Chapter Text
There was nowhere in the world as quiet as a snowy forest. Moonlight refracted silver off the thick blanket of snow. The pines overhead left fuzzy shadows on the ground. A place just as beautiful as it was severe. Any child of Hakoda's knew to respect nature in all its forms.
The crunch of snow under Sokka’s boots sounded like crashing cars in the silent woods. He was not feeling particularly respectful at this moment.
“Sure, leave good old Sokka to run the retreat for a week. Sokka would love to do it. Sokka surely doesn’t have anything better to do," he groused to no one in particular, "Let’s leave him without wifi or video games or cell service, that will be nice. Let’s run off to the city in our heated cars and laugh about it behind his back."
It was a mostly true account of what had happened. Really, Katara had a med-school interview to ace, and his dad had to rush back to deal with flooding in their basement. Sokka had been on his own at the Winter Wonderland Cabin Retreat before, but he'd never been on his own when they had guests staying in their four log cabins. Someone needed to stay on site and handle any repairs that the overworked cityfolk might need. And apparently that someone was Sokka.
One of those repairs had brought him out in the middle of the night. He was freezing his ass off in his pyjamas and snow boots. All that couple in cabin two had needed was a new lightbulb.
“New lightbulb at one in the morning,” grumbled Sokka to himself, “Just go to sleep, sheeple.”
Sokka wound his way back towards the main lodge. His family lived there in the winter while they ran the retreat. The retreat promised a cozy winter getaway, free from the stress of daily life in the city. ‘Stress’ was code for the convenience of modern technology. Sokka missed it dearly. He missed a lot of things. Like sneakers. What he would give to just pull on a pair of sneakers and walk on a sidewalk he didn't have to personally shovel for three and a half hours just for it to snow all over again that afternoon-
He was so lost in his tirade that he almost trampled over the bird.
“What the fuck!” Sokka sidestepped around it at the last minute.
Sprawled on the snow, white wings outstretched, was a big goose. Or, goose-like thing. Its neck was longer and slenderer than most geese. Its wings were huge too, more than two metres across. The only contrast from the snow were a red and black marking on its face, its thin black beak, and a wound on its left wing bleeding into the snow. Sokka couldn’t see how bad it was in the silver shadows of the night. All he could see was a wide splotch of red on white feathers.
The bird croaked and turned its head to peer at Sokka. He backed up a step. Where did it come from? The only birds in these woods were owls and turkey vultures. Neither were particularly goose-like, or peaceful, or anything Sokka was remotely interested in approaching. This bird certainly wasn’t from around here.
It was clearly in trouble. Blood actively seeped from its wound. It looked like it had fallen right out of the sky. Sokka put his hands on his hips and glared up at the moon. In moments like this one, he thought about yelling ‘why me’ or something Nicholas Cage-y at the moon. He was too close to cabin one for that. Getting a guest complaint would really round out his night.
In the north, life was a brutal black or white thing. The only choice was to survive, no matter how unsavoury the method. Sokka had heard stories of his dad's friend turning a household pet into a mitten when theirs blew away on a walk. People had to make choices like that all the time. There wasn't room to philosophize about the circle of life. This bird wasn’t from around here though. It probably took a wrong turn somewhere over the ocean. The suckiest part was that with some proper care from a professional, this bird would be good as new.
That gave Sokka an idea. It was an idea so insane, it just might work. Or maybe it was just nonsense. One in the morning often made bad ideas sound smart. That was something for Tomorrow Morning Sokka to find out. Tomorrow Morning Sokka was usually the wiser of the bunch.
“If you give me rabies, I’m roasting you at three-fifty and serving you with potatoes,” warned Sokka.
He carefully approached the bird and crouched beside it. The goose watched him all the while with its one beady black eye. Sokka took his hands out of his mittens for grip and slowly reached under its wings. Once he was in a good spot around its sides, he lifted it.
The bird gave a piercing squawk and flailed its wings and legs. Sokka had to lean away to not get hit in the face.
“Ow, ow, Jesus! I’m trying to help you, you ungrateful dinosaur!”
Sokka waited and held on tight.
Soon, the bird seemed to run out of energy. It just dangled limply in Sokka’s hands, glaring at him sideways.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m not too keen about you either, pal.”
Sokka tucked the nasty bird under his unzipped winter coat. When he didn’t feel a nip or a scratch, he resumed his long walk back home.
He ran into his next problem when he got to the main lodge. The building was a two-storey log cabin built back when going moose hunting for sport was considered the height of class. Where would Sokka put a goose that it wouldn’t destroy the furniture, or hurt itself trying to escape?
He decided on the bathroom. The goose was mostly docile, or maybe on the brink of death, so Sokka placed it gently in his empty laundry hamper while he cleared out the bathroom of razors and other pointy things.
