thearena | Far from home on a road unknown

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Far from home on a road unknown

Who| Aang and YOU
What| Aang running away from ghosts AND another prompt with Aang at the banquet.
Where| Around the castle grounds.
When| Late at night, Week 4
Warnings/Notes| Sad little boys, references to violence and some violence against children.

Ghosts

Aang wandered into the catacombs and dungeons. That was a bad idea, especially on the heels of the horror that was last week. He's yelling as he runs out from the dungeons, going into the castle, but ghosts are still following him. One has the vague outline of a young woman, the other a younger man, neither of them older than nineteen at most.

"Of course you run. You're always running," the younger man says as Aang ducks down a hall and climbs into a little nook to hide.

"How many people are going to die before you stop running?" the woman asks as Aang curls up into a ball and covers his head, doing his best to stay hidden even as he shakes.

"Come out, Avatar!" the ghost boy shouts. "Face the consequences of your actions for once!"

Banquet, later on

Aang is not doing too hot. Last week was hard, and being chased by ghosts didn't help. So he came to get food in low spirits.

But he sees food he actually recognizes for once. Food he hasn't had in over a hundred years. He sits down in front of the modest collection of airbender cuisine--all vegetarian, very little salt. Overall unimpressive except for the fruit pies. Beautiful, perfect crust with fruit custard filling whipped to a cloud-like consistency by airbending.

It all looks mostly perfect, but there are telltale signs of no airbending used in the process. That would change the taste and consistency completely, but would he really be able to tell the difference anymore?

He loads his plate with the food, but he doesn't eat it. He just... stares at it. He moves to eat, then he stops, putting his hands back on the table. He looks to the nearest person, chewing his cheek gently. "Do you have any rituals before eating where you come from?"

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It's the first time he's entered the castle. Hasn't considered it, even briefly. It doesn't look much like his home, not sitting there on its own like that, but the grand look of the lone castle sitting there is a little too much like a couple others he'd used to visit on trips to nearby baronies. It reminds him of the year-end festivals, all of them sitting close together underneath the stars. Roland knows he is not nearly popular enough in the Capitol to justify the thinking that the castle is mocking him specifically, but even so, he hasn't been at all tempted to wander inside and be reminded of the life that was, once.

This is a fair enough reason. And a fair enough distraction, too, once he gets inside. He keeps behind the shapes making chase until they stop, crowding around one spot. Then he walks up beside the spot too and hunkers near to it, paying them no mind. "Aang?" he calls, keeping his voice low and steady, but hopefully loud enough to carry over anything those spirits might say next. "Can you hear my voice?"

Aang stays curled up, burying his face in his knees. "Please tell me you're not dead too." He doesn't want to deal with this. He's not sure if he can. It's not fair. Why do so many people have to die? Why does he have to lose so many people he cares about?

The ghosts are trying to close in. Zuko, Korra. People who he failed. People who the world needed. "They're all dying, Aang. All of them. Just like everyone back in our world," Zuko muttered.

This is the worst time for one of Roland's rare flashes of humor. But maybe it isn't, because no one but the 'spirits' (and the cameras, though those are far from Roland's mind) are going to see the moment when the corners of his eyes crinkle and his lips turn up a little. He tries and, luckily, succeeds at repressing a snort. In Panem, 'are you dead' is a bit of a loaded question, and maybe even before -

Never mind. Best keep this simple and, for the boy's sake, reassuring. "No," he says, voice strong, expression evening out. "I'm as alive as you are."

The spirit and its mutter do not even get a glance. If the spirit is not helpful, it does not get to join the conversation. "Is that what frightens you about those things? That they're no longer living?"

"Sort of." He visibly relaxes a little when Roland says that he's alive. The ghosts are muttering, saying horrible things about him, but he focuses on Roland. "I'm scared because they mean I failed."

Korra, his future life, apparently trapped here even in death. Zuko, the only member of the Fire Nation royal family who could turn around the Fire Nation. Aang was supposed to save their world, and he's doomed it.

