auriferouseyes:

Hakoda having to realise how big Sokka and Katara truly are.

That even outside of a war they aren’t the little kids he had to leave behind, clinging to his shoulders and making his war paint run with tears. He didn’t expect to come back to them like that, not really. He didn’t expect them to find him either, on the back of an ancient bison with the world’s lost hope grinning from ear to ear.

But realising that Sokka has carried on hunts alone, finding tradition in Gran Gran’s stories and clinging to it desperately. How he had remembered the way Hakoda framed his kayaks, but perfected it. Bending the bone and skin in ways Hakoda could never imagine, making it sturdier and sleeker and stronger and Hakoda can’t believe that the little boy who stood on shore screaming for his father is now cunning enough to outwit half the world. How his little boy can go toe to toe with any one, bender or other wise. When the day comes that Sokka can look Hakoda in the eye without craning his neck, the father has to take a moment alone to mourn and celebrate.

Hakoda realising that Katara is more like her mother than she has any right to be. How her laugh is like Kya’s, how the grit of her teeth and the furrow of her brow is like Kya’s. But even she does things Kya could never do. She’s not the little girl who shivered in his arms every night, begging for her mother to come home. How she heals everything she touches, how she stands her ground like a polar bear dog, how she does not bend to anyone’s will (not even her father’s) and how she loves. Hakoda wonders who taught her to love like that, so fiercely and unabashedly.

It is at once a comfort and a punch to the gut. Because Hakoda felt the waves pull him back to his children every waking moment, petrified of what could happen in his absence. Of what they would be without him.

But they are so much more than he could have ever imagined, so much more than he could have raised them to be (he thinks).

He just wishes they were small enough to hold again.