7. WE ADOPT A ROUTINE. We travel for a day, rest for a day. The resting is as much to stop, gather bearings, figure out what's next, as it is to actually rest. When we're neat a village or a town, Sokka and Katara will head out, try to get news, gather information, but some supplies. Toph and I always stay behind. Sokka and Katara can pass as refugees, but the rest of us? There just aren't that many scarred twenty-two-year-olds in the world, nor all that many blind teenagers that talk like upper nobility.

Through it all, our lives very much revolve around the comatose Airbender in our midst. The vast majority of the nitty-gritty devolves upon Katara and I. We wash him, feed him, clean him. We make sure he's in a comfortable position. We feel for his pulse and listen for his heartbeat (though Toph comes quite in handy for this). We bandy theories about where his mind is. Sokka believes that he was dragged to some eternal party, up in the Spirit World, with endless food and drink and hordes of giggling teenage girls to fawn over him, and that he's just having too much fun to come back (Sokka, as far as I can see, mostly uses this theory to fantasize about food). Katara theorizes that he's fantasizing of a world where Katara does all the chores without complaint, and appreciates his more teenager-y moments, and never gripes at him (though, in private, with me, she admits that she really thinks he's been sucked into some fantasy where the way never happened). Meanwhile, Toph offers that he's just avoiding the fact that, with me there, if we wakes up, he'll have not just two, but three irritable bending instructors.

My own idea, for the record, is the most realistic, but also the most lame. I can't help but point out that, maybe, just maybe, he's in a legit coma, backing this up with the information that, when I got my own scar (a comment that makes Katara reach over and squeeze my shoulder), it was a good two-to-three weeks before I woke up; lightning attacks, I tell them, can do strange things to the body and, most importantly, the mind.

The others don't like this theory, and I have to admit, I agree with them. It raises to many possibilities, too many questions, too many concerns. The fun theories are more comforting, and even I have to admit that Sokka's lively descriptions of the food at the theoretical feast are far too entertaining to discount or ignore. It even becomes a new game for us, creating the menu for this feast. It gets quite obscene and complex.

IT's Katara and I who get into the serious questions that the others are avoiding, late at night on our smoking excursions. It's one of the few times we break our unspoken no serious stuff rule. We run in endless circles. She grills me on my own recovery process, all those years ago, and on other things I might know about recovering from a lightning attack. Will Aang have his memories when comes back? Will he be the same person? Better? Worse? Insane? She doesn't relish the idea of Aang regressing. Apparently, from what she tells me, in the beginning, Aang was a fairly typical fourteen-year-old boy: Flighty, pervy, impatient, resistant to reason and ignorant of caution. It'd taken most of the past year of trial-and-error to even begin to turn him into a tolerable human being. To go right back to the beginning, not just undoing his personal progress but his bending progress? She shudders at the thought.

One night, I point out that it could be that bad. We've stopped in a deep valley, cut out by a fast-flowing river. Trees line the banks, but up on the ridge above, it's nothing but gently waving grass. We lay in the grass, smoking and looking up at the stars, when I make my observation.

"What do you mean?" she asks.

"Well…I mean, just look at me. When I was exiled, I was lonely, angry, immature…you know, an eighteen-year-old pampered prince."

She scoffs. "From what you're told me, you were anything but pampered."

"True, maybe not in the traditional sense, but the point still stands. I wasn't like this in the beginning. Gods, I wasn't even like this a year ago. If I can turn into a functional adult in a relatively short amount of time, then it stands to reason that the fucking Avatar sure as hell can."

She rolls over onto her side, props her face in a hand to look down at me. "You really don't give yourself, like, any credit, do you?"

I shrug. "Takes one to know one."

"Heh…yeah…be that as it may, though, I'm just tired of being the mom to this group of misfits. I'm finally getting them trained, and if Aang comes back completely regressed back to the beginning…just…ugh. No."

I smile up at her. "You don't have to mom me."

She smiles, soft and sweet. "Well, yeah. Why else are we becoming friends?"

I blink in the gathering darkness. "We're friends?" I'd long since started thinking of them that way, but to have one of them, especially Katara, say it back to me? And like that, all calm, casual, like it was the most natural thing in the world? It's a lot to take in.

She, for her part, also looks confused. "Why wouldn't we be?"

"Well…" I fumble for words, for excuses, settle for the truth. "I guess…I never really had a friend before."

She looks at me for a very long time, then, out of nowhere, leans down and kisses me softly on the cheek. "Well, you've got one now." She rolls back onto the ground, but…closer this time. I can feel her body heat beside me, feel the pressure of her weight in the grass. I rub my cheek, smile.

It's nice to have friends.

The catacombs, with their flashing whips and falling rocks, seem very far away, even if only for a moment.


Not much to add here! Again! And I actually mean it this time!

Alright, real quick, just heading off a question here: What's Sokka doing during all this? Well, the dude's hunting. It's kind of what he does. Also imagine him fashioning, like, a bow and arrow or something, working and whittling and shit. Why else did he get that small dagger? One problem with a first-person perspective is that we're kind of limited to one person's experiences. As the other designated full adult in the group (which I think we all noticed even in Canon, once Zuko joined up), Zuko spends most of his time doing designated adult shit with Katara. If you know what it means to take care of a coma patient, it's doesn't take much to believe that both Sokka and Toph would get themselves as far away as possible.

Also, I'm happy to tell you that we're about to come out of our story lull here. Shit's going to start happening, and we're going to start building to the Day of the Black Sun, which in this story is going to be a bit more complex and a fuckton more bloody. Also, Aang will wake up at some point. Stay tuned!