Chapter Text
Shining hazel eyes. Bright robes made up of strips of fabric coloured in shades of sunset they almost never saw down in the Southern tribes. Katara wasn’t quite sure what to make of the boy sprawled across the ice in front of her. One minute, she’d been getting upset with Sokka over how rude he was being about her water-bending, and the next, she had split a massive iceberg clean in half and released some glowing beam, a blue-arrow-tattooed teenage boy, and his hulking fluffy monster-dog-bear-thing.
The boy would later tell her that it was called a “sky bison”, and that it flew. Sokka would not believe this. She had rushed over the hill towards the bluish glow, tumbling through the snow until she had seen him.
Shining hazel eyes. Bright robes made up of strips of fabric coloured in shades of sunset they almost never saw down in the Southern tribes.
The most beautiful boy she’d ever seen .
She couldn’t help her lips parting slightly, jaw hanging slack before she remembered herself. The boy sat up, and Katara tried her best to focus, to gather a cohesive thought.
“W-What is it?” She breathed, whispering for some reason as if the boy would spook and disappear if she was too loud.
“W-Will-” he struggled, the words so hoarse that it was as though he hadn’t used his voice in decades. He cleared his throat, eyes sparkling distractingly, grinning roguishly. “Will you go penguin sledding with me?”
Katara blanched, momentarily caught off guard. She looked back over at Sokka, who had been watching the exchange with narrowed eyes and a suspicious expression as he recrossed his arms over one another.
“I- um-... yes?” she answered, hesitantly, just as Sokka’s voice overlapped hers, yelping the words “She absolutely will not!” Katara shot him a scathing glare as the boy rose to his feet, shaking the snow off of his cloak like a polar-bear dog.
Sokka continued, his voice both indignant and commanding.“We don’t even know your name, Mr. Walking Ice Cube! What were you doing in there? Were you trying to mimic a snow-man and you got too carried away?”
“And you aren’t dressed for the cold,” Katara added appraisingly, giving him a once-over. “You look-”
“Dashingly handsome?” The boy smoothly interjected, accompanied by a grin that felt like it was just for her.
“...Cold.” she said flatly, hoping she wasn’t furiously blushing as she shot him with what she hoped came across as a scathing glare.
Aang chuckled, pushing himself up with his hands on his knees. He was… taller than Katara had realised, taller than Sokka. He rubbed a hand on the back of his neck, turning to look over his shoulder at the remains of the boulder-sized chunk of ice he had just been blasted out of. “Aang. My name’s Aang.” He hesitated, momentarily seeming to puzzle something over. “And honestly? No clue. Don’t remember how me and…Appa!” He yelped, suddenly scrambling back over the hill of ice and snow. Katara followed him without thinking, and Sokka, grumbling under his breath, followed moments later.
Katara was honestly sure that nothing could have prepared her for her first sighting of a sky bison. The creature Aang called “Appa” was huge, towering over all three of them. Aang had run straight for his side, moving more swiftly and lightly than Katara would have thought possible. With a jump, he launched himself at one of Appa’s six legs, wrapping his arms around him in a tight hug. Katara giggled behind her thick seal-fur gloves, the show of affection strangely tugging at her heartstrings. Sokka, meanwhile, remained unamused.
“So, you’ve brought a monster to invade the village, then? You’re some incognito Fire Nation soldier sent in as an undercover scout? Well, I’ll have you know that I’m the village’s strongest warrior, a-”
“The only warrior,” Katara chimed in, lightly elbowing Sokka’s side, earning herself a responding glare.
“The strongest warrior.” Sokka reiterated. “And I don’t much like firebenders.” He added the words pointedly.
“Ah.” Aang titled his head. “That’s a shame. Some of my closest friends are Fire Nation.”
“Of course they are,” Sokka glared, hunching over into a defensive position and adjusting his fishing spear until it pointed directly at Aang.
“Well, I certainly am not,” Aang huffed. “I’m a- ah- ah-,” he began to answer Sokka, but instead, suddenly let out a loud, booming sneeze, which launched him up through the air until he hovered higher than Appa before dropping back down and sliding through the ice until he was back in front of Katara and Sokka.
Katara and Sokka’s jaws dropped in shock. Her voice full of wonder, Katara raised one of her gloved hands to cover her mouth. “You’re, you’re an airbender .”
