Quiet Form Upon the Dust
The world's an orphans' home.
—Marianne Moore, "In Distrust of Merits"
Katara dips her hands again into the basin. The water soaks down into her skin and seeps back out, a waterbender's washing. And still, her hands unclean. Brown hands stained red.
The hospital, created from the shambles of a mansion ravaged by the surge of war, cannot stop the bitter wind. Katara sometimes summons up walls of packed snow against the cracked hospital walls, in an effort to buffer the sharp wind before her patients become chilled. She does this most often for the little ones: the children with badly burned skin or shattered bones, watching her meekly, their eyes so deep so hurt. She sees herself in them, rage and pain and doubts and fears building up inside them until they burst. They do not know the hand she had in creating this off-kilter world for them. The older patients do not know, either, but she still shrinks from their gaze.
She steps outside to dump the basin on the ground. The sky is gray. She remembers sitting under a gray sky like this with Aang once—how long has it been?—to plan the next strike against the evil nation of which she would years later become queen. So strange, to remember the Avatar who disappeared twice, who has yet to return.
She does not believe he will, this time.
She sits on the rubble of the outer hospital wall to watch the Fire Nation air tanks drift like clouds across the gray sky. Their destination is somewhere many miles from here, where an Earth Kingdom army waits. They float, languid, in search of prey.
The ocean washes against the sharp rocks below her. The rocks seem ready to jump out to the steel sea. She would join them, let herself be taken into the clutches of furious water.
Instead, she ducks beneath the strip of canvas serving as a door and turns to the next in an unending line of sufferers. Brown hands stained red.
For the six months Katara has been here the hospital had received supplies from the south every other week. She'd assumed it would go on like that forever. The supplies didn't stop coming so much as they dwindled until the healers told good Li not to make the trip; his ostrich horse was too haggard. They had food stored up and two waterbenders to ensure pure water for as long as they needed.
Katara still feels that they are sealing themselves up in their own tomb.
Morning a harsh, piercing blue, so bright it hurts. Katara lifts a little green-eyed girl into her arms and carries her outside to watch the sealhorses come up out of the water to play. The little girl clings to her neck and they stay out there for hours, until the wind gets so cold their bones hurt.
—Did you come from across the ocean? asks the little girl.
—Yes.
In front of Katara's eyes flicker images of tall, silent mountains of ice. Setting out candles onto the black water for her gran-gran when she died. Dancing under the full moon. The scent of seaprunes brewing when she woke. Her mother's smile. Her father's cough.
—Did you live there always?
—No.
Again: watching the sunrise at the peak of a volcano. Laughing at Zuko's attempts to dance. The feel of him on her skin. The swelling of her stomach.
—I'm scared.
—The Avatar will save us.
(She's become a liar, one who tells lies to children, and she hates herself but she can't bear to tell her that the Spirit World maybe doesn't touch their world at all anymore and the Avatar's gone and the dirt's gone bad and she's scared, too.)
A man is carried in so disfigured Katara runs outside and vomits. She has seen so much war now that she is surprised at the violence of her reaction. He didn't even look human.
Sometimes she wishes she'd killed the man who murdered her mother, but then, by the time she got to him he wasn't even the same man, was he? She could do unspeakable things to him and she would never touch him, the big him, the whatever it was she'd used to think she was fighting against.
Oh, Aang. What have you left us to?
The sealhorses' iridescent skin mesmerizes her. Like living art. She remembers how her father used to make carvings out of whalebones. When he'd become chief her gran-gran, that fearsome matriarch, had presented him with the bone of some sea monster slain before she'd even arrived. He'd etched into it images Katara couldn't see now, only remember how they made her feel—like the water called her, like the sky smiled, like the sun so pale at the bottom of the world could make whole worlds grow, like the spirits hung in the sky protected her, like she could always be okay as long as she was brave enough and loved her family enough. She tries to recall those images as she moves ribbons of water around in the air. In the end she retreats to the hospital where the smell of death is becoming overwhelming.
The air tanks swarm through the sky more thickly. They no longer bear the emblem of the Fire Nation. Watching them, she finds herself fearing for her sister-in-law, crumpled skeletal in that white white building. She will be turned into some sort of demented mascot, raped repeatedly so that men can boast they've had the Fire Princess. Katara hopes Azula finds the strength to bend enough fire to castrate them. She can't decide which is worse: that Azula is some sort of ally, or that the shift between the bad guys and the good guys is so fluid. She looks down at the blood crusted on her hands and goes to wash them.
