Chapter Text
“When you come of age you may go in search of a master, not before then.” Gran-gran chided her after a particularly lengthy tirade of Katara's. Teaching herself to waterbend in secluded ice caves was not going well. She could feel the power of her bending beneath her skin. She could feel the pull of the moon and the tides, but her ability to put those feelings into practice only resulted in pathetic misdirected splashes.
Katara simply groaned at Gran-gran's declaration. Five years may as well have been a hundred, especially when every year wasted was one she could have spent progressing toward mastery. Gran-gran fixed her with a withering stare. “None of that Katara. No one in this tribe would allow a child to make such a journey alone, even if the world were at peace.”
“Sokka could come with me.”
“Yes, when you are of age.” With that declaration Gran-gran seemed finished with the matter, and no amount of grumbling or well-crafted teenage arguments would move her. She only repeated those same words. When you are of age. So Katara continued training in hidden caves desperately trying to claw forbidden knowledge from the snow and ice around her.
In the beginning, her stubborn nature was a detriment. Everytime she tried to force the water into shape, it only responded by spilling from her control. It was Sokka that brought it to her attention. “Well of course it won't obey you. It's water, Katara. We don't try to change the tides to suit us, we change to suit the tides.” He gave her an exasperated look, clearly sick of listening to her complain.
The next time she managed to sneak away to the ice cave, she paused. Rather than immediately reach for her bending and continue trying to force the water into shape, she sat down. We change to suit the tides. She rolled the words around in her mind. How did we change? Mostly they waited, until the cycle of the tides aligned with their needs. She flopped onto the ice, the thick material of her parka preventing the cold from biting into her. She fixed her gaze on the curving patterns of the cave's ceiling.
There were other cycles. Some she could feel, like the motion of a boiling pot of water, others she’d only heard about, like how water moved from the ocean to the air and fell back down again as snow. The twisting patterns of the cave wound around her. She closed her eyes. She needed to align with the cycle, with the flow of the water around her. Even ice, rigid as it seemed, was a part of it. It melted and froze, melted and froze, over and over again. Changing forms but staying the same, like the moon and the tides.
After bending her mind into a million knots Katara felt the rise of the moon. The sensation snapped her out of her meditation. Gran-gran would worry if she wasn’t home. The ice was dangerous at night. She growled in frustration and slowly picked herself up from the ground. Next time. She'd figure it out next time. She would turn her stubbornness into an asset. Afterall, even the hardest of rocks can be worn away by the persistent motion of the tides. Katara smiled. Then turned and trudged back through the snow to her chores.
Over and over again, Katara returned to the cave; she stretched her mind and her bending and slowly melted herself into the cycles around her. It took nearly a month for the full moon to rise. Its pull finally made the sensations inside and around her clear. The energy inside her body and the water around her fell in sync, not in matching cycles, but in opposing ones. They pushed and pulled against each other. She raised her hand and the still pool of water in front of her rose with it, following in a smooth tear drop, until the balance shifted. The water fell back into the pool with a splash that echoed through the cave.
Katara gasped. She'd done it. That was nothing like the warbling balls of unstable water she'd managed to pull up before. That had been true waterbending. The frustration of months of meditation broke over her like a wave, wrecking the tranquil circulation of her chi. This was only the first step. There was still so much ahead of her, but she couldn’t push things further and end up exhausted tomorrow. She needed to sleep and let what she had learned today settle inside of her. She stood up and headed home.
Wake, learn, sleep, repeat. That was an important cycle as well. I will become a master. She promised herself. Even if I must claw the secrets from Tui and La themselves…
Katara found ways to practice even outside of the cave. She wasn’t fool enough to make the same mistake she had as a child. She would never allow such a thing to happen again, but there were invisible ways to exercise the skills she was building. She had learned to sense the movement of the water around her. This skill was foundational to her growth. Every movement she made in the cave was drawn from these observations, so she made it her goal to be able to maintain this awareness at all times. At first it was exhausting, she could barely manage thirty minutes. This time dropped even further if she was doing something that required her mental focus, such as mending clothes.
“You’re going to stain my pants with blood if you keep stabbing yourself like that.” Sokka grumbled as he watched her mend his fox seal skin pants.
Katara snarled at him and threw the half-stitched garment at his head. “If you’re going to complain then you fix it!”
“No wait! Katara, come on, please. I can’t wear these!” He stuck his hand through the gaping hole in the groin on the pants. She fixed him with a cold glare, then stormed out of their hut. “Katara!” She didn’t even turn to acknowledge his plea.
