A/N: For exactly three years and a day, this story has been a part of my life. I have learned and grown so much since starting this, and I cannot tell you all how much I appreciate the support and kindness you have shown me. I have to thank one person in particular, because without her, this story probably would have ended a long time ago, and that person is superliz6. I dedicate this last chapter to her, and anyone else who has stuck with me for the last three years. With regard to questions—is this it, is it really the end, will there be no more stories—I would like to say that perhaps I will write another series entitled "The Beginning," and actually go through it chronologically this time…and have all the canon sorted out so that it agrees with what the actual writers have come up with…but we'll see! It's all speculation!

Some quick chapter notes: Lin is eighty-one in the 'present' of this chapter, which makes Tenzin eighty-two, Pema sixty-six, and so on. In the flashbacks, Tenzin is seventeen (before he leaves to travel the world with his father) and Lin is around sixteen and living on Air Temple Island after her mother's death, if you recall this story well enough to remember that. Lin was a witness to her mother's violent death, and so in the months and years following that event, there were times when Lin was suffering rather severely from the trauma. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go back and read chapter 10, "Promise," and chapter 23, "Absence." Please leave a review and let me know what you think.

Time

It is quiet.

Not silent, but quiet.

Lin can vaguely hear Jinora in the sitting room, humming softly as she rocks her youngest child to sleep. It is a haunting sort of sound, a Southern Water Tribe tune Lin believes she herself once knew, once sang, a long, long time ago when times were simpler and the people she loved were always close at hand. The girl—not a girl anymore, but children have a way of remaining children in the memories of those who knew them—has a wonderfully smooth and serene voice that is suited to lullabies in a way Lin's never was.

It is sweet, Lin thinks, that Jinora remembers the notes to this particular song when she herself has forgotten them. (That Lin's old age has affected her sensibilities enough for her to admit to herself that it is sweet is another matter altogether.)

Somewhere, a clock is ticking. Lin wonders what time it is, but doesn't particularly care enough to waste the amount of energy it would require to get up and look. She would rather like to do it, if only to prove she still could, but dismisses the thought as unbefitting a woman of her esteemed maturity. Besides, her right leg has been aching worse than usual lately. She isn't sure she could make it to the door without her cane, and even then…

No matter. She doesn't need to know the time.

Time is irrelevant, now. She has come a long way from that little girl who slept on the floor in the hallway, counting the seconds, minutes, hours…waiting for her mother to come home. Lin doesn't shy away from grandfather clocks. Not anymore. She's much too old.

Old.

Strange. She neither wanted nor expected to live long enough to grow old, and yet…

"A muscle in her back twinges painfully as she shifts in her chair. Damn uncomfortable seat. Damn uncomfortable cushion. Damn airbenders never did seem to value comfort or ease or…

Strange. These things never seemed to bother her when she was young. Age has made a fool of her.

"Auntie Lin!"

Senna Sato enters the room like a whirlwind, long black hair flying out behind her, with a familiar, mischievous smile dancing on her lips that makes a phantom ache flare up again somewhere between Lin's ribs. When Senna sees the solemn expression that didn't quite leave Lin's face quickly enough, the girl's dark brown eyes flicker briefly to the man lying on the bed beside Lin's chair before she stammers out an apology.

"I-I'm sorry. I forgot—well, I didn't forget, but—it's been so long since…"

Lin finds a chuckle for the girl somewhere deep inside her, but cannot help the way it rattles through her chest on its way out. "Come here, kid."

Senna hesitates for the briefest of moments, but then launches herself toward the old woman just as she's always done.

"Easy does it, kid. I'm not as tough as I used to be."

Nestled in Lin's embrace, Senna sighs. "You're as strong as ever, Chief."

The responding scoff is softer than Lin intends it to be.

"Lin?"

Lin catches Tenzin's impatient, sideways smile out of the corner of her eye. He wants to go get some lunch—their lesson was finished fifteen minutes ago—but Lin is working on something that requires her full attention. His grin becomes insolent as he tries to grab her notebook from her. She'd really like to knock him right on his ass, and would certainly do it without hesitation, if she didn't think Katara would throw a fit when they arrived for lunch covered in dirt and sweat. Instead, she wrestles her notebook out of his hands with only the slightest hint of excessive force, wanting to return quickly to her calculations of the exact trajectory—

"Lin!"

Ignore him. He'll get tired of bothering her in a minute and then she'll have some peace. Let 'g' equal the gravitational acceleration—

A cool, whip-like breeze slashes against her neck. It takes every ounce of Lin's self-control not to retaliate. She takes a deep breath, counts to three, releases it, and starts again. And the distance traveled is equal to the velocity squared divided by—

Another sharp whip at her writing hand, and Lin's temper is rising dangerously as she has to erase the stray lines her utensil made against the paper.

