Living in Vallo came with a certain expectation of…weirdness. Weirder, even, than their lives had been back home. Sokka knew this. He did expect it. Whether it was waking up to pokemon, smashing snowglobes as a legitimate threat, or fighting off murder turkeys, Sokka had learned to be ready for just about anything. With his trusty boomerang and sky sword in tow, he was pretty confident that he was ready for just about anything Vallo decided to throw their way.
Except, apparently, kids.
It wasn’t that he had never considered the fact that kids were likely in the very far off and distant future, or even that he was necessarily opposed to kids, in general. It was that there was a very big difference between sometime and now and the idea of thinking about the future when he still didn’t quite know what he was doing with his present was kind of a scary one.
When things got scary, Sokka knew one thing would make him feel better.
“Okay, okay. Have you ever tried jalapeno jelly with cream cheese on crackers, though? Because, dude, this is so good. Here, you have to try it. There’s no exception.” He handed a cracker he’d made for himself over to Aang, whom he was very pointedly not asking about his feelings toward recent events. Who had time to talk about the future if their mouths were stuffed full?
The idea of his future children wasn't new to Aang - Jinora being here for a while and the picture of their family that showed up for Katara had already put this topic in the spotlight a few times. But that didn't mean he wasn't freaking out a little. Riaka was a new element altogether. A child born and raised here. And apparently after their other children were born. Four kids were in his future.
He loved kids and he loved the idea of having a big family. Especially after losing his fellow monks to time and tragedy. His friends were his family and adding children to that was inevitable. Just totally and completely terrifying at fourteen years old. He sat leaning against one of the bison babies. Ceba didn't seem to mind. It probably helped that he kept sneaking her bites of his snacks.
"I don't know if I can eat anything else!" Aang groaned. "The jalapeno pringles might have done me in, Sokka." He took a bite of cracker anyway and made an approving noise that turned into another whimper. "What was I thinking! I don't know if asking Katara to heal my bellyache is going to go well with...everything going on."
Sokka glanced over at Aang, feigned shock on his face. He reached out and cupped his hands over Momo’s ears as the lemur fought back against him. “I can’t believe you just said that in front of Momo and Ceba. Can’t eat anything else, pfft. You’re not a quitter, Aang!” He let Momo go and tossed him one of the jalapeno jelly and cream cheese crackers and the lemur seemed at least partially mollified for the moment. Sokka laid back and pat his stomach and refused to admit that he, too, was feeling a bit full. “Those pringles were good, though. We should get more tomorrow, maybe throw in an extra can of cheez-whiz, too.”
After a moment, he relented and looked over at Aang. “You mean with Riaka and everything, right?” Of course that’s what he meant. It wasn’t surprising to Sokka that Aang and Katara had future kids. It wasn’t even surprising that they were probably getting married in the future. That didn’t make acknowledging it easier. It was weird. They were kids. This was too much responsibility for any of them. Why couldn’t they just go back to helping Aang defeat the fire lord? That was so much easier to deal with.
He shrugged. “I think you can still ask. I mean, just blame it on me. She’ll take pity on you. Probably.”
“Well yeah, but…” Aang sat up off of Ceba, who promptly started to crawl on her belly towards the crackers. She was massive already and not at all subtle, but Aang was distracted, staring off back towards the house. “I don’t want her to think ‘oh great, I have a family with this dumb kid who doesn’t even know when to stop eating’.” He gestured wildly as he spoke, but his face was actually very serious for Aang. There had been more and more moments of these expressions here, as he aged and experienced a life that wasn’t about dramatically saving the world every day of the week.
He was still fourteen, though, and he crashed back into the grass with his arms spread wide. The back of his fingers smacked against Sokka’s cheek. “Sokka, I’m going to be a dad. A bunch of times! What if I’m terrible at it?! What do I know about raising kids??”
Sokka gave Aang an incredulous look as the other boy’s fingers smacked his face, but was quickly distracted. He shifted on the grass, turning both to look at his friend and keep his face safe from any further attacks. Momo, however, started climbing up on top of his head, feet digging into the same cheek. Sokka sighed dramatically and pulled Momo away before setting the lemur back down on the ground.
“Okay, look,” Sokka started, holding out a hand to keep Momo from starting the climb again. “I obviously have the most experience at being a dad in this group, so I’m going to do you a favor and give you all of my advice.” He sat up, squaring his shoulders importantly and clearing his throat emphatically. “First you have to set boundaries. Just go into the stone house and be like, ‘Hello, kid. You can’t have fun until you clean the fish I caught today.’ She will totally respect your authority just like Katara totally respected mine.”
He eyed Aang pointedly. “Are you taking notes? Because this is really good advice and you really should be writing it down.”
Aang was not taking notes. He was slowly feeding himself another cracker in an upside down way that was definitely not going to go well for him. But food therapy was a real thing, wasn't it? His quietly simmering anxiety sure thought so.
