Tattoos

In the end, they both have marks.

Lin wears hers proudly; battle scars, strikingly apparent against her skin just days after her eighteenth birthday, mark her as a warrior.

Tenzin, skin raw and inflamed from the ministrations of his father's needle, needs a bit more time to become accustomed to the arrow stretching its length up his back and over his bald head. He wears them humbly, honored to be the first boy in over a hundred years to sport the blue ink of his ancestors. They mark him as a master.

When Lin saw his tattoos for the first time, she ran to him, and he lifted her up into his arms, the air around them circling and undulating. He had been gone for a year, traveling with his father, and he had missed her dearly.

When Tenzin visited Lin late in the evening after the altercation that had left her scarred, he was turned away by his mother, but not before he caught a glimpse of her laying on one of the guest beds, the red flesh of her cheek raised and uneven, in stark contrast to the smooth skin of the rest of her face. She had looked so frail, so alone, lying there in an empty room under white sheets, her body so small without her new metalbending uniform that she had taken to wearing even on the rare occasions when she was not working. He had gone out to the pavilion where his father had taken him every morning to meditate since he was a toddler, and prayed for dawn.

Though Lin never paid any notice to her scars, and Tenzin eventually grew accustomed to his tattoos, there was a bond formed between the two. A bond born of skin marred and pain withstood. A bond of the strong, of the enduring.

In the end, they both have marks.

But the tattoos, the burden of Aang's legacy, eventually tear the two apart.