Aang couldn't tell if his eyes were open or closed. There wasn't enough difference between the two for him to make up his mind. They both looked equally fuzzy. Sounds were even harder, because there was a loud and consistent buzz whenever he tried to listen to anything. Maybe the buzz was always there and he hadn't noticed? Either way, there was no question of smell, taste, touch, balance, heat detection or pain reception. Baby steps, Aang, baby steps. Find something to latch onto and go for it.

Fear.

He didn't fear the lightning that coursed through him. He could see the arcs of light dance in his mind's eye, and they melted away like syrup. It was back-handed and petty. Dangerous though it was, it didn't deserve his fear.

Guilt.

He had failed to defend Ba Sing Se. It was this failure to defend those he loved that always got to him. But it happened, and he did all he could. No use dwelling on it now.

Shame.

He had lied about mastering the Avatar State, and hadn't attempted to solve it until it was too late. But he had to accept his passions were too strong. It was just a part of who he was. It couldn't be otherwise.

Sorrow.

He felt cold, alone, after such blinding heat. He felt himself falling, and yet didn't feel a thing. He felt alone, and sorrowful for all he'd left behind. But in the distance, approaching around him, he could feel himself merging with something greater. He could hear laughter. Child-like, honest laughter, out of sheer joy of life. How can he feel sorrow around such love?

Evasion.

He had a responsibility to master the Avatar State. He couldn't skirt around it again like before.

Illusion.

He had felt he could counter Azula and the Dai Li on his own, turn the tables on them. But it would need all of them. Every being in the world was a part of this. Everything affects everything else.

Attachment.

This is bigger than Katara now. Bigger than Ba Sing Se and the people in it. This is bigger than everything. Nothing else matters now except the balance.

And like a fog lifting, Aang could tell night and day by twitching his eye-lids. The buzz cleared and his hearing could pick up, as if it were a thousand miles away, Katara's voice. Strange, he thought, that she was always the first thing he sensed.

"A…Aang. Aang!" Katara echoed in the distance of his mind, "Sokka! Aang's awake!"

What Sokka said was only barely intelligible to Aang, but cleared as the Water Tribe warrior came closer…"…he's just going to drift back out again, he's done it half a dozen times."

"No…it's alright," Aang could hear Toph's voice even though it was further away than Sokka's had been, and he could just about make out two blue blobs before him, "I can feel his heartbeat, it's calm and regular, and his breathing's stable. He's awake."

"Thanks, Toph, it's nice to see some positive thinking around here," Katara was much clearer now to his hearing, and a green blob had joined the two blue ones. Things didn't have texture to them yet, but he was starting to feel the cotton blankets around him, which was a plus.

"After all that's happened, I think we can excuse a little denting of the optimism here," Sokka complained, his tanned skin, as well as Katara's, becoming distinguishable in Aang's vision from Toph's pale complexion…as well as a distinguishable fidgeting white blob on Toph's shoulder, "but I guess you got a point. Aang? Aang! Can…you…hear…the…sound…of…my…voice?"

Aang felt it was as good a time as any to attempt to use his vocal chords. "I'm alright…Sokka…I'm not…brain-dead." His voice felt raspy and stiff to him. It sounded like a chorus of frogs to his ears. Though it would be some time before he entirely trusted his ears. At once he realised that he was leaning back at an angle on some kind of slanted surface. He slowly began moving some unresponsive muscles to sit himself up and nearly lost his balance all over again, but his senses were coming back to him with surprising ease. He was able to make the rest of the group out right down to the eyes on their faces, though they were still blurry.

Katara leant forward to warn him, "be careful, Aang. You've been in and out of it for the last two weeks. You're still not fully recovered yet."

"I'm alright…" Aang asserted, shortly before the sudden change of position led to a fresh burst of blood into his head making it feel like it was inflating like a frog's throat. For some reason he kept reminding himself of frogs. He looked back up at Katara and realised something in what she said, "it's been two weeks? Where are we? And…what happened to your hair?"

Aang's vision had mostly returned, and Katara's pig-tail and 'hair loopies' had decidedly disappeared, and a not unattractive fuzzy mess of black hair had replaced it. Katara seemed to dismiss the comment, stating "we're in the Eastern Air Temple. We've been hiding out here to let you recover…but…we don't know how long we can stay here. Do you feel you can move?"

