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The first thing Katara ever hears is her mother’s voice. She knows this. Not because she remembers, but because she knows. Her mother’s voice is the ever-churning rush of the ocean and she knows it in her bones, in the beat of her heart that her mother’s voice was the first sound that ever fell like rain on her ears. That her first sight was her mother’s bright blue eyes.
Katara can’t explain, not really. She can insist that her connection to her mother was special. But she cannot give words to the knowledge she carries that when she was born, Kya didn’t just give her life, she split her spirit in two and gave Katara the other half. For eight years those two halves resided not in one person, but two, joined hand-in-hand.
For as guilty as it makes her feel to claim unique understanding and unique love of their mother, Katara knows there’s a bond like that between her brother and her father. They share love in a way Katara doesn’t know how to access, and when Hakoda and Sokka set out under the small, white sun to go fishing, Kya and Katara stay in. And Katara knows that the things women do and the things men do are different, but she’s small and doesn’t understand that her father and brother will not stay. She is small and her emotions are big and she cries.
And the memory is so faded. It’s so hazy there’s a part of her that’s worried she’s fabricated it all, but she can still close her eyes and feel how her mother picked her up. She laid her head on her mother’s chest, and listened to her hum, felt her sway. Every breath as even and deep as the tides. Every sway like the rocking of a boat, as natural as if she were standing on the ocean itself. And when she gets a little older, a little bigger, and moves her hands and moves the water, too, she thinks she knows where it comes from.
And Katara’s a little older, still, when she looks at her mother and sees the ocean sitting in the hollow of her throat, in a clean little pendant made of rare, blue mother-of-pearl. As they sit with one of the seal-walruses, breached on the ice floe and heaving in labor, she reaches out to her mother’s neck and touches it. Her mother shows her this women’s task, and her grandmother advises from the sidelines, but Katara watches as Kya moves quick, sure and confident but ever-gentle.
They deliver the pup in a puddle of red, and her mother holds it, its soft, white fur matted down, covered in caul and blood. And she knows it happens, that sometimes the womb is the only thing keeping a baby alive and as the caul tears the baby cannot clear the water from its lungs, cannot take that first breath and imbibe itself with spirit. Knowing this does not keep her from weeping over the tiny, bloody pup and its mourning mother.
Her mother guides her to the edge of the ocean, and her grandmother carries the pup. They wash its fur free of the caul and the blood and sit in silence with the small form, and when appropriate time has passed, her grandmother gathers it in her arms again and they return to the village. Katara holds onto her mother’s hand. They typically leave female and baby seal-walruses alone, their temperament much milder than that of males and the females good for milk during the spring, but it would be shameful to leave the little creature to freeze in the snow.
Her mother stretches out the skin of an elk and fastens it to white driftwood, a baby bed for a young woman named Talluk whose first pregnancy is causing her extraordinary pain. Katara’s heard the other young mothers talking about turning the baby, but they haven’t explained it exactly. The bed is flat and bottom-heavy to sit between the mother and the father in their own bed, and Katara carefully stitches the seal pup’s fur to the bed, and thinks about the baby it will keep warm, nestled between its parents.
The first time she remembers a raid is when she’s five. She thinks there were more before, because it’s not as scary as it should be. Her running steps to the most internal igloo, where her brother and grandmother are already sequestered with Tullok and her new baby, with Kahan and her own gently curving stomach that she curls around, back to the entrance. As Katara approaches, she slows, hearing gruff, new voices. The men in red approached quickly, without warning, with a long streak of silence behind them that made their coming that much more unexpected. She shuffles, uncertain, and instead of dodging into the igloo, she hides behind a wall and watches.
The man has removed his helmet, and every person left outside is either frozen in horror or waiting to strike. Katara spots her father and Bato split up and circle behind, their movements slow and precise. The man in red has an exotic look about him that Katara has never seen before, his skin pale, his eyes bright like smoldering embers. His strangeness is unnerving.
