Chapter Text
He lands face-first into cold snow and the utter shock of it is for all the wrong reasons. He lands in snow that cradles him gently, so gently, and it’s just another thing that’s wrong.
He wasn’t supposed to survive the landing. He’d been hundreds of feet too high for that.
Sounds warp around him, muffled from the snow in his ears and the awful ringing in his head. For a second, everything blends together in a confusing, tangled mixture. He’d been struck over the head— no, that’s wrong, it’s his leg that’s broken, wasn’t it— and his teeth chatter from a comforting cold that wasn’t supposed to exist at summer’s end, not where they were in the Earth Kingdom and the whole world feels like it’s on fire.
Wait. The thought is like an ice spike in a current, disrupting the flow of ideas around it, like a single fish singled out of the shoal.
Earth Kingdom? He’s never left the village before.
The thought is urgent, desperate enough that Sokka scrabbles at the snow, ears ringing, thoughts sluggish. Where’s Toph? Where’s the firebenders? Suki?
Even that feels wrong but the ringing is growing louder in his ears and one thing is exactly the same— the sharp, acrid scent of ash that hits him with a bolt of instinctive panic. Firebenders. That’s right. He’d been fighting, then he’d been falling as the airship crowned the red sky above him.
Sokka manages to flip himself over in the snow. His arms shake with the effort, pain throbbing behind his eyes from the club wound that downed him and even that’s not right. His arms are too thin and scrawny. His gloved fingers twitch in the cold, hands empty, no weapon, but the flecks of soot-stained snow that lightly dust his upturned face are gut-wrenchingly familiar.
The sky above him is silver, not red. The disconnect keeps not making sense. His hair’s longer, no characteristic undercut, no warrior’s wolftail. The fur-lined hood of his parka is stained with blood and the world feels out-of-focus around him from his head wound.
A face leans over him where he’s lying in the snowbank. There’s the sound of yelling in his ears. The old woman shakes his shoulder, grasping at him, and the touch grounds him and makes everything snap into perfect clarity around him.
The raid. The Fire Nation soldiers. That final sight of a skull-faced, spikey Fire Nation helmet and the iron club coming down over his head as the world went dark and still.
He’s awake, and more importantly he’s alive. He’s alive.
His grandmother shakes him again, tear-tracks frozen into the lines on her face. “Sokka,” she says, and he’s never seen her eyes so wide before as they catch on the blood staining his hair. “Sokka, can you hear me? Are you injured?” She helps him sit upright and the world spins around him.
The village is in shambles. Any hut not made of ice or bone is burning and greasy black smoke boils in the air around them like an ugly fog. There’s the thin, high sound of wailing in the distance. It sounds like Katara.
Sokka blinks as he takes in the sight, because he remembers this day. Of course he does— it’s the worst day of his life.
Sokka bolts upright, swaying as his balance lurches like a drunken penguinseal because he’s shorter now and the nightmare doesn’t stop happening once he realizes what is wrong.
Sokka is twelve years old again. He’s just lost his mother to a Fire Nation raid and the realization makes him feel just as small and helpless as it had the first time he’d lived through it.
He stumbles along behind Kanna, ears bleary with tears even though she hasn’t told him yet. She doesn’t need to. Only one thing would make Katara wail like that and he’s lived with the sound of it haunting his sleep for years.
Grandmother doesn’t take him to his family’s igloo. Instead she sits him right down in the snow by what little is left of the healer’s quarters and checks over the bloody, growing lump on his skull. He winces at her tender touch and he thinks he’s gone cross-eyed. He must be concussed, badly, because that’s the only way any of this makes sense.
Kanna snaps her fingers in front of him as he drifts. “Sokka,” she says, frightened. “Are you okay?”
Only then does he start to break down as the shattered village musters around them. Old man Tenut is there picking through the debris and his familiar face is a slap because the man had died in his sleep over a year ago.
Everything starts to twist inside him like gears clicking into place.
Sokka dies over three years in the future on the day of Sozin’s Comet. He and Toph fall together and it’s a memory branded into his mind. Suki was already dead, and by that point nothing else had really mattered anymore because Aang died first. Sokka’d watched the Avatar crumble underneath the overwhelming amount of fire that ignited the very rock of the landscape aflame.
The plan had failed. Sokka had failed. And for that mistake Lord Ozai lit a fire that consumed the world.
