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When Aang is eight and learning to fly on his glider for the first time, he falls. It’s not a big deal — practically everyone falls their first time flying — but it leaves a cut on his leg, shallow enough to not be a worry but deep enough to scar. A souvenir to remember the incident by, a thin line, pale on his skin. It’s small and easy to miss if you aren’t looking for it. It’s the last time he falls.
—
Prince Zuko, the first son of Prince Ozai and Lady Ursa is born at night and enters the world wailing in a dark, candle lit room. He’s quickly cleaned, bundled up, and presented to his father. No one notices that he already has a scar, the pale line blending into pale skin.
—
When Suki is born the mark on her leg, though faint, is examined and analyzed along with quite a few more imagined blemishes, by her mother and half a dozen other Kyoshi Warriors. Objectively the evidence is inconclusive, but that doesn’t stop the warriors from congratulating their battle-sister of her daughter’s good fortune at having at least one soulmate, if not more.
—
When Sokka is born, Kya notices the mark on his leg. But it’s small. It could be a birthmark; it could be her imagination. Soulmates are rare. It isn’t until Katara is born a year later with the same mark on her leg and a bruise on her forehead mirroring the one Sokka got while learning to walk that she accepts the truth: her children have soulmates.
—
Toph is born blind. She also sports a variety of childhood bumps and scrapes that reinforce her parent’s belief that their daughter is hopelessly fragile. When she’s older, Toph personally takes it as an omen of things to come. She was never delicate, even as a baby.
—
Zuko gets enough childhood injuries for about a dozen kids his age, but everyone knows that he’s a rowdy kid. Besides, he plays with Azula a lot, and when they play together, things get intense. And then he’s starting his firebending training and it’s hard and he keeps stumbling. He probably just bruises easily, that’s all.
Eventually, he gets the hang of firebending enough to stop falling down all the time, and playing with Azula begins to lead more to burns than bruises. By that point though, he’s training with the dual dao in secret and sneaking around the palace in the dark learning just how far he can jump and trying to climb things that really shouldn’t be climbed. Mother is gone and nobody cares, so he covers up the scrapes and bruises and tiny scars he’s accumulated because Father thinks he’s weak enough as it is. If he doesn’t remember where half his injuries came from and they really don’t hurt as much as they should, well, he just bruises easily and has a high pain tolerance.
—
Suki is a rowdy child, constantly running and playing and getting into scrapes when she should be doing her chores. She’s got at least one soulmate who’s nearly as much trouble as she is though. While it’s theoretically plausible that she manages to get in that many scrapes, occasionally burns show up that she definitely didn’t get.
She hopes that the burns are just from cooking, or maybe she has a soulmate who’s a blacksmith’s apprentice or something. Suki knows that the fire nation’s out there, burning places that won’t bow down. She knows that war is just as likely a cause. It’s the burns, quiet and minor though they may be, that convince her to start training with the Kyoshi warriors. She needs to know how to defend herself, her home, and any soulmates she has. Her first day of training leaves her aching and sore and she silently apologizes to the soulmates who will have to deal with all the new bruises she’s collected, but she also feels more alive than she has for a long time.
Someday, she swears, I’ll be able to keep you all safe.
—
Sokka really wishes that his soulmates would get beat up less. Because, like seriously, he can’t remember a time where he didn’t wake up with at least one injury he didn’t remember getting. (He hopes that that just means their stupid and reckless and not bullied or a soldier or something).
Being soulmates with his sister is kind of handy, sometimes. Most of the time though, it’s just annoying. He can’t get away with anything without Katara knowing about it. How she can tell that he was the one who sliced his finger open on a fishhook and not someone else, he has no idea, but all the denial in the world won’t stop her fussing over him.
—
Katara and Sokka have a signal. If one of them is in trouble, like real, life-threatening trouble, then they can cut an x into their skin, not very deep, really just a scratch, but since they’re soulmate’s it’ll show up on the other one’s too and they’ll know to get help. They tried it once, just as a test, sitting across from each other in their home with one of dad’s knives. It barely hurts at all if it’s not yours, but you can still feel it. It was emergency prep, not the sort of thing they’d ever have to use.
But now there’s a fire nation soldier in their home and Mom is telling Katara to leave, that she’ll take care of this. She does leave, but she’s eight now and she knows what Mom’s ‘I’m lying because I’m an adult and you’re not’ voice sounds like. Mom is in trouble and Katara needs to do something.
