Of Returns and Reunions

By Flamehead23a

"Aang, where are we going?"

"It's a surprise."

"But why are we going now? It's nearly midnight!"

"That's a surprise too."

Katara bit back a frustrated growl. She opted instead to bend a sheet of snow into ice, just as her boyfriend was about to step onto it. "I know you were raised a nomad Aang, but this is only our fifth night in the South Pole. Do we really have to start traveling again so soon?"

The fifteen-year-old Avatar smiled as he deftly skipped over Katara's sheet of ice. He retaliated with a draft of air that found its way underneath her heavy parka. His smile widened to a grin at her startled gasp. "We're only going bit farther, I promise."

"Good," Katara grumbled as she readjusted the parka around her maturing frame. "We start work on the east side of the city tomorrow, and if I'm late, Pakku won't let me hear the end of it."

"I could always ask him to make an 'Avatar exception' for you."

"What." Katara narrowed her eyes with feigned anger. "You don't think I can handle my own grandfather?"

Aang flinched. "Come on Katara, you know I didn't mean—"

She shushed him with a kiss. "I'm just teasing, Air Head." She took his arm and snuggled closer, enjoying the subtle heat the firebender in him exuded through his layers of fabric.

Aang wrapped his arm around her waist in silent acquiescence. She leaned her head on his shoulder and gazed at the stars and moon that illuminated the crisp night sky.

"So this surprise…does it have to do with you sneaking off every night for the past week?"

"Maybe."

"And all those letters to and from Iroh, Shyu, and Arnook?"

"Possibly."

"So like me you've been waterbending from sunrise to sunset bringing Sokka's snowflake-city to life, all the while writing letters to half the world then running off across the tundra every night to work on this secret surprise?"

"Probably."

"Aang." She lifted her head off his shoulder to give him a look. "You're sweet, but Tui and La, you're crazy. You're working yourself into the ground."

As if to prove her point, a yawn sprang from Aang's mouth. He gave her a sheepish grin. "Definitely."

This time, she did let loose a frustrated growl. Detaching herself from his arm she sped up her pace, though it faltered to a standstill when she realized they had already reached their destination

Aang's grin grew even more sheepish. "Surprise, Katara."

The young couple stood before an exact replica of Katara's childhood village. Not the village she had brought Aang to those three years ago, but the one she had been born and raised in before the Fire Nation had changed her life forever. As Aang bent open the large ice doors and led her inside, Katara was caught up in a torrent of bittersweet nostalgia. Every igloo, every tent, every well-worn path through the snow—all of it had been recreated in exact detail.

"Sokka drew up the plans for me. Your Dad helped." Aang answered her unspoken question as she explored with a sense of guarded wonder. "They were hard as a sky bison horn to read, but hopefully it's pretty accurate?"

"It's…perfect."

At the tone of her response, Aang's smile faltered. "You don't sound too happy about it."

She wanted to face him, but her eyes refused to give up their relentless probing. "I'm sorry Aang." She paused to swallow against the lump in her throat. "I know you worked hard on this, but…not many memories I have of this place are good ones."

"Don't worry, this isn't the whole surprise. I'm going to give you at least one good memory to hold with this place. It's the least I can do."

Aang's brow knit into a slight frown, and he paused as if making one last decision. "Alright." He nodded. "Just…don't freak out, okay?"

Aang pulled at the outermost sash that clung to his body. The cloth came loose, and was quickly left to its own devices on the frozen ground. It was soon kept company by another sash, then a jacket, and so on.

Katara's attention snapped back from the village to her boyfriend the second he started tugging on fabric. "A-Aang!" she stammered. Blood rushed to warm her cheeks. "What do you think you're doing?"

Aang froze with an under jacket halfway off his torso. "I said don't freak out!" he exclaimed.

"I don't…I mean…do you really think we're ready? And here of all places?"

Aang's face grew confused. Then his train of thought linked up to his girlfriend's, and soon his own mortified blush was visible in the moonlit darkness of nighttime. "No! No, nono, no, that's not the surprise," he barked out a single, relieved laugh. "Spirits no, that's not what this night's about at all."

Katara's embarrassment bled away, but the vacuum it left behind had to be filled with something. Raising an eyebrow, crossing her arms, and jutting a hip, she settled for irritation. "And just what is that supposed to mean, mister, is there something wrong with me thinking about that?"

