The fire war renaissance

Chapter 52: With child

Sorry for the hold-off guys and girls. I've been busy studying for my SAT and I wanted to do well on it. Those 2,000 vocab words won't learn themselves.

But, moving on, now we're getting back to the secondary characters of this plot who have, for the most part been absent and all share a common situation/conflict: babies. And, of course, some lovely Kataang to bring it all home.

See…I didn't forget about them.

Chapter Fifty-Two: With Child

The wind was always cold and annoying.

Sokka stood at the foot of an icy cliff right outside the newly reformed South Pole. He still had a hard time considering the new place home. The igloos and boxed ice houses were all in place carefully. Since the population count wasn't nearly as massive as the North Pole the south still wasn't very big in comparison. But, anything was better than tents on a slush of snow out in the middle of nowhere.

Still, though, Sokka didn't feel like himself. His home was new and the love of his life was gone. It was much too much to take in while dealing with a broken heart and utter romantic abandonment and frankly, he mostly stood his time in the south doing just what he was doing at the moment. Standing in the chill and thinking.

For the most part, he was thinking about his baby. He knew Suki probably wasn't due yet, but he wanted so badly to see his child. To hold it and take a first look at the wonderful miracle of birth. Surely a year or two ago he would've cringed at the thought of actually wanting to be there for a woman's labor, but he supposed things were different now.

A lot of things, in fact. Hakoda was the most surprised to learn that Sokka had become quite a budding chef. He was always good at cutting and skinning his meat, but Katara was always the expert at cooking on such matters. So, it was a refreshing change of pace for Hakoda to kick back and know just because Katara wasn't there that he could still have a fairly decent family meal.

Gran Gran and Pakku were still happily together, spending most of their time reminiscing and playing catching up on the obvious missed years. Sokka always smiled at the older couple. He'd never seen his grandmother smile so much in his life, not since his grandfather had died when Sokka was very young. But, as well as fill him with joy, watching the two reminded him too much of how lonely he was without Suki.

He breathed in the crisp, chilling air, watching his exhale fan in front of him before turning to see his father walking behind him.

"Out here again, Sokka?" Hakoda asked sternly.

"Yeah, just thinking." Sokka responded with a lazy shrug.

"That's the same answer you gave me yesterday, and the day before that…and the day before that."

"And…?" Sokka breathed again, exhaling just as heavily.