Chapter Text
“HEY! Come back!” Aang yells as he jumps, arms wide in an attempt to grab the lemur that seemed to always be one step ahead. The lemur recoils and rapidly jumps from the spot it had momentarily laid rest, toward the direction of a small stone building with a veil covering the front entrance. Aang, in his great pursuit of the lemur that had bested him all the way up to this point, quickly runs after him into the cloth veil that the lemur dove behind.
“Come on out little lemur, that hungry guy won’t bother you anymore,” Aang continues, briskly moving towards a second lavender veil that, once again, Aang assumes the lemur to be hiding behind, in what Aang can only mentally describe as the “Great Lemur Chase of the Southern Air Temple.” Classic.
Just as a chuckle is about to escape his lips from the joke, Aang pulls back the second veil and steps in, only to reveal a sight that hitches the breath in his lungs.
“Firebenders? They were here?” he asks, confused.
Aang looks over the room with an expression one can only attempt to describe. The rocky yet smooth stone floor scorched in seething darkness anywhere you could look, with Fire Nation armor and equipment strewn about. The armor, too, was scorched and worn in what one could only assume was a great struggle. Upon closer inspection however, the high altitude that the Southern Air Temple took residence in kept the bodies of those who had worn the armor invariably preserved, as the spring or summer heat could be enough to allow the corpses to decompose, creating monstrous amalgamations of lifeless skin with patches of bone and muscle peaking out in every which way one could imagine.
Aang was standing on the remnants of the battlefield, but yet had he to notice the shining bright light upon the remains of one who laid at the other end of the room. Aang holds his breath even more than what one could even think is possible, as he gazes upon the skeleton bathed in bright sunshine with a familiar wooden medallion kept around its neck.
“Gyatso…” Aang chokes, allowing the breath that has lodged deep in his lungs to escape as he falls to his knees, palms press firmly against the ground.
“Hey, Aang, you find my dinner yet?” Sokka asks jovially as he too pokes through the second veil covering the entrance to the room. He quickly notices Aang trembling on the ground in front of him, so in an attempt to lighten the mood as quick as possible he (very intelligently) says, “Aang, I wasn’t really gonna eat the lemur, okay?”
As Sokka says it though, he looks up, and regret lights up his features. He as well as Katara knew that the Fire Nation had come to the temple, and it was only a matter of time until Aang figured out. But even then, when he’d found the Fire Nation helmet by its own lonesome, it was nothing compared to… this.
The smell was terrible. Although the cold and snow had preserved some physical features of the deceased, it couldn’t fully stop nature from reaping the final bits of humanity that remained on these husks. Fungus, yeti-flies, and varieties of worms had grown and moved in order to survive the harsh mountain climate, feeding on what to them was a sack of nutritional value; food, a means to survive. Nature was seemingly unforgiving, cruel, and methodically torturous to the Fire Nation intruders even in death, in a sort of karmic vice that only the spirits could pull through with; yet nature had been swift and peaceful to Monk Gyatso, whose skeleton freely integrated itself back into the nature it was birthed from.
But that didn’t matter. That didn’t mean anything. The emotions swirling within Aang’s head in a vortex were maddening. His people, his friends, the people he cared about, gone, in a flash. It seems so simple to describe, yet the mass of the thoughts that pierced his skull weren’t anything short of indescribable. An entire people; the culture, the customs, the traditions, the actual living and breathing human beings that had been a part of it all for centuries, gone into what Aang could only describe as a flash. The Fire Nation had taken away almost everything but a living soul from Aang all in a deliberate and evil attempt to control the world. And it was done against people who had a solitary life in peace, his people. Whether his people were always truly pacifistic and peaceful, that wasn’t necessary to discern; regardless of how terrible someone may be, to Aang, killing one person (let alone an entire people) was something so monumental, so terrible, so evil, that it took Aang to the brink and straight over.