"Come on, Beifong!"

The next breeze has her book flying off the table and onto the ground.

Lin sees red.

"Leave me alone, Tenzin!" She starts towards her book, but he uses his bending to make it fly up in the air far above her head. "Stop acting like an idiot, Airhead, and let me have my book!"

Tenzin is laughing, seemingly very proud of himself as he bounces the book higher and higher off of the wind currents he creates. "Lessons are over, Lin. It's time for lunch!"

Lin's fury manifests in the ground starting to shake, but Tenzin knows an idle threat when he sees one.

"You'll have plenty of time to do stupid physics problems later, but lunch will be over in twenty minutes!"

"But that's just it! Time is the problem! I'm trying to calculate the time it takes for a projectile to finish its trajectory but first I have to—"

Tenzin starts making absurd noises halfway through her explanation, putting both hands over his ears once he has successfully manipulated the air into carrying her book to the topmost branches of a tree. "La-la-la not listening! Not listening!"

At this point, Lin's patience has run out. She can feel the anger boiling in her stomach, dangerous and searing and threateningly strong. Knowing she will be the one to get in trouble for this, but not particularly caring about the consequences, she starts hurling rocks at him left and right. Tenzin just continues dancing around with the grace of a teenage boy thoroughly accustomed to moving lightly on his feet.

"Get my book down from there right now, you little—"

"Lin! Tenzin! What in the world are you doing?"

Kya's usually musical voice is hard, but her eyes are full of laughter. She appeared from the direction of the dormitories, as stunning and vibrant as ever, with her hair braided in its typical fashion and her blue Southern Water Tribe ensemble slightly ruffled from a long day of traveling.

Lin is momentarily shocked into complete immobility. She tries wrap her head around Kya's sudden presence here. Had she come to visit—for some festival or birthday or something…? Lin can't think of a reason, but how could she forget that Kya was coming today? Surely someone had told her—why wouldn't they have?—so it is she who must have forgotten… but the question remains, what did she miss? What is today's date? Didn't they just celebrate an equinox or something last week…or was it two weeks ago…?

Time certainly didn't seem linear anymore. There were stops and gaps and leaps in it that made no mathematical or logical sense at all. In a time of inner chaos, she had turned to numbers and facts to be her foundation, and if they had failed her...

Kya was still waiting for an answer.

Looking thoroughly chastised, Tenzin rubbed the back of his head. "We were—uh—we were just—"

Kya's laughter interrupts his search for an explanation. Waving her hand in a carefree manner that she has perfected over the years, she says, "Never mind. I don't want to know."

Finally shaking herself out of her confusion, Lin launches herself towards Kya with a slightly embarrassing amount of enthusiasm. "Kya! What are you doing here?"

Their embrace is strong and steadying, and for a moment Lin allows herself to fade away in it. But Kya's body tenses, and in that simple action, Lin suddenly remembers it all.

"Lin?" Asami's warm voice is carefully measured as she enters the room. At forty-nine, the woman is just as striking as ever, though her black hair has a streak of gray, and there are perhaps more wrinkles when she smiles than there used to be. "How are you?"

Senna does not seem to want to yield Lin's comforting embrace to her mother, so Lin shifts a bit in order to see over her head. "As well as I can hope to be, at my age. Where's your wife? Surely she…?"

"Right here, Chief," Korra's smile is strained as she enters the room. Lin doesn't blame her. There is a heaviness weighing on them all. The air in the room seems thicker and harder to breathe. "We came as soon as…well. We're here."

"I can see that." Lin gruffs out, but there is a teasing edge to her voice that hasn't always been there. She places a wizened hand on the back of Senna's head as she holds her closer. She can feel the girl trembling slightly, and Spirits forgive her, she doesn't know how else to handle it.

Asami mumbles something about needing to speak with Pema and motions for their daughter to follow her. Senna resists for just a moment, but eventually untangles herself from Lin's embrace.

The silence weighs heavily between the two remaining women, and the man lying unresponsively on the bed does nothing to ease the tension.

"How much time…?" Korra ventures, coming to the other side of the bed.

Time? Time is irrelevant. Lin knows time to be untrustworthy. Time ticks and slips and tumbles and falls. Time is clumsy and irresponsible and…

Lin really hates how foolish it makes her feel.

(But what is the time? Hadn't it been her intention to consult a clock? She should have done it, her leg be damned.)

