Chapter Text
102 AG
Year of the Dog
The South Pole
Summer at the South Pole turns the landscape around her home into a completely different world.
Katara likes to sit on the high exposed rock with her legs dangling over the cliff edge and look out over her growing village and the lands beyond. It’s easy to forget herself for a while up here.
The sun graces the sky for nearly the full day, never fully setting and bathing the continent in sunlight. The sun glints off the sea, the sparkling ribbons of water disrupted by icebergs large and small. Glaciers recede inland and expose rich soil and barren rock underneath. Colorful lichens and mosses spread across the ground, and later in the season stiff-stalked grasses and berry bushes push up through the dirt. The camel yak herds have started to replenish since the end of the war and have begun to traverse their ancestral migration patterns. A small herd of them graze on the lichens near the shoreline.
Nothing is so blindingly hopeful as new growth of the warm season in the South Pole.
A stiff, cold breeze blows from behind her, from the part of her nation that never unfreezes, and a shiver goes down Katara’s back. It brings with it the sound of otter penguin calls, and everything she’s trying to forget comes rushing back.
Aang.
His proposal.
The painstakingly carved pendant that she still wants to cry thinking about.
And the answer that leaped to her lips almost as soon as he finished his question: no. Emphatically, but painfully.
“Katara!”
She turns back to the path--it’s Suki. It’s still strange to see her in something other than Earth Kingdom green or her Kyoshi armor, but the indigo tiger-sealskin jacket and trousers look good on her. The necklace she wears is rare to see on someone not of the Water Tribe--a hunting chain of wolf and polar bear dog teeth. It’s usually given to a hunter after they’ve had five successful hunts and shared the subsequent spoils with the village. Katara hadn’t been in the village for most of the last two years, but apparently Suki had made quite a name for herself as a capable hunter, despite not being Water Tribe.
She’s struck with a fierce stab of longing that she could’ve been here.
“Sokka wanted me to come find you. The council wants to talk to you about the bending school.”
“Yeah,” Katara says absently, eyes still dancing over the landscape, barely able to absorb Suki’s words.
No, Aang. I can’t marry you.
Tears welling in his eyes.
The confusion on his face.
I’m sorry. I can’t do this anymore.
Suki pauses before she sits down next to Katara. “Are you… okay?”
“Yeah,” Katara says brusquely and moves to stand. “I--yeah.”
Suki catches her arm before she can rise. “They don’t need us just yet. We have some time if you want to talk.”
She hasn’t really done that yet--aside from her weeping, barely coherent rambling after she saw Sokka when she got off the boat a few months ago. It wasn’t pretty, and she’d barely known how she herself was feeling, let alone being able to voice those thoughts to anyone else.
To be honest, she still doesn’t know if she can, but she’s in a place where she can at least try. And as much as she loves her brother, this seems like something that might be easier to talk to Suki about.
“The penguin-otters,” Katara says.
“What about them?”
“They remind me of Aang.”
“And that’s… bad?”
Katara nods, then winces. “Well, not… not bad, just--” She makes a sound of frustration. “I can’t really think of the words.”
A silent beat passes before Suki says, “Remember when I went to the Fire Nation to protect Zuko after the war?”
The abrupt change in topic throws Katara for a loop, but she replies anyway, “Of course. I was nearly right behind you.” But I stayed with Aang instead of helping a friend in need. A bitterness tinges the back of her throat.
Suki looks like she knows exactly where Katara’s train of thought has gone, but doesn’t linger on it. “Sokka and I broke up before I left.”
Katara’s eyes widen as she turns her whole body to face Suki. “Wait, what?” Sokka had only said they were having trouble with the distance, never that they’d actually broken it off.
Bizarrely, Suki is smiling. The sun lights up her face, her gray-blue eyes shining like the ocean. “Yeah. It didn’t really last long, but I still remember how it felt. Don’t worry about using the right words,” she says, “just talk. It’s like lancing an infected wound. It hurts, and a lot of nasty stuff might pour out, but it’ll feel better afterwards.”
Katara grimaces at the description but hopes that Suki’s metaphor is apt.
“I don’t even know where to start.”
“The otter-penguins,” Suki suggests, “They reminded you of Aang.”
“Yeah, penguin sledding was the first thing he wanted to do when he came out of the iceberg,” Katara says. “I don’t know; up until now it was such a good memory. One of the first really good days I’d had in a long, long time.”
“It’s not a good memory anymore?”
“I mean, it’s good but just… different now. It’s like there’s a different color painted over it. And it’s like that with everything . Everything we did, every good memory we made.”
“So you were happy when you were with him?”
Suki probably didn’t mean for that to be a complex question, but it is. “I thought I was. Until he asked me to marry him and I had this moment where it was crystal clear to me that the life I was living wasn’t actually making me happy.”
“That’s why you broke up with him.”
“I guess. And honestly, I don’t want to get married yet. I’m only sixteen,” she says, and realizes as soon as she says it that if she hadn’t traveled, hadn’t fought in the war, had stayed in the village without finding Aang, she’d probably already be married.
“You don’t have to get married yet,” Suki says, “or ever, even.”
