Fan Fic: Timeline
Title: Timeline
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender/The Legend of Korra
Rating: PG
Work Count: 4,249
Characters/Pairings: Katara, Aang, Zuko, et al.; Kataang, very minor Zutara.
Warnings: Some spoilers for The Legend of Korra, but mostly speculation/wishful thinking based on what little we know so far.
Author's notes: I have no excuse for this. It was intended to be a bittersweet collection of moments from Katara's life between The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, but it came out way more bitter than sweet.
This is Katara’s life.
It’s two months after Ozai’s defeat when Katara officially becomes the Avatar’s girlfriend.
His feelings for her have been evident for some time, but she’d never let herself think about them because there had had always been more pressing matters. Teaching Aang, finding other people to teach Aang, evading capture, escaping capture, navigating the world, making their limited supplies last, plotting against the Fire Nation, leading a rebellion, holding everyone together when both time and tempers grew short - these things had always been her immediate concerns. Romance was something that might be nice, but later.
The war over, the peace treaty she’d helped to draft signed, and balance restored, Katara finds that later has become now. Finally, she is able to focus on something more fun and less complicated.
And if anything is uncomplicated, it’s Aang’s affection for her. They’ve been friends, they’ve journeyed together, they’ve learned from each other. He adores her, and returning his sentiments is the easiest and most natural thing in the world.
It’s a year later when Zuko confronts her, full of unwanted concern and over protectiveness about things that are really none of his business.
She and Aang have come to the Fire Nation capital, Aang on Avatar business, she mostly just to visit. They’ve been staying in the palace for a week. Somehow, in that time, the Fire Lord has gotten it into his head that she’s leading Aang along. As if she’s just fooling around with him until someone better comes along. Katara is incensed at the implication, and she lets him hear about it. What kind of girl does he think she is, that she’d do something like that? Aang is the Avatar and her best friend - how could she possibly expect to do better than that? And besides, he isn’t one to be giving relationship advice when he and Mai have just broken up. Again.
Zuko tells her to leave Mai out of it and says that he’s just worried about both of them. She tells him to worry about something more important, because she and Aang are very happy together, thank you very much.
It’s three years after that argument when Aang asks her to marry him.
He’s just turned sixteen - the legal age for marriage among both the water tribes and the air nomads. They’ve been together for four years and were friends before that, traveling the world all the while, and they are very much in love. It’s the logical next step. He’s even carved her a necklace.
She accepts his proposal without hesitation.
It’s ten minutes after they’ve announced their engagement when Toph takes her aside and asks what the hell she’s doing.
Everyone else seems genuinely happy for them - Zuko perhaps a little grudgingly so, but she doesn’t dwell on that. Toph, on the other hand, seems to think she’s lost her mind. Sure, you and Twinkletoes are sweet together, she says, but do you really think you guys are cut out for marriage?
Katara says that of course they are. They’re in love. People who are in love get married. That’s how things work. Toph refuses to believe a word of it, and insists that Katara doesn’t either. Before she can think of a decent retort, Aang calls her away to return her attention to their impromptu engagement party. She shoots Toph a frustrated glare instead.
Someone has decided that music is in order, for when she returns, there is a hastily assembled group of musicians playing. She and Aang dance, laughing like schoolchildren, and she wonders how anyone could doubt that they’re going to live happily ever after.
It’s just over an hour before her wedding when Katara panics.
Her hair is already done up in elaborate braids, and it is time to change into the heavy formal gown that she had thought so beautiful when she had selected it months previously. She tells Suki that she wants to use the bathroom before she puts it on. As soon as she is alone, she climbs out the window and runs.
Rounding a corner too fast, she runs smack into Zuko. He catches her by the shoulders and halts her wild flight. Without thinking, she bends the water out of the nearest fountain and onto his head. He releases her with an indignant yell, which restores her to her senses somewhat.
Apologizing profusely, she bends the water off of him and back to it’s proper place. His topknot has come completely undone, however, and his own formal clothes are a rumpled mess. Her braids, which had taken hours, are likewise ruined. Face etched with concern, Zuko demands that she take a deep breath, calm down, and tell him what’s wrong.
She tries to explain how when she saw her wedding gown, the layers of fabric and embroidery had reminded her of all the weight and importance of being the Avatar’s wife, of everything that it meant and how it would inevitably come to define her. She tries to explain how daunting it had seemed, but she is still half-hysterical, her words coming out in a rush punctuated with wild hand gestures.
