This is a follow up to my story, "Intermission."
Katara peeked her head through the doorway to the balcony again. He hadn't moved since she first checked on him an hour earlier. Still sitting cross-legged in front of the candles, facing out into the moonlit night on Ember Island.
"Is something wrong, Katara?"
His voice made her jump. It wasn't loud, or soft either. He spoke calmly and plainly. She felt foolish, of course he had noticed her, he'd be a pretty poor Avatar if a nervous girl was able to sneak up on him while meditating.
"No, nothing's wrong," Katara said stepping onto the balcony. The breeze coming in off the ocean was warm, but she instinctively shielded herself by crossing her arms anyway, "Sorry if I'm bothering you, Zuko said you needed to figure things out on your own, but I just wanted to check and see how you were doing. Out here. On your own."
Aang kept his eyes closed, "You know that you could never bother me. I'm doing…..well, things are what they are."
Katara didn't know what else to say. Her first instinct, as it always was with Aang, was to comfort and reassure him, to do anything to remove the thing that was causing him an ounce of unhappiness. But this wasn't something either of them could just avoid, this was something that had to be done and was so much bigger than them. Katara knew that she understood Aang better than anyone alive, but she had absolutely no idea how to go about convincing her sweet best friend to be more ruthless. If he were capable of being talked into doing this, then he wouldn't be the boy that she understood so much.
Before she could think of a way to fill the tense silence between them, Aang opened his eyes, turned to look at her and did it for her, "I'm sorry, Katara. For snapping at you earlier. I don't want you to think I don't appreciate how much you're all counting on me."
Katara couldn't believe what she was hearing, "Aang, we do not think that you don't appreciate the situation or realize what kind of pressure we're under. It's quite the opposite, not only are you expected to defeat the most powerful firebender in the world, but you're holding yourself to an additional impossible standard. Aang, I have seen you do so many things that I never thought possible, but at the end of the day, even the Avatar is only human. Defeating him is going to be hard enough without protecting him from yourself."
"It's not an impossible standard, Katara, it's a standard that my people have held themselves to for thousands of years. If I do this, I will lose a part of myself that I will never get back. I won't….I won't be the same person anymore."
Katara sat down beside him and rested a reassuring hand on his shoulder, "Aang, that might be true if you had any choice. But sometimes we don't. I understand that it's terrifying to consider what crossing that line might do to you, that's why I couldn't bring myself to kill the man who took my mother from me. But that was different. That was revenge against a man who was no longer a threat to anyone, it would have just been about me giving into my own hate."
She shifted even closer to him, as if maybe by touching him she could absorb the pain he was feeling, "You're not taking revenge against the Fire Lord, even though you have more reason than anyone in the world to do so. That's how I know doing this won't make you a worse person. You're always going to be the best person I've ever met. As for being a different person….well, I don't think there's any way to avoid that. You're already not the same boy that I pulled out of that iceberg last year. With each new element, I've watched you master new parts of yourself, and grow into the man you were born to be."
Without thinking about it, she playfully nudged him and winked, "You're certainly more bold now than when I first met you, I know that better than anyone."
Aang's calm demeanor cracked slightly as his cheeks turned red, and Katara could feel her own doing the same, partly out of embarrassment and partly with anger at herself. They still hadn't directly addressed Aang's previous "boldness" and she suddenly realized that right now he probably didn't need a reminder of the last time conviction backfired on him, even if it was due to her own lack of it.
Katara quickly tried to not linger and plow ahead with her point, "And maybe that's what it means for you to truly become the Avatar. Maybe that's what we've been coming to this whole time. You started your life as an airbender, but you're not just an airbender, you're the Avatar too. I don't want to be mean, Aang, but...isn't the Avatar supposed to be loyal to the whole world, not just his native nation?"
