Aang sat in the centre of a gold dragon, its jaws falling open round the quiet tuck of his robes, his boots pressed firmly against it's teeth. It's clay-baked tongue stuck out like a root under the place his legs crossed, and Katara watched as he fell into himself, the tranquil expression on his face so at home with the glow of his arrow that her breath caught. He was so beautiful like this, and had been growing even more so these past few months, all as he gently passed over her in height; and she knew she was lucky, she really truly was.
Because with Aang she had fallen into a fairytale romance, something she had only read about in her passing moments of freedom growing up. Gran-gran had smuggled a few favourite novels, dog-earred and worn down with her when she left the Northern Tribe, and occasionally merchants would dock at the South, offering a book, some new spin of the same old cliché, of a man and woman meeting in odd, sometimes legendary circumstances and growing closer together. Sokka would roll his eyes at it but it was a genre Katara loved, no matter how cheesy it was, and she made no apology for it.
Aang lived up to her expectations. And she hoped she lived up to his. Even if everyone else seemed a bit discomforted by the way they snuggled into each other and took peace in each other's presence, Katara couldn't help but feel dizzy with it all, with Aang's warmth, his smile. More importantly, she deserved it.
Just like Zuko deserved his mother back.
'Aang will find him,' she repeated for the fifth time in several minutes. 'Aang will find Koh.'
Zuko's expression didn't change. Neither did Aang's. And Katara felt it, the restlessness, the urge to console, to help. There was no one else here to do so; Sokka and Suki were busy scouring the Palace, Sokka determined to put his oh-so-impressive detective skills to work in trying to seek out anything Suki might have missed.
'There's not,' Suki had stated firmly, but that didn't seem to prevent her from humoring him. And who knew, after all? There was no harm in retreading old ground. Sometimes things did resurface.
Katara turned. She asked Zuko quietly where his mother was. And then, trying not to feel his eyes digging into her back, she walked out of the hall and past the paintings where legions of Fire Lords glared down at her, feeling small and blue and stubborn all the while, beneath the weight of red, gold and orange on the walls. She was like a tiny fish slipping through the cracks of the stones that rested at the bottom of a raging river. And she couldn't help but feel proud and defiant as she did so.
I beat you, she thought smugly. You tried to beat my people into the ground, smother out our bending, but we're still here. And we came back years later, to help wrestle you down into your corner of the globe.
But that's not fair, she thought suddenly. Plenty of Firelords hadn't invaded the South Pole or the Earth Kingdom. It was only three generations of them she needed to condemn. She turned and looked Sozin right in the eyes as she passed. Ozai was the one she felt personal hate for, but it was Sozin who had wiped out Aang 's people, who had first commanded the raids on her home to begin. He, who had inadvertently driven Aang into her arms a hundred years later.
We won, she thought at him, then turned and walked away, to the granddaughter of the friend he had left to die.
The skin was smooth, unblemished under the glow of blue Katara passed over Ursa's...lack of a face. It was creepy, wrong; the lines of life, of chi, continuing to flow with strength beneath her palm. All the usual passages she directed her water over ebbed against her will like any living thing used to functioning on it's own, and she could feel how undamaged they were, allowing Ursa to live; if this was what you could living.
That didn't stop Kiyi from glaring at her suspiciously from the corner of the room, arms wrapped round the knees she had brought up to her chest. She was a small, sullen thing, wrapped in shadow, with only the light from the window allowing expression to fall over her face and cast a razor-sharp focus at Katara.
'I'm not hurting her,' Katara found herself assuring her. 'Don't worry, Aang is doing everything he can to get your parents back. He won't let you down.'
Still; it couldn't stop the shudder of unease racing through her as she fell the way the usual web of chi fell short of her expectations, all the parts that should curl and fall under the usual folds of facial muscles, practically shorne clean away. Ursa was here, but not fully. The same for Ikem.
There was a creak and the door swung open. Katara looked up with a wan smile as Zuko pushed his way in, a tired expression on his face.
'Hey,' she said softly, letting the glow fall from her fingers, because there was no point; there was nothing she could do for Ursa, not while part of her was lost. She wanted to do more, say more, but couldn't. She felt like asking, offering, would be to make a promise she couldn't keep.
Zuko stared at her, eyes dull. He opened his mouth, then caught sight of Kiyi. 'I...maybe this isn't the best place for you,' he managed and his sister stood up, defiant, tears budding at the corners of her eyes. The faint traces of sunrise from the window made them glimmer gold from within, like beads of jewelry.
'No!' she shouted, stamping her foot. 'This wasn't the best place for us! Why'd you have to come and spoil everything! I was just getting used to Mum having a different face and then she loses it! And now I've lose Daddy too! All because you made us come and live out here!'
Zuko's face crumpled with guilt, but Kiyi had had enough; she fled past him, nearly tripping over the long drapes of his robes with a stray, spilled-out sob. Then she was gone, racing out into the darkened hole of the corridor which seemed to swallow her whole within seconds.
