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Title: a memory remains
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
**Pairing:**Aang/Katara. <3
Rating: PG
Summary: The past, the future may be endless, but he will see it all, and she is only one face, one person; one thought that will fade away the moment the baby cries, still bloody, and he is born anew.

Notes: Also written for the Avatar Drabble Request Meme!

The past is endless.

Katara knows this; knows it when she lies awake at night and wonders how many people have been here before her, glimpsed the same stars with older, younger, wiser eyes. Knows it when thoughts of a world without war tease her, seeming so close in these final, heavy days (it existed before, hadn’t it? Once, when everyone lived and loved and died quietly in their beds). Knows it as she watches Aang toss and turn in his sleep, brow gently knit, bothered by more than she will ever know.

He dreams of people he’s never met, of places he’s never seen. No names, just details, insignificant, pointless -- but warm, always warm in his words. The house he once lived in had a table that was painted an ugly color, had a broken leg. His brother taught him how to row a canoe, laughed when he tumbled out on the first try. There was a girl -- and this is the part where Katara always tightens her grip, tries to look past him, far away -- who ruffled his hair as she passed by, who smiled like the sun, who loved someone he had been all those years ago.

Maybe that is the hardest part, she thinks. The past, the future may be endless, but he will see it all, and she is only one face, one person; one thought that will fade away the moment the baby cries, still bloody, and he is born anew.

But he‘ll remember her, she insists, stubborn, selfish -- wonders how many girls and boys before her have wished the same thing.

(“I don’t want to remember,” Aang once told her, twilight high above them. “It’s too hard, to think about so many people. To think about what I’ve lost.”)

They haven’t been through this, she decides, firm. They all haven’t lived through this war to end all wars; haven’t stood beside the Avatar more times than can be counted. And when it’s over, when this awful war is finally done with, they’ll escape, they’ll go somewhere far away from all this, and live forever and ever and ever and --

“Are you okay, Katara?”

She jerks upright; Aang is turned on his side, eyes half-lidded.

“You’re just kind of...staring,” he says, arching an eyebrow.

For a brief, desperate moment, she wants to grab him by the collar, kiss him so hard that he’ll never be able to forget it, never.

“Nothing,” she stammers, embarrassed by the thought. “Just -- thinking. About stuff.”

“What?”

“It’s nothing -- really, I’m fine.”

And she turns away, doesn’t close her eyes until she’s heard the soft shuffle of his body as he lies back down, heard him mutter a gentle “okay,” before growing quiet.

It’s too much to ask, she realizes, moments before the stars fade from her eyes -- still hopes that maybe, fifty lifetimes from now, he will think of her face, and smile.

(And four hundred years later, a boy of only sixteen -- they will tell him in the fall, the elders decide -- dreams of cold, of ice all around him, of a girl’s bright eyes, bringing him to life, and can only wonder what it all meant.)

~