Katara sighs and taps her heels back against the cliff face. “Maybe someday. With the right person.”
You will marry a powerful bender.
When Aunt Wu had told her that, she’d been excited. Assured, even. It had been a sign that her life might eventually find its way back to the vision she’d always had for it. Before she met Aang, she thought that she would marry a nice waterbending man, maybe from the North, and settle down in the South. Then she and Aang happened, and--
“I could never really picture our future,” Katara says, realization dawning over her. “Aang could. He talked about it all the time. But what he saw I never could. Whenever he talked about getting married and having kids, I went along with it but I never… it was like I was never really a part of it, you know? I just agreed because I wanted to protect him. I was just always, always protecting him.”
“That must have been tiring,” Suki says, “feeling like you’re constantly protecting someone who is supposed to be a partner.”
“I never thought of it that way,” Katara says, but realizes that Suki may have just hit the proverbial nail on the head.
“You were always the caretaker of the group,” Suki says, and leans over to bump her shoulder against Katara’s. “That was the dynamic you always had with Aang, too. I guess it’s not too surprising that that carried over into your relationship with him.”
“I just don’t know how else to be with him,” she replies. “I do love him. I’m just…”
“Not in love with him?”
Katara nods, her voice shaky when she finally answers, “I never wanted to hurt him.” If she has any regrets about her decision, it’s that . Romantic relationship or not, Aang is one of her favorite people in the whole world; he’s one of her best friends, and he is the reason she’s become the person she is now. He was her avenue to getting a waterbending master to teach her, to taking an active role in the war, to seeing the world from the back of a sky bison… She quite simply cannot imagine her life now without him in it, but that appears to be what she may have to get used to.
Suki shrugs. “Some hurts are unavoidable. With all that emotional protection you were giving him, he might never have to grow as a person. You’re pushing the baby sparrowkeet out of the nest.”
“I guess.”
Suki’s gaze is intense when she says, “You shouldn’t beat yourself up for looking after your own happiness for once.”
A defense leaps to her tongue but doesn’t come out. Is that really what she’s doing? The last few months have been emotionally tumultuous, to say the least, and Katara has been more focused on helping the tribe than sorting through everything that’s been plaguing her heart.
“And even if it doesn’t feel like it right now,” Suki continues, “Aang will forgive you.”
“What about me forgiving him?” Katara whispers unconsciously, and almost slaps a hand over her mouth.
Suki looks surprised. “Are you angry at him?”
Katara’s stomach churns, and she pulls her legs up to her chest. Her forehead drops down to her knees. “Forget I said that,” she murmurs.
“No,” Suki replies. “Not if it’s what you really feel. Stop holding back so much, Katara. You never used to do that.” A beat passes before she adds, “It’s perfectly fine to be mad at your ex. You have to stop trying to shield him from things that might hurt him. He’s not even here.”
A few heavy, almost awkward minutes pass as Katara tries to calm her racing heartbeat and discern what exactly it is that’s making her feel like this.
Eventually, she gets it. She raises her face from her knees. “I am mad,” she admits softly.
Suki nods, encouraging.
“I’m mad at him for asking me to marry him, and I’m mad at myself for turning him down,” she continues, her voice growing in volume and vehemence, “I’m mad that I got together with him in the first place, and I am especially mad that I spent two years doing whatever he wanted to do and that I wasn’t here helping to rebuild, or that I didn’t go to the Fire Nation when Zuko needed his friends--” Katara cuts herself off when her voices starts to echo a little too loudly and takes a deep breath. With a huff, she throws her legs back over the edge and flops backwards so that she’s laying down.
“I don’t think he’s a bad person,” Katara says, “but Spirits, I am so mad at him, and I’m sad that we can’t ever go back to the way things were. It’s always going to be at least a little bit weird.”
Suki leans back with her, mirroring her position and turning her head. “Not always. For a while, maybe. But eventually, time’s going to smooth away the rough edges. That’s just the real rub of it though--it just takes time.”
“But I want it now.”
Suki chuckles. “Tough luck.”
They lay there for a silent minute, the blue sky clear as they stare up at it.
“Thank you,” Katara eventually says. “It’s good to finally talk about it. I wish I would’ve sooner. Steeping in my own head for that long probably wasn’t that great.”
Suki shakes her head with a soft smile on her face. “No. You have to wait until you’re ready to talk about these things. It doesn’t happen all at once.”
Katara pulls herself back into a sitting position and looks down at Suki, who is smiling up at her, expression soft. She is struck by a stab of affection going through her. She doesn’t love Suki just because Sokka does.
If Katara were ever to have had a sister, she’d want them to be like Suki. She supposes, with a grin on her face, that she will have a sister like Suki eventually. At least once Sokka is satisfied with his carving skills enough to ask her.
“Come on,” Katara says. She stands and holds a hand out to Suki. “We should go. Bending school to talk about and all.”
Suki reaches up and pulls herself to her feet. “I can’t wait to see you make mincemeat of Master Pakku.”
Katara laughs. “It’ll be a bloodbath,” she promises.
They begin the walk side by side. Suki replies, “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”