Hey everyone, RoseSaiyan2 here! It's been a while since the last update but new chapters are coming soon.. starting with this one! We're now finally going to meet Toph! She may be a bit different than in cannon,but that's okay. Who do you think end up as a couple next?
1. Goku x Ty Lee
2. Sokka x ?
3. Aang x Katara
Anyways, you can either leave your thoughts on the pm, or vote for which pairing you think will come to fruition next. Anyways, I'm not going to take too much more of your time, without further ado: onto the story!
Disclaimer: I own nothing other than the oc's that appear in this story! The series and characters of Dragon ball, Dragon ball super/ Z/ Xenoverse, Black Clover, and Avatar: The Last Air Bender all belong to their respective creators.
Opening:
Opening theme: Dead End by Retbear (Black Summoner op 1)
Visuals: flashes and introductions of the main cast of this story. Flashes of characters from both sides: team avatar (aang, katara, sokka, odyn, asura, and goku) and Azula's side: (Azula, Ty Lee, Mai, Zuko, and Iroh) shadowed characters are those yet to be introduced (Toph, Khanna, Roy).
Chapter Six: The Blind Bandit and Her Guard
Gaoling — The Earth Kingdom
The city had the particular energy of a place that had decided prosperity was its defining characteristic and had arranged everything accordingly. The streets were wide and well-maintained, the market stalls stocked with goods that implied a supply chain extending well beyond the immediate region, and the citizens moved through it all with the easy confidence of people who had not, in recent memory, been asked to worry about anything they could not afford to resolve.
It was, Odyn reflected, a pleasant city. He was wearing a conical hat and trying to look like someone who had no particular reason to attract attention, which was an ongoing project.
Aang, beside him in a matching hat, was doing somewhat better at the inconspicuous part, mainly because his natural tendency to be delighted by everything around him read as ordinary tourism rather than disguise.
Ahead of them, Sokka had stopped walking.
He had been stopped for approximately three minutes at a stall selling travel bags — green, well-constructed, with brass fittings that caught the light at a flattering angle. The price tag appeared to be conducting a negotiation with his better judgment.
"It's pricey," Sokka said, to no one and everyone.
"Then get it," Katara said, with the tone of someone who has had this exact conversation before.
"I do deserve something nice."
"You do," she confirmed, without particular enthusiasm.
"But it's expensive."
"Then don't get it."
"Maybe I shouldn't." He turned from the stall with the resolute expression of a man who has made a difficult decision and intends to stick to it. "Too expensive. Not getting it."
Asura, who had been watching this process with the patience of someone counting down from a number he had not yet reached, exhaled through his nose.
"Sokka," he said. "We don't have all day."
"I've decided."
"I can see that."
They walked. The stall receded. Ten seconds passed.
Sokka turned around and sprinted back.
The rest of them waited at the corner while the commercial transaction resolved itself with the speed of a man who has realized the only thing worse than spending the money is not spending it. When Sokka rejoined them, he was wearing the expression of someone who has made peace with a choice and the bag across his shoulder.
None of them said anything. Some victories were best received in silence.
The man with the flyers found them two streets later, materializing from the flow of foot traffic with the specific energy of someone who has been given a task and intends to complete it regardless of the receptiveness of the audience.
"You kids like earthbending? You like throwing rocks?" He produced a flyer with the practiced gesture of someone who had done this many times. "Check out Master Yu's Earthbending Academy!"
The flyer made its way to Aang, who turned it over and examined both sides with the focused attention he brought to everything.
"There's a coupon on the back," he said. "First lesson is free."
The group looked at Odyn, as they had developed a habit of doing when presented with information that required evaluation.
He turned the flyer over. Studied the crest. Considered Master Yu's face, which had been rendered in ink with the confident expression of someone who charges substantially for instruction and feels this is justified.
"I wouldn't normally be enthusiastic about this," he said, which was accurate. "But we've been looking for an earthbending teacher and we're not in a position to dismiss possibilities without examining them. Master Yu may not be the answer. But someone at his academy might be able to point us toward one."
"Agreed," Goku said. "Even if it's a dead end, it costs us an afternoon."
"And technically nothing," Katara added, holding up the coupon side.
"I like free," Sokka confirmed.
