Roku's Island

"Again!" Roku shouted, and Danny did a side-kick, rolled, and then punched twice on one knee. Small fireballs launched forward as he did each of these movement.

It had been nine months since they had left the Southern Air Temple shortly after they learned Danny could firebend. Roku took him back to his home, a small village on a volcanic island, to further train him.

For days, Roku had Danny practice stances and breathing techniques before actually practicing firebending. Finally, after a week, Roku showed Danny the basics.

Realizing that jeans weren't the best material to be practicing martial arts, Danny traded his blue jeans and white t-shirt for a cotton red shirt and pants.

Danny learned quickly, mastering the first set of forms in the first two weeks; and now, nine months later, he was close to mastering firebending.

Indeed, Danny had each form, stance, and technique down to a point, but something still wasn't right. His firebending was, for some reason, weaker than your average firebender.

For example, Roku performed a side-kick, rolled, and punched twice while on his knee, and with each movement, fireballs the size of basketballs launched forwards. When he told Danny to do this, fireballs did come forward, but they were about half the size.

This was, understandably, frustrating for Danny.

"And once more." Roku told him. Danny repeated the movement, shouting with each kick and punch. While these ones were larger than the last two attempts, they were still proportionally smaller than Roku's.

Danny kicked a rock in frustration.

"I don't understand, why am I so… weak?" Danny said, and he sat on the ground.

Roku frowned and sat next to him.

"I don't know, Danny." Roku said. "A firebender's strength varies from person to person."

"Yeah but I'm the..." Danny looked around to make sure no one was in the valley they were training in. "I'm the Avatar. Shouldn't I be, you know, stronger?"

"There are many reasons you could be a different case," Roku said, "perhaps it is because you are from a different world. Maybe there, this is incredibly strong."

"Yeah, maybe." Danny said, rubbing the medallion attached to his chest through his shirt.

"Why don't you take a break? Go into the village and get some fruit." Roku suggested, giving Danny four copper pieces. Danny smiled.

"Thanks." He took the pieces, stood up, and began walking westwards towards the village.

.

.

When Danny had first come to the island, he was greeted with curiosity, but was very welcomed as the Avatar's firebending apprentice. Danny liked the little village, and most of the villagers that he had met liked him.

One of the girls, Ming (daughter of the local fruit vendor), had actually developed a bit of a crush on the stranger. It was hard for her not to, with the mystery surrounding the teen and his strange appearance; like his colorful red, white and blue clothes that he arrived in. Or his eyes that seemed to belong to someone in the watertribe, but with pale skin like those in the earth or fire nation.

Danny's mysterious and sudden arrive had created some rumors around the village as well. The rumours ranged from Danny being an orphaned Firenation boy off the street that Roku had graciously taken in (not too far off), to that Danny was the long lost son of Roku from an affair in the Northern Water Tribe when he trained there years ago.

Ming really didn't care about Danny's past, just that he was here now. And that he was walking into the village. She ran to the shed in the back of her house, and wheeled the fruit cart out front. Normally, when the sun started to lower in the sky, her father would close the stand, and put the fruit cart away.

She placed a block on each wheel to stop it from moving, and unfolded the legs from the other side of the cart. Ming still remembered the one time that she had forgotten to put the blocks in front of the wheels, and the cart began rolling down-hill towards the ocean. Danny happened to be there, and ran at unbelievable speed to stop the cart. Which he did, with only seconds to spare before the cart hit a rock on the beach. If that cart had broken, she knew that her father—

"Hi Ming." Danny said.

Ming snapped her head up from organizing the fruit.

"Oh." She pushed her hair out of her face. "Hi Danny."

Ming was fourteen years old, and the oldest of her family's two children. Her brother, Lee, was four. She was a few inches shorter than Danny, with black hair, and brown eyes.

Danny looked down at the selection of fruit, even though he already knew what he was going to get.

"I'll have a—"

"Mango?" She asked, interrupting Danny. She immediately blushed, and avoided eye contact while she picked up a mango from the cart and held it out to him. "Sorry, you usually get a mango."

Danny took the mango from her and took out the four copper pieces from his pocket.

"Uh, thanks. It's cool that you remembered." He said.

"That would be three copper pieces." She told him.

"Isn't it usually four?"

"Not for you…" Ming said and giggled as she took the three copper pieces from him as he stood there, stumped about why he was receiving this act of kindness.