She stopped to stare up at the vortex of drifting snow above her. It wasn’t fair to snap at Sokka like that. He worked hard. A solid twenty percent of the food the village ate was trapped, hunted, or fished by him. In a group of forty people that was a major contribution and it had only continued to increase as he grew in age, skill, and strength. He had no choice. There were so few left in the tribe who could hunt after the men had left for the war. They both had to do so much now. She shouldn’t have yelled at him.
…but sometimes, the way he talked about her work, about the hours and hours she spent keeping everyone clothed and fed, he acted like it was worth less than the work he put in. What was sewing compared to hunting tiger seals? At least to Sokka, so-called ‘women’s work’ was to be looked down upon. She would never discount the work he was putting in, so why did he think it was okay to do to her? She growled into the grey sky and watched her breath fade into the swirling snow.
Now that she was no longer splitting her focus it was far easier to extend her awareness to the ice and snow around her. She could feel how the fluffy snow under her feet slowly compacted as her focus drifted deeper, until it was as dense as ice, or rather until it was ice. The snow here didn’t thaw. It was buried by more snow, the pressure slowly compressing it into denser and denser ice. She couldn’t tell how deep it went. I’ll be able to reach that far eventually. Katara decided, one day she would feel the end of the ice. She added the goal to her slowly growing mental list.
The painful ache of cold in her fingers finally drove her back into their hut to finish her sewing. In her haste to get away from Sokka she had forgotten to put her gloves back on, and while she would give a lot to avoid Sokka’s quips, a finger was not part of that list. She managed to keep her awareness up for another fifteen minutes before another prick to her index finger broke her concentration and she gave up for the evening.
She alternated between expanding her awareness of her surroundings and focusing on the flow of energy inside her. Eventually she wanted to be able to maintain both at once, no matter what task she was doing, but that goal was a long way off. Every time she turned her attention inward she smoothed the turbulence of her chi and set it slowly circulating through her body. She was learning every twist and turn of the meridians which carried her chi, some carried the energy outward from her stomach and others returned it from her limbs back to her core. The slightly weakened energy was then replenished by the swirling sea of chi that was her stomach and sent back out again.
She was beginning to sense the series of pools where the energy was meant to collect before moving on as well as the places it stagnated where it was not meant to, but solving these flow problems was currently beyond her. She could only focus on resolving one at a time and often when she returned her focus to a problem area she would find her work undone. It was a frustrating and seemingly never-ending task.
Focusing on her own internal energy proved to be more difficult than sensing the water around her. She quickly learned she could only manage it alongside the simplest tasks. Unfortunately, she did not learn fast enough to avoid needing Sokka to cut her free from the tangled mess of one of their best fishing nets. “What in the world is going on with you Katara?” He grumbled as he worked. Each time his knife cut through another knot he winced, obviously thinking of how much time it would take to repair. “I don’t even know how you managed this. I’ve pulled this net through kelp forests and wound up with fewer knots!” Katara turned her head away from him and shrugged. She had no idea how it had happened either. Only that she had spent too much focus on her practice at the wrong time, but that wasn’t something she could explain to Sokka.
As soon as Sokka severed the last knot holding her she leapt to her feet and bolted, ignoring Sokka’s confused cries, she made a beeline for the cave and spent the rest of the day pulling water from the walls of ice and refreezing it into every shape she could think of. She was getting better. Only a few months ago she struggled to freeze any amount of water evenly, now she was freezing perfect pillars of ice as tall as she was. She moved, worked, froze, and unfroze the water until she was dripping with sweat and shaking. That was another thing to add to the list, her physical body lacked the endurance she required of it. She fell backward into a soft snow drift and watched the resulting cloud of powdery snow rise and settle back down onto the ice. There was too much to do, but she was making progress. Step by tiny step.
After three months of practice she found it was no longer a struggle to be aware of the water around her.
Six months after that she could track each snow flake that drifted around her. Even deaf and blind, she could sense Sokka’s footsteps in the snow when he snuck up behind her. “Sneak Attack!!” Katara twisted out of the way before he even finished yelling.
“It’s not a sneak attack if you yell it out, Sokka.”
“You’re no fun anymore.”
She was fifteen when she finally felt the bottom of the ice and the endless depths of water that flowed beneath it. Their fishing haul had significantly increased, so long as they dropped their nets where Katara told them they were guaranteed barrels of fish. “We can’t live off of just fish Katara!” Sokka grumbled in frustration. “I still need to hunt. We need the skins and the bones as well. Can’t use fish for that.” Katara only nodded.