Zuko doesn’t tell her that none of that matters as long as she’s in love, the way Aang would. He doesn’t tell her that she’s more than capable of rising to all those challenges, the way Sokka or Suki would. Instead, he says that she doesn’t have to marry Aang if it isn’t what she wants.
Katara is flabbergasted. Her moment of panic over, she can’t even contemplate walking out on her own wedding, abandoning her fiancé in front of all her family and friends, disappointing everyone in the world who had been waiting for this day. She protests that she is not about to run away.
Ignoring the irony of that statement, Zuko insists that he wasn’t suggesting that. He just wants to make sure she knows that she has a choice. She responds irritably that of course she knows, that she wouldn’t have agreed to marry Aang if it wasn’t what she wanted. Not giving him a chance to say anything else, she turns and storms back in the direction she came.
When she returns to her room, Suki is getting ready to send out search parties. She is distraught to see her ruined braids and wonders what could have gotten into her. Katara dismisses it as wedding day jitters, and Suki helps her rearrange her hair into a simpler but still elegant style. They manage to be ready just in time.
Though her mouth is dry with nerves as she recites her vows, the sight of everyone gathered, happy and proud of her, and most of all Aang smiling from ear to ear reassures her.
It’s four months since they were married when she discovers she’s pregnant.
Aang is happy, of course, but also nervous about being a father. Katara, on the other hand, is ecstatic. Mothering has always been second nature to her. She throws herself into planning for the baby’s arrival, selecting a room in the air temple where they live to be a nursery, sewing sheets and blankets and baby clothes, and rattling off potential names. Three months before she is due, they settle on Tenzin if it’s a boy and Kaya if it’s a girl.
Where their courtship had been predictable and almost perfunctory and the early days of their marriage had been shy and awkward, her pregnancy is joyful. This child, it seems, is the piece that had been missing in their relationship. For all his worries, Katara is convinced that Aang will make a wonderful father, and the three of them will be a picture-perfect little family. When the baby comes, Katara will have everything she ever wanted. When the baby comes, finally everything will be right. It has to be.
It’s a little less than five years after her elder son was born when he airbends for the first time.
Aang is in Ba Sing Se, a trip Katara was supposed to accompany him on until both their children came down with colds at the same time. Understanding that the Earth King needed him, she had told him to go anyway, and he had reluctantly left her with two sniffling, miserable toddlers.
She had been preoccupied with Nanuk, trying to get him to eat in spite of his sore throat, when Tenzin had been hit with another bout of sneezing. Each sneeze grew increasingly louder. The last one sent a sudden gust of wind through the room.
She had fussed over him appropriately and told him how proud she was and written to his father right away. But that night, when both boys are tucked into bed and finally sleeping and she is alone with her thoughts, she can’t help but feel disappointed. She doesn’t really know why. She had always known that her sons might be airbenders. She had even suspected it before Tenzin was born, based on some kind of gut feeling or maternal instinct, the way he had moved in her womb being far lighter and more energetic than she had expected.
So when Aang returns, she forces herself to be every bit as excited as he is, burying those feelings of disappointment and feeling ashamed of wanting their children to be hers and not his.
It’s a week after her younger son reveals himself to be a waterbender when she leaves her husband.
Her joy when Nanuk’s tantrum had caused the water in the bath he had been refusing to get into to slosh and spill over was entirely genuine and entirely shocking to her son, who had been expecting a reprimand for his behavior. But when she had looked to Aang, who had been getting Tenzin ready for bed, she had noticed that his smile did not quite reach his eyes. Katara imagined that this was what her own face must have looked like when Tenzin first displayed his bending ability.
That night, she confronted Aang about it, admitting everything. She told him how she had wished both their sons were waterbenders. She told him how she had spent all the years of their relationship waiting for it to finally feel right, always expecting that it would soon and always disappointed. She told him how she felt increasingly bound to him more by duty than love.
In perhaps the most significant display of maturity she had ever seen from him, Aang admitted to feeling more or less the same way.
The question of what to do next had been difficult for them. Katara had proposed staying together for the sake of the children, trying to rebuild their relationship, but it sounded like a losing prospect even to her. Aang had suggested she spend some time with her family at the South Pole, taking the boys with her if she’d like. Eventually, Katara had realized that once she left, she wouldn’t want to come back.
