Chapter Notes: Writing their travel sequences is SO HARD for my brain - I live in the northern hemisphere, but, obviously, Katara and Sokka don't, and spatial relationships are so not my strong suit. I seriously gave myself a headache trying to map out the seasonal transitions Team Avatar should experience on the way north. :P (Relatedly: if you see a mistake, tell me!) Kyoshi's daughter's name is canonical; her husband's, I made up, and same goes for the name of Suki's village, Suki's mother, and the individual Warriors of Kyoshi in this chapter. Suki's backstory is also noncanonical. Canon makes it sound like Kyoshi Island was the only landmass Kyoshi broke away from the south coast; for the purposes of this story, however, she's the reason all of the southern islands exist, and the gap between them and the mainland is called the Strait of Kyoshi.
I also adjusted the reasoning behind Sokka's freakout a teeny bit - I don't think sexism is out of character for him, but given some of the changes I have made to the Southern Water Tribe (women serving as warriors, women going north with Hakoda's fleet, etc.) it no longer makes quite as much sense in this story.
Chapter Three: The Warriors of Kyoshi (Part 1)
The day they spotted the island was the third in a row that Katara had had to take off her parka before noon - a nuisance, but another sign that they were heading north.
Sokka, in the bow, was the first to see it, and let out a whoop of delight. "See, I told you there had to be some islands coming up," he said. "The map does not lie."
"Luckily for you," Katara said, "or there wouldn't have been any breakfast tomorrow, and you'd have starved before we could even get a fish to bite." Katara hadn't expected to find herself actively appreciating the fact that Aang couldn't eat, but Sokka had gone through their supplies like a rampaging tiger seal. It was just luck that Mother had saved the otherwise useless currency Gran-Gran had gotten the last time the village had traded with an Earth Kingdom ship. Katara only hoped Earth money hadn't changed much: theirs was at least forty years old.
Katara turned the canoe and bent the water a little harder, and the island began to grow steadily larger; by noon, they were sailing across a small bay and in toward the shoreline.
"Have you ever been here before?" Katara asked Aang, shifting the end of the canoe that she was carrying until she could hold up a quelling finger in Sokka's direction. They'd agreed on that as a signal two days ago, when Katara had gotten tired of getting two simultaneous answers to all her questions. "It was too small to get a name on the map."
"Nope," Aang said. "I used to ride elephant koi in the ocean near here, but that was about as close as I ever got."
They finished stowing the canoe away, and covered it up a little with extra brush, just to be safe.
There was a clear path up the slope from the shore, presumably to a village; the first ten minutes of walking were pleasant, if a little too warm for Katara's taste, but then Sokka started to get twitchy.
"... Are you really that bored already?" Katara said, raising her eyebrows.
Sokka rubbed at the back of his neck, glancing around at the trees nearby with an odd look on his face. "Not - bored," he said shortly.
Katara gave him a closer look; saw the uneasy clenching of his free hand, and the way his eyes kept darting, never settling, and began to feel faintly edgy herself. She liked trees - or what she'd seen of them so far, at least - but right now they seemed dangerously obscuring, and she would have given a lot for the broad flat openness of ice. "Fire Nation, do you think?" she murmured, and wished fervently that they hadn't optimistically left both of their clubs and all their fishing knives in the canoe.
"I doubt it," Sokka said, "I don't hear any clanking."
"I could go look," Aang offered, from Katara's other side. "There's no way they'll hear me," and he bounded off into the trees - right through them, even.
Katara had just lost sight of the last glimmer of blue when she heard Sokka yelp; before she could even turn around, there was a sudden sharp pain at the back of her head, and everything went dark.
.*.
When Katara came back to herself, the first thing she heard was Aang's voice - "Katara, Katara - come on, wake up," he was saying, low and worried.
Her head was pounding, so she didn't open her eyes right away, knowing that the light would only make it worse. She was in a sitting position, feet tucked under herself, and she could tell without looking that she was tied to something - wood, she thought, feeling the texture against her hands; that was why she had been upright even while she was unconscious.