Asura looked at Aang. "Think of it as research."
Aang had been quiet during this discussion, but now he smiled. The expression had something specific in it — not the reflexive optimism he sometimes deployed, but something more considered. Like a person who has a feeling they can't yet justify but has decided to follow it anyway.
"Let's go," he said.
They moved through the streets. Behind them, unnoticed and unnoticing, a small barefoot girl walked in the other direction, her unfocused pale eyes aimed somewhere between the ground and the middle distance. A few paces behind her, a young woman with lavender and black hair moved with the unhurried precision of someone whose attention never fully left the person ahead of her.
They disappeared into the crowd.
The group walked on, unaware.
Earth Rumble VI — That Evening
The arena had been built specifically for the purpose of making a large number of people feel the maximum possible level of excitement about earthbending, and it was performing its function admirably. Every seat was occupied. The torchlight made the fighting platform look like the center of a contained sun. The announcer had the particular voice of a man who had spent years developing the range necessary to be heard above an arena crowd, and who now deployed it with the joy of someone doing the thing they were made for.
Odyn was not watching the announcer.
He was not, if he was being honest, watching most of the fights, though he was aware of them in the peripheral way of someone whose threat-assessment instincts are always operating regardless of context. What held the arena's attention was objectively remarkable — a small girl, barefoot, whose pale eyes looked at nothing and apparently needed to, because she was doing things with earthbending that had very little to do with looking.
Each opponent arrived with size, bluster, and the particular confidence of someone who has not yet fully appreciated their situation. Each opponent departed rapidly, in a direction and at a velocity they had not chosen, launched by pillars of earth that appeared with the timing and precision of something calculated rather than improvised.
"She's incredible," Katara said, leaning forward.
"She's not looking at them," Aang said. The wonder in his voice was the specific kind that comes from watching someone do something you've been told requires what they clearly don't have.
Sokka punched the air. "Go, Blind Bandit!"
Odyn's gaze had moved.
Not away from the platform — he was still tracking the fight, still registering every technique — but he had found something else as well. A figure at the arena's edge, in the space between the stands and the tunnel entrance where the fighters emerged and retreated. Standing with arms crossed, slightly separated from the handlers and corner people, watching the platform with an attention that was different from the crowd's excitement. More focused. More personal. The slight weight-shift whenever an opponent pressed the girl hard, the position that put her between the tunnel entrance and the nearest crowd access point.
That, Odyn thought, is not a spectator.
He had almost completed the thought when his recognition caught up with his observation, and for a moment the two pieces of information arrived simultaneously and he was not immediately sure what to do with either of them.
The hair. The ears. The eyes, which from this distance across a torch-lit arena he could not confirm the color of but somehow did not need to, because the rest of the picture was already assembled.
"Khanna," he said.
The word came out quieter than he intended. Barely audible. Goku heard it anyway.
"What?"
Odyn's attention had not moved. "Down there. At the arena's edge. The young woman with the lavender hair."
The group looked, with varying degrees of subtlety.
"You know her?" Katara asked.
"She's my cousin." He said it without inflection, which was the voice he used when the thing being said required more processing than he had yet completed.
Asura was quiet for a moment. "Of all the earthbending arenas in all the Earth Kingdom."
"Indeed."
"She's watching the Blind Bandit," Goku observed.
"She's guarding the Blind Bandit," Odyn corrected. "Look at her feet. Look at her sight lines. She's positioned between the girl and every access point in that section."
Sokka leaned over to look more carefully. "But the Blind Bandit doesn't look like she needs any—"
"Everyone needs something," Odyn said. "Whether or not they look like it."
In the arena, the Blind Bandit sent her final opponent skyward with a single rising pillar and received the crowd's roar with the expression of someone who finds this attention less interesting than the earthbending that generated it. The girl dropped from the platform's edge, landed on bare feet, and walked toward the tunnel. Khanna moved immediately — not running, not conspicuously hurrying, but closing the distance with the quiet efficiency of someone who has done this many times and has a system.
They exchanged several words. Then they disappeared into the tunnel together.
Odyn was already standing.
"I need to follow them," he said.
"I need to talk to her," Aang said simultaneously, already on his feet. They looked at each other.
