey in the first place, to capture the most powerful being alive: the Avatar.

As he looks over the boat edge, his uncle humming over a cup of jasmine tea beside him, his fury grows into a dark resolution.

Father, you will accept me again. No matter what I must do.