this fic is lowkey a katara character study disguised as a kataang fic. take that as you will

xXx

Katara hates the quiet.

A noisy environment is a lively environment. Children laughing as they make portraits out of snow around the central igloo in the Southern Water Tribe, her grandmother humming under her breath as she braids Katara's hair to delicately frame her face, Sokka singing off-key as their parents dance arm in arm to his makeshift tune. When babies are born, Katara thinks, they are born kicking and screaming and crying.

Noise means life.

Silence means death.

Because her mother didn't have a chance to scream before the Fire Nation struck her down.

No whisper escaped Jet's lips as he broke from the Dai Li's control, his eyes fluttering shut, never to open again.

The Avatar state flickered once, twice, and Aang fell.

All was silent but for the scream of horror that ripped from Katara's body, an electric hand plunging into her chest to tear her bleeding heart out.

Silence means death. Katara knows this, and she knows it well.

That's why she talks to him.

"Your wound is healing nicely." She musters up a smile as she carries over a bowl of cool water, placing it down next to his makeshift bedside. "Another few weeks and I might even be able to prevent major scarring."

Katara glances at her surroundings, unable to withhold a shudder. The room is so… red. No matter how long they are on this ship, she doubts she will ever become used to the omnipresent scarlet, a color so rich it might as well be hot blood trickling down the wooden walls.

"Of course, maybe you wouldn't mind a scar," Katara continues. She kneels down next to his prone figure, his body so still she can never stop herself from succumbing to anxiety and placing two fingers against his neck to catch a pulse.

So still Katara can never stop herself from fearing his pulse will no longer be there.

"Steady," she murmurs, relieved at the lack of change for the worse, disappointed at the lack of change for the better. She shakes her head to snap herself out of this contemplation before she can spiral, instead concentrating on the task at hand as she carefully pulls back his bandage.

"Sokka thinks your scar will look manly," Katara says, pulling the water from the bowl beside her. It threads through her fingers, the blue glow glittering in stark contrast to the orange lanterns that light the rest of the room. "I told him he was being ridiculous, but he said there was nothing cooler than someone surviving a lightning strike."

Katara stutters over the word survive, and maybe she's afraid she jinxed him and maybe she's terrified her lack of faith has the power to finish what Azula started. It's all too much, sometimes, but Katara is here because she's got to be and because she knows it'll hurt them both more if she isn't.

"Toph was here yesterday," Katara says, once she has regained her composure. "She pretends not to be, but… she's worried about you, too."

Katara places her hands directly above the jagged wound, exhaling slowly as she lets the water sink down into the swollen skin and feels her bending start to do its work. Healing has always been an agonizing process, at least in her experience. Waterbending can dull pain with its innate chill, yes, but little more, and she fears the day he will wake up screaming at the fiery sensation of his nerves and muscles stitching themselves back together across the rise and fall of his spine.

Even as she fears that day, Katara longs for it, too.

Anything to break the silence.

"The floors in here are wood," Katara continues, flexing her fingers to spread the water in a thinner but wider layer across where the lightning splintered his back, "so Toph can't see you. Like on earth, I mean."

On their first joint visit, Toph instructed Katara to be quiet as they both approached his bedside. She needed total silence, she explained, if she wanted even half a chance to hear his breathing. And Katara tried to sit in the discontent quiet, she really had, but when blood began pounding at the insides of her ears like waves beating against the shore she reached out with unnecessary force to grab Toph's hand and place it against his side.

Toph tried to recoil, but Katara reassured her the best she could through her fading panic, promising she could feel the slight motion of his ribs, his lungs, of air moving in and out his body if Toph just held her hand right here—

Toph stilled.

Then a smile twitched onto her lips, and Katara knew she'd felt it.

His life.

Katara clenches the water over a particularly tough knot in his back. "I told her you wouldn't mind her invading your personal space, just for a little bit." A small laugh escapes her lips despite herself. "I hope I wasn't wrong."