Then he called animal control on the satellite.
It went straight to an automated voice messaging system, spilling some garbage about being ‘out of office’ or something.
Sokka swore. Sokka thought about opening the window and dropping the bird back into the woods. Sokka shook his head.
Deciding he had already come this far, Sokka got out the first-aid kit.
“Okay, buddy,” Sokka said, more hyping himself up than the bird, “Let’s do this. It’ll be fine.”
The bird did not think it would be fine. It wailed and screeched whenever Sokka so much as went near with an alcohol swab.
Sometime around three in the morning, Sokka cracked open his laptop. The satellite dish internet was shit, and so expensive he was only supposed to use it for emergencies. This was emergency-adjacent. If his dad ever asked, he would have to say he was the one with the bullet hole in the arm to justify the usage bill.
He found something eventually. The video on the Batty Birdlover’s Facebook page outlined the steps in stitching up waterfowl in bright pink comic sans.
Sokka watched it once through. Then he gave it a try.
The technique of holding the bird’s head to the side and gently pinning the wing prevented the worst of the thrashing. Sokka found himself apologizing over and over as he methodically cleaned the wound.
“Sorry, god this looks awful. Somebody get too rowdy with the BB gun, did they? Sorry. Yowch, buddy, you’re doing great. Sorry. Okay, three more passes with this, then we get into the good stuff, alright?”
The good stuff was stitches.
Sokka had his wilderness survival certificates which included extensive first-aid components. However, there was a big difference between seeing a slideshow full of clip-art stitches, and performing them on an unsedated wild animal.
Sokka stitched. Then gagged a bit. Then stitched. Then apologized. Then stitched. Then cursed his highly qualified sister for not being there. Then stitched. Then swore when he got his own thumb.
It was slow going.
When he finished, he thought the bird was dead. It was sprawled belly-up on the bloody bathroom floor unmoving. But then he saw its chest moving. Sokka was hugely relieved that he hadn’t killed the bird. It would have sucked after all that work.
Unsure of what else to do, Sokka rummaged in the pantry for a can of tuna. He left it open in the bathroom, shut the door, and went to bed.
The bird stayed for one week.
It was a weird bird. It hissed and spit like any other hateful goose Sokka had ever met, but it didn’t fly into windows or knock things off the shelves. Sokka honestly didn’t mind having it there. Maybe a reasonable person wouldn’t like a wild animal in their home, but boredom had pushed Sokka away from reason long before the bird showed up.
He responded to maintenance calls and gave guided snowshoe tours. He talked to the bird. He called Katara and Aang from the crackly satellite phone. He fed the bird. After a while, it almost seemed like the bird was talking back in its own bird-y way. It ducked its head when he asked it rhetorical questions. It stalked out of the room when Sokka was being ridiculous.
Sokka kept up with the Batty Birdlover’s Facebook group, posting about his bird’s progress and taking any help he could get. Apparently it was a crane, not a goose. Who knew there were so many nosy strangers with so much bird-related medical expertise out there on the web? The internet was a beautiful place.
The bird began to heal.
A few days after the stitches went in, it started flapping its wings experimentally. Near the end of the week, it took short flights across the lofty living room rafters. Sokka whooped and hollered to show his support from the ground. Every time the bird stuck a landing, it strutted around on the beam in this loping graceful walk like it knew it was getting better.
On one afternoon, Sokka was called out to cabin three to chase squirrels out of the chimney. When he returned, he found the front door swinging wide open on its hinges. He must not have closed it properly. Panic struck him. He frantically searched through the lodge, even climbing the living room rafters to see if the bird was stuck somewhere.
It was no use. The bird was gone.
For a brief second, Sokka wondered how many clients they’d lose if he went shouting after the crane through the woods. His rational mind finally won out. No matter how less lonely he felt with the bird around, it was still a wild animal. It had to go do bird things like chase children out of parks and bite unsuspecting ankles. Probably. Sokka was still convinced his bird was a goose in a crane's body.
He couldn’t help feeling defeated for the rest of the day. Even Katara could tell he was in a weird mood when she arrived that night. When he told his family what he’d done, keeping the internet usage part out of it, his dad shrugged.
“I’m sorry, champ. You know what they say?”
“What, a fed bird is a dead bird?” Sokka guessed.
“Well that's true. That was irresponsible to keep it inside. But what I mean is that no good deed goes unpunished.”
“Wow,” Sokka scoffed, “That’s a bit depressing.”
“I 'spose so,” said Hakoda, "Kindness is always good instinct, but remember it's always going to cost something. Especially out here."
Sokka decided, then and there, that he was through with random acts of kindness.