The first thing that Katara did upon becoming aware was reflexively reach forward to catch Aang, who had just come out of the Avatar State and was tumbling down from the lip of the half-melted iceberg.

After coming out of his own disorientated state, Sokka just squatted, pulled out his bone-knife and started scratching things into the surface of the ice, muttering to himself.

"Stupid past with no inkwell pens or typewriters or word processors… or calculators... ugh. Xiao was really onto something with his probability theory of fundamental syntax, I can't forget that stuff…" Scritch scratch scritch scratch.

Katara ignored her brother and focused on Aang, quickly waving her arms so that his entire body except for his mouth and nose was covered in glowing healing water. In addition, she reached in and touched the blood flowing in his veins and arteries, making it glow with the power of healing. The result was pretty spooky-looking if one had never seen it before, but to her, it was as common as breathing; she knew that she could do it asleep if need be.

For this, however, she was wide awake.

Those first seconds out of the iceberg turned out to be crucial to his future health. His one hundred years of slumber damaged him in a way that could not be mended easily unless he got instantaneous medical attention from either a proper modern hospital - which wouldn't exist for another 120 years or so - or Katara's abilities. If he didn't get the deep-healing treatment within minutes it would wreck his chromosomes' telomeres and hasten the aging process, among other things. The only way to stop that was to wrest control of thermodynamics from its natural course and get the remaining microscopic ice crystals present in his body to slowly defrost.

This one procedure added decades to his lifespan. Almost doubling it, actually. Delayed healing would have only managed twenty years, maximum.

His eyelids slowly fluttered open, and Katara moved the water covering them out of the way. But as soon as he conscious of where he was, grey eyes (with still-glowing blue veins) flicked over to her face, and beneath the water covering mouth, he slowly grinned.

She smiled tiredly down at him.

"Here we are again, Aang."

At those words, his beaming dialed down a notch, becoming slightly pained, but he closed his eyes and shook it off, and the corner of his mouth went up in an expression of shared cynicism. Katara's smile faltered, becoming a small frown, and she looked away even as her hands stayed busy shaping the water to do as she commanded.

"I know," she said in response.

There was no end.

But that train of thought led to madness and despair. So she instantly let it go.

A few more minutes later, she gently lowered her hands. Her work with him was done, but there was another member of their precious family that needed attention. The water sloughed off and Aang stopped glowing with healing light. Then Katara stood up from her kneeling position and briskly strode directly towards where Appa lay within the broken egg-shell of ice, brushing the wall separating them away with a flick of fingers and thought, but retaining the water in a globule which trailed after her.

Standing up, the airbender followed after to make sure that the flying bison had a familiar face to wake up to.

And to give him a hug. It was definitely a tradition, by now.

Katara swiftly brought the water she took from the iceberg-shell to bear on Appa in a luminescent blanket which she used to completely cover him except for his face, speaking casually as she did so, "Your book got made into a mover."

Aang, who was leaning back against the bison's forehead watching her work, flushed red, groaning as he brought a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose, "Oh, no… which one?"

"The Thrilling Adventures of the Blind Bandit."

The comedy. Of course. "Who…?"

"Lobsang. Your fifth great grandchild. Airbender."

The Avatar blinked. He knew who she was talking about.

"Really?" Of all the acolytes, he least expected him to become attached to the material world. He had seemed so enthusiastic about the Air. Or maybe he just worshipped the ground Aang walked on, he wasn't sure now.

"He didn't really like temple life," she explained, "He took the 'I'll do whatever I want, thank you' approach to airbending philosophy. Or so he told me. He left the island around the time when Toph moved on," she shifted, and the water moved with her.

Shrugging, he nodded in understanding, "That's freedom. Doesn't get much more airbender than that. I'm glad he decided to be an artist."

Moving around to Appa's other side to focus more of her energy, she glanced at her spouse, "It was good. He renamed it, though. Professor Wang Fire Must Be Stopped."

He snorted in amusement. "Good one."

"I thought it was a good adaptation. You would have liked it. I told him so."

"Yeah?" he closed his eyes, feeling mellow.