"I feel fine…mostly…" Aang closed his eyes and squinted as he brought a hand up to his head, "I've just got a splitting headach…ch…ch…"

Aang spluttered and froze at the horror of what he was feeling under the tips of his fingers. He gave the surface of his skin a further experimental rub to confirm that his demented imagination wasn't just making it up…a fine layer of some mysterious fuzzy substance had attached itself to his skull, covering it in a prickly, parasitic morass. He gurgled in terror.

"G…guys?" Aang squealed, "there's…something wrong with my head…"

"It's called hair, Aang," Sokka confirmed with some mirth, "and…you're welcome by the way. Keeping you alive was hardly an easy task. So I thought you'd appreciate if we considered things like shaving your head to be pretty unimportant besides."

"Hair?" Aang rubbed some more, a little mournfully, "I always wondered what it felt like…"

"Man, you're pretty self-conscious for a monk, aren't you?" Toph commented. Aang turned and realised that it was Momo who was sitting on Toph's shoulder. Without Aang to play with, the two seemed to have bonded somehow…in ways mysterious to Aang because Toph bonding with much of anyone seemed perplexing and peculiar to him. Toph leant down to pick up a dropped cherry and threw it up to Momo to keep him occupied with peeling something, while still facing Aang, approximately.

Aang took a deep breath and focused. Yes, he had hair. Lots of people have hair. It's just appearance. Get over it. You can't afford to be hung up on attachments like this. At this realisation a sudden calming wave washed over him, and he surprised himself with how easily he got over it. He even felt a lot better, and looked at his arms moving to see that he had managed to recover very succinctly. In looking at himself under the blankets, he also couldn't help but notice his lack of clothing. So, onto the next baby step.

"Thanks for taking care of me, everyone," Aang began, "but I think I'll try to get up. Where are my clothes?"

"Oh…about that…" Katara placed an arm behind her head in embarrassment, "I tried salvaging your clothes but…there was a great big hole in them. Actually, you could say there was…more hole than clothes."

Aang took this news of the demise of his clothing without much enthusiasm, and instinctively felt along the back of his spine. Azula's scar was still there, seemingly imprinted for the rest of time, and led Aang to glib "there's more hole than me right now. Maybe we'd match?"

"Sorry, kid, but even little sis' mastery of the tailoring arts wasn't enough to save your clothes," Sokka added distractedly from across the clearing they were in, busily sharpening his boomerang. His comment earned him a sharp slap of water from Katara, drawing from a small pool in the centre of the clearing.

It was when Sokka made his comment that Aang paid attention to his surroundings for the first time. They appeared to be on a raised platform, leading down and back upwards to other platforms around this part of the temple, surrounded by hills that closed off this section of the Eastern Air Temple to the outside world. It was a handy…and beautiful…place to hide. Though on a raised platform, it laid on a rocky outcrop that rose above the stonework, from which a scraggly and thin cherry tree jutted out in full bloom and water cascaded from a ledge high above into a pool that had formed on the edge of the platform. The section he was resting on seemed to have been propped up by Toph's handiwork.

Looking around, it may not have been 100 years for him, but for the first time Aang felt like it had been a hundred years since he'd seen the Air Temples. The reality of distance was a hard thing to sink in. But over the course of winter and spring it had eminently sunk. The distance was even starting to worry him, about his Airbending self. But it was useless to worry about such things, especially around these surroundings, because it felt so comfortably like home. With Katara and Sokka fighting, Toph listening with impatient interest, Appa snoring heavily nearby below the platform, Momo clambering off Toph's shoulder to gather more cherries that had dropped from the cherry tree in full bloom above…

In full bloom. It was the summer. He had no time to waste anymore, he needed to get moving, and a sense of urgency entered his voice when he said, "so is there anything I can wear?"

The shared glance amongst the three of them…even Toph, weirdly enough…was palpable, like the question was somehow extremely awkward. But Katara attempted to hide this, "of course! We didn't have a lot of options but we managed to find something your size…"

Katara embarrassedly opened up her bag to reveal Aang's brand-spanking new outfit. It was small, practical, and looked just right for him…except it was red. Katara looked down at the ground in some disappointment, and Aang was just plain confused until Sokka piped up to fill in the blanks: "yes, it's Fire Nation, and yes we really did try to find something else, but you've got to understand, Aang, we can't go anywhere with Appa without being spotted. We snuck down the mountain and some Fire Nation traders had just set up a new trading post and…well…they had a lot of these, so we decided to get one because they were cheap and no one else in the area has anything your size and…well…yeah…I'm…I'm sorry Aang…"

"It's okay," Aang shrugged, with complete neutrality, "I know you did the best you could, but I don't mind it, really. If I can live with hair I can live with red clothes."

