Hey there everyone, it's RoseSaiyan2 here again! Hopefully you all enjoyed the last chapter! Since the episode following the Omashu episode was short, I think I'll extend this chapter to include 2 episodes. I did receive a suggestion for Aang to remain single so he could live the true life of a monk, what do you guys think?
Should Aang stay single?
A. Yes
B. No
If yes, should Katara end up with Zuko?
A. Yes
B. No, keep Zuko with Mai
That's pretty much it for now. Be sure to leave a review or comment for the polls.
Disclaimer: RoseSaiyan2 (Novablade 67) does not own the characters belonging to Dbz/ DB super/ ATLA, or Black Clover... He merely owns the plot of this story and the Oc's (original characters).
Opening theme:
Black Summoner op 1: DEAD END by Retbear
Visuals: flashes and introductions of the main cast of this story. Flashes of characters from both sides: team avatar (aang, katara, sokka, odyn, asura, and goku) and Azula's side: (Azula, Ty Lee, Mai, Zuko, and Iroh) shadowed characters are those yet to be introduced (Toph, Khanna).
Chapter Four: Those Bound by Fate — Journey to Ba Sing Se
Part One: The Swamp That Remembers
The Earth Kingdom — Somewhere Over the Foglands
There was a particular quality to Appa's silence that Odyn had learned to read over the weeks of traveling together. The sky bison was not, as a rule, a subtle creature — when he was happy, the entire saddle knew it; when he was hungry, the entire sky knew it. So when the great animal flew without complaint over the foggy expanse of the foglands below and Aang grew progressively quieter in the front, Odyn noticed both things and said nothing, watching.
Aang was looking down.
Not at the landscape in the general sense that people looked at landscapes — the casual sweep of a traveler's eye marking distance covered — but at the swamp specifically. Fixed on it. The way a compass needle fixes on north, without explanation and without apology.
Odyn raised an eyebrow.
"Aang." He kept his voice even. "Is there a reason we're slowly descending toward the swamp?"
Aang blinked. Looked up. The particular expression on his face was the one he wore when he had been somewhere else in his head and had just returned to find his body had made decisions without him.
"Oh. Sorry, I didn't even—"
"Aang," Sokka said, in the tone of someone who has been watching the ground get closer for the last several minutes and is choosing now to address it.
"Right. I just—" He paused. Tried to find the language for it. "It felt like it was calling to me. The swamp. Like it wanted us to land there."
Goku leaned over the side of the saddle and looked at the dense, fog-threaded tangle of vegetation below. "It... was calling to you?"
"Almost like it wants us to land."
Sokka leaned over beside him. "I don't see anywhere to land."
"I know it sounds strange," Aang said. "But Bumi told me to wait and listen, and right now the earth is—"
"Yes," Sokka said.
Aang blinked. "Yes what?"
"Yes, we should ignore it." He gestured toward Appa, who gave a rumbling sound of what appeared to be firm agreement. "See? Even Appa thinks so. And Momo." The lemur chittered from his perch on Sokka's shoulder. "Unanimous. Appa — yip yip."
Aang considered this for a moment. Then, with the particular restraint of someone choosing their battles: "...Okay. Bye, swamp. Appa — yip yip."
The sky bison began to ascend.
Odyn had already looked away from the swamp, back toward the horizon, when he heard it — or felt it, more precisely, the way you feel a sound that is too low for ordinary hearing. Something below. Something patient.
Waiting, he thought.
Then the wind changed, and the tornado appeared behind them, and waiting became entirely beside the point.
It came out of nothing — a column of churning air and water and swamp debris that materialized from the fog with the sudden conviction of something that had been there all along and had simply decided to stop being polite about it. It moved toward them with the relentless purpose of a thing that does not negotiate.
"Aang!" Sokka had turned first, which was the only warning any of them got. "Another yip! Right now! Behind us!"
Aang wheeled Appa hard. The sky bison responded with the desperate speed of an animal that has made its opinions about the swamp abundantly clear and would very much like to be proven right. For a few seconds it seemed like they might clear it — the saddle tilted, the wind screamed past them, Momo plastered himself to Sokka's head with all four limbs in a grip that expressed significant opinions about the situation.
