The itch is back. It's crawling beneath her skin, focusing somewhere between her shoulder blades where she can't reach it and knows not to try. If she starts scratching, all will be lost, she'll scratch until her back is bloody because the only way to stop the itch is to do what she swore she would not do. The rest of the group doesn't notice. Aang is chatting with Sokka near Appa's head, Zuko is meditating and Toph doesn't pay attention to anything but the lack of earth up on Appa.
But oh, for once in her life, Katara wants to be weak and give in without a fight. She feels like she might understand the old man back home who's never up before midday, smells unpleasantly of something sharp and whose hands shake when the small bottle he usually carries with him is taken from him. She, too, longs for an innocence lost, though she has not yet given in to her brand of distraction.
It is not for a lack of wanting to. Ever since Hama, the area between her shoulder blades has been itching, the crawling in her skin growing claws near the full moon and settling when the moon was hidden from her. Katara of the Southern Water Tribe loves the moonless nights. She has a feeling the itch is going to remain there for the rest of her life, crawling through the wretched veins that learned a forbidden skill from a madwoman with eyes like claws.
But the itch is clever. It is maddening, constantly shifting just beneath her skin. (And sometimes, when Katara bolts up from her sleeping mat in the middle of the night, she thinks she can see shapes moving underneath her skin. She convinces herself that they're just a trick of the light and a madwoman's laughter echoes in her ears like a curse. There is no rest to be found on those nights.) So Katara cheats. Just a little, and never where it could be noticed.
Every battle they fight in, Katara is just the tiniest bit faster, just a little bit stronger than she ought to be. The others complain about always losing sight of her when the fighting begins and Katara's blood whispers to her of the memory of the song of battle and she will act contrite and explain that her opponent was just so strong and she's always preferred to dodge a hit. What she will never tell is how her blood starts pounding in her ears once the fight gets going(how someone else's blood starts pounding in her ears), how the itch settles down when she uses tiny bits of her forbidden knowledge, gives in to the madwoman's laughter bubbling inside her skull. They always find her after a battle, but usually only when the opponent has long since been defeated and Katara's movements are strangely jerky and weak. She always insists on bathing after a battle.
Sometimes, Katara thinks Toph knows. There are times when she turns her eyes straight at her and looks with the ruined milky pools she calls eyes and she holds her breath. Toph never says anything, because she's strangely honourable like that, for all her crassness and blunt ways, but Katara's pretty sure she can feel the way she manipulates the blood in her veins.
She knows the day she uses it on another is the day that Toph will do something drastic and so they both pretend that Katara doesn't use a forbidden art that's slowly tearing her body apart (she is not always quite as careful as she should be and it is easy to tear something as delicate as a vein in the heat of battle) and that Toph doesn't hear the change in her heartbeat at the start of every battle.
But the itch is quiet for a while after, not completely, but close enough and Katara of the Southern Water Tribe closes her eyes and dances to the song of battle and listens to the blood singing the sweetest lullaby she has ever known.
Avatar the last Airbender isn't mine, I make no money off this fic, yadda yadda yadda. Reviews are much appreciated, feel free to point out any grammatical errors, you know the drill. (And yes, I know how absolutely painfully unoriginal my choice in title is.)