"Then we go together," Odyn said. "But follow my lead. I don't know the shape of this situation yet, and I'd rather not blunder into something my cousin has carefully constructed."
Below the Arena
The tunnels beneath Earth Rumble were utilitarian — rough stone, functional lighting, the smell of packed earth and sweat that came from years of fighters moving through them before and after matches. Odyn led them through the turns with the instinct of someone who reads spaces quickly, and they found the antechamber at the end of a broad passage that widened into a small waiting area.
Two figures. Talking. Both of them turned at the sound of footsteps.
For a fraction of a second — the space between one heartbeat and the next — something crossed his cousin's face that was not composure. Her eyes found his, and the word she said was barely above a breath.
"Odyn?"
"Seraphina, you know these people?" The Blind Bandit's voice was flat and immediate, her pale eyes fixed on no particular point while somehow managing to convey the impression that she was assessing all of them simultaneously. Her feet were slightly wider than shoulder-width. Her hands were loose at her sides.
The girl was ready to fight if she needed to.
"That's what I go by now," Khanna said to Odyn, answering the question in his expression before he could ask it. She had recovered her composure. It had taken less than three seconds, which told him something about how much practice she'd had.
"Seraphina," he repeated, tasting the name. "Your elven name."
"Yes."
Aang stepped forward with both hands open, palms out, projecting peaceful intent with the full-body sincerity of someone who genuinely means it. "We're not here to cause trouble. I just wanted to talk—"
"About what?" the Blind Bandit said, the question landing like a stone. "How I won? Not interested."
"Actually—" Aang tried.
"How did you find us?" Seraphina asked, her attention back on Odyn, her voice carrying the particular tone of someone asking a practical question rather than an accusatory one.
"I saw you in the stands," Odyn said. "I recognized you."
Her jaw tightened, slightly. "I've changed."
"Not as much as you think."
The silence between them had the specific density of people who share a history that the rest of the room cannot access. Questions on both sides, none of them small.
"This isn't the place," Seraphina said, glancing at the Blind Bandit beside her.
"Then tell me where the place is," Odyn replied, "and I'll be there."
The girl at Seraphina's side tilted her head fractionally — a gesture that had nothing to do with trying to see better and everything to do with listening more precisely. "Whoever you are," she said, addressing Aang with the direct, unhurried certainty of someone who has decided she knows what she wants, "I don't have anything to discuss with you. The win was fair."
"That's not—"
"We're leaving."
The girl's foot came down on the stone floor with a sound that was barely audible and completely intentional. The earth responded before anyone could react — a clean vertical wall, stone from floor to ceiling, closing the passage between them with the speed and precision of something engineered rather than improvised. On the other side of it, Odyn caught one last view of Seraphina's face.
She was looking directly at him.
Something in her expression was not quite apology and not quite warning and not quite goodbye. It was something that implied all three without committing to any of them. Then the stone was complete, and she was gone.
Sokka hit the wall with his palm, more from surprise than any belief it would help. "Did she just — in the middle of a conversation—"
"Yes," Katara said. "She did."
Aang's shoulders curved inward with the contained disappointment of someone who has identified what they need and watched it disappear again before they could explain themselves. "She's the one, though. I know she is."
"She's remarkable," Goku said, pressing a hand flat against the stone face of the barrier with the academic interest of someone who appreciates good technique. "She built this without looking at it."
"She doesn't need to look at it," Asura said. "She's using something else. Something deeper."
Odyn stood in front of the wall and did not touch it. He was thinking about the look on Seraphina's face in that last half-second. The recognition behind the composure. The question she hadn't asked because this was not the place.
"She'll find us," he said.
"How can you be sure?" Sokka asked.
"Because she recognized me. And if I know Seraphina — if she is still anything like the person I knew — curiosity will outweigh caution eventually." He turned from the wall. "We find out who the Blind Bandit is. If Seraphina is guarding her, that girl is more than she appears — and an identity that specific is rarely as hidden as it seems to those who aren't looking."
By the Canal — Later That Night
Gaoling at night was a different texture than Gaoling in daylight. The lanterns painted the canal water amber and copper, the reflected light moving in slow broken patterns across the stones of the bridge. The evening had cooled considerably.
They sat on the stone benches near the water, and Odyn answered what he could.