Katara had been terrified of getting to this point. It needed to be said, they had been dancing around it, but she was sure he would lash out and ask how she could possibly say something so heartless. But when Aang responded, he didn't sound angry, or even frustrated. He sounded…..tired. Tired, scared, and above all, sad. As if he were grieving a lost love.
"I think it might be different when I am my entire native nation."
He stood up, and leaned with both hands on the railing, hanging his head between his arms. Katara could see his hands trembling as he gripped the wood as if for dear life.
"You're right, Katara. I'm not just an airbender. I'm the last airbender. So if I don't hold to my people's beliefs…...then who will? My people's beliefs….they're all I have left of them."
The front he had put on since the moment she stepped outside started to crack as a sob caught in this throat, "All I have left of Gyatso, and Jinju, and Pasang, and Iio, and Tashi, and all my other friends I knew, and every man, woman, and child I didn't."
He didn't even seem to be talking directly to her at this point. He seemed far away from her, his eyes looking out across time one hundred years, "Every pair of fat, old monks playing Pai Sho, every acolyte crashing his first glider, every group of kids playing airball. As long as I stay the best airbender I can be, then maybe...maybe they're not really gone. But if I actually do this…..if I kill the Fire Lord…..then that's the moment when the Air Nation is truly dead."
He looked up at the moon, as if she might hold an answer, and Katara could see the moonlight reflecting in the tears forming in his eyes. "I'm the Avatar. I'm supposed to maintain the balance of the World. How can I claim to do that after I kill off what's left of one of the Four Nations?"
Katara followed him to the railing and they stood shoulder to shoulder, "You know Aang, sometimes I get furious with myself that I keep doing this."
He was momentarily snapped out of his despair by the amazing girl next to him saying something bad about herself, "What? Doing what? What do you have to feel sorry for?"
"I sometimes forget that you've already gone through more heartbreak than anyone can be expected to endure in a lifetime. You're such a warm and kind person that always sees the best in people that some people might mistake you for downright sheltered. But even close to a year out of the iceberg, you're still just trying to piece back together an entire world that you've lost. After we saw the ruins of the Southern Air Temple, after a few days you managed to regain your sunny disposition, I thought you had moved on already. But I quickly learned….you have to "move on" all over again every single day, don't you?"
Aang had to break his eye contact with her and look at his feet, feeling uncomfortably exposed by someone else explaining him to himself so easily.
"Aang, even after you lost everything you had to fight for, you still fight. You fight and struggle every day to bring hope to a world that, until you came along, had none."
She tilted his chin up to get him to look back into her eyes, "And that is the single bravest thing I've ever seen."
"Puh," Aang let out a sarcastic chuckle and shrugged her off, hard as it was to pass up any chance of physical touch with her, "If I were brave, none of this would have happened. I wouldn't have run away, the Fire Nation wouldn't have taken over the world, and I wouldn't be here now choosing whether to be a true Avatar or a true Airbender."
"Aang, it would take a lot more than stopping one monster for you to suddenly not be a true Airbender anymore. You fight for what you believe in harder than anyone I've ever met. The Air Nation way won't just live on in you, it will live on in everyone you've touched. Because that's what you do, Aang. Everywhere you go, you inspire people to be better versions of themselves. To fight for a better world, in any way they can. You inspire me."
She found herself reaching out for his hand and grasping it in both of hers like it was the most precious thing in the world, "I'm not the same person I was a year ago either, you've changed me. If I had never met you, I'd still just be a scared girl hiding my bending at the end of the world."
His eyes softened and he cracked the faintest of smiles that looked both comforted and comforting. She hadn't really solved his problem, he couldn't bring himself to agree with her that the Air Nation way would survive what he now contemplated, but it always made things better to hear Katara say nice things about him, no matter the context.
"That's nonsense and you know it, Katara," said Aang, unharshly and with a slight chuckle, "You were ready to fight even when there was no one around to fight. It was you who inspired the prisoners on that prison ship to rise up. That was the first moment since I saw the ruins of the Southern Temple that I started to truly believe that we might be able to bring back the world that I failed. That was also when I realized that I lo-," he stopped himself, his smile vanished, he slipped his hand out of hers, took a step away and could no longer meet her gaze," when I realized how special you were."