They agreed it was best for Tenzin to remain with his father so that he could receive proper instruction. Nanuk, on the other hand, would benefit greatly from living among waterbenders. After careful explanation and tearful goodbyes, they boys were separated, Nanuk accompanying his mother, Tenzin remaining behind.
It’s over a month after their relocation when Nanuk finally stops crying himself to sleep.
On a whim, Katara had decided to go north instead of south. She justified it based on the fact that with Pakku now at the South Pole, the Northern Water Tribe lacked a master waterbender of her stature. Perhaps she had also been unwilling to face Sokka and Suki’s happy family so soon after the breakdown of her own. Either way, the bending school was more than happy to have her as an instructor and Nanuk as a student.
She tries to ignore the irony of Kana’s granddaughter fleeing to the North Pole to escape an unhappy marriage.
She knows that in the long run this is better for her son, that this way Nanuk can benefit from the tutelage of other benders besides his parents and the more readily accessible vast quantities of water and the exposure to more of his heritage. This way, he won’t have to watch his parents grow steadily more distant and bitter.
But she also knows that he is lonely without his brother to share his room, that he misses going flying with his father, and that all of this is an overwhelming amount of change for a little boy to handle. She lets him curl up next to her in the big bed at night, and it’s all she can do to keep her heart from breaking at his sobs.
It’s the instant he asks if the entire family would still be together had he been an airbender like his brother when Katara wonders how she’s managed to make such a mess of everything.
She holds him close and reassures him that it’s not his fault and he must never think otherwise, that she and his father both love him and his brother and their separation was because of their own problems. She writes a letter to Aang making sure he tells the same thing to Tenzin, wishing she could do so herself. But that is an absurd wish, really, because if she were there to reassure him, he wouldn’t need reassuring.
Katara has only recently come to realize what a disservice she and Aang had done to themselves by going along blindly with what was expected of them, but this is quickly overshadowed by the realization that even more than they, it is their children who will suffer.
But she has chosen this path and there is no turning back now, so she forges on. Slowly, things settle down. Nanuk attends school. Katara teaches. They make friends. The new house acquires decoration and personal touches and begins to feel like home. Katara keeps up a correspondence with Aang, and they even talk of going to visit in the spring.
In spite of everything, life goes on.
It’s a few short months since she managed to reestablish some kind of order when the Fire Lord arrives on a diplomatic visit.
After the official reception, Katara steals a moment with her old friend. He knows about her and Aang of course, and even though she realizes that he must have been one of the first to see this coming, he doesn’t even hint at an I told you so. Instead he offers his condolences, as if she were a widow. She brushes off his pity, jokingly reminding him that she is technically still married - there is no divorce under water tribe law - and insists they talk of more pleasant matters.
He tells her about his daughter - his only child, the Fire Lady having died giving birth to her and Zuko having yet to remarry. He beams with pride as he boasts of her progress with her studies and her bending, and if half the things he says about her are true then she is a very bright and precocious child indeed. She in turn brags of Nanuk’s latest accomplishments and shares amusing stories of Tenzin’s exploits from Aang’s letters. Being single parents seems to be yet another way in which they are now kindred spirits.
Though he is kept busy throughout the length of his stay, Katara manages to introduce him to Nanuk before he leaves. Her son is both awed and intimidated by the man who features prominently in so many of his mother and father’s stories, and barely says a word to “Uncle Zuko,” even though the latter proves to have become quite comfortable with children. But afterwards, when the two of them are alone, he tells his mother that he likes him.
It’s two days after Tenzin’s sixteenth birthday, which arrived sometime when she must have blinked, when her elder son begs her not to leave.
She and Nanuk have returned to the air temple as they do every summer for Tenzin’s birthday. Sixteen is an important year, and Tenzin has just completed his training as an airbender - his tattoos are still fresh and tender. Katara marvels at how tall he has gotten, how much he resembles his father, and how perilously close to adulthood he is. But when the time comes to say goodbye and he pleads with his mother to stay, he is still every bit her little boy, the child she is unable to hold most of the year, the child that, no matter what she says to the contrary, in her heart she feels she abandons every autumn.
Nanuk joins in his brothers pleas, begging to stay just a few days longer. She holds them both while Aang looks on, and she sees from his face that his heart is just as heavy as hers. In the end, they stay one day longer than planned. It only delays the inevitable. The next day, they leave.