"Her birth name is Khanna," he said. "Seraphina is her elven name. Among our people, both names are real. The birth name is given. The elven name is discovered — it reflects something true about the person that the birth name doesn't capture." He looked at the water. "Using the elven name in public is unusual. It's typically reserved for our own kind. Which means she's using it as a cover."
"For what?" Sokka asked.
"That's what I don't yet know."
"When did you last see her?" Katara asked, her voice carrying the particular gentleness it took on when she was asking about something she suspected would cost him something to answer.
"Before our clan was scattered," he said. The words were simple and plain-faced, with nothing dressed up about them. "We were children. Persecution — the kind that doesn't announce itself openly, but accumulates. Restrictions, then displacement, then worse. Our people dispersed. I believed most were gone." He paused. "I was wrong, apparently, about at least one."
"And now she's here," Goku said.
"Now she's here. Far from our homeland, using her elven name, serving as a personal guardian to a blind earthbending prodigy in a city where nobody knows either of them." He looked at each of them in turn. "Coincidences of that size don't exist. Something brought her here. Something specific."
"Could she be hiding from someone?" Asura asked.
"Or protecting the Blind Bandit from someone," Katara said quietly.
"Or both," Odyn answered.
"Our bloodline carries certain qualities," he continued, after a moment. "Qualities that some have historically found... useful. Or threatening, depending on their relationship to power." His hand moved briefly to his collar, where the golden emblem sat beneath the fabric. "We are not the only people in this world who have been hunted for what they are rather than what they've done."
Sokka's grip on his boomerang shifted. "So someone might be hunting her."
"Possibly. Or hunting the girl she guards. Or both of them together, which is the version that worries me most." He stood from the bench, looking toward the estate-lined hills above the city where the lanterns of wealthy households made their own private constellations. "One thing at a time. Tomorrow we find out who the Blind Bandit actually is. If Seraphina has embedded herself in that girl's life, the girl's identity will tell us something about what Seraphina is protecting her from."
"And if we find Seraphina again?" Katara asked.
"Then I ask the questions I should have asked before the stone wall appeared," Odyn said. A small, dry humor entered his voice. "More efficiently this time."
That Night — The Edge of Camp
The fire had burned down to embers that breathed orange and settled. Around it, the group had found their sleeping positions with the natural distribution of people who have been traveling together long enough to have preferences without needing to discuss them.
Momo was arranged along Aang's side with the proprietary comfort of an animal that has designated a person as its preferred sleeping surface and considers the arrangement settled. Sokka's new bag was within arm's reach, which said something about his relationship with new possessions. Goku and Asura had oriented back-to-back in the way they always did, the unconscious tactical habit of years.
Odyn was not asleep.
He was at the camp's edge on a fallen log, which was where he usually ended up when his mind was doing things that didn't resolve themselves before the body's preferred sleeping hours. The embers were far enough away that they didn't interfere with his night vision. Close enough that the warmth reached him if he wanted it.
He heard Katara before she reached him. He recognized her footsteps now — the particular cadence of them, the slight difference in weight distribution between her left and right foot that nobody who hadn't been paying attention would notice.
"Can't sleep?" he asked, without turning.
She sat beside him at a distance that communicated thought about rather than accidental. "Too much on my mind."
He waited. He had learned that Katara organized what she wanted to say before she said it, and interrupting the process was not useful.
"I need to know something," she said. "From you directly, not from inference."
He turned to look at her. Her eyes in the moonlight held something that had taken work to get to — a clarity that cost something to maintain. He recognized it as the expression of a person who has decided that the cleaner truth is worth more than the comfortable ambiguity.
"Ask," he said.
"How do you feel about me?" Her voice was steady. "Not as a companion. Not as part of the group. Me."
The night held the question for a moment. Odyn considered it with the same honesty she had brought to asking it.
"You are one of the most genuinely remarkable people I've encountered," he said. "Your courage isn't the kind that comes from not being afraid — it's the kind that comes from being afraid and going forward anyway, which is the only kind worth having. Your care for the people around you is not a performance. I have seen you direct that same care at enemies, at strangers, at people who gave you no reason for it." He held her gaze. "I trust you completely. I would protect you without hesitation, for the rest of my life, because you are someone worth protecting."
She nodded, slowly.
"But," she said.