After a moment, the pounding receded, and Katara blinked a few times to clear her eyes, only to find Aang staring her in the face. Through his head, she could see a group of people, all dressed in green, standing in a clump perhaps twenty or thirty feet away and apparently discussing something amongst themselves. The pole Katara was tied to was in the middle of a large cleared space, and the slope beyond the group of green-clothed people was covered with two rows of houses, leading up to a larger building - a village hall, Katara thought, like the central igloo back home.
"Oh, good," Aang said, and the tight, worried lines of his face relaxed into relief. "I thought maybe they'd hit you too hard. I'm so sorry - I couldn't do anything, I tried but I can't touch them-"
"It's okay," Katara risked whispering. She didn't want to catch the attention of the people who'd captured them just yet, but Aang didn't need any more guilt to pile on himself.
Almost as soon as she'd said it, though, her caution turned worthless, because she heard a loud groan behind her - Sokka, she thought, tied to the other side of the pole; he must have come awake.
One of the people in green turned around - a girl, Katara noticed, and then looked more carefully. They were all girls, everyone in the group, and their faces were painted with the same dramatic red and white paint that Kyoshi had been wearing in Katara's dream.
"Looks like our guests are ready to join us," the first girl said, with a tiny smile; and it could have been frightening, but she didn't say it meanly - just wryly, and a little warily.
"What?" Sokka said grumpily, and then groaned again. "Oh, my head."
Katara craned her head around as far as she could, and caught the barest glimpse of Sokka's ear. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah, yeah, you've given me worse practicing with our clubs," Sokka said, and then the girl stopped a few feet away and crouched down to look Katara in the eye, and there was no more time to talk.
"So," the girl said, and reached out to touch the white edge of Katara's blue shirt where it curved over her shoulder. "Water Tribe. It's been a long time since any of you have been here."
"Long enough that we're on opposite sides of the war now?" Katara asked. If the alliance against the Fire Nation had fallen apart in the years since Father had sailed away with the other warriors to aid the northern Earth Kingdoms, that was very, very bad news.
But the girl smiled, a little ruefully. "We're only one little island," she said, "we're not really in the war at all. But the Fire Nation doesn't seem inclined to let us stay out of it, recently; and it's been long enough that we can't be sure whether you're really Water Tribe, or Fire Nation prisoners who've turned spy, or actual Fire Nation citizens who've somehow found a way to turn their eyes blue."
"If I can have one hand free, I can settle your worries as far as that last goes," Katara tried, but before she was even done saying it, the girl was shaking her head.
"And then you could turn out to be Option Two, and freeze us to death, or drown us," she said. "No thanks."
"Well, you're not really giving us a lot of other choices," Sokka said from the other side of the pole, sounding exasperated.
The girl grinned, and then, incongruously, pulled out a fan from her sash, and flared it open - no, not incongruously, Katara realized, seeing the way the outer spokes of the fan glinted. It was iron, with bladed tips - a weapon. "I'm sorry," the girl said, "but I can't put my people in danger just because being tied to a pole is uncomfortable for you."
"Oh, for - look, she's the Avatar, okay?" Sokka said. "Now untie us already."
"Sokka!" Katara hissed, but it was too late - the girl's eyes had already gone wide with sudden interest.
"She's only doing this to us because she thinks we might be Fire Nation," Sokka said, in a tone that Katara knew meant he was rolling his eyes. "She's not going to turn around and sell us out to them."
"A bit of a leap," the girl said, "but true, in this case." She focused her gaze on Katara. "Are you?"
Katara thought about saying she still wasn't sure, but it wouldn't have been accurate; she still didn't feel like the Avatar, but she knew that she was anyway. "Yes," she said.
The girl narrowed her eyes. "Prove it," she said.
"Yeah, that's ... maybe not a great idea," Sokka said.
The girl fluttered her iron fan dismissively. "I don't need a natural disaster," she said. "Just a little proof. You can't be more than sixteen, but it's been a hundred years since anybody saw the Avatar, and he was an Airbender. What happened?"
Katara darted a glance at Aang, who was standing there with his face shuttered; there was no way for the girl to hear him, but it felt strange, and even cruel, to tell such a painful story herself when he was right there. "How about this," she said instead. "You look just like Avatar Kyoshi; she painted her face like that, and the fan - she fought with fans just like that one, too. She-" Katara broke off, startled. There was an end to that sentence, and sentences that came after it, all lined up in Katara's head; nothing she had ever learned before, or heard from anyone, but she knew they were true. "She made this island. I mean, everybody knows that, she made all the islands in the south; but this was where it started, wasn't it? She was here."