It’s a year after Nanuk, at the age of twenty-one, marries and moves out of his mother’s house when the Chieftain of the Northern Water Tribe asks her to fill the recently vacated post of ambassador to the Fire Nation.
Feeling the burden of the empty nest and knowing that she has by now trained enough top-notch waterbenders that the school can get on without her, she answers the call and welcomes the chance to get away. But before she can set sail, she must spend weeks in meetings and briefings getting up-to-date on all the political goings on of both nations. In between finishing reading a report on the fur trade and starting one on the Fire Nation’s guest worker program, she briefly wonders if this is really what she wants or if she isn’t letting everyone else’s expectations dictate her life again. The melancholy that had set in after her son’s wedding only gets worse.
When she finally arrives in the Fire Nation, the welcoming delegation escorts her briskly to her new offices and the mountain of paperwork waiting for her there. When she asks how soon she will be able to meet with the Fire Lord, she is told that he is very busy and will likely not have time for her until the following week or later. She dismisses her assistants and settles in behind her desk. The excitement and sense of purpose she’d expected from the job have yet to manifest. Her sons are half a world away. The one friend she’d expected to find here is apparently too busy for her. All in all, she feels very much alone.
She’s made it through exactly one document and is on the verge of tears when Zuko barges into the room with her very startled secretary in his wake. He sweeps her into a hug, protocol be damned, rambling apologizes for not meeting her at the docks himself, but his useless assistants hadn’t seen fit to tell him that her ship was coming in today until she was already in the palace and then the idiots had tried to shuffle him off to a meeting with the minister of agriculture instead of sending for her until finally he’d simply left his study and run all the way to the ambassadorial wing to see her.
She has trouble making all of this out, however, because she is laughing uncontrollably, really smiling for the first time in too long, and the tears running down her cheeks are now tears of relief.
Whatever their duties, whatever is expected of them, Zuko is still first and foremost her friend.
It’s over two decades since she’s been splitting her time between the North Pole and the Fire Nation capital when Aang dies.
She is not there when it happens, for it comes suddenly. Tenzin and Nanuk are at his side at the end, though, and she receives a letter from them at her North Pole office informing her of their father’s passing. She knows that now she will be expected to mourn him publicly as a proper wife should, to speak at his funeral, and to bear her loss with dignity befitting of her station.
But first, she locks herself in her bedroom and cries, grieving for her friend and the father of her children, who at one time had been her whole world.
It’s four years since she was officially widowed when a little girl from the Southern Water Tribe is identified as the next Avatar.
Sokka sends her a letter, not as her brother but in his official capacity as Chieftain, asking her to be the girl - Korra’s - waterbending master. Katara is in the Fire Nation when she receives it. She knows it is an honor to instruct one Avatar, let alone two. She knows that she is the most qualified for the job. She knows that she is supposed to accept.
She talks it over with Zuko first.
Eventually, she decides that this really is something she wants to do. She says goodbye to the Fire Nation for what could be the last time and boards a ship headed south.
It is strange to be back in her childhood home. She had returned once or twice after her initial adventure with Aang, but the last time had been just after the birth of Sokka and Suki’s youngest child, over forty years ago. The circle of tents and huts she remembered had even then been replaced by larger, sturdier ice houses. Now, the little village has grown to a bustling city that rivals its sister in the north.
Korra is a stubborn, willful child and a definite tomboy. Without even knowing she is the Avatar, she demands perfection of herself. Usually, she can achieve it. When she can’t, Katara has a very sullen student on her hands.
But most of the time, Korra is cheerful and exuberant. Katara wonders if this is a trait all Avatars share, at least at the beginning of their lives. As the girl grows, she learns quickly - not just waterbending, but also sword fighting and hand to hand combat and history and engineering. She seems to soak up knowledge from everyone around her. By the time Katara has taught her all she can of bending, the young Avatar is a veritable know-it-all. She hopes that all that knowledge will soon be tempered by wisdom.
It’s a month after she declares Korra’s training complete when she shocks everyone by neither remaining at the South Pole with her brother, nor returning to the Northern Water Tribe to be with her younger son, nor even moving to Republic City where her elder son lives, but instead journeying back to the Fire Nation.
The air temple around which the city had sprung up had never really been home for her, and the South Pole hadn’t been for a long time. Nanuk and Tenzin were grown men now with families of their own, and though she loved them and her grandchildren dearly, they didn’t need her hovering over them. The Northern Water Tribe’s bending school was in the capable hands of her former students. Though there were many places she could have gone, there wasn’t anywhere where she was particularly needed.
