She gives a quirk of her eyebrows at that crack that says, really, he wants to go there? But she scoots over a margin for him anyway that's an acceptance of him sitting down.

She's quiet for a few moments more, chin resting back in her knees . . . trying to catch the words that slide away under her grasp.

"I was here a long time before you guys," she said quietly at last. "Months. A lot of that time, it was only me -- and only later Iroh. And Aang. That was before the M-guy. Before we even knew what the M-guy was. I made a life here. I had friends."

I waited.

But she can't say that. Doesn't even know how. The words are like daggers in her throat.

"I used to live here." Nodding forward she indicates the Earth Sector. "With my own place. It had three floors. I made one of them a whole training room . . . and then the last one was for Aang. I threw all the furniture out. I decorated it the way I wanted."

I kept thinking you'd come. I waited.

You didn't.

"They kept telling us that time back home . . . it was frozen or something. We'd come back to the moment we left. It'd be like nothing ever happened. I'd wake up and you guys would all be there and we'd have the war, and we'd win, and . . ."

She's not making sense, and she knows it. And suddenly she's angry, angry with all of it, surging up from her gut.

"Yeah, well, it didn't work that way for me. I closed my eyes and I went away, and I didn't wake up. I never had the war, and instead I wake up, all that time waiting, and the war's over here and you're all here and everything's different and people are gone, and I wasn't here. I wasn't there. I wasn't anywhere. I didn't do anything."

I let you down in two places. I got cheated in both.