The woman's nimble bronze hands run over broken flesh, and slowly it knits back together. She smiles at the little boy and he kisses her cheek before running off to his mother.
This life is sweet.
She is happy.
But she is broken and there are yet debts to repay, while the anger still runs in her blood.
Sometimes the villagers ask why she wears a robe of crimson, she who has the look of the tribes.
She tells them it is a reminder of her past, and for what she must do, and they are silent.
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She has never had the master (teacher, teacher) she once yearned for, but she practices her art until finally the water obeys her every command and she feels it around her and running through her streams in a way she thought only blood could do, pushing and pulling and flowing and swirling in tides of life half-remembered.
She feels a rising of the tides when she brings forth a child into the world, and they ebb when she eases a death.
She feels the waters roar when they call her home.
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Goodbye, goodbye, they say, as she flows with the tides out to sea.
Her voice is weak as she answers goodbye.
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The days grow cold and she shivers, and takes to wearing a parka over her red kimono. Her fingers run through the familiar fur.
She is broken, but the time when she will mend is drawing nearer.
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The ice is cold under her feet and her skin is pale with rice powder.
She tells the guards that she has come to speak with the chief.
He's with his counsellors, they say, and the Avatar. You must return later.
It already is later, she says, and four years too late. She slides quickly past them and throws open the doors.
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The first person she sees she does not recognize. A tiny girl dressed in the colours of the Kingdom, all brown and green, jet hair swept up over her head. Her jade eyes are clouded, and the tides in her are blocked in one area. Blind.
The other two people in the room she recognizes all too quickly.
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She approaches the raised platform where the Water Chief and the Avatar sit with the blind girl. They stare at her as she kneels (like she did when her kimono was still white, so long ago now) and speaks the words she has carefully planned for all those long years.
Hail, Chief of the Water Tribe. Hail, Avatar.
Her old kimono flows on her body, pooling about her feet like blood on the ice.
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The Avatar's cloudy eyes sweep over her form, and for a moment she thinks that, if things had happened differently…
But the chief is angry.
Guards! I did not call for a courtesan. Take this woman out of my house!
Her thoughts freeze like water, petrifying the hot burst of anger and shattering. Once more the guards pound at the doors (heat and blood, darkness!) but with a ripple of movement she seals them shut with ice.
When she speaks, her voice is smooth and fluid and mocking.
You called for me, O honoured ones.
She rises to her feet, and she knows to them she has risen like a goddess clad in blood (Raise us, Lady of death and freedom, raise us up).
They stare at her, and the pounding of their hearts matches the pounding at the door, drowning (raise us up, O, Lady, O, Goddess! Release us—), and cold in the ice, as the ice in her veins.
The chief starts again, but his voice betrays him and he knows something is not right. At his side, the blind girl clenches her fists. Listen, Princess, we don't need interruptions right now. Get out.
Her gaze passes over the girl and meets those of the chief, flickers to the grey of the Avatar, cloudy with heat (familiar) and confusion (heat?), back to those that are blue like her own.
You called for me, she repeats, and her emotions flow free under the thick crust of ice. You commanded my presence. You bought me with your freedom, and my pain with your joy—
She is standing red-clad before them, and the waves are swelling, and there is no fighting and all she can do is ride with the wave, but she cannot tell if it is water or if it is blood—
(Save us, O goddess! Free us! Raise us up—)
(Save us and be free—)
(Blood and death and darkness. Where is the light? I cannot hear the sea—)
There are no tears in her eyes.
Everything I am is how you made me. You called for me, my friend. You called for me, my brother. You called.
For a moment, all is silent, and all is still. She is standing on the ice, and her kimono weighs heavy with years and with old (fresh) blood, the blood of her master, soaked into the weave, and the two men before her gaze in quiet and maybe…fear?
The Avatar's eyes are still on her, looking at her with wonder, now, rather than want, the eyes of the boy she'd maybe almost loved.
And then the chief—her brother—speaks, and his voice seems to her, as the Avatar's gaze seemed to her, like a boy's: who had protected her, and held her, and made her laugh, and rocked her to sleep.
Katara? He says, and then the Avatar says, Katara?
The friend who'd left her behind. The brother who'd never come back.
And so she meets their eyes and says, softly, No. My name is Niu-hsieh-sun.
The blind girl stiffens and reaches out when she hears the words (for they are in her language), but it is too late.
I am not Katara. I am Niu-hsieh-sun. I am the Lady Who Bends Blood!
The power carries her up, lifts her, swelling and rising above them in waves of force, in waves of blood and the tears of a little girl who was once called Katara. She rises with the force of pain, with the memories of white silk turned to crimson that night, with the ghosts of her parched throat and her tortured cries, and the force of the tides in her blood and in her streams and the tides of those she killed and those that killed her, with cold and darkness and all those things that until now she had been keeping, frozen, in her heart, and the cries of the slaves of the House.