Lin counts to ten, breathes in the air that is much too heavy and tries to exhale too soon. Her body is being difficult again. She silently tells herself to get it together—she can't afford to be drawing attention to her frailty. Not ever, but certainly not now. She tries to count again, this time to eight, but chokes on seven.

Korra politely ignores her struggles. She changes the subject with all of the grace she has learned over the years. "Kya is on her way from the South Pole. It's amazing how well she still gets around."

Lin closes her eyes. Yes, Kya is as able-bodied as ever. Lin has a feeling the damned waterbender will bury them all.

"Lin?"

Korra's voice catches in her throat and Lin has no choice but to open her eyes.

The avatar is staring at Tenzin's wrinkled face, transfixed on the tattoo that still stretches itself over his bald head. The ink has faded over the years. His skin is puckered and leathery from too much exposure to sun and wind. Tenzin probably wouldn't like them sitting here, staring at him, but Lin does not know what else to do.

"Will he wake up?"

Korra has such an uncanny ability to make her voice sound exactly as it did thirty years ago, when she was all vulnerability hidden beneath a tough exterior. It is as if the teenager never quite managed to find her way to complete adulthood. Getting married, raising a daughter…none of it has served to age her a day. Lin blames Aang's influence for that. Damned avatars never change, even when they do.

"Maybe. It's difficult to say. I've been sitting with him for…" How long? Twelve hours? Twenty? She had taken over when Pema needed to make…arrangements.

"You've known him the longest, haven't you?" Korra's eyes are overly bright as they search for anywhere to look besides the bed. They settle on Lin's own, but even then, they sometimes flicker about her face, lingering a little longer than is strictly polite on the scars on Lin's cheek that have stretched and faded only slightly over time. When Katara told her they were permanent—that she would have them for life—she really wasn't exaggerating.

"Technically, Kya's known him the longest. I'm younger than him, you know!" Lin tries to bring some levity, some teasing happiness into her speech, but Korra's responding chuckle is perfunctory.

"But you knew him best?" It is a statement more than a question, but Lin still takes a moment to consider it.

Yes, she knew him best, once upon a time. Pema is in her sixties now, and while her marriage to Tenzin had been a happy one as far as Lin could gather, the fact remained that there were things Lin is sure the man never told her.

(Lin's mind does not heed her own protests as it drifts back to a time when the air smelled strongly of low tide and the sun had spent a full day struggling to be seen through the clouds and Tenzin's smile as his lips formed the word "forever" was the only thing that mattered.)

Pema, as expected, is not taking Tenzin's condition well. He was doing relatively fine until recently, when a moderate case of bronchitis turned rather unexpectedly into pneumonia. Fluid in the lungs, and a rather nasty infection, was the death knell. What irony for an airbender whose mother was both a waterbender and a healer to be dying from such a thing. It is really the infection that is the problem, and if Tenzin weren't so old, it would certainly be treatable, but his health deteriorated too rapidly for healers to offer much help besides making him more comfortable.

Lin suspects that it is Pema's relative youth that has her so caught up. The difference in health between a woman in her sixties and a man in his eighties can be insurmountable.

(Subtract sixteen from eighty-two. Add twenty to thirty more years of loneliness. Divide each painstaking hour by the number of grandkids who will demand their grandmother's attention. Extrapolate the likelihood of great-grandchildren that will all share some feature of his—the smiling eyes, the strong jaw, the large forehead, the soft lips—)

…Not that Lin spares Pema's life and youth much thought. She is past pettiness in that respect. She regrets that the girl—for she is another who will remain a girl forever in Lin's mind—will spend Tenzin's last days (hours?) in a state of terrible distress. Death will not wait for acceptance; it will not give time for grief and goodbyes before dealing its final blow.

Lin knows Death too well to be deluded. She will stay with Tenzin until he's gone. She will not let Time cheat her out of a single moment.

"The dedication ceremony…?" Lin is mortified to find herself having forgotten it entirely.

Kya takes her hand soothingly, as if she can see the storm rising in Lin's mind's eye—distressingly similar to the one she almost drowned in, not so long ago—

"You came all the way from the South Pole for that?" Lin shouldn't be surprised, but she is searching for something solid to hold onto./p

"Lin…" Kya's voice is only slightly anxious, but her eyes are frantically examining Lin's, clearly wondering if her friend has gone off the deep end in her absence. "We talked about this, remember?"

(damn it damn it damn it all to hell)

"Of course I remember. I just lost track of time. It's tomorrow, right?" Lin takes her hand away, looks to Tenzin who is now holding her book with an apologetic and slightly concerned frown.

"It's Sunday. Two days from now. At noon. Remember? You're supposed to give a speech?"

