Siku
South Pole - AG 85, Winter
Ethan Reed had always known he wasn’t going to get a happy ending. Not in his first life.
He never said it out loud, of course. Not to his family. Not to his doctors. Not even to himself when he lay in a sterile hospital bed with tubes in his arms and a paper thin gown over his way too thin body.
But he knew.
He knew when the treatments stopped working. He knew when his mom started crying outside his door instead of in front of him. He knew when his dad, who always tried to be upbeat, sat down one day and just… held his hand without saying anything.
So, when the end came, he wasn’t surprised.
He was seventeen.
He wasn’t angry about it, either. That part shocked him. You’d think he’d rage against it—against the injustice of it all. But mostly, he just felt… tired. And sad. Sad about the little things. That he never kissed anyone. That he never got to graduate. That he never got to try the food from that Sushi place across town. That he never got to be someone.
And when the dark came, when everything slipped away, he thought, “At least I tried.”
And then…
He was cold. Not hospital cold. Real cold. And wet. Soaking, heavy, and bundled in furs.
⸻
He cried the first time he opened his eyes.
He wasn’t supposed to be here. He wasn’t supposed to have eyes anymore. He was supposed to be buried or cremated or whatever his parents chose. He was supposed to be a memory in a slideshow with sad music.
Instead, he was a newborn.
His name was Siku now, and he was a twin.
He couldn’t believe it at first. But when Katara, rolled against him in their crib, he knew. He had watched the show a thousand times.
And Sokka… Sokka was older, sure, but the voice, the shape of the hair, the way he kept talking about how he was the man now?
It had actually happened. He had been reborn into the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
The story had gone wrong. The canon was infected. Something about tropes. About broken narrative threads and corrupted archetypes. The world was in danger. But all of that seemed so far away when he wasn’t even strong enough to lift his own head.
—-
Being a self-aware baby was awful. The lack of agency, being humiliated all the time. While he was happy to still have his memories, why was it necessary to be conscious during this? Couldn’t Aang have let him wake up in his older self? Ugh.
But there were silver linings. He and his sister were already close. Sokka was already trying to teach them both how to throw imaginary boomerangs. And Gran Gran told the most beautiful stories in her soft, voice that made him feel like maybe this world wasn’t all broken.
And of course, he had the ability to waterbend. He wasn’t strong enough to actually do anything with it voluntarily. But whenever he stared out at the ocean, he saw the ocean move. Just a ripple, but it was something.
As much as it sucked right now, He had been given a second chance. He had a new family, and above all else, a purpose. He wouldn’t waste it.
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