Chapter. 47.4- And so the Dragons Danced

I smiled as I felt revitalized by the resurgence of the green flames. They came and went at their own will these days. After the fight with Iroh, I’d had a brief breakthrough with getting them to show up more regularly than before, but that was still erratic at best. It seemed it had smiled at me now though.

Aang dodged out of my first fire blast, but the force of the blast still managed to knock him off course. Oh we were so cooking. I shot forward, forming jets of flames beneath my feet that carried me forward even faster than before. Almost faster than I could keep up with. Fuck yeah. He blocked the fist I sent for his head and I smiled. This was the first time all fight that I’d managed together him to block. I pushed my fist into his staff, upping my output and waiting for the staff to combust but it didn’t. Interesting. Our eyes met.

There was something there. An awareness beneath the bright eyes. “You are an abomination” he said, but I was stopping to think this was him. Would Aang have used that word? Surely not. The voice still carried the echoes of hundreds of others like his voice used to while in the Avatar state but there was something deeper about it. Something Other.

He pushed against me, and now Aang fought like someone else completely. We broke apart and then he wielded the staff like a baseball bat, tryin g to brain me with it. I bent at the waist to avoid the attack and then slammed a kick into his side. He didn’t even move. Where Aang from before had been unable to pin down. This one was like an immovable object. He punched at me and it was all I could do to lift my hands in time to block. Regardless, I was sent flying right back into the ground from the force of the blow.

I braced for the pain but needn’t have worried because I found myself landing in a pool of mud. Thank you, Toph, I said silently as I caked part of the mud with my fire and used that solid hand hold to lift myself back on solid ground. Aang was still coming at me, but he had to block several explosive blasts from Maki. Toph was also sending boulders in rapid fire fashion.

He weilded the elements like he’d been learning them all his life, but the element he weilded the best was water. He called forth massive amounts of water from the air itself, using it to block Maki’s combustion bending and to wear down Toph’s rocks into nothing but sand. While still floating in the air with his airbending. We weren’t fighting a twelve year old boy with power anymore. This was the Avatar.