"Um… flameo." Danny said awkwardly, remembering the word he heard some kids say when he told them he was Roku's apprentice. "Thanks again!" He said and waved at her as he left.

"Bye!" She said and he repeated back at her. Ming sighed and started folding up the cart again.

.

.

'Why was she so nice back there?' Danny wondered to himself as he peeled the skin off the mango while he walked. He remember the way she said,

"Not for you…"

Then giggled. "Not for you…" What is that supposed to mean?

Danny stopped walking. 'Wait… Does Ming have… Does she like me?' He paused for a minute.

"Nah." He muttered under his breath and waved his hand to the side, as if to dismiss the idea.

He stopped again.

But does she?

Thinking back, Danny began to recall how Ming treated him since they first met. She was almost always the one behind the stand when he got there, he had even seen her shooing away her father as he approached, she gave him a kiss on the cheek when he saved the cart from destruction, and he was pretty sure when walked into town that the fruit stand would be closed since the sun was almost setting in the sky.

If he was right, he wasn't really sure how to feel about this.

On one hand, a fairly pretty girl actually liked him for a change, instead of him pinning after her. That was new. On the other, he wasn't really sure he could be with anyone right now, since he didn't know how long he was going to be here and everyone who had gotten close to him in the past died.

Don't think about that.

And on another, deformed, sad hand, he could be completely wrong.

Danny sighed and finished up the mango as he approached Roku's house.

.

.

.

It was almost dark, and when he entered the house, Roku's wife, Ta Min, greeted him.

Ta Min told him that Roku wanted to speak to him in Danny's hut. Danny thanked her and walked back outside and around to a small house that looked like it had been carved into the mountainside; for it was.

With Roku wanting Danny to be close by, but not having enough room in his house, he earthbent a small house out of the mountain. A wooden roof was later added, for a house made completely out of rock worked like an oven in the hot, Fire Nation sun.

Danny entered through a cloth hanging door, and Roku was indeed waiting for him. He was currently looking at the framed picture of Danny's family on the nightstand.

Over the past nine months, Roku and Danny had grown fairly close, as is expected when you spend the majority of your time another person, and they enjoyed each other's company. Roku was the closest Danny let anyone get to him since the accident with his family; he was almost like a father figure.

The boy had grown on Roku too; he was becoming like the son he had never had. Whenever they weren't training, Roku was telling Danny more about their world. The nations, what animals inhabited this world, his previous friendship with the current Fire Lord. He had even shown Danny how to play pai sho, something else they did in their free time.

And Danny in tern told Roku about his world. How there were many nations in his world, too many for him to count, but he knew it was in the hundreds. He explained that he was from a place called the United States of America, where people voted for who was in charge. He told Roku that in his world, dragons did not exist, to which Roku was surprised.

Danny eventually told Roku about what his family and friends were like, and how his parents were ghosts, or rather spirit hunters. Roku found this strange.

"Hunting spirits." Roku contemplated. "It just sounds… Disrespectful. Spirits are fairly peaceful unless bothered."

"Not in my world." Danny had told him. "Most are just malevolent. Some have even hunted me."

Danny was glad to have someone to talk to again, and he really hoped that—

"Oh, Danny," Roku said, looking up at the teen and putting the picture back on the stand. "I was wondering when you would come back." He looked back to the picture. "I'm still amazed how such a small painting could capture such unimaginable detail."

Roku walked over to Danny.

"I wanted to tell you that we may be leaving for the Southern Air Temple soon. Your firebending training is nearly complete, and you should begin your training at the temple."

Danny frowned. He liked this island, it was beginning to feel like home.

"Will you be coming with me?" Danny asked. Roku smiled.

"Of course." Roku walked over and put a hand on Danny's shoulder. "Clockwork instructed me to mentor you on all of your abilities; to do what no other Avatar has done before and instruct another Avatar. Once you learn the basics of airbending, we'll be coming back to this island; where I'll teach you the rest."

"When do you think we'll leave?"

"In a few weeks to a month. You still have a bit to master."

Danny nodded and, seeing that it was dark out, bid Danny goodnight. Danny sat down on his bed, and picked up the picture frame.

He felt great. The best in over a year.

.

. . .

.

BANG!

Danny's eyes shot open as the ground shook.

He jumped out of bed and ran outside.

Balls of fire were slamming into the earth, sending shards of stone and ash everywhere. Danny looked to the sky for the source, and found it coming from the volcano.

Oh no.