(Raise! Us! Up!)
The packed snow of the floor thunders and cracks, and then expands in a great pillar, raising her up as the sea comes to her call, a tsunami of ice and frigid water. Her crimson robes flow out with the raw force and she pulls the old blood from them, a seemingly infinite supply, enough to stain the sea red as if with the blood of every person she has murdered.
They are many.
And suddenly they are with her, ghostly hands tearing at her kimono, crying her name (which name, she cannot tell), clawing at her face and drawing more blood for her to shape. Blood pours from every crack in the ice, great steaming torrents, and around her all the voices fight to be heard. Why did you kill us? Why did you kill? Katara. Katara!
She is high on her pillar of ice. The voices scream around her, and she screams with them, and in pain and fury she pulls the blood and water, the ocean itself, up, and prepares to smash it down at the brother, and at the love, who never came.
But then, so softly she shouldn't notice it in her current state (but she does, as though it is an electric shock), the Avatar is there, and he reaches out and places his hand in her own.
She turns on him, ready to unleash her fury, and on her other side the great, calloused hand of the Water Chief takes her fingers in its gentle grip, and it is as if the red-stained mist has cleared around them for a moment, soft glows in the night.
Her whisper is soft, like trickling rain. Why did you leave me?
But it is then that she sees, and she doesn't need their answers, because she knows: We didn't. We searched, we looked for years and years, Katara, we thought you were dead, and it was like we were dead as well.
We love you.
The ice gives a great, splintering, tortured crack, and then she lets them pull her from the darkness and from the red-stained mist.
We love you, Katara.
All the waters of the ocean flow down, but the blood is gone and it is pure water that touches them, those three companions, and even the Earth Kingdom girl has joined them:
"Oh, spirits, I just took a bath last week. Did you have to dump all that stupid water on me? I was already clean!"
They all laugh, and it rings happily through the ruins of the hall. Sokka is hugging his sister and wonderingly trying to examine her streams at the same time, all while the silver of her tears run through them, pure and unsullied in the swirling channels that make her almost glow. "Spirits," he mutters. "What on earth are those?"
But the mist has cleared away as if it was never there, and the world shines bright like crystal. Frigid, purifying water washes around those four and through them, and there are questions to be asked (what happened to you? Is the war over? How did you learn how to bend…like that?)
And the woman Katara stands in the crushed ruins of the Water Chief's hall, smiling for the first time in four years, two hands in hers; while her streams run clear and cool with water—and maybe with stars.
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A/N:
Alllrighty then! Before a load of people with tomatoes, rakes, vicious dogs and other rather unpleasant things attack me, I would like to do a little explaining for those who don't get something. Here goes.
Yes, Katara is OOC. She is OOC because (a) she's gone through a totally different history than in the series (this is AU, obviously), and (b) the history she's gone through has been less than happy. So don't get on my case that she's not acting like the Katara of the show, because this woman simply isn't the Katara of the show.
Yes, Katara is bending blood. I didn't make it a totally different class of bending; I just thought water benders would be able to manipulate diluted liquids as well as pure water, and blood is effectively a diluted liquid. Here, she's basically learned blood bending as a 'sub skill' instead of healing like she did in canon. And she's using it to kill people in rather gory, nasty ways. Uh-huh.
Yes, Katara 'sees' like Toph does in the show—although to a much lesser extent because she isn't blind. She can merely feel the rhythms of water, such as in a river or a human bloodstream.
Yes, Katara is insane for at least part of the fic. Sorry, but that's how I feel she would react to what she sees as betrayal, especially after being severely traumatized like she was here. If it's any comfort, she's already starting to get better at the end.
And finally, I know that everyone would like a better answer for what the heck those 'streams' are, so I will tell you that I effectively have no clue. Somehow, probably when she was losing any sense of identity during her captivity, she took wounds already in her skin and altered them to match the chakra pathways that we saw in "The Siege of the North." This actually does nothing to improve her effectiveness in bending. I just imagined her doing it because she had no other way to express her feelings and needed an outlet. They basically go all glowey like Aang's arrows, but Katara, once again, gets NO EXTRA POWER from them. Thank you.
As an aside, I know that certain aspects of the story, most especially Katara being a murderer, are not resolved. Well if they were, it would be a much longer story, and this thing took me months as it is, so there.
[edit: Wow! Now I feel weird.
According to chapter eight of book three, the Puppetmaster, I wasn't the only one who thought of blood bending. Just so y'all know, I wrote this story about a six months beforehand. I am not a copycat.
Ciao!