Disclaimer: I do not own, do not make profit on, nor really have anything to do with Avatar: the Last Airbender, which is the sole property of Mike di Martino, Bryan Konietzko, Nickelodeon, and…I have no idea who else.

Disclaimer 2: There's creative use of punctuation (or lack thereof) in this particular chapter. It's done for effect, and I promise I know how to use quotes. I wouldn't play around with grammar rules if I didn't. Anyway, if it's still confusing, let me know.

Kanna (1x01 The Boy in the Iceberg)

Kanna wasn't alive when the Fire Nation last attacked the North Pole. By the time she was born, it was a hazy nightmare that people still whispered about over dinner. By the time she was a child, it was a grim tale recounted by the men who had fought and lived. And by the time she ran away, it was hardly mentioned at all.

The Western Earth Kingdom was just beginning to fall when she made her journey South. In those three months, she learned that all the stories the veterans told were actually real – and far more fantastical than even their most gruesome inventions. She learned a lot about war, and about the people who suffered from it. Despite her desire to continue South, she dwelled in the aftermath and tended to the wounded. Doing whatever she could to help a nation that had never had the peace she'd enjoyed further North.

When she finally arrived at the South Pole, she was exhausted, feeling decades older than she actually was. Her reason for running away – to avoid an arranged marriage – seemed almost paltry now, after what she'd seen. For, where she had run away from an imagined oppression, those Earth Kingdom men were fighting a real one. And she felt properly humbled.

So humbled, in fact, that she didn't complain about South's own sexist practices. She did the wash and fixed the dinners, worrying when her husband took their son ice dodging. Fretting when they didn't come home, only to learn they'd gone to celebrate with the other men afterward. There was still that fiery spirit in her, which balked at the assumption that the woman's place was in the home. But as she told herself nightly, if such a world had to exist for her family to be safe, she would take it.

She'd spend an eternity mending socks if it meant she would never again have one day like she'd had in the Earth Kingdom.

And soon enough, Kanna made her own peace with her role in the world. The South Pole may have been like the North in many ways, but it was also different. After all, she married her husband because he ate three courses of her charred turkey whale with a smile, not because he carved her some trinket. And those women who could waterbend were just as capable fighters as the men.

Not that they ever had to fight. Their world was quaint, happy, and – most importantly – peaceful.

Of course, happiness was never meant to last in a war-torn world, and Kanna's past caught up with her the day the Fire Nation arrived. Yet unlike the North, there wasn't an assault followed by decades of memories. The Fire Navy ships left, and then they came back. And again. And again.

The raids continued monthly for years, to the point that Kanna didn't remember what it was like not to live with war. The very life that she had fought and eventually accepted no longer existed. Friends and family, murdered or captured. Their villages left in ruin, survivors picking up the pieces just as they had in the Earth Kingdom. Perhaps, if Kanna had to find something to be grateful for, it was that no one in her family was a waterbender.

No one knew what happened to them.

The raids eventually stopped, after the Fire Nation had destroyed everything it could. All that remained were broken men and devastated lives, nobody spared even the smallest torture. They had nowhere to turn, for it was the same everywhere.

It was then that Kanna's fiery spirit returned to her. That part of her that never could stand to be oppressed. She approached her son that evening – the head of the house, after his father had been killed – and forced him to listen to her.

She said to him, you have known more war than I had at your age. You have known more suffering and more pain. To everyone in this village, we are defeated. But I know that somewhere in this world, there is peace. We can run to it, or we can fight to bring it here.

Take the men of this village and find those last vestiges of peace. Take to them your story and tell them that, like us, they will lose their freedom if they do not fight for it. Do this, so that maybe someday, your children and my grandchildren will know the kind of world that we once had.

He didn't want to leave her, he protested. What about the village? How could they leave it defenseless, without any men to protect it?

Don't think we women are so weak, she said. We have lived through the same war as you. While you are gone, we will be strong. We will protect what little of our home remains. But if we can't rely on you men to be strong, also, then we'll have protected nothing.

Hakoda left after that, commanding the men to follow. And though they didn't want to leave their wives and children, they understood through him the importance of what they had to do.

Kanna stayed, guarding her grandchildren while their father struggled to give them what he'd never had. And at night, she would give them this lesson – the same lesson it had taken her forty years to learn:

The world is what we make it. We can fight, we can run, we can accept. But if we do nothing, we will have nothing. Peace does not come because we wait for it.

It will always be the hardest won prize.

A/N: I'm sure this idea isn't original, but….this will be a long series of one-shots (if I can keep with it), centered on minor characters. What I plan to do is take one minor character from every episode, in chronological order, and write a little something – backstory, character study, what have you – describing them. These will be a mixture of sad, funny, happy, inspiring, dark, etc stories, all based on whatever character I'm writing for.