Then the pull of the vortex overran the bison's strength entirely.
Odyn had just enough time to register what was happening — the G-force reversal, the saddle pitching beneath him, Katara's hand reaching for Sokka's arm — before the world became entirely noise and motion and the particular chaos of being thrown somewhere you did not choose to go.
The swamp received them without comment.
Odyn hit the water at an angle that was survivable but unpleasant, went under briefly, and came up in a tangle of algae and indignation. He shook the water from his hair, checked his hands, found everything present and functional, and stood.
Around him: dense, fog-draped vegetation. Ancient trees with roots that disappeared into dark water. The particular silence of a place that is not actually silent at all but has learned to present itself that way. And the smell — rich, complicated, the smell of things that had been living and dying and living again in the same place for a very long time.
Katara surfaced nearby, pressing a hand to her lower back with a wince that told him the landing had been harder than she was showing.
He reached down.
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine." A pause. "It hurts."
"I know." He helped her stand, steadying her until she found her footing on the submerged root beneath the water's surface. "Better?"
"Getting there." She looked around, then up, then in every direction. The fog made the distances meaningless. "Where are Appa and Momo?"
Odyn cast his awareness outward — the particular extension of Ki-sense that he had developed for exactly these situations, pressing past the fog's interference with the patience of someone who has learned that searching harder is usually less effective than searching more carefully.
Nothing. Or rather — too much. The swamp was alive in a way that made individual signatures difficult to isolate. Like trying to find a specific conversation in a room where everything was talking.
"They went somewhere different than we did," he said. "They're not here, at least not close. They're alright though — I'd feel it if they weren't."
"Then we find them," Asura said, from a tree root ten feet to Odyn's left, where he had apparently landed with considerably more composure than the rest of them.
"We find them," Goku agreed, already oriented and ready, because Goku was always already oriented and ready, which was one of the many things Odyn appreciated about him.
Above them, Aang dropped from a branch with a soft landing and looked around at the fog.
"Appa? Momo?" His voice was swallowed almost immediately by the trees. He looked at Odyn. "I can't see anything."
"Keep calling. I'll listen." Odyn closed his eyes. "The rest of you — spread in pairs, stay within earshot. If anything feels wrong, stop moving and signal."
The group split.
Elsewhere in the Swamp — Iroh and Zuko
The coin landed in Iroh's hat with the small, precise sound of charity delivered with good humor.
"The coin is appreciated," Iroh said, warmth in every syllable, "but not nearly as much as your smile."
The woman laughed and moved on. Zuko stared at the hat in his uncle's hands with an expression that had long since moved past embarrassment and was now occupying the territory of a man simply enduring reality one moment at a time.
Royalty, he thought, for the third time that afternoon. We are royalty.
"They will give you whatever you want," Iroh had told him that morning, "if you ask nicely." And then Iroh had gone ahead and demonstrated what asking nicely looked like when it was performed by a heavyset former general with no dignity left to protect and absolutely no concern about that whatsoever.
Another coin landed in the hat. Iroh brightened. Zuko looked up.
The woman who had contributed it was already walking away — dark hair, dark skin, moving with the particular economy of someone on an errand who had allowed themselves one small detour and now needed to return to the purpose of the day. The thing that Iroh noticed, in the half-second before she disappeared around the corner, was her eyes.
The color of open flame. Unusual in the Earth Kingdom. Unusual anywhere, really.
And her ears — he thought he had seen — but she was gone before he could confirm it, the crowd closing behind her like water behind a stone.
Where have I seen that before? he thought.
A swordsman appeared before he could finish the thought, flashing a gold coin with the smug energy of someone who has made a show of this kind of thing before and intends to again.
Zuko's jaw tightened.
"We're not performers."
"Not professionally," Iroh agreed, and then began to sing.
