Letters from the Falling Sky
Summary:"Katara felt helpless. Aang didn't know he had a daughter." Things more complex than the war had finally torn them apart. In isolation, they take out their brushes, regret the past, and write. Kataang, Tokka. Rated M.
Author's note:I wanted to add more about Katara and Aang's situation chapters ago, but decided against it. Now seemed like the perfect time! I hope you all enjoy, as usual, and feel free to give me your thoughts on this slightly newer style.
Yay—reference to Chapter One—w00t!
Much love,
-scorpiaux
.14.
"Hey," said an unnamed male child, "it's Kya Lynn! She just flew out of her house!" Temporarily forgetting the bison thingy that had graced their presence only hours ago, the boy ran up to Lynnie and helped her to her feet.
"Wow," said Lynnie, giggling.
"That was so sick!" the boy replied. "You gotta teach me, Kya Lynn!" He looked at the hole in Lynnie's home—a large, jagged formation roughly shaped in Lynnie's image. His eyes traced the trail that the girl had formed in the snow. "So sick!" he repeated in disbelief.
By this point in time, Katara had appeared in the newly formed opening. She ducked underneath and ran to the collecting group of village children as quickly as she could.
To say that there was pure shock on the healer's face would be an understatement unworthy of description. Lynnie had never seen such an expression in her mother's eyes before, and the sight made the child laugh even louder as more villagers gathered around them.
"Mama, did you see me?" Kya Lynn inquired, wiping her nose again. "I exploded!"
Katara's brows knitted together. She sat next to her daughter and looked at the trail of snow, grimacing, wondering how Lynnie wasn't crying out in pain. The side of the igloo nearly had the stability of brick. "You did," she stated quietly, lifting loose strands of Lynnie's brown hair away from her face. "What happened?"
"I exploded," the girl repeated, louder this time, as if emphasizing the fact.
Katara shook her head and smiled a little. "No, darling," she clarified. "What made you...'explode'?"
As if to answer this question, a clear dribble of mucus slid of the child's nose. And Katara—who was a prepared mother, if not a good one—quickly unleashed a handkerchief and cleaned the offended area off. But it was proof, Katara thought, that Lynnie had sneezed.
So the thought grew, and—quickly enough, or so it seemed—Katara pieced a recollection together with this sudden, recent occurrence.
After everything is said and done and over with, they lay on opposite ends of the bed, side by side, staring at the ceiling of a hotel room that is surprisingly well kept.
She pushes the heels of her hands into her eye sockets and blinks a few times, trying to let the stimulation process. In a short thirty minutes she has given herself to him. The sheets are rumpled in thick, wet creases beneath her thighs. She feels a rush of blood pounding into her head.
He turns to her, and in that very moment, she feels ashamed to look back at him. Something about this feels ominous and romantic. But there is also a shallow dread that is building inside of her...a smooth shell of being that she can already predict.
"Do you think..."
He turns to her voice.
"Aang...do you..."
"Do I think what?" he asks, stretching his arms over his head.
But she doesn't finish the sentence. Instead she looks through the slits formed between her fingers and turns to her side, facing him.
"If we were to have children—" she starts instead. But his facial expression drops immediately, and then she changes her choice of words.
"I mean," she begins again, "not...not right now but...in the future, if we were to—to start a family..." She closes her eyes. "What kind of benders would they be?"
And he knows what she wants him to say—what she wants to hear—that they'd all be girls and look just like her and have her amazing waterbending ability. But for some reason he feels oddly sure about the fact that their first child will be a male airbender, and he tells her this with a contented, boyish grin.
"We'll name him Gyatso," he says, because she has been expecting that sentiment, too. He laughs a little. "He'll have your eyes, Katara."
In that moment, her stomach tightens in obscure knots—she leaves a mass of bloodied and crumpled sheets for the bathroom, where she leans over the sink, looks at her young, naked figure in the mirror, covers her mouth, and releases a strained chain of muffled exclamations—things she only wished she could have asked him.
"Do you think I'm pregnant?"
"Do you think it would have happened this quickly?"
"...What if it's not a boy?"
