disclaimer: it's all bryke's, except what's not.
notes: the atla wiki says that kanna is katara's paternal grandmother. i hope that's right.
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It hurts to breathe.
Katara had forgotten that, in her long travels away from her homeland. The last time she was anywhere this cold was nearly a year ago, in the North Pole.
It's not even winter yet—only early fall—and already her lungs ache with bitter cold.
Perhaps her time away from home has changed her more than she'd thought.
Aang, ever unaffected by the cold, tumbles off of Appa's saddle and into the waiting crowd of people. Her people.
Katara follows more slowly and breathes deeply into the fur of her father's collar when he wraps her in a tight hug.
"Katara."
"Dad."
"You're home."
"I missed you, Dad."
"I missed you, too." Her father's arms are tight around her, and Katara lets herself relax into his embrace. This is not like their reunion before the Day of Black Sun or even quite like their reunion after his escape from the Boiling Rock; there is no long string of absent, unaccounted days stretching behind them, no war threatening now. This is their arms wrapped around each other with wounds begun to heal, and for a moment Katara can forget that he was gone; forget that she was gone. She breathes in the frigid air through her nose, mixed with the smell of cold fur and distant smoke and animal fat. As she squeezes her eyes shut against the tears, the weight in her heart lessens.
Her father's chin raises from the top of her head, the moment passes, and the familiar ache fills her chest again. Hakoda's hug is as steady as ever, but their tribe and their family are not the same constant that they were when she was a child.
When Katara opens her eyes and tilts her head to look at Hakoda, she sees that he is looking over her head at Aang, who is asking the children he met on his first sojourn with the Tribe whether or not they'd like to go penguin sledding once he and Katara settle in. And from Katara's view, the weight in Hakoda's eyes is a palpable thing, laden and laced with questions he won't ask now.
She doesn't know if she knows the answers, anyway.
Aang approaches with a light burst of airbending. He floats to the snowy ground in front of Hakoda and Katara.
Like a proper Avatar, a proper political representative, he clasps his hands and bows in deference to Hakoda, the chief. And Katara sees, for a fleeting instant, a glimpse of the old, old knowledge in his eyes.
It's like when he and Zuko spoke at Zuko's coronation. They stood in front of the assembled crowd and spoke with the revelations born of pain and war—and even after that, Aang can still turn around and act like the only thing that matters is penguin sledding.
Katara admires this innocence Aang carries with him, even after the carnage he's seen and the losses he carries, but she carries her own wounds differently. They swirl in her soul and carve hollows where Aang's seem to echo through his body and leave with a breath, lost to the breeze. She's seen him at his worst, and even then he only want to help others find peace.
She wants to help people, too, but she lacks Aang's boundless faith.
The sun slants above the horizon, clear light cast onto the snow, and Katara balls her fingers underneath her gloves. Her hands are cold.
Aang rises from his bow, and beside her, her father clasps his hands and bows in return. "Avatar Aang."
"Chief Hakoda."
"You honor us with your visit, Avatar."
With an ingenuous smile, her boyfriend is back to being himself. Just Aang, not the Avatar, if there is any tangible separation between the two.
In her heart, Katara knows that there isn't, but despite his performance at the end of the war, there are parts of being the Avatar that Aang hasn't grown into just yet, and there is still a sigh of relief that echoes in his posture and the corners of his eyes when he switches back to being just a boy.
"Yeah, well—" he blushes a little "—Katara wanted to see her family again, so we came here." The smile fades, but the sparkle of life in his eyes doesn't. He is eager; he wants to help. "And your people, they lost so much in the war. I wanted to see, before I go to the other nations, if there's anything you need. Or want. Or if there's anything that could make peace easier."
"We will talk, Avatar Aang," Hakoda says. He reaches out and clasps the boy's shoulder and a smile crinkles the edges of his eyes, all worry pushed aside for the time. "For now, let's get you kids settled for your stay."
The village is just like Katara remembers it—a small collection of fur-and-ice structures that lie scattered by the icy bay. It is fuller now with the men returned home than it was when she left.
She breathes in the air, feels it settle with a sting in her lungs, and takes Aang's proffered hand as they walk through the crowd with her father toward the structures.