She learned to disperse water into mist, then fog, then as droplets so tiny they were invisible. Then she learned to pull them back out of the air. She thought about where else she could pull water from. She thought about where she had been afraid to let her senses explore, about the water that she could feel inside of living things. Katara shook the thoughts from her head. Reaching inside of a living creature that way -- it twisted her stomach into knots, so she refused to pursue the idea any further.
She was sixteen when Sokka didn’t come home. She had warned him, but he had been so obstinate lately, so desperate to prove that he was a man, that he was valuable. The gathering moisture in the air, the drop in temperature, both signs that the weather was about to turn very foul. The sun set, the winds started, and Sokka had still not returned home. When the sun rose and Katara still couldn’t sense any sign of him, she started gathering her things and packing provisions. “Please wait just a little longer.” Gran-gran pleaded with her. The grip of her arthritic hand on Katara’s sleeve was easy to pull away from.
“He’s not anywhere near the village, and he wasn’t dressed heavily enough to endure a blizzard.” Katara kept moving, kept packing.
“I can’t lose both of you.” Gran-gran’s voice was quiet. It pulled at Katara’s chest, but she couldn’t stop. Gran-gran didn’t know. The blizzard couldn’t kill Katara -- she was a part of it -- but it could kill Sokka.
“I can’t just sit here and wait for him to die.” With that she slipped out of the hut and began trudging towards Sokka’s hunting grounds.
Her hands shook as she bent the snow around her. She forced them to steady. There was no one around to see her. No one could see her. She kept repeating it in her mind as she pushed against the limits of her ability to sense the water around her. Somewhere in this world of white was her brother, and only she could hope to find him, as the only waterbender in the South Pole. Even if someone did see her, if they came for her like they had before, she was not some trembling defenseless child anymore.
She kept searching.
The sun was nearly at its peak when she finally sensed him, huddled under a small mound of packed snow. He had built himself a burrow to keep the wind out and the heat in. It had kept him from freezing to death. Katara slid through the barely shoulder width opening straight into her shivering brother. The burrow was barely large enough for both of them.
“You idiot! I told you not to go!” She slammed her mittens against his shoulders. Worry began to claw at her chest when he didn’t snap back at her. Sokka’s eyes opened slowly, like he was half asleep. “Sokka!” She shouted and shook him, but he still barely responded. She pulled one of her mittens off and laid her hand against his forehead. The icy chill of his skin shot straight through her, freezing her heart in her chest. Katara gasped, panic starting her heart back up in a frantic rhythm.
She quickly bent the burrow deeper into the ice, creating a space deep enough for her to stand and move around in. With a flick of her wrist, she pulled the moisture from his clothes and froze it to the wall. She pulled her pack down from the entrance which was now around five feet from the ground and started pulling out the thick fur sleeping bags she had brought with her. With the help of her bending she managed to get Sokka off the ice and into one of the sleeping bags. She pulled off her own parka and then his, before climbing into the sleeping bag with him and tying them both inside.
Immediately she could feel how cold he was. Even through both of their shirts, he was chilling her. “Big dumb stupid idiot.” She grumbled. “I’ll kill you if you survive this.” The cold was slowing the circulation of chi in her body. Almost on reflex she pulled it into a faster rhythm and felt warmth suffuse her limbs as the stored chi in her stomach was drained more rapidly. Sweat began to bead on her skin and she immediately bent it away before it could chill Sokka. He was still shivering. If only she could manipulate his internal energy the same way she could move her own.
Katara pondered the thought.
Maybe…
She pressed her palm to his chest and tried to sense the energy inside him. She could feel his blood, the beat of his heart, his breath, all moving far too slowly. She growled in frustration and moved her hand to his face. His skin was still icy under her fingertips, but she could feel it, just barely. It wasn’t enough. She could sense it but not move it. Just like his blood it was circulating much too slowly, like half frozen sea water.
She was probably leaving bruises with how hard she was pushing her fingers into his cheek, but she didn’t care. She pulled and pushed as hard as she could against the stagnation inside of him, but no matter what she did there was no response. Sweat slicked her palm and her grip slipped. She moved to bend the moisture away before pausing. She could move water. Maybe it would work as a buffer, or an intermediary of sorts, a bridge between her internal energy and his. She twisted her wrist and pulled some water from the ice around them, carefully heating it to body temp before coating her hand with it and pressing it to his face and neck.