Gone. Stolen. Taken. Never to return. Those words kept repeating over and over again, swirling in Aang’s head in a vortex moving at Mach 1. Gone. Stolen. Taken. Never to return.
At that moment, Aang felt it all. Rage. Fury. All the emotions he was taught to take control of and properly vent built a wave so immense that it’s as if it’s all he’s ever felt in his entire life. Some part of him tries to stop these emotions taking over; he knows that to be consumed by rage is a recipe for complete disaster, yet that piece of him is only an infinitesimally small fraction of all else.
“Oh man… Come on Aang, everything will be alright,” Sokka says in a (futile) attempt to comfort Aang, with a hand on his shoulder.
Then it happens. Aang’s tattoos begin to glow, and any part of his mind once dissenting from the idea of not lashing out disappears in an instant.
The power of The Avatar explodes with an unfathomable potency, as Avatar Aang releases a scream that is felt by all those who have an ear to hear it.
Sokka recoils heavily as winds rapidly accelerate around Aang, and Sokka is sent flying back-first into one of the stone walls that had just seconds ago been covered by the lavender veils. Under the immense speeds of the winds, the Fire Nation armor and the remains of the fallen soldiers within it are unable to stay upon the ground of which they had laid to rest. They move and fly in the violent cyclic movement of the cyclone, like limp marionettes yanked along by their strings.
And, as like the flick of the wrist, the winds shatter most of the fragile pieces of wall that still stay standing and the entirety of the roof. Launched back and into this rubble, Sokka tries to regain his footing against hurricane level winds as Katara rushes up behind him in panic.
“What happened!?” Katara yells over the deafening rage of the wind.
“He figured out firebenders killed Gyatso!” Sokka responded, again, yelling.
“It has to be his Avatar Spirit, he most of triggered it. I’m going to try and calm him down!” she states - rather matter-of-factly despite the circumstances - as she begins her attempt to move toward Avatar Aang.
Sokka firmly grabs her hand, not wanting for her to move any further. “Are you crazy? We can barely stay standing, do you really think you’ll be able to reach him without being blasted off the mountain!?”
“I have to try! There’s no point in arguing unless you want both of us to be thrown off the mountain!”
Pulling her hand from her brother, she moves with as much speed as is allowed by the air piercing her eyes and ears. She falters several times as she is pushed and pushed against the wind but does not stop, with a determination to save this boy she cares about in tandem with her own self-preservation. She yells to Avatar Aang as loud as she can, hoping, praying, that he can hear her.
“Aang! I know you’re upset, I know how hard it is to lose people you love, I-” she begins, but as she tries to continue, the impossible speed of the winds manage to move even faster.
She yelps as she loses her footing once more, dragged against the ground and colliding back-first into debris covered with the Fire Nation armor. She sees Sokka holding on to his own life, grasping with the full strength of his body and soul to stay grounded, with eyes full of panic, before Katara then puts her focus on Avatar Aang once more.
And, as “unlucky” as it is, as soon as Katara looks away, a small yet dull chunk of rubble about the size of a tennis ball finds itself being launched in the perfect trajectory to directly impact with Sokka’s forehead – and like the snap of fingers – the force exerted against his head sends him quickly and painlessly unconscious.
Unknowing of her brother’s new condition, in what would be Katara’s last attempt one way or another to try and talk to Avatar Aang, she yells with all her voice allows.
“Please, Aang! I know how hard it is! I went through the same thing when I lost my mom. Monk Gyatso and the other airbenders may be gone, but just know you still have a family! Sokka and I, we’re your family now!”
And, like a lone ray of light piercing through black curtains, she is heard.
The pressure of being forcefully pushed against hard rock and debris begins to dissipate, as Aang begins to descend back to the ground and the murderous force of the winds calmly spiral into serene nothingness.
Katara lifts her now aching body up from her forced sitting position, and she began to warily approach Aang as he finally places two feet back on the ground, with glowing tattoos still being present. Katara grasps his right hand as she softly says, “Sokka and I aren’t going to let anything happen to you. Promise.”