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Hakoda takes Aang to his lodgings first. "You'll be staying with Bato," he says, and the lean warrior comes out at the sound of his name.
Bato's smile is easy and Katara remembers when his was the first Water Tribe face she had seen since she'd left home. Now, Bato's wife Nuniq steps out behind him and bows to Aang. "Avatar Aang," she says, "it is so nice to see you again."
Aang bows in return. "It's nice to see you again, too," he says with a smile.
No one could ever replace Katara's mother in her life, but Nuniq had come as close as she thought anyone could. Bato and Hakoda are close friends, and after Kya's murder, Nuniq had joined forces with Kanna to ensure that Katara and Sokka were looked after.
Hakoda had taken his canoe and paddled among the ice floes and done what many men who had lost their beloveds to the Fire Nation had done—he had hunted and killed and hunted and killed until the Tribe had more meat than usual to salt and smoke for that winter. The Tribe had been grateful, but no one had dared to thank him.
Often, he had walked alone into the howling winds. Sometimes, Bato had gone with him.
When Aang had awoken and come to the Tribe for the first time, it was Nuniq who always made sure the meal-pots in the main house had an offering without meat for the Avatar.
Katara steps her way around her father and goes to Nuniq for another of what will surely be a day full of hugs. Nuniq is round and solemn where Bato is spare and full of smiles, but both of them have bright eyes and they are a well suited match. It feels comforting to be in Nuniq's hug, although it is not quite the same comfort as her father's.
Nuniq smiles at Katara, a small smile that makes her usually solemn eyes crinkle around the corners. Katara is used to that expression, directed at her, although a pang shoots through her heart when she sees that Nuniq is also blinking back tears. "I worried about you, Katara," Nuniq says, and Katara dives back in for another hug as unexpected tears prickle at her eyes, too.
"I missed you, Nuniq."
There is another, new, small sadness in Hakoda's face when Katara pulls away. Her heart is sad again, because she knows he misses Kya still. She should be here, with them all—but if she were here, Katara might never have gone to war, and it might be a different sadness that fills them all, one of ongoing loss rather than past grief.
The war with the Fire Nation is over, but even the scabbed-over wounds sometimes seem fresh.
They walk inside Nuniq and Bato's house and Nuniq shows Aang where he will sleep. The boy doesn't have many possessions, and what few he does have are lodged on Appa at the moment. Katara makes a mental note to bring his extra clothes—his Avatar robes, which are a gift from the Fire Nation; the clothes he'd worn in the Fire Nation; and a spare outfit she'd made him buy in the Earth Kingdom because you really can't go around wearing your Avatar robes—or your underwear—every time I need to wash your clothes—back from Appa later today.
One part of traveling during the war that Katara is sure she doesn't miss is doing everybody's laundry.
After thanking Bato and Nuniq, Katara and Aang follow Hakoda back to Katara's family home. When Katara steps inside, she is struck by how much it hasn't changed. The world around them has changed—the village and Tribe, too, have changed, and lost (lost for years on end), and mourned—but the contents of their home are almost exactly the same as when she left.
With the addition of a step-grandfather. She had forgotten about Pakku, in the excitement of returning home, and she startles when she sees him standing beside Gran Gran in the light of the cook-fire.
She bites her tongue, swallows her surprise, and lets Gran Gran wrap her in a hug.
This hug, too, is familiar, but her grandmother watches her with keen eyes when she leaves the embrace. Kanna knows what it is like to travel in hard times and to emerge changed, but she says nothing to Katara about that. Instead, Katara watches as her grandmother composes her face and asks, "You remember Pakku, don't you, Katara?"
"Of course she does." Pakku's words come before Katara can answer, and she remembers the North Pole. She remembers their fight and their meetings afterwards.
Pakku had been kinder after he, too, had fled the North, when they had met again at the White Lotus camp. She wonders, now as then, if that was her grandmother's influence. Kanna is not an overly open or loving woman, but she does not tolerate nonsense.
She fled from her own tribe at nineteen, after all.
Still, Katara chokes on a near cough because Pakku still presumes to speak for her. She swallows and says, "I do," her own smile a distant echo of Aang's—he has fallen in beside her and is already greeting their master with a bow. "How could I forget our introduction at the North Pole?"
Pakku frowns, but Gran Gran only nods. "You two have catching up to do," she says. "I'll make sure you have time to talk later."
