Written for clockworkchaos, who prompted me for a "Full Metal Bitch" style drabble where it was Katara and Sokka, not Toph, that had been aged up 10 years.

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Winter's Valkyrie

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They leave her behind, at first.

The survivors return from battle covered in blood and burns. Katara does important work with her healer's hands, saves men's lives from death or debilitating injuries. She practices the other uses her waterbending has but Dad and Sokka refuse her utterly on the idea of putting that training to practical use. It isn't that she's a woman, they say, it's that her healing ability is irreplaceable. Fathers will live to see their families because of her. How could she justify risking that?

But nothing in war goes according to plan. One night a platoon of firebenders attacks their beachside camp, setting fire to their ships, hoping to press the Southern Water Tribe against the waves and destroy them. They don't count on Katara having the ocean at her disposal. She saves the ships while the sands run red with icewater mixed with blood.

Katara isn't left behind after that.

But she's still never quite one of them, either. While the other warriors talk around the campfire about their absent families or memories of home, she stays silent. Katara misses the beautiful desolation of the South Pole, sure, but she comes to realize a part of her would be perfectly fine with never going back. It's not that she loves war. She hates it, loathes it in the way only a battlefield healer can. But Sokka and Dad are with her, and wherever her family is... that's home.

Katara has no one waiting for her back at the South Pole.

Even accepting the attrition due to the raids, finding a husband had been harder than Katara had ever expected. Not that she'd given it much thought. Katara had just assumed she'd find the right man, that she'd just look at him and know he was the One.

Being a chieftain's daughter probably wouldn't have hurt either, she once supposed, considering how many girls had courted Sokka. Yet no parents wanted Katara as their daughter-in-law. People, she eventually learned, steered their sons clear of her.

Dad might have been important but Katara had a single, overwhelming mark against her: she was a waterbender.

Any children she bore would have a fair chance of inheriting her gift, which made whatever family and village she married into a potential target for Fire Nation raids. Without any mastery of her waterbending she didn't offer any 'benefits' for the danger involved in a marriage match, as Gran-Gran had bluntly put it.

While she had gone unwed even at twenty-four, Sokka had fathered twin daughters with his wife Corazon when they were still both seventeen. While the spirits had give them easy births, they had also made the girls waterbenders. Katara sometimes wondered what Sokka and her sister-in-law thought about their children's future, but they had never broached the subject so she respected that silence.

Yet sometimes, in her quiet moments, a tiny voice nagged at Katara that the only reason Dad had allowed to come to war was not to put her healing hands to use, but so his granddaughters would potentially have an experienced waterbender to teach them.