Aang’s tattoos then lose their luminescence, and he falls against Katara with a soft groan as she catches him, with a soft mumble of “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Katara says calmly. “It’s not your fault.”
“But you were right. If firebenders found this temple, that means they found the other ones too…” Aang states, with each word growing quieter than the last. “I really am the last airbender.”
Aang then beings to softly weep as he nuzzles himself into Katara looking for any sort of comfort to fill the fresh, gaping wound on his heart. Katara adjusts herself in order to properly let him cry on her shoulder, and she looks around to assess their surroundings while she lightly caresses Aang’s back.
The entire mass of corpses and armor that previously were piled up were now few and far between, with helmets and breastplates stuck against the walls that somehow managed to stay standing. Any remaining organic material within the armor will likely be able to fully decompose now with more direct sunlight and more open space for decomposers to eat the remaining sustenance.
Katara does her best to avert her eyes from the various patches of disgusting biomass, before slowly angling herself a bit to the left to gain angle of vision on the what, if anything, had happened behind them. A few moments after she does this, she quizzically looks for Sokka before quickly noticing his limp body with his face down, left cheek to the ground.
Katara’s heart rate spikes, and she yelps with disbelieving terror, “Sokka!?”
Sokka does not respond, and Katara – incredulously fearful that Sokka was somehow slain – releases Aang from her grasp as she turns on her heels and runs as fast as her wind-ached body allows her.
Aang hiccups in surprise at the sudden movement before he then angles his eyes slightly to follow Katara, and he too then sees Sokka’s lifeless body laying against the ground.
Aang, in an instant, begins to spiral. Sokka is laying right there on the ground, living, and in the next moment not, as it would seem.
It doesn’t matter how terrible what I saw was, he thinks to himself. If I just managed to keep it under wraps, Sokka wouldn’t be gone.
Sokka willingly came with Aang to help him on his journey to save the world, and because of Aang’s terrible, stupid negligence, his friend not too much older than him now doesn’t get to live out the rest of his life and enjoy the many things that it can entail.
You should have kept it under wraps. He’s gone forever, because your terrible inability to let your emotions properly flow, like the wind. You are a disgrace, to not only Avatars but all airbenders you absolutely distasteful littl-
“He’s breathing! Oh, thank Tui and La, he’s breathing!” Katara yells to no-one in particular, snapping Aang out of the tragedy taking place in his headspace, not realizing he ironically wasn’t breathing at all.
Aang then lets his limbs move once more – reinvigorated by the fact that he indeed did not inadvertently kill Sokka – and he runs over to where Katara has pushed up Sokka’s unconscious body to hold, and as Aang approaches, indeed he sees Sokka is breathing.
“There’s a big bruise on his forehead, which will probably form into a bump. He must’ve been hit in the head when there was debris flying through the air,” Katara says in a weirdly mixed tone of voice composed of doctoral formality yet full of relief. “I think he’s going to be okay. Thank Tui and La, I think he’s going to be okay.”
Aang finally lets himself release a sigh of relief and sniffles as Katara continues after a brief pause, “We should move him onto Appa, so he’s in a safe place when he wakes up.”
“Okay. Let’s get him to Appa then,” Aang quietly agrees.
The sense of time, as with every sense, is completely lost while you’re unconscious. To wax a bit poetic: it’s indescribable to explain to those who live each of their tangible moments in a state of consciousness; you cannot describe the lack of perception to something that is only self-aware through the lens of their own perception.
It’s all darkness. No, even worse, it’s advanced darkness; he is still alive, but he has no senses whatsoever, as is the nature of being unconscious. Despite that, under this temporary veil, Sokka manages to understand something vaguely spoken to him with no voice or sound in his own mind, as if the concepts and implications of the statements were being directly inserted into his skull, brought to him directly from the spirits beyond:
“The seemingly smallest change can have the greatest consequences, just as the largest change can have none at all. To all existence, fate will continue to be a non-consensual command with no question of dissent. Will you comply?”
