The product of a severe case of insomnia and weird midnight thoughts. Rated M for graphic torture.
Katara sometimes wondered whether the world actually appreciated its wicked sense of humour. She often tried her best to endorse the universe in a taste of its own medicine, but whatever celestial letter box that received subliminal hate mail was particularly evasive in its reactions, because never once did Katara receive any sort of compensation for the grief that had been thrust upon her small shoulders.
Aang's body did not return home in one piece. The explosion from riotous earth nation bandits that had shattered his body had also shattered Katara's fragile heart (her sanity). Only by the charred, tattooed hand wrapped in a frayed cloth had she been able to mourn him in the traditional air nomad way: by way of burial.
The days after the Avatar's death were dark and shadows and tears and loathsome gifts and sympathy from strangers.
Katara's only ally was her anger: her dearest friend, the hand she instinctively grasped when she did not understand the world's crude sense of humour.
Anger was safe; anger was strong and fearless (reckless, more like). Anger was the mental clarity she so desperately sought.
Anger was her salvation, and it was her sin.
Though she wished only to dream of long nights spent with Aang, the need for revenge littered her nightmares. She imagined wrapping her blood- bending powers so completely around the thick bodies of those men who had robbed her of her husband. Their faces would contort with fear as they realised how utterly in control the monster with a woman's face wielded over every artery and muscle and bone and limb in their bodies.
She would make them suffer, as she had suffered, as her unborn child would suffer.
Her face would twist with a wicked delight at the thought.
Katara would unleash the monster that prowled beneath her skin, and she would enjoy it.
With her monstrous gift, Katara burst their eyeballs in their sockets as if they were grapes ripe for the picking. She peeled veins from bones and knotted them together, as simply as if she were tying bootlaces for Toph.
Bones and men cracked and snapped and shattered.
When all that was left were mutilated corpses in a bloody, messy heap, Katara lowered trembling arms.
She stepped back from the scene of her revenge.
A single tear slipped down an icy cheek as she turned her back on the atrocities she had committed in the name of sweet revenge.
The thoughts terrified her. She was going insane, and nobody could see it. Nobody understood.
Except perhaps one person: the man who would forever wear the scars of his mistakes on his face for the world to stare at and judge and condemn. The man who had spent his princehood trying to kill the people who had made him into a king. If one person understood the nature of irony, it was Zuko.
The fire lord did not blink an eye when Katara asked him to hold her hand at night, and talk to her until she fell asleep. Perhaps she would find the key to the mysteries of the universe in his husky, quiet voice.
That night, she did not dream of blood.
And the next morning, she felt the first kick in her stomach of Aang's unborn child.
This is my brain rant for the day. Enjoy or don't read.
- MashPotatoSquishBanana -_-