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Aang turns fifteen today.
Or, technically, a hundred and fifteen, but—that’s not the point. The fact remains: the dead light of the stars flickers through the night sky, and the Sun will rise in the morning, and Aang is now fifteen years old.
It shouldn’t hurt much as it does.
He’d gotten through his thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays relatively unscathed, with usually only Katara and Appa to keep him company as they travelled, the air biting at their skin and cheeks permanently sunburnt. After the war was officially over, there were just so many things to do ; two years went by with little to no pause between them, just an endless, mindless searching for anything that could be traced back to descendants of Air Nomads, or any relics of his culture, and. It was easy to let it slip away, for a while.
Aang never got the whole thing about birthdays that the other nations seemed to have, anyway; for Air Nomads, each year of life during their younger years granted them new freedoms or responsibilities, though mostly both; after a certain age, well — age stopped mattering as much.
Aang doesn’t even really know the date of his birth. All he knows it’s that he was born on the second week of Spring, days before the equinox. He didn’t realize it was such a big deal until he mentioned it offhandedly to Katara—who of course, freaked the hell out. And then, proceeded to freak out even more at Aang’s nonchalance about the it.
“It’s just a day, Katara,” he’d laughed. “What’s the difference between a day and a week, on the long run? The monks always said the age isn’t important; what you do within it is what matters. What’s the big deal?”
Katara had seemed subdued at that, though the smile she gave him was more bewildered than understanding. “Air Nomads,” she’d mused, resting her cheek on Aang’s shoulder. “The more I hear about them, the more confused I get.”
She didn’t mean anything by it. Katara’s not like that, Aang knows. And it isn’t fair of him to expect her to just be so—so accepting of a culture that had disappeared a hundred years before she was even born. Of course she’d find it weird. It shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did.
That night, with Appa snoring next to them and Katara snuggled against his shoulder, Aang breathed and counted. He raked his mind for very little tradition, every little custom, everything he could remember about Air Nomad culture. Otherwise, it dies with me, he’d thought, suddenly terrified. It dies with me.
At ten, you become responsible for your own air bison. They’re companions for life. At eleven, each airbending child gets the chance to visit the wenwú shí of their Temple. At twelve, the standards become higher; assisting the air nuns and monks is your top priority. Thirteen, the first taste of travel; at the Eastern Air Temple, the Shēnqíng de hú will be the start of your spiritual journey. Fourteen is the age of enlightenment; with the mastering of your element, the arrows start being drawn over your skin.
It’s a long process, and a sacred one. Each age brings with it something new; with each age, something grows.
Needless to say, Aang hasn’t gotten a lot of experience with that.
He was so excited to meet Appa when he turned ten. He could barely sleep for a week before visiting the wenwú shí. And then—twelve. He mastered airbending, years before it was expected of him. The monks sat him down and told him he was the Avatar. They tried to take him away from Gyatso.
And, well. No more birthdays for him. Not for a hundred years. And when he blinked away the snow from the iceberg he’d been trapped in, and a year passed, and Aang breathed in the second week of Spring—
Nothing. No one to give him well-wishes as he left for Shēnqíng de hú, where all the older kids gushed about having been to, but wholeheartedly refused to talk about what actually transpired there, as a form of secret pact between them. Aang remembers being just turned twelve and bouncing up and down on the heels of his feet, thinking, Next year I’ll know, next year I’ll know, only one more year.
One more year. It sounds almost funny. Back then, it sounded like more time than he could ever hope for.
Look at him now.
Aang tilts his head back to watch the stars. It’s late enough that a haze of sunlight is beginning to form on the horizon, but the world is just a blanket of silence around him. His legs dangle in front of him from where he’s sitting on the rooftop, purposefully close to the edge so that if anyone found him there, the height from the fall would scare them enough to leave him alone.
He just can’t right now. His throat feels swollen and tight, but he knows he isn’t sick by the way his eye sting against the warm breeze of Spring. Sometimes, it just feels like so much. This grief, this loss, this — homesickness , feels almost alive in the way it chews at his heart. If Aang closes his eyes, he can almost pretend he is sitting with it; a feeling so absolutely other in its immensity that it becomes its own presence, its own being. And Aang sits with it and watches the stars. He doesn’t know how to live without it anymore. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get the chance not to.
It used to make him worried that he hadn’t, in the end, unlocked his heart chakra. He pretty much ran all the way back to the Eastern Air Temple, weeks after Zuko’s coronation. All this grief, all this inside him, eating him alive and swallowing him up. I think we did something wrong, he’d told Guru Pathik. It didn’t work.
But is it eating you alive? Guru Pathik had said. Or are you just living with it?
Aang hadn’t known how to answer. He still doesn’t.
He feels rather than hears Zuko approaching, and he lets him. In moments like these, it’s different with Zuko than it is with everyone else. Even Katara—Aang loves her, he does, and he knows she loves him too. But they’re too similar in their grief to lean on each other like this; if they tried, they’d both fall apart. Life without war has taught them that they have time. So much time. And they can be something more when they are ready for it. But with Zuko, there is no expectations. He’s just there.
