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i.
Aang is twelve when he meets his waterbending master. Katara hovers over him when he wakes from his hundred-odd year sleep, all big blue eyes and tanned skin and a glow about her that brings a wide smile to his face. A toddler perches on her hip and a man stands at her side, wielding a nasty club and a nastier glare. He could be a Fire Nation spy, the man spits, and Katara rolls her eyes. He can't be any older than most of the kids in the village, Sokka.
Aang is not, in fact, a spy, but he does have a flying bison that might compete with the spies for Sokka's attention. Appa crawls over a ledge of ice behind them, and as Aang exuberantly twirls up to hug the bison's face, Sokka lunges back, quivering club extended in front of him. Get back!
"It's just Appa," Aang explains, because that explains everything. "He's my flying bison."
Sokka remarks on his flying sister, but Aang is much too busy hearing Katara scold her brother to pay much attention. He's never seen anyone so beautiful, but that might be because he was raised by monks. Not an attractive bunch.
"Do you want to go penguin sledding with me?" He asks, and Katara looks at him, her mouth a small, round shape, before one mitten ghosts over her abdomen. I'd better not. Would you like to go, Flutterbat?
The toddler squirms in Katara's arms, nodding furiously. Aang blinks. He's never been penguin sledding with someone that young before, and he isn't sure whether it's going to be as much fun as it would be going with Katara. Still, her smile dims a little when he hesitates, so he plasters another grin on his face and straightens up.
"Great! Come on! I haven't been penguin sledding in ages."
ii.
Katara is twenty when they leave the Southern Water Tribe again. She left last when she was sixteen, she tells Aang, to find a waterbending master. The North Pole hadn't put too much stock in the last waterbender of the Southern Tribe and her big brother, but they'd accidentally stumbled into the Foggy Swamp after Sokka's instincts and a leaky boat led them astray on the way back home.
Aang laughs at all the right places in her story and frowns when he thinks he's supposed to, when she tells him about all the people they met in the Earth Kingdom, when she tells him how the Northern Tribe refused to teach her to fight, when she tells him they need to stop in the swamp when it's time to find him an earthbending teacher. That's not really what he's worried about now, though, not when there are Kyoshi elephant koi and hopping llamas to ride.
Kya regards him with a solemnity that seems out of place when she sits between the Water Tribe siblings. Aang hadn't thought much of bringing the toddler along--Monk Gyatso always took him everywhere too--but he doesn't know what to make of the way she curls into Katara when they go to sleep in a makeshift camp or the way Katara whispers fairy tales to the little girl when it rains.
Aang is twelve when he learns about mothers. Katara was twelve when she lost hers.
iii.
Kya is three when Aang first notices the new roundness in Katara's belly. They've been travelling for nearly four months, and the weather warms as the Northern Water Tribe recedes from view. Katara has shed the thick parka as she did when they first ventured north, complaining that she hadn't grown so quickly the first time. Sokka and Kya don't seem surprised, though, and Aang isn't sure what he's missed. They haven't, after all, been eating all that much lately.
We need to get back, Sokka mumbles to her one night, and Katara frowns pensively, one hand on the rounded bump and the other on Kya's head. We have another three months, I think. Sokka crosses his arms. Better to play it safe, Katara. Don't you miss him? And then Katara smiles in a way that sends a pang through Aang's chest, though he can't say why, and she fiddles with the gold bracelet she's always wearing. Of course I do. So does Kya. But what we're doing is important. He knows that.
Just the same, the next morning, Katara suggests they start heading for the swamp after they've finished with General Fong. Aang shrugs. He's heard there are semi-tame catagators there.
He agrees more forcefully the next day when General Fong traps Katara in the earth beneath them and then Sokka is screaming at him to calm down while his sister scrabbles for her daughter and smooths black, wavy hair down with the tears dripping from her eyes.
iv.
Bumi is one hundred and eighteen when Aang insists they stop in Omashu again on their way back, though, because he's really, really hoping Bumi will be his earthbending teacher.
But when they arrive, Bumi is going on about neutral jing and how perfectly lovely the view is from his little metal box above the city, and Aang wonders if his friend has always been quite this crazy. He finds himself wondering more and more about crazy the longer they stay in the Earth Kingdom; between singing nomads, freedom fighters in the trees, and a fortuneteller who won't stop talking about flying boars, Aang is beginning to feel a little unwound.
He'd been a little bored heading north, aside from their capture on Kyoshi and Sokka's sloppy reunion with someone Aang assumes is his special friend for equinox festivals or something. That had been gross, and Aang had been glad Gyatso had suggested he go to bed early after those festivals. Katara had looked at them with just as much disgust, but he'd spent most of that week with the girls his age on the island, and he'd never really asked about Suki.
Simpler times. Aang misses those.
