Chosen by the Spirits | A male reader x Avatar the Last Airbender story

Chapter 20- Family Reunion

"How could you let them take Appa?" Aang screamed at Toph with anger. "Why didn't you stop them?".

Moments ago there had been celebration amongst most of the gang. We had found the date of the next solar eclipse, when the fire nation would be extremely vulnerable. But none of that mattered now, as we were stranded in the middle of a sandy desert, with no form of transportation out. Appa, as Toph had glumly explained to us, had been taken by vicious sandbenders. And now Aang, in an act of denial, was taking it out on Toph.

"I couldn't! The library was sinking!" the young earthbender truthfully responded. "You guys were still inside and-,"

"You could've come to get us!" Aang angrily countered. "I could've saved him!"

"I can hardly feel any vibrations out here," Toph reasoned. "The sandbenders snuck up on me and there wasn't time for-,"

"You just didn't care!" the young Avatar furiously objected. "You never liked Appa, you wanted him gone!" he unfairly tried to reason. This had gone on for too long, now, and I wasn't going to stand by and watch the argument. Myself, Sokka and Katara all knew that without Toph, we'd all be buried right now.

"Aang, Toph is the only reason we're standing here right now," I calmly told him, placing my hand on his shoulder. "Without her we'd be buried who knows how many feet underground,". Despite my words, Aang just grumpily shrugged my hand off of his shoulder and took a few steps away from me.

"Well, who's going to save us now?" Sokka asked as he stared into the distance, which consisted purely of hills made of sand. "We'll never make it out of here,"

"That's all any of you guys care about; yourselves," Aang shouted at all of us as he began to walk away. "You don't care whether Appa is okay or not!" he cried out as he dropped to the floor dramatically.

"We're all concerned, but we can't afford to be fighting now," Katara told him.

"I'm going after Appa," Aang mumbled, barely audibly, before using his glider to fly off into the distance. Despite Katara calling after him, we watched as Aang flew away into the distance.

"We'd better start walking," Katara instructed. "We're the only people who know about the solar eclipse. We have to get that information to Ba Sing Se,"

"You think if we dig out that giant owl, he'd give us a ride?" Sokka joked, though nobody laughed as we began to walk in silence. The vibes were well and truly dead after Appa's capture and Aang's subsequent leaving.

We walked for a few hours across the burning sand; the surrounding dunes all that we could see in the distance. The heat was certainly starting to get to us, as we were all sweating profusely, and Sokka had started to use Momo as a sort of umbrella for the sun. To make matters worse, we were running out of water very quickly. All we had left was Katara's bending water, as the majority of mine I had used when training with Wan Shi Tong. It was becoming abundantly clear to me that we wouldn't last much longer without a source of water. However, it seemed that Sokka found a solution, as he loudly exclaimed, pointing forwards.

"Look!" he shouted, pointing at a cactus in the distance. Without a second thought, he used his sword to slice off one of the prickled ends of the desert plant, and began chugging the fluids that were inside. I must admit, it did look very refreshing, and I was dying for a drink. I starting jogging over to the cactus, preparing to finally feel hydrated, before Katara put her arm out in front of me, stopping me in my tracks.

"Wait! You shouldn't be eating strange plants!" she scolded us, though it was mainly directed at Sokka, who was still guzzling the cactus liquid.

"There's water trapped inside these," Sokka stated confidently, though Katara looked very hesitantly at her brother. "Suit yourself. It's very thirst quenching, though," he continued, though I noticed his pupils starting to expand as he spoke. "Drink cactus juice, it'll quench you!" he suddenly explained spontaneously. He then began a strange performance where he danced around the rest of us, chanting about how quenching the cactus juice was. Though I couldn't help but laugh at him, my desire to drink the cactus juice has quickly diminished.