“Running away from your own festivities?” Zuko’s voice is low and amused, and hearing him so lighthearted makes Aang crack a smile in spite of himself. “You almost look like me.”
Aang turns around, making a face. “It’s hardly a festivity.”
“Don’t let Sokka hear you say that,” Zuko says, walking over to the edge of the rooftop and flopping down beside Aang, posture relaxed. “He’s been planning it for weeks .”
It’s the first time in two years that Aang’s birthday coincides with them all being in the Fire Nation at the same time; Sokka had gotten the position of Water Tribe Ambassador, and finally moved all the way to the capital to his new official quarters in the palace. Suki was still the head of the Kyoshi warriors, and had been working as a guard for the Fire Lord ever since the end of the hundred-year war; Toph had been living in the court after a brief visit to her parents’, which didn’t end well, and Zuko, of course, was in the second year of his reign. After a brief stop at the Southern Water Tribe for Katara to visit her father and Bato, she and Aang had packed up their stuff and made it in time for his own birthday. And, of course, Sokka went insane.
Aang adamantly refused to have any big celebrations of his fifteenth year. In fact, he preferred that his exact age be kept a secret to most; Avatar or not, adults would use any excuse to be condescending to him. It’s best that they not know. So, Sokka had found a compromise.
“Reunion. Party.” His smile was so big it seemed to nearly tear his face in half. The amount of confetti containers he carried in his arms was alarming. “Team Avatar back together again!”
And come on. Aang isn’t heartless . He let Sokka decorate his quarters with little trinkets and balloons and colorful strings to the point where you could barely recognize the floor anymore; Suki raided the palace kitchen for as much alcohol as she could find, and well.
Screams erupt from the window beneath them, followed by the sound of shattering glass and Toph’s mad cackling. Sokka yells something incomprehensible, and Katara yells back even louder. Zuko sighs and tips his head back.
“Toph invented a new game,” he says, unprompted. “She calls it beer pong. I don’t know what the objective of that is, but I think we’ll have to replace all the windows in the northern wing of the palace.”
Aang chuckles, but doesn’ say anything. The words get lost somewhere between his throat and his tongue, and whatever he meant to say tastes awfully sour.
Zuko knows.
Aang is aware he’s being watched, so he turns to watch Zuko back. Nowadays, it’s almost weird to see his friend in casual clothes like this; even the topknot has been ditched for the night, with Zuko’s slowly growing hair being tied back in a simple bun. There are still everlasting eye bags under his eyes, but there’s a smile playing at the corners of his mouth, as if it’s ready to boil over, and Aang thinks this suits him. Though he sometimes feels too old for his own bones, the same way Katara feels too big or small for her own skin, the same way Zuko feels like a caricature of himself, somedays, Aang knows they aren’t. They’re so, so young.
“Fifteen is the year of travel,” Aang says, looking away. He feels Zuko’s confused head tilt, so he continues, “As soon as an Air Nomad turns fifteen, they're encouraged to see the world. Mostly to know the other Air Temples, but I remember the stories of all the things you could do when you were on your own out there. I didn’t get all the inspiration for those mini vacations out of thin air.” There’s something on his face that could be mistaken for a smile, but it doesn’t feel like one. The words are out of his mouth before he can hold them in. “Sometimes it feels like I did, though.”
Aang breathes and doesn’t look at Zuko. Zuko draws his knees up to his chest and doesn’t look at Aang. The silence between them expands and loosens, not in an uncomfortable way, but in a way that says, you can keep going if you want. I’ll carry it with you, if you'll let me.
Aang is fifteen and he is so tired.
“I hate my birthday,” he says, so softly it could be just a breath. Then, louder. “I hate it.”
He turns to look at Zuko, whose golden eyes peer right back at him. There’s no pity in them, or even a semblance of understanding. Zuko looks so sad it almost makes Aang stop talking, but then Zuko reaches out and takes Aang’s hand, squeezing.
Aang talks.
“There are so many things I never got the chance to. No Shēnqíng de hú to visit. No year of travel. No - Agni, no year of choice. At sixteen, I would have been able to choose what I wanted to be, right? An airbender can decide between dedicating themselves to becoming a master and serving their Temple, or carrying on with their travel. Airbenders could travel forever. But,” he laughs ruefully, eyes dry. “I guess the year of choice was never coming for me, anyway. If it wasn’t for the war, they would’ve told me I was the Avatar then. I don’t know which is worse.” Aang takes a breath. One too many. “I never had a choice in the first place. So I don’t know why it still hurts that it got taken away.”
“Aang,” Zuko says, forcefully. “You’re allowed to hurt.”
Again, he has the bizarre urge to smile. He doesn’t, in lieu of simply shaking his head.
“I know,” he says. “It’s just stupid. I’m—yeah, I’m sad , but that’s not the right word. It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing if it’s bothering you,” Zuko says, echoing the words he’s heard from Aang so many times. Reverse card , his eyes say.
