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Katara’s mother disappears, lost forever, never to be seen again. Her father follows, but this hurts in a different way, because Hakoda chooses to go. Hakoda chooses to leave them behind.
Katara knows, logically, that he has to. He has to go to the Fire Nation, he has to fight, he has to make them pay. All the Fire Nation knows is violence, and destruction, and they have to be stopped. For her mother, and her tribe, and her , because she’s the last waterbender, and—
Well.
Things like this simply have to be done. Hakoda doesn’t have a choice. Besides, Gran-gran is here, and Katara adores her grandmother, the same way she adores all the elders of her tribe.
But still. Her father’s decision hurts, and she aches with it, for a while. It festers and it builds, and even though she knows it shouldn’t, resentment grows, slowly and surely. Towards Hakoda. Towards her grandmother. Even towards Sokka, sometimes, when he makes sexist remarks and throws his dirty socks at her to be washed.
She doesn’t understand these feelings. She should not feel such bitterness towards her own father and grandmother, toward her own tribe, when she knows everyone is doing the best she can (and when it’s her fault, anyways, that her mother is— her mother is—)
It just doesn’t make sense. But nothing really does, anymore.
Katara does not see her father for nearly three years. When she does meet him again, she is weighed down by nearly a year’s worth of travel, and she’s just seen Aang die (he died and she almost didn’t save him, another burden for her to bear, and it’s her fault, her fault, it must be) , and she’s so tired. She’s just so tired.
Something inside her snaps.
She is cold to him, and distant. She can’t speak to him without it coming out disrespectful and garbled, and Sokka and the other warriors are giving her odd looks, because this is not how a proper Water Tribe child should act. But she doesn’t feel like a child anymore. She can’t go back. She’s been carrying everything for too long and this is all wrong and now her father wants to talk to her like he’s been there all along, like he knows even a fraction of what she’s been through. She won’t have it. She won’t.
Deep down, more than anything, Katara wants to go home. She wants Aang to wake up, and for Sokka and Toph and everyone else to be safe. She wants to be tucked into bed by her father, and her mother, and she wants to wake up in the South Pole, surrounded by fresh snow.
She can’t have that. But she wishes, so badly, that she could.
Relations between her and her father grow increasingly tense, and it all comes to a head on the deck of a Fire Nation warship. To her unending fury and humiliation, Katara is crying. Aang has woken up, and he has run away. Again.
“Maybe that’s his way of being brave,” Hakoda says, and something in Katara quails at that, because how can that be true? How?
“It’s not brave, ” she chokes out. “It’s selfish, and stupid! We could be helping him and I know the world needs him, but doesn't he know how much we need him, too? How can he just leave us behind?”
Hakoda closes his eyes, as if he’s in pain. “You're talking about me too, aren't you?”
Everything inside Katara crumbles, and then she’s thrown herself into her father’s arms. He smells of salt, of the sea. She’s missed him. She’s missed him, so, so much.
Being in his embrace feels like a homecoming, but it hurts like one too.
“How could you leave us, Dad?” she asks. “I mean, I know we had Gran-Gran, and she loved us, but we were just so lost without you.”
Hakoda apologizes, and she can tell that he means it, but Katara doesn’t know if he truly understands. How could he? He chose to go, he had to go, but it hurt her so badly. It hurt everyone so badly. Sokka had to teach himself to be a man with no one to look up to. Gran-gran had to watch the rolling of the tide and worry that her son would never come back. Katara had to cook, and clean, and grow up fast, too fast. She wants to tell him all of this, but her voice is shaking and she doesn’t know if she can. How can she make him see?
“I understand why you left,” she says eventually, and her face is pressed into his chest, so her voice comes out muffled. Maybe it will mask the hurt. “I really do, and I know that you had to go, so why do I still feel this way? I'm so sad and angry and hurt!”
And that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? When you love like this, it hurts, and you ache with it. And the people you love do their best, but sometimes, that isn’t enough.
Hakoda tried his hardest. Kanna did too. Was it enough?
Katara doesn’t know. She loves them anyways.
“I love you more than anything,” her father whispers into her hair, and Katara only cries harder. “You and your brother are my entire world. I thought about you every day when I was gone and every night when I went to sleep, I would lie awake missing you so much it would ache.”
“I love you too, Dad,” Katara whispers back, and she can feel the broken edges and turbulent waves inside her calm just a little. “I love you too.”
It doesn’t fix everything. But it’s a start.
Later, once the war is over, Katara will return home. Her father and her grandmother will be there waiting for her, sitting around the cook fire she grew up tending to. There will be a bowl of five flavor soup and fresh maktaaq waiting for her. She will settle beside her father, pass her ulu to her grandmother so she can cut the maktaaq on the tray.
They will eat, and they will talk. They will discuss Hakoda’s travels and Katara’s friends and Kanna’s past. They will remember their history and their traditions. They will reconcile the past and present and future, of the tribe and of themselves. They will laugh at Sokka, who is determinedly working on a box he claims will keep ice from melting.
They will remember Kya, and it will hurt. It will sting. It will be joyous and solemn, happy and sad, a million things all at once. But they will learn to be a family again, one without the weight of war.