"But not in the way you mean," he confirmed, gently. "No."
The truth settled between them. She had been ready for it — he could see that — but readiness and ease were not the same thing, and he did not pretend they were.
"And Azula?" she asked.
He was quiet for a moment. Not evasive — considering.
"Whatever I feel toward Azula is something I don't yet have the vocabulary for," he said. "It doesn't follow the lines I'd expect it to follow. There's a pull toward her that exists independently of whether it's wise or whether she's given me any reason to trust it." He looked at the dark line of the hills. "I can't fully explain it. I'm aware that's unsatisfying."
"It's honest," Katara said. "That's more useful."
They sat for a while in the particular silence that forms between people after something true has been said — not empty, not uncomfortable, but different from the silences that precede such things. Filled with a different quality of air.
She stood, eventually. Paused.
"Will this change anything?" she asked. "Between us."
"Not from my side," he said. "You are exactly who you have been to me since the first day. Nothing about this conversation changes that."
Something in her expression shifted — not relief exactly, but the easing of something she had been holding. "Good." She managed a small, authentic smile. "I'd hate to give up the only person in this group who remembers to keep watch at night."
"That's me," he agreed.
She turned to go, and then he said her name.
"Katara."
She looked back.
"There's something worth knowing," he said. "I've been watching it for a while and not sure it was my place to say. But — have you noticed how Aang looks at you when he thinks no one else is?"
The question landed differently than she expected. He watched her work through it — the brief inventory of recalled moments, expressions, small gestures reassembled in a new frame.
"I hadn't—" she started.
"He doesn't say it. He may not say it for a long time yet, because Aang is not the kind of person who hurries things that feel important to him. But it's there." Odyn held her gaze. "I'm not telling you what to do with that information. I'm telling you it exists, because you deserve to have it."
Katara looked toward the sleeping form of the boy who had come out of ice and into a world that was one hundred years past what he remembered, and was carrying that weight with a grace that still surprised her sometimes. She looked at him and reassembled him in the new frame and found that it fit — and that she didn't entirely know what to do with that yet, but that it warranted thought.
"Thank you," she said, quietly.
"Rest well."
She walked back to her sleeping roll. Odyn turned back to the hills, and the distant lights of Gaoling, and the question of what his cousin had built for herself here and what it was protecting against.
The stars moved overhead in their long, unhurried arcs, and the camp breathed in the steady rhythm of people who did not know yet what the next day would ask of them.
The Bei Fong Estate — That Same Night
The estate was everything that money could arrange and pride could sustain — the flying boar insignia on every gate, the guards at intervals that communicated wealth and the anxiety that accompanies it, the gardens maintained to a standard that was less about enjoyment and more about the impression gardens of that quality create on people walking past them.
The hidden passage in the rear wall was imperceptible from the outside. The girl who had created it had done so with the kind of precision that comes from intimate familiarity with how stone actually behaves when you ask it things — not the broad, powerful earthbending of the arena, but the fine, patient bending of someone who wanted a specific outcome and took the time to achieve it.
Toph came through it first. Seraphina followed.
"Parents' carriage was spotted near the city limits," Seraphina said, reading the position of the estate's guard rotation as they crossed the garden. "Twenty minutes, perhaps."
"Mm." Toph's feet read the grass, the path, the subtle vibration of a household preparing for its masters' return. "We made it."
They moved quickly to her chambers, which were elegant and tasteful and arranged for the impression they created on the people who saw them rather than for the convenience of the person who actually lived in them — something Toph had accepted long ago with the weary pragmatism of someone who learned early that certain battles were not worth the energy.
"They're at the gate," Toph said, as Seraphina retrieved the silk nightgown and began the practiced work of transforming the Earth Rumble champion back into the perfect sheltered daughter.
The headband came off. The hair fell loose. The posture that had dominated an arena full of grown men began, by measured degrees, to reduce itself into something smaller and less certain — not a full transformation, because Toph's actual bones and muscles couldn't be hidden, but enough. Enough to confirm what her parents needed to see.
"You called him Odyn," Toph said, as Seraphina arranged the last strands of hair.
"Yes."
"His footsteps are unusual. Heavy in a way that doesn't match his weight — like the ground is registering something else about him in addition to the physical." She tilted her head. "He was surprised to see you, but not frightened. That's interesting."