“I think,” Aang begins. Falters. “I’m homesick. But there’s no home anymore.”
He expects Zuko to tell him that’s dumb. Or to say something along the lines of we’re your family, and home is wherever you want it to be , but it doesn’t come. Instead, Zuko tilts his head up and breathes in the weak sunrise as if he’s drinking from it, as if he’s trying to see how much light he can hold before he breaks.
“Wǒ bù zàijiā ,” he murmurs, looking skyward, “‘I am missing from home.’” He’s silent for a moment, and then speaks up again. “A homesickness for a home that is no more, and a homesickness for a home that never was.” Zuko looks askance to Aang. “One more thing in common, huh?”
Aang looks at the scar, and then at Zuko. Back and forth, until they’re not separate entities anymore. In the dawn, his face could pass for a shadow.
“One more thing in common,” Aang repeats, pulling his knees against his chest at the same time Zuko lets his legs dangle over the edge of the roof. It’s so simultaneous it almost startles a laugh out of him, but Zuko doesn’t seem to notice. He’s staring at the sun, his good eye barely squinted, pale skin almost translucent.
“Do you hate me?” He asks suddenly, and Aang does startle then. At his reaction, Zuko deflates, sounding almost sheepish. “I mean. Sometimes. Because of all the—”, he gestures vaguely at the horizon, and then lets his hand fall, face turning pink.
“Tui and La, Zuko, of course I don’t!” Aang says, completely bewildered. “Why would I?”
It’s not a new discussion. Zuko’s father—Ozai—had really done a number on him, and the recovery from years of abuse has been a lot of two steps forward, one step back. It’s been mostly up to Sokka and Suki, as Zuko’s partners, to daily remind him that he is not unforgivable, and he is not a shameful thing, and he is not unworthy, but it’s tough. And each time, Aang gets so genuinely affronted by such suggestions, that it usually makes Zuko crack a smile.
But he remains serious. He doesn’t look at Aang, but his tone is casual when he speaks again. “I mean,” he says, “I’d understand it if you did. What we—what the Fire Nation did, was…”
“If you say unforgivable,” Aang says, “I will tell Katara, and you better prepare yourself to be mothered to death.”
Zuko lets out a cackle, and then promptly claps a hand over his mouth in horror. Aang can’t stop himself from grinning—it did sound an awful lot like Toph’s laughter.
“Fuck, Aang, I’m being serious,” Zuko says, smothering his face into something neutral. “What the Fire Nation did was inexcusable,” he continues, his voice hardening to what Sokka likes to call his Fire Lord voice, “and no amount of reparations will ever bring back what we took from you. It’s a burden no one should ever have to carry. We will do whatever it takes to stand by you and keep the Air Nomads alive. They will be as long as you are. And, Aang?” Zuko takes both of Aang’s hands in his, eyes searching his face. “I am not asking for forgiveness. But both as the Fire Lord, and as your friend, I am so, so sorry .”
Aang swallows. “Zuko,” he says, strained, “I forgave you a long time ago. I forgave all of you a long time ago.”
Zuko doesn’t let go that easily. “I know the monks taught you that revenge is poisonous, and that holding grudges takes away from you,” he says, “but you’re allowed to have feelings. Even if those feelings are anger or resentment or hate. They’re yours.”
Aang pulls Zuko’s hands to circle his arms against him, in what is possibly the most awkward hug he’s ever had, considering the angle. But neither of them pull away for a while.
A new day dawns in the Fire Nation. It burns in the horizon, yellows and reds and oranges like smudges of ink in the sky, giving way to a pale blue that looks almost cold to the touch, but promises the life of Spring.
“The year of travel,” Aang muses, cheek squished against Zuko’s bony shoulder. “I always thought it had a nice ring to it.”
Zuko huffs and pushes his face away. “Haven’t you done enough travelling already?” he asks. “You and Katara have been everywhere .”
Aang’s face pulls into a smile, though it tastes more bittersweet than what he is used to. “We have,” he agrees, “but I think it’s time I did something for myself. As a birthday gift.”
Zuko’s face is soft. “Yeah.”
They’re quiet for a moment. Then, Zuko says, “You know, if you’re accepting offers for reparations, feel free to beat me up. Toph always says I’m a good punching bag.” He wiggles his eyebrow at Aang. “I’m sure it’ll be awfully cathartic for you.”
Aang sputters. “You,” he says, between giggles, “have been spending too much time with Sokka.”
Zuko honest-to-Agni smirks. “Too much quality time. But let’s not leave Suki out of the game. She’s a player.”
“Zuko, stop,” Aang screeches, punching Zuko on the shoulder. “You’re not supposed to be making those kinds of jokes!”
“And you’re not supposed to be getting them!” Zuko quips back, trying to fend off Aang’s repeated attacks on his torso, where to his absolute delight when he found out, Zuko was incredibly ticklish. “You’re a child!”
“No, you’re a child.”
The sun paints the sky golden, and then settles into being. It’ll be a beautiful day.