Disclaimer: I have thirty whole dollars, but they laughed at me when I offered to buy The Last Airbender. I'm not really sure why.


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Bent

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He tells himself that he only closed his eyes for a moment. Not even a minute, just one second, because the sight of waves towering over him, reaching up like praying hands into the sky and curving down to snatch him out of the air, was too terrible and beautiful to bear. The Avatar shouldn't be afraid of the elements (what are they but a part of himself?) but the Avatar shouldn't run away, either. No – the Avatar shouldn't be someone who cannot face raging seas and the trusting faces of his people, shouldn't be a frightened twelve-year-old boy – shouldn't be Aang.

He only closed his eyes for a moment, but a moment is a hundred years and when he opens them everything has changed.

This world, his world, is all fire and ice, and the ground shifting under his feet, uneasy, unbalanced his mind whispers. Water is divided, pared down to a tiny village in the south, and in the north a rigid, frozen culture, self-contained, and unchanged in a hundred years. Earth endures, but is weakening, falling back and losing form the way the most solid stone erodes after centuries of weathering. Fire is out of control, a flame licking hungrily at the edges of a parchment map. Air is no more.

There is no way back, no celestial scale to lean on, to stop the earth from spinning off its axis and into endless darkness. There is no way to close his eyes and forget what it has become. He cannot leave it behind and return to the kinder world of his childhood: when Aang sleeps, he wakes gasping for breath – there is no air – there is no Air.

He only closed his eyes for a moment, but the world has come crashing down around him, and now he lies awake, staring at the shifting stars, afraid; he cannot close his eyes.

Not even for a moment.

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Finis


A/N: This little thing was not written in the middle of the night, but you can't really tell. Thanks for reading!