Katara smiled gently, "I think he was happier than when he got the Golden Gong."

The mood turned cold.

"Stop," he implored, "Please." No more.

She understood. "... Okay."

Aang suddenly found himself being lifted up by a giant tongue. Groans vibrated through the ice to their feet.

"Hey, Appa!" he called, laughing, "Good to see you awake!"

He was lowered to the ground, and Aang leapt on to his head, embracing.

"I missed you buddy," he murmured into his fur.

When he jumped back off to his feet, he faced his companion and gestured, "This nice girl's name is Katara. She's healing you right now, and she needs you to stay still."

A slow blink and a moo of acknowledgement.

"It'll feel good, I promise!"

Then he backed off, looked to his wife of another life, and looked away. The air between them was uncomfortable, as it sometimes was. That was the difference that a decade of distance, for her, and yesterday, for him, brought.

It wasn't that he wanted to avoid her. He just didn't want to think about the people that he left behind. Pointing, he started shuffling back to where Sokka was scratching up the ice.

"I'll be over there having a lie down."

Her voice was soft (and pained, but she did her best to hide it), as he walked away, "Alright."

The Avatar just lay there in the snow watching clouds go by through the bright blue sky, and all was silent except for the distant blowing of arctic wind and the scratching of a knife against the ice.

Scritch scratch, "... the sum of the frequency of occurrence for n-tuple relations between morphemes within a random grammatically correct sentence should add up to the expected value…" Sokka mumbled, eyes raking over the symbols he'd already written even as he hurriedly continued his figuring.

Aang couldn't stop the smile coming to his face, and he sat up from his previously horizontal position.

He might as well ask; taking care of Appa usually took Katara a while, since he was pretty big.

"How's your research going?" he asked curiously. Updates on Sokka's projects were invariably interesting.

He didn't look up from what he was doing, but possessed the presence of mind to answer his friend while he worked, "Finished… for now. I finally found that basal bit I was raving about, about six months after the Ba-Sing-Se Element Collider was built this time, only about five years after you left."

"I'm sorry I wasn't there," Aang offered honestly. It was heady to be around Sokka when he was excited about something. A beautiful breath of fresh air.

The glow of Katara's healing session suffused the air with an ethereal light and a low ringing, bell-like sound. He could hear Appa's groans of contentment as Katara washed away the aches of cryogenic sleep.

"Don't worry about it. I'll paint a picture of the party for you when I get my hands on a kit."

That was a skill the Sokka had taken singular care to absolutely master. There wasn't any other way to share memories from another lifetime, after all.

Sweeping snow over what he had written, he waddled over to a fresh patch of ice, still in his squatting position, and started making a table of numbers based off of the calculations he had been making previously. Sharp blue eyes scrutinized the work, endeavoring, as always, to extract meaning from the world.

"After that, I decided I wanted to switch specialties. I think I'm done with physics for now. I wanted to see what was up with linguistics."

"Linguistics?" his friend asked bemusedly.

He vaguely waved his free hand around, eyes still focused on the task at hand, "The study of how language works?"

Aang rolled his eyes, rolling his whole head with the movement and leaning back on his elbows, "Ugh, I know what it is, Sokka. I mean, why?"

At that, his head turned up from what he was doing to pierce the airbender with his analytical gaze, some degree of unbelief showing in the tilt of his head, "Why do we do anything?"

The Avatar coolly returned his stare, raising an eyebrow. That question did not deserve a response. "Patronization doesn't suit you. I mean," he stressed, "What made you think of linguistics in particular? Why not," he threw random disciplines into the air, "Computers? Chemistry? Or…" he thought for a moment, adding on wistfully, "Rocket science?"

Now Sokka rolled his eyes, "Your love affair with space is heartbreaking, you know that? You do know that it's going to be at least eight decades before that's even close to happening, right?"

