This story is something my friend wrote that she asked me to post for her. This is her first fanfic, so please read and review!
-Queen of Pi
Author: Morgaine of the Faeries
Rating: T, for the implication of adult situations, violence, and intense themes.
Genre: Drama/Angst
Characters: Katara
Pairings: the barest hint of Kataang
Summary: AU. There is only so much one girl can endure, and Katara has more power than she knows. (She'd given up after the first night she wore the red kimono….)
She lies on her side. Cold stone numbs her flesh and her throat begs for water.
This time when they come for her she does not resist.
She cannot hear the sea.
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The place where they bring her is called the House, and she wishes she could have stayed in the cell. They dress her in a white kimono and tell her to kneel before her master. She does.
After that, the robe is red.
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Tonight, she knows what is coming. She fights. She is punished.
When it is over, she curls up in her cell and runs her hands over new bruises and old scars, and heals them with her tears.
She spends her days waiting for her brother and her best friend, whom she knows will come for her. She plans out her escape, memorizing the endless labyrinth of corridors and rooms.
She prays they don't find her in the nighttime.
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Someone blindfolds her.
For a moment everything is dark.
And then she sees a glow in the darkness and a river, coursing through the other, another coursing through herself, and her master reaches out.
She screams.
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She can see blood now; feel the rush of water through human and animal and even the air. She thinks how proud her brother will be when she can finally tell him. She is never thirsty anymore.
But it makes the nights worse, because even when she closes her eyes she cannot cut off her sight.
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Even in the House, deep underground, news trickles in, and she hears this news: The Tribes have a new chief. He is the son of Hakoda, from the South Pole. The Avatar has escaped from the dungeons of the Great Lord and is traveling to join the chief, where he will complete his training.
There is no mention of the chief's lost sister.
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After a while she stops imagining her escape, and even loses the will to heal herself. A fine lacework of scars cross her back and legs and even her belly, fine white threads that flow and wind and remind her of streams. Sometimes she runs her hands across them and imagines that they are streams, streams of cool clear water or maybe of stars.
Her life is an eternity of suffering, and she wonders what she might have done to deserve the nights that are clouded heat and agony. Sometimes she wonders if her streams can tell her, but no matter how they flow they are silent.
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She'd given up trying to fight after the first night she'd worn the red kimono, because it caused more pain. If she gave them what they came for without a struggle, they would not beat her as much afterwards. She knew there was logic there.
She didn't fight after she found out that her brother and the Avatar were free, because although there was no time in the House that she could feel (hadn't she always been here?), by that point she was too used to acceptance and acquiescence to really think about breaking. In fact, by the definition of the slave masters, she was perfectly broken already, perfectly tractable and meek.
Despite what she'd told herself (I am water I am the sea water cannot break)
It can.
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One day, she finds her necklace (her mother's necklace, her grandmother's necklace), hidden in the bottom of a chest, frayed, broken, and tarnished. Her fingers with their delicately painted nails run over the familiar bronze, and it is then that she remembers her life before the House, before slavery. It is then that she realizes that she will never know real life, real freedom, again. And with certainty in her heart she knows that they are not coming for her.
It is that night that she breaks.
Water does not have to be pure to follow her will. The one who came to her that night was the first to learn.
His blood drenches her body and she listens to the pounding of the soldiers at the door, her streams alive with heat and fiery pain of her own, coursing over her skin and through it. When they break the door in a shower of splinters and shards of stone she is ready.
She kills her masters. She kills every jailor, every slaver, every soldier; every person who had ever made her scream in pain or fear, and gives it back to them scream for scream. By luck, the bounty hunter is visiting the House the night she breaks.
Jun drowns in her own blood.
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When she is finished, the House is silent.
She moves through the halls and frees every slave, every girl and woman wearing red. There are even a few little boys, small and white and shivering like tiny, tear-stained spirits.
Somewhere far back in her mind a chord is struck. She kills slowly after that.
They follow her like ghosts, but as she leads them through the lake of crimson on their way to the door, there is fear in their gaze.
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She is a killer.
But she is free.
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Niu-hsieh-sun. They bow to her like a goddess, reverent and fearful, and call her Niu-hsieh-sun.
Lady Who Bends Blood.
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They plug up the trapdoor to the House with rocks. None of them ever want to see it again.
One by one, the slaves wander off to find the things they have lost. Finally, she is alone.