Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial , the sequel to Night Line from last week, and the final in the trilogy dealing with Aang and Katara’s children and how they deal with Aang’s declining health. In order:
Part of the Little Moments ficlet collection. Also, the final ficlet in this collection (for now). Read the full ficlet on ao3.
Summary: Kya remembers that her father loved to dance.
Kya watched the vivid leaves dance in a circle on a gust of gentle wind. They were the colors of fall, the colors of the Air Nomads. Red spun in a wide arc, yellow twisting as if along the length of a temple's spire, and orange was caught in a never-ending spiral that spoke of pattering feet and carefree steps.
She was reminded of how her father loved to dance. He taught them all the steps of nearly two hundred years ago when there was no such thing as the lingering memory of a century-old war. He had friends in all four nations back then besides his own, he said. Earth Kingdom, Water Tribe, and even from the Fire Nation.
Kya recalled the first time she attempted the Camelephant Strut, a dynamic, precise dance move that required a certain confidence she did not quite have at the age of five. But in time she learned. She was not as good as her older brother, Bumi, who was a natural at all things nimbly artistic. At least, she was much better than her ironically stiff younger brother, Tenzin, who happened to be their family's only other airbender.
"C'mon Tenzin," their father would say in that playful way of his, "you can bend air, remember? You have to be like a leaf in the wind when you dance too."
Tenzin it seemed, had the talent and the spirit of an Air Nomad, but not the wonder of one. Bumi had gotten all of that instead. Kya supposed it was only fair, as he was the only one out of the three siblings that could not bend an element.
Kya saw dancing like the water she moved through her fingers. It flowed and it rained, ebbing through the current of someone's body until it burst forth like a waterfall of unadulterated energy.
Bumi saw it as fun. "Because it is, obviously," he had said when they were children. "What else can it be?"
He made a game out of it every time their father walked in unannounced.
"I challenge you to a battle!" Bumi had shouted. "A battle that will revolutionize the dance world!"
Their father laughed. "So, a revolution?" he had asked the first time. He played along easily.
"Yes!" Bumi had agreed. "A dance dance revolution!"
Kya wanted to smile as she remembered those times. She felt the quirk of it at the corner of her dry lips as the autumn air sapped the moisture away from her skin. Still, the smile did not come.
She longed for the dock at the base of their family's island where she could waterbend to her heart's content. She wished for the night to settle more permanently on the back of Republic City's horizon, but instead, dawn's pink line broke through the surface and interrupted what she wanted.
Everything should be dark, she thought. She dreaded the new day coming...the day when she would have to bury her father.
There was nothing left in her to give.
She had thought that she was taking it rather well. She did not have to bear the burden of being the last airbender like Tenzin, nor did she have to carry the memory of being the last to keep watch over their father like Bumi. Their mother stayed resolute and kept moving forward, but Kya saw the tremble on her lips and the tears that came in spurts when no one but them could see.
Kya was tired of being told advice she did not need or want from strangers and people she hardly knew. She patted backs and said, "It's all right," to friends of friends of friends. She thought that someone else might think that she was consoling them. In fact, all of the theatrics and condolences annoyed her.
She did not want to see so many people. She did not want them to see the kind of weakness she only allowed herself when the darkness crept in and the door to her room was shut.
She felt fine. Then, she did not. It was a cycle, a curse. She had lost enough and yet too much. She had thought that after living a year of constant uncertainty she was made of the same metal even Toph Beifong could not bend.
Yet, it was not a sense of hope or acceptance that she felt, but rather the unrelenting roll of an ocean's waves as she rode them upon every dip and every crash. Because life, it seemed, would keep going, nonetheless.
And as the sun finally rose, melting the night off the trees, she remembered herself and forgot herself all at once.
She stayed that day to listen to the speeches, the eulogies, the cries, and the laughs. All of them were for the great Avatar Aang, the last true airbender, the man who had saved the world after the longest war in history.
When eventually an air acolyte who had been one of the first to join her father's followers sat beside her, she realized the anger she felt.
"I saw you tapping your feet to the flute rhythm Bumi was playing," they told her. "That's the dancing your father loved."
Kya perked up. "Yeah, he loved dancing!" she replied. "Once in a cave—"
"You know one of the Northern Air Temple acolytes, Tashi, tried dancing Phoenix Flight once."
Her shoulders fell. The acolyte kept talking to her.
She was searching for her father in places he could never be, in people that pretended to be interested in bonding with her but never were. They were people that emerged from the woodwork with pitying smiles and half-cares who arrived before her because it was right, and it was good, and it was what should have been done.
But Kya looked and never found the dad she really wanted.
She took their flowers and handwritten messages to add them to the collection piled and knew it was not fair.
