AN: This was written for 2008's Kataang Week at the Kataang community on LiveJournal. There is also a sketch that goes along with this (which can't be posted here for obvious reasons). If you'd like to see it, it can be found on DeviantArt by removing the dashes from the link below:

luculentquark-dot-deviantartart-dot-com/The-Last-95751661

Thanks.

Aang's always liked sleight-of-hand. Pulling handkerchiefs out of sleeves, swallowing a dozen eggs, making a dovesparrow disappear. A puff of smoke, a magical pass or two, and poof! into thin air! Then, with a mysterious smile and a snap of the fingers, the bird returns, cooing as if it had never left.

"Wonderful!" the audience cries. "Marvelous! Do it again!"

"Absolutely not!" the magician winks. "Whatever would you do if I couldn't make it come back again?"

The children laugh and nudge each other, because really, who ever heard of something vanishing and never coming back?

Abra!

It doesn't really sink in at first, how long Aang's been asleep. He knows it in his head, of course, but there's a gorgeous girl who wants to sled with him and he's lost anyway, and if the air tastes a little smokier than it did a few hours (days? weeks?) ago, it's just because he's so far south and they use different wood for their campfires.

Even when she tells him it's been a hundred years, even when they see the desolation and lifelessness at the temples, he's still not convinced. The airbenders worked magic with the winds, didn't they? And whoever heard of a magic trick that didn't bring the lost home?

He keeps his certainty tucked away in a safe corner of his mind, just for when they've stumbled across another ruin, when they've uncovered a little more of the world and found no airbenders in it. Then he reaches for that certainty, the knowledge that nothing's ever really gone, and steps forward with new vigor. There's plenty of world to explore yet.

Suddenly, though, there's a war in his lap (another of those things he knew with his head and not his heart) but it's abruptly real and the world is waiting (has been waiting) on him to end it, and everything he was gets pushed aside in order for him to become who he was meant to be. They all work terribly hard for a terribly long time, and finally at the end, he stands victorious and tired and wonderfully not alone, because somewhere along the line he loved a girl and she loved him, and that makes it easier to forget that there were others who once made him not alone, too.

Kadabra!

He's walking with this girl, now, in a podunk little village in the middle of nowhere. They're seeing what few bits of the world they haven't yet (he's having the time of his life). They stop at a roadside vendor; he's selling these little fruit pies and they look absolutely horrible, covered in pastel-colored swirls, but Aang insists on buying two of them anyway. As they walk away with their questionable spoils, he laughs and explains. He tells her of the stuffy old monks at the Southern Air Temple, how he and Gyatso would make fruit pies (that, honestly, really didn't look anything like these-for one thing, they were edible, but it's the nostalgia that's important anyway) and send them soaring through the air to-

He can't remember Gyatso's face.

The realization is so sudden he nearly chokes on it. Katara touches his shoulder in concern, but he's completely unaware of it; he's diving into his mind, looking for that little corner that he keeps his most important memories in, the things that you do not forget like faces and voices and the way wood smells after the monks rub oils into it for hours.

There's only a shadow left. It's like a little hand has gently painted over this corner of his mind in greys, smoothing out all the important edges, sanding down his treasures into faces as featureless as if Koh himself had slipped in. He sinks to his knees in the middle of the street; Katara wraps her arms around him and he grips her hand like a drowning man, because she loves him and she's real and he can't remember, and there is no one at all to help him. Then, like smoke suddenly dissipating in a strong breeze, he realizes-there will never be. He is the last.

Really, it's the greatest vanishing act of them all.

Alakazam!