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i. sweep me off my quiet caves
Katara turns fourteen at the break of winter, a week after the skies erupt molten gold, and a week before the Avatar's return.
Sokka doesn't hunt that day, or go fishing, or set out on whatever other "solo-manly-activities" he's so inclined towards. Instead, he stays home at their tiny village of ice and furs, and presents his little sister with a piece of driftwood in the shape of a… fish?
"Is this a fish?" Katara asks, eyeballing the splintering carving with the most neutral expression she can summon.
Sokka looks stricken. "No, it's an otter-penguin!" he objects indignantly, snatching the wood back and holding it close to his face for inspection. "Why would I make you a fish?"
Katara shrugs. "It's meat," she points out.
Sokka grumbles and groans about the truth, but begrudgingly passes the otter-penguin back to his sister, accompanied by a flattering bow. "Well, whether or not you have an appreciation for the fine crafts, happy birthday, Kat," he says with a suspicious heaping of positivity, slinging his arm around her shoulders and dragging her out of their tent.
The whole village is there — the whole village that is left, that is.
Mom isn't there (because the Fire Nation took her away), and neither is Dad (because the Fire Nation forced him away), but Gran-Gran and Sokka and Uki and Yura are all there. There's an oversized fish that kind of resembles Sokka's carving hanging over the fire pit, and Katara dances with the mothers and children of the Southern Water Tribe until the sun falls and the moon rises — and she thinks it's enough.
(Is there anything you want for your birthday? Sokka asks as they lay beneath thick seal-otter skin bedrolls.
There are a lot of things Katara wants. She wants the war to be over. She wants the Avatar to return. She wants to not have to uphold the entire legacy of a lost culture alone for the unhoned talents she was birthed with; she wants someone to teach her to bend water the way she should know how to but doesn’t for the burns inflicted upon her people; she wants to feel her mother's arms around her one last time, or maybe a million more.
But Katara is fourteen, and knows that she doesn't get to want anymore.
I wish Dad was here, she confesses instead. It’s not a lie.)
And the Avatar returns a week later.
ii. drown my fireplace
Zuko turns sixteen on the winter solstice.
Azula was born on the summer solstice, the height of power and potency — destined to rein in the sun, and rule. She was born lucky.
Zuko was lucky to be born.
Uncle gets captured, and Zuko spends the day hunting him down rather than hunting down the Avatar. He threatens an Earth Kingdom peasant, sets a course for his place of banishment, and refuses to fail. (He does. He always does.) When they return at the brink of dusky purple skies, the crew thinks it's hilarious, sling their tattooed arms around their teenaged captain, and crack open a horrifying amount of alcohol of unknown origin.
Getting you drunk til' you can't fuckin' stand, the helmsman says cheerfully, calloused hand shoving a spilling jug into the now-sixteen-year-old's grasp.
He scowls at the older woman and inhales the familiar bitter brown flask determinedly, eye-contact notwithstanding. The drink burns liquid fire down his throat, but Zuko's used to getting burned and doesn't mind the sensation too much.
His stomach hurts. His head hurts, all hazy and upside down like the engine room's gassy steam and a boiling pond in a sakura garden.
That night, through a sort of unshakeable misery that always lingers too close, Zuko swears that his seventeenth birthday won't happen on a big metal ship.
(For the first time in three years, he doesn't let himself stare over the edge into the obsidian waters and think about death; because this year, there's something to chase.)
iii. meant to be identity
Suki turns sixteen at an undercover ferry station (— at an undercover refugee camp).
She doesn't know her actual birthday — but it's the day she showed up at Kyoshi Island's pinewood orphanage dressed in gold-green silks, desperately clutching a muddy badgerfrog carving with blood on her lips —, so she always considers it to be at the start of cherry blossoms and spring.
The last time she'd really celebrated her birthday, she was eight and praying to join the island's team of elite warriors. She'd been granted her wish, sent off to spend her days running laps around fields of soft grass knolls and snapping golden fans against flame until she couldn't breathe, until she could breathe again, until she learned to fight.
Chiharu, Ayako and Takara present her with handcrafted mochi that they’d snuck out and bought last night. Suki feels tears prick at the corners of her eyes, because she knows that mochi is expensive and far from this camp where burned people come to hide, and makes sure all of her warriors get a piece.
(Suki doesn’t mention that she’d awoken to their slipping out of the shoddy hut they’ve been residing in these past months, doesn’t mention that she’d stared up at the ceiling through to the covered stars and worried for her oldest officers despite how much she trusts them.)
Thank you, she says, and her girls cheer.
You’re so old! Miki says wonderingly, thirteen and vibrating with excitement. I wonder how it feels to be sixteen! Suki, do you think I’ll ever find out? She’s revering her tiny piece of mochi like it’s the last time she’ll ever get to taste sweet rice flour on her lips and asking if she’ll ever reach the age of sixteen, and Suki almost does cry.
There’s a reason Miki only speaks in hypotheticals.
(They don’t mention that she’s the oldest among them.)
iv. the moon's got a grudge
Sokka turns sixteen in the Earth Kingdom’s city of walls and secrets.
Katara wakes him with open shutters and far too much cheer in her voice for this hour. Aang and Toph are right behind her, equally loud and joining the chorus like a horde of meowling pygmy pumas — tiny, obnoxious, and clearly nocturnal, because the sun's barely cracked the horizon and they don't have bags under their stupid, Big Child Eyes.