Danny ran back into his hut and threw his photographs into his backpack, still packed with the ghost hunting gear and some clothes (he never unpacked them), and slung it over his back.

It looked like they would be leaving for the Southern Air Temple a little early.

He sprinted into Roku's house, almost running into him as Roku and his wife exited.

"Danny!" Roku yelled as he airbent a tunnel through the cloud of ash. "Follow me!" He ran through the tunnel of air, dragging his wife behind him with Danny following.

This was bad.

Danny looked up at the volcano as he ran, smoke and ash billowing out of it.

This was really bad.

He thought back to school, back to history lessons about Pompeii. They watched docudrama about it; first, firey pumice rained to the earth, then ash, then a hot fiery heat wave of dust and ash, and then lava.

It wasn't the lava that killed the people in Pompeii, never the lava. It was heat waves that swept through the village. What was it, four hundred degrees Fahrenheit?

Even hotter?

It doesn't matter. It killed them almost instantly and buried them in ash. When a volcano's heat doesn't kill the area's inhabitants, the curtain of ash coming at them certainly does.

Danny couldn't let that happen to these people.

A surge of energy overwhelmed Danny, and suddenly he was running at almost super-human speed, grabbing and dragging Roku and his wife behind him. They weren't that far from the village before, but now they were in the center.

Those closer to the volcano, closer than Roku, where already up and running, but it didn't seem as though the entire town knew what was happening.

Danny yelled at the top of his lungs, aided in part by his ghostly wale (not enough to cause destruction but enough to wake those still sleeping.

"Evacuate your homes! The volcano is erupting! Run for the boats!" The streets were now filled with screaming people, running towards the many boats.

Roku stopped and looked back at the sheet of ash coming at them. He airbended a sphere of air around him that quickly expanded to cover the entire town, setting the ash back but not stopping it.

"Danny! Head to Air Temple Island! Make sure everyone gets off the island, I'll meet you there!" Roku shouted at him and Danny nodded.

Almost everyone was at the shore, some in their boats, when Danny heard someone shout,

"Danny!"

"He looked back to see Ming, carrying her little brother, about forty feet from him. She tripped over a rock, and they both fell. The ash was approaching.

"No!"

Two white rings formed at Danny's waist, spreading over his body and putting him into his old black and white jumpsuit. His hair became snow white, and his eyes a determined green as he flew at top speed towards Ming.

The ash was almost upon them. Crawled towards her brother, embraced him, and closed her eyes. Danny grabbed them both as the ash and dust enveloped them all.

Danny emerged from the darkness, intangible and carrying Ming and Lee towards the shore.

He landed on the hot sand, next to an empty boat, and set them down.

"Get in the boat!" Danny yelled at the two. Lee was crying, and Ming opened her eyes, surprised that they were somehow alive.

"How…" She looked closely at the white haired stranger. "Danny?"

"GO!" He said, picking up Lee and sitting him down in the boat.

He turned around to see Ming still starring at him, mouth gaping open.

"Hurry!" Danny told her grabbing her shoulders. "If you haven't noticed, a volcano is erupting behind—"

Ming kissed him, which lasted for a few seconds, then stepped away from the shocked Danny.

"Thank you." She said, and got into the boat. Danny shook his head to snap himself out of the daze he was in, and pushed the boat into the water, and then flew as he pushed it up ahead of the other boats.

Danny shared one last look with Ming and flew back towards the island.

.

.

Roku earthbent a wall up from the ground where he was standing, blocking the debris from getting any further.

He looked back to the boats to see something flying towards him. As it got closer, he saw that it was a man flying without aid… Impossible!

The being got closer and there was something very familiar past the white hair.

"Roku!" He yelled. "It's me, Danny!"

"Danny?" Roku yelled in surprise. He looked back toward the stream of lava coming towards him. It over came the wall and Roku slid down to a rock jutting out of the mountain. He then earth bent two trenches to divert the lava.

"But, how—"

"I'll explain later!" Danny yelled. "What do you need me to do?"

Roku looked up at the teen.

"Get out of here!"

"But…"

"Go to the Southern Air Temple! I'll be fine!"

Another blast of lava came out of the volcano.

"Please, do as I say!" Roku shouted at Danny.

Danny floated there with a look of disdain on his face as he turned and flew from the island. He looked back and was able to see Roku run and jump to the top of the peak.

Danny turned back towards the mainland and flew as fast as he could.