A/N: Originally this was going to be about a Katara who stayed at home with her kids and Sokka's kids, but that wasn't nearly bitter enough. Although it would have been pretty badass to have Katara go Jurassic Park on Zuko's ass once her started threatening the village's women and children.
They left her behind, at first.
The survivors would return from battle covered in blood and burns. Katara did important work with her healer's hands, saved men's lives from death or debilitating injuries. She practiced the other uses her waterbending had but Dad and Sokka refused her utterly on that matter. It wasn't that she was woman, they said, it was that her healing ability was irreplaceable. Fathers would live to see their families because of her. How could she risk that?
But nothing in war goes according to plan. One night a platoon of firebenders attacks their beachside camp, setting fire to their ships, hoping to press the Southern Water Tribe against the waves and destroy them. They don't count on Katara having the ocean at her disposal. She saves the ships while the sands run red with icewater mixed with blood.
Katara isn't left behind after that.
But she's still never quite one of them, either. While the other warriors talk around the campfire about their absent families or memories of home, she stays silent. Katara misses the beautiful desolation of the South Pole, sure, but she comes to realize a part of her would be perfectly fine with never going back. It's not that she loves war. She hates it, loathes it in the way only a battlefield healer can. But Sokka and Dad are with her, and wherever her family is... that's home.
Katara has no one waiting for her back at the South Pole.
Even accepting the attrition the menfolk faced because of raids, finding a husband had been harder than Katara had ever expected. Not that she'd given it much thought. Katara had just assumed she'd find the right man, that she'd just look at him and know he was the One.
Being a chief's daughter probably wouldn't have hurt either, she once supposed, considering how many girls had courted Sokka for an alliance between their respective tribes. Yet no parents wanted Katara as their daughter-in-law. People, she eventually learned, steered their sons clear of her.
Dad might have been an important chieftain but Katara had a single, overwhelming mark against her: she was a waterbender.
Any children she bore would have a fair chance of inheriting of her gift, which made them and their home village a potential target for Fire Nation raids. Without any mastery of her waterbending she didn't offer any 'benefits' for the danger involved in a marriage match, as Gran-Gran had bluntly put it.
While she had gone unwed even at 24, Sokka had fathered twin daughters with his wife Corazon when they were both seventeen. Their girls were waterbenders. Katara sometimes wondered what Sokka and her sister-in-law thought about their children's future, but they'd never broached the subject so she respected that silence.
Sometimes, in her quiet moments, a tiny voice nagged at Katara that the only reason Dad had allowed to come to war was so his granddaughters would have potentially an experienced waterbending teacher.
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branchandroot
It's not Toph's family whose aged, it's Sokka and Katara'. [1/1]
Date: 2010-11-23 11:59 pm (UTC)They left her behind, at first.
The survivors would return from battle covered in blood and burns. Katara did important work with her healer's hands, saved men's lives from death or debilitating injuries. She practiced the other uses her waterbending had but Dad and Sokka refused her utterly on that matter. It wasn't that she was woman, they said, it was that her healing ability was irreplaceable. Fathers would live to see their families because of her. How could she risk that?
But nothing in war goes according to plan. One night a platoon of firebenders attacks their beachside camp, setting fire to their ships, hoping to press the Southern Water Tribe against the waves and destroy them. They don't count on Katara having the ocean at her disposal. She saves the ships while the sands run red with icewater mixed with blood.
Katara isn't left behind after that.
But she's still never quite one of them, either. While the other warriors talk around the campfire about their absent families or memories of home, she stays silent. Katara misses the beautiful desolation of the South Pole, sure, but she comes to realize a part of her would be perfectly fine with never going back. It's not that she loves war. She hates it, loathes it in the way only a battlefield healer can. But Sokka and Dad are with her, and wherever her family is... that's home.
Katara has no one waiting for her back at the South Pole.
Even accepting the attrition the menfolk faced because of raids, finding a husband had been harder than Katara had ever expected. Not that she'd given it much thought. Katara had just assumed she'd find the right man, that she'd just look at him and know he was the One.
Being a chief's daughter probably wouldn't have hurt either, she once supposed, considering how many girls had courted Sokka for an alliance between their respective tribes. Yet no parents wanted Katara as their daughter-in-law. People, she eventually learned, steered their sons clear of her.
Dad might have been an important chieftain but Katara had a single, overwhelming mark against her: she was a waterbender.
Any children she bore would have a fair chance of inheriting of her gift, which made them and their home village a potential target for Fire Nation raids. Without any mastery of her waterbending she didn't offer any 'benefits' for the danger involved in a marriage match, as Gran-Gran had bluntly put it.
While she had gone unwed even at 24, Sokka had fathered twin daughters with his wife Corazon when they were both seventeen. Their girls were waterbenders. Katara sometimes wondered what Sokka and her sister-in-law thought about their children's future, but they'd never broached the subject so she respected that silence.
Sometimes, in her quiet moments, a tiny voice nagged at Katara that the only reason Dad had allowed to come to war was so his granddaughters would have potentially an experienced waterbending teacher.