His hands were always so cold, his fire wicking away the heat. She used to hold them against her stomach to warm them. Sometimes she would hold them in front of her, watching the lamplight flicker across his skin. The color often surprised her, even after she knew his body as well as her own. He used to wonder at her skin, too, his cold fingertips raising brown goosebumps as he brushed them across her arm, her abdomen. You are the most beautiful woman, he'd say, his voice hushed with awe. All of you is so beautiful.
She tries not to think about him. At night she'll sing to herself all the songs she remembers from her childhood just so she won't think about him. The top of a list of things she tries not to think about.
When their food supplies start dwindling the twelve healers and their five assistants huddle in the back room, shivering against each other. Battles are taking place closer now and more refugees roam the streets every day.
—It's like the first war, says YuLi. Only worse.
—They've gotten better at it, says Du. The killing, that is.
Katara says nothing.
They decide to send out two of the assistants to the islands. A week's journey by sea, at the most, and one of the assistants being sent is a robust waterbender from the North who spent the majority of his life on a ship. Katara feels hope flutter inside her. She's always been such an idealist and she only ever gets disappointed.
She hopes in earnest, anyway.
Aang had come to them in the middle of the night screaming. Damn it damn it all he yelled through the halls of the palace. Katara pleading Zuko yelling until Katara realized Aang wore bandages for a hat. Finally Aang sank down exhausted and he was so thin his eyes more like a child's than a man's. Katara laid her hands against his head and he let her pull off the bandages. Underneath them the grizzled remains of claw marks, like he'd tried to dig the arrow off his skull.
—It all follows these damn arrows, Aang said.
—What?
—Everything. And it's killing me.
His child-eyes glowing up at her and all she could do was hold him against her, his thin body trembling in her arms. They'd had premonitions of future strife but everything was still okay so she couldn't comprehend that haunted look in his eyes.
—They won't speak to me, he said.
—Who?
—The spirits. They've left me.
Suddenly the man in her arms was foreign, half spirit half human she doesn't know doesn't know him at all. Where is Aang? Here is the history of the world in her arms. Aang is a face this spirit wears. Every Avatar must choose to which world he or she will belong. Katara does not know what happens if an Avatar chooses Heaven over Earth.
—You're here now, she said, watching Zuko's face contort, it will all be okay.
She stands outside to watch the birds against the crisp autumn sky. Sharp wind off the ocean. Images of the dead. The mass funeral, the growing graveyard, the miniscule coffins. The badly burned soldier and the one with legs so badly crushed he will never walk again clinging to each other, humming prayers as the earthbenders rolled the soft earth over the coffins. Lighting incense in her room that night.
YuLi joins her. Hand in hand, they watch the birds, listen to the waves crash against the rocks, breathe.
The little green-eyed girl is still too thin but she's eating, now, so Katara takes that as a good sign. She is about the age Katara's daughter would have been. Her green eyes sparkle as Katara teases her, holding a morsel of food between the chopsticks and moving the food in a circle the little girl follows with her mouth. This is Katara's dinner but she forgets about that as the little girl's thin arms flap excitedly.
—I'm a baby bird! Feed me Momma!
Katara drops the food into the little girl's mouth and she chews so that Katara can see the food being mushed between her teeth.
—Good girl, Katara says.
—More?
—Only if you tell me your name.
The girl hesitates. Katara remembers her gran-gran warning her never to tell strangers your name because they might curse you and your family too.
—Sun.
—That's pretty.
—What's yours?
—Katara.
—That's pretty too.
—I don't think we can get through another war, she'd said to Zuko as they lay in the dark.
—They're going to destroy us. They're going to kill and rape and plunder and bury and burn and wipe us out. I have to defend my people.
—Yes. Yes you do. But I don't think we can have another war.
—There's nothing else to do.
—Just remember that the Fire Nation was first. You were them for a hundred years.
—I can't forget.
Only the waterbender returns. The other assistant, overwhelmed by coming to a place where crops were being harvested, remained. The waterbender presents them with the food he brought back.
—A whole winter with so little food, says Du. Katara has been hungry for at least a week and the time stretches out like a snow-covered plain. Indefinite endings.
—It's just one winter, says one of the healers.
—One winter is all we can think about now.