Which might be why he feels nothing less than complete exasperation when a carriage with a golden flying boar comes flying around a bend in the road near their camp, and a young girl is cackling loudly from the driver's seat. Katara fusses over the dirt in Kya's hair, and Sokka squeals at the mud splattered on his boomerang, but Aang is distracted.
The driver looks like she's having the time of her life. And, something to file away for later, he's pretty sure she was blind.
v.
Toph is eighteen when they find her in a seedy Earth Kingdom tavern, arm wrestling and winning odd tavern games. Aang watches her cheat and tells Katara, who covers Kya's eyes and ears and hisses that it's dishonorable to cheat. Sokka rolls his eyes. Don't you start about honor now too, Katara.
She does agree to become Aang's earthbending teacher, though, and the first secret she tells him is that earthbending is all about waiting, listening, and being rock-like. Especially when some dunderhead thinks he can beat you in a game just because he brought metal dice. Aang's eyes widen.
Toph Beifong, secret metalbender, renowned champion of Earth Rumbles 6, 7, 8, and 9, has agreed to teach him earthbending. Aang feels a little starstruck, even when Toph goes after Katara and shouts about pulling her own weight. Katara can handle her, Aang thinks. She's the greatest waterbender he's ever seen, and possibly the angriest.
He intervenes when they descend into wrestling in a giant puddle of mud. Katara is clearly protecting that ever-growing swelling, and Sokka's face takes on the grim cast he gets when things are getting a little too out of hand.
vi.
Aang is newly thirteen the first time he learns certain facts of life. Katara and Sokka have been pushing them mercilessly toward the swamp the last month, and Katara has begun to be especially nervous about her belly. In fairness, Aang would be nervous too. Sometimes a little lump pokes out, almost like a tiny fist, and then it dissolves back into nothing.
Aang is entirely perplexed, but Toph is the only one he dares to ask about it, and she cackles loudly before walking back to camp. Good luck, Twinkletoes. You clearly don't get out much. I hope you can get out of this rock.
She leaves him to ruminate, encased in a brick of earth nearly the size of Appa. Aang realizes for the first time that Sokka is right about women. He'll never understand them, and he can't hope to, least of all what's going on with Katara.
At least, he thinks that until he finally frees himself and slinks back to the firepit. Katara stirs soup with a few flicks of her wrist, head cradled in her other hand, and Toph is on the ground, laughing so hard that the earth shakes when her feet kick the rock. Sokka is pale and drawn where he stands with Kya. When Aang approaches, he puts the girl in front of him, almost like a shield, and she looks up at Aang with that pensive solemnity lurking in her face.
Go, Sokka, Katara groans. Just get it over with.
Aang is newly thirteen and Sokka twenty-one when they have the talk about what exactly he and Suki were doing that one time when it wasn't the equinox but probably should have been, and about the fact that Katara is pregnant with a whole baby, due to be born in another month. Six weeks, if they're lucky.
Aang is less concerned about this deadline to return to the swamp than he is about this man who must have been in Katara's life. Sokka's explanation, red-faced and blustery as it was, had left several details to be filled in by Aang's imagination, but he thinks the most beautiful, perfect girl he's ever seen, who he hopes maybe could wait for him to grow up, must have been in love with a complete idiot.
Who could feel that way about Katara and let her go?
vii.
Kya is proudly three and-a-half when they return to the Foggy Swamp. Aang is put off by the humidity and the density of the vines, but Katara waterbends the vines away, and they cross streams full of those definitely-not-tame catagators on a relatively dry path. She tires more easily now, easily thrown off balance and often rubbing her lower back, so Aang, feeling himself rather gallant, takes over after a while.
Katara directs them into what he expects to be the densest part of the swamp as the sun begins to go down, but then the trees clear and there is a large, flat space with a blazing bonfire in the center. Men and women dressed in odd leaf clothing, holding skewers with large bugs, gather around, taking turns roasting their prey. Aang swallows thickly, but then Katara is running as fast as she can toward a man tending the fire.
He's remarkable in that he isn't wearing leaves like almost everyone else. His sleeveless tunic is a dark burgundy, and it looks like it might have been expensive once. He has shaggy, black hair that falls into his face, but as she throws herself at him, Katara tangles her hands in it and kisses him fully on the mouth, and then Aang can see a large, angry burn scar covering the left side of his face. Arms wrap around Katara's waist, and Aang can see that one is smooth and pale like snow, and the other is redder, riddled with bumps, from neck and shoulder to the middle of his forearm.
A swamp man with a thick accent approaches them. So, the Dragon's family returns, Tho. A bright grin erupts on his face, and the fire flickers off his pearly teeth. Another swamp man blows a tongue of flame from the spindly leg of his skewered bug. He leans toward the group as they emerge from the thickets. Sokka? That you back there? And Kya?