Three years in the past, twelve-year-old Sokka cradles his head in his hands on the first worst day of his life. Kanna cradles him and his father doesn’t know what they’ve just lost because he’s busy chasing the Fire Nation ship away from the village with the rest of the warriors and Sokka can still hear his little sister sobbing.
He remembers that disbelief, the staggering incredulity of the wound carved through the heart of their family so suddenly, so pointlessly, because Mom was gone and he couldn’t wrap his head around why.
He knows better now.
Sokka’s used to being the one to step up, to think things through, and his brain chews away at everything he remembers. Each smallest detail lines up down to the patterning of the parka Kanna wears when she, at last satisfied he’s not about to start bleeding out the ears, pulls him into a close embrace and whispers that Kya’s gone. The words are identical. Even the teary inflections match.
Grandmother holds him there against her chest and he’s numbly grateful for the way it hides his face. He’s not surprised. Why should he be?
Sokka’s lived through this day before. This day and the next, when Chief Hakoda comes home to a village that has grown yet another person smaller.
But it’s not that day yet. It’s not the week after either, or the next year, or the next— all those days struggling to survive when the only threats had been the cold and the hunger and one or two Fire Navy ships. Or after, with Aang, when the threats had been the entire world.
It is once again the worst day of his life. Why?
The feeling swells within him, threatening to break free, and Kanna rocks him against her chest like he’s six years old again, back and forth as ash falls around them and his racing mind goes deadly still when his bleary eyes trace the shape of the full moon that hangs in the sky above him. He’s too worn out to even cry.
For a second, the images overlap. Red sky. Fire Nation airship. Failure. Dying. Silver moonlight. Black snow. Back and forth. Push and pull. Life and death.
The full moon hangs overhead like a promise.
Tui, the black koi fish, the Ocean Spirit who in it’s grief and rage destroyed the Fire Navy fleet and saved the North Pole.
La, the white koi fish, burned and lifeless as the moon itself disappeared from the sky.
Yue, the princess who gave her life to give it back to the Moon Spirit. Her hand in his. The way everything works in a circle, even time. Even death.
All of him is one long spiral. He’s twelve. He’s grieving. He’s lost. He’s grieving for things he hasn’t lost yet and today he lost his mom and he failed and he died and it’s all happening again.
Sokka presses his gloved fingers into his eyes and scrubs snow across his face to shake off the fuzziness of the concussion and wipe away his tears. Why him? Aang’s the bridge between here and the spirit world— he’s the Avatar, the savior, the important kid around whom destiny turned. Sokka’s just a guy with a boomerang and quiver full of snappy one-liners and a mind that never learned how to let a problem go.
Kanna sits with him as grief works its way through them both. He compares what he knows with what he remembers and gets immediately distressed by the lack. They made so many mistakes that it’s hard to count them. The siege of the North Pole. The failed invasion plan. Ba Sing Se. Azula almost killing Aang. Losing Appa. Zuko. Everywhere he checks, he finds more and more mistakes. They pile up around him like snow.
But he’s twelve again and can do nothing for these future hurts, not when his mother is dead. She’s dead, and that’s not his fault the way everything else going wrong feels like it might be, and the grief of it builds into a grim urgency inside him.
Katara is still wailing from their burned igloo. He remembers he hadn’t gone to her the first time, hadn’t wanted to see their mother blackened and unrecognizable the same way Kanna doesn’t want to either as she holds him and sobs over her daughter. His mother. His sister still crying.
He hadn’t gone to her, so blinding by grief and impotent anger that he’d ran off after Hakoda and Bato and the rest of the warriors in a small canoe and spent several hours paddling in useless circles without an inkling of a plan until the shame had struck and he’d screamed out at the ocean around him and thrown chunks of ice and stabbed at the water with his spear. By the time he returned it was after dark and Katara had fallen silent on her own.
He remembers that shame now, how badly he’d hurt her by haring off like that. How the action had done nothing but caused the both of them more pain. He hadn’t been kind to her either, in the days and weeks and months after, bristling around each other’s hurts in a way he doesn’t think he’ll ever forgive himself for.
But he is twelve years old and the grief is fresh and raw and unending and he almost wants to laugh because isn’t this exactly what he wanted? The chance to do it all again but right this time?
His sister wails again and it’s like every shattered, disordered thought in his head finally lies flat. The dream-like floatiness evaporates, leaving simple reality behind. The thought connects. Fuck saving the world. He’s starting with Katara.