It was like being in the Air Temple again, that quick flash of vision back into the way things had been - suddenly Katara was looking at the village with someone else's eyes, and it wasn't just a village on an island she had happened across, it was hers, her house on the top left next to the old hall, her sister across the way and her brother to the right, her childhood friend two more houses down, her daughter playing in the dust-
"She - she lived here," Katara heard herself say, and suddenly she was back, looking the girl in the face again next to a village of strangers. "This was her home, and they would never have given in; Chin would have razed it to the ground, killed them all - definitely Matasuri, and even Koko-"
The girl had been giving her an odd look, and now her eyes went suddenly wide again. "What?"
My daughter, Katara almost said, and caught herself only just in time. "Her daughter - Kyoshi's. And her husband."
"That wasn't in any of the stories Gran-Gran told us," Sokka said, almost accusingly, from the other side of the pole. "How do you know that?"
Katara kept her eyes on the girl, and let her mouth quirk up a little. "I'm the Avatar," she said.
"So you are," the girl agreed, a tinge of awe in her face, and sliced the ropes with a swing of her fan.
.*.
The girl's name turned out to be Suki, and the village's, Manamota; and by the time Katara and Sokka had shaken the ropes away, introduced themselves, and dusted themselves off, several dozen people had come out of their houses, and murmurs - that included the word "Avatar" - were rippling through the crowd.
"This is my second-in-command, Mikari," Suki said, indicating a girl to her left with a green headdress bound into her black hair; "and this," she continued, turning and raising her voice for the crowd, "is the Avatar herself."
The murmurs turned into outright exclamations, and Katara felt herself flush. Yes, she was the Avatar; but so far, she hadn't done anything but break an ice floe and sink a ship, which didn't seem like a deserving foundation for awe.
"Ayuko, quick, go and get Oyaji-" Suki told another girl, but before she'd even finished saying it, Ayuko had turned to glance over her shoulder.
"I think he's already noticed," she said wryly.
And, sure enough, the crowd was parting for an older man with a fine fur cloak draped over his shoulders. "Chief Oyaji," Suki said, and bowed her head for a moment.
"When you left this morning because a boat had been sighted coming in, I didn't expect you to come back with the Avatar," Oyaji said, and laughed, deep and booming. "And - who are you?"
"Oh, nobody," Sokka said, "just her brother."
Oyaji smiled. "Well, any companion of the Avatar is welcome here. Come," and he began to usher them through the crowd and up the hill, toward the village hall. "Kyoshi's house has been kept, untouched, since the day of her death; you may stay there," he said, and Katara turned her head to glance unthinkingly at the house she knew had been Kyoshi's.
When she looked back, Oyaji was smiling at her. "I see you remember it, Avatar," he said.
"That's seriously kind of spooky," Sokka told her, when they had gone inside and she led him back to the sleeping room without even thinking about it.
She glared at him.
"But helpful," he added quickly, lifting his hands defensively.
Suki and Mikari walked down to the bay shore with them to retrieve the canoe - no point to keeping their things in the bushes when they were staying for a few days, and had a house to themselves to do it in.
"So are you all girls?" Katara asked, on the way down. "I mean, all of you - you know, your group, with the paint and the fans-"
"The Warriors of Kyoshi," Suki supplied. "There are orders of us on all of the islands Kyoshi split from the mainland, but this one is the oldest. This is called Kyoshi Island, because she lived here; and our village has the only order on the island. And yes, all Warriors of Kyoshi are women."
"But you're all sort of ... young, aren't you?" Katara said - awkwardly, but she was curious and there didn't seem to be a better way to ask. "I mean, not that I mind, obviously."
"There was a Fire Nation raid when I was little," Suki said a little flatly, and Katara immediately wished she had kept her mouth shut; no explanation that started that way ever ended well. And, indeed, Suki's next words made Katara flinch: "My father was killed, and my mother almost was; and now I'm the oldest Warrior of Kyoshi on the island."
Katara glanced at her; Suki was older than she was, but not by much, and Mikari might even have been a little younger. "I'm sorry," she said, and tried not to grimace at the inadequacy of it. She felt almost as stupid saying it to Suki as she had saying it to Aang, and glanced over at him to find him looking back with a sympathetic little smile, obviously remembering the same moment.