"Katara," says a hoarse voice. In the dimness of the healing lodge, Katara can only make out phased outlines. But she knows—without looking, even—that this is her grandmother speaking to her.
She looks up to find a shadow holding a smaller shadow.
"Wake up, Katara," Kana urges. "The baby needs to eat."
In the first few minutes of refusal from exhaustion, Katara finally decides to have a look at what she's created. When the child first drinks, Katara smiles. But it is a quick smile that melts over to a disappointed frown—remembering, perhaps, that she didn't create this by herself.
"You are a mother now," Kana emphasizes, as if Katara didn't already now this. But there is a warning tone in the older woman's voice. "You have to learn what I teach you. You have to take care of this girl." Katara looks up with baggy eyes. "You have to be a good mother, Katara, no matter what."
"I understand, Gran Gran," says the healer. And Kana smiles and nods to herself even though she knows that understanding isn't nearly the same as agreeing.
It would be a lie to say that it didn't bother Katara when Lynnie's first word was "Graga," which Gran Gran took to mean "Gran Gran." Now the child is two years old—it is long after the first word—and still Katara looks at her grandmother with an envious flare in her eyes. She is sewing Lynnie an air bison doll.
"I don't know why you're doing that," Katara admits, drying out the inside of a tea kettle with a piece of cloth. "Lynnie's never seen a sky bison before. She won't know what it is."
"I've told her about them," the woman answers simply. She reaches for a button and continues sewing. "I know you think this will remind her of her father," Gran Gran states wisely, "but, it shouldn't bother you. Her father was a good man."
"Don't talk about him like he's dead," the healer warns, leaning over the kitchen sink now. "He isn't dead, for God's sake."
"I never said he was."
Katara looks disappointedly at her reflection in the kettle.
"I said he was a good man. Maybe he isn't now. Who am I to know?"
"I'm sick of you telling her things," Katara replies in a fierce whisper, picking up a wet ceramic plate. "She doesn't need to know about Aang. She doesn't need to hear about her father."
Gran Gran reaches for her leather bag of feathers and begins stuffing the sewed outline of skin, as if deaf to Katara's worries and arguments. She is old and tired and—regardless of what Katara thinks—she simply knows better.
"Why is that?"
"I don't want her to know, Grandmother," Katara continues, using a formal name instead of an endearing one. "She's a non-bender. She's plain. She doesn't need to know that her father was the Avatar."
"Don't talk about him like he's dead," says Gran Gran, raising a brow.
Katara dries the plate with a new found energy, ignoring this.
She scoffs shamelessly,"But I don't expect you to understand. Lynnie loves you!" Her tone is bitter. "You just make her love you more everyday. You make her things...tell her stories...give her the crazy hope that—ha! Maybe someday, she will be a bender. So of course, you don't mind what bothers me. You have my daughter lined up as one of your own.
"And to think," Katara finishes, shaking now, "that I was ashamed to return home with a child and without a husband. If I had known you'd take to Lynnie this nicely, I would've had premarital sex ages ago."
She doesn't expect the ceramic plate to drop, but—like most things in her life—it betrays her and falls a full three feet to the ground, shattering. Katara starts crying uncontrollably. But Kana is helpless to help her. Their problems are too deep to mend now. There is a hatred that has been bred between them. And Kana wishes dearly—wishes more than anything in the world—that Katara would love Kya Lynn the same way Kana loved her own daughter, and her daughter's daughter, and now, her daughter's daughter's daughter.
Kya Lynn walks in at this moment to the sounds of her mother wailing in the kitchen. When Katara hears her soft steps, she tries very hard to stop herself.
"Ma," says Lynnie remorsefully, handing her mother a wooden block. "So cry?"
"It's okay," replies Katara. Lynnie has recently acquired the ability to add "so" to everything she says—her complete vocabulary of some forty plus words. "Mama's okay, Lynnie darling. I've just caught a cold. I'm sick."
"So stiff," agrees the child, frowning when Katara completely ignores her offering of wooden block.
"Sick, darling. Not 'stiff.'"
Gran Gran watches from the sitting room, shaking her head, wiping away a few tears of her own. She is under the impression that she won't be able to protect Kya Lynn from Katara forever.
