Chapter 37.5- And so the Dragons Danced

X_. _THE WATERBENDING MASTER

“How was it?” She asked, staring at him as he came out of the hole in the wall that he’d been using for his training.

“Just as always. Kyoshi spends as much time teaching as she does scolding me” Aang replied. She turned away from her stitching to stare at him. To really look at him. In the months they’d travelled together, Aang had completely transformed from the boy she’d found in the iceberg. If she knew what the world would hold for them, she would have never left the South Pole. She would have had Aang grow out his hair and hide his tattoos and swear never to bend again. She would have made the same oath if she’d known what elevating to the level of waterbending master would mean for her- for them.

Aang looked like he had aged decades. Like the century of time that he had spent in the iceberg had come down on him all at once. It had cracked him, she felt. The news. Their victory at the North Pole had not mattered when weighed against what Aang had lost. What they had both lost. Omashu had fallen, Aang lost the one human link he had to the time before the iceberg- his best friend. She had lost even more that day. Hakoda, Chief of the Southern Water Tribe, was dead, and the world would never be the same. Sokka was all she had left now, and he had taken the loss even harder than she had. He didn’t sleep, barely ate, and tried to spend every possible second training. Revenge was his goal, and it was telling that Aang did not even consider talking him out of it.

General Sung of the Fire Nation would pay, she thought. Sokka might have been the one who spent day and night talking about it, but she was the one who truly had the will and the power to see it to fruition. She knew the man that had seen through her Father’s best strategies as Bato had told them and thoroughly outwitted them to the point that her Father’s only choice was surrender, would be a tough nut to crack. Sokka could m make his plans and train with his boomerang, but when they found Sung, it would be her ice that would take his life from him.

“But she teaches at least? That’s better than Roku” She put forward, trying to see some sort of silver lining in their present situation.

“Yeahhh. It is. I wish she could convince him, but it’s not like all my past lives get to talk to each other. Apparently, their only link to reality comes from me, and when I draw on one of them the others are blinded. They come together when I’m in the Avatar State, but that’s too much of a blended mess of all of them for a conversation to take place” He said with a sigh before stomping both feet on the ground and pushing up an earthen stool. She smiled at the sight. Aang never really understood how much of a genius he was.