The man approaches an elder, a very, very old man who remembered a time before the war but no longer does because age has stolen his mind. He’s sitting and watching the Fire Nation man approach and breathes through his mouth, eyes unfocused. The man, she knows, was a great warrior once upon a time, but with his mind, every faculty has slowly marched onto the next life ahead of him. The firebender steps in front of him, and the old man looks up and focuses slowly on his face.
As the firebender opens his mouth to speak, a woman screams and shatters the tense stillness, and the men rush out and clash with the firebender, but the man steps forward and looks Haamit in the eyes and asks him if he is a waterbender. And Katara sees the old man’s eyes clear a little, the question familiar, the pride bone-deep and older than the war, and he smiles. She knows the last waterbender, the last before she was born, was taken long ago, but that pride in their culture cannot be swayed by the fraying of a mind or the shattering of their home.
Not realizing this, the firebender rears and strikes him across the cheek with the back of his hand, the crack echoing across the ice, and the old man falls. A few of the soldiers bustle forward and steal him away and the others continue their fight and the little children and the pregnant women are watching with bated breath through the opening of a curtain. They take the old man away and they blast through the wall and collapse one of the homes and set their whole stock of firewood ablaze, and they leave.
The snow continues to fall as they leave, and the layer of grey snoot is slowly covered over by a layer of white. Her mother crushes Katara to her chest, her father snakes one arm around the two of them, the other around Sokka and he kisses her head.
The raids continue, after that. She’s not sure what invokes such interest in them, but they hit every few months during the summer seasons, when it is light out, and the Water Tribe gets a reprieve in the winter when the moon keeps an ever-present vigil over them.
Her mother tells her she cannot ever let the men in red know what she can do. She cannot ever let them know she is a waterbender, her mother drills into her, but she also makes sure Katara never confuses protection with shame. Over their laundry, over their chores and work, Kya tells Katara she is a miracle, a waterbender in a land without them, like a tree springing up from salted earth. Her gift, her mother tells her, is the heart of their tribe. It is sacred history, alive and incarnate in her. And her brother calls it magic and complains when she splashes him with “her fancy water” but Katara knows better.
She practices, with a mouthful of water that she suspends in the air and she pushes and pulls it, and she believes she’ll find a master one day to teach her. And she will be a master herself.
Katara’s mother is looking at her when she dies. Her eyes bore into Katara’s and Katara can feel it when she dies. She screams and falls to her knees and screams, and the firebender shoves her aside and stalks out like he didn’t just leave Katara’s world crumpled on the ground at his feet. She screams until her father and grandmother and Sokka come, and her father pukes in the snow and Sokka goes still and silent, and her grandmother herds them away and presses snow to Katara’s forehead, trying to calm her.
The days afterwards are a blur she doesn’t snap out of. Not for immediately. Sokka goes silent and sullen and their father goes distant. He’s away in the days, out in the wilderness hunting or scouring the ocean’s edge for signs of trouble, and he gets home at night and waits until he thinks they’re both asleep to leave. She doesn’t know where he goes in the nights, and sometimes he doesn’t return in the mornings. Their grandmother keeps a vigilant, nearly-overbearing watch on her and Sokka, but things fall apart.
Sokka’s not talking, and her grandmother is a wraith who cannot let them out of her sight, and her father may have gone as well for his lack of presence in the aftermath. Katara’s not much better. She spends days crying on her mother’s bed and refuses to eat.
And as sudden as the waves, she snaps from it.
She’s curled in the blankets and her father left their home later the previous night and didn’t return in the morning, and set out on a fishing expedition in the morning and she hasn’t seen him in over a day. Sokka’s wearing the same clothes he’s been wearing for six days and her grandmother hasn’t cooked since three days before. She sees Sokka in dirty socks grab a piece of seal jerky for breakfast and she sits up in bed and fixes her gaze on him. He yells when she smacks the jerky out of his hand, and yells even louder when she throws a blanket at him to cover his modesty and commands that he take off his nasty clothes, but he listens.
She marches to the wash bucket, and like she’s done a million times before, kneels in front of it and scrubs each piece with tallow soap until the water runs clear and she hangs them in front of the smoldering fire at the heart of the village. There are still pieces of the wall collapsed from the raid that took her mother, and everyone is busy trying to rebuild the wall like it makes any difference. It’s never kept them safe but they waste all this time trying to erect it again and again.
