Chapter Text
[0 AG]
Throughout history, both recorded and unrecorded time, there have always been horrors. Living nightmares that make the skin crawl, turn organs to jelly, and make knees weak. Just to hear of them is to be presented with the unimaginable, making it nearly impossible to comprehend for those who come later to grasp the reality. No one desires to live through unprecedented times, and yet they do all the same. They live and they fight and they find ways to survive when even that seems farfetched.
‘Survive’ is an apt word to describe exactly what happened to Gonpo of the Western Air Temple. She survived the raid on her home. She survived the immediate aftermath as the world seemed to burn and torch around her. The sky itself felt ablaze as she hid amongst the dense forest at the southern tip of Plum Island. She was hundreds of miles from her home, and perhaps thousands of miles from her son. By virtue of her life as an Air Nomad she had given him up, surrendered him to the monks to learn and be raised in their ways. She had no claim to him in the eyes of her people.
But her people were no more, and in the absence of her kind she craved to feel her kin pressed against her flesh again.
Gonpo spoke silent prayers every night for his safe return. ‘Let him be not harmed!’ She begged whatever spirits were above. In the aftermath of her world being turned upside down she was not quite sure what spirits, if any, existed above, or below, or anywhere. ‘How could they, when they allowed such evils?’
Gonpo had always been a wild thing, chaos incarnate. Before the end of the world her hair had been growing out. She had meant to cut it, really she had, but she'd been delaying it. Pimee was supposed to cut it the next day, but the sun never rose for Pimee and Gonpo never returned home to have her scalp shaved. Fortuitous that it was though, as it grew quickly in the weeks that proceeded, allowing her to hide, mostly, the tattoos on her head. The slightest speck of blue could be spotted by a keen eye at the apex of her forehead, and this proved to be her undoing one day in a market by the forest.
The man was large, dark, and unfeeling. He gripped her by the wrist in public and stared into her very soul. He'd just caught her stealing fruit from a stall, a punishment that could've had her hand in Sozin’s Fire Nation, but with her true identity a much larger prize, her meager hand in his grasp was the least of her concerns. For a moment, or perhaps a lifetime, she waited with hushed breath for him to expose her. She could feel his amber eyes digging into her grey ones and searching for something more. The denouncement never came, and when the merchant turned his attention from one patron to the pair, the giant man with dark brown hair took the fruit from her hand, and paid for it. He pretended to be an acquaintance, an embellished but necessary ruse to disarm the merchant's suspicions. They exited the market, arm in arm, Gonpo wondering all along if he was escorting her to Sozin’s shadowy reach.
The man's name was Izanu, of the clan Ty, and he proved to be her salvation. Izanu of the Ty clan was a pacifist man, a black sheep in his family and in his country. He did not care for the crown and its petty squabbles. He had seen Air Nomads in his life, known them, befriended them. Izanu had been enamored with the culture and way of life, it captured his heart as much as his mind. He brought Gonpo back to his farmstead and gave her the first home cooked meal she’d had in months.
Uncertain and afraid, he earned her trust with warm meals, a bathing tub free of his eyes, wool blankets, and all of the sleep she could manage. It was not a passionate affair, but rather a relationship they built over time. When she was ready to hear the way of things, he told her the course of events: the Air Nomads were all gone. All except, it seemed, for Gonpo, and perhaps the Avatar, although those rumors scarcely seemed possible and every passing day seemed to seal the fate of his passing as well. Gonpo and Izanu wagered that there were likely other Air Nomads who had been out and about when the attacks took place, but the truth of the matter was that they had no way of knowing for certain. The bleak reality set in and Gonpo spiraled once more into despair.
Through it all, the unshakable rage and the fury and the heartache, Izanu stood beside her and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. He did not betray her, he did not seek to manipulate or take advantage of her. He was a man who hated his Nation and despised its actions. Gonpo could not have found a better man for her circumstances if she had tried, and the blessing became evident quickly to her.
They came to an agreement. She would assist in his farmstead and he would keep her secrets, give her a roof over her head and food in her belly. He asked her questions of the Air Nomad lifestyle, a way of keeping alive her life from the Before Times. She asked about his clan and learned how he wished to strike out on his own. Eventually, when she felt the courage, she spoke of her son, a boy named Aang, who would've been 12 years old when it all happened. They kept alive the hope that he was alive, somewhere out there, despite both knowing the grim truth. They invented stories of how he had also been away from the temple when it happened and was making his own way to the Western Air Temple. In their fanciful daydreams they imagined him coming across the farm where they were, running into her arms and embracing her. It was a magnificent dream that balmed the cruel pain they both felt in their guts. Nevermind the impossibility of it all: Air Nomads were forbidden from telling their kin that they shared blood. Even if he was alive, he would never have known her as his mother.
The idea of welcoming a boy into their arms and into the home they built together spurred new thoughts. Fresh seeds were planted in the garden of their minds. Gonpo would never know her family again. Ty Izanu wished to never again coalesce with his own. They were happy and they were together, and by some blessing of the Spirits, they were happy together. The seeds grew up in the garden, watered by their love, given light by their shared dreams of family, and sprung forth new flowers of a future together.
So it came to be that Gonpo married Ty Izanu and joined the Ty clan. They bore sons and daughters who bore the brown of their fathers hair and the grey of their mother's eyes: impossibly strong genes that served as a permanent reminder of their bedrocks. A pair of outcasts brought together by fate, but whose destiny lied not with them, but in their ancestors to come.