A/N: This is just something I had an idea for. I've never done a one-shot before, so when you comment (tacky hints are tacky [: ) let me know what you think.
Prison wasn't something she liked to think about. She didn't think anybody liked to think about it, but she hated even the mere mention. So many of her people - so many people she loved - had been kidnapped or...killed. If her plan failed - and it wouldn't - she knew that that was where she would end up. She would be swallowed up by the flame and rage that those people symbolize. She would die. If not in prison, then at the hands of a merciless bender.
And that's what happens to you when you get taken by the Fire Nation. That story can be told in three short words. Taken. Tortured. Killed. It was the scariest story she'd ever heard, because it could be recounted endlessly.
A mother crying in the street? BAM. Child taken.
An old man hobbling down the street with the use of a cane? BAM. Tortured war hero.
The significant absence of a matriarch in her life....bam. Murder.
She wasn't sure when she had stopped hating Zuko as much as the Fire Nation. The Fire Nation were monsters in human flesh, willing, happy, to cut out, snuff out and burn out anything that wasn't emblazoned with red and black. Green, blue, orange...none of these colors were worthy enough, fit enough, to exist with their supposed great Nation.
She spat in the grass bitterly. She'd never felt so weak...or so strong.
The boy she hated, the boy that signified the Fire Monsters for so long for her...had held the answer to her greatest need. Revenge. Hate drove her.
It wasn't just her mother this man was going to pay for - and oh, was he going to pay - but it was for everything that the Fire Nation had done to her. Her personally - and maybe for what it had done to those she loved. Which, once she thought about it, was almost worse than doing something directly to her. Almost.
When her mother died powerless in the face of a merciless man, when they had taken the men of her village away to fight, when they had taken away every single bender - years before she had been born - from the South Pole, depriving her of a teacher, for killing Aang's people, his friends, when they had destroyed their village at the South Pole, destroyed Kyoshi, destroyed the Hei Bai forest, when they overtook Ba Sing Se by sneaking and lying, when they destroyed the Western Air Temple, when they almost took Aang away from her...!!...when they put the scar on Zuko's face...when they did these unspeakable acts of evil, they asked for what was coming, and dammit if she wasn't going to serve their fate to them on a silver platter.
They were damned!! All the Fire Nation scum were DAMNED, dammit! And she would see to it that what comes around goes around, even if it took her one lowly man at a time.
She looked up from the ground, looking at the monster dead in the face. He was disgusting, clinging to the Earth like it pitied him enough to save him. She laughed mercilessly, and advanced slowly but surely. With every pronounced step she took, his quivering increased.
"Katara..." the voice of Zuko floated up from behind her.
"Shut up!" she exclaimed, not looking away from the quivering man at her feet - and that was surely where he belonged. At her feet. Begging for mercy.
He knew who she was, and why he was here. She raised her arms gracefully, bending the obedient water to her will. It was so easy - almost as if the water itself wanted to rip and tear at his flesh. She smirked, and struck. She saw the man convulse, and the first bit of death touch him - a tiny amount of blood seeped its way from under his clothes, welling up to the surface of his shoulder, and slowly dripping to the sodden Earth.
And she was shocked right out of her trance.
What she saw was a man, bowing piteously before her, murmuring over and over that he did not want to die, about how sorry he was, about how he never intended this harm - that killing her mother was a horrible act...that she didn't know how sorry he was. He looked up, vaguely nonplussed. The shards of ice, sharp as razors, strong as steel, were hovering - inches above his shaking frame. She was unsure. Did she want to kill him? Maybe that wasn't the right question.
Did she want him to die? She had to think about that for only half a second.
Yes. Of course she did.
But did she want to deal the hand that dealt with him?
She hesitated. The man's eyes shifted back and forth, to the floating shards of death to the blank look on her face. His face was no longer twisted up in sorrow, but cold. Calculating. She couldn't have any of that. She pushed the one shard that had already tasted blood further into his shoulder. Slowly. The monster cried out in pain - and the measuring look was gone. He was under her complete control, and he knew it.
But what to do? Surely, she couldn't just....do it? She'd forced herself not to kill on many occasions, no matter how much it seemed like she wanted to. There were battles that could have been won by blood, but she had always resisted that temptation - because she knew how she would feel the next morning.
Disgusting. Merciless. A torturer. A murderer. A monster.
She quickly rewound the last few seconds in her head. Surely...surely it had just been the hate driving her. She couldn't be...like that...on the inside...not really. She wasn't disgusting. She wasn't like them. She had mercy.
But for him?
No.
Never for him.
But the jarring thoughts she'd been thinking not twenty seconds ago made her lose her nerve. She'd let her anger flow too heavily - too heatedly. She was always angry, but she just let herself boil and boil and boil until the the lid fell off of her metaphorical pot. She'd seriously considered...killing this man. She'd done more that consider - she'd wanted to! She wanted to rip, to tear, to cut and snuff and burn him...it was...disgustingly Fire Nation. The fire in her, fed by hurt and anger, went out. She was shocked at herself for acting...for thinking that way. She dropped the shards, letting them happily return to their
natural liquid state, and it splooshed to the ground.
She saw the man, almost as if for the first time. The first time not completely driven by hate and blood-lust, anyway. He was frail. Broken. A man, a monster true enough, but not one by choice. He wasn't...inherently evil. He was just a puppet, a place-holder. And what was worse...he was empty. Null. Void.
"I see what you are. I used to wonder what kind of person would do that kind of thing...now I know. You're nothing, you're empty. You deserve to die, but I won't partake in the pleasure of giving you that"
And with that, she and Zuko turned sharply, letting the hollow man weep himself into something.