Katara stomps over to Bato’s home and asks him for fish and she forces Sokka to show her how to clean them. She throws the meat in a pot with sea prunes and water and cooks it until it’s mush and forces Sokka to eat it. He complains about the taste but it’s a hot meal and it goes over without much more fuss. She does the same to her grandmother, and when her father comes home late that night she forces him to sit down and watches him as he chokes down a bowl, making sure he finishes every bite.
And she keeps doing it. Her grandmother comes back to herself, and sits with Katara to do the chores like her mother used to, and they clean the laundry and they sew new parkas, and they cook the dinners alongside the breakfasts and lunches. Sokka seems to do better when someone is looking after him, making sure he eats and that his socks get cleaned and she hollers at him about his smelly feet, but they get better. The wound doesn’t heal as much as it callouses over, a present slash in her heart that remains at a low-level ache until it is agitated and the pain flares as fresh and sharp as the very first day.
Her father comes back, and then he leaves again, setting off with every other man in the Tribe to go fight. He left and came back and then left again and she watches him go and swallows down her anger. He leaves .
It breaks Sokka’s heart. She watches him watch them go.
It is her and Sokka and Gran-Gran. She feels like an orphan. She feels old and tired.
Her dream of becoming a master was never given up on. It was just on pause. She couldn’t very well set off into the unknown, the strange world beyond the South Pole, not for no reason.
So she stays. Until she frees reason from an iceberg and he takes her penguin sledding and tells her he can find her a master. Aang smiles and makes the little kids laugh and makes her laugh. Then the Fire Nation comes again and when they load a sweet, confusing airbender onto the ship and sail away, leaving the wall collapsed again, and cracks branching out through the ice, mild burns on Tullok’s nose and Kaamakana’s hands, the grief wells up inside her. It flies out, and she hurls it at Gran-Gran and Sokka and there’s a part of her that’s so so angry that it fell on her. That it all fell on her to watch her mother die and then keep everyone else together. That she never got to fall apart.
But they surprise her, both of them. Sokka packs food and no clothes on a tiny canoe and her grandmother brings them the rest of what they’ll need and gives Katara her blessing. And she flies on Appa’s back and sees the world from a new view and her heart beats nearly out of her chest at the idea of the North Pole and the masters there that will help her become the master her mother always knew she’d be.
Her world changes fast. It opens up like the unfurling petals of a snowdrop.
The first place Aang takes them is his home, and she knows he hasn’t seen the war, that he doesn’t understand yet the way it has crept into every crack and crevice of the world like a disease spreads through the body. But she watches him understand when he goes through what she went through, and he kneels in front of the body of the person he loved most in the world and is bowled over by grief.
She calms him, and tells him they’re family now, and watches as he experiences the losses she has in the span of a few hours.
If anything he’s much more private in his grief than anyone in her family had been. She hears him take sharp breaths in the night, but in the day, he shows them more and more of the world, marching north to their sister Tribe.
Having spent years as the glue that held her family together, having waited patiently for her chance, having journeyed across half the globe to get there, her composure breaks very cleanly when Pakku sniffs and spews his sexist opinions and tells her to go heal with the other women. She stares at him blankly and imagines crafting a tiny little crate out of ice and putting him in it and setting it adrift on the ocean.
And then she fights him. He’s a master, sure, but she’s fighting with a half a decade's worth of pent-up anger. She loses but not before she strikes a few satisfying hits. And he grabs her mother’s necklace and she is kneeling, exhausted, but the sight of his fingers touching her mother’s necklace sets adrenaline pumping again. And it turns out well enough, that he knew Gran-gran and Katara’s secretly very proud of her grandmother for breaking this old sexist’s heart and running from this place, but whatever shell of anger had grown around his shriveled old heart seems to molt, and he agrees to teach her.
Then everything falls apart again. And slowly gets put back together. And she learns faster than any of them, including Aang.