A pale blue glow bloomed in the water and Katara’s mouth dropped open in shock. It looked like the phosphorescent algae blooms that sometimes happened near the shore, but this was not the time to admire it. She could feel his chi clearly now. It resisted her as she pulled it along its proper path, but she was stubborn. This new sort of bending was more instinctual than moving water, easier in some ways, even as Sokka resisted her at every turn. She moved her hand down to his chest. The water soaked through his shirt and let her sense the meridians there too. If she could warm up his core then the rest of him would follow. As she continued she found that she could move the energy in the water into him. She pushed the warmth in the water into his chi, then heated it again with her bending and repeated the process. Slowly, he was beginning to warm up.
A few minutes later his eyes fluttered open and properly focused on her face. “Katara?” He groaned and tried to lean away from her, but was stopped by the furs of the sleep sack.
“Stop moving. I haven’t finished thawing your big dumb manly muscles.” Katara rolled her eyes. He was so proud of his recent growth spurt, but all this extra mass was only making her job harder, requiring even more energy to warm up. “Why couldn’t you have stayed skinny for just a bit longer?” She complained.
His teeth chattered a moment before he snorted at her comment. “I’d have been dead before you found me if I was still as lanky as an eel fish. You should be thanking my big dumb muscles for keeping me alive.”
“You and your muscles can kiss La’s tail fin. I swear-- if it weren’t for your ridiculous pride! You should’ve just listened to me in the first place and I wouldn’t be stuck in a sleeping bag trying to thaw your frozen fingers!”
The sarcastic smirk fell from his face and he had the decency to try and look away from her. They were both silent for a moment. “I’m sorry, Katara.” She narrowed her eyes.
“That’s it? No follow up sarcastic quips or jokes?”
“No. I--” He swallowed and looked back at her. “I was wrong. I should have listened to you and this is my fault.”
She rolled her eyes and huffed. “Just don’t forget it.”
They stumbled back into their hut just past nightfall, right into Gran-gran’s arms. “Don’t you two ever worry me like that again!”
She lectured and hugged them at the same time, insisting on checking every inch of them for frostbite. A few hours ago she would have found Sokka’s toes to be an icy blue, but Katara had fixed that, and Gran-gran was left with nothing to do but yell at them both until they were all equally exhausted.
Two things changed after Sokka’s ill-fated hunting trip. Sokka actually listened to Katara without complaint, at least regarding matters of water and weather. The incredulous look on his face when she’d described how she had found him in that blizzard was a memory that Katara often replayed when he was being a smug ass about his warrior pride. The second change was that Katara began healing everything she could manage, the bruises and skinned knees of the village children, joints dislocated and sprained by fishing mishaps, bones broken by hard ice. She knitted torn flesh back together and soothed long mishealed injuries.
As she worked her way through a village of ailments and injuries Katara discovered a few things. First was that she had a talent for this; it was instinctual in a way nothing else with bending had been. Next was that she couldn’t heal everything. She could soothe the pain and swelling in Gran-gran’s hands, but she couldn’t fix the warped bone and internal flaws that caused her pain. Perhaps regular healing could have prevented the damage, but now that it was present all Katara could provide was temporary relief.
The third thing she learned was that the water she used mattered. Something simple like heating someone up or healing a bruise could be done with anything nearby. But when Kava came back from checking the nets with a tiger seal tusk in her leg, Katara had to pull water directly from the sea. It was inconvenient; she couldn’t heal in the open, but the best way to heal was to stand in La’s energy and borrow their power. It was Sokka and his endless inventiveness that found the answer and then built it for her.
A new hut was erected in the middle of the village. Inside was a floor of ice with a six foot long and one foot deep depression. Sokka’s original idea was to melt a channel in the ice under the village from the shore to fill the pool, but Katara had improved on it by bending two channels straight down into the ice to the water below, one at each end of the basin. With her bending she could circulate ocean water through the pool, giving her a continuous supply of water ideal for healing. Her bending also kept the water at a comfortable temperature despite the surrounding ice. Soon the hut replaced her cave as her meditation spot most evenings, now she only needed to leave the village when she planned on practicing larger bending moves.
When Katara was 17, a new child was born in the village. It had been so long since they had been blessed with new children. The village feasted for nearly two days when Kava announced her pregnancy and then they did it again when the girl was born. Katara helped with the birth. Kava was older than she should be, her husband had stayed behind when the men left for war. An old hunting injury made him unfit to fight. Katara thought that Kava had been grateful, despite the pain it caused him, at least it had kept him by her side.