"He doesn't frighten easily," Seraphina said. "He never did."
"And the Avatar was with him."
Seraphina paused, briefly, in the smoothing of Toph's nightgown. "You're certain."
"The vibrations from him are layered," Toph said. "Like there's more than one person in there. I've never felt anything like it." She considered. "He's young. That's surprising."
"A lot of things are surprising tonight," Seraphina said.
The knock at the door came with the formal precision of people who announce themselves in their own house because the household has run long enough on ceremony that even the residents follow its rules.
And then it happened.
The change. Toph's spine curved slightly inward. Her chin dipped. Her hands folded in front of her. The expression that had been clear-eyed and direct softened at the edges into something tentative. It was not a performance of helplessness — it was the careful management of a perception, deployed with the precision of someone who understood exactly what it maintained and what it cost.
"Come in," Seraphina called.
The Bei Fongs entered. Poppy moved immediately to her daughter with the warm instinct of a mother who loves her child and has been frightened of the world on her behalf since the day she was born. Lao directed his questions to Seraphina, as he usually did — the assumption being that information about Toph was best gathered from someone capable of observing her properly.
Seraphina answered each question with the smooth accuracy of someone who has done this long enough to have the answers ready before they're asked.
Yes, all meals properly taken. Yes, a gentle evening stroll, modest pace, designated paths. No overexertion. All windows to be secured before retiring.
"Your service continues to be invaluable," Lao said, with the approving nod of a man who has found a solution to a problem he does not fully understand and is grateful not to have to think about it further.
"It is my honor," Seraphina replied.
The Bei Fongs said their good nights with the careful tenderness of parents who love what they are afraid of losing, and departed down the hallway with the sound of soft footsteps on stone floors.
The door closed.
Toph collapsed onto her bed with the full-body exhale of someone releasing a held breath that had been held for several hours.
"How was our gentle stroll, my delicate blossom," she intoned, in a note-perfect impression of her father's concerned solicitude.
"Perfectly," Seraphina agreed, settling into the chair beside the window and allowing herself, for the first time all evening, something approaching rest.
"It's exhausting," Toph said, to the ceiling. "Being this fragile."
"You've never been fragile a day in your life."
"Don't tell them that."
Seraphina checked the window locks, as promised. Her gaze moved from the glass to the dark garden below, to the estate walls, to the city beyond them where somewhere in the quiet streets a group of teenagers was settling down to sleep.
"What kind of person was he?" Toph asked. "When you knew him."
Seraphina considered the question with the honesty it deserved. "Determined in a way that wasn't stubbornness — he pursued things because he believed in them, not because he'd decided to. Honest, sometimes uncomfortably so. And..." she paused. "He had the particular quality of someone who sees the people around him as they actually are rather than as they present themselves."
Toph was quiet for a moment. "That sounds like a problem for someone trying to maintain a careful front."
"It was," Seraphina said, the ghost of a smile in her voice. "It still will be."
"What do you think he wants?"
"Answers. The same kind I'd want, in his position." She looked at the city lights. "He was supposed to be gone. Far from here, beyond finding." A pause. "The Avatar changes trajectories."
"That's generally his function, from what I understand," Toph said dryly.
"Get some sleep, Toph."
"You first."
She didn't say it unkindly. It was the exchange they had, at the end of evenings — the habitual, affectionate friction of two people who had spent enough time together to have developed their own particular language for I will if you will.
Seraphina stood. Moved to the door. Paused with her hand on the frame.
What she had built here — the life, the cover, the arrangement that gave Toph the freedom her household denied her and gave Seraphina a purpose and a reason to stay invisible — it had functioned exactly as intended for longer than she had expected. The threads of it had held.
She had not planned for Odyn.
She was not sure if that was because planning for him was impossible, or because some part of her had simply stopped believing he would ever appear.
Destiny, she thought. Or coincidence. The distinction mattered less than she had once believed.
"Tomorrow," she said.
"Tomorrow," Toph agreed.
The door closed softly between them, and the estate settled into the silence of a house where everyone believed they knew what they had, and almost none of them were entirely right.
To be continued...
Next: Chapter Seven — The Blind Bandit and Her Guard, Part II