"I can't help it, okay? The stars, the sun, the moon… It's beautiful. And -"

"And it's the ultimate expression of detachment from the earth. Right. Every airhead's wet dream. How could I forget?" he replied dryly, outwardly sarcastic, but internally wondering somewhat at how Aang managed to hold on to that part of his identity, even after all this time. He, himself,certainly didn't feel like he was Water Tribe anymore. Turning back to the chart he drew, he eyed it critically, "To answer your question, let me see if I can remember…"

Adding a few changes to the graph he composed out of the data he somehow still had stored in his head, he finally stood up, looking over at the monk and shrugging, "I guess that it started when I wondered if there was such a thing as a 'perfect language'."

"A 'perfect language'?" he queried, a hint of skepticism in his voice, "What does that even mean?"

At that line of inquiry, Sokka smiled, big and bright, and Aang felt himself automatically reciprocate it. It was too rare. Those moments when they were lighthearted. For whatever reason he found, and even for no reason at all for the sake of raising his family's spirits, Aang would smile.

Chortling, Sokka nodded, a starlike twinkle in his eyes, "Well, that's the big question, isn't it? What, indeed?" he affirmed happily, "I hope to spend a nice long time figuring out the answer."

And that's all that it ever was... just a matter of time.

They waited, simply absorbing the environment of the South Pole, neither saying anything while they waited for their flying bison's medical treatment to finish up. Aang went back to laying in the snow, lazily flicking and twirling his left pointer finger and letting his mind wander while he bent the air into a convoluted pretzel of jets and cyclones.

The glowing stopped, and Aang looked over just in time to see Katara removing the sheet of water that she covered Appa with, who moo-ed energetically, feeling refreshed and ready to fly due to being rejuvenated by Katara's waterbending. Wandering back over to where Sokka was standing, she folded her arms and her mouth twisted into a smirk as she gave a sidelong glance at her brother.

"You didn't tell Aang how you died this time?"

Having had a great deal of practice, Sokka's card face was truly a thing to behold… to anyone who wasn't included in their little group. Whenever he pulled it out in front of one of them, though… well, all it served to do was afflict the airbender with morbid curiosity and a sense that he was about to hear something ridiculously funny.

"Forgive me for my oversight," he said, a hint of annoyance peeking through, "It was only a few minutes ago for me, you see, so it slipped my mind. I think it was a very dignified way to go, thank you very much. By the way, how long did you last?"

Katara allowed the temporary deflection to answer him, "Zuko ended up croaking first… again. I suppose it was too much to hope for otherwise. He held out for four months after you. I'd already taught the new Avatar waterbending by then, so I didn't really have a reason to stick around, and wasn't looking forward to the waiting time to expire of old age, so I drank the tea."

"Katara…" uttered Aang sadly, quietly. But he didn't say anymore when she flicked a warning glance his way. They had been over this before, and with the relentless march of time, he came to understand her point of view. Not that he'd ever personally be okay with it. But he could see how, after having seen their grandchildren's children become adults, having outlived her children, having outlived all of them, she would be quite tired of it all by the end of the run and want to get it over with.

Her gaze moved back to pointedly pin down the tall warrior, raising her gloved right hand to gesture at him, mockingly offering him to walk the plank, as it were, "That was an admirable attempt, brother mine, but it will come out of your mouth, where you can control it, or it will come out of mine, where I will twist it to the fullest extent that I'm capable of."

Finally giving up, Sokka huffed and crossed his own arms, his lips turning into pout as he glanced down at Aang with some trepidation. The Avatar leaned forward from his sitting position in eager anticipation.

"... I fell asleep during a lecture."

Even though he guessed that it would be good, he didn't expect that.

Laughter exploded out of him, and he nearly tipped backwards from the force of it, "HAHAHAhahaha! Y-You! The fearsome Professor Sokka, slayed by the boring drone of one of his colleagues! HAHAHA-!"

"Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, airboy!"

"A-and that explains w-what you were doing just now… y-you were still taking notes! HAHA-!"

It didn't become hysterical, but it was close. Novelty like that was the most precious thing in the universe, following his family. He enjoyed it to its fullest.

Wiping away the tears that came with such a good laugh, Aang nodded to himself, "That right there… Is going into a book."

And what a threat that was, since he seemed to regularly find himself hailed as the greatest man of literature in history. It was pretty flattering, and, Aang noted slyly as he watched Sokka blush and start to spit in incredulous fury, it would bring in a suitably large audience.