She doesn't think he'd mind. Really, she doesn't.

But maybe she's just saying that to make them all feel better.

"My dad has helped with your care, too, you know," Katara says, in need of a new topic for their one-sided conversation. "Some local painkillers, for starters, if he has to… If he has to do anything serious."

Katara's grandmother, her father's mother, Kanna taught Hakoda all she knew about tending to any range of injuries afflicting the Southern Water Tribe. Spear wounds, wolf-bear bites, broken legs, blood infections—

There's a war going on, Katara's father echoed his mother, and you never want to be caught in a worse position than you have to.

He'd learned even more about healing during his travels, he told Katara one morning, as they sat at the only bedside permanently occupied on their ship, as he showed her how to remove dead skin from around a recovering wound.

Most of his time had been spent fighting and tracking, he also admitted, but any second of free time Tui and La graced him with he would use to pick up bits and pieces of medical knowledge from around the Earth Kingdom. Even from the fringes of the Fire Nation they'd touched, too. Chew this to ease an upset stomach, mix those to soothe harsh burns, don't drink that or today will never become tomorrow.

Katara remembers soaking in all the knowledge eagerly. Sometimes having her father by her side would let her forget how still, how quiet, how statuesque the prone figure was before her.

But today, Katara has only her own voice for company. And she is sick of it, sick of hearing herself speak, but when a one-sided conversation is all that can be had what choice does she have but to pretend the unsteady flow of words from her tongue is enough?

"We were worried about the possibility of infection, a few days ago," Katara says, opening and closing her palms as the water around them thrums with a constant rhythm against the wound. When the glow of her bending catches the right angle, she swears she can see the veins tracing outward from his spine. "One part of your injury was still inflamed, even though the swelling for everything else had started to go down."

With these repetitive motions of her palms, Katara's session with him is almost complete. She is grateful.

And she is devastated.

"But my dad had the ship stop at a local market." Katara chuckles despite herself. "Well, not quite. He had us dock out of sight, then he and Bato went ashore to get some supplies."

Katara pulls the water back into the bowl, standing only to sit back down again after stepping a few paces to her left. She now rests at his feet, where a similar but smaller wound makes its presence known near his heel.

"He didn't let me watch, actually, when he treated the infection," Katara says. Embarrassment creeps into her tone. "I think he was worried I'd panic too much. Maybe end up distracting him. The worst part?" She sighs. "I think he was right."

Katara doesn't like feeling useless, but useless was all she felt as she applied glowing water again and again to the red, blistering, oozing, swollen part of his back and it hadn't done him a damn bit of good.

"But it's okay, now." Katara holds a palmful of glittering water to the bottom of his foot, and maybe the effort is inconsequential but Katara knows she won't be able to live with herself if she doesn't try, because he may not be able to live at all if she doesn't try, either.

"My dad fixed you right up. Everything's healing so well now that Sokka won't stop insisting you'll be awake before the end of the week."

Katara laughs, and the sound is wet with tears. "Sokka's wrong about a lot of things, but…" She shakes her head, wiping her face with the palm of her free hand. "I hope he's right about this."

Katara pulls the water back into the bowl, hands shaking as she sets it aside. She'll have to empty it, at some point, but she knows if she tries to carry the bowl now its emptiness will surely arrive far too soon.

Katara pushes herself to her feet, dusting off the front of her tunic as she pretends the voice in her head isn't begging for him to spring to his feet, to laugh and cheer and smile and bring life, bring light, bring sound back into this dead, dead room.

"Please, Aang," she whispers, and her voice cracks. Katara's hands drop to clutch the blue and red fabric hanging at her sides. "Please, you have to wake up."

But Katara receives no response.

Only silence.

xXx

My grief lies all within,

And these external manners of lament

Are merely shadows to the unseen grief

That swells with silence in the tortured soul.

—William Shakespeare, Richard II