A/N: Short chapter. Last chapter. 3
"Aang! Your phone went off next to me while I was meditating again!"
"Sorry!" Aang hollered through the house. He knocked the remote off of the coffee table, fumbled to pick it up, paused his show, and ran to the kitchen. With restrained anger, Gyatso handed him his still-ringing phone and turned to go back into his bedroom. Aang glanced down at it- Katara. Oh, right, he had forgotten about their daily walk. (Again.)
"It won't happen again!" Aang said to Gyatso's retreating back.
"I love you," said Gyatso. "But that's what you said the last three times it happened." He shut the door.
Aang sighed and swiped to answer the video call. Katara's blurry but smiling face appeared on his screen.
"Hey! Did you forget about our walk again?"
"Yes," said Aang. "It was so much easier when you could come bang on my door in person. I keep leaving my phone places."
"We'll be out of the apartment soon," said Katara. "I hope. I'm coughing a lot less today, and Dad still hasn't had any symptoms at all. It's just that Sokka's still pretty bad. So we're still more than two weeks from going outside."
"That could be worse." Aang set his phone down on the floor next to the door and sat to put his shoes on. "Appa! Momo!" His pets came running when he called. They sat still while he clipped their leashes to their collars and picked up his box of sidewalk chalk.
"Did you watch the livestream of the school committee meeting last night?" Katara asked.
Aang chuckled. "You know I can't sit through those things."
"Yeah, I had to eat a lot of microwave popcorn to keep myself awake. And of course they still haven't made firm decisions, even though we're getting closer and closer to the start of school. But the main thing I remember is that educators called in to insist on fully remote learning."
"Oh, wow," said Aang.
"Yeah. Teachers' unions are kind of powerful, I guess." said Katara. "But we still don't know if they're powerful enough to win. And even though I think I'd rather learn online, I don't know if it's fair to make everybody do it, even to protect teachers. For some kids, it might just not be enough."
"Yeah." Aang knew Katara was talking about him. And other kids, of course. But mostly him. During the spring, he had barely been able to sit down for an hour a day to do schoolwork. He had even considered going back on his ADHD meds, even though they made him feel so sluggish and slow. He had passed the semester, at least. But barely.
"You're not wearing a mask," Katara said.
"Oh no! Thanks." Aang tugged the pets back into the apartment and put on his mask before opening the door again.
"If you get to decide between hybrid and totally remote, what do you think you'll do?" Katara asked.
"I don't know." Aang looked straight ahead as he walked down the stairs, avoiding Katara's furrowed eyebrows. "Did you talk to Toph today?"
Katara's face relaxed, just like Aang wanted it to. "I did!" she squealed. "And she and Zuko both tested negative for COVID!"
"Yippeeeee!" Aang yelled. Appa started to bark in response, and Momo glared at both of them disapprovingly.
"I know. It's so good. So, so good. I feel so much less guilty. And now they don't have to tell Toph's parents that anything happened. They never need to know that I exist." Katara said.
"Wow. That's so lucky." said Aang.
"Yeah, I guess it is lucky. I wish I could know, like, exactly which decisions kept her safe. Exactly how close I was to infecting her. I wish there was one line where the risk went from 0% to 100%, but there's not. It's just this messy gradient where nobody can ever really predict anything." Katara said.
"Gyatso says that we can change our chances, but we can't change our outcomes." Aang said. "Everything's in that gray area between what we can and can't control."
"That's so true," said Katara. "He's so smart."
Aang laughed. He missed having pai sho tournaments with Katara, Sokka, and Gyatso. Those were always the nights when he felt most certain that he had been adopted into the right family.
"What other news did Toph give you?"
"She and Zuko took me to the beach and the seals were there. It was beautiful." Katara said, staring above the camera at what Aang knew was a blank wall in her bedroom. She was probably picturing the ocean. "And her gift is done. Hey, thanks for going out to buy me the hot glue and the packaging. I'll leave the finished product by my door later so you can take it to the post office."
"Of course!" said Aang. Katara had been talking about this gift for Toph, and planning how to ship it to her, since she had arrived back in Boston. Still, Aang had never been allowed to see it. "What did you end up writing?"