Aang waved his hands. The gesture was slightly ruined by how he was halfway out of yet another jacket. "Of course not. It's just that is like the exact opposite of what your surprise actually is. Here, let me just get the rest of this off—"

As Aang continued to strip off layers of clothing, Katara's eyes grew wider and wider. Beneath all his Air Nomad yellows and oranges laid, not the pale pinkish-beige of flesh, but the blues and whites of a Southern Water Tribe parka.

A female Southern Water Tribe parka.

Her mother's Southern Water Tribe parka.

"Katara." She could hardly hear Aang's voice over her ragged breathing. "Remember what I said about freaking out."

"What are you…what is this…?"

Aang approached her slowly, trying his best to radiate calm through his voice. "What day is it, Katara?"

Katara stepped back, wary. "The…the second full moon of winter…"

Aang shook his head and gave her a disarming smile. "That was yesterday. It's past midnight now, remember? Now it's the Winter Solstice."

If she had been looking at anything but Aang in that parka, Katara would have noticed that a slight breeze had picked up on the previously still night air, or that an array of celestial lights were slowly reaching their mysterious fingers across the horizon.

"You remember the Solstice during the war, right? And the Spring Equinox in Chin after that? I served as the bridge for Avatars Roku and Kyoshi. I allowed them to come back, in the flesh, to settle unfinished business.

"Katara, I've done all the research, spoken to all the experts. It turns out past Avatars aren't the only spirits I can serve as a bridge for." Cautiously, he approached her. "I've recreated the spirit's physical home, I'm wearing clothes the spirit wore in life, and we're here when the boundary between the spirit world and ours is at its thinnest. Everything's ready. Everything but the last requirement..."

She stepped backwards, only to find herself pinned against a hut. Vaguely, Katara realized it was the facsimile of her family's old home. Her head spun, her knees shook, and she knew it would only be moments until everything became too much and she leveled the entire village with one emotionally charged sweep of her hands.

But then Aang put his hands on her shoulders, and the world froze back into place.

"Katara." His breath steamed her vision. His voice anchored her soul. "Do you trust me?"

Katara swallowed. The lump in her throat was gone. "Yes."

Nodding once, Aang moved his hands from her shoulders to her neck. His long, slender fingers worked at the clasp beneath her hair, and he removed her family necklace with an almost reverent delicateness.

Katara watched, breathless, as Aang took a few steps back. The wind was blowing faster now, kicking up a blizzard of snow and ice that ripped and tore at the village's canvas tents and frozen huts. Above them the celestial lights were in chaos, swirling and mixing together in a maelstrom of color. Her eyes stayed locked with his though, and he smiled.

Aang said something as he reached behind his neck to clasp the necklace. She couldn't hear him over the wind, but she thought his lips read, "I love you."

The blizzard coalesced and condensed around the young Avatar. Katara was forced to shield her face with her hands, and by the time she lowered them all was quiet once again. Now however, her eyes met not with the storm grey of Aang, but rather the light blue of Kya.

At first, there were no words. And how could there be—in the stillness of the night, a night so late it was more accurate to call it morning, breaking a silence such as the one that fell over a Mother and Daughter reunited past the threashold of death should have been impossible. But then, as if to simply prove she could, Katara let out a choked sob and rushed forward.

Kya met her half-way with sobs all her own. The two embraced, and for a short eternity they simply held each other, weeping. It wasn't until their tears had long since changed from shock to joy that they separated, if only far enough to take one another in again.

"Tui and La, how you've grown," Kya breathed, "my little Katara is all grown up!"

"It wasn't easy." Katara brushed away a few remaining tears, giggling at the sheer miracle of it all. "A lot of people tried to stop me along the way."

"Come." Kya took her daughter's hand. Katara could feel the living warmth through their mittens. "Walk with me, and tell me all about it."

For hours the two walked the paths of their old village. Katara told her mother everything. About what happened to the village after the Southern Raiders attacked, how her father and the other men left for war, and how she and Sokka were left behind to lead the village themselves. Kya's laugh was like ice-chimes in the wind as her daughter told her about having to wash her son's dirty socks, and she listened with silent awe when Katara told her of that fateful fishing trip that led them to find the boy in the iceberg.

