Before anything else, before memory or even consciousness returned, there was cold.
Piercing, unending, agonizing cold.
They tried to move, tried to open their eyes. They couldn't even shift their weight. Panic
seeped in through the cracks in the cold, and they tried to scream but their mouth wouldn't
open, and -
Bright. A sudden shot of brightness through the cold.
Sounds of crumbling, of ice breaking apart. Falling, falling - fallen. On the ground.
Now that the cold had faded a bit, he could remember who he was again. Male. Thirteen
years old. Lonely almost all of the time. And his name was Ryga Axcel. He thought that was
probably something worth remembering.
He opened his eyes, and the light was nearly as piercing and painful as the cold had
been, but he forced his eyes to focus. He needed some idea of where he was. And why it was
so goddamn cold.
A girl. A very familiar girl shaking him awake, and two very familiar boys standing back.
"You're awake!" she exclaimed. "Are you okay?"
"Cold..." Ryga muttered, rubbing his eyes. "What..." He looked behind him, and his heart
almost stopped.
A cracked-open dome of pure ice, and a six-legged (flying) bison.
"I was in there?" he managed.
"Yes," the familiar girl said. "Oh, and this boy was, too. Aang, you said your name was?"
"Mhm!" The tattooed boy nodded cheerfully. "But... I'm sorry, but I don't know who you
are. You must've been in there with me for a reason, but I can't remember what it was."
I know who you are, Ryga thought but didn't say. He couldn't even imagine where he
was or what was going on, but he felt it would probably be a bad idea to clue them in on the fact
that he may or may not know their future. "Me either," he said instead, figuring it was best to
stick close to the truth without telling it - he really, honestly had no clue what was going on, so
he might as well act like it. "How long were we in there?"
Aang shrugged. "I dunno. Felt like a few days to me."
"Yeah, I somehow feel like the tribe would've noticed a giant ice comet dropping into the
ocean," Sokka (although he couldn't exactly let on that he knew the boy's name yet) said.
"Either that weird icicle dome was already there and you two just crawled in for a quick nap, or
you've been in there way longer than a few days."
"He has a point..." Katara said, her concerned look directly contrasting Sokka's very
irritated one. "What's the last thing you can remember?"
Ryga felt a lump in his throat as Aang pretended not to recall a past he just didn't want to
talk about. Ryga was the only one who knew that Aang had been in there for a hundred years,
that nearly everyone he'd loved was dead, everything he'd known destroyed. And he couldn't
say a word about it.
Provided, of course, that this really was the world of Avatar. Which was impossible. This
had to be a dream. A very photo-realistic dream.
But as Aang reached out a hand to help Ryga up onto Oppa, Katara smiling and Sokka
grumbling behind him, he decided to let himself believe, just for a moment, that everything
around him was real.