disclaimer: i do not own ATLA
'Healing' prompt
circles
Aang once said, "Healing isn't linear," and she wonders; if it isn't linear, what is it? A zig-zag? A frequency, a wave? Long troughs with low crests, rolling under her like long ocean swells that raise and lower the rickety little schooner that Sokka bought when he finally saved up the money? Or are they small, barely noticeable rushes of water? Like the little ones that lap at her ankles while she pulls a shawl tighter around herself, her toes curling into the sand to anchor herself in place before she drifts away.
Maybe healing is circular- but if it is, where is she in the orbit? And what is she revolving around?
What is the path of travel, anyway? Is it flat, swinging around and around like the pendulum that Aang tells her used to hang in the eastern corridor of the Southern Air Temple? Or does it climb and fall, the way the moon does?
And where is she in the damn orbit? At the top, full? No, not that. Waxing, or waning? Somehow, there is simultaneously less and more of her than before. There are scars on her stomach that didn't used to be there, and she wishes she could fall through the cracks in the skin that was once as smooth as silk. And, of course, he's still tall, and vital, and perfect, adoring her as if she hung the moon in the sky herself, and how can that be?
Shame coils around her, a poisonous ivy that curls up her wrists and ankles and chokes her. This is supposed to be the most special time in her life, and it is, damn it. She thought she knew what love was, thought she understand how her heart would fill and make space for new life, like a forest expanding at the border. Old things dying and falling away so that new life can rise.
It is nothing like that. It is everything like that. She's two people, now. By day, she's never been happier, never loved more, never felt her heart so full. At night, she's never felt so sure that she was drifting away, curling into nothingness, a wisp of smoke carried on a breeze. There, one moment, forgotten the next. She shoulders the trials of motherhood, and motherhood is a treasure, a joy... done in the background. A genuine smile is spread across her face every moment Bumi is awake, cooing and gurgling and giggling, and when he is asleep, she is alone and there is no one to hear her crying. Because Aang is gone- the burden of the Avatar did not stop when he became a father- and she is not who she once was.
Bumi sleeps in his crib, set in the corner room of the little house that the Acolytes built on Air Temple Island, and she stands above him, the pad of one finger lovingly tracing the plump curve of one impossibly soft cheek. When her finger drops below his chin, it falls away, and so does she. With the baby asleep and her husband away, who is she now?
Is she still Katara, the Waterbending Master? Or is that woman behind her? What did the war hero know of this kind of deep love, the kind that frightens her with its intensity? What did that child, that little girl who thought she knew everything, know of about being lost in a room as tiny as Bumi's nursery?
She finds herself on the little beach, just a few yards beyond Bumi's window. Did she leave her skin, stretched and worn and swollen, in that humid little room? Is a husk standing above her son, guarding his dreams, while she herself withers away, floating in the night breeze? The little waves caress her ankles. Her shawl is sliding off her shoulders, its tasseled end diving in and out of the water.
Her knees meet the wet sand, soaking through her night dress. If healing is a circle, is there ever an end?
His hands are gentle when he lifts her to her feet, concern plain across his face, his brows so furrowed that he's creasing the sky blue of his arrow. She sees his mouth moving; forming words, speaking to her. Who is she, again?
"When did you get home?" she asks blankly, as if he hadn't found her on her knees, somewhere at the bottom of the orbit.
He breathes a sigh of relief, and then his hands, calloused and warm, are curled around hers. They squeeze tight, and then tug her gently inside.
Aang leaves on a mission, and comes back. Leaves, and comes back. Eyes worried, kisses lingering, sweet nothings whispered- are they 'nothing'? Is she?
Bumi sits up, crawls, walks, speaks. Eyes inquisitive, and angry, and delirious with joy- all in the space of a moment. She lives and breathes by the smiles on his face, the words he says, the steps he takes. The way he toddles to his father, who scoops him into his arms with that wolfish grin and that laugh that stays with her until the sun sets.
She drags herself up one night when Bumi's weak cries turn to a cough, but Aang is there, a soft hand on her shoulder, ushering her back to bed. "I'll do it," he murmurs. "Sleep. Please." The 'please' is meant to sound like a throwaway, a polite addition, but there's an intensity beneath it that makes her wary. She returns to bed, but lays awake, 'please' ringing in her head again and again and again, and when Bumi is quiet and Aang glides back into the room, she stares at him, as though the reason he might plead that way is something she can pull straight out of his brain. Maybe she knows the answer already.
