Chapter Text
It was a chilly morning that day at the Southern Water Tribe, though any comment regarding the place was redundant, because living in the South Pole didn't exactly mean living at at the heart of the Fire Nation, where the summers seemed to reign eternal. The snow here seemed to stretch miles and miles across; only in this specific setting does the water seem to reach into the edges of the earth, with huge blocks of ice swaying in the still waters.
Oikawa Tooru yawns as he holds the fishing pole in his hands, the cold air nipping at his bare face. His younger cousin, who was still currently trying to figure out how to put bait on the fishing hook, sits behind him with an intense glare. Oikawa predicts it would be five minutes until Kageyama eventually gives in and asks him for help, which is usually the case when it comes to seemingly menial tasks.
"Oikawa-san?" Kageyama speaks out, and the noise disperses through the empty seas, fading into the air. A small smirk stretches through Oikawa's lips, "Can you help me? I can't put the bait on the hook."
'Make that two minutes', Oikawa turns back to face him, rolling his eyes, "You're useless, you know that?" He laughs as Kageyama glares at him, "It's alright though. Of course I'll help you."
Kageyama looks surprised, as he should, when being confronted with unreadable people like Oikawa (then again, Kageyama isn't good at reading anyone), "Really? Thanks—"
"Only if you tell me you love me." Oikawa coos back mockingly. It elicits a repressed shiver on the younger's side.
Kageyama glares, "I'd rather starve, thanks."
"Oh, don't be like that, Tobio-chan," Tooru chastises half-heartedly, shoving the fishing pole back into its owner's arms, bait on hook, "You wouldn't know a thing about waterbending if it weren't for me."
Tobio pouts, "You sound pretty confident for the guy who accidentally slipped on ice when trying to talk to Kiyoko-san."
Oikawa sputters with a rising blush at the young lady's mention, "Oh shut up, you! You don't even know how to talk to girls, let alone anyone!"
"Yeah, well I had a good teacher for that," He sasses back, "He's always too busy styling his hair and trying to tell the difference between a penguin and a girl."
"That was one time! You know perfectly well that I'm short-sighted!" Oikawa exclaims defensively, "Anyways, you're all bark and no bite if you can't even put bait on a fishing hook."
Kageyama, with all the mustered maturity of a 15 year old, sticks his tongue out at his elder, but stays silent. Instead, he immediately throws the line into the water in an almost defiant manner, though maybe he threw it a bit too hard, because the hook misses the water entirely, opting instead to stick itself into a giant floating iceberg that's a just feet away from them.
A stretch of silence follows, "Ah...my bad."
Oikawa snorts before sighing dramatically, "Oh La, the spirits have cursed you with sweet karma. See, this is why I don't bring you on fishing trips. You're a walking trinket of terrible luck."
Tobio glares at the brunet, "I don't see the need to gloat considering that this is your fishing equipment. I don't even get why we need fishing equipment if we could just bend the fish out of the water."
Oikawa looks dumbstruck for a good moment—a good moment where Kageyama's confidence goes up by a significant amount—but then makes a face at the raven, "Just get it back, loser."
Kageyama rolls his eyes, tugging on the line only to grow more frustrated as it doesn't budge from the ice, "It's not—getting out!"
Oikawa snorts, "Nice going, loser; there goes my fishing hook."
"Shut up!" Tobio bites, "What should I do?"
"I dunno, break the ice so that the hook can budge free?" Oikawa suggests, leaning back on the boat, "Or has sailing too long on sea dulled your senses?"
Kageyama pouts angrily, but raises his arm nonetheless. Immediately, he can feel the weight of the iceberg shift between his fingers, almost like a rocking chair, and feels his chi gates open to let the energy flow within him. After a couple of seconds, He brings his hand down swiftly, promptly cracking the iceberg considerably so, or at least enough that the hook is not stuck unto it anymore.
“Good,” Tooru sighs, “Now get my hook back, you—“
Before Oikawa could finish his sentence, the sound of a loud crack stopped him. Then another. Then another one, this time with enough force to make the water below it splash around the near vicinity. Slowly, Oikawa and Kageyama glanced over to the iceberg, where large cracks have started to accumulate over its translucent surface.
“W-What,” The brunet stammers, “What in the name of spirits did you do?”