—But, maybe, the Fire Nation will help, says YuLi.
—No, Katara says. She can feel them staring. Her breath fogs in the small room. Sun is asleep in her arms and she holds her more closely for warmth. Katara continues, Haven't you noticed the insignias?
They hadn't. Quietly they stand, drifting outside to see if any air tanks float across the sky. Katara sits in the room, holding Sun so tightly she fears the girl will wake.
By first snowfall they have to send away most of the patients, and some of the healers leave, too. The orphans remain. Their eyes, hollow and dark, follow Katara as she walks through the hospital. The building is silent.
Katara ties her shabby parka around her thin waist. Outside the sun sets slowly, the trees black against the dusk sky. She can hear the roar of the ocean.
Uncle Iroh used to sit with her every evening to watch the sunset glittering on the ocean. He'd tell her the stories of the Fire Nation, stories not quite forgotten during those hundred years of hell. Her favorite was the story of the Sun Spirit, who gave up the Spirit World to light up the world for the human children, every day, for the rest of time. She clung to this when Aang told her, eyes clouded over, that he thought things would get worse, that he'd seen his whole past and all people are ever going to do is kill each other, that he couldn't sleep anymore because all he could see was hatred spread out in front of him, played out again and again.
A blackbird lands on the snow in front of her. Her first thought is to roast it for dinner, but then she vaguely remembers old Earth Kingdom superstitions surrounding this bird. As if in a trance, she follows it towards the tall cliffs, stopping once to see the dark blot of the hospital against the rocks, the steel ocean looking as if it would wash it away.
Flooded fields frozen over—remnants of a war only a few years earlier. The bird is leading her to the hills in the East, not so far away to make her think it better to abandon this quest. She tries to remember the symbols her father carved as she walks, breathing crystalline forms into the air where they hang momentarily like ghosts.
She comes across six Earth Kingdom soldiers. They regard each other, breath fogging in the frigid air. She sees their tattered shoes, the blood frozen on their bandages, the harsh burn marks deforming their skin. She is a thin woman alone in a world of ice. The water responds to her fingertips. Ghost images of their dead frozen bodies float across her eyes.
Then they bow, so Katara does too. She keeps one hand out as she continues following the blackbird, testing the air for movement the way Aang and Toph used to test the ground, but they keep heading South.
(Katara wonders why she is heading toward Ba Sing Se. The City of Death, Zuko used to call it.)
The last time she saw Sokka they were both royalty, of a sort, she of the Fire Nation and he of the industrial revolution underway in Ba Sing Se. He gave her a room in his best apartments where at least twenty people that she could not account for loitered around all day and some heavy cloying smoke hung in the air.
—Is it true? she'd asked. That there is going to be a famine?
Sokka had laughed! This is the scientific age, sis, and everything's going to get better! No more spirit mumbo-jumbo. No more wondering whether the crops are going to come in. No more war, even! What the hell are you talking about?
She wonders if he is still alive. The tears freeze on her cheeks.
The blackbird flies into a cave in the hillside at dusk. The opening is just a crag, almost imperceptible from the road she had been on. She follows it inside; starts when she sees it perched on something human-shaped. In the last dregs of sunlight she settles her nerves, examining the statue. It is the crude form of some Avatar long forgotten, facial features worn away, feet stained with soot. The hands outstretched, as if they used to hold something. A symbol she doesn't recognize is carved into the chest. Thinking of her father, Katara snatches from the air the ice-shape of one of those symbols he had carved, retrieving it from memory as suddenly as she does from the air. She places it in the Avatar's hand. Forgiveness, she hears, her father's deep voice filling the cave. She remembers that after her mother died he'd shaved away all the other symbols and just left this one because, he'd said, we need this one the most.
Katara sits down to wait, dozing off sometime in the early evening. She dreams of Azula, hollowed out on the inside, staring at her like she sees right through and she says We're sisters aren't we Katara you and me sisters and then Jet is lying dead in her arms and so is her little baby girl she can still hear Zuko crying only three months old when she died and she's lost on the ice of home without the moon or the stars shining above her and beneath her feet she can see all war spread out and she thinks this is the end, all of us burning, all of us alone in ice.
—What good did you think would come of this?
Her fingertips are tingling. When she opens her eyes she has to close them again, shocked by unmitigated color. Blinking, she looks up and sees at once Aang and thousands of other Avatars. A sharp pain so deep it hurts all through her.