There’s nothing sharp nearby, but Katara is a waterbender even if she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She can make ice. It isn’t usually that sharp but right now she needs it to be and she’s a waterbender and Mom’s in trouble. It’s sharp enough.
—
Sokka is watching the battle from behind the wall, a safe distance away, which means too far away to be really interesting. It’s still exciting though. His cheek itches. There’s a cut there — when did he—? It’s shaped like an x.
Sokka is no longer staying a safe distance away from the fight. He’s running towards it because Katara’s in trouble and he needs to get Dad. He hasn’t run very far though when he changes course and starts running for home because the battle’s too chaotic to see where Dad is and Katara’s in trouble and probably needs help right now . How did she even get in trouble? She was supposed to be an even safer distance from the fight than he was. He gets there too late and there’s a fire nation soldier leaving their igloos and Katara’s okay, but Mom… Mom’s not.
—
Toph can’t see how much trouble her soulmates get into, but judging by the sighs her parents give and the amount of makeup the maids apply every morning, it’s a lot. Honestly, Toph is pretty glad about it, not that she’d ever tell her parents, but what’s one more secret among family? Learning to earthbend from badgermoles isn’t the most ladylike hobby in existence after all. It’s so much easier to blame her training scruffs and bruises on her soulmates than it is to explain them to everyone. And if Toph a little more sore than she should be from her soulmate’s injuries, well, she was just so delicate that she was vulnerable to even the echo of their pain.
(Okay, so maybe she hates it, just a little. Maybe if she didn’t have soulmates to blame everything on, her parents would finally see that she isn’t just their delicate little flower and would stop treating her like she’s made of glass.)
—
Prince Zuko has no soulmates. Even if he did, that wouldn’t stop the Firelord’s flames from burning him as he kneels. After all, in the Fire Nation, honor is shared. One can gain honor for all, and, as is more relevant in this case, one can lose honor for all as well.
—
It’s the middle of the night and Toph should really not be out that late, but she got distracted practicing her earthbending and oww, her eye hurts. Correction, the left side of her face hurts. It’s definitely one of her soulmates’ faults. For one thing, she definitely managed to deflect that rain of rocks flying at her face, and for another, Toph is taking no responsibility for the black eyes she definitely did not get from not getting hit by those rocks. (Though she does silently apologize to her soulmates, for no particular reason at all.)
She doesn’t give the aching side of her face any more thought until the next morning when the maid whose job it is to get her dressed in the mornings screams in a way that she shouldn’t for just a black eye.
It’s probably a bad thing that Toph’s first reaction to learning that she has a hideous looking burn on her face is glee that she’s going to have a pretty metal scar. Won’t that just drive her parents crazy? Good luck marrying her off now! It’s only later that worry for the soulmate who just took a fireball to the face hits. For a brief moment, she wonders if they're dead, but that gets dismissed quickly. She wouldn’t be soulmates with a wimp after all. (And it’s easier to know they survived than to think about the alternative.
—
If asked later, Sokka wouldn’t be able to say exactly when it happened other than that it was night and it was winter (which didn’t really narrow things down much since winter was basically one long night anyway.) What he can say though is that he, Katara, Dad, and Gran-Gran are all sitting around the fire. Gran-Gran is telling them stories and Dad works on a spear while they’re all waiting for the food to cook. Sokka might be dozing off a little bit when suddenly there’s a flash of pain from his face and his hand instinctively flies to his left eye. Across the flickering flames of the fire, Katara’s doing the same thing. For a few seconds, there’s warmth as well, but it vanishes quickly.
Their cries of shock are simultaneous.
By this point, Gran-Gran’s paused in her story but neither she nor Dad look very concerned. Sokka isn’t that concerned either at what’s probably just a bad black eye until he and Katara remove their hands from their eyes (at the same time, they’ve had lots of practice) and— Wow. That isn’t a black eye. Instead, it’s the nastiest burn he’s ever seen and he’s pretty sure that if there was more light in there, he’d be sick.
Katara looks sick, Sokka feels sick, and somewhere in this whole mess, Dad’s grabbed his face for a closer look and is wearing that carefully calm expression that means things are really bad. He knows that this isn’t an ordinary wound. He knows deep down in his gut, even without seeing the mess it’s made of his — of his soulmate’s — face.
