Title: thaumaturgy of woman
Author: Serendipity
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Katara
Summary: Her people believed that the power of a female bender was tied to her body.
Author's Note: In response to a challenge meme by redbrunja, the trope assigned me was Virgin Power.
In the quiet times of the day, when the cooking flame was low and the chores were complete, Gran Gran told her stories of those who could bend the water before her, the ancient customs of their tribe and their people. She'd sit on furs before her, rapt, the softness of the blankets between her fingers as the tales would weave themselves through her mind, filling her with dreams of shifting tides under the moon, waterfalls pouring through her fingers, of silver ribbons of water rippling through the air like flowing, malleable icicles.
"Woman," she was told, "Was the first to gain the craft, and was greatly beloved over man. For while man used the gift only to destroy, woman was given the highest gift of healing, of the ability to set bones and mend wounds. For she was the most like the moon of the two, she waned and waxed, shifted and ripened like the moon. Woman was changeable, capricious, and so she understood the steady cycles of the moon, her aspects from the rich swell of the full moon, to the mysterious shadow of the new moon. Like the ocean, woman's body gave forth life, like the ocean, she raged and she nurtured. So close was woman to the moon, to the ocean, her body became tied to their cycles, to the life-giving push and pull."
Katara felt her body respond to the moon's pull, felt it answer to its call. When it was high in the sky, round and full and silver, her body shivered with power as cool and turbulent, deep as water itself. When it fled from the sky, she felt a soft whisper of magic in her veins, a seductive promise of what was to come. On the night when her first woman's blood spilled from her body, the power that once sparkled and fizzed through her slipped into a smooth, steady flow, syrupy and serene. Beneath it, she felt the potential for the rage of an ocean in a maelstrom, a fury of tidal waves and foam.
In the North, they told her that when a woman knew a man in an intimate way, her bending shifted once more.
"There is Tui and La inside us all," the healer woman told her, as they beat turtle-seal fat for salves and Katara selected herbs from where they were stocked, "Push and pull reigns strongly in a woman, and the ocean and moon live in us in a way man will never know. A virgin may feel the excitement of the sea in a summer storm, may give way to the whims of her mood and flirt with the squalls as they come. But once a woman knows a man, her body prepares itself for a child, and she becomes like the ocean on a calm day: tranquil, peaceful, gently rocking the infant inside her. A woman who does not reach maturity is unfulfilled, cast adrift on her own waves with no hope of an anchor."
When she first gave herself to a boy, she felt that power inside her build, shivering, like a rising wave before it crashed down upon her and drowned her in its intensity. Tidal waves and foam gave way to something stronger, deeper, greater than the surface of the ocean. Something inside her opened up for the fathomless depths of the sea, water that stretched and touched the very heart of the world, the moon at its fullest and heaviest, a great white circle in the polar sky.
"Child, girl, woman, mother," she remembered, "The cycles of female, with woman always ending in child once more, delivered from her body."
In time, when Katara became mother, she marveled at the heartbeat she could feel within her body, the life that echoed the patterns of her own push and pull. She sang to it softly at night, moonlight pouring down like a clear fountain, the songs of her people, of the moon, of the sea, of water changing and flowing.
She wished for a girl.