Hey fellow ATLA cult memb-I MEAN FANS. NO CULT HERE. KEEP MOVIN' ALONG.
Please keep in mind that this is canon A:TLA and LoK - however, the arc of this story will be non-canon in between. Enjoy!
Main pairing will be Zutara/Bluetara with some generous servings of side Taang and Tykka (I really don't like Suki, poor sorry Sokka).
Disclaimer: Don't own anything! Wish I did own Zuko though. Yum.
Pariah
I: Home Is Where The Heart Is
The war is over. The fighting, Katara discovers - much to her chagrin - well, the fighting isn't. The fighting is far from over.
Rebuilding is harder than they thought it would be, she also realizes as she stands in the center of the Southern Water Tribe in her blue fur parka and hair loopies, waterbending new buildings out of the frozen tundra. But she doesn't truly realize this until much, much later, when she has to fight for change every agonizingly slow step of the way.
Rebuilding - well, physically, it's not so difficult, really - she grins as she unleashes the full potential of her bending to carve out a city in hours that would have taken a team of other benders weeks. By nightfall, the returning warriors are reunited with their families and are already staking claims to the largest rooms in her new ice palace, and the newly elected Council made half of Northern Water Tribe ambassadors throws a feast. For the first time in fifty years, there is life and joy in the heart of the south pole.
There is also, of course, an abundance of seal jerky and sea prune soup. Katara stifles a laugh as she imagines her brother wolfing down as much food as he can fit into his mouth at once and complaining about the lack of meat he'd had on his travels. She pauses to wonder how Sokka and Suki are faring in their diplomatic tour around the Earth Kingdom colonies, the ones that were governed by the Fire Nation.
Her laughter dies when her mind conjures up an image of a laughing airbender with childhood sparkling in his eyes and a mouth too large for his not-quite-adult-yet face. He has a comically disgusted expression, nose upturned and mouth slanted down in exaggerated horror as Sokka tips an entire bowl of sea prune soup down his throat and holds his bowl out for seconds before he's even finished swallowing.
Katara shoves everything but reality away and tries to pretend that her fingers don't itch with the overwhelming need to tear the long-hanging string of orange and yellow beads from around her neck and replace it with the comforting coolness of her mother's necklace. The rest of her body yearns to wander through the four corners of the earth with him, wherever he is, without a care in the world, but she pretends that she doesn't want that, either, that she is happy here, in the Southern Water Tribe, alone, helping to rebuild what once was a grand people.
It's a lie, of course. But she learns to become quite skilled at lying to herself. Besides, not even Gram-Pakku had begrudged the Avatar a chance to recapture his lost childhood. She wonders when Aang will return to help them create the better world that they'd promised themselves that day in Iroh's tea shop. She tries not to remember the way Aang kissed her, but she relives it anyways.
(That day is the last time she remembers smiling for a long time to come.)
Not once did they ever believe that rebuilding would be easy. No, Katara knew that putting together the pieces of a shattered world would take time and strength. She just hadn't realized that time and strength precluded sweat and blood and tears and dark circles under her eyes that never seem to go away anymore.
Her days are filled first with heavy labor, then with heavy politics, and then a mixture of both. There are dozens of faces to remember, dozens of faces she should remember but doesn't, seventeen new pro-unity decrees she signs off, three new trade agreements established with the Earth Kingdom...and then, despite the fact that the war is over and Zuko is Fire Lord now and everyone is safe, the Council does everything they can, short of outright refusing, to worm their way out of an agreement with the Fire Nation.
So the first thing she ever exercises her authority over is securing a trade relation with the Fire Nation. Seal jerky in exchange for lightwine. Being a war heroine, master waterbender, and daughter of the Chief did include perks, she supposes. Like shutting up a room full of men and women twice her age to get what she wants, what the Southern Water Tribe needs but refuses to admit to. Not everyone derides her decision, of course. Many of the warriors who returned from the Fire Nation wholeheartedly support her initiative. Warm, spiced lightwine is better than any kind of liquor they could produce on their own, in the snowy plains of the South Pole.
Not that they support her other plans, in any case.
In fact, she seems to be waging her own war, her against her people, and she doesn't know if she's fighting them or herself, or if her hard-won victories are bleeding her people drier and drier. Except they don't seem to be withering, she's the one who's withering as they suck strength out of her and use it against her, and every inch she gains is paid for a hundredfold in shouting matches, hours of lost sleep, and days when she doesn't eat because she's too busy preparing for her next battle.