—
Gran-Gran’s face doesn’t look worried at all as she holds an oil lamp close to Katara’s face. She never looks worried though, so that doesn’t tell her anything, really. Dad and Gran-Gran exchange a glance over the fire. “We need bandages,” Gran-Gran says at last.
Dad nods and Katara sits still as Gran-Gran’s wrinkled hands gently wrap bandages around her head, leaving only a gap for her to see. She does the same for Sokka.
Gran-Gran continues the story she was telling, but Katara can’t focus. How can she pay attention when the fire nation has just hurt another person she loves? (Just because she’s never met a soulmate beside her brother doesn’t mean she doesn’t care about them.) She can barely focus on her food. What if her soulmate’s dead? What if the fire nation killed them before they even got the chance to meet?
Gran-Gran checks the wound again the next day. Judging by the faces she and Dad make, it’s still ugly. Gran-Gran says that’s a good thing. It means their soulmate is still alive. Death wounds age years in a matter of seconds. As long as the burn’s still raw, her soulmate’s still alive. The thought doesn’t actually provide that much comfort.
Weeks later, when the sun’s finally risen again, Katara and Sokka stand across from each other and get their first good look at what their face is going to look like for the rest of their lives. The scar is angry and red. It covers a quarter of their face, creeping under their hairlines and over their left ears. Katara’s hatred of the fire nation solidifies like it hadn’t before. The fire nation has hurt them all. Now it’s just more obvious: on her skin and not just on her heart.
—
Suki is eating dinner with the rest of the Kyoshi warrior trainees when it happens. They don’t need to wear the uniform while they eat, but they do it anyway, all too proud of having earned them so recently to take them off to eat. Looking back, it’s a blessing that her face was painted when it happened.
She's drinking soup when her hand flies to her eye. She nearly drops the bowl. The pain is sharp for a few seconds like she ran into a wall or something, and then it fades to a dull ache.
“You okay?” Min asks, glancing across the table at her.
Suki nods. “Just one of my soulmates being an idiot again,” she says with a roll of her eyes and a shrug. Then, removing the hand from her left eye, “How does it look?” she asks.
There isn’t an answer right away which is the first — no, the second — sign that this is no ordinary wound. (The first is the simple fact that none of the bumps and bruises her soulmates have given her before have hurt this much.) Instead, four silent faces just stare at her.
“It’s really hard to tell,” Seong ventures tentatively.
“Bad,” Yun says at the same time.
“It’d be worse to look at if you didn’t have your facepaint on,” Nari adds
“I think your soulmate may have been a bit more than an idiot,” Min says softly.
Suki’s hungry. She doesn’t want to get up in the middle of supper and deal with a soulmate’s mistakes, but the expression on Min’s face means that she shouldn’t wait either, so she gets up and grabs a basin of water, a rag, and a mirror and gets the first good look at what her face is going to look like for the rest of her life. It… isn’t pretty. She looks up and Nari flinches, Seong looks like she’s going to be sick, Yun’s ready to strangle something, and Min tries to smile encouragingly with mixed success. They’re all thinking about how it looks and Suki can’t blame them, but what hurts her more is the fact that the fire nation got to them before she could. Before she could even try and do something to help.
—
The story of how the crown prince of the fire nation got himself banished is old news by the time Hakoda and the rest of the Southern Fleet make it to the Earth Kingdom. He still hears it though in a bar one night after everyone involved has had a few too many drinks. It’s been two years. Rumors are rarely anywhere close to the truth and Hakoda decides not to believe the story he hears from a drunk Earth Kingdom soldier. For one thing, is he really supposed to believe that a man, even the Firelord, would really do that to his own son? And for another, the details and the timeline are a little too familiar for comfort and the implications… unnerving to say the least.
—
It’s a while before Suki can put on the facepaint of the Kyoshi Warriors again. Just the thought of putting something on that bad of a burn makes her wince. Yes, it’s just a reflection of her soulmate’s wound and nothing she does will make it any better or worse. Still, it’s one thing to know it and another to actually do it. Sure, she could just paint half, but that would feel even worse than not wearing it at all. So, for as long as it’s healing, Suki trains with her face unpainted.
When she finally takes brush to skin again, she starts with the white. It covers the burn, but pink still pokes out. When she adds the red, she starts with the traditional highlights, but then, motivated by who knows what, she keeps going. Kyoshi herself taught them how to paint their faces. They follow the tradition she set, but surely she won’t mind if Suki changes it, just a little. The fire nation tried to kill one of her soulmates and she’s not going to forget it any time soon.