The concept easily cements into Sokka’s subconscious, aware immediately. The final question, however, is a caliber much beyond what a comatose brain can figure out on its own, and thus Sokka shall wake to answer the call…
…
… He’s still unconscious. Looks like a hitch in the metaphorical road?
…
Supposedly, one can’t exactly wake themselves up to a conscious state without, well, being conscious. Apologies for ruining the immersive experience, it won’t happen again. Let’s get back to the regularly scheduled programming with a quick mental jumpstar-
Sokka wakes with a startled jump, sitting up immediately. He hisses and quickly raises his hand to his temple as pain exudes from it like an earthquake. He then also quickly realizes he is not in the spot he once was; he finds himself on the rear end of and perpendicular to Appa’s saddle, tucked halfway into his sleeping bag like someone tried to get him in completely but gave up mid-way through. Sokka is pelted like he was in a blizzard with the thoughts, eliciting additional aftershocks of pain. To try and ease the pain as swiftly as possible, he angles himself back down onto his sleeping bag, slightly propping himself on his left arm with his right still on his forehead.
He then begins to softly rub the rather obvious bump that had manifested itself during his unplanned “nap” as he finally takes a moment to look around and survey his surroundings fully, mumbling quiet curses to himself as the aftershocks of pain continue to rage on.
Sokka, deciding that he saw nothing immediately important in the mountainous terrain of his periphery and the temple behind him, focuses on the front-end of the somewhat small, circular pillar they landed on when they first arrived. He rather quickly notices Katara very intently cooking with things he can’t quite discern over a campfire, back turned to him. Almost immediately after perceiving the sight, Sokka’s sense of smell essentially flicks on, and the absolutely amazing scent of fruit permeating throughout the air thrusts itself straight into his olfactory nerve.
Despite the recent head injury, the mere thought of food somehow allows Sokka to (metaphorically) divert all pain directly to his stomach as he realizes he is very hungry, and he needs to eat right now. So with basically no thought necessary, Sokka wriggles his lower half out of his sleeping bag, hops off of Appa, and clumsily walks over to Katara.
“Please tell me you’re almost done with whatever you’re making,” Sokka somehow manages to say in the most normal way possible, eliciting Katara to jump in place and gasp from the sudden sound of his voice.
Katara whips around rather tensely to face her brother with an expression Sokka can’t quite make out. Relief? Anger? Unbridled anxiety? All three, potentially?
“Sokka! What are you doing!? You need to rest; do you not feel that big lump on your forehead? How are you even standing up!?” Katara belts out, her tone of voice oscillating from a surprised franticness to stern, mother-like concern.
“Rest later. Food now,” Sokka states, ignoring approximately 83% of everything that he just heard.
Katara knowingly glares at her brother, recalling that about 93% of his intelligence and sense of self-preservation is launched directly out his ears when he’s hungry. She thinks that at the very least he probably didn’t get much mental damage from the blow if it seems like he’s acting normal.
“Just sit down, at least,” Katara grants, knowing she won’t get any further by scolding. “And yes, I’m almost finished, to answer your question.”
Satisfied with that response, Sokka plops himself down where he was standing, with the pain from his forehead still present but surprisingly not as severe as moments before.
This is why food is so awesome, Sokka begins to think. Just the thought of it makes all the pain go away!
Sokka then allows himself to zone out, in a trance triggered by the sweet smells produced by Katara’s masterful cooking. He daydreams of eating delicious seal jerky and enjoying the highest quality meats, cooked to perfection and cooled to the perfect temperature for consumption. He dreams of eating and sharing the aforementioned delicious meat, in the safest place in the world with his dad and his sister, even with Aang, Toph, or Suk-
Instantly, Sokka’s forehead once more erupts in pain causing him to hiss very loudly as again he reflexively places both hands on his head in a futile attempt to lessen the catastrophic mind-quake that just released itself upon him.
