As One Fey
An Avatar: the Last Airbender plotbunny
By
EvilFuzzy9
It is cold.
This is all I know. The cold is everything. It envelops everything, bites so deeply into flesh and blood and sinew and bone.
I cannot endure it. This cold pains me. It weakens me. It stifles me.
My life, my chi, as it is called in their tongue, is as the essence of fire. It is hot and bright, a mighty force for both destruction and creation. Fire is science, civilization, the heart of a forge, the hammering and shaping of things fair and useful alike. It softens metals, makes them pliable, malleable. Fire is the driving force of civilization, the pulsing heart from which all progress springs.
It is also that which has taken everything from me. Because of fire, I am laid low, reduced to cowering and scavenging at the furthest, remotest fringes of society like some manner of base animal.
Fire has shamed me, made me so weak and vulnerable. It has taken my home, and all which I loved.
My body was consumed by the flames of my very soul. Yet it is my body no longer. Not even ash, nothing remains.
Yet I am not formless, not without flesh and blood. But my body, if I can truly call this pitiful hovel as such, is meager, so small and soft and wretched.
I am weak now, a thing to be pitied. My life now is measured in the revolutions of the Sun, in the coming and going of the seasons.
It feels so brief, now. They tell me I am at the age of manhood, yet how can I be? So short a time as has passed, surely, cannot possibly be sufficient to shape one into the fullness of their natural might and cunning!
It frightens me, how short time now seems to be. Before, I could have marked entire years passing with the same indifference the elders here give to a week or two. Yet the years as these ones reckon them are so frightfully fleeting, pass so quickly, so soon.
Before my very eyes, I see young women grow gray and stooped, see newborns grow so swiftly into children.
So brief, so fleeting, life now seems to me, and so weakly does my Inner Flame burn in the wastes of this icy pit.
The cold bites into my very soul. The blood in my veins feels as ice.
This feels wrong, I should not be so cold, should not be so weak, so fleeting, so feeble of mind. Yet I cannot grow warm, my strength avails nothing, I grow older with each short "year", and my cunning can contrive naught but that which could be comprehended by the Other.
The Other chains me to this wretched existence. The Other inhabits my body, rules my limbs as often as not. It chills me, enfeebles me, dulls me.
It is an invader, I cannot help but think, a wrong, foreign presence. Yet try as I might, no effort of will or contortion of mind can extricate my essence from that of the Other, who saps my strength and inhabits my body.
... Or perhaps it is I who inhabits the body of the Other. Perhaps I am the alien presence, the intruder, the outsider, the parasite.
This thought unnerves me too greatly to contemplate. Could I truly be so entangled with the Other, that I can not even discern my reality from its?
For mine is a reality of fire and steel and minerals of the earth, of graving and smithing and shaping and making, where the Other's is of ice and snow and chilling waters, of hunting and fishing and trapping and subsisting.
Yes, surely, two essences so clearly opposed cannot possibly belong in the same body, the same soul. I am Fire where the Other is Water. I am iron and steel where the Other is ice and horn.
Yet I cannot extricate myself from the Other. Try as I might, my existence seems almost the same as the Other, my life force the same, my essence, my memories.
I no longer know what is real, and what is false. What is truth, and what is imagined? Dreams have I still of jewels and metals and fires and forges, of crafting and smithing and carving and shaping, of lands of lush green, trees as of silver and gold, of rolling hills and dense forests, and cities of stone and wood and silver and pearl, high and radiant and vast and beautiful.
What is real?
I look through eyes that feel wrong, eyes which feel like they should not be mine, yet eyes also which are the only ones I have ever had, eyes natural and right and belonging to no other.
I look through these eyes, and I see nothing but white, and blue, and gray, and black. Nothing but ice and snow and sea. Nothing but the endless wastes of this frozen tundra.