Katara suspects Gran Gran has been waiting for this, but she is too busy cataloging the contents of their home to think on it now. She doesn't know whether to be comforted or horrified that so little has changed. In some ways, she irrationally thinks it should be different. She is different, and so her home should be, too.
On the other hand, there is a comfort in sameness.
Her lungs expand and contract. She can breathe here, even if it hurts. Where before she stung with the cold, now the fire-smoke bites at her breath.
The cooking utensils that hang from a beam over the cook-fire are the same ones they've used for years. Katara fights the urge to walk over and run her fingers over a plain-bone spoon, the one used for stirring the turtle-seal stew that feeds them through most of the winter. She can see that it's only a bit more worn than when she left. She breathes in, and imagines the smell of the thick, oily stew. Smoke from the fire fills her nostrils, and she tries to cough surreptitiously.
Gran Gran's eyes have been on her since she walked in the door, and Gran Gran catches her. Gran Gran always does.
"Don't tell me your time away has made you forget that you shouldn't breathe in the smoke from a cook-fire, Katara." Gran Gran's words are disapproving, but the wrinkles around her eyes hold the hint of a smile.
She'd sent them off, Katara and Sokka, in the dawning of the last spring, and she won't say the words like Nuniq did, but—she worried. She will see, through her own method of examination, whether or not they have come back to her whole.
"I haven't forgotten, Gran Gran," Katara says. She thinks the words mean something more than that, but she's not sure what promises they hold or which of those promises she can keep. "I cooked the whole time we were gone. I kept Sokka fed, and Aang, and everybody else, too."
"She did," Hakoda supplies when Katara pulls away from her grandmother, and when Katara glances at him, she sees pride in his expression. "I wasn't with their group for long, but I saw that she did a good job." He cracks a lopsided grin, and for the first time, Katara realizes the possibility of Sokka, some two decades from now. "She learned from the best, Mom."
"I sure did, Gran Gran." Katara smiles, too.
They all remember the long days after Kya's death, when the only thing Katara could do was learn to keep the house, because Sokka wouldn't and her father was wandering the ice, but they only smile. They don't bring up the past now.
"Katara!" In the space of that moment, Sokka bursts from behind one of the flaps of fabric that hang across the house, dividing it into somewhat separate rooms. "Hey, sis!" He hugs her tightly, then turns to Aang and hugs him, too. "I've missed you guys!"
"We've missed you, too, Sokka," Katara says.
Sokka grins. "Of course you did."
He slings an arm around her and they head off with Aang to gather their belongings from Appa. They carry clothes and the many gifts from Iroh and others back to Hakoda's house and take Aang's few belongings to Bato's.
In her old room, the one she still shares with Sokka, Katara arranges her things. She notices that Sokka has rigged up a new dividing blanket between their beds, and she is strangely grateful for it. They've spent their whole life sleeping near each other, even on their travels, but the division gives her the semblance of a place to retreat in solitude.
They both need that, now that they aren't clinging to each other for support, now that they need time to recover.
Katara didn't leave much behind and she doesn't bring many things with her, but she folds her new clothes neatly and tucks her new trinkets away inside her whalebone box.
The items—a tea set from Iroh, an ancient piece of hair jewelry from Zuko, an honestly gained waterbending scroll from Piandao (one for her, just her, not the ones that Pakku gave to Aang), a bracelet she bought in an Earth Kingdom market—aren't as important as her friends and her experiences, but the memories are much harder to tuck away neatly in storage.
She finds places for her new clothes and trinkets, instead, then emerges with Sokka and Aang into the common room again.
Gran Gran sits near the fire, working a spindle with sure fingers as she spins from the summer's harvest of camel yak hair. The rest of their family, and some of the other villagers, sit nearby.
The Avatar has returned to their village and the war is ended; neither is a small event. People gather; people talk.
But Gran Gran catches Katara's eye and pats the empty space beside her. Katara walks over and sits down. She takes a spindle from the basket near her grandmother and gathers her own bit of hair to work as she sets it to spin.
For the rest of the evening, she listens and lets her fingers work in rote motion while others talk.
She is in her village, with her people, and it has been a long time since she has allowed herself to feel this tired.
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tbc.