So she returns to the city where she remembers the festivals to celebrate the coronation of the new Fire Lord, taking afternoon tea with General Iroh, and enjoying the challenge of sparing against benders of her opposite element. She goes back to where she fed the turtle ducks in the royal gardens, spent hours in the palace library, and lost even more time in conversation with Zuko, where she attended state banquets and private dinner parties with the royal family and negotiated peace treaties and trade agreements.
The Fire Nation capital was also where a friend had been willing to sacrifice his life for her, where she had ignored some of the best advice she had ever gotten, and where she had laughed for the first time after her bout of depression.
She doesn’t think of it as returning to Zuko. She simply thinks of it as returning to where she had been happy.
It is four days after Korra arrives in the capital having mastered earthbending when Katara sees her bend fire for the first time.
She is eighty-two years old. She has traveled the world, mastered previously unknown bending techniques, helped to overthrow a tyrant and worked towards establishing peace. She’s trained two Avatars, has two sons and five grandchildren. She’s been a wife and a mother, a single parent and a teacher, a leader and a diplomat. In spite of her regrets, she’s always felt that she’d done so much there was hardly anything she could have missed out on.
But watching the blue-eyed girl manipulate swirling jets of flame as she spars with the Fire Lord’s grandson, standing next to the Fire Lord himself, her closest friend and most trusted confidante throughout all the ups and downs of her life, for the first time Katara finds herself wondering What if…
It’s two months after Ozai’s defeat when Katara lets Aang down gently. It’s ten minutes after they’ve announced their engagement when the Fire Lord’s advisors finally stop protesting and begin to see the advantages of the match. It’s a little less than five years after her daughter was born when she firebends for the first time.
But there is no sense in wondering. For better or worse, this is not Katara’s life.
Fandom: Avatar: The Last Airbender/The Legend of Korra
Rating: PG
Work Count: 4,249
Characters/Pairings: Katara, Aang, Zuko, et al.; Kataang, very minor Zutara.
Warnings: Some spoilers for The Legend of Korra, but mostly speculation/wishful thinking based on what little we know so far.
Author's notes: I have no excuse for this. It was intended to be a bittersweet collection of moments from Katara's life between The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, but it came out way more bitter than sweet.
This is Katara’s life.
It’s two months after Ozai’s defeat when Katara officially becomes the Avatar’s girlfriend.
His feelings for her have been evident for some time, but she’d never let herself think about them because there had had always been more pressing matters. Teaching Aang, finding other people to teach Aang, evading capture, escaping capture, navigating the world, making their limited supplies last, plotting against the Fire Nation, leading a rebellion, holding everyone together when both time and tempers grew short - these things had always been her immediate concerns. Romance was something that might be nice, but later.
The war over, the peace treaty she’d helped to draft signed, and balance restored, Katara finds that later has become now. Finally, she is able to focus on something more fun and less complicated.
And if anything is uncomplicated, it’s Aang’s affection for her. They’ve been friends, they’ve journeyed together, they’ve learned from each other. He adores her, and returning his sentiments is the easiest and most natural thing in the world.
It’s a year later when Zuko confronts her, full of unwanted concern and over protectiveness about things that are really none of his business.
She and Aang have come to the Fire Nation capital, Aang on Avatar business, she mostly just to visit. They’ve been staying in the palace for a week. Somehow, in that time, the Fire Lord has gotten it into his head that she’s leading Aang along. As if she’s just fooling around with him until someone better comes along. Katara is incensed at the implication, and she lets him hear about it. What kind of girl does he think she is, that she’d do something like that? Aang is the Avatar and her best friend - how could she possibly expect to do better than that? And besides, he isn’t one to be giving relationship advice when he and Mai have just broken up. Again.
Zuko tells her to leave Mai out of it and says that he’s just worried about both of them. She tells him to worry about something more important, because she and Aang are very happy together, thank you very much.
It’s three years after that argument when Aang asks her to marry him.
He’s just turned sixteen - the legal age for marriage among both the water tribes and the air nomads. They’ve been together for four years and were friends before that, traveling the world all the while, and they are very much in love. It’s the logical next step. He’s even carved her a necklace.
She accepts his proposal without hesitation.
It’s ten minutes after they’ve announced their engagement when Toph takes her aside and asks what the hell she’s doing.
