They had come to the village in the evening, haggard and war-worn. The cloth beneath their armor was charred and torn, scars which they wore proudly, but the wounds beneath the tattered clothes were much deeper than surface-valued pride. They were a matter of survival. Kill or be killed. There was no room for hesitation or fear in a world driven by the iron-clad machine of the Fire Nation army.
She often received soldiers of the Water Tribe Resistance. The sick, the injured, the ones who were too weak to go on. She took in the dying. The helpless. The youthful that had left wide-eyed wives at home, the old who had long since lost the spark of rebellion, the middle-aged fathers who still clutched the mental pictures of their families close to their hearts.
When the nights were cold and they ached with patchworks of burns and bruises on their native skin…that was when they held fast to what they believed in. Why am I fighting? For posterity, for love, for the age of peace they had never known.
Hope. It was what kept them sane. They had long since given up on the idea of a savior. A messianic figure that would rise out of the written legends and orated stories they were told as young children – the Avatar. He, who had abandoned them in their time of need. The Avatar, who they all believed to be a myth. An artifact of ancient times and mythology, nothing more than a piece of tall-tale history. They no more believed in his being than the existence of the goodness of the Fire Lord – it was impossible. There was no such entity; not even in the precarious form of man.
But she still believed in him.
Even when all was lost, when humanity danced on the brink of destruction.
Katara would never give up on that one last chance. The last aspiration for the peace of mankind manifested in the body of a mere human being. Of course, it was a stretch of the imagination. Something that only children, innocent and untouched by the scorn of the world, could believe in. Perhaps Katara was naïve. Perhaps it was silly to dream of something better even when the once-bright prospects of peace were dimming with each year. Each decade.
But at least she held onto something more than just sanity when everyone else had simply let go.
Katara was the young, and rather inexperienced, village healer. The only one who had even a modicum of knowledge in the art of waterbending. And though she had never had a proper master to teach her how to use it as a defense mechanism, a means to fight, she had turned her abilities as a healer into skills as a fighter. It was frowned upon in the north, where the origin of healing powers had been founded, and here it was nearly unheard of for a woman to engage in battle. She was both an anomaly and a disgrace in regards to her heritage and yet she found acceptance easily in the slow pace of everyday life.
Only one tradition was shared between the separate tribes – there is no place on the battlefield for women.
But Katara longed to fight, avenge the death of her mother and the absence of both her estranged father and her young brother. With each day he spent away from home, Katara watched from afar, a spectator, to Sokka's slowly fraying resolve, the dying embers of his confidence in the resistance sputtering out as the Fire Nation's victory became more evident.
Inevitable.
She could hear the despair in his letters, when he gathered enough strength to write them – You hope too much, Katara. There's nothing we can do. I can't say this to my men, but I can say this to you. The Fire Nation is winning, it's been something I've known for ages now. Without any help, we're just drawing out a lost cause…we may win our picks of battles, but we can't win this war. Don't expect me home…I don't think I'll make it through the winter.
I won't make it through the winter. He has always said this to her. Every year it appears at the bottom of the page like an omen, a dark oath. As common a threat as the signature which followed.
But a contradiction all the same as the familiar rolls of parchment she received from him quieted the gnawing doubt of him existing out there, somewhere beyond her reach. Every time he wrote to her she breathed a sigh of relief….each time he allayed her fear for his life with an old pen and some poorly mixed ink.
This pocket of resistance had seemed to have lost all faith in their cause too. It was a fast-spreading plague, the sickness of submission, affecting nearly all of the freedom fighters that Katara had come across during the course of the long war. The empty look in their eyes told stories of sacrifice and death and suffering that had, in the end, all amounted to nothing.
Each one wore a different color of defeat, varying shades of lost loved ones and runaways and last hopes that had all but turned to ashes in the fiery clutches of their enemies. Like storm clouds, they encroached the fragile security of the small tribe as the embodiment of ultimate loss, the sentinels of sacrifice, and she could see the questions pacing beneath the surface of each soldier's crestfallen face.
When will it end? Is there even hope for a new beginning?
It was only a matter of time before they reached the crossroads – death or subsistence. Neither were desirable, but both were unavoidable.
She approached the group cautiously, clutching her full water pouch at her side. Keme, a young girl rendered mute after her mother had been murdered in a Fire Nation raid not two months before, followed behind with a stack of thin, weather-beaten blankets, her footsteps silent and grave.