This time, Sokka goes to his little sister and wraps his arms around her and he can’t ever believe she was once this tiny and young. He feels tiny and young too but his head is crammed with knowledge about what’s going to happen next and none of it feels more important than the way he hugs Katara. This time, she hugs him back.
It’s the first big mistake of his already unmade as Katara sobs against him and he holds her and whispers how everything is going to turn out okay and they rock back and forth underneath a full moon he’d never believed in until he gave his heart to the girl who became it. Push and pull. Push and pull.
Something’s splintering deep inside him. Something’s being reborn.
Everything keeps on circling back to the same impossible truth— he knows better this time.
…
Sokka wakes up changed in more ways than one. He knows without a doubt that the things he remembers are real— he doesn’t even question this— but the eyes are a surprise.
He stares at himself in the small, polished copper mirror Grandmother holds up to him. He’s seen his reflection before in still pools of meltwater and, later, actual mirrors. His younger face is a shock, but not as much as his eyes. His whole life they’ve been a bright, cheery blue, much like the rest of his tribe.
Now they’re both strangely opaque, the colors misty. He blinks at the change. He’s seen eyes like these before, bright as full moons. Yue’d had them, and his eyes changing to match hers brings him up short.
Kanna makes him follow her fingers with his eyes. “Has your vision changed at all?” she asks.
“No,” Sokka says, shaking his head, dumbfounded as he holds up the small mirror and tilts it this way and that, watching the pale colors shift.
Kanna clucks her tongue at him. “You’ve been spirit-touched, Sokka. The Moon has granted you a blessing.”
Doesn’t he know it? La once blessed Yue the same way and gave her matching eyes. “I don’t think I’ve earned the Moon’s blessings,” he says anyway. “Katara’s the waterbender; she can have whatever freaky eye nonsense this is.”
Grandmother smacks at him for the blasphemy of it, scowling. “Sokka,” she childes. “The spirits are nothing to scoff at.”
“I’m not scoffing,” Sokka says, at a loss to explain. He has Yue’s eyes. Spirit-touched.
Well, the spirits must have a sense of humor because the funny thing about knowing he’s on a deadline doesn’t mean he magically knows what to do about it. The war in all it’s awful grandeur is distant from the Southern Water Tribe, distant in a way he doesn’t argue with when his father gathers all the remaining warriors together and they take their ships out into the bay and don’t return. Watching Hakoda’s small fleet vanish from sight hurts just as much the second time but this time Sokka doesn’t fight it like he had before. He has the benefit of knowing the Fire Navy won’t return for three more years and in that time the Southern Water Tribe warriors can help a lot of people.
And maybe he understands the appeal of running from grief better now.
There’s a certain amount of perspective that comes with living through events a second time. He doesn’t feel abandoned, betrayed, or unwanted by his father’s departure. The war demands things of them that no one likes. This is just another necessary sacrifice. It’s a math he understands.
Still, Hakoda hesitates. “You’ll be the man now, Sokka,” he says. “It’s a lot of responsibility for someone your age, but you’re my son. I believe you’ll do well.”
It’s not what Hakoda’d said the first time, when Sokka had been desperate to join him, desperate to prove himself a true warrior worthy of sailing under him.
“You can trust me,” Sokka says back. He’s just cut his hair into an undercut wolftail and it doesn’t feel as performative as it had the first time he’d worn the traditional style. “I won’t let anything happen to the village while you’re gone. I’ve got this.”
And Hakoda squints at him with pride, because even now Sokka was excelling in hunting and fishing and training drills. He’d been working hard, pushing his young body to the limits to recover the skill he’d used to have, drilling the muscle memory of it back into himself. He could take Bato in hand-to-hand half the time even if a part of him longed for a sword in his hand, but swords weren’t Water Tribe weapons and he’d have no way to explain his skill with it so he stuck to his club, his spear and knife combo, his trusty boomerang that has never let him down.
“I trust you, son,” Hakoda says. “My heart isn’t so troubled leaving the village and Katara knowing that you’ll be here to watch out for them.”
Knowing what’s coming does nothing to lessen the sting of it. “Go crack some Fire Nation heads for me,” Sokka says, flashing his new moon-pale eyes. “And watch out for Bato— you know he never learned how to dodge.” This is said with a wry, joking grin.