“Sure am,” Aang nodded with a smile, the pride in his voice evident.
“Suuuure,” Sokka said flatly, his voice clearly distrustful. “And I’m the Avatar.”
Instead of responding in a similarly snippy tone, Aang awkwardly looked away for a moment, his body language tense before his eyes scanned the sea around them. “Do you guys not have any kind of boat? How’d you get out there in the first place?”
“Ask my magical sister,” Sokka snipped, sticking his tongue out at Katara.
“Magical?” Aang’s nose wrinkled in confusion, head tilting before his eyes widened in understanding. “You’re a waterbender!” Katara nodded, and Aang beamed, clearly excited before an idea came to him. “Well, if you guys are stuck, Appa and I can give you a lift!”
“Appa can give us a lift?” Sokka said incredulously. He gestured at the sky bison, sprawled across the ice and looking as though he could sleep for weeks longer. “If anything, he looks like he needs us to lift him up off the ground.”
Aang just grinned toothily, and minutes later, after a few attempts to get up onto Appa’s saddle and the words “yip yip!”, the three of them sat on the back of a flying sky bison.
Naturally, Sokka was still a skeptic. “A pulley system! Hot air from a hidden firebender! Secret underwater sea-vents! Or maybe we all ate something funny and all of this is all in our heads… ” He finished off his sentence by wiggling his fingers as if he was ready to cast a spell.
“Sokka, I think Appa is about to throw you off if you keep accusing him of being a fake.”
Sokka was ready to snap back at Aang with even more ludicrous theories, but stopped when he looked over at Katara. He leaned over, waving his hands in front of her face. “Katara? Earth to Katara?”
Katara snapped back to focus. “Huh?”
“You were staring, at-”
“The sky!” Katara interrupted, before Sokka could follow her line of sight back to Aang. “It’s- it’s so nice from up here.” She smiled awkwardly as Aang nodded his agreement. She wasn’t quite sure why she had been gazing at him since they’d taken off. There was something so different and so familiar about him. She felt an odd urge to get to know him better. And she was more than intrigued that he was an Airbender in a world she was sure no longer had monks. There was a reason she and Sokka had found him, and frozen in an iceberg of all places! She just knew it. There had to be something greater behind this.
When they landed just outside the village, to say the village children were excited would have been an understatement. Squeals of joy and excitement bounced between nearby glaciers as kids yelled into tents and called one another together, and in no time, Aang was surrounded by a hoard of small children, pinching and pulling at his robes and petting Appa by smacking grubby hands against the fur of his legs. Aang had only chucked, tugging off one kid that had wrapped around his leg.
“They’re… well, we don’t see newcomers or visitors up here much.” Katara smiled as Aang offered her a hand to get down from Appa’s saddle. She slid down the slope of the sky bison’s back, landing gracefully. “At least, not the kind you want to have.”
Aang followed her eyes to a series of sticks with Firebender helmets haphazardly balanced on them, then sighed deeply, turning back to her with a sympathetic look in his eyes. “I understand. Believe me, I do.” He was distracted by one of the nonsense-jabbering kids at his feet, asking him why he was blue. Aang smiled softly, kneeling so he could look the kids in the eye.
“So I can do this ,” he grinned, and pulled out marbles from his bag. Holding out his palms, he spun them in a circle using air, his face the picture of excitement. The kids oo-ed and ah-ed appropriately, clapping their hands and cheering.
“Again! Again!” They cheered, tugging at Aang’s robes some more, but Aang simply promised to show them more later and turned to ask Katara if she wanted to take him up on his penguin-sledding offer. They set out across the tundra to the spot Katara remembered going to with Sokka when they were little, walking in comfortable silence for a few minutes.
Katara still wasn’t quite sure what to make of Aang. The Water Tribe boys had always been all flashy muscles, seal-jerky breath, and overconfidence, so Katara had never seen someone move, carry themself, the way Aang did. Besides, much of them had gone off to aid their fathers or find their place on the mainland against the troops of the fire nation. She hadn’t really gotten to hang out with guys around her age in years.
“No one’s seen an Airbender in…quite some time.” Katara said the words gently. “How’d you find your way up here, anyways?”