He registers Sokka thumping the swamp people on their backs enthusiastically, but then Kya has wriggled down from Toph's shoulders and darts into the clearing after her mother. The scarred man pulls away from Katara with one arm, the burned one, and he crouches to lift the little girl and swing her up to his hip. Kya throws her arms around the man's neck, and Katara moves a bit to the side to accommodate. Hello, Flutterbat, the man says, and Kya giggles, and Katara smiles.
Aang looks at the man's face, and a golden-eyed Kya looks back.
viii.
Prince Zuko is twenty-two when he begins training the Avatar to firebend. The bitter irony, that he found the Avatar only when he stopped looking, is not lost on him, he tells Aang. Zuko's uncle smiles knowingly behind them, trying and failing to hide it with a teacup.
Former-General Iroh has, unfortunately, taken to the leaf-wearing customs of their adopted people, and Aang and Zuko's first point of agreement is that they really wish he wouldn't have. Undeterred, Uncle reclines in Sokka's latest invention, the swampy loungy chair thing, and Zuko rolls his eyes.
Aang isn't ready to learn firebending yet, Toph decrees, so Zuko starts him on early morning meditation that occurs without fail every sunrise (to Aang's chagrin) for five weeks and three days. Aang, for his part, loathes every second of the breathing and doing nothing, and the fact that he has to do these things with Zuko of all people nearly sends him into a fury. Zuko got to Katara first, Aang grumbles to himself, but first doesn't mean forever.
Then, one morning, Aang meditates alone, and he doesn't learn until later that Katara had delivered her baby, another girl, with gold eyes and light skin like her father but the dense, brown hair of her mother. Zuko cradles Izumi with a gentleness that Aang hadn't realized he possessed, and Aang, who had gone looking for the banished prince to demand answers, finds himself with more questions.
ix.
Aang is still thirteen when he learns to control the Avatar State. The swamp sent him vision after vision of an old guru at the Eastern Air Temple, and when he'd taken Appa there, Guru Pathik waited for him at the top of the temple with a smile and a large bowl of onion-banana juice.
"How did you know I'd come?" Aang asks, but the Guru only chuckles and begins telling him how to open his chakras. He comes to the last one, and in his mind's eye, there's Katara in her parka in the snow and ice, radiant blue and brown against the white behind her. "I can't," he says, sending the Guru his best and most pleading look that had always worked on Gyatso. "There has to be another way."
You must let go, the guru reminds him.
"Look, I know she's older than me," Aang admits, "but she's not going to stay with Zuko forever, right? Maybe when I'm older, or maybe after Zuko goes back to the Fire Nation, Katara and I can be together.
But the guru shakes his head, and in the purple stars in Aang's head, he sees the gold bracelet that never leaves Katara's wrist nestled inside the silver band that he's seen wrapped around Zuko's bicep. He sees Kya riding on Zuko's shoulders, crowing that she is Flutterbat, ruler of all the catagators, and he sees Izumi tucked to Katara's chest, gold eyes as solemn as Kya's, as solemn as Zuko's.
And then he remembers what Zuko told him, three months ago, when they'd first started meditating in the swamp. Zuko and Uncle had decided to search the swamp for the Avatar after some peasant came out of it rambling about spirits and possessed vines. Zuko had seen himself turning the Avatar over, a faceless, old airbender, to his father, and then the world had burned before the fire was turned back on him.
Zuko had been eighteen when he stopped searching for the Avatar. He had been almost nineteen the first time he could remember being happy. He had been twenty and a new father the first time he'd bent lightning.
And then he'd let her go, Aang remembers. Let her go back to the South Pole to search for the Avatar that the swamp had shown her. Let her go find the boy destined to overthrow his father. Aang is a little ashamed of himself for whatever unnamable emotion he's held so tightly.
Katara is twenty-one when Aang lets her go.
x.
When he returns to the swamp, a little older and a lot wiser, Kya has joined sunrise meditation. Katara nurses Izumi sleepily as she watches their progress, and suddenly Aang feels every bit of one hundred and thirteen. His childish crush is gone, replaced by a deep-running affection that makes him smile when she smiles and squeeze her hand when she cries. She is flawed, he realizes; sometimes a little harsh with Zuko, sometimes a little impatient with her children.
But, now that Aang is really listening, they've never been closer friends, and it's not what he wanted, but it's better.
Aang is thirteen when he defeats Fire Lord Ozai and sixteen when he masters firebending. He is twenty when he restores the Southern Air Temple and thirty when Sokka and Suki's fifth child declares he wants to be an Air Acolyte. Aang is fifty-seven at the coronation of Fire Lord Flutterbat, who splutters and flicks him between the eyes when he calls her that in front of all the ministers.
She inherited Zuko's sense of humor, that one.
Aang is sixty-three when he feels the end coming, and upon reflection, he decides he wouldn't do anything differently. Maybe in a different world, where he is twelve and Katara is fourteen instead of twenty, but the swamp showed him how that ended.
She's happier this way, and so is he.