Hakoda laughs, the sound booming across the ice shelfs. The ships are stocked. They’re both stalling now.
“You know, Sokka,” his father says, gazing at him. “You’ve grown into an amazing boy. I’m saddened that I won’t be around to watch you grow into an even better man.”
The praise tightens his throat and Sokka allows himself a moment to feel like a child again as he hugs his father as tightly as he can.
He still has to let go in the end.
…
Every day Sokka learns how to better use his memories. He doesn’t spend the first few months as the oldest man in the village floundering around, struggling to provide for the army of mothers, children, and elderly who are all that’s left. He already knows exactly what to do, how to find the best hunting spots, the best places to cast his nets. There’s no learning curve. They don’t nearly starve that first winter and he spends his extra free time reinforcing the village defenses. The wall grows thick and sturdy and his watchtower isn’t a rickety deathtrap this time around.
He takes his time with Katara, spends his evenings holed up in their igloo with Kanna eating stewed sea prunes and listening to the old tales. He learns how to braid to help Katara with her hair, takes up a bone needle to learn how to mend clothes, doesn’t reach for a second fishhook when he gets the first stuck in his thumb.
That first year after losing their mom and being left behind by their dad had been a long, slow, miserable affair. This time he works hard to make sure that the time passes easier, that the village is well cared for and even better fed, that Katara doesn’t feel so alone and Kanna so helpless in the face of it.
It gives him time to think, sometimes more of it than he knows what to do with. He’s already retraced his steps to the ice field where they’d found Aang, as fruitless an endeavor as he’d known it would be— that iceberg had been deep underwater until Katara’s waterbending had displaced it. There’s no trace of it now. Even with a deadline looming overhead, some things simply cannot be rushed.
So Sokka takes his time, relives a part of his childhood he didn’t get the first time. He throws snowballs with the young ones, helps Katara reenact the old stories for a crowd when the nights grow long and cold and the sun stays a shy thing in the sky. He misses his parents but it’s a weight he knows how to carry, and being so steady and reliable makes Katara more stable as well. She’s only a year younger than him, after all. He doesn’t need to live through this grief twice to know kids always bounce back easier. They’re more flexible, more adaptable, and he’s there for her like the big brother he should have been the first time.
One amber-drenched sunset he stares out across the frozen water with a pang in his heart. It’s about the time of year that Zuko receives his injury, and Sokka thinks hard about if the spirits sent him back minutes too-late to save his mother on purpose or if he’d always carried this knowledge in his head and the club wound had simply jarred it loose. One is a kinder thought than the other, and he’s not sure he believes in the kindness of spirits.
But he does know that he won’t be able to save everyone. Wartime promotes the grimmest of arithmetic, and Sokka hadn’t been able to save his mother and he isn’t able now to spare Zuko the suffering of his burn. What can he do to stop it? Steal a canoe and strike out for the Fire Nation? Run the blockade and break into the Caldera, sneak inside the Royal Palace, and kidnap the Prince? It’s as good a way as any to die.
It’s still such a tempting thought. What good is knowing the future if he couldn’t spare his best friend the worst of his agony? At least he knows Toph and Suki are doing okay for themselves out there in the world but Zuko always needed rescuing.
The thought eats and eats at him as time passes. Summer is always a short affair this far south and too soon the sea ice thickens and the tiger seals return for the winter and with them flee his chance of… something.
The sun sinks like a fiery disk below the distant horizon in every streak of gold he’d ever seen matched in Zuko’s eyes. Sokka isn’t one for prayer, even now after everything he’s seen and done, maybe because of everything he’s seen and done, but he offers up a small one now. “Agni,” he speaks into the dying light, voice lowered like a secret. “Keep him safe for me, alright? Until we meet again, okay?”
The sun spirit does not answer him.
Sokka sighs and lifts his empty fishhook out of the icy water. “Fine then,” he says. “Leave that to me too.”
And so ends his first year.
…
The second and third pass much the same. The Fire Nation leaves the village alone and the fishing is good. He feels older now and still younger than he’s ever been. He’s glad of the three inches he gains in height, and he’s skillful and bold enough now to dare take a tiger seal alone and the village throws a feast in celebration when he hauls it back in triumph. When it comes time to leave them, at least their stock of jerky and frozen fish will keep them for months. It’s one less thing to worry about on top of the growing pile of everything else.