Katara became acutely aware that she was asking him to confront a decision that went against everything central to his very identity, while she couldn't even confront how a boy felt about her, and how she felt about him. There were dozens of times since that night at the theater when she could have told him everything, and despite the fact that it would be literally nothing but positive for everyone involved, she still didn't have the courage to do this simple thing that would make both of them happy. She had been so afraid to open up that door with Aang because that would make the danger so much more real. The idea of losing her best friend terrified her enough, let alone the idea of losing someone she was in love with.
But the more she thought about it, the more she thought Zuko had been right. If, perish the thought, something happened to Aang, her keeping that door closed wouldn't shield her. It would just add the pain of everything left unsaid. And talking with Aang now, she was starting to think that some reassurance about what awaited him once this was all over was just what he needed to get him through what he faced.
She closed the gap between them again and put her hand back on his shoulder, "Aang, I can't give you a reason, but I have faith that you will see this through. And you will do it in the most good way possible, because through everything, you are good. It's as simple as that. And whether that way is by going through with this, or by pulling off yet another miracle to find another way that I can't see, the whole world will know that you did your best."
He still wasn't looking at her, he was back to gazing out into the night air, "Do you really believe that?"
Trying to muster up some courage that she could pass over to him, she closed what little space remained between them, leaned forward, and kissed him on the cheek. The front part of his cheek, not quite on the corner of his mouth, "I know it."
Aang had at the same time about a thousand words and zero words running through his head. This wasn't, technically, a new experience, she had kissed him on the cheek before, but not since….everything happened. All he could do was blurt out the start of new sentences before he could finish them, "What…..But…You…...Do you…"
Katara just smirked, "Like I said, you're not the only one who's grown into a bolder person. We're all just figuring it out as we go along. And I know you will, before this is all over."
She gave his shoulder one last affectionate squeeze before turning around to head back inside, "Now try to get some sleep, you remember how you got the last time you stressed yourself out instead of getting rest."
Aang could still do little more than just blink. After a while, the only thing he could think of was sitting back down in front of the candles and resume meditating. He supposed if Katara had been trying to distract him from facing the Fire Lord, then it definitely worked. He found himself less paralyzed by the upcoming battle, because reconciling his core beliefs with stopping a genocidal monster seemed easy compared to mentally processing that kiss.
After remaining alone on the balcony for some time, he was joined again, this time by someone far less likely to confuse him with romantic affection.
"Hey Momo, I don't suppose you know what I should do."
The lemur's big eyes didn't offer any wisdom, about either puzzle.
"I didn't think so."
This is my first time writing new material in six years, and it's...a follow up to a one-shot no one was asking for, instead of continuing any of the three series I started then abandoned when I lost interest in fanfiction in 2014. I guess this is my way of easily cutting my teeth by going back to where I started, since this is a sequel to "Intermission," the first story I ever wrote. I'm hoping to accomplish two things with this story:
1) Like "Intermission, explain why Katara's feelings seem to change between "Ember Island Players" and the final scene of the show with no apparent explanation, and
2) Try to make Aang's dilemma in the finale more sympathetic. The writing spent three seasons pointedly trying to NOT humanize Ozai, I never really bought into Aang's "he's still a person" angle, because the way he's written and framed, he's NOT a person. So Aang came off as really selfish to me the first time watching, willing to risk the fate of the entire world just to preserve his own ethical purity. So I re-framed it as Aang not being concerned with HIS beliefs, but with HIS PEOPLE'S beliefs, and how those beliefs are his only remaining connection to them.
One more thing: if you like this, maybe check out my other story "Baby Brother?" It's probably the story that I'm most proud of, but very few people read it when I posted it because it's not tagged with any ships.