What did I do!? Sokka mentally and exasperatingly asks himself, as if he was going to get an answer.
Katara whips around once more upon hearing the distress from Sokka, and upon seeing him place his hands on his head and hunching over, she moves with the swiftness of an airbender to close the rather small gap between them.
“What happened? Are you okay?” Katara asks rather anxiously, kneeling and surveying him efficiently as she can to pinpoint what exactly the problems are.
Sokka grunts as the waves of pain continue to crash against his skull. He leans back a bit, extending his left arm fully and pushing it against the ground behind him, trying to find any position that eases the temporary agony. Luckily, the thought of responding to his sister pushes through after a few moments, as he doesn’t want to worry her any more than he probably already has by having such a “random” outburst.
“I’m… fine,” Sokka lies through gritted teeth. “I guess the lump just isn’t happy with me.”
Katara sighs. “This is why I said you need rest. Can you just… relax a little while I finish up with dinner?”
“Yeah. Relax, I got it.”
Katara sighs once more before standing up and turning on her heels to walk back the short distance to the campfire to continue, as Sokka puts it, the “greatest” and “awe-inspiring” act of cooking – ironic in comparison to who exactly Sokka thinks should be doing said act.
By the time Katara is back to cooking, Sokka has already let himself be re-consumed by his thoughts, despite the fact that his pain is much more present than the last time.
“If this lump flares up again,” Sokka quietly mutters to himself, “I’ll… do something bad to it. Is it possible to discipline a lump on your forehead…? Ugh, it’d probably just make it worse.”
After “successfully” threatening his own forehead, Sokka’s thoughts trail back to his very brief daydream.
Could my own thoughts have triggered it? He questions. Nothing about it was crazy; just another warrior cherishing the greatest food of all: meat. Did my own body decide I can’t have meat anymore while I was out?
Sokka continues to contemplate whether he needs to extend his discipline from just his forehead lump to the rest of his body for rejecting the idea of eating meat; how could his own body deny him the world’s most amazing and delectable dish?
He quickly decides he was going to stomp out any parasitic opposition toward the consumption of meat that found its way into his body during his temporary comatose state.
However, a couple conclusions very rapidly surface from the depths of Sokka’s subconscious, stopping him from enacting his justice upon his own body. Namely, he was thinking of meat just a moment ago as well as quite literally planning to squash anything that steps out of line in his own head, and although the pain from his forehead isn’t alleviating, it isn’t getting worse. Sokka from there deduces that it was not him thinking about meat that triggered the flare-up; the only thing other than meat that was of importance in that brief daydream was the people he wanted to share his meals with…
And then, from that deduction, it all very quickly clicks into place.
The memories sprang forth in droves; memories of a prince constantly on their tail, of the warriors that inhabit Kyoshi Island, and the beautiful princess of the Northern Water Tribe. Memories of a blind, prodigal earth-bender, the introduction of the perfect fire princess taking charge, and the greatest battle to end the century-long war.
The realization and subsequent confusion drowns Sokka as if a wave the size of the Earth Kingdom just crashed upon him. Somehow, he is remembering events that haven’t even happened yet, every major and minor moment from start to finish with as much detail as memories can produce.
Are these things fated to happen? Does he have a choice? Does him knowing matter at all?
Sokka then tries to calm down by re-orienting himself.
These “memories”, he tries to reason to himself, are just made-up events my stupid mind came up with while I was out. There’s no way I’m “remembering” things that haven’t happened yet.
Despite that last thought however, Sokka couldn’t entirely shake the feeling of dread and anxiety. He was able to mostly comfort himself with his hand-wave explanations of where these “memories” came from, but perhaps a part of him knew that something was too… real, about these events he can now recall.
You can’t remember things before they happen, Sokka mentally insists. That doesn’t even make sense!
… Right?