(She wonders how much longer she can continue before she crumbles away into dust and brittle ashes.)
And the elders - they fight her. Every single step of the way along the rebuilding process - it takes her four months to convince them that teaching male waterbenders to heal and female waterbenders to fight would not, as they put it, "shit upon centuries and centuries of Water Tribe tradition." But she succeeds, in the end. To an extent.
There's just the slightest hiccup in her plan; there aren't exactly any female waterbenders to teach at the school. They were all left behind in the Northern Water Tribe because it's improper for a woman to involve herself in duties like becoming an ambassador. The Southern Water Tribe still lacks its own waterbenders - a lingering aftereffect of the genocide during the war. (Katara suspects that this is the real reason the Council finally acquiesces to her elaborate waterbending academy plan.)
At night, she shivers under her warm furs that cannot stop the icy cold of the new ice palace (her new ice palace; she's the one who built the damn thing, after all) floors from seeping through and wonders when the South Pole had turned so cold. sometimes, the fierce-eyed waterbender remembers the fairytale dream she has about the world and her and Aang, and she thinks it's too much. Thinks it's not worth it, thinks that maybe it's time to quit and let the adults sort things out. Adults like Gram-Pakku (she thinks of Sokka, somewhere far, far away rebuilding the Earth Kingdom; who knew the annoying nickname would stick?), Uncle Iroh, and Master Piandao. Adults like her father and Chief Arnook.
And then she remembers what happened last time the adults were left in charge (a hundred-year war was certainly nothing to shake heads at). But for some reason, the first thing that comes to mind isn't the war. It's Zuko and his scar and his mother's gentle face, and she thinks, that's what happens when only adults are in charge and no one else has any say. The thought makes her inexplicably sad.
So Katara keeps her head high and nods and smiles and pretends that she doesn't feel uncomfortable in her own home (because it's not her home anymore, really, it's her people's) and that she's interested in the complicated politics that seem to have followed the Northern tribesmen like a swarming plague. She pretends that she fits perfectly into the role of Chieftan's daughter, something that likens to princess in the Northern Water Tribe, and she pretends that she doesn't notice the stares, the whispers, the attention - because even her tribesmen seem to have noticed that Katara of the Southern Water Tribe left home with the Avatar and her brother and won a war and has come home completely and utterly alone.
It's funny, she thinks, because her mother had once told her that home is where the heart is; but her heart seems to have been misplaced because she doesn't feel at home anywhere. Not since Aang ran a—left to take some time off from "being the Avatar." Not since her brother left to start uniting the Earth Kingdom settlements that were still occupied by the Fire Nation. Not since Toph moved to Omashu to help Bumi with rehabilitation efforts (and was promptly named his successor by the mad king himself).
Everyone had left until she and Zuko were the only ones still in the capital, and then she was gone, too, whisked back to the south pole while her father sailed off in the opposite direction—north, to become the southern ambassador for the Northern Water Tribe. Her heart was scattered in itty bitty pieces around the world; perhaps that was the reason she didn't feel right at the south pole anymore. Didn't feel at home.
Only, it's not home anymore. Not to her. Because home can't possibly be a place where she feels so ill at ease and clumsy, where she no longer has a family, where she is so unorthodox. As the only female fighting waterbender in existence, she is ostracized; as the chieftain's daughter, she is courted by Northern tribesmen she has no interest in, who have no interest in her; as Master Pakku's granddaughter (never mind the fact that it's a nonbiological relationship), she becomes an object of gossip; as one of the Avatar's gang, she is revered as a hero and placed upon a pedestal.
But Katara knows better.
She's not their hero. She's their pariah.
She's their savior, too - they just don't know it yet. They will, though, because she's the kind of change that you fight and fight and fight even though you know it's inevitable, and then she tows you under and she drowns you in tears and blood until all you know is her push and pull and the taste of salt and bitter metal. And sometimes, she is dragged under, too, and she flounders in blindness.
But then Katara looks around her at the village that's not a village anymore, it's a sparkling, glorious city of crystal ice that rivals the Northern Water Tribe, it's alive for the first time in a hundred years. Women's eyes are no longer dull and weary and jaded. Her Academy has enrolled its first female waterbender, a tiny little girl who resembles Ty Lee in all but appearance from a recently reunited Southern Water Tribe family. (The girl calls her sifu without needing any prompting.)
(She looks into the little girl's big blue eyes and sees herself, and Katara knows that she will never give up.)
Katara of the Southern Water Tribe is not hiding.
