Oedipus
In his dreams, even, his fingers skimmed the figures of hundreds, thousands of people, all old and grown and wise. He touched the faces - fire, earth, air, water, and each one stared back, their stoic gaze screaming his lack-thereof and his loss-of-this and his child-does-that. Even those with placid smiles turned to wicked smirks of triumph before his sleeping eyes, making his dreaming hands clench for something close. He found things.Trinkets of time, baubles on his avatar tree. None could offer the wisdom of one thousand souls.
They were hardly dreams nor nightmares that any ordinary twelve year old experienced, filled with the dead and the dying and the when-you-need-them-most. He knew every face he didn't recognise, loved every man and woman that he'd never kissed, found comfort in the long-gone arms of people tens of thousands of years dead. Countless mothers and fathers smiled warmly or reached to strike, thousands of coffins loomed eerily, their dead arms never known. Lovers reached out in protest or died before him, held him tightly or pushed him back with a rough, open shove. Children he'd never made blinked their blue eyes and stared accusingly at him, wondering oh-so-quietly why he was little older than themselves.
His face contorted with rage and shrieked in his sleep, pounding rythms he'd never created, drums he'd never learned to play. Warriors streamed past him in fluid streams, striking or recoiling from his might.
In the dark and the night, brightness like never before smashed his skull outward, consuming the earth, the world, the universe in terrible dances of light and shadow and colour.
Warm arms shook him and a thousand women flashed across his eyes in an instant, smiling in pleasure or twisted with horror, begging for mercy or crumpled in tears like a fallen willow. Her hands didn't register as they flashed so many different colours, sizes, strengths. He pulled back from them, escaping the embrace with horrified eyes that flashed a million colours. His mouth contorted with so many expressions he couldn't count, and his hand rose to so many different actions that he gasped, all his strength clasping that single movement of hand to mouth, the contact creating more echoes of actions, memories, moments. His teeth lurched down at the command his own self-army, finally tasting the bittersweet blood of strangers in his mouth.
one hand moved behind the other quickly, crawling back with tensed fingers that still hit one thousand different floors, his buttocks touching surfaces he'd probably never know. His hands - all of them, all the thousands, moved back again and touched the void.
And for a second, Aang was Aang and all was right.
'But,' he thought, reluctantly twisting back up - 'What sensation ever lasts?'