In the Swamp — Night Approaching
The problem with the swamp, Sokka had concluded, was that it was deeply and personally committed to being unsettling about absolutely everything. The sounds it made were wrong. The things that moved in it moved at the exact threshold of visibility, which was worse than either seeing them clearly or not seeing them at all. The gas clouds smelled terrible and appeared without warning. The bird — whatever it was — made a sound that suggested it had studied horror and was pursuing it as a personal passion.
He was, accordingly, chopping.
The machete was helping. Not with navigation, not with finding his friends, not with locating Appa and Momo — but with the general sense that he was doing something active in a situation that otherwise threatened to simply happen to him, which was a feeling Sokka disliked intensely.
"Sokka," Aang said, for the second time. "I really think you shouldn't be doing that."
"I asked the swamp," Sokka said, grabbing a nearby branch and adopting a falsetto. "No problem, Sokka." He resumed chopping.
The rest of the group stared at him with the collective expression of people who have run out of things to say.
Odyn stood slightly apart, arms crossed, eyes moving slowly across the treeline. He had been doing this for the last ten minutes with the quiet attentiveness of someone listening to a language they almost understand.
"I'm with Aang," he said, without looking away from the treeline. "This place is alive in a way that's not just biological. Whatever's here, it's watching us decide how we're going to treat it."
"Great," Sokka said. "Then it can watch me chop wood."
The light changed as darkness settled over the canopy, and what had been merely unsettling became something with more substance to it. Hundreds of eyes appeared in the near distance — small, reflective, arranged in the particular way of things that have decided to stop hiding. Aang, Katara, and Sokka pressed together with the instinctive geometry of people who have suddenly realized they are in the center of something.
Odyn, Goku, and Asura stood their ground. Not with bravado — with the simple stillness of people who have learned not to move suddenly around things they don't yet understand.
"Except for them," Aang said.
"Except," Sokka agreed, considerably quieter than before.
Later — The Separation
Odyn was not asleep when the vines came.
He had been in that particular state of watchfulness that resembles sleep from the outside — still, eyes closed, breathing slow — while remaining present in the way that years of training had taught him to remain present. So when the first vine broke the water's surface with the soft deliberateness of something that had been planning this for a while, he was already moving.
"Up —"
The warning came half a second before the vines reached the others. Goku and Asura were on their feet before the word finished. The other three were not so fortunate — Aang, Katara, and Sokka were yanked awake mid-dream, the vines closing around them before they could orient, and then they were gone, pulled into different directions by a swamp that had apparently decided it had something to show them.
Sokka's machete hit the bark of a tree as he cut himself free and tumbled, splashing into the dark water below. Odyn heard the crash, filed it as survivable, and turned to the vines coming at him from three directions simultaneously.
He didn't want to use fire in here. He had made that decision before they camped — the swamp was too old and too alive for fire, too interwoven, the kind of place where burning one part would mean burning all of it. So he fought the way he had been taught to fight before he had learned to bend at all: with his hands, with his weight, with the precise application of force to the points where force would do the most.
A vine reached for his wrist. He redirected it. Another went for his ankle. He stepped through the grab and used the vine's own tension against it. A third wrapped around his forearm before he broke it with a sharp rotation of his elbow.
"Odyn." Goku's voice, close. "There are too many."
"I know." He looked at his brother. "Don't destroy anything you don't have to. This place doesn't want to hurt us — it wants to talk to us."
"Vines seem like an aggressive conversation opener," Asura said, severing a particularly persistent one with a ki-blade and watching the edges of it closely to confirm it wasn't reaching for his tail again.
"We're in its home," Odyn said. "We broke things coming in. From where it's sitting, we owe it at least a chance to say its piece."
The vines continued coming. The three of them continued managing them, retreating carefully rather than advancing, until the swamp seemed satisfied that it had separated what it wanted to separate.
Then the fog closed in, and Odyn was alone.
Odyn — In the Deep Swamp
The fog thickened and thinned in patterns that felt deliberate. He moved through it carefully, senses extended, calling for his friends at intervals and receiving only the swamp's layered quiet in return. His Ki-sense, which had served him reliably in every environment he had encountered since learning to use it, was giving him something here that it had never given him before.