"When I think about it, I can't even remember why I wanted to go with Sokka that day. I always hated leaving the village just to go sit in a boat with him for hours on end."

"You went with him because if you hadn't, the Avatar would have never been found." Kya's warm smile was just as katara remembered it. "You were called by destiny that day. Both my children were."

Katara grinned and pulled her mother closer as they walked. "I'm glad I did, but it would've been a little less stressful if destiny hadn't decided we needed to get our butts kicked every week after that for three whole seasons."

They didn't go over the last year of the war in any rational order. Katara related the stories of her travels as they came to her, jumping from meeting Toph to getting chased by Zuko; from stealing scrolls and fighting pirates to unearthing long-lost libraries and angering owlish knowledge spirits.

Kya chortled at that one. "Wan Shi Tong and his library are in our realm now, you know. He tries to keep up that stuffy demeanor of his, but I get the feeling he's terribly wanting for more knowledge from the physical world. That and he misses his knowledge seekers."

"You've spoken to Wan Shi Tong?" Katara gasped, "Doesn't he hate all humans for what they've done to his library?"

Kya's smile was bittersweet. "I'm not human anymore, dear. On the other side everything is balanced, and everyone can blend together regardless of status or power. That's not to say I go pay Koh daily visits or anything, but If I did I'd show him the same respect I show to everyone else I meet."

Katara nodded in understanding. "Aang met Koh the Face Stealer once, back when Admiral Zhao invaded the Northern Water Tribe. We needed a way to save the city, so he went to the spirit world…"

As Katara told her mother of everything that'd happened since the war, Kya gushed about how proud she was of her family, fighting and working together against the greatest of odds. Eventually though, Kya had to ask how her daughter had come to trust so deeply in all her strange and eclectic companions—Fire Nation nobles and royalty included—and Katara knew it was time to address the elephant koi in the pond.

"It wasn't easy to trust Zuko, especially after his betrayal of us at Ba Sing Se got Aang…" Katara paused unconsciously; scared to even talk about how she almost lost the most important person in her life. "Got Aang killed. If I hadn't been able to bring him back, I don't think anything could have stopped me from finding Zuko and killing him." Kya listened to the steel in her daughter's voice, and squeezed her hand in comfort. After a moment, Katara spoke again. "But he helped me when no one else would. He helped me find Yon Rah, the man who murdered you."

Katara felt her mother stiffen beside her. Slowly Kya withdrew herself from the half-embrace the two had maintained since she'd arrived. "And what did you do when you found him?" she asked, her voice even.

The young waterbender looked at the ground, hugging herself. "I…I wanted to kill him, Mom. I'd hunted him down, spent weeks tracking him, and when I finally found him…Mom, he was the most pitiful man I'd ever seen. I looked in his eyes, and I just couldn't do it."

Kya's voice was neutral. "Why?"

Katara looked into her mother's face, tears in her eyes. "I was hoping you could tell me."

Kya stared deeply into her daughter's eyes. Then she smiled, the same warm smile Katara remembered so vividly from her youth, and pulled her into a fierce hug. "You couldn't do it because you're my daughter. My treasure, my little water droplet. My Katara. You knew, somehow, that if we had the exact conversation then we are having now, I'd tell you that I'd never want you to kill someone in my name. I died protecting what I loved, and no amount of violence or murder can change that."

Katara's voice was muffled by the fur of her mother's collar. "So…you're not upset I didn't avenge you?"

"Spirits no! I could never be upset with you Katara, no matter what."

Katara smiled and snuggled closer, breathing in her mother's familiar scent even as the sun's first light broke over the tundra. Even after all this time, she smelled like the ocean. Like bone sewing needles and sea-prune stew. Like home.

"But tell me," Kya's voice was fading, becoming more distant, "Why did only Zuko go with you? Didn't Aang want to help?"

"He did, but he said revenge was never the answer." Katara's fingers curled into the parka; even as she felt the body beneath it shift and change. "He said it would only leave me feeling worse than I already was."

"He's a good man, Katara. Don't lose him again."

She looked up into storm-gray eyes, and smiled.

"I know Mom. And I won't."

Written for the drabble contest on ASN. The prompts was "Midnight". Took first place-felt pretty good about it.