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Korra eyes the three kids, lined up with their hands clasped respectfully, and braces herself.
"Avatar Korra," Jinora starts, and Korra winces.
"Okay, kids, what's broken?" Jinora clearly has a speech planned, and it'll be faster to just jump to the end.
"Um," Jinora says, her airbender's flow deserting her. Ikki takes over, smiling brightly at Korra. "Now that you've discovered how to restore bending," she says, and then, uncharacteristically, stops.
Korra raises her eyebrows. The sisters look at each other uncertainly.
Meelo rolls his eyes at them. "Can you make our mom an airbender?"
It's like a punch in the gut - actually Korra's taken plenty of hits that didn't hit this hard.
"I - " she stammers. "Would she - you want - but - "
The three kids are suddenly all around her, crowding her, looking up at her imploringly.
"She would understand us," Jinora pleads.
"She could play with us!" Ikki argues.
"And she could do something about Meelo," they say together.
Meelo shrugs. "Yeah, that's fair."
Korra doesn't know where to look. She feels like she's in the spinning gates again, buffeted from all sides.
She takes a quick spiral step back, out of the circle of airbenders.
"I don't even know if that's possible," she says, putting her hands up.
Jinora narrows her eyes at her. "So… you're not saying no."
***
Korra isn't sure how long she's been meditating when Aang finally appears. She still struggles with it, wants to be up, moving, doing. But this isn't something she can figure out with her fists and feet.
"So, energybending..." she starts, and Aang nods at her kindly. She loves the way he always knows what she's thinking without her having to put it into words. (Because he's in her head, sort of, she guesses; she's still a little fuzzy on how all this spirit stuff works.)
"You want to know if you can awaken bending in someone who has never had the ability," he says.
"Right," Korra says, "And, that's crazy, right? Restoring bending, that's like, healing a broken arm or something, but making someone a bender, that would be like, making them grow a third arm, right? You can't just... right?"
Aang bows his head for a moment.
"I only did it once," he tells her.
"You - what?"
He looks away. "We tried for a long time to have a child," he says slowly. "We watched our friends, our family, building their families, and Katara couldn't find anything wrong, it just kept not happening. Finally, Kya - Katara said she could feel in the womb that the child was a waterbender, and I tried to trust the spirits, that they were sending the child we were meant to have, and I thought, next time. Then Bumi came so soon after, and I thought at first that he would be - but he wasn't, and I thought, one more." He sighs. "It was a long time, again, until Tenzin. Katara was old, by then, for children, and when he was finally born, she told me he would be her last. She could feel it, she said, that the Moon wouldn't call her again."
He looks at Korra. "There had to be airbenders in the world," he says. "For the balance of the elements; for the Avatar cycle to continue. I could see he didn't have the potential. So one night, when he was three days old, I took him, while Katara slept. I held him on my lap, and I meditated, facing the sea, to see if the lion turtle would show up, or anything else. Some kind of sign. But nothing happened, and when the sun rose, I put my hand to his forehead, and I opened his connection to the Air."
Korra blinks, jaw dropped. "Does he know?"
Aang shakes his head. "No. I think Katara knew - we never talked about it, but I think she could tell, when I brought him back to her, that something had changed. She trusted me a great deal, as the Avatar, and as a father."
"She must have," Korra says, shaking her head. "I mean - whoa!" She looks at Aang. "So I could do it. I could - bam! Airbender!" She smacks the heel of her hand into her palm.
"Tenzin was an airbender his whole life, except for those three days," Aang says seriously. "He grew up with it. Even if you opened the pathways for an adult, I don't know if they'd be able to use them."
"But you don't know she wouldn't, either," Korra says. "Oh, man! This is - I gotta - wow!" She jumps to her feet, only realizing as she does so that she's leaving the spirit world. Whoops. But there's no going back right now, she's way too keyed up to meditate again. She needs to ride Naga, fast fast fast, until the world is a blur around them, and then maybe when she stops it will make sense again.
***
She ends up telling Mako and Bolin - she has to talk to somebody, and Tenzin is obviously out.
"That's incredible!" Bolin shouts, of course. "You could make Asami a bender. You could make everybody a bender! Goodbye, anti-bender sentiment!"
"I'm not sure you should have told us this," Mako says, frowning at his brother.
Korra frowns too. "But... I tell you everything," she says, puzzled.
Mako pats her hand. "Aang kept it a secret, though."
"He must have been tempted to make more airbenders," Bolin says, "He always hated being the last one in the stories. Did he say why he didn't?"
"I didn't ask," Korra says. She hadn't thought of that.
"Tenzin was born before Aang fought Yakone," Mako ponders. "So he'd only taken away bending once, from Ozai."
"You think he had to have taken it, to give it?" Bolin asks.
"And maybe that's why he was able to give it back to Korra, because he'd taken it from Yakone."
"But Korra gave Chief Beifong back her bending without taking anyone's bending."
"But Amon had taken it."
"So maybe she could make Asami a bender, there are lots of people Amon got who don't need their bending back. Like Tahno, that guy's a jerk."
"Or Lightning Bolt Zolt."
"But could she take someone's firebending and make an airbender?"
"Why not? That's what Aang did."