—We need you, Aang. We need you.
She isn't sure she's spoken, but she knows her words still ring in the air. (This isn't air, she thinks, this is too pure and complete to be air.) Aang looks away. The familiar crease of his eyebrows. A movement of the hand that she doesn't recognize. A look in his eyes that is both his and isn't.
—I believe you can save the world, she tries again.
—This world is beyond saving.
The pain flares, nearly paralyzing her. She tries to lay a hand against the earth but she can't find it. The air moves, the colors realign, showing her the whole world, all of it in minute focus, all history compacted to show her in this moment. The broken figure of Aang standing in the middle of the fighting fighting fighting. Katara can hardly stand to look.
—Come with me, Katara. You aren't one of them.
In this titanic vision Katara sees her own history—a flash in the vision, and then no more. The faces of the people she loves, clear, sharp, a new pain she hasn't yet endured.
—I am. I am. I am. You won't save me?
—This world is beyond saving.
—It's not. I don't believe that. Come with me, Aang.
The whole line of Avatars staring at her; she realizes the pain tearing her apart is Aang's pain, shared between them—but. But,
—Aang, you have to forgive us.
—I can do nothing.
He sits down. She sees only Aang, now, his hands held out in front of him, empty. There is nothing to be done, and yet there is everything to be done. She reaches out to lay a hand against his cheek. As soon as she feels the warmth of his skin her connection to this world begins to fade. She doesn't look away as the colors become muted, staring into his eyes. Hoping, forgiving, loving.
The plunge into the corporeal is cold, agonizing, emptying, jolting, but she can breathe again. Through the crag in the mountain she sees the sun rising over the ocean. By force of will she overcomes hunger and fatigue, heading towards the sun to return home.
Sun leaps into her arms when she returns. The hospital is cold and dark because, YuLi tells her, the air tanks have been flying lower and the big house a few miles away was burned down. They've all crowded into one room and eat greedily from the meager rations YuLi hands out. Katara watches Sun gnaw on a piece of jerky and smoothes her hair away from her forehead.
Sun sleeps as close to Katara as she can manage, Katara's parka spread over them. Katara cannot sleep, now, Aang's broken voice echoing in her ears. She feels as strongly as she did all those years ago when she pulled him from the iceburg, that he must be helped, protected, and yet now she can do nothing for him. She hears his voice—this world is beyond saving—and her father's—we need this one the most now—and she brushes Sun's bangs from her eyes, watching this tiny, undernourished orphan sleep unaware.
She sees them in relief—the shapes of their faces carved from stone, statues rivaling those of the air temples. These are the faces of the dead, those she loves but cannot touch, removed from her into the realm of stone and spirit, bloodless, stainless.
Real to her are the faces of the six children who still shiver in the cold hospital, the faces of the three healers who stand in the doorways to watch the dark shapes of air tanks run along the ground. They can see explosions, now, the smoke rising above distant hills. Katara stands with Sun in her arms to watch the brooding ocean crash against the rocks, her back to any lingering smoke. Sun laughs as Katara spins rivulets of water around them. The clouds cover the sun in the day and the moon in the night. Katara holds Sun close to her, because she isn't sure what else to do.
In the middle of the night the front door slams open the children screaming a dark shape in the doorway Katara a hurricane of instinct as she slams the shape against the wall—fire exploding in her face, stab of pain in her side —the full moon prickling her scalp—reach inside blood rushing—the hood falls away
red slash over pale face—
Katara gasps. She lets go the man's blood and drops to her knees, holding his head while he vomits from the overwhelming force of her bloodbending. His parka is shabby and under her hands she can feel his ribs as she tries to support him. When he looks at her, her hands fall away. She can't look at him. She says something, she doesn't know what, to the others and leads him into the room that was hers when they still heated more than one room. Sits down on the cot and waits. Watches his shadow along the floor.
The first thing he does is seize her water pouch from beside her and take a long drink. The second is pull her up and kiss her, holding her so hard she thinks they'll fuse together.
—I thought you were dead, he says, and she still can't look at him.
—I'm sorry.
—I wanted to die, Katara. Damn it, I thought you were dead.
—I'm sorry.
—But you're not dead.
—No.
—Thank heavens.
