Tenzin is eleven and the crashing weight of responsibility settles on his shoulders the first time his father takes him and his siblings to the Southern Air Temple's memorial garden.
His father is gentle, his mother kind as they explain, as they tell the story in more detail then Tenzin has ever heard, even though he knows they must be leaving out so much more. Kya is still, eyes wide, and Bumi is trembling and Tenzin is distant.
Tenzin is the second-to-last airbender and it hits differently, here in this garden. Kya and Bumi may listen to the stories, help pass on the culture, but only Tenzin can carry on the art of airbending.
He's surprised by the sudden bitterness and longing that Kya and Bumi were airbenders with him because then he wouldn't be alone. Tenzin will be, because even though he has his dad, he'll be the only kid in Republic City with mastery tattoos when he earns them one day, the only kid who can airbend, the only one with the weight of learning and passing on as much as his father, Aang, can give him before he dies. Tenzin's future all of a sudden seems very set in stone by the simple fact that unless he has children, airbending children, and passes his culture along, there will be no more airbenders and the world will be thrown into imbalance. Tenzin will spend his adult life teaching airbending and if that's both terrifying and comforting, well.
He's eleven and suddenly, as they rise from the grass, Tenzin feels much older.
Tenzin is nineteen and he's so fucking angry he aches with the sharpness of it.
He knows it's not Uncle Zuko's fault, but he can't even look at him right now when it was his ancestors that murdered all of Tenzin's. He knows that but it hurts anyway and he's been having enough nightmares of faceless firebenders chasing him that adding his uncle didn't seem like a very good time to him.
He's so angry and his father reassures him that his anger is valid, his anger is natural, and holds him tight when he needs him to and pushes him to use that anger in a healthy way and there's still so much of it that it explodes out of him in training, at dinner, in sleep.
He yells at Izumi and Kya calls him childish and Izumi looks stricken, and Bumi yells at Kya
and Tenzin ends up leaving the room because he can't do this.
It's not fair.
It's not fair and it'll never be fair and Tenzin is so sick of watching Bumi play with other kids without a care in the world or Kya train with dozens of waterbenders and he knows, usually, that it's not their fault, that they are descended from air nomads too, that they've been hurt by imperialism too, but he's so fucking jealous and so fucking angry and it's not fair because despite everything he's the one who will have to carry this. Kya is too busy with her water and in his more uncharitable moments he thinks it's because she's too scared of the weight of the Air Nomad legacy. Bumi tries, learns what he can, but there's only so much he can do and he doesn't have the same urgency that Tenzin does because unless there's a miracle, he won't be having air bender children. He doesn't have the weight of a whole culture on his shoulders the way Tenzin does.
The only person who gets it is his father and Tenzin won't bring it up on his own because he sees the way it all clings to him, the urgency reflected in each other like mirror images, the grief that has written itself into their breast bones. Tenzin has only ever known one air bender, but he mourns a civilization.
Tenzin is forty nine and his children are airbenders.
He is forty nine and grieving.
Tenzin is forty nine and grateful they will not be alone and angry they'll have to carry on the legacy themselves because he knows how heavy it can be, and overjoyed that his children's children will have nieces and niblings and nephews that are airbenders, that it will no longer be a small two person circle but rather a slightly larger, slightly brighter circle of benders, a culture coming back to life. It will never be the same and Tenzin grieves a people he will never know, a culture that will never fully be his despite the fact he is- was- the only one who carries it forward, but there's hope and there's light and there's a small child in his lap and he begins to wonder if this is how his father felt holding him.
Tenzin will never grow up in an air temple surrounded by other air benders but his children will at least have a glimpse and his children's children will have more then that and maybe, one day, one day, the air nomads will be alive and well once more, a dying breeze turned playful wind.
He may be the only one who can train the children in airbending, but Bumi teaches them air nomad music and feeds them air nomad food and Kya tells them stories and mythology and history.
There's grief but there's hope as well and Tenzin thinks his father would be proud.
It'll never be okay, but they were alive now. The air nomads were still here.
It would never be enough, but it was enough that he could breathe.