(the title was ripped from Moana, because my brain was empty)
I
There’s something familiar about the boy with the arrows, and this lemur can’t figure out what, as he watches the boy walk through the temple. His smiles tug at this lemur’s memory, like he’s seen them before, and his laughter plays like a misremembered dream. Then the one-who-smells-like-death starts to chase him, and there is no more time for thinking.
And, for the sake of that laughter, when the boy finds the bones and falls to his knees to cry, this lemur decides to help.
This lemur doesn’t follow him to the bones, because this lemur doesn't go there anymore, he can’t sleep after being there— Fire and pain and death all around and I can’t die I have to find him and make sure he’s safe and I can’t die! Not yet! w h e r e i s a a ng— but he can hear the stomach of the boy and the one-who-smells-like-death, who is also just a boy, gurgling. And this lemur knows where the fruit trees are, so he goes.
Because lemurs are good at finding food, and he can do this for his boy.
II
This lemur returns with the food. He drops it in front of the one-who-smells-like-death, before climbing onto his boy’s shoulder.
His boy laughs. It is good.
III
His boy is somber. He’s told this lemur-now-called-Momo that they are all that remains of this place. Momo feels his boy’s shoulders drop under the weight, and wishes that he could carry the weight for his boy. He steals the one-who-smells-like-death’s apple from his hands, and delights in his boy’s laughter.
Maybe that is what Momo can do to help lift the boy’s burden.
IV (Enroute to Kyoshi Island)
Momo likes being in the air. There is less risk of being eaten. Particularly with Appa, warm-large-flying- bison , around. He likes Appa, though Appa seems unsure about how he feels about Momo. Appa feels familiar and comfortable, and he’s big enough that he can keep Momo from getting eaten.
His boy would probably be sad if Momo was eaten. Momo doesn’t want his boy to be sad.
His boy already woke up crying once. He’d held Momo tight, and muttered that he was sorry, over and over again. The other two had been asleep, otherwise he would have woken the one-who-smells-of-the-sea. Momo is envious that she can hug his boy when he can’t, but he doesn’t have another way to help his boy. Hugs are best for comforting his boy though, Momo knows this.
Momo curls around his boy’s neck, and hopes that his presence will be enough to keep the sadness away from his boy for another night.
V (Aang)
After the temple, he’s spent most of his time focusing on flying Appa. Or pretending to, Appa didn’t need a lot of help flying. But it stopped Sokka and Katara from trying to talk to him about the Temple, and what had happened there. Katara had tried to talk to him on that first night after, but other than offering him a hug, there wasn’t much she could do. She’d tried, and Aang had narrowly avoided breaking down into tears.
Momo helped the most, because maybe if Momo was still around, there were other lemurs, and if there were lemurs maybe there were bison and maybe he hadn’t doomed his people, airbenders to die by running away. Momo reminded him of home. And that was all Aang really wanted now.
Home.
VI
It takes a while until his boy starts smiling again. He was smiling from time to time, but it was empty, and cold compared to how he’d smiled before. It never quite reached his eyes. His boy pretends to smile, pretends to laugh, and pretends to have a plan for things that they should do before going to the North Pole. Things he’d ‘never done before’. The siblings of the water are impatient with that, unwilling to let his boy have time to be a child.
What his boy, Aang, really means is that he needs to go back to these childhood haunts, needs to see that they’re untainted by the violence that took away his home, needs to see how the world has changed. Momo knows that his boy had been asleep for a very long time, and it will take him a little while to wake up to the world around them.
He’s only a boy.
And Momo only wants what is best for him.
So he’ll try to distract the siblings, while he waits for his boy to wake up.
Thanks for reading my first posted foray into the ATLA fandom! This was a lot of fun to write, even though it came out of nowhere-- there may or may not be more where this came from. (there probably will be more, I really did love writing this)