“You mean, no one’s seen an Airbender up here in a while? Yeah, I still don’t remember much, but I’m pretty sure I just brought Appa out here so I could check out the South Pole.” He said the words with a strangely manufactured casual air. She opened her mouth to say that what she’d really mean was that no one had seen an Airbender for a century, but she held her tongue, sure that it would be wrong to remind him of his own peoples genocide. There must have been Airbenders who escaped then, ones who quietly stuck to the shadows.
Katara had admittedly forgotten how much fun penguin sledding was. “Spirits, I haven’t done this since I was a kid!” she called to Aang as he raced past her, surprisingly skilled considering that he’d never even seen a penguin until half an hour before.
“You still are a kid!” He called back over his shoulder. “A kid who’s losing this race, badly !”
Katara’s competitive streak reared its head, her eyes narrowing as Aang stuck out his tongue. She sat up slightly, no longer gripping the penguin’s fur as tightly. “You wish!” She shouted back the words as she raised her hands, breathing deeply. Her hands moved through the positions she had practised from the few bending scrolls the tribe still held on to, and before Aang knew it, the snow in front of Katara turned to ice, and she shot past him as his own ice trail suddenly became dry snow with too much friction to slide on.
She made it to the bottom of the hill, beaming, breathing heavily. The wind had whipped her hair out of her bun, and she knew without checking that her hair must have looked like a lion-turtle’s mane. She watched as Aang made a show of drying himself off with a gust of wind that he then redirected at her, messing up her curls even more.
“You’re a cheater !” Aang gasped, mockingly clutching imaginary pearls at his throat. “I demand a rematch.”
Katara strode past him, only turning her head to cast him a smug smirk. “Maybe you’re just not as good of a penguin sledder as you thought .”
“Oh, not so fast!” Aang grabbed her wrist, tugging her back towards him, and she internally questioned why the momentary brush of their skin made her heart flip. He tried to trip her, she tried to flip him, and they both ended up on their backs in the snow, giggling, cheeks and noses bright pink from the cold.
She rolled over onto her side, noticing a simple linen and wood bracelet around Aang’s wrist. She reached out before she could think better of it, lightly brushing the wood with her fingers then awkwardly withdrawing her hand. “I thought monks weren’t supposed to have earthly possessions?”
“Ah,” Aang smiled, sitting upright. “I made an exception for this one. My friend, Monk Gyatso, he made it. It’s a reminder of my people. Air nomads raise children in communities, often send them to different temples, so… I never really knew my parents. Gyatso was the closest thing to family I had. He was a… mentor of sorts, I guess.” He shrugged, clearly trying to keep it light, but she could see in the way his eyes glistened slightly that Gyatso meant a lot to him.
“I get it.” Katara smiled. “Me and Sokka’s dad went off to fight against the fire nation years ago, and our mother-” she coughed, trying to cover the way her voice had caught in her throat. “My mother…passed, some time ago.” She reached up to her neck, fingers subconsciously brushing the familiar cloth and stone necklace.
“Was that hers?” Aang looked sidelong at her, the empathy in his eyes almost too much for Katara to bear. “It’s…beautiful.”
Before she could nod her response, she heard a shout from across the ice. She rose to her feet, brushing off the bits of snow that clung to her jacket, only to see her brother jog across the snow toward them. Sokka shot a side eye at Aang and Katara, looking between the two of them judgmentally, before telling them that Gran-Gran wanted to meet their new visitor.
The trio walked quietly across the ice, and Katara tucked away the memory of Aang saying the word “beautiful” to her, tucked away the image of his eyes sparkling as he pretended to be furious when she beat him at sledding.
When they had returned to the village, Sokka made a beeline for the elders tent right away, where Gran-Gran was already waiting. The moment Aang ducked through the doorway to join them, Katara watched her grandmother’s hands begin to shake.
“Gran, I want you to meet Aang, he’s-”
“An airbender.” Her grandmother said the words with complete and utter awe. “The last airbender.”
Aang’s nose wrinkled in confusion, his head tilting and mouth opening to ask for clarification, but Gran’s next words stunned him and the rest of the room into silence.
“The Avatar .”
Sokka and Katara’s jaws dropped, both pivoting to face Aang. Katara looked up at him, expecting to see shock and confusion, but she was met with sheepishness as Aang rubbed the back of his neck with his hand.