It does not occur to Roland to assure the boy otherwise, to tell him he surely hasn't failed after all, although he does have his doubts that these spirits are proof of anything at all. He thinks at least that they aren't the sort of spirits he knows, because the people of Panem would never care to learn all the old rituals for binding spirits and bidding them do your work, and would not be able to carry out those rituals even if they were. Capturing all these spirits, moving them into this arena, would be impossible.

But even if any of that holds water - Roland has no idea how anything in this world truly works, including spirits, and he is well aware of that - he will not say it. To tell the boy that these things may well not be real or proof of anything would be to rob the people of Panem of their show, of their excitement at this boy's expense, and the consequences would not be good for either of them. So Roland only turns and slides down, settling himself next to Aang's hiding place, and adopts an idle tone, continuing to ignore Aang's spirits completely.

"Failure?" he muses. "If that's what draws them, it's a great turn of luck I've seen none of my own." He does take a moment to gaze at Aang's spirits now, or rather, past them. When he speaks next he's quiet, almost speaking to himself, although those words would be a great deal quieter if he did not mean Aang to hear them. "They'd fill up the whole of this chamber, I think. Yours are trying to tell you of your failure? That's why you ran?"

Aang is quiet for some time, just breathing and keeping his face hidden. "Mine would fill the Capitol up. These are just the ones I've failed since I got here."

Aang considers every person who has died in the war to be a personal failure. He doesn't like to talk about it, but it's true. It was his responsibility to protect the world, and he failed. He fails every day he's here. All the adults tell him that it's not his fault, but it is.

"I'm tired of failing. I'm tired of people I care about dying. I want it to stop, but it's not stopping."

He sounds tired. More tired than a twelve-year-old should. He sounds like an old man.

Well.

Roland huffs out a breath, lets his head fall back and studies the ceiling. Of all the things no adult wants a child to say to them, this has got to be the most dreaded. Not only because of the age he's just had to hear in the boy's voice, but because - well, what is there to say to that? What Aang has just said is a fair description of the whole of Roland's life, and it says something that Roland searches a moment anyway through the piled boxes and dusty cabinets of his mind, trying to remember if there's anything he's seen or heard that can dispute it.

"If you figure a way, let me know," he says finally, not without some sympathy. His voice is not so defeated as Aang's seems, but there's a hint of the same sort of weariness in it. "It's a hard thing, isn't it? Losing people like that. Losing them no matter what you try. And going on anyway."

He does eye the spirits now, knowing they look like people who were close to Aang here in this world rather than only in Aang's, that he might have known them, might have passed them in the halls once or twice. If they truly are the spirits of Aang's friends, surely they'll care about what seeing them is doing to him now. He waves his left hand a couple times at them, frowning impatiently. Trying to shoo them off. Doesn't expect it to work, of course. Worth a try.

"What gives you a right to live when they're not?" It doesn't look like the spirits plan on leaving, because they're still there and still talking.

"They didn't choose to die for you," the young woman said with a pitiless voice.

Aang hugs his knees tighter and keeps his eyes squeezed shut. "It is hard. It is. But I can't show it, because everyone needs me to be strong. I'm sick of being strong when I just want to be sad. Who thought it was such a good idea to make a little kid in charge of saving everyone?"

He's never said it out loud before, the growing resentment of all the responsibility on his shoulders. He had just accepted it before, but after nearly eleven months of being treated like a normal kid, he sees the discrepancy and the unfairness of it all. He didn't dare complain about unfairness after seeing what it had done to the Air Nomads, but now he's thinking about it again, and not just the unfairness of not being able to play with the other boys in the Temple. He sees the unfairness of all the adults he met expecting him to either save the world, shut up, or die. He sees the unfairness of it taking him being taken to another world before an adult tried to take care of him. He sees the unfairness and he's sick of it.

Arya, tormented by her own ghosts in those catacombs, had been able to confront the figures of her murdered family and walk away from them. With some prompting. A part of Roland's mind considers trying the same thing here, but not for more than an instant. Demanding something of Aang which he can't give - and Roland is sure, right now, that he can't - will only make all this worse on the boy, and probably make him resent Roland on top of it. Those two figures of Aang's dead aren't the real problem here, anyway. Roland spends a second thinking on that problem, and how to begin untangling it.