Suki didn't seem bothered by it, though; she said, "Thank you," and dipped her head a little in acknowledgement. "It was a long time ago - it's a bad memory, but that's all it is, now," she added, as though Katara were the one who deserved comforting.
It took them only a minute to find the canoe and clear the camouflaging branches off of it; they were checking it over to make sure that everything was still in place when Sokka suddenly frowned. "Wait a minute - so we got jumped by a bunch of girls?" he said.
"Thoughtfully put, Sokka," Katara muttered, mostly to herself, and leaned over to make sure her parka had been tucked away securely before she lifted her end of the canoe.
"Yup," Suki said cheerfully, and took the other end before Sokka could, beaming at him as she lifted her half of the canoe one-handed. "I hit you on the head myself."
.*.
Sokka was still grumbling under his breath about girls and fans and unfair advantages the next morning, even after a delicious feast in the common hall, a truly impressive selection of sweet-cakes for dessert, and a good night's sleep.
"I've beaten you up before, you know," Katara told him over their breakfast - a few leftover sweet-cakes. Aang couldn't eat, but he'd come with them anyway, and was sitting in the middle of the table, idly dipping his fingers through the wooden surface.
"Well, yeah, but I've always gotten the chance to beat you up back," he said. "Besides, you're not a girl, you're my sister. You don't count."
Aang laughed; Katara sighed, and licked a few lingering crumbs off her fingers. "So go find her and ask if you can beat her up to make yourself feel better, then," she said.
The training hall of the Warriors of Kyoshi was off behind the village hall, a clean little building with walls of sliding paneling - they were open, today, to let in the pleasant spring air.
Suki and another girl - not Mikari or Ayuko, but Katara did recognize her from the day before - were sparring, fans flaring and clacking against each other; but they slowed to a stop when Katara and Sokka approached.
"This is going to be good," Aang said.
Katara couldn't reply in front of everybody without looking crazy; but she figured she could get away with shooting a small smile at empty air, and did.
"Sorry about yesterday," the girl who wasn't Suki blurted out, shifting her weight anxiously. "We didn't know you were the Avatar."
"Oh, it's fine, don't worry," Katara said, trying to be reassuring. "You wouldn't happen to have a bowl in here, would you?"
"What for?" Sokka said.
"Holding bending water in," she told him. "Might as well get some practice in while you're busy embarrassing yourself."
"Oh, ha ha, that's just hilarious-"
"Embarrassing yourself?" Suki said brightly. "Can I watch?"
"Oh, better than that," Katara said, very dry. Mikari came up with a bowl for her; she took it with a nod of thanks, and settled down in the corner of the room. She'd meant it, about the practice, but she suspected she might end up just sitting there and watching.
"I'm sorry about yesterday, too, if that's why you're here," Suki started off, clearly trying to be diplomatic. "I didn't mean to hurt you-"
"Hurt me?" Sokka said. "You didn't hurt me-"
"Oh, of course not," Suki said, sardonic, "my mistake; I must have been fooled by how you fell unconscious," and she gave Sokka a look of mock apology, diplomacy pushed away by Sokka's annoyance.
"You ambushed us, you had the element of surprise," Sokka snapped.
"All right," Suki said agreeably, and snapped the fan she was holding shut. "You aren't surprised now, right?"
"No!"
She smiled. "So hit me," she said.
"Oh, boy," Aang murmured, from his seat next to Katara.
"Yeah," Katara whispered, and abandoned any pretense of bending, propping her elbows on her knees and her face on her hands, and settling in to watch.
The first punch, Katara could tell Sokka hadn't put much effort into, and Suki could probably tell, too. She put only a little more effort into blocking it, snapping her closed fan against Sokka's shoulder so that the blow went wide.
Sokka staggered back a little, thrown off by the unexpected miss and the impact of the fan, and then pulled his arm back, rolling the struck shoulder a few times. "Lucky," he said, half accusing and half as though to reassure himself.
Suki smiled.
Sokka took a second to arrange himself into the beginnings of an actual stance, and then threw a kick, a little more carefully - but Suki had begun to duck almost the moment his foot had left the floor, and bent low to plant her shoulder against his other leg, shoving him back and using her arm to knock his leg out from under him in a single motion.
