Duty
By xannychan
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters.
A/N: The pairing is really very cute. Too bad I'm feeling like some angst and I don't like canon ships too much. It was heavily inspired by Koh, but does not involve him.
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He is a hundred different things, a hundred different faces, a hundred different people, all representing a single ideal:
Hope.
In his hand, he holds the world. In his gaze, he holds the future. In his heart, he holds the people. In his bending, he holds power.
But in his dreams, he holds her.
And it is only her—her blue eyes, brown hair, dark skin, and her fight against what she is told to become—that he most desires. He feels the absolute need to hold her for all these things, before he must fade away to become a hundred other things (and, to his dismay, none of them will involve being her lover.)
Because he is the face of hope, because he is the very embodiment of an impossible ideal, he must choose the world over her.
(But what about me? He asks this question a hundred times, once for every part of his being, but it is then that the world comes to him in black, white, and empty dreams.)
It is this kind of thing he must reconsider, over and over and over and over again, because he is just one very small boy against an entire nation, an entire people, an entire world of fear.
"Aang," she whispers into his ear, "I will love you, forever and always."
In that exact moment, he wishes he was the face of love and that it was just him, her, and nothing else, because forever is a long, long time (and it is exactly the time he needs to tell her how much he loves her, how much he needs her, how much he could not live without Katara, his Katara, by his side).
But a hundred, a thousand, a million, a billion different things will stop them, and every single one of them will be him, because he must be a hundred faces of hope and he will never have the chance to be the actual victory.