"Are you charged with saving everyone? Strange thing for a Capitolite to tell someone who's about to enter an arena." Roland knows, of course, that Aang was thinking of his own world when he'd said that, although you couldn't tell it from his tone. But he is making a point, one that will be more effective if Aang makes the realization himself. Might not help much, of course, but it'd be a start.

"No, the Capitol didn't tell me that," Aang mutters into his legs. "They want me to kill people, and I'm not doing that."

He selectively forgets the one time he did accidentally kill someone. It was an accident and the person was okay afterwards, so it doesn't count, right?

The spirits are talking, saying awful things, but it's not the things they say that upset him the most. It's that they're there. And he failed. He's the worst Avatar ever.

"Mm. If not them, then who?" The point he's still determined to make may not be so convincing as he'd like, but it's worth a try. Roland doesn't know too much about the life the boy led before Panem took him, but maybe that'll only help. It can be easier, Roland knows, to speak of something to someone who's never been involved in it.

"My whole world."

His world is built around the understanding that there is one person who will protect it, one person to link the physical and spiritual, one person to keep the peace. It has worked. And yet the toll it takes on that one person is enormous.

There's a reason they aren't supposed to tell the Avatar who they are until they're sixteen. That kind of responsibility on a child is too much, except this is a crisis situation and Aang isn't there to help.

There's a great deal more to that, Roland's sure. He's also sure that if Aang chooses not to tell his story, long and personal and painful as it no doubt is, then it is not relevant here. At least, not in a way which demands that Roland know it. He remembers Aang's face, briefly, as it'd been back in that other arena. The coldness in it as the boy'd easily twisted water from the pipes and stopped one of that arena's beasts in its tracks with barely a whisper of effort. He remembers it now because it's moving into a new place in his mind, slotting neatly next to the new things he's learned about Aang here.

But that isn't relevant either.

"And I'm sure your world knew what it was talking about. Then. But do you think they could have really forseen this? This other world, which you're no more capable of saving all on your lonesome than the rest of us? There's a reason no one in this world, as you've already told me, has told you the same thing those of your world did."

"It doesn't matter if I could have foreseen it or not. I'm supposed to fix it."

The Avatar is held to unrealistic standards because the Avatar usually reaches those unrealistic standards. The Avatar is the guardian and the guide of the world, a bridge between physical and spiritual that protects humans and spirits from each other and themselves.

The world remembers the Avatar's successes and forgets its failures over the generations because the stories of success give hope. So the successes grow and grow into a legend no living person can live up to, and yet they are always raised thinking that they should be able to.

"I'm not good at it. I keep messing up. I'm supposed to be better."

"Why? Because you're your world's Avatar?" It's becoming clear that Aang may not see Roland's point, may not change his mind, so it may be time to be a little more blunt. "This place recognizes no avatar. Its people ask for none. Would you insist on doing those duties anyway, pushing your old arrangement on a world who's never wanted any part of it?"

"I'm not supposed to save this world. I'm supposed to save mine. And I'm not there when it needs me."

He rolls his shoulders, looking at the ground. "I can't save this world on my own. It's not my place to even if I could. But I need to go home, and I don't know if it'll be there when I get back."

Ah. So that's the problem. He isn't sure if he's supposed to share what he's about to, especially since the Capitol's watchful eye is closer on them in these arenas than ever. But Wyatt, so far as Roland knows, never suffered from sharing it with him. He glances over at the boy, hiding, suffering next to him, and decides to pass on what Wyatt had shared all that time ago. If the Capitol doesn't want its citizens to know, it doesn't have to show it. "Some time ago, the Capitol pulled in... visitors." Visitors, prisoners. Same thing, here.

"From some of our worlds. One of the tributes who was here then - hmm, what was his name? Maximus, I think - met a man who came from the his world's future, and was told no one there had even realized he was gone. Because to them, he wasn't. That world had its Maximus. I know, too, that some have left and come back with memories of being in their own worlds for some while, before being taken back here. I don't know how both can be true, Aang, but they are. You may well end up back there one day but even if you don't, your world will have its avatar."

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Far from home on a road unknown

ghosts

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