Aang and Sokka joined the crowd in utter disbelief, Sokka trying in vain to pull his hair back into its binding. Katara seemed to be thinking more to herself, but suddenly, their presence there pulled her out of her recollections. She scooped Lynnie up and away from the village children and looked at Aang with a brilliant light in her eyes.
"She's an airbender," Katara stated, and the word "airbender" never tasted so good on her lips. Aang could tell, because there was a new air about the healer—one of surprise and hopefulness. "You're an airbender, now, Lynnie darling," she said to the girl in her arms, rubbing Lynnie's nose against her own.
"Really?" returned Lynnie quietly, looking up to the expectant eyes of her father. "Is that true, Baba?"
"Yes," said Aang immediately, surprised that she was looking for his opinion.
Lynnie wiggled her nose and sighed outwardly, as if relieved of a burden.
Koko—the next top healer after Katara—stood behind the family with a slanted grimace and a muddled disposition. "An airbender," she said nasally, loud enough for Katara to hear her. "She'll learn to blow wind, then, just like her father." A few village women laughed at the statement; Katara turned anxiously to them.
"She'll learn to dodge and hide when the world needs her most!" another woman stated, smirking from the corner of her mouth. Encouraged by laughter, the same woman continued, "And she'll leave, if she ever realizes she may be with child!"
"What will happen when she burps?" asked another village gossip, giggling like mad.
Koko shook her head. "Fickle and windy—just like her father."
Perhaps in that instant, had Lynnie not been in her mother's arms, Katara would have turned around and severed their heads off of their necks. But she couldn't process what they were saying quickly enough. All of these insults...they were familiar. She had heard them before. Yet every time someone mentioned her bastard child, Katara felt as if the wounds were sliced afresh, leaving said wounds open to the salty spit of the serpents surrounding her.
"You've got a lot of nerve," Toph's voice returned before Katara could put her next move together. Heads turned in unison to find that Toph, also, was heading out of Lynnie's makeshift doorway. The young earthbender sauntered up to Koko and pointed to her chest. "Jealous that Katara gets all the Avatar's love? Because, by my age standards, you're pretty much considered an old hag by now—a hag who never married because she couldn't find someone dumb enough to take her shit."
"Ouch," exclaimed a bystander.
"Hmph," snapped Koko evenly, shrugging this off. "You forget that our beloved Katara never married either."
Had the village paid attention, they would have noticed that Koko's comments had brightened Katara's face. Her cheeks burned with an embarrassment that had existed between her and her village—between her and Gran Gran.
"Women your age should learn to hold their tongue in the presence of important people," Toph continued shamelessly, crossing her arms. "Whether its the Avatar or the daughter of Lao Bei Fong. Married or not, Katara is twice the wife you'd ever be. And twice the mother, too. And ten times the healer!"
"Toph," Katara interrupted, "this is really unnecess—"
"This woman," Toph insisted, pointing to Koko, "is nothing but a selfish, inconsiderate, disgusting—"
"Toph—"
"—lame excuse for a human being! Her comments are perfect examples of her jealousy towards Katara." The same village women who had laughed and commented before now looked about themselves, questioning Toph's motives. Koko's eyes flashed in Sokka's direction, expecting him to do something. But Sokka was pleased with the outcome of Toph's accusations so far, and so he simply watched from a reasonable distance, grinning to himself
"This shouldbe a moment of celebration," Toph finished loudly, nearly spitting out the words. "Katara's waited forever for this, and so has Lynnie." She turned to the congregation. "One of your own has finally been realized as a bender! And all you can do is stand around and make bad airbending jokes? So what if Katara and Aang aren't married? So what?!"
Koko, with a look of pure disgust and anger on her face, looked at Lynnie through the corner of her eyes. Lynnie nuzzled deeper into Katara's neck. Koko turned to leave, but stated, upon turning her back to the crowd, "Katara knows very well what she's done."
And Katara, gaze downcast, pulled Lynnie closer to her. They walked silently back to their igloo. The hole was repaired in a matter of seconds—quickly and fiercely, closing the family secrets away from the nosy, inappropriate villagers.