Everyone else seems genuinely happy for them - Zuko perhaps a little grudgingly so, but she doesn’t dwell on that. Toph, on the other hand, seems to think she’s lost her mind. Sure, you and Twinkletoes are sweet together, she says, but do you really think you guys are cut out for marriage?
Katara says that of course they are. They’re in love. People who are in love get married. That’s how things work. Toph refuses to believe a word of it, and insists that Katara doesn’t either. Before she can think of a decent retort, Aang calls her away to return her attention to their impromptu engagement party. She shoots Toph a frustrated glare instead.
Someone has decided that music is in order, for when she returns, there is a hastily assembled group of musicians playing. She and Aang dance, laughing like schoolchildren, and she wonders how anyone could doubt that they’re going to live happily ever after.
It’s just over an hour before her wedding when Katara panics.
Her hair is already done up in elaborate braids, and it is time to change into the heavy formal gown that she had thought so beautiful when she had selected it months previously. She tells Suki that she wants to use the bathroom before she puts it on. As soon as she is alone, she climbs out the window and runs.
Rounding a corner too fast, she runs smack into Zuko. He catches her by the shoulders and halts her wild flight. Without thinking, she bends the water out of the nearest fountain and onto his head. He releases her with an indignant yell, which restores her to her senses somewhat.
Apologizing profusely, she bends the water off of him and back to it’s proper place. His topknot has come completely undone, however, and his own formal clothes are a rumpled mess. Her braids, which had taken hours, are likewise ruined. Face etched with concern, Zuko demands that she take a deep breath, calm down, and tell him what’s wrong.
She tries to explain how when she saw her wedding gown, the layers of fabric and embroidery had reminded her of all the weight and importance of being the Avatar’s wife, of everything that it meant and how it would inevitably come to define her. She tries to explain how daunting it had seemed, but she is still half-hysterical, her words coming out in a rush punctuated with wild hand gestures.
Zuko doesn’t tell her that none of that matters as long as she’s in love, the way Aang would. He doesn’t tell her that she’s more than capable of rising to all those challenges, the way Sokka or Suki would. Instead, he says that she doesn’t have to marry Aang if it isn’t what she wants.
Katara is flabbergasted. Her moment of panic over, she can’t even contemplate walking out on her own wedding, abandoning her fiancé in front of all her family and friends, disappointing everyone in the world who had been waiting for this day. She protests that she is not about to run away.
Ignoring the irony of that statement, Zuko insists that he wasn’t suggesting that. He just wants to make sure she knows that she has a choice. She responds irritably that of course she knows, that she wouldn’t have agreed to marry Aang if it wasn’t what she wanted. Not giving him a chance to say anything else, she turns and storms back in the direction she came.
When she returns to her room, Suki is getting ready to send out search parties. She is distraught to see her ruined braids and wonders what could have gotten into her. Katara dismisses it as wedding day jitters, and Suki helps her rearrange her hair into a simpler but still elegant style. They manage to be ready just in time.
Though her mouth is dry with nerves as she recites her vows, the sight of everyone gathered, happy and proud of her, and most of all Aang smiling from ear to ear reassures her.
It’s four months since they were married when she discovers she’s pregnant.
Aang is happy, of course, but also nervous about being a father. Katara, on the other hand, is ecstatic. Mothering has always been second nature to her. She throws herself into planning for the baby’s arrival, selecting a room in the air temple where they live to be a nursery, sewing sheets and blankets and baby clothes, and rattling off potential names. Three months before she is due, they settle on Tenzin if it’s a boy and Kaya if it’s a girl.
Where their courtship had been predictable and almost perfunctory and the early days of their marriage had been shy and awkward, her pregnancy is joyful. This child, it seems, is the piece that had been missing in their relationship. For all his worries, Katara is convinced that Aang will make a wonderful father, and the three of them will be a picture-perfect little family. When the baby comes, Katara will have everything she ever wanted. When the baby comes, finally everything will be right. It has to be.
It’s a little less than five years after her elder son was born when he airbends for the first time.
Aang is in Ba Sing Se, a trip Katara was supposed to accompany him on until both their children came down with colds at the same time. Understanding that the Earth King needed him, she had told him to go anyway, and he had reluctantly left her with two sniffling, miserable toddlers.
