Chapter Text
Returning to the Southern Water Tribe as an airbender carries a faint taste of treason, but she has more important matters to worry about than her own feelings of personal blasphemy.
Katara, who once guided her small, impatient hands over bowls of water; who pressed her palms over Korra’s hands and told her that water, more than any other element, is tied to the fundamental architecture of life. Its rhythms, its memory and cycles. Every time you touch water, Korra, you touch the moon. Everything that lives moves, everything that moves changes, and everything that changes can be restored to harmony. Healing, at its core, is nothing more than nudging a person’s own water back toward balance.
Katara, throughout Korra’s childhood, had been a comforting, steady presence, like the grandparent she never got to have.
Hearing the news of her illness, the incurable nature of time, Korra’s fingers suddenly feel useless. She wants to reach for water, to soothe Katara’s pain if she feels any, to bend her back to youth. She knows healing can’t turn back time, but still. She wishes.
Tenzin sits to her left, rigid and soft all at once, a column of contradiction. On her right, Bumi and Kya, siblings whose faces she’s known only through photographs.
The entire room feels strangely intimate, like when people have already mourned once in their minds, and are now waiting for the body to catch up. Korra stands among them like a borrowed heir, feeling both included and alien.
Katara does not speak, she can’t, so Korra steps to the foot of the bed and slips her hands beneath the blanket, cupping Katara’s feet to keep them warm; the simplest, most ancient gesture of care.
This is the part no teacher prepares you for: watching the people who shaped you become small, thinning into something fragile. Korra feels the tide pulling out, taking something irreplaceable with it.
They wait, guarding the passage between life and death like guiding spirits, and Korra thinks, this is what love looks like in its final form.
Korra is meditating, hovering over the edge of an iced over cliff a few ways away from the village, hair whipping wild around her. The ocean below keeps striking the cliff face in what feels like slow motion, grief-drunk beats.
The last time she was here, she begged the universe to give her back what had been taken. This time, she has the decency to ask for nothing.
She’s searching.
Katara is gone, and Korra tries to find her, the way one looks for rivers beneath the ice, stretching her spirits like torches looking for a lost soul during polar night, reaching for the echo of hands that used to guide her.
Meditation has always felt like trying to open a door in the dark. Sometimes you find it, sometimes you bruise your forehead against a wall. Korra looks for the texture of water, the lingering warmth of Katara’s spirit.
There is nothing.
She sinks deeper.
Please.
One last time, please.
There’s a pressure, light as a thumbprint on the inside of her skull, warmth circling the perimeter of her mind like someone looking for a pathway in—not Katara, she knows instantly. Katara’s presence had always been water: cool and flowing. This is different.
Aang steps into her consciousness the way air enters a room: already there, just—visible, is the best way Korra can put it. She knows it’s him.
Her first reaction is irritation.
“I didn’t ask for you.”
The pressure around her shifts, almost amused, and Korra presses the heels of her hands into her eyes.
“I wanted—” she chokes, “—Katara.”
The air around her warms, compassionate, and hardens. His presence expands slowly, like fire warming a cold room, and, when he finally speaks, it’s lighter than she expected, less serious than Tenzin, brighter, like a child’s.
“I know why you came here, Korra,” Aang says, and Korra realizes she has never heard him speak her name. “And I know who you were hoping to find.”
Her chest constricts, she closes her eyes. “I wanted—to say g-goodbye.”
Expanding, and expanding, and expanding, this warmth, like a hundred powerful spirits hugging her, helping her control the rising tide of grief.
“Katara has returned to the water, trying to find her in the air won’t work.”
“Then tell me what will,” she grits out, and Aang inhales slowly.
“You’ll never find her the way you want to, but parts of her can be found in the parts of you that remember every life you’ve lived, every teacher you’ve had, every person you’ve loved. There is a pool of millions of memories. Yours and mine are in there; that’s where the Avatar gets their strength from: all the love.”
“I don’t know how,” she whispers. “Every time I try, it slips away.”
“You’re searching for the Avatar state the way you’re searching for Katara, like it is something separate from you. It isn’t.”
Korra shakes her head. “What does that even mean?”
“Connection to your Avatar state isn’t a destination. You’re already there. Korra… Katara lives in the currents of who you became because of her. She lives in your healing. She lives in your strength, in every choice you make from this moment forward.” There’s something hot behind Korra’s eyes. “If you want to find the Avatar state, if you want to feel all of us, then follow my voice. And breathe.”
The air wraps around Korra like a hand guiding her chin upward, and she does.
“Again.”
She obeys, Aang’s presence guiding her away from the ether and into herself.
“Stop looking for the door, you are it.”
And suddenly, Korra understands. Something cracks open inward, a tidal rush of lives and memories and power folding into her all at once.
Her eyes snap open, glowing like moons.
For a moment, she is every Avatar who ever was. She is Katara’s steady hand and her soft smile, she is Aang, and Kyoshi, and Yangchen, she is all of them.
“You never needed to find us. We were right here, waiting for you to find yourself.”
She inhales, and for the first time, the air bends first. An exhale and the water beneath the cliff heaves upward, answering like an old friend. She feels fire and earth and water and air all around her, like seeing in color for the first time in years.
Somewhere inside, in the place that once felt unbearably empty, she feels the faintest ripple of waterbender warmth, the memory of a hand guiding hers.
The glow dims, but the warmth does not.
Korra rises.
Katara is gone, but she is also here, everywhere water moves.
She thinks of new beginnings after great, tragic endings, and feels a new current forming at the edge of an old sea.
She has to go see about a girl.