With the world having grown so big in the last few months, home seems so much smaller. She feels bigger, more confident, but there are times when it comes up and hits her like a physical thing in the chest. They’ve all been separated and she’s wandering alone in a shiny swamp when she sees a woman and she knows it in her bones, in the beat of her heart, that it is her mother. The dark brown of her hair, streaked with silver that shines in the moon, the slope of her shoulders. Katara doesn’t think how when she runs, tears leaking from her eyes before she turns her mother’s shoulders and her stomach twists from the illusion. She breaks down and weeps and feels eight years old again, barely able to hold herself together.
It comes to a head when Zuko offers her revenge in exchange for her trust. She wakes up one morning and he tells her he can show her how to find the man who stole her mother and turned her world inside out and there is not a force in the world that would stop her. It’s like she’s driven by something beyond herself, and she spits sharp words and Zuko mirrors her energy, and she leaves Sokka and Aang behind with their sad eyes on her and she tells herself they don’t understand. They couldn’t. It’s not the same.
She was Sokka’s mother too - but Katara’s relationship with her was different. She was the one who watched her die. She’s the one who has to go to sleep every night knowing that the last sight her mother ever saw was Katara’s bright blue eyes and the last thing she ever heard was Katara’s voice, crying out for her far too late as the arc of flame rushed towards her. She was the one that monster shoved aside as he left. As he went on to live his life uncaring for every destroyed one left in his wake.
And Aang had mirrored her every move. He brushed aside a curtain and unveiled a sight that tore his heart apart but it’s not the same. He knew 100 years had passed. He knew the world waiting for him was different from the one he’d left. Katara watched her world fall apart in real time and had to pick up the pieces.
She bloodbends a man and tries not to think of what her mother would say. Of what she would feel, seeing Katara use her bending this way. She feels his muscles strain against her will, she feels the pressure she’s putting on him bloom bruises under his skin. A vein pops, but this is not her mother’s killer.
Her anger thrums through her and Appa flies to a town where an old, retired man lives. His name is Yon Rha. She knows his name. She knows his face. He burned it into her mind that day.
He walks a lonely path in the rain and the only thing she can feel is the slow beat of her heart. Her breaths come cold and her fingers are numb. Zuko has the man on his knees and she pulls down her mask and shows him her face, and he doesn’t remember. The life he has lived has left him unable to remember the face of a child whose parent he murdered.
Then recognition dawns and he remembers.
She relishes the fear in his face when she halts the rain. When he sees what she is. She wants him to know that same pain, that same fear. She hopes the halted rain churns his gut the same way the black snow churned hers. She thinks of his eyes, of his boots crushing the furs underfoot in their home and sharpens the ice into spears and sends them flying towards him, envisioning him lying dead on the ground, just like her mother.
He kneels on the ground and begs like a dog and he doesn’t understand . He doesn’t feel guilt or shame. He only feels fear.
But Katara understands. She thinks of her mother telling her that though she needed to hide, her bending wasn’t shame, it was pride . She looks at this pathetic man on the ground, whose spirit is so empty and torn apart from a lifetime of cruelty that he could never understand the love that she feels, that her mother felt for her. She melts the ice and it falls on his head, his body flinching violently as he feels it, and he looks up, mistaking her restraint for mercy.
She leaves her mother’s killer wallowing in the mud and turns her back on him. And the next time she bends, a stream of water she and Aang pass back and forth, the eternal push and pull of the moon and the tides, she feels settled. There’s no forgiveness in her heart for that man, but she understands now. That though water moves in reciprocation, it’s also about change. Her bending is her own, and with every movement of the water she thinks of her mother’s even breaths as deep and steady as the tides. Her mother swaying as she held Katara in her arms, the movement like the rocking of the waves.
In the hard-won peace after the war, they all grow and rebuild. The world continues to open up. Katara carries her mother close to her heart, around her neck, and understands her sacrifice when she feels the stirring within herself. Katara can feel her own spirit split in two and looks into the bright blue eyes of her daughter, curls her tiny hand around her finger, and calls her Kya.