Taking Flight

Taking Flight is a collection of one hundred drabbles based off Avatar: the Last Airbender, a television show created by Mike DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko. Avatar belongs to these two wonderful guys, and certainly not to me. I'm just messing around with the world they created. The drabbles focus only on Avatar in general, and not on a particular pairing/ship, nor a particular character, though there are drabbles within the collection that focus on a pairing or character. All are unrelated unless otherwise specified.

001. Beginnings

He had once had a mother who loved him…

It was difficult for a mother to give up her only child—her only son.

She tried not to be selfish. She tried to think of the world, that she would be giving her son up for the world. That she had birthed a son so important everyone needed him. And she sighed, because she knew that though the whole world needed him, she needed him, too. It was enough to drive any mother mad.

The monk told her that he was an Airbender—that he was more than an Airbender. He was the Avatar. And Aang went with the monks to study, away from his mother. They had known he was the Avatar for some time now, they told her. He was close, but it was necessary that the Avatar have no attachments. It would disrupt the careful balance in his soul. And it seemed to be disrupting the balance in her own.

So she watched from a distance, long brown braid falling down her back simply and neatly, dressed in orange and yellow. The monk talked to her sometimes, Gyatso, his name was. He was a nice man, a calm spirit. And she knew, more than anything else, as much as it pained her, that it was Gyatso that Aang trusted, and not her. To him, she was nothing more than a face in the village.

Each night, she wished him luck, until the night it started to rain and the smell of burning approached from the distance, and there was nowhere to go and nowhere to hide, and her son was far, far away, angry and torn, and though he was supposed to save them all, he didn't, and steam hissed in the air and lives ended and another story began, with a prayer for hope Aang never heard.

Thank you for reading and have a nice day! Constructive criticism is much appreciated!

Ekatherina