The otter penguins are back for the start of spring breeding and their growing flock darkens the rocky ice inland. Time turns in it’s great circle, careless of how much he needs it to pass, how much he dreads it. Summer is looming with all it’s inherent threat.
Sokka looks out into the bay. It’s a fine day with perfect weather, exactly like he remembers it being. Blue skies for miles. The certainty settles into place. He can’t afford to wait any longer. This time, he’s seizing the opportunity.
“Hey, Katara,” he calls out and she looks up where she’s beating out the heavy pelt of a polardog. “Come fishing with me.”
She makes a face. “Ew, why would I do that?” she asks. “I’m busy.”
“Think of the fish,” he urges.
“The last thing I need is you smelling more like a fish,” she tells him, cheeky.
He sticks out his tongue at her. “Come on,” he wheedles. “It’ll be fun,” then, “you could practice your waterbending.”
She puts the pelt down, eyebrows raised. “Even after last time?” she asks curiously. “All I managed to do was dump freezing water all over you.”
“Clothes dry out,” he says nonchalantly. “Bet you can’t catch a fish with it before I manage it.”
Her eyes narrow playfully at the challenge as she pats down her dress. “You’re so on.”
Sokka runs for a canoe and his spear, heartbeat pounding inside him. It’s time. It’s finally happening.
He loads up his fishing gear as Grandmother waves them off from the shore for luck. “Be careful!” she yells after them.
“We will be!” Katara yells back.
Sokka points the nose of the canoe resolutely north, everything in him eager. We’re coming for you, Aang, he thinks. Be ready.
The bay is mostly clear by now but right outside the village the sea ice is still hanging around in chunky, jagged bits, a landscape of towers and temple pillars the sharp current cuts through without warning. He knows the area well. It’s dangerous this time of year and he never passed his ice-dodging test strictly speaking, but Katara doesn’t question his choice of fishing ground. She knows he can navigate it like a pro.
He wants to paddle right to the spot, tell Katara everything, beg her to waterbend to iceberg up to the surface and deal with the consequences. But that nagging fear in the back of his mind is loud. So far things have been unfolding as expected. He fears going off-track. All his meticulous planning depends on everything following a similar pattern as it had the first time. What use is his knowledge if everything is different?
So he fishes with his sister. It’s more of an excuse than anything. What few fish approach the canoe he ignores, letting Katara focus on attempting to waterbend them up to herself. In his memories she’s a master at her craft and she’s already better than she’d been the first time with all his careful encouragements, and he focuses on the push and pull of water around the small canoe, watching the currents.
“You’re doing it wrong,” he calls out as she makes a noise of frustration and the careful stream of water she’d been directing collapses.
“How would you know?” Katara challenges, huffing. “This isn’t exactly as easy as it looks.”
Sokka snorts. “I know it’s supposed to look fluid,” he tells her. “Not blocky as an icecap.” He’s lounging by this point, sprawled lazily with his spear to the side, paddle in his lap.
She huffs at him in irritation and frost spreads out around her hands.
“Hey, careful with that!” Sokka snaps, purposely rocking the canoe before the ice can stick to it. “Last time you froze us to an iceflow!”
“I am trying my best,” Katara complains, but her temper is rising with the repeated failures so he takes a deep breath.
“Focus yourself,” he says. “Find your center.” Master Piando might not have been a bending master but he still gave good advice. Sokka says, “let go of your anger. Let it flow through you.”
She takes a deep breath, mirroring him as she tries again.
The first time this happened, it was because of a fight. An escalating argument where emotions ran high. He wants to believe this time that they can do this together without needing the resentment of it.
He wants to believe that he can make a better world, one where finding the Avatar wasn’t born from an act of anger.
Katara focuses herself, hands waving, and a bubble rises from the ocean’s surface with a fish held inside it. She moves the water along with arms that wave like the waves around them and the trapped fish hasn’t even noticed it’s floating.
Her grin is blinding.
Sokka rocks upright, his answering grin equally as wide. “You did it!” he cheers. “That’s what I’m talking about! Yeah!” He throws an arm around her shoulders, jostling her enough the bubble pops and dumps a heap of frigid water over him he’s too happy to be mad about. The fish flops to the floor of the canoe. He scoops it up and hands it over to her in victory but not before making a whole show out of weighing it in his hands. “Feels pretty scrawny,” he jokes. “Might as well throw this one back.”