Depth. A sense of something enormous just below the surface of perception. The swamp wasn't blocking him — it was simply so present, so vast and interconnected, that parsing it for individual signatures was like trying to count waves on the ocean from inside the water.
He stopped trying to force it and let himself feel it instead.
And that was when the fog ahead of him shifted.
A figure. Tall, familiar in the particular way that bypasses the eyes entirely and lands somewhere older. Dark skin. Broad shoulders. A face that Odyn had last seen alive when he was six years old, in a memory that time had softened around the edges but never touched at the center.
His feet moved before his mind gave them permission.
"Dad—"
He crossed the remaining distance without strategy or dignity or the careful composure he had spent years building. He simply ran, and when his arms closed around Berethon's form the sound that came from his chest was one he had been holding for nine years.
The figure held him. Solid. Warm. Real in the way that mattered most, whatever that meant here.
"I know, son," Berethon said, with the voice Odyn had spent a decade reconstructing from fragments of memory. "I'm sorry I had to leave you so soon." A pause, gentle and absolute. "Look at how you've grown."
"I—" Odyn stopped. Steadied himself. "If I had been stronger—"
"Odyn." His father's hands took him by the shoulders — a grip Odyn recognized in his bones before his mind had finished processing it. "Listen to me. It is a parent's purpose to protect their child. I did what any father does. Your mother understood that. And you understand it too, even when the grief tells you otherwise."
Odyn exhaled. Nodded once, slowly. "Yeah."
"Good." Berethon smiled — the specific smile Odyn had spent nine years trying to remember accurately and had apparently succeeded at, because seeing it in full was like being handed something he hadn't known was lost. "I see you've found people you care for. That's exactly what your mother and I hoped for."
He became serious then. Not grave — careful. The way someone becomes careful when what they have to say is important and the time they have to say it is not.
"Listen closely, Odyn. I don't have much time left. What you need to hear is this: you are not the only one of your kind still living. They are scattered — reduced — but they are there."
Odyn stilled. "My kind? Dad, I'm—"
"More than you've been told." Simple. Certain. The kind of answer that isn't trying to be mysterious but is limited by something external to the speaker. "What you are exactly is something you'll have to find for yourself. But when the opportunity presents itself — go to the library hidden in the desert. Everything you're looking for begins there."
A sound that wasn't a sound moved through the fog behind Berethon. A second figure — and the moment Odyn's eyes found it, something in him lurched with the specific confusion of recognition without context. Dark skin, crimson hair, pointed ears like his own, eyes of fire. Young. Perhaps his age, perhaps older. Wearing a black hooded tunic and a face that grinned at him with the ease of someone who expects to be recognized and is patient about waiting for it.
"I — I know you," Odyn said slowly. "Somehow. But I've never—"
"You'll figure it out," the figure said. "Sooner than you think."
The first light was breaking through the canopy above. The figures were going with it — not dramatically, not with urgency, simply receding back into whatever space the swamp had borrowed them from.
"Dad—"
"Go." Gentle. Final. "Your friends are waiting. We'll speak again, Odyn. I'll always be watching over you."
"I know," Odyn said, to the light that had taken his father's place. "I know. Thank you."
He stood still for a moment longer than he needed to.
Then he turned, found the direction where his friends' energy signatures were slowly converging, and ran.
Katara — Elsewhere in the Swamp
She had followed the figure without fully deciding to.
That was the honest account of it — she had been moving through the fog calling for her friends, and then she had seen something in the distance, and then she had stopped calling because something had closed around her throat that was not fear and not hope but some version of both that didn't have a name.
Mom.
She had run. Of course she had run. And the figure had been there, right there, close enough that she had reached out her hand — and then close enough to see the face clearly, and the face was a rock, and the rock was just a rock, and Katara sat down in the swamp water and did not bother trying to stop the tears.
"Dear girl." A woman's voice — not her mother's, but kind in a way that was its own kind of answer. "What's wrong?"
Katara didn't turn. "I miss my mother."