"Don't worry, Sokka! I'll be sure to use a nice, opaque pseudonym for your character!" he said cheerfully, bringing his big, innocent, twelve-year-old gaze to bear on him.

Upon seeing just what that deceitful flying rat was doing, he flicked at the biological preteen's forehead-arrow, "Like Wang Fire? And drop the act. That never worked, you pipsqueak. From day one. Not even when you were an actual little kid."

"Oh, I recall a lifetime or three when it worked," Aang replied loftily, letting up on the cuteness and swiping away the older boy's offending finger.

"HA! Never," he sniffed.

"Besides, you were never Wang Fire last time around! No one knew!" the Avatar argued.

Sokka shook his head. "Oh, no, that punk knew exactly what he was looking for when he picked a lookalike of me to act that part in the mover. You've been talking."

To his right, Katara sighed in exasperation when Aang looked like he was about to retort.

"Anybody interested in getting off of the hunk of ice? Today, maybe?"

With that interruption, the airbender paused and glanced in Katara's direction. Wrapping arms around his legs, he turned away from his love of innumerable years and leaned his head into his knees.

"You guys sure about this?" came his muffled voice.

It was a pertinent question. Katara hummed a bit, raising a hand to rub at her eye. She recalled the last time they all had a meeting together, and the decision they had arrived at.

"I am. This'll be good for us, Aang. I think that we've all been a little depressed, lately. We should be more active, this time."

He lifted his head back up.

"Yeah," he said softly, "I agree. I just wanted to know whether you two were still okay with that. It's been a few years since then for you, is all. I was wondering if you might have changed your mind."

Neither Katara nor Sokka acknowledged the lie they knew their friend was telling. Both knew that if they showed even the remotest hesitation, Aang would latch on to that and it would all be over before it began. He was always a little skittish about these kinds of lifetimes, at least at first. His pacifism, still present within him, made him resistant to the idea.

But, for one of them, the specter of boredom was a far more powerful motivating factor, and they knew it.

Throwing up his arms, Sokka made a warding gesture.

"Hey," he interjected, "I'm with all of you on this one. Relaxing is fine, and all, but I can tell we've been coasting for a while, now." A small, dark smile as he brought his gloved hand to his chin to stroke a nonexistent beard, "It'll be fun to shake things up, for once."

Boy, that sure brought back memories. And they were Really Bad ones.

Aang and Katara shared a brief look, communicating volumes of trepidation in an instant.

Noticing the byplay, Sokka sighed in irritation at the other two, "I'm not gonna blow up anything important, okay?"

"Oh, that's reassuring," his sister said dryly, but not without some warning in her voice.

He frowned, "How long ago was that, now?"

"Long enough that we really should just forget about it," the Avatar emphasized, turning pleading eyes onto Katara to please don't bring it up again please.

She relented. "Anyway," she added reasonably, "It'd be rude to hang Toph out to dry when she's going to act according to plan with or without us."

It was her plan, went unsaid, and she'll probably kick your butt if you jump ship while it's her turn.

Taking this pause to finally airbend himself up from his reclined position on the ice, Aang snickered, "I guess you guys are right," he said, grinning, "It's not like it's the end of the world, or anything."

The deliberate irony of that statement was not lost on any of them.

Once upon a time,that was how it really was. Frightened children lost in a war-torn world, trying desperately to snatch peace from the jaws of destruction. It was an unforgettable journey, a date with destiny topped off with an epic battle between the forces of good and evil. Then, afterward, it was a long drive to rebuild and reshape the world, filled with successes and pitfalls and happy (now faded) memories and unnecessary pain. They were pleased with themselves, when all was said and done, having lived fulfilling lives. They had done their best.

But then it happened again. And again. And again, ad infinitum.

The Avatar turned suddenly to gaze off to the east, a brief look of concentration appearing on his face before relaxing.

Katara inclined her head. "Zuko?"

Aang nodded. "He says hello."

The moment was interrupted when the three of them were bowled over by an impatient Appa.