Katara blushed. "It might be too much."
"C'mon, tell me," Aang teased.
"I wrote, 'I love you, so I will keep you.'"
"Awww!" Aang could feel his face light up. "She'll love it. It's not too much. It's perfect."
"I want her to have something to remember the good things. The beach and the forest. In case… I don't know." Katara said.
"In case she doesn't come back?"
"I think she will." Katara said. She looked up at the wall again. "Still. Just in case." Katara frowned and stood from the edge of her bed where she sat. "Wait, I gotta close the bedroom door. Sokka decided to facetime Suki in the kitchen, for some reason. They're so loud." Her room spun through the frame of the screen as she turned and walked to close the door.
"Yeah, sometimes I can hear their voices coming up through the floor." Aang said. Appa whined and looked up at him, and he realized that he had stopped on the front steps of their tripledecker without knowing which way he was going next. "Where do you want to walk today?"
"To the river!" said Katara. She usually did. "And to the left, upriver, to see Perkins."
Aang nodded. Even before Toph entered their lives, they had loved walking to see the Perkins school on the Watertown side of the Charles river. It rose up out of the trees like the watchtower of a castle from a different time.
Aang divided his attention between keeping his distance from other people, herding Appa and Momo, and talking to Katara. They talked about the normal things that they talk about now: case counts, mask fashion, new games that can be played through Zoom. Tonight, they'll try to sync up their TVs and watch Hamilton, just because their middle-school selves would have wanted them to.
When Aang got to the empty parking lot of a shuttered rowing club within sight of Perkins, he let Appa and Momo off of their leashes. They chased each other a bit, gently wrestling despite Appa being nearly as big as Aang, and Momo being a wiry tabby cat. They knew how to be safe with each other.
"Did you draw anything today?" Aang asked.
"Yeah! I have a new flower design. I'll text it to you." Katara paused their video and sent it to Aang. Like most of her flowers, it had radial symmetry and a mix of rounded and pointed petals. So like most days, Aang scanned the parking lot to make sure no one was coming near his six-foot bubble, then knelt and began to re-draw Katara's flower with his chalk on the concrete. Beneath it, he wrote messages that he hoped someone would read: "No matter how you feel right now, I hope that you feel better." "Love your friends from far away." "There is always beauty where you look for it." "Go with hope." "Go with courage." "Go with love."
The chalk messages went a lot faster back when there were two of them, writing and drawing together, from six feet apart. Flowers used to be Katara's job, while the words were Aang's. They left clusters of words and drawings, spaced out, all along the river and the streets of their neighborhood. Aang hoped that they made someone happy.
"This was better when you were doing it with me," Aang said when he was done. He restarted the video and panned it back and forth so that Katara could see Appa and Momo wandering across his work.
"I'll be back someday. Soon. It's not even that far away." she reassured him. He could see the little worry lines between her eyebrows. They both knew that Sokka was still very sick. They both knew that the virus could linger in their bodies even after they seemed healthy.
Aang looked out across the water at the few kayaks and singles that were winding around the river in the shadow of Perkins. There were more of them now than there had been in April and May, but still fewer than he had ever seen in his years living by the river. "Soon is a nice word, but… that's what we said in March," he said.
"And it's what we'll keep saying until it's true," Katara said firmly. "Because what else can we say?"
"Yeah, I guess so." Aang said. He looked down at his phone just to see Katara's face again, even though he had it so well memorized that he knew what expression she was making at any given moment. Just to be sure. "You'll be able to leave the house someday soon. And even now, you're never that far away."
"No. No one is." Katara said.
Aang called his pets back to him and clipped their leashes back on. With his chalk and his digital window into Katara's room, he walked back home. The apartment he had spent too many hours in was waiting. And beside his best friend's door there would be a package full of love for him to send away to Cape Cod, where it would make two distant people feel a little less far away.
A/N: Thank you so much to everyone who stuck with me until the end. I LOVE hearing your thoughts and feelings!
I've already written some scattered scenes in this world that take place later on. I'm in school full-time and working part-time, so it'll definitely be a minute before any more significant work comes out, but it is coming. Eventually. I think.
:)