"I know." A sad pause. "Her death still weighs on you."
"It always will." A breath. "I know she died when I was young. I know it was a long time ago. But sometimes it—" She stopped. Tried again. "It doesn't feel like a long time."
"Grief measures itself differently than everything else."
Katara finally looked up.
The woman who stood before her was striking in the particular way of someone whose appearance is secondary to the feeling they carry with them. Long purple hair. Dark skin. Ears that came to gentle points at their tips. A Water Tribe-styled dress beneath something warmer. And eyes — the same burning amber-orange that Katara had seen every day for the past several months in the face of someone she had come to care for more than she had intended to.
Those eyes. She knew those eyes.
"Who are you?"
The woman smiled — not the smile of someone who finds the question amusing, but of someone who finds it understandable and is choosing gentleness in response to it.
"Someone you will know, but do not yet." She crouched, briefly, and put her arms around Katara's shoulders in the simple, unhesitating way of someone who has known her for a long time and is not going to let formality prevent comfort. "Please, Katara. Continue helping Odyn. He is someone very dear to me, and the road ahead of him is not easy."
Katara looked at her. "How do you know Odyn?"
"You will understand in time." A pause. "He will need your help. Not your bending, not your strength — your understanding. The kind that doesn't ask anything in return."
Katara held those fire-colored eyes and felt the answer settle into her the way true things settle — not with drama, but with the quiet permanence of something that was always going to be true and was simply waiting to be recognized.
"He's my friend," she said. "I'll help him. Of course I will."
The woman's expression did something complicated and tender.
"There is a choice coming," she said quietly. "A choice about where you stand and what you let yourself feel. When it comes — be honest. With him, and with yourself." A final pause. "That is all I can ask."
The swamp light shifted. The fog lifted in one long slow exhale.
And Katara was alone, sitting in the water, with the particular feeling of someone who has been told something important they don't yet have the context to fully understand.
She stood. Brushed the water from her skirt. And went to find her friends.
Sokka — Still in the Swamp
He had been telling himself the figure was the fog.
This was the rational position. The swamp made shapes in the fog — everyone knew that, or at least everyone should have known it, because fogs made shapes and swamps were full of fog and the combination was straightforwardly explicable. There was nothing about the figure in the distance that required any other interpretation.
He stopped walking.
The figure was still there.
White hair. The particular way of standing that he would know from any distance, in any fog, for the rest of his life.
"Yue," he said, before he could tell himself not to.
He took a step forward. The figure spoke.
"You failed to protect me."
He lurched backward. The words hit the exact place they would need to hit to be maximally effective, which told him some part of his own mind had selected them and was using them against him, which was a thought he filed away for examination later when he was not standing in a swamp in the dark.
When he looked up, the figure was gone.
Something else was there.
Different this time — young, perhaps near his age, perhaps a year or two older. Dark skin. Long black hair past her shoulders. Pointed ears, which his sleep-deprived brain registered and then filed under questions for later. And eyes — the first thing that made him stop and actually look — the same flame-colored eyes that he saw every day in the face of his friend, that same burning amber-orange that was somehow different in this face, paired with features he had never seen and an expression of mild, intelligent amusement.
She wore green and earth-tone armor that suggested she was comfortable outdoors, comfortable in the body she occupied, and comfortable looking back at someone who was staring at her.
"You seem lost, human," she said.
Sokka opened his mouth. Closed it. "...Yeah. I was separated from my friends. I'm not sure where I am."
She tilted her head. "You don't need me to find them. You're already where you need to be." Something in her expression shifted toward something warmer. "I've simply helped you arrive."
"Who are you?" He heard the skepticism in his own voice and elected to let it stay. "And how do I know this isn't some kind of trick?"
She looked at him with an expression that was not offended by the question. "Believe what you like. The information stands regardless." A small pause. "The choice is always yours."
Sokka looked at her. Looked at the direction she was motioning toward. Looked back at her.