(the time of flight is equal to radical two multiplied by the velocity and then divided by…)

"Right." Lin shakes her head, clearing it of all the unwanted clutter that makes it so difficult to concentrate. "Right. I'm giving a speech. I knew that."

Kya's eyes silently question the validity of this statement, but she lets the matter drop. "I know it's going to be a little weird to see the statue and everything…"

"It'll be fine." Lin needs something to do with her hands. She spots the book, now slightly worse for wear after having been tossed into a tree. She snatches it out of Tenzin's hands so quickly and forcefully that Tenzin takes a surprised step back from her.

"Is your speech ready?" Kya cautiously exchanges a look with Tenzin.

"Of course it is: 'People of Republic City, we gather here today to witness the unveiling of a complete waste of time and money. While my mother was glad to give her life to protect our great," Lin over-enunciates this word, sarcasm thick and unpleasant on her tongue, "city, she had no use for statues, since, not only was she blind, she was practical. An oversized statue in front of a police station won't change the fact that she was murdered in the line of duty. Nevertheless, this icon will forever remind our people that she was a true hero," Lin pauses again, swallows, and rushes the rest, her voice rising with every word, "and that her daughter was no such thing. In fact, she didn't even remember she was supposed to be here. So please forgive her if she doesn't smile at you as she passes the giant bronze image of her dead mother.'" Turning away from her friends, her family, Lin all but runs back to the compound.

Tenzin looks to Kya helplessly. Kya only sighs in defeat.

"I guess she hasn't been handling this well?"

Tenzin runs both his hands over his face in frustration. "I don't blame her. It's been over a year and I still don't think she's accepted it. She's repressed everything." His whole body seems to deflate before Kya's eyes. "I think something is seriously wrong, Kya. She acts like a cornered animal all the time. She has problems with her memory, she has no concept of time, and she's not eating. She's always on edge… I don't know what to do."

Tenzin sits down right where he was standing, his body feeling much heavier than usual. There is no elegance in his movements now.

Kya casts another look up the way Lin had gone, then comes to sit beside him.

"Just be there for her. That's all you can do. Time will have to heal the rest."

She puts an arm around his shoulders. He leans against her slightly, taking in her strength.

"But what if it doesn't?" His voice is very quiet. Kya wonders if he was really looking for an answer or not.

"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. She's strong. She'll come up with a way to survive."

There may or may not be tears sinking into the fabric on her shoulder. Kya turns her head away to give her brother some semblance of privacy.

Tenzin seems to be struggling with something much larger than himself. "I just wish I could help her. I can't stand to see her in so much pain. I…I think I might be in love with her, Kya."

Oh, Spirits. It only took him how many years to figure this out?

Kya takes in a deep breath. This is certainly not the right time for a romance. "Well, all I can say is that if you really love her, you'll be her friend. You'll stand by her, even when she's having a rough time. Especially then. Death is hard, but life is harder, isn't it? So help her live her life again, hmm?" Kya hums as Tenzin brushes the back of his hand against his eyes.

"And if you break her heart, I'll kick your ass, you here me?" Kya shoves his shoulder, gives him a quick kiss on the cheek, and heads off in the same direction as Lin.

When Tenzin wakes up for the first time in what feels like days, it is an hour after midnight, and Lin is the only one still awake. She refused all offers to be shown to another room, and only won her arguments against both Pema and Kya because she's the only one of the three of them who is accustomed to so much stress and so little sleep.

It is a shame that Bumi's been gone for years. He could have easily kept her company long into the night. Leave it to military and police officers to know how to maintain a strong vigil.

Tenzin's breathing is labored when he returns to consciousness. He coughs and coughs and is too weak to sit up properly.

"Lin?" he asks, but he doesn't need to. He's known all along that in the end, it would be her.

It would always be her.

"Who else, Airhead?" Lin offers a half-smile and tries not to be affected by the way his coughing shakes his whole body. She lifts a hand to wipe away some of the sweat that has gathered on his tattoo.

"You always liked," Tenzin wheezes out, "my tattoo."

She takes his hand in her own. "Maybe I just have a thing for bald men."

"Liar." Tenzin smiles in a way that makes her wish she had been able to see it more often when he was well.

He weakly removes his hand from hers and slowly lifts it to rest on her cheek. His thumb moves ever-so-slightly back and forth over her scars.

"I'm glad you're here," he whispers, his strength wavering.

"So am I." In all her years, Lin has never quite learned how to say goodbye, so she doesn't. And neither does he.

Instead, she rests her hand on top of his and is only distantly aware of time passing them by.