She scoffs at him but she’s pleased too even as she makes a face at the offered fish. She opens her mouth to say something, hands on her hips, when a jolt rocks the canoe violently and Sokka drops the fish. It hits the water with a plop and vanishes from sight as the current seizes them.
“Be steady,” he orders as he rapidly begins to paddle. “Hold on tight.”
Katara braces herself inside the canoe, her knuckles white on the bone rim. Sokka steers them through the worst of it as the ice spires crash and stagger around them almost as if alive. The crackling of them is loud as thunder. His teeth chatter from excitement and the cold. He couldn’t escape this current if he wanted to. For the first time since waking up in the snow it feels like destiny is on the move again, toothy and cruel as it could be, as unflinching as the brash ice around them.
The current spits them out in a hollowed opening. The ice around them is flat here, empty for miles, and two floes slam together behind them to block any escape. They’re trapped.
Katara looks around the suddenly calm cove. “What was that?” she questions, fearful, but Sokka’s eyes are locked onto the empty ice under which he knows his friend sleeps. There’s no sign of Aang from the surface.
This feels like a test. He may be a genius but he’s never been good at tests and he wracks his mind for solutions. Aang’s so close. He can almost feel it.
“Are we stuck here?” he asks instead, looking out over the ice floes as the idea strikes him like a ringing bell.
Sometimes the simplest, most obvious solution is right.
Katara bites her lip as she studies their surroundings. Walking back across the unstable, mobile ice is a death sentence. It’s too easy to imagine them dying out here. In a world filled with war and element benders, the best killers remain the lonely, empty ice around them. “Maybe I could waterbend us out?” she suggests hopefully.
“Please try,” Sokka says, jabbing at the nearby ice experimentally with his spear. “Freezing’s no fun, I hear.”
But Katara’s still staring around them in shock. “This is a lot of ice,” she gulps, and the first time she’d been so infuriated she hadn’t been thinking about how she couldn’t do it. This isn’t the Katara who’d look at a sheer ton of sea ice and laugh. This is his little sister who’d just caught a fish for the first time and thinks ice is an accident.
“I trust you,” he reassures her calmly. “Listen, you are the best waterbender I know. You’ve got this, Katara.”
“I’m the only waterbender you know,” she grumbles, but she takes her stance inside the canoe. If her hands shake, he pretends not to notice.
The ice flat in front of them starts to shift. It groans, creaking back as Katara persuades it to shift out of their way and create a gap for them.
For a second, all is well in a way that means nothing is as the open water Katara reveals remains still and empty. She turns to him grinning, eyes sparkling.
Please, he begs to any spirit listening. Please.
There’s a fierce rumble from below as a massive block of ice rises to the surface. The cascading water shoves their canoe back as a wave pours off the blue-tinged dome of ice. His heart soars. He feels like cheering. In his head, the timeline starts again right on schedule.
The iceberg dips and sways before them, shedding seawater. His eyes easily pick out the two shapes trapped within. He paddles eagerly forward, breathing quickly.
Inside the ice sits Aang with Appa arranged protectively around him, frozen in time. They’re nothing but dark shapes like this, the details lost, but he’d know them anywhere. Sokka crashes the canoe up onto the lip of the iceberg and hops out.
Katara follows him, mouth open as she stares hard at the figures within the ice. “Are you seeing this?” she asks him, shocked.
Sokka can only nod, his lips numb with relief as he drinks the sight of them in. At last.
Katara puts her hand up to the ice in front of Aang’s blurry head, staring intently. “I think there’s someone in there!”
Inside the ice, Aang’s eyes snap open, glowing eerily for a single moment before closing again.
“They’re alive!” Katara gasps, grasping at him. “Sokka, we’ve got to get them out!”
“Way ahead of you,” Sokka says on automatic, drawing his club. He holds it out to her. “Together then, on three,” he says as she wraps her determined fingers around his. “One, two—” And his beautiful, brilliant, overbearing sister doesn’t even stop to question any of this as they bring down the club with all their combined strength. “Three!”
The ice starts to split. Cracks race across the surface as a vent of steam bursts out. There’s a flash of pure light bright as the sun, a beacon visible for miles as across the world, the eyes of every Avatar statue in the temples begin to blaze.
The cycle starts again. Fate turns on it’s head. Sokka is fifteen years old once more and it’s finally time to try again.
The Avatar is back.