That night, the silence in Katara's abode was unbearable. Aang couldn't think of what to say. Toph, self-justified and feeling much better than she had been in years, felt the need to play with Kya Lynn and all of the new toys Aang had brought. Sokka sat in the kitchen and drank pot after pot of tea. Katara slept in her grandmother's room and looked out the window.
She remembered the night Gran Gran had passed away. She remembered her inability to cry. It was only then that Katara—lying flat on Gran Gran's bed—felt a scroll of some sort hidden away underneath the pillow. She pulled it out and unrolled it.
It was written there, in fine, shaky black strokes: I have become a terrible, lonely, disgusted person. I see the world through a thick dark film. My Gran Gran is gone forever, my daughter is falling apart, and it's all my fault.
Never had her words rang with such a haunting truth. Never had her emotions built up in such a way. Katara made the conscious effort to press the heels of her hands into her eye sockets and blink. It was out now. Her shame—her Gran Gran's shame—her daughter's shame—all of it...everything melted behind her eyelids. Lynnie was an airbender who looked exactly like Aang. Katara had slept with the Avatar before marrying him. The whole village knew. And now...now? Well, in Katara's eyes, nothing else mattered now. The disgust—in Lynnie's terms—had "exploded," and left only shattered ceramic remains in the aftermath.
The leather flap that acted as Gran Gran's door shuffled uneasily. Katara saw the tips of Aang's boots underneath.
She hid her head in the pillow.
"Can I come in?" he asked, his voice sounding out of place. "...Katara?"
"Yes, come in."
He hesitated, rocking his weight back on his heels. "Okay. Are you sure?"
"Yes. Come in, Aang." She sat up and waited for him. When he walked through the doorway, his frame made the room seem smaller than it already seemed to be. He looked at the scroll and then turned the other way when Katara rolled it up and put it back under the pillow. Aang placed his hands in his pockets.
"Come sit next to me," she offered unsurely, gesturing towards Gran Gran's mattress.
He obeyed, looking from wall to wall. "Are you okay?" he asked, staring at her with an acute blankness.
"Yes," she stated immediately. "Yes. I'm perfectly alright."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes," she repeated, bothered.
Aang threw his hand through his hair and sighed. "I know what you're feeling right now, Katara," he added. "I just...know."
"Of course you know," she said, faking a smile. "I just told you that I'm perfectly alright."
He made a face. She leaned forward then and—to both their surprise—kissed him gently against his mouth. But it was merely a weak effort to prove to him that she was feeling okay, and it failed miserably.
"I'm sorry," he said, moving his tongue around in his mouth, staring deeply at her. "I know that apologies fix nothing. But...the marsh..."
"The marsh fixes nothing, either" she returned with a noticeable air of bitterness. But then she pressed a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and—to avoid making the mistake again—she looked up at him and smiled sadly.
He could tell in an instant that this was Old Katara, who wrote her emotions on her sleeves and lived for the moment. He could tell because he felt she had nothing to hide form him now, and her sentiments on this matter were displayed very obviously to him today. Katara was glad that Lynnie was an airbender. Aang was glad too. And it was this coming together of mother and father that reminded them of their Old Love, symbolized so perfectly in Kya Lynn.
"Do you think," she started now, touching his hands, "that I'm pregnant, after the marsh?" His eyes widened, but she continued. "I mean, would it happen this quickly, for a second time? And what if it's not a boy, Aang?"
"Katara—"
"You knew," she murmured sleepily, shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders. "What can I tell you? You knew. The moment we were there in that hotel room, looking at the ceiling...you knew. You could tell."
She kissed him again, only more realistically than the first time, and touched her hand to the side of his face. "You had the gender wrong, but not the bending. So you have to tell me this time, too. Because I can feel it, Aang. The second time I carry around something from you." She bit her lower lip and looked at the floor. They were both sitting cross-legged, facing one another on Gran Gran's low mattress. "And again," she continued, wiping her face with her free hand, "and again, for the second time...we still aren't married."
It was then the Avatar exposed a small, ornate box from the inside of his tunic.