He sits next to her on the cot. She rubs both of her hands against one of his to warm it. After a while he places the other hand in her lap and rests his head on her shoulder as she warms this hand. Like that, speaking more to her shoulder than to her, he tells her of the war. His months trying to find her. His uncle appearing to him at sunrise. Waking up and thinking she was there beside him, only to find she wasn't.
She cries when they make love. He asks her what's wrong but all she can say is I love you, like her whole body will burst. They stay huddled on the cot until the sun rises orange and gold through the window. She watches him breathe, his breath fogging in the unheated room. She knows he's awake but he isn't moving so she tells him about the hospital, her sanctuary. Watching the air tanks in the skies. The little girl, Sun. Her encounter with Aang.
—You could have left all this behind, Katara.
—I couldn't. I love you. I love Sun. I love this whole damned world and I can't turn my back on it.
He says nothing, watching the sunrise, face pensive, fingers tangled in her air. He looks at her, full of something she can't recognize. She kisses his cold hand as he pulls her closer.
Sun takes to riding on Zuko's foot, clinging to his leg as he walks. They run around the courtyard, Sun shrieking wildly, Zuko kicking up the flocks of birds who land there exhausted in their late journey south. Katara and YuLi sit in the doorway, laughing. YuLi has dark circles under her eyes. She spent the night before sitting up with three of the children who have caught the winter fever. Katara does not think they will survive but does not tell her friend, who attends to them so faithfully, so hopefully.
—Have we failed? YuLi asks. The hospital has become desolate. They are subsisting on the very last of their food stores. The children, orphans all, have watched their friends die off over the last few months.
Katara lays her hand over YuLi's, still watching Zuko as he swings tiny Sun up into the air. I don't think so, she says, watching the birds against the sky. We still have hope, she says. YuLi's grip tightens around her hand.
—There's more of them, Zuko says, looking at the sky through a hole in the hospital roof. Katara is washing clothes, periodically making Zuko heat the water, and hadn't noticed the new swarm of air tanks in the sky. She can feel the helplessness prickling on his skin.
—What does that mean?
He shrugs.
—It can't mean anything good.
They hold a funeral for the four children that end up dying from the winter fever. Zuko carves a flute from a piece of wood and plays a short song with it. Katara carves forgiveness into its side, remembering Zuko playing the tsungi horn at his uncle's funeral.
The other two healers leave. YuLi talks about going to find her sister in Omashu. The little boy does not speak at all and Katara can't help but think of Longshot and wonder if he, too, is dead. YuLi tells her that his parents died in one of the first Fire Nation attacks—maybe the one Katara had authorized, weeping bitterly, in the same room where she'd discovered her baby girl had died in her sleep.
Sun holds his hand and takes him to watch the sealhorses, but they've all gone south to warmer waters.
—KATARA!
She is shielded from the explosion only by Zuko over her, a dome of fire surrounding them. Sun cries in her arms as they try to stand—no water no water—Zuko drags her by the arm out into the night air, carries both of them away from the burning hospital. They sit on the hillside, gasping to breathe.
—What about?—Katara asks, searching wildly for YuLi and the little boy. Zuko shakes his head. He is holding her arm so tight she thinks it will bruise. Sun is crying in her arms.
They stand. The hospital is a pillar of smoke and flame, rising high into the night. Her parka is singed around the edges from running through the fire. Zuko takes Sun into his arms. They walk south.
In Omashu the sun rises quietly, light diffused in the early morning mist. Katara sleeps fitfully, waking up at the first sign of light, watching it quietly from the window of the apartment they've lived in just long enough now to start saying I'll see you at home or Please put Sun to bed when you get home. But there are no guarantees—YuLi should be here, instead of Katara seeking out her sister, telling her the news.
Katara doesn't want to fight war with her own war but she's done waiting; she can't do nothing. She thinks of Aang, sitting defeated, the scars on his head non-existent in the Spirit World, saying helplessly This world is beyond saving. His words echo in her mind as she and Zuko find allies, make plans, dream of a world for Sun that isn't torn apart. She doesn't know if this is possible, knowing her own hate-hardened heart. (I am one of them, Aang. I am.) Still: she hopes.
The sun is rising while her family sleeps. Katara listens to the birds calling to each other. From the air she forms in ice the shape her father carved. Lets it melt in her hands.
End.
Title, epigraph, and theme all from Marianne Moore's "In Distrust of Merits." I don't own Avatar: The Last Airbender.