Sokka landed hard, and Katara couldn't help but wince a little, even as Aang cheered next to her; but, to his credit, he came up right away with another punch. The first one landed on Suki's shoulder - but the second, Suki let fly past her, and Sokka's momentum carried him right onto the knee she lifted into his stomach.
.*.
Katara shoved yet another spiky branch out of her way, and wished for the tenth time that she were intangible, too.
"Here, he's right this way!" Aang called from ahead of her, and sped through another bramble bush without so much as slowing down.
"Yeah, thanks," Katara muttered.
Fortunately, the alternate route she found was relatively quick, and a moment later she saw Sokka sitting with his arms around his knees, with Aang hovering, anxious and glowy, a few inches in front of his face.
"What is wrong with you?" Katara demanded. Sokka had gone haring off into the trees behind the training hall as soon as Suki had finished with him, ignoring the hand up that Suki had offered after the last time she'd knocked him down. Katara had followed him readily, but she'd gotten hit in the face with branches, stabbed in the foot with rocks, and scratched everywhere in between with thorns; now that she'd finally caught up to him, she wasn't in an especially understanding mood. Forests were pretty from the outside, but Katara was finding that she didn't much care for walking through them without a path.
Sokka didn't say anything, though - only hunched his shoulders a little higher.
Katara looked at him, and then sighed, and picked her way forward until she could sink down next to him. "Aang's here, by the way," she said.
Sokka shrugged one shoulder.
"You remember everybody who went off with Father - Aunt Pasira, and Tanna, and everyone else. You didn't get weird about that."
"That was different," Sokka insisted. "They were-"
"Warriors?" Katara filled in. "So is Suki." She paused for a moment, but Sokka had gone quiet again.
"Are you sure that's really what he's upset about?" Aang said uncertainly. Katara glanced at him, and he shrugged. "I mean, maybe it's the girl thing, a little; but when you beat him up, it was just practice. This could have been real, if they'd been Fire Nation, and he couldn't do anything about it."
Katara remembered the way Sokka had gone charging out at the soldiers the day she'd broken the iceberg, the way he always turned serious when it came to their village's defense, and realized Aang might well have a point. "She beat me up, too," she said to Sokka after a moment, tingeing her voice with chagrin. "And I'm the Avatar."
Sokka snorted a little; it came out sounding sort of dismissive, but when Katara looked at him, he was smiling. It was squished down into one corner of his mouth, like he didn't really want it to be there, but it was definitely a smile. "Yeah, I suppose she did," he agreed grudgingly.
"Actually, it must have been one of the others," Katara said, "since she hit you."
"Yeah, lucky me; the whack that soldier gave me just barely scabbed over, and now I have a whole new lump," Sokka said, throwing up his hands. But he laughed after, so Katara knew he was all right.
Suki liked to get up early, especially in the spring and summer; it was cool and relatively quiet, even once the birds woke up, but still usually light enough to practice without having to worry about stabbing herself in the arm by mistake.
So she was dressed and painted, and had been in the training hall for a couple of hours already when somebody slid one of the wall panels open.
She turned and raised her fans reflexively before she realized it was the Avatar's brother, and quickly lowered them again; she didn't want to fight with him, not if it was just going to make him angry when she won.
But he didn't charge at her, or start throwing punches; or crack a joke, which Suki had figured was the other most likely option. He looked oddly serious - serious, but not upset, and when she raised her eyebrows inquisitively, he went down on his knees on the floor, palms to his thighs, and bowed his head a little. "I apologize for my behavior yesterday," he said quietly, "and I would be honored if you would teach me."
Suki stared at him, startled. The best possibility she'd been imagining was that he would pretend nothing had happened and leave her alone; this was way beyond her expectations. "We don't usually teach boys," she said after a long moment, testing.
"Please consider making an exception," he said, head still bowed, and then broke the formal pose to peek up at her. "Besides, after yesterday, I'm already sort of your student, right?"
She supposed he had a point. "We are the Warriors of Kyoshi - if you want to train with us, you'll have to follow the traditions passed down to us from Kyoshi."
"Of course," Sokka agreed immediately.
Suki grinned.