Disclaimer: Check this out: Avatar belongs to Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko. Not me.
Author's Notes: …Do I even need to explain myself? Surely you guys get it by now. Yes, Out the Window is coming, and yes, The Angel Experiment is in the works as we speak. But the world never stops turning, and time stops for no man. Or woman.
Simplicity
Sokka was a simple sort of guy.
Katara cried when their mother died; she was so full of complex emotions and feelings swirling through her young mind that she became overwhelmed and broke down in tears the day they set her free on the ocean. But Sokka didn't. And not because he was heartless; no, he didn't because he knew it wasn't her. Like his mother's body without her spirit, and he knew she was gone to someplace bigger and better.
And that was that.
When their father left a few short years later, he shrugged, set his shoulders, and picked up the slack. Because if he didn't, then no one else would, and where would his village be with no warrior to protect it, no chief to guide it, no hunter to provide for it? Of course he was sad, upset, angry furious confused emotional overwhelmed… but his village didn't need that. They didn't need a sad upset angry furious confused emotional overwhelmed little thirteen-year-old; they needed someone to be a warrior protector, someone to be a chief guide, someone to be a hunter provider.
So he was.
And then they met Aang.
Everything changed after that.
Things became much more complicated. In his tribe, it was easy to kill an animal because the tribe was human, and the animals were just animals. They needed the polar bear-dogs' cubs to raise as hunting animals, the Arctic wolves' teeth to make weapons, the seals' blubber to make soap and food. But in this strangely enticing world where everything was green and brown and red (colors rarely seen at the South Pole), things got confusing. Morals mushed together. People killed animals because they could, not because they needed the pelts to keep warm or the meat to stay alive.
What once seemed so black and white suddenly blurred together into a confusing hue of gray.
They experienced things that had never even occurred to the people of the Southern Water Tribe. Huge men raped young women because it made them feel powerful. Thieves stole from the elderly because they were greedy. Slimy circus folk scammed the commoners because they were too dense to figure out it was a trick.
All three of them—naive Water Tribe siblings and young Air Nomad—shook their heads in mute disbelief. When did people get so low and rotten, dirty? A century ago, and in a frozen place untouched by civilization for over eighty years, it was difficult for the children to wrap their minds around this concept.
People had fallen and brought their morals with them.
A murderer would be left alive with nothing more than a warning because he "was in a severe state of emotional instability." Homeowners could be forced to pay many golden coins to robbers who were attacked when they broke into homes and stole things that obviously didn't belong to them. Shouldn't murderers be killed, and robbers be thrown in prison? The punishment should match the crime.
Not anymore, Sokka realized. There were too many in-betweens, too many maybes. The world had become morally gray.
Then they headed deeper into the Fire Nation.
Fire Lord Ozai should be killed, Sokka argued. He and his forefathers had ordered the vicious slaughter of not only the Air Nomads but also the attempted Southern Water Tribe. HIS people. The Firebenders had already committed genocide against the people of the Air; he wasn't about to let them get his too. But Aang refused.
He was still a man, the Avatar shot back, and it was never right to take a life.
And, in shock, Sokka shook his head in agreement. It was wrong. Polar bear-dogs and Arctic wolves and tiger-seals were much different than humans… no matter how bitterly evil they had become.
And even though Sokka was furious at Aang in the beginning for being so weak, he eventually realized that the Avatar had been strong. He had been the weak one for placing one foot on black and one foot on white.
He tried to convince Katara to return to the South Pole with him, but he knew that wasn't what she wanted. Just like in the beginning, her emotions were complex and three-dimensional; they were always becoming something more and building on each other. He was just a simple guy with a boomerang who really didn't want a part in all this "flying" and "magic" nonsense to begin with. She had seen broken hearts, and she couldn't leave now. Not to mention that their frozen tundras and fur-lined parkas just seemed too uninviting and small to her now. Katara needed the entire world to live in.
But the South Pole was just big enough for Sokka.
He came back home, much wiser but also much more confused. The obvious had been perverted into something not-so-obvious. He tried to stop thinking about everything that had happened—the friends he had met, the loves he had lost, the people he had cared for. Sokka made an attempt to block out all his memories of pain, friendship, loss, love, anguish, despair… hope. And at first, it was hard, and he failed. The ties and relations he had made were much too strong for him to sever in such a short amount of time.
But eventually… eventually, he managed. Sokka forgot the huge world he grew so much in, and he became content with the small village nestled into the ice shelves of the South Sea.
He forgot about his love, cursed to hang forever silver in the midnight sky.
He forgot about his companions, always listening and never spiteful.
But most of all, he forgot about his brothers and sisters, with whom he had grown and matured and fought beside. They had shed blood together, shed tears together, and wiped clean the slate of the world. But he didn't want to remember them, so he forgot.
He just wanted to be happy.
So he was.
Instead of a bamboo forest, he drifted lazily in his canoe through ice-cold streams of water. Instead of koi fish and platypus bears, his glacial eyes searched for the tell-tale gleam of a silverbacked fish or the flash of an off-white tiger-seal pup. He drifted quietly through snow and ice and seas, his mind no longer churning out plans and strategies and schematics of fantastical war machines; rather, his thoughts floated docilely, slowly, lethargically, as if he weren't really thinking of anything much at all.
And that was how he liked it: simple.
Like he was.
No magic, no flying, no make-believe. Just a boy and his boomerang.