“You are .” Katara breathed. “Spirits, you’re the Avatar.” Sokka muttered something under his breath about knowing that he would have probably been able to figure that out himself, and Katara kicked him in the shins in response.
“I…” Aang trailed off, turning to look at the painted map hanging across the heavy canvas wall. He reached out, tracing lines through the different territories. He hung his shoulders, then looked back at them. “I never wanted to be. All my life, it's just made me different, and, well, it's drawn a lot of unwanted attention. A couple years back, when I was about 13, a comet came overhead that boosted the Fire Nation’s bending. They came for my temple, for me, so that I wouldn’t stand in the way of their plans for world domination, but I went into this… thing called the Avatar state, and I fought them off.”
“ All of them?” Sokka asked incredulously, sounding uncharacteristically impressed. Aang nodded, then continued.
“After the fight, the monks increased my training, then shipped me off to the Water tribes to learn waterbending once I’d fully mastered Air. Or, at least, they intended to… there was a storm. I think that’s how I wound up frozen. Spirits , I must’ve been stuck in there for weeks. “
Katara, who had been quietly listening, suddenly felt a flicker of recognition. “The comet… Aang, we haven’t had any comets since Sozin’s comet.”
Aang nodded tersely. “That’s the one.”
Katara’s face paled in shock, along with Sokka and Gran. “Aang.” She stepped closer, tentatively resting a hand on his forearm, which was still grazing the map. She pulled it down to his side, then pulled away, but kept her hand near, as if she worried he would collapse.
“I think you’ve been in the iceberg for more than a handful of weeks.” Sokka said the words hesitantly, stepping towards them until he was beside Katara, facing Aang alongside her. Katara looked back at her brother, then drew in a steadying breath.
“I think you’ve been in there for a hundred years .”
Katara watched as her words seemed to cut through Aang, his world crumbling inside of his mind. She watched him realise that all of the monks he had known, including Gyatso, had lived and died, had spent entire lifetimes without him. She wondered how much worse it would be when he found out that there had been a second attack on the Air nomads, probably orchestrated to line up with when he was being sent South. That not just the Air nomads he had known, but every Air nomad in existence had been wiped out by the Fire Nation. Katara had never felt more powerless than how she felt in this moment. There was nothing she could do, nothing she could say, that would even come close to easing the pain and shock Aang was likely experiencin g.
But she didn’t have to.
Because before she could speak, before Aang could speak, horns blared through the crisp air outside. Horns the entire village knew, horns that prompted screams from children.
Another Fire Nation raid.
Aang didn’t pause, didn’t let himself hesitate. Katara didn’t blame him. She was sure that if he thought about it for more than a few moments, he’d crumble entirely, and considering the situation they were now in, they couldn’t afford for Aang to sort through everything.
Katara didn’t realize how dire a situation it was until the three of them had reached the gates to the village, and Katara watched as the hull broke through centuries old ice as if it were butter. Sokka ran ahead as the bow of the ship split open in a rush of steam and machinery. Katara felt the blood drain from her face as she saw who stepped out. The Fire Nation prince. The one who had been scarred by his own father. He was here, in her village. Terror began to set in.
Prince Zuko wrinkled his nose at Sokka as though he was nothing more than an inanimate obstacle in his way, and shoved him aside, his soldiers following suit.
“I have come here for the Avatar. For my honour ,” Zuko snarled, his words a sharp, lethal weapon. “I know he’s here. I saw his beacon. He should be an older man? Master of all four elements?” His eyes swept through the crowd, passing right over Aang as his gaze narrowed on Gran and the other village elders. Katara felt Aang tense beside her.
With no warning, Zuko and his soldiers blasted a wave of fire straight for the grandmothers and grandfathers who had huddled together.
And their fire was met by a gust of wind so powerful that it sucked the very oxygen out of the air, extinguishing their flame before it got anywhere near their targets.
Zuko whirled around, his voice contorting in anger at the sight of Aang, standing tall and proud with his staff in one hand and a constantly spinning sphere of wind in the other.
“You?” Zuko spat, seething. “I’ve trained for years to face the Avatar. You’re just a teenager.”
Aang, somewhat caught off guard, leaned back, raising an eyebrow in confusion, a teasing grin on his face once he’d realised that he’d managed to bother the Fire Prince himself.
“...S- so are you...?"