The birth did not go smoothly. Without her healing Katara doubted Kava would have survived. The process left both of them exhausted, but Kava would have the aid of the entire village in caring for Hama -- named after the great aunt Kava had lost in the Fire Nation raids. Everyone was scrambling to help with the new child. Her parents barely had a second alone with her.
Katara let them all celebrate and held the horrible secret she had discovered in her heart like a stone. Hama was a waterbender. Katara had felt it the moment her hands had touched the newborn. She could feel the power that flowed inside her, pushing and pulling gently against her own. Katara was no longer alone, but this perfect and tiny being was now saddled with the same burden she had grown up under. A blessing or a curse, Katara couldn’t tell. When she delivered the news at Hama’s official naming ceremony a month later Kava had sobbed into her arms and Katara still couldn’t tell, was it pride or fear? Had her mother sobbed the same way, when Katara had proudly shown her the unsteady ball of water in her hands?
As her eighteenth birthday approached, Katara started preparing and so did Sokka. She had never asked him to go with her, but he fell in step beside her all the same. They didn’t talk about it, but they both sat up by the fire every night, Katara stitching embroidered skins into a beautiful satchel and Sokka carving bones into intricate whirling shapes, both items made to trade with the spring traders for passage across the Southern Sea. Gran-gran watched them in silence.
The night she came of age, Katara knelt with Gran-gran in front of all the women in the tribe. Gran-gran held her face in one hand and smeared a crescent of ash and tiger seal fat over her brow with the other. She tilted Katara’s face to meet the full moon, its light shining silver in her blue eyes. “Under Tui’s light we welcome Katara as a woman of the Southern Tribe. From the stories of the women here tonight, she will know what it is to be one of us, to protect as a polar bear dog protects her cubs, to provide as a seal penguin provides for her mate and egg, to teach as the black whale shark teaches her juniors to survive, and to endure as every creature endures the winter’s long night.”
Then each woman in the tribe, from youngest to oldest, stood one by one and told their stories. Katara sat and listened in silence to each one. When tears began to spill down her cheeks she didn’t move to brush them away. When her legs ached and grew numb beneath her she remained still. Twenty women stood and told their tales, each one terrible and lovely, filled with tragedy, triumph, and the banal invisible parts of life that compose them both. And the last of them stood just as the first sign of light was visible on the horizon, Gran-gran stood and told her story.
Horror dawned on Katara's face as Gran-gran spoke of the place she was born, where women were not the steady pillars on which the tribe rested, but the ornaments it was decorated with, where they were silent and hidden away, where even the decision of who to marry was taken from them. Katara clutched the carved stone at her neck feeling the weight of it for the first time in her life. She knew now why Gran-gran had made her wait. Her tears were angry now. They fell from rage-filled eyes as she stared up at the moon and resisted the howl that rose inside of her. “The greatest achievement of a woman with strong bending,” Gran-gran explained, “was giving birth to a strong male bender. No one in the North would ever teach a woman to fight.”
The ice beneath their feet cracked and some hopeful part of Katara cracked with it. The ocean swelled to meet her fury and despair. Katara would never have a master, no matter how far she traveled or how hard she worked. Frigid water rushed up through the cracks in the ice and over the feet of the tribe’s women, collecting in a ring around Katara. Shouts and screams echoed outside of the whirling wall of water. Katara could hear Gran-gran’s desperate shouts but the sound was so far away. The water rose higher and higher until all Katara could see was its violent flow and the tranquil full moon above her and she finally howled. She screamed her fear and her rage, her anguish for all the women in the north forced to live with only half their bending, for her mother who she had killed with her carelessness and her father who had abandoned them. She wailed.
She was alone with the moonlight and water, and then a freezing hand reached through the vortex to grip her arm. Katara tore her gaze from the moon to watch as Kava forced her way through the wall of water even as stray shards of ice cut through her skin and her muscles trembled in the cold. Kava pulled Katara into a crushing hug. “You are not alone.” The water crashed down soaking them both. The women of the tribe stood in a ring around them, many of them bore cuts like Kava, having tried to reach through the water towards Katara, and all of them were shivering in soaked clothes. Kava placed her hands on Katara’s shoulders and met her eyes. “You are not alone.” She took a shivering breath. “You will teach yourself, and then you will teach Hama, and we will all protect you both and every one that comes after.” The icy determination in Kava’s gaze was matched by every woman around them.
Her tears frozen on her cheeks, Katara looked around her and nodded. They would protect her, and she would protect them.