I shudder a little, shivering in the cold, trying to call the fire I know is there, just below the surface, just barely out of reach. I breathe in the air – so cold I nearly cough, nearly retch and wheeze as it freezes my throat and my lungs with a burning frost itch – and pull on the warmth I know to be there, breathing out my breath, exhaling a sliver of my soul.
Weakly, faintly, a dull red flame flickers to life in my hands, dancing and wavering in the air between mitten-clad palms. For a moment it grows, becoming stronger and warmer, and I begin to feel aright.
But then the Other reemerges, reasserts itself, and the flame dies away.
The Other fears the flame, abhors it. Fire took everything from it, fire has destroyed its home, laid us all low.
In that way, at least, the Other is like myself.
Or is it that I am like the Other?
Against my will, my feet turn around, turn our body so that the Other is facing back towards the village, if village you can call it. A scant smattering of low, snow huts, the dwelling-place of a few small families.
A "tribe" they call this, but so small it is, and so few there are.
A girl comes out, young yet still older than the other children here, and pretty I suppose you could call her, also, in the strange, homely manner of these people. She is clad heavily in furs, as are myself and the Other.
The cold is everywhere, here.
"Sokka!" the girl calls me, and for a moment I wonder whether that is truly my name, or the name of the Other which shares with me this body. "What are you doing?!" she cries, annoyed, irritated, impatient. "You said you would help me and Gran-Gran clean that tiger seal, but all you're doing is looking out at the sea!"
Ah, the Other must have made a promise to her. I was unaware of this.
The Other speaks through my lips, as ever it does, but this is just as well.
The language spoken by these people is strange to me, its sounds alien and unlovely, its words clumsy and cumbersome. In this language, which I understand as clearly as my native tongue, I can find none of the beauty of the language of my home, the language I keep close to my heart, and dear, as one of the few things I know to be mine, and no other's.
"Sorry, I guess I got distracted," says the Other, in the voice of a boy who has not yet come into the fullness of manhood.
"Well, don't!" snapped the girl in response, Katara they call her, my sister, or is she the Other's? "Don't forget, we still have to go out fishing today, too! You're the one who keeps fretting about our stores running low, after all."
"Better safe than sorry!" called back the Other, more out of reflex than any sort of spite or real desire to illuminate.
The Other moves my feet, our feet, its feet, and brings us back towards the village, towards the only manner of civilization for leagues beyond counting.
Not for the first time, as the Other rules this body, for now, my own thoughts turn inward, turn to contemplation of old, half-forgotten memories from another life. As I do so, our spirit burns just the smallest bit brighter.
Though this body be of snow and ice and Water, my soul, our soul, is of hot and bright, all-consuming fire.
A soul of flame.
Fire-Spirit.
Fëanáro.
That was my name, in another life.
Yet that life has passed. That body is gone. That reality is now little more than a dream. This tongue of mine can scarcely even form the syllables, this voice cannot even sing the words as they ought to be sung.
All is gone of the life I once knew. All is gone, all is lost, save one thing alone.
The Fire still remains.
Sokka, may I now be, the Other may have always been, but once Fëanáro, Curufinwë, was I.
And Fëanor I will always be.
For the Fire still remains.
A/N: A neat/silly little idea I had, an extension-slash-sideways-evolution of the notion I had for a firebender Sokka, which I actually outlined in a challenge prompt at the end of one of the chapters of Unexpected Aftermath. Also, of a silly-ass idea I had of Sokka being the reincarnation of someone like Feanor (EVEN THOUGHT TECHNICALLY ELVES HAVE AN ESTABLISHED SYSTEM THAT DOESN'T REALLY WORK LIKE THAT BUT WHATEVER)
Now, I do not list this as a crossover because [-crossovers get fewer hits-] it is only SORTA KINDA crossover-ish. Also, for now this is just a standalone thing, with no plans for continuing.
For now.
But who can say when the mood might strike me again? :D
EDIT: 9-7-13, fixed a few minor typos
TTFN and R&R!
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