This complete contentment and acceptance shocked even Toph, who couldn't help but lay a hand on the floor and check if he was lying or if he really was this un-Aangy. Katara recovered from the shock a little and leant forward to give Aang the clothes. As he dressed himself she stammered her next point.

"Well, uh, since you're in that kind of mood…I guess…uh…you know your staff?" Katara ventured.

"What about it?" Aang asked innocently, getting used to the differences in clothing styles between his old clothes and these new ones. He wasn't too used to lacking sleeves.

"Katara left it behind in the Old City," Toph said as accusingly as possible with one hand on the ground. While Katara shot Toph a glance, she realised what the blind girl was up to when she saw the look of concentration on Toph's face. She glanced quickly back at Aang, who looked almost reassuringly put-upon, until his face cleared with alarming rapidity.

"I was nearly killed back there. My staff should've been the last thing you'd be worried about," Aang looked Katara in the eyes and laid a hand on her shoulder, "and…I realise I never had the chance to thank you. Without you I would've died…thank you, Katara."

Their eyes remained locked for a lengthy amount of time, and Katara could see that Aang meant every one of those words with an earnestness that assured her that Aang was still there. But Aang seemed to realise this himself, and forced his eyes away. Katara could sense something was wrong. They could all feel it. Toph could feel it physically. Even Momo had paused in his cherry-stuffing to look at Aang with some panged curiosity.

Aang attempted to stand up, trying to allow his feet to support his weight. Though uncertain at first, and needing Katara for support at times, he got the hang of the good old 'left foot goes after the right foot' in no time. He wandered over to the edge of the platform to look around the temple, with its peaks and shallows. In an alcove he could see on the other side of the mountain, he could spy for the first time a couple of small figures, one of which was walking to and fro in much fretfulness and the other looking large, brown and innately curious about its surroundings. He'd forgotten about the two of them. But questions about that sort of thing would have to come later.

As of that moment, he was engrossed in his surroundings. With his friends behind him, Momo creeping up beside him, Appa chewing on a branch beneath him, and the spirit of the Airbenders all around him. He could feel a strange, metaphysical oneness with everything, but at the same time a peculiar emptiness. He looked back into the pool at the corner of the platform to see his own reflection. He looked unrecognisable to himself, with his loose red clothing and the arrow on his head hidden underneath his newly formed fuzz of hair. As much to get rid of the image as to quench his thirst, he leant down and slapped water all over his face, drinking up the fresh stream. When that proved insufficient, he dunked his whole face in.

This elicited a satisfying giggle from Katara, and Aang stood up again with a sardonic smile, looking himself over and saying, "well, I'm arrow-less, staff-less and orange-clothing-less, but at least I got my friends…my family…" Aang looked over the group as a whole, "and I'm still the Avatar."

To prove the point, Aang let his energies flow up his arms to bring the water up and shower over himself. He felt he could get a decent laugh out of it, just to assure them that it was still Aang inside this mysterious shell. But when there came only stunned silence, he realised with a start that he was still bone dry. He looked at the still water, concentrated, and tried again to produce a flow, one hand over another. The water didn't even ripple. The flow was gone.

Aang looked at his hands in panic. He attempted to calm himself and deal with the problem, and saw the rocky outcrop ahead of him. He grounded his feet, took a strong stance, and thrust a clenched fist in the direction of the rock. It didn't budge. Breathing harshly, he found it harder to calm down and focus, to accept the situation and handle it, and brought himself back to the move he had made himself. From a fixed position he rapidly spun around and tried to spin the air beneath him. All he got for his efforts was his new clothes getting wet in the pool and a scraped elbow.

The group gathered up around Aang, unsure what to do. Only Momo ventured so far as the edge of the pool, and no one could see Aang's face, as he moved around and looked down, sitting dejected and defeated in the centre of the pool. When he looked at the rest of them, he had tears in his eyes.

Aang started, stopped, faltered, sniffed, gasped, and finally said "I…I can't bend…"

Aang brought his knees together and locked his arms around them, burying his head in his legs, soaking wet and shuddering from the tears. Katara crept in closer to embrace him, while the others stayed motionless as if a bolt of lightning had hit them as well. The Avatar, the world's last hope for peace, was helpless.

To Be Continued…

Avatar: The Last Airbender Concept and Characters © Nickelodeon 2005-06