Katara looked at Zuko sadly and then strode away from her patient's side, suppressing the small tinge of guilt as she did so. 'I'll go after her,' she said. There was no offer in her voice, but Zuko's hand seized her shoulder as though she had made one anyway. 'No,' he said. 'You can't help her with words.'
'No,' Katara agreed. 'But talking to someone who's in pain isn't about curing or fixing it; it's about softening it, and letting them rest a while, so that they can function. Keeping so much anger bottled up is exhausting.'
Zuko shook his head, a wan smile touching his face. 'Aang's lucky to have you,' he said, before letting his hand fall from her shoulder. He sighed, his eyes traveling past her and the expression on her face to land on his mother's empty one, left coldly blank like an unfinished statue. He seemed to gather himself, push a breath out through his nose, and then walked over to her silent form.
Katara stayed frozen, the swish of his robes sliding softly into her ears like the rustle of a scroll, or a book beneath her fingers.
I was lucky too, she thought as she tried to shake it off, walking quickly so she wouldn't be tempted to turn and watch Zuko's face as his eyes fell on the prone form behind her, now a doll to everyone else's movements. Ursa could still be made to sit and have a bath, even join them for dinner. But she wouldn't eat, couldn't eat, and her chest remained still, all the breath from her last meeting with Koh still locked up inside. She was just there. And unable to be the mother Zuko had only recently managed to re-find.
Katara couldn't imagine going through the same thing with Kya.
Yes, lucky, she thought again. Because didn't Zuko realise that she was simply doing the same for Kiyi as he had done for her, back when he had listened to her vent, tell the story of her mother's last moments, the moments she had left Kya to face alone? No judgement, and his words, when he had spoken, had been for Kya and Kya alone.
'Your mother was a brave woman,' he had said, instead of a meaningless 'I'm sorry.' And okay, yes, maybe they had been for Katara too. But they had mainly been about a benderless woman standing up to a bender, someone who he might once have thought of as a lowly peasant.
And Katara would never forget.
Perhaps bravery was alive and well in her veins; perhaps courage was truly something she had inherited from her mother. Because when she awoke later in the night, to see Ursa's face stretched above her, the dark hair and gold eyes smeared like a constellation against the sky-like stretch of the grand ceiling above, she didn't choke and scream. She merely gasped, the shock curling up from her throat on a puff of air as her eyes widened and the shadows came swooping down, the insect legs digging into her face as a massive weight buried her against the bed.
Katara was terrified. She had sometimes had nightmares about being pinned against the bed by someone taller and stronger like her; especially on her travels round the world before becoming a waterbending master. But what held her down was not a man, but a thing, a hungry spirit, who as far as she was concerned, deserved only fear and no respect. She felt dizzy, pulled away from herself as the pain started to abate, and she felt herself lift and float. Dreamily, she peered around through the swirling mist that sparked and flowed through her eyes like the chi she had moulded beneath her fingertips as she worked to heal bones and ease pain, and detect life, even behind a pane of skin that should host a face-
Katara came back to herself abruptly and oh, the pain was terrible again, even though less than a second had passed. Koh's talons, his legs, whatever they were, dug into her forehead, her chin, the very boundary of her cheeks, but she couldn't scream, because her face felt numb, and she couldn't even feel the shape of her jaw to move it. Her arms were crushed beneath Koh's bulk, her wrists pinned by something other than human fingers, and with a massive effort, she twitched them, forced them to move. She might not be able to feel her face, but that was nothing, nothing, compared to the pull of the moon she could feel outside.
Without breathing, because she was only left with the hollow of her throat and the remembered sensation of a mouth, she reached out for it, for the blood. But there was no response to her will, and then she felt like an idiot because, of course, while Koh was real and here, he was also not of flesh and what filled him was not reddened water, but something far darker and older, not rooted in physics and biology. But Katara still pushed and pulled, with tiny twitches of her fingers, movement that could only summon thin slithers of ice from the air around her. That didn't stop her from drawing her paltry weapons against the side of the thing holding her though, even if they broke apart and melted instantly.
And Katara could see it, with eyes that were both there and not there, through the mist that held her from her body, even while she was still inside it, all the chi that rolled through the air. The bed was a shadow, she was a shadow, and Koh was the eclipse, the block against the light in a way that shouldn't make sense.
Katara summoned her water drops again and made them bob uncertainly in a tiny circle, then pushed them round and round, faster and faster, tried to push her own chi inside it, out from the pathways in her body Yugodu's training had made her memorise. Push out, pull round in the circle, push out, pull round in a circle, until it was calm and steady, ready to fight and drain away the dark chi she could see or feel encompassing Koh from within. It was something she would not have thought to do, or even seen to do, without this new sort of vision in front of her, the mist and the shadows that held unreal colours. A flicker of purple sprouted out of the dark shadow that was Koh and drifted out to touch the chi she had placed inside her water; it was as though it was curious, trying to imitate the pulse of chi she kept steadily racing through the water. But an instance later, this development made Koh draw back and spit.
And just like that, the pain vanished.
And Katara? Katara, much to her everlasting shame, fainted.