"Maybe -"
"Stop!" Korra yells. Mako and Bolin both jump a little and turn to look at her. "Just... stop," she repeats. "I don't want to decide who bends and who doesn't bend. I don't want to be like Amon."
"You're not like Amon!" Bolin says, throwing his hands wide, wait-wait. "You're the Avatar."
"And you are choosing," Mako adds. "If you could make someone a bender, and you don't, that's a choice."
"Thanks," Korra mutters. "My head hurts..." Mako reaches for her, but she dodges away, heading for the door, for Naga again.
***
That night she tosses and turns, thinking about Aang, about Tenzin, about Jinora and Ikki and Meelo. When she finally sleeps she has disturbing dreams where she's bending water through the streets of Republic City, like the whole water-supply system moved above ground, and as she goes she siphons off little rivulets for certain houses or businesses, but not for others, and then she realizes that the silvery stream isn't water, it's bending energy.
When she wakes up, heart pounding, the sun is coming in brightly through her window, and Pema is sitting in her room, fiddling with a half-unrolled portable pai sho board with one hand and nursing Rohan with the other.
"Good morning," she says cheerfully, and Korra blinks at her.
"Do you play?" Pema asks, stacking and unstacking tiles. "I don't have much time for it any more. I'd always hoped Jinora would be interested, but she'd rather read."
Korra shoves loose hair back from her face. "Are you White Lotus?" she asks.
Pema smiles and shakes her head. "I have my hands full being Tenzin's wife," she tells Korra. "Of course I've spent some time around them, being with Tenzin... I get to meet a lot of people."
"Right," Korra says slowly. "Um, what are you doing in my room?" Pema raises her eyebrows, and Korra recalls that she is, in fact, this woman's guest. She ducks her head apologetically.
"My children are not as subtle as they think they are," Pema says fondly. "I know what they asked you, and - " she shrugs - "I got tired of wondering when you were going to ask me about it."
Korra winces a little.
"Did you know that when the White Lotus was founded, there was a debate over whether benders should be allowed to join?" Pema asks. "The argument was that 'benders bend, scholars study'. Some believed there could never be a great bender poet, because benders would always choose actions over words, and were too tied to their nation to speak universal truths."
Korra can't think of any great poets at all, benders or not. "But lots of White Lotus are benders," she says instead.
"Because there were no Air Nomads who weren't airbenders," Pema says, "They didn't want to go forward like a three-legged eelhound. Walk with me," she says suddenly, shifting Rohan to her shoulder and leaving the pai sho board behind, and Korra yanks on enough clothes to be decent and follows her into the hall.
As they walk across the Temple grounds, they pass various Air Acolytes doing the things that need doing, sweeping and weeding and hanging the wash. They all pause in their tasks and nod to Pema, who has a nod and a smile for everyone.
"I guess this little guy is another bender," Pema says, patting Rohan's tiny back. "But the rest of us, we are all here because we believe there's more to the Air Nomad way of life than airbending."
"But you'd be more like the original Air Nomads if you were benders," Korra says.
"We can't ever be the original Air Nomads," Pema answers.
They walk a little further.
"When we got married," she goes on, "Tenzin and I agreed our children would be just as much Air people whether or not they could bend. Jinora and Ikki think right now they want a mother who can airbend. But what happens when one of them has a child who can't?"
Pema leans her hip against a railing, and Korra realizes they're overlooking the spinning gates.
"After the war there was a sort of friendly battle between the Air Acolytes and some people living at the Northern Air Temple," Pema tells Korra. "Well, not always friendly. They were called air walkers, they flew gliders, made the first airships. Some of them spent more time in the air than on the ground."
"They had hoped Aang would come live with them, that they would be the new Air people, but Aang settled here. I guess there were hard feelings - this was all long before my time - but when Tenzin was born, the leader of the air walkers had these sent from the old Temple," Pema gestures at the airbending gates, "And they made up. We visit, sometimes."
Korra forces a smile. "Good old gates... but, I'm sorry, I don't - "
"Avatar Aang chose us," Pema says. "He could have picked the flyers. But he thought we could walk the path of the Air even if we couldn't fly it." She shrugs.
Korra looks at her for a long moment. "But you can't tell me that nobody here dreams of flying."
"We have the bison... but no. I'm sure not everyone here would turn you down." Pema frowns. "Korra - Avatar Korra, can you really do it?"
Korra bites her lip and looks away. The easiest thing would be to say no, to let it end here. "I don't know," she says honestly. "If we could have a world where everyone who wanted to bend could do it - wouldn't that be something to try for?"
"And if there were no more poets, and no more inventors?" Pema asks. Her voice shakes a little, and Korra feels ashamed.
"If the kids ask again, I'll tell them something," Korra says, "Something - Avatar-y." Pema's family has only just survived one revolution, and now Korra is talking about something that could start another one. Carefully, she touches the back of Rohan's head. "Aang saved the world. Maybe I'm supposed to change it. But I'm not going to do anything to mess things up for this little guy."
The Air Acolytes are the wrong place to start. If she really can make new benders, she needs someone who can help her figure out what that means, and how to do it right. She needs an expert on the future.
***
"What did you want to talk to me about?" Asami asks Korra.