Just a quick, messy drabble because I'm still trying to catch my breath after that episode...

They fight like their parents taught them.

Kya can almost hear her mother's patient voice in her ear, feel the water all around you. Feel the tiny particles in the clouds, the silent rivers underground, the ocean...pull from it.

She deflects and dives and jumps and pushes, and the water moves with her, but she is no match for a woman who has literally added limbs to her body with her element.

Kya hopes that her mother is not to disappointed.

Bumi tries to fight with air.

He really does. He reaches for it and pushes and stumbles, but he is not comfortable with calling the element. He's not an airbender, he's never been a bender, it's not in his nature.

But he is a fighter.

So he jumps and bites and pulls hair and yells and kicks and fights until he can't anymore.

He thinks as he and Kya fall through the trees, that Uncle Sokka would have been just a little disappointed.

Tenzin is air.

He abandons himself to his instincts and flows. Each breath is controlled, a conscious act of pulling air in, and pushing it out. He moves with and around the air around him, flowing and bending and pushing and deflecting and jumping.

Zaheer is all aggression-punches and spins and kicks.

Tenzin centers himself and flows around him, moves and kicks and blasts air, again and again.

Even when he's exhausted and everything hurts, and air, air his precious element, is throwing him back against a wall, again and again, and again, he can feel it. If he is strong enough, he can reach out and bend the air back at Zaheer, send him and the rest of the Red Lotus spinning back into nothing.

But he's so very, very tired.

Eventually, it hurts to much, and he can't see or think or feel anything but pain, pain, pain, PAIN.

He screams for his father before his head cracks against the stone one last time.