"Stop," Sokka groans, shoving his head under his pillow. "Leave me alone, please, I want to sleep. Is that a reasonable enough birthday wish?"
Toph kicks him, and ow, Toph kicks hard. "No," she says pleasantly, like the puny petty jerkface she is.
"We're going shopping!" Aang announces gleefully, and now there are two ridiculously powerful twelve year olds tugging on his limbs to pull his poor, tired ass out of bed. "C'mon, Sokka!"
Sokka mumbles and grumbles some more, but eventually changes into one of the two blues seen wandering among Ba Sing Se’s silently desolate streets. Aang is absolutely thrilled, skipping up to vendors and asking to try their mianbao, to pet their turkey-ducks, to test their teas, and Toph is oddly pliant when it comes to trying the paraphernalia the airbender comes across as Katara holds back her laughter.
(Sokka adamantly refuses to think of how they’re putting aside their mission of looking for Appa for him. He’s the plan guy. It’s his job to make sure that they’re sticking to schedule — but every time he opens his mouth to say that they need to concentrate on what’s actually important, Katara’s uncanny older-brother senses manifest in the form of a threatening glare, and he retreats.)
That night, when the moon is half-full and Sokka can’t sleep, Katara slips outside to find him dangling his legs over the engraved marble fence and staring into the lonely sky.
“What are you looking at?” she asks.
Sokka shrugs. “Nothing much,” he lies.
It’s not nothing much. Sokka thinks to himself that his intangible repentance isn’t enough — not when the moon’s only half-full and still retreating further, yet holding him in her arms with the relentless flood she pulls along.
Katara accepts his response with a quiet hum, even though they both know. “Happy birthday, Sokka,” she says instead.
Silently, he wishes that Yue could say that, because he loved her more than he should’ve, but she’s not here; and he wishes Dad would say that, because he’s finally sixteen and tradition speaks, but he’s not here; and he wishes Mom could say that, because he doesn't remember her face and wants to relearn, but she's not here; and even though Katara will always, always be enough for him, he can’t help but be selfish and wish they were here too.
v. tired days, skies rain
Aang turns thirteen in a coma.
The monks used to celebrate his birthday with prayers and the air chimes, an expanse of peargerine and kumquat fruit pies in his wake; to celebrate another year of life and love, surrounded by the life and love of the people who raised him. At thirteen, the Air Nomads are to free up their minds and learn to fly — to meander the rolling grasses of the Earth Kingdom, the icy tundra of the Water Tribes, the fiery volcanoes of the Fire Nation.
This year, Aang spends his birthday with lightning dripping out his veins and dark hair growing over his arrows. Aang turns thirteen in the midst of a century-old war that is his duty to end, with a hollowed skull full of dead people and a tiredness aching in his heart that he can't feel.
(He dreams that day, or that night, or whatever those endless bounds of oblivion are. Not of a pilgrimage to never occur, but rather the color of ripe tangerines and yellow topazes, and a temple sprouting grasses without retribution. The corpses don't stir from their scattered ashes in the wind.
And they float.
Why'd you leave? Aang tries to ask, but the words don't come out of his mouth, replaced by nothing but swathy ash. He looks down at his fingers melting off their bones, and can't remember why he's asking.)
The children on the big metal ship don't celebrate.
He doesn't realize he's thirteen until a month later. By then, it's too late to say so.
vi. i'll soon be older than (me)
Toph turns thirteen in the Fire Nation.
This year, she isn't celebrating her birthday on the Beifong estate with a mother whose fragile limbs are made of porcelain and glass and a father who's never touched a metal but polished silver. She isn't dressed up in a mortifying silk dress trailing her shoed feet, hair pinned up in whorls of emerald and gold pins; isn't the blind, useless heir written to be married off for profit.
Zuko makes her boiled taro balls for breakfast, and for lunch, and for snack and not dinner, and promises to spend the afternoon sniffing out scammers to scam on the streets with her. His heartbeat's all wonky — well, wonkier than usual — when he says this, but Toph likes to assume that it's his healthy dose of fear of her law-bending speaking.
She's wrong. When they get back plastered in dirt and sweat, Appa's in the courtyard.
"Toph!" Aang launches onto the ground and flings himself at the girl, voice filled with unadulterated joy. "Happy birthday, Sifu!"
Katara, Sokka and Suki drop into sight from the saddle, the former's heartbeat ramping up at the sight of the Fire Lord and his official scribe, and Toph cackles as she punches her friend in the arm.
How does it feel to be thirteen? Zuko asks after their delightfully unrefined dinner cooked fresh in the better-Fire Lord’s chambers, fingers picking at the hem of his shirt and feet slung backwards against his too-big bedpost.
Toph hums. She thinks about gold-inlaid chopsticks, pearly fingers; an obligation towards silence. About cheering crowds in an arena of earth, shitty plays; children who don't lie.
She's more fortunate than her friends, in a way. She hasn't been carved by war, hasn't been burned again and again by the raging inferno of generational hatred, and her eyes haven't seen too much because they can't see at all. Toph's thirteen, in a way that they never were, and promises to herself that it's something she won't take for granted.
It feels great, she finds herself saying.