Something — entirely unreasonable, completely inexplicable, the kind of thing he would not be admitting to anyone — told him to trust her. Not the evidence, because there wasn't any. Not logic, because this whole conversation defied it. Just something quieter and more certain than either of those things.
He sighed.
"I hope this doesn't get me killed," he said, and started walking.
"Remember something," she said, from behind him. He didn't stop walking but he listened. "Your past is not your identity. What you've lost, what you've failed to protect — those things are not the whole of what you are. Use them. Learn from them. But don't let them be the story you tell about yourself."
He paused. Did not turn around. "...That's — thanks. That actually—"
He turned.
She was gone.
The fog occupied the space where she had been with the complete impassivity of fog everywhere.
Sokka stood for a moment, processing the experience with the part of his mind that handled things that didn't fit into existing categories. Then he filed it, unresolved, in the place where those things went, and continued walking.
Somewhere ahead, he could hear familiar voices.
Reunion
They found each other the way separated people in impossible places usually do — by accident, momentum, and the particular comedy of converging trajectories.
Aang came over the ridge first, chasing someone he couldn't quite catch, and then ran directly into Katara at a speed that sent both of them off the edge of a tree root and into Sokka from behind, the three of them sliding down the root in an undignified pile before coming to rest at the bottom.
Sokka raised a hand toward the canopy.
"What do you think you're doing? I have been looking everywhere—"
"I've been looking for you," Katara said.
"I was chasing someone," Aang said.
"What someone—"
"A girl. In a fancy dress. I don't know who she was."
A familiar voice from above settled the conversation.
"You mean me, Katara?"
The three of them looked up. Odyn dropped from a branch with characteristic ease, landing on the root beside them and offering a hand to Katara, which she took.
"Odyn!" The relief in all three of their voices was genuine, unguarded, the kind that comes out before you can decide whether to perform it.
He steadied Katara, helped her the rest of the way upright, and looked at the three of them with the expression of someone quietly glad they are all in one piece.
"Where have you been?" Katara asked.
He paused. Something moved through his eyes that was too complicated to name quickly.
"I spoke to my father," he said.
The silence that followed had a different quality from ordinary silence. Aang's face moved through concern. Sokka's closed briefly, in the particular way he closed his face when something touched territory he wasn't ready to open.
"Your birth father?" Sokka said, carefully.
"Yeah." Odyn looked up at the canopy, where the light was beginning to break through in long pale shafts. "I don't know how. But I did."
Katara looked at him and thought of a woman with purple hair and fire-colored eyes who had hugged her in a swamp and asked her to take care of a boy who was, apparently, more complicated and more important than she had yet fully understood.
"I thought I saw my mother," she said quietly.
Odyn met her eyes. His expression carried something she was grateful for — not pity, not performance, but recognition. The acknowledgment of one grief by someone who has their own.
"I know," he said.
Sokka looked away. "Yue," he admitted, to the fog. "I saw Yue."
A pause.
"Sokka," Katara said.
"I know," he said, before she could finish. "I know. It doesn't prove anything. We were scared and tired and the swamp—"
"Something else too," Odyn said. "A figure you didn't recognize, immediately after." He looked at his friends. "Both of you saw someone else, didn't you? Someone unfamiliar."
They looked at each other.
"...Yes," Katara said slowly.
"Now that you mention it," Sokka said.
"And you?" Aang looked at Odyn.
"A young man I've never seen. But I knew him anyway, somehow." He turned this over once more, the way he had been turning it over since the fog lifted. "And the girl you were chasing, Aang. You've never met her."
"No," Aang said. "But I feel like someday I will."
The silence settled around them comfortably. The swamp breathed. The light grew stronger.
"The center," Aang said, looking up. "All of our visions brought us here. To the heart of the swamp."
"It's just a tree," Sokka began.
"Sokka," three voices said simultaneously.
He stopped. Considered. "...I'll entertain the possibility."
The Banyan-Grove Tree
The man who lived in the swamp introduced himself without ceremony and bent their path clear with the same ease a city person might clear a path through a crowd — familiar, habitual, ownership expressed through casual use. He was old in a way that the swamp was old, as though the years had stopped doing much to him at some point and had begun doing other things instead.