The second in command was a tall and grim-faced figure who seemed to impose a shadow of regret and great sadness without even speaking a word. Katara rested her hand on Keme's thin, tiny shoulder as she gently instructed the timid girl to give blankets to the wounded soldiers; she gladly obliged, eager to escape facing the intimidating man standing, waiting, at their village's icy border.
She scanned the men for familiar faces. Bato. Dad. Sokka.
Not one.
You the healer? The question came to her in a gruff voice, like the sound of a splitting glacier. Cold and harsh on the ears, even from far away.
The one and the only, sir.
She wanted to ask where her brother was. If he knew of the great general Sokka, leader of the seventh Earth division. Who had gone away, absconded from the only place he knew how to call home. Ice, perpetual winter, igloos planted in snow that was as ordinary here as sand in the desert – it never went away. It was all the same to him and Katara knew, just knew, that he had to miss this arctic no man's land or else she was really as alone as she feared.
The lieutenant waved her over softly, inviting her to walk beside him. As an equal. In different circumstances, she might have liked him. Might have thought him handsome, when his blue eyes could have still held onto the fervor and pride of the typical Water Tribe leader. Perhaps, she might have flashed him a friendly smile and Sokka might have told him one of his contrived, stupid jokes.
But the least she could afford him was her respect.
He's my best man. The lieutenant fell to his knees beside what looked to be only a boy, no older than Sokka himself. Katara looked on, ever the spectator. Ever detached from the cruelty of war and unable to do anything but try and soothe the shockwaves, walk amongst the aftermath. We almost lost him a few times on the way over, but he seemed like he wanted to hold on for something.
She knelt beside her first burnt, doll-eyed soldier and saw, even from her first evaluation of the damage, that there was nothing she could do. Third degree burns covered him like a poorly sewn blanket of blood and charred skin and thread-like muscle. He seemed in so much pain that it would be more merciful to end his suffering than to prolong it; the boy had long since resigned to dying and there was no fear, no regret, not even the smallest hint of sorrow. Just…relief. And the pain.
Anything you can do for him? Please, can't you save him?
She shook her head. Septicemia. Impure blood, most village healers called it. The conclusion came to her before she even had a chance to put all the parts of this severely damaged puzzle together. If only I had the proper training, she thought, her eyes brimming with tears at the hopelessness, how useless she felt in the wake of so much destruction, picking up the pieces of the broken lives that came passing through here only to have to throw them to the wind when she came to the end of it. When she arrived at that point where they parted ways and she was left behind while they moved on.
They were like ghosts caught in a winter storm – as fleeting as the summer sun.
I can't. She agonized over the finality of the situation. There's nothing I can do but try and relieve the pain; I don't have the training to clean blood, only to heal superficial wounds. This is beyond my expertise. The most I can do for him is make his passing a little easier.
The soldier held out a pleading hand. Don't, he never had to speak the word; she could see the desperation in the downward curve of his mouth. Don't try to make it easy, because it's not. It never is. Just let me go.
She wrapped her fingers gently around his arm…all he'd wanted was to be here before he'd passed. He'd wanted to die in his home.
He wouldn't have to go alone.
It was as his soul escaped its mangled body, the rime-coated breath sinking into the frozen air, that Katara broke down; she couldn't take it anymore. No more watching death through the eyes of a spectator. No more missing her brother, her father, and passing the slow days in agony of not knowing if they were even alive. No more regretting her mother's murder as something she couldn't have stopped if she had tried, an inexorable sacrifice. No more wishing she could do more when she could.
And she would, she decided. She would. The restless spirits of her past would haunt her no longer.
She looked away from the shell of the body that had already begun to lose its warmth, from the sad, looming shadow which stood behind her...
And she set her sight on the remnants of the setting sun which lingered on the blue horizon.
Author's Note: I had this planned as a story, but I don't want to just leave people hanging if I decide not to continue it, so I'll leave it as a one shot for now. Obviously, it's an AU piece. Let me know what you all think. Perhaps, if I get some more good ideas for this concept, I will continue it as a multi-chaptered story.
edit - 7/13/10 - for those of you who were reading this as a multi-chaptered story, I want to tell you that I've discontinued it for now. But don't worry, I might put it back up later. For now, I'll stick to one shots. Thanks.
Disclaimer - I don't own Katara, the Avatar, Hakoda, Bato or Sokka.