“I-I—“ Kageyama sputters, but before he could finish, the iceberg breaks cleanly in half, followed by a massive, “BOOM!” that sends an outrageous beam of white light from inside the broken block of ice, stretching infinitely into the heavens. A huge push of force quickly follows, and the water ripples with such intensity that it nearly throws both of them off-board.
"Ah—!" Oikawa shrieks, "Was—Was that you?!" Oikawa says in bewilderment, which is the most genuine emotion Kageyama has witnessed Oikawa express this past week. The elder raises his arms at both sides of the boat—an attempt to calm the waters threatening to throw them into the icy sea.
Kageyama promptly follows the other's actions and responds, clearly as confused as the other, "I don't know! How did that even happen?"
"Like hell I would know! You're the one who set it off!" Tooru hisses.
"You’re the one who told me to!" Kageyama argues back.
"I told you to get the damn fishing rod; I didn't ask you to create a beam of light that could potentially signal anything! What if it's a distress signal? It could even alert the Fire Nation here!" Oikawa stresses.
Tobio rolls his eyes despite his equal amount of panic to the brunet, "Yeah, because that was definitely what I was trying to do."
"Oh, sweet spirits," Oikawa groans. As the rippling waters transition into calm seas under their hands, Oikawa does to, fortunately.
Kageyama glances at the iceberg tensely, "Do you think it's...a sign?"
Oikawa’s eyes flicker for a split second, "Well, whatever it is, we should probably—“ THUD! “—Oh sweet spirits, someone just fell out."
"What?" Kageyama exclaims, blue eyes shooting towards the iceberg once more, and lo and behold, a red-clad figure lies dormant on the algid ice. A moment of horrified silence follows before the raven asks, “Should...should we help it?”
Oikawa rolls his eyes, momentarily forgetting about his panic and holding his arms out again to slowly push the boat towards the iceberg. They almost stumble trying to get a look at the figure. Oikawa gets there first, on the account that he bended some cold sea water on Kageyama's face out of annoyance, and paces to the body.
"Hey! No fair—" Kageyama shouts, bending the freezing water off his face while jogging up to his older cousin, who suddenly looks eerily frozen in place, "Oikawa-san, are they alri—oh."
A boy around Kageyama's age or younger lies stagnant on the cold, clear ice; the fiery red and orange hues of his whole being is a direct contrast to the frozen ice beneath his pale skin. His hair is an unruly mess of orange hair that looks like messy flames of a campfire, and his skin is almost fatally pale from being inside the ice for what seemed to be a very long period of time. If he wasn’t clad in Fire Nation clothing, then Kageyama would've been mesmerized. Instead, he gasps, turning his gaze over to Oikawa, who kneels still, eyes piercing into the unmoving body.
"He's...he's Fire Nation." Tobio says out loud in utter shock.
"Brilliant observation, baby cousin," Oikawa responds, strangely and eerily calm for someone who had just discovered a potential corpse, and presses his ear against the stranger's chest, "Doesn't exactly explain why he was trapped in an iceberg, though."
The raven shrugs, hesitantly kneeling opposite of the brunet, "Maybe...he was in a fight with waterbenders? And they trapped him in an iceberg?"
"Then why on earth was there a huge beam of light?," Oikawa mutters almost to himself, lifting his head from both the stranger's chest and from deep thought, "Well, I know now he's aliv—" Oikawa stops abruptly as his eyes reach his face. Kageyama gasps.
Living in the South Pole, the most you can get from the sun is a shy peek in between the icy valleys; it's light so soft and distant, making a visual symphony with the snow it nestles between in.
But his eyes—oh, those wide eyes—slowly open up, only to reveal eons of summer trapped in those eyes, only suddenly now escaping from its confines of ice and winter. A warm kind of light—not the destructive flames that swallow entire Kingdoms whole, that burns villages into ash, the kind that killed his own mother—shine from his eyes and envelopes every crevice it can reach, including Kageyama himself, because how else can his face feel so warm? It's only when he hears a not-so subtle cough from opposite of him and looks up to see Oikawa's irritatingly smug grin that there's no warm light anywhere; He was simply blushing.
"Hi!" The stranger greets suddenly, and quite loudly too, enough to create an echo in the atmosphere and to bring Kageyama back from his reverie, "Wanna go dragon-riding?"