When she finishes, her scar is painted over in red, a flame mirrored on the other side of her face as well, not hidden, but flaunted and proclaimed, a message to those who would face her and a reminder to herself of why she needs to be strong.
—
Lao Beifong watches his daughter’s earthbending lessons through his office window, the latest news from the fire nation sitting on the desk in front of him. Master Yu is showing her the most basic basics of moving the earth. It is a shame that his daughter will never be able to do more. Toph looks so fragile and weak, sitting there on the ground, breathing and feeling the earth, the burn on her face looking more healed than it did before but still ugly and painful. Poppy had convinced him that learning to use her earthbending would distract their daughter from the unpleasantness. He could only hope that that would be the case.
It hurts them both to see Toph injured like this. They both tried so long for a child and Poppy nearly died giving birth to her. They’d sunk so much worry into a daughter they can’t even keep safe. And now, if the latest news is to be believed, there may be nothing they can ever do to secure her future. It hurts to be unable to protect her. Lao would never speak ill of the spirits, but he wishes that they would at least have some pity for a weak little girl.
He shows Poppy the letter that night. Her eyes grow wide as she reads. For a second, she looks as if she might faint.
“It can’t be,” she says, at last, her voice so faint as to be almost inaudible.
Lao wishes the same thing, but the date and the time and the description all line up. “We can’t tell her,” he says.
Poppy nods. “Of course.” And then she starts to cry.
Lao places his hand on hers. “We’ll do what we can. We’ll keep her safe.” They both know it isn’t enough. What can they possibly do when the spirits have linked their daughter’s fate to that of the fire nation’s banished prince?
—
There is a boy in the iceberg and he emerges in this huge burst of light that just screams spirit business. If Sokka could have his way (cough cough if Katara would actually listen to him) they’d be running in the opposite direction. Instead, his little sister runs towards the glowy boy for some reason(maybe weird attracts weird) and he has to follow to make sure that she doesn’t get herself killed.
“Stop that!” She exclaims when he takes the perfectly reasonable precaution of poking the probably-a-spirit with the blunt end of his spear. “Look!” She turns the boy’s face to him.
Sokka gasps because right there, on this weird spirit kid’s face, is a really familiar scar. A glance up at Katara confirms that this isn’t just a really similar scar. This blatantly suspicious kid is their soulmate. Go figure.
—
This boy is her soulmate. The thought races through Katara’s head. After so long with their identity being a mystery, with so much distance between them, it doesn’t feel quite real to know that he’s right here . In her arms, he opens his eyes. He leans up; she leans in. For a second, there's a connection between them.
“Will you go penguin sledding with me?”
He leaps up and she leans back and that connection’s gone. “Umm, sure?” That wasn’t how she was expecting this conversation to go, but he seems friendly enough. “I’m Katara and this is my brother Sokka. What’s your name?”
The boy grins. “My name’s Aang!”
“How’d you get in that iceberg?” Sokka asks. He sounds suspicious, but he’s no longer brandishing his boomerang so that’s something. “Also, is the scar yours?”
The grin disappears from Aang’s face, replaced by a look of confusion. “What scar? I don’t have any scars.”
—
Now both of the water tribe teens are looking at Aang like he’s the crazy one when they’re the ones asking weird questions. They frown at him and the burn that they both have on their faces makes the expression look more intimidating. Not that they’re intimidating! They both seem perfectly nice.
“Umm, the scar on your face?” The guy - Sokka - gestures at his own face. “Big, red, looks like this?”
Aang laughs even though the joke isn’t very funny. “Come on, you’re not going to fool me.” But he reaches up unconsciously and touches his left eye and there’s something there. “Huh?” He looks into the water. It isn’t a very good mirror, but he can still see that there’s a red splotch on his face where there definitely wasn’t before. “Well, that definitely wasn’t there yesterday!” he says lightly, trying to hide how much this bothers him.
Katara and Sokka exchange a glance.
“No, it definitely was,” Sokka says.
“Aang,” Katara asks gently. “How long were you in that iceberg?”
Aang shrugs. “I don’t know, a few days?”
“If this is the first time you’ve seen that scar, it’s been more like a few years.”
Years? That was crazy. Monk Gyatso must be freaking out so much right now. He was going to be in so much trouble. Aang groans. “The elders are going to kill me when I get back to the temple.”