"I'm not making her clean a fish, Sokka. I don't even eat fish!" He rolled his eyes dramatically and managed not to choke on the cracker when he took a bite. "Anyway," he said, spraying cracker dust on himself. "She's all grown up. It would be super weird to boss her around. But I guess…" He hummed and shrugged. "...The boundaries thing is probably right. When we actually really have kids that are kids, I mean. And I get four tries so I have to be a serious pro by the time I get to Riaka, huh?"
“I wasn’t being literal,” Sokka replied. “It was just an example of how you can put your foot down and establish your authority!” Then, again, that had never actually worked with Katara. It didn’t matter where they were, how old they were, or how long their parents had been gone, Katara had always been fiercely independent and more likely to put Sokka in his place than listen to him. And if Riaka was anything like her then that was both awesome and a sign that Aang was definitely going to be outnumbered.
“Four kids, though, wow,” he mused. “Like that’s a whole lot of kids, Aang.” Sokka tried to imagine having even one kid and his seventeen-year-old self was pretty sure he’d need more food than they had in the stone house to cope with that sort of news. It was just a lot, really. “How do you, uh, feel about it?”
Aang made another complicated and overdramatic face, and stuffed one last cracker in his mouth, talking around it. "I don't want to establish authority. She's older than me! And I want her to like me!"
Eventually, maybe Aang would get more backbone where his future kids were concerned. Probably. What he knew about the other kids seemed to imply he was maybe a little too serious about being a dad. Which freaked him out for different reasons. He sighed and covered his face with his hands. "I'm scared but excited? I want to have a family. I miss the monks and I don't...I don't want to be the last airbender. But that's a totally different thing and not important right now!"
“You do cool air tricks, dude, what’s not to like??” Sokka shrugged a shoulder and moved to lay back again, his arms crossing behind his head. “Though I wouldn’t be surprised if your kids like their cool uncle the best because I am pretty awesome, not gonna lie.” He raised an eyebrow as he glanced over at his friend, clearly teasing.
But Sokka got it, he really did. The same thing Aang was stressing over was on Sokka’s mind, too, and he didn’t even have that future staring him in the face while he was still a teenager. “I mean, it’s kind of cool, though, right? You get to meet her without all the pressure of actually having to be responsible for her. Which is way better than some of the people talking about random babies showing up in their houses. Can you even imagine having a random baby in the stone house??”
Aang smiled, in spite of his anxiety. Sokka was good at that. Distracting him with a joke and being genuine at the same time. And he wasn't wrong. Aang set aside the food and sat up, crossing his legs underneath himself. He'd meditated a lot since this whole thing started but he suspected talking it out was doing him more good.
"It is pretty cool," he admitted, shrugging. "It's scary and I just...want to get things right, but it's nice too. Seeing her. Knowing there's a chance of a really great future here with a big family." His smile grew wider and more relaxed, and he leaned over to elbow Sokka in the ribs. "Thanks, Sokka. I was getting into my own head too much. It is definitely better than suddenly having a baby to change and feed. What are you going to do if that's what happens to you?!"
Sokka made note of the palpable way that Aang’s tension seemed to begin to dissipate and smiled to himself. He knew there were a lot of things the others were good at that he wasn’t. He couldn’t bend anything, he wasn’t an animal whisperer. There was nothing magical about him, really, and though that sometimes bothered him, he knew he was good at this. At people. At his friends. And knowing that he was helping Aang, who he suspected was more sick with anxiety than food, brought him an easy kind of joy.
But as quickly as that joy had flickered, Sokka pulled a face and dramatically squirmed away from the ribbing. “Wow, wow. Now if it does happen to me, I’m making you change all of the diapers because it’s your fault.”
Honestly, the thought terrified him. He didn’t really understand why the thought of defining the future was so daunting, other than the fact that he already felt a little bit like he wasn’t living up to some imaginary expectations for himself. What would happen if he suddenly had real expectations for what tomorrow was supposed to look like?
Aang rolled his eyes and started collecting their food trash. Now that he'd calmed, he felt the need to bring order to the space around him. It was something that seemed to happen more and more as he got older.
"I'm definitely not doing that, just so we're clear. I will help though. How hard can it be?" It was probably very hard but Aang liked experiencing new things and meeting new people. Sokka's hypothetical kids would be great people to meet. They'd be family. "You'd be a great dad, you know. You're funny and strong and protective." He stood up with his arm full of food leftovers and trash. "But don't start panicking okay?! One emergency at a time."
As if on cue, Ceba wobbled forward and stole a bag of chips from next to Sokka's hip, running away as fast as a square-shaped baby sky bison could.
“How hard can it be?” Sokka mimicked. How hard could it be! But he blew out a breath, preemptively taking Aang’s instruction of not panicking to heart. After all, it wasn’t even a thing to worry about yet and maybe he could just pretend away the possibility that it would ever be a thing. Maybe Aang was right, maybe he’d be a great dad and his trepidations were completely unnecessary, but he just wasn’t sure he wanted to find that out just yet. The future was daunting enough as it was.
For being so relatively small, Ceba ran faster than Sokka would have expected. Exchanging a very quick glance with Aang, Sokka followed the lead and tore off after the sky bison, too. The worry of the future would have to wait until, well, the future. For the moment, there was a bag of chips--no, a sky bison!--to save.