That's what she tells herself after nearly a year since the end of the war, a year of bitter loneliness and longing. She's frustrated with herself and her inability to lead her people as she should; she is only sixteen, still, barely of marrying age. She is still a child, the Councilmen and Councilwomen murmur sympathetically, patronizingly, she is not yet wise to the ways of the world, she is too young and ruled by her emotions. Katara knows better. She is not a child; no one who has lived through a war is a child anymore. She asks herself every day why she stays at the South Pole when snatches of gossip she catches by the docks reveal that yes, the Southern Water Tribe needs her, but it's much more likely that the rest of world needs her more.
Katara of the Southern Water Tribe will never turn her back on anyone who needs her.
So why do you stay? some part of herself whispers in the recesses of her consciousness, flickering like a firefly that refuses to crawl back underground to escape the frigid cold. Why do you stay when people need your help?
Katara of the Southern Water Tribe is not hiding, she tells the firefly obstinately (she almost believes it herself if she says it enough), and then she traps the firefly in a jar so that she does not have to see its glow during the day.
Katara writes every other week to Zuko. He's the only one she could write to, at any rate. Sokka and Suki are never in the same place for more than two weeks. Toph can't read. She is a little more than afraid to write to Ty Lee or Mai. And Aang...well, she doesn't know where he is, exactly, but he's probably spending time with Guru Pathik and maybe teaching Teo and the Mechanist and their community how to settle into the Air Temples.
Besides, writing to someone she knows must have have it just as hard as she does keeps her sane. Katara would bet her waterbending that Zuko had it much, much harder than she does.
She always starts her letters with Dear Sparky, because she knows how easily irritated he is by that nickname. Plus, she figures it can't hurt to remind him that being Fire Lord doesn't exempt him from being teased by old friends.
Sometimes she follows with an offhanded comment about how cold the South Pole is, even with her thick parka (she received a new one, rich and burgundy and velveteen, from her father with the first winter shipment from the Northern Water Tribe). Other times, she catches herself halfway through writing the sentence and stares at the black ink numbly, remembering that the South Pole used to be all the warmth she ever wanted, and she crosses it out angrily with thick black strokes.
She tells Zuko about how her waterbending Academy is doing and the progress that the little girl makes. She complains about her suitors and the way they stare at Aang's necklace as if it is a viper-mantis on her neck, ready to strike at any time. She describes the beauty of the emptiness of the tundra plains are at night, when the sun finally dips below the horizon after the month of daylight and the entire world is suspended in frozen silence with just the sprinkling of stars overhead in the indigo sky and the snow underfoot crackles with the beginnings of first frost. She tells him she likes moments like these best, moments where she can lose herself in the vast quiet of the wilds.
She admits (reluctantly, of course) that she is getting tired of seal jerky and lukewarm lightwine and sea urchin soup and longs for the variety of spice and flavor in Fire Nation food. She wants meat that isn't part fish - Sokka must be rubbing off on her.
She writes that, too, in her seventeenth letter to Zuko. Sokka would be proud, reads her loopy script, and she wonders if Zuko will laugh when he reads it, if Zuko will snort inelegantly in that way of his and crinkle his gold eyes and allow a small chuckle to escape his permanent scowl.
(She can't remember the last time she laughed.)
She writes to Toph once. She sends Toph a shard of a frozen meteor embedded in the tundra some four miles out from the city that she finds on one of her long midnight walks. Toph sends her a piece of charcoal and a poorly written reply. It's so illegible and nonsensical that she can only imagine that King Bumi wrote it, and the paper it's written on is so smudged with dirt that the whole thing is pretty much unreadable anyways. Katara appreciates the effort, though she writes no more letters to Toph. She wouldn't know what to tell the younger girl, anyways. Toph Bei Fong - Queen Toph Bei Fong - has dealt with politics her entire life. Katara can understand why the earthbender so adamantly shied away from this kind of life, now.
Though on second thought, the waterbender realizes that Zuko must have had to deal with politics his entire life, too. She writes to him, anyways - somewhere deep down inside, Katara knows that he will understand her better than Toph will.
Every other week, Katara sends a messenger sparrowkeet to the Fire Nation capital and thinks about Hawky, probably being spoiled fat by the Bei Fong family. She almost smiles a half-smile, but the action feels awkward and stiff, as if her body can't quite remember how to do it properly.
Every other week, standing on the parapet that surrounds the Southern Water Tribe, Katara watches her sparrowkeet wing off into the distance and wonders if he will ever write back.
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