Sokka nods sympathetically. “I bet,” he pauses. “Wait, why are you living at a temple anyway?” He raises an eyebrow, the one on the burned side of his face. “You seem awfully young to be a monk.”
“But all airbenders are monks. Or nuns,” Sokka and Katara must be from a really isolated village if they don’t know that much.
Why do Sokka and Katara keep looking at each other like that? It’s beginning to make Aang nervous.
“Aang,” Katara says in the same gentle voice she used to tell him that the scar was years old. “There haven’t been any airbenders in nearly a hundred years.”
—
The village harboring the avatar is tiny and pathetic, guarded only by a single warrior who’s digging himself out of the snow. A single warrior who’d knocked off Zuko’s helmet with his stupid boomerang. He shoved back on of course, but now all the women and children in this tiny stupid village are all staring at him and whispering. He doesn’t need this. He needs the avatar.
The warrior looks up from the snowdrift he’s buried in. Most of the paint on his face is gone, all the red on the right side of his face washed off in the snow, leaving only splotches of black and white. “Is the scar yours?” He asks like the stupid idiot of a peasant he is.
What kind of question even is that? Is his mark of dishonor and shame his? Stupid uncultured water tribe barbarians. “Who else’s would it be?” he snaps.
And immediately regrets a moment later when the avatar finally stops hiding and shows his face. Suddenly the water tribe’s warrior’s question is a lot less idiotic. Looking back, that’s also the moment when Zuko realizes that he can never go home, but if running around the globe for three years on an impossible quest has taught him anything, it’s to ignore uncomfortable truths. So what if he’s soulmates with the avatar? He’s still loyal to his father and his nation and he’s going to prove it by bringing the avatar back in chains.
Not that he makes it very far back to the Fire Nation before a sky bison of all things (they were supposed to be extinct, but then again, so were airbenders) lands on his deck and somehow a couple of water tribe kids (and the avatar) manage to wreck his ship into an iceberg and get away. The avatar is his soulmate. That stupid water tribe warrior is his soulmate. The waterbender who froze his men to the deck is his soulmate. Somehow, he’s gone from having zero soulmates to having three. This isn’t a good thing and contrary to what Uncle may think, it isn’t going to be solved through calming tea.
—
“Are you sure that guy was our soulmate?” Katara asks, looking down at the Fire Nation ship as they fly away. “He’s Fire Nation .” That’s honestly the hardest part of this whole crazy day to believe. Finding the avatar in an iceberg? Being soulmates with the avatar? Also crazy, but never in a million years had she imagined herself linked by the spirits by one of them .
Sokka shrugs. “Hey, I don’t like it either, but you weren’t there when he was attacking the village. His helmet got knocked off and there was no mistaking that scar. He claimed it was his too.”
That’s even more of a blow. The one thing Katara has always known is that the Fire Nation hurt her soulmate just like they hurt her. Now? She doesn’t know what to believe. “He probably got it doing something evil,” she mutters.
To Katara’s surprise, Sokka doesn’t immediately agree with her. “He didn’t look that much older than us,” he says slowly. “Just how evil could he be?”
“He said he was a prince. Of the fire nation.” Katara says emphatically. “And he attacked the village, of course, he’s evil!”
Aang looks over his shoulder from where he’s sitting on Appa’s head. “Maybe he’s actually nice,” he offers. “I mean, the entire Fire Nation can’t be evil, and he is our soulmate.”
“Maybe,” Katara wants to believe him, she really does, but right now she’s feeling angry and betrayed and if Zuko was actually nice then he shouldn’t have kidnapped the avatar and attacked them. That was all there was to it.
—
Aang is excited as Appa flies over the southern ocean below. Yes, he’s been frozen in ice for too long, and, yes, according to Sokka and Katara all the air nomads are gone, but they’re probably wrong. There’s no way that they could all be dead. Airbenders are really, really, good at getting out of trouble. Besides, he just found out that he has a bunch of soulmates and he’s always wanted to have a soulmate.
(That was one of the reasons it was so hard to believe that he was the avatar when the elders told him. Everyone knew that the avatar always had soulmates in the stories and Aang didn’t have any. That didn’t seem to convince any of the elders though.)
He was sure that they were all going to be great friends! Even if Zuko seemed kind of mean, he probably just needed time to get them better.
There were places to see and animals to ride and a world to save. He had Appa and he had his soulmates and they were going to go to the north pole to learn waterbending. This was going to be such a fun adventure.