He showed them to the Banyan-Grove Tree.
The tree was — Odyn stopped trying to find the appropriate word and simply stood with it for a moment. It was vast. Architecturally vast, the kind of vast that rewrites the scale of everything around it until the things you thought were big reveal themselves to have been gesturing toward this all along.
"This whole swamp," the man said, settling against a root with the ease of long practice, "is a single living thing. One organism. Branches spread, sink, take root, spread again. Everything you walked through today — it's all this tree."
"How does it call to people?" Aang asked.
"That's the wrong question." The man smiled. "The right question is — why were you listening?"
Odyn stood slightly back from the group, one hand resting against the tree's bark. He pressed his palm flat against it and felt — not nothing, not the ordinary background hum of living wood — something larger. Older. The swamp's awareness, if that was the word for it, running through the bark the way water runs through stone: patient, pervasive, permanent.
Everything is connected, he thought. The man was saying it aloud, but Odyn was feeling it.
"The visions," Katara said. "Why did we see the people we saw?"
"Because the swamp shows you what you're still connected to." Simply stated. True in the way that simple things are sometimes more true than complicated things. "You think the people you've lost are gone. The swamp knows otherwise. Time is not a wall. It's a river. And all rivers go to the same place."
Your father's voice in a swamp. An impossible conversation. The information in it real and specific and actionable.
The library hidden in the desert. Others of your kind still living.
Not a hallucination, Odyn thought. Not the swamp's interpretation of grief. Something that was actually there, using the mechanism the swamp offered.
"What about people we haven't met yet?" Aang's voice was quiet, genuinely uncertain in the way he sometimes got when something reached past the surface of his certainty and touched the age underneath.
The man looked at him with the particular expression of someone who recognizes a question that deserves its full weight.
"You're the Avatar," he said. "You tell me."
Aang was still for a moment. Then: "Time is an illusion. So if I saw someone I haven't met yet — she's someone I will meet."
The man smiled.
"And your point," Sokka said, from a strategic distance, "about the whole world being one organism—"
"Same point," the man said. "You think you're different from me, or from this tree, or from the girl in another nation you've never been to. But somewhere under everything, you're all running on the same roots."
The argument Sokka had been assembling didn't quite come together, and he seemed to decide that this was a reasonable place to let it go.
Finding Appa and Momo — Together
Aang knelt at the base of the great root and pressed his palm to it the way Odyn had pressed his, but differently — with intention, with the specific meditative openness of someone accessing something they have been practicing their whole life. His tattoos lit from within, the pale blue light traveling down the root and outward, branching through the swamp's vast network in every direction simultaneously.
Odyn watched.
The light ran through the water. Through the vines. Through the root system that connected everything to everything else. And somewhere in it — two signatures, both of them alive and moving, one with the broad warmth of a large animal who was currently very displeased about being caught in a net, the other small and indignant and throwing things at people from a bag.
Aang opened his eyes.
"They're caught," he said. "But they're alright." He stood, and Odyn heard the urgency in the way he arranged himself — now, not in a moment. "We need to go."
They went.
The swamp assisted them for the rest of that journey — or at least stopped obstructing them, which amounted to the same thing. Roots that would have barred the way bent aside. The water moved beneath them with a current that was helpful rather than resistant. The fog thinned.
Goku and Asura materialized from the treeline about halfway to the waterway, mud-spattered and displaying the particular satisfaction of people who had recently made decisions with their hands.
"Appa's downstream," Asura reported, without being asked.
"Being moved by a group of swamp benders," Goku added.
"There are swamp benders?" Katara asked.
"Apparently," Goku said. He paused. "We may have been slightly aggressive with the ones in the trailing boat."
"Slightly," Asura confirmed.
"How slightly?" Odyn asked.
"They're fine," Goku said. "Probably."
