Mari: Scroll 1 (Being Reworked)

The Southern Air Temple

I do not own Avatar: The Last Airbender only my own OC's.

Mari

We'd stopped on an island to sleep, which sounded more glamorous than it was. In practice, "stopped on an island" meant "collapsed on a patch of dirt between some rocks while a ten-ton bison snored loud enough to register on seismic equipment." I'd slept in worse places. Not many, but some.

You're probably wondering why I stuck with them. Fair question. The answer was simple, if you squinted at it from the right angle: Aang was the Avatar. The Avatar's job was to defeat the Fire Lord. And if I stayed close enough to that fight, eventually, I'd get my chance. My parents' ghosts deserved that much. Everything else, the flying, the bison drool, the fact that I'd somehow joined a traveling circus of two teenagers and a twelve-year-old messiah, was just logistics.

The only problem was Sokka.

Not Sokka as a person. Sokka as a sleeper. The boy slept like he was being paid for it; committed, professional, immune to all outside stimuli. Katara, Aang, and I had been up for twenty minutes. We'd packed most of the supplies. We'd loaded Appa. We'd had an entire conversation at normal volume three feet from his head. Nothing. He lay in his sleeping bag like a man who'd made peace with never moving again, snoring with a consistency that bordered on musical.

"We could throw him in the water," I suggested.

"No," Katara said.

"Just a little bit in the water. The shallow part."

"No."

"You people have no vision." I sighed and went back to tying down supply bags on Appa's saddle. The knots were becoming second nature. I'd picked up the technique from cargo ships during my weeks crossing the ocean, and my fingers moved through the motions without conscious thought. Tie, loop, pull, secure. Repeat.

"Wait till you see it," Aang said from Appa's head, where he was tightening ropes on the bison's horns with the casual confidence of someone who'd done it ten thousand times. "The Air Temple is one of the most beautiful places in the world."

"Really? Because I've been to some pretty amazing places." I had, too. The crystal caverns outside Omashu. The painted cliffs along the eastern coast. A waterfall in the northern Earth Kingdom that caught the sunset and turned the whole gorge to liquid gold. None of those places existed for me anymore, they were just coordinates on a map I'd passed through while running, but they'd been beautiful.

Katara's face shifted. The brightness dimmed into something more careful, more worried, the expression of someone about to deliver news they wished they didn't have to.

"Aang, I know you're excited, but... it's been a hundred years since you've been home," she said.

Realization hit me like a slow wave. He hadn't been home since before the war. Before the Air Nomads were wiped out. He was flying toward a graveyard and he didn't know it, and the excitement in his voice was the sound of someone about to walk into a room where the lights were about to go out.

"That's why I'm so excited!" he said, beaming.

Katara and I exchanged a glance. Hers said I don't know how to tell him. Mine probably said I don't either. We held the look for a beat, two people bound by the shared knowledge of a truth neither of us wanted to speak.

"It's just... a lot can change in all that time," Katara tried.

"I know, but I need to see it for myself." Aang hopped down from Appa and landed beside Sokka with the weightless grace that still caught me off guard every time. Gravity was more of a suggestion for this kid.