Chapter Text
Lightning flashed above his head, purple-white through the clouds and lancing across the sky in great serpentine bolts. Thunder joined the arcing dancers with a chorus of baritone, rolling across the prairie in great booms, shivering up his heels and joining his heart as it beat.
Sokka stood some distance away from where his sister and the Avatar were hunkered under a low, scruffy tree, in loving embrace with the weeping mushrooms that ringed the trunk. His feet were planted firmly in the quickly-softening ground, shoulder width apart, and he had his arms raised to his sides, palms face up. The lightning was far enough away that he didn’t need to worry about getting struck.
Growing up, he’d always loved thunderstorms, as much as but in a different way as he’d loved fire. His parents had worried, urged him to stay inside so as to not risk electrocution, but it was one of the pure freedoms he felt. He wouldn’t let anyone take that away.
Now that he understood how lightning was related to fire—its colder, deadlier cousin—he understood, too, why he’d always been so enamored. It was a thrill to be so close to his element, to watch it take the skies in massive luminous cracks. It was this heart-pumping giddiness, one that forced laughter up through his throat and caused his head to buzz as if filled with static.
He wondered what it would be to bend lightning. Such a fleeting thing, next to fire that could burn eternally should it only have enough fuel to do so.
A thought crossed his mind, brief as a moment, and he just barely managed to snag it with the edge of his pinkie fingernail, to reel its struggling body back to the forefront.
Firebending felt an awful lot like, well, fire. It was as captivating to produce as it was to watch, a sinuous dance of flame that warmed Sokka from the inside out. Perhaps lightning was the same—perhaps bending it would be like a bubble that grew in his chest, would be like spinning circles in the mud, barefoot, like tossing laughter to the sky and crying out in exaltation of the heavens.
He had to try it.
He squatted down, dizzy. Brought his hands up near his face so that his palms faced each other, engaged in a dialogue that only he could understand. Focusing on that feeling, that joyful delirious hysteria, he began to pull from his inner flame, trying to let it race and tumble from his palms rather than flow outwards in strands. Time passed without his notice, and the sky flashed uncountable times, and he pulled and pulled and pulled until he stopped grasping at open air and instead caught on something in the pit of his belly.
A spark—just one, blue like static, but a spark nonetheless—hopped from his left hand to his right. He whooped, and stood, exhilarated—the spark had been measly and barely there but he’d seen it and felt it and most importantly, it had been him who made it.
He tried again many times, but couldn’t recreate his first success. He wouldn’t let it get him down: he understood now how it felt, and in time, he was sure he could do it again. His smile felt permanent, like his muscles had stretched so far that they would never return back to their previous state.
In that moment, it seemed almost ridiculous to him that he’d ever been afraid or ashamed of his bending. Even more than that, he balked at the idea of something so pure being used for something as soiled as war—when soldiers turned their violent hands on innocent people, how did they not realize it as an insult to the gift they had been given?
He shook his head, trying to break himself from his thoughts. If he let himself think about all the evil things in the world, the magic would break and he would be stuck back in the ever-familiar mires of misery. So he didn’t think about it, and he let himself be swept up in the arms of the wind and rain and let the thunder sweep him into the sky.
It was mostly dry, though still exceptionally damp, underneath what Aang had called a pumice tree—or, at least, it would have been, if not for Katara deftly waterbending the encroaching moisture away from where they’d set up emergency camp when the massive towers of cloud had appeared on the horizon. Momo was curled in one of their bags, sheltering from the rain, and Appa was languishing in the downpour, occasionally airbending the water from his fur in great puffs that sent vapor out from his body in a misty halo.
She watched, with amusement and a faint tendril of nostalgia, as her brother whooped and danced and spun himself in so many circles that he fell to the ground, dizzy from the movement. Thunderstorms gave her peace, too—she liked to feel the water’s descent, trying to focus on individual raindrops from as far out as she could sense them to when they hit the ground and splattered—but they exhilarated nobody the way they did Sokka. She remembered the many arguments that had surrounded thunderstorms in their childhood, Sokka insisting on watching the cells pass by and their overprotective parents worrying themselves to death.
She leaned back until she made contact with the tree. Tilting her head up, she watched droplets filter down through the blue-black berries and the oblong, waxy leaves, their free-fall stopping when she curved them away from their encampment until they landed just outside the wide reach of the branches.
One drop fell straight through, landing right at the crown of Aang’s bald head. She laughed when he took no notice: he was too preoccupied with the dried mango-apples gifted to them by the swamp-benders. She should’ve been reprimanding him—they were running out of food, and they didn’t know when the next stop would be. But it was late, and she was getting tired, and today was a day for indulgence.
She closed her eyes and promised herself she’d tell him off in the morning.