The reunion with Appa was characteristically expressive on Appa's part and more restrained on everyone else's. Aang's airbending cleared the net. Katara's waterbending scattered the confusion. Odyn and Goku arrived at flanking positions that the swamp benders found sufficiently discouraging, and then it turned out that swamp benders were waterbenders, which caused an immediate and complete shift in the interpersonal dynamics of the situation.
"You're waterbenders?" Katara said. "We're kin."
The two swamp benders looked at each other. At Katara. At the South Pole clothing she was wearing. Back at each other.
"Huh," said the taller one.
"Huh," agreed the shorter one.
Momo, freed from the bag, immediately attached himself to Sokka's head and expressed his feelings about the entire afternoon at volume.
That evening, the group ate around a fire at the swamp men's camp — possum-chicken, which Sokka pronounced tasted exactly like something he couldn't name but recognized, and a variety of swamp fruits that no one asked the name of. The gator-creature called Slim was fed from the scraps and expressed its opinions about Sokka specifically with the consistency of an animal that has made a decision and will not be revisiting it.
The conversation was easy, as conversations become when people have passed through something difficult together and come out the other side without any major casualties.
Odyn sat back from the fire slightly, not absent from it — present, but with some part of him still in the fog. Still hearing his father's voice. Still seeing the face of the young man who grinned at him with the specific ease of someone who expected recognition.
Others of your kind. The library in the desert. What you are is more than you've been told.
He turned these over the way he had been turning them, pressing them against each other to see what fell out. Nothing new arrived. Not yet.
The night wore on. The swamp settled into its layered quiet. Somewhere in the dark, the bird made its sound, and a plant root swatted it away from the vicinity of the camp with the exasperated efficiency of something that has dealt with this particular neighbor for a very long time.
Goku sat down beside Odyn.
"You okay?" he asked, the way Goku asked things — direct, without the preamble that was supposed to make it easier to say no.
"Yeah," Odyn said.
A pause.
"You talked to your dad," Goku said.
"I did."
"Good things?"
Odyn thought about his father's hands on his shoulders. The smile. The last words before the light took him back to wherever he had come from. I love you, my son. I'll always be watching over you.
"Yeah," he said. "Good things."
Goku nodded. Said nothing else. Sat beside him while the fire burned down.
That was one of the things Odyn valued most about Goku — the understanding that sometimes the thing someone needs is not a response, but a presence. A body beside them in the dark that says you're not alone in this without turning it into a conversation.
Brothers, he thought.
Not by blood. But that never mattered.
Elsewhere — Nightfall
In a town at the edge of the Earth Kingdom, a figure moved through an alley with the particular quality of movement that comes from having a destination and no interest in being observed.
The swordsman from the afternoon — the one who had made a fat man dance for gold — turned at the sound of footsteps. Found nothing. Turned back.
The arms came from the dark and introduced him to the crates with considerable authority. His swords clattered to the stone.
A figure stepped from the shadow. The mask was blue and white, cracked down the middle, and had seen a great deal of use. The swords were lifted and examined with the critical attention of someone who understands blades.
The figure said nothing.
The screen offered nothing more than the mask, the night, the swords, and the silence of someone who has become, for reasons that will eventually be explained, two different people at once.
To be continued...
Next: Chapter Five — Those Bound by Fate III: Journey to Ba Sing Se, Part Two
Ending theme: Twin Star Exorcists ending 1 (Eyes)
Visuals: replace the characters with Odyn (being the boy instead of Rokuro) and Azula( being the girl instead of Benio) Flashes of the other characters in the cast in between (Odyn thinking about team avatar before thinking about Azula at the end. Azula is shown thinking about her friends, Ozai, Iroh, and Zuko before it stops on an image of Odyn). The song ends as Odyn and Azula are then seen staring towards each other, a distance apart.
Hey guys, i hope you enjoyed this chapter! Sorry for the delay on it as I've been focusing on one of my other stories mainly. I figured the swamp episode was important because of what happens in it so yeah. I may cover the Avatar Day episode and perhaps another one, but we'll see. The mysterious girl that Sokka sees will be introduced pretty soon you'll just have to stay tuned for that. Anyways, that's all for now. Have a great rest of your week guys!