He stills when he catches her staring, moonlight spinning his fair skin silver. "Let's go for a walk," he suggests quietly.
She doesn't remember agreeing, but they're on the beach not long after, steps silent in the sand as he trails slowly behind her. Her footprints are washed away moments later.
"Do you remember the last time we were here together?" he asks. When she doesn't answer, he presses on. "You were on your knees. Your clothes were soaked... your hands were freezing." His eyes alight on her, gray made black. "I spoke to you, and you didn't hear me. I held your hand, and you didn't even react."
She turns away, ashamed.
"Where were you?" he pleads. "Where are you now?"
One hand reaches to him, then falls uselessly to one side. "I'm right here."
"It's like you're two people. Katara- my Katara, my wife and the love of my life and mother of my son-, and... someone else." He looks down at his hands. "Someone who... isn't quite here."
"Day and night," she whispers.
He chuckles, laced with pain. "I guess so."
The waves wash between them, swirling over the tops of their feet. The bottom of his linen pajama pants grow heavy with saturation. "Where did you go?" he asks again.
Lodged between Katara's ribs, demanding more space, is emptiness and pain and love and grief and shame like she'd never felt before. Her breath catches. "I'm a little lost," she admits, her voice breaking. And then its out there, pouring out of her, every nameless emotion she's ever felt, every sharp edge she's buried deep because she's a new mother and she isn't supposed to feel sad or weak or like a shell of the woman she used to be.
And he listens, gray eyes grave, and wraps an arm around her when she reaches for him, and presses a kiss to the crown of her head when her sobs sink into his skin, and mutters soft promises to catch the smoke she's become. "But, I can't do it alone," he says.
"What do you mean?" she asks, a pointless question, because she knows what he means.
He doesn't answer. Instead, he takes her hand in his, and squeezes. "Do you feel that?"
She nods.
"It's because you're here, still Katara, still the things you were before, and more." His fingers glide around her palms to the back her hand. "This is still the hand that saved my life. Fought Azula. Healed hundreds." The pads of his fingers trailed to her wrist, and up her arm, and moonlight followed. "These are the arms that held me on our wedding night, and every night after. Well, every night I've been there," he amends quietly, but his hand keeps moving, over her shoulders, sliding the thin straps of her soft linen dress down her arms. It flutters to the ground, weightless, as his hand continues its trail down her breasts, to hover lightly over her stomach, gentle on the thin scars that float silver like wheat in a moonlit field. "This is where you carried our baby. Our whole world, our legacy. A memory of you, and me." He pulls her close, and presses a kiss to the column of her neck. "You're not nothing; you're the sun and moon. We're in the dark without you."
Goosebumps prickle at her flesh as a breeze drags over her naked skin, and for the first time since Bumi's birth, she forces herself not to hide behind her own arms.
He drops to his knees in the water before her. "You're the most amazing woman I've ever met," he says. "Together, we can bring you home."
The journey is long, and uphill, and all the cliches and metaphors Katara can dredge up. And then, late one night months or years or centuries later, she's standing in the candlelit room of their tiny kitchen, and Bumi is asleep in his nursery, and she and Aang are doubled over with laughter over some silly thing- a crumb stuck to his cheek that he can't wipe off. And when they're done laughing, he asks if she wants to come with him on his journey to the Fire Nation next week. He is nervous, and his voice is quiet, and he tells her that he knows that she might be nervous to take Bumi somewhere so new but it's just for a few days. He knows how much she loved traveling with him before, and they can have it all again if they understand the balance. The push and pull of life, the way it keeps on going, and the way it sometimes starts back where it was before.
"Like circles." He's stammering, made wary by her silence.
She rushes over to him, presses a kiss to his lips, and agrees. Because she's Katara, the Waterbending Master, the war hero, the mother, the wife. All of it at once, and someone new.
a/n: yea i should be working on the accord and i actually swear i will finish that. i just wasn't in a place where i could do that for a while.
this is for kataang week. the 'healing techniques' prompt. don't think this is what meant but they gave me an inch and i took my mile so that i could remind everyone and anyone who cares that postpartum depression is REAL and even someone as strong and badass as Katara could suffer from it and break through stronger on the other side.
review if you'd be so kind. I need praise like a dog so I can muster the willpower to keep writing other things. Like the accord.