She had been preoccupied with Nanuk, trying to get him to eat in spite of his sore throat, when Tenzin had been hit with another bout of sneezing. Each sneeze grew increasingly louder. The last one sent a sudden gust of wind through the room.
She had fussed over him appropriately and told him how proud she was and written to his father right away. But that night, when both boys are tucked into bed and finally sleeping and she is alone with her thoughts, she can’t help but feel disappointed. She doesn’t really know why. She had always known that her sons might be airbenders. She had even suspected it before Tenzin was born, based on some kind of gut feeling or maternal instinct, the way he had moved in her womb being far lighter and more energetic than she had expected.
So when Aang returns, she forces herself to be every bit as excited as he is, burying those feelings of disappointment and feeling ashamed of wanting their children to be hers and not his.
It’s a week after her younger son reveals himself to be a waterbender when she leaves her husband.
Her joy when Nanuk’s tantrum had caused the water in the bath he had been refusing to get into to slosh and spill over was entirely genuine and entirely shocking to her son, who had been expecting a reprimand for his behavior. But when she had looked to Aang, who had been getting Tenzin ready for bed, she had noticed that his smile did not quite reach his eyes. Katara imagined that this was what her own face must have looked like when Tenzin first displayed his bending ability.
That night, she confronted Aang about it, admitting everything. She told him how she had wished both their sons were waterbenders. She told him how she had spent all the years of their relationship waiting for it to finally feel right, always expecting that it would soon and always disappointed. She told him how she felt increasingly bound to him more by duty than love.
In perhaps the most significant display of maturity she had ever seen from him, Aang admitted to feeling more or less the same way.
The question of what to do next had been difficult for them. Katara had proposed staying together for the sake of the children, trying to rebuild their relationship, but it sounded like a losing prospect even to her. Aang had suggested she spend some time with her family at the South Pole, taking the boys with her if she’d like. Eventually, Katara had realized that once she left, she wouldn’t want to come back.
They agreed it was best for Tenzin to remain with his father so that he could receive proper instruction. Nanuk, on the other hand, would benefit greatly from living among waterbenders. After careful explanation and tearful goodbyes, they boys were separated, Nanuk accompanying his mother, Tenzin remaining behind.
It’s over a month after their relocation when Nanuk finally stops crying himself to sleep.
On a whim, Katara had decided to go north instead of south. She justified it based on the fact that with Pakku now at the South Pole, the Northern Water Tribe lacked a master waterbender of her stature. Perhaps she had also been unwilling to face Sokka and Suki’s happy family so soon after the breakdown of her own. Either way, the bending school was more than happy to have her as an instructor and Nanuk as a student.
She tries to ignore the irony of Kana’s granddaughter fleeing to the North Pole to escape an unhappy marriage.
She knows that in the long run this is better for her son, that this way Nanuk can benefit from the tutelage of other benders besides his parents and the more readily accessible vast quantities of water and the exposure to more of his heritage. This way, he won’t have to watch his parents grow steadily more distant and bitter.
But she also knows that he is lonely without his brother to share his room, that he misses going flying with his father, and that all of this is an overwhelming amount of change for a little boy to handle. She lets him curl up next to her in the big bed at night, and it’s all she can do to keep her heart from breaking at his sobs.
It’s the instant he asks if the entire family would still be together had he been an airbender like his brother when Katara wonders how she’s managed to make such a mess of everything.
She holds him close and reassures him that it’s not his fault and he must never think otherwise, that she and his father both love him and his brother and their separation was because of their own problems. She writes a letter to Aang making sure he tells the same thing to Tenzin, wishing she could do so herself. But that is an absurd wish, really, because if she were there to reassure him, he wouldn’t need reassuring.
Katara has only recently come to realize what a disservice she and Aang had done to themselves by going along blindly with what was expected of them, but this is quickly overshadowed by the realization that even more than they, it is their children who will suffer.
But she has chosen this path and there is no turning back now, so she forges on. Slowly, things settle down. Nanuk attends school. Katara teaches. They make friends. The new house acquires decoration and personal touches and begins to feel like home. Katara keeps up a correspondence with Aang, and they even talk of going to visit in the spring.
In spite of everything, life goes on.
It’s a few short months since she managed to reestablish some kind of order when the Fire Lord arrives on a diplomatic visit.
After the official reception, Katara steals a moment with her old friend. He knows about her and Aang of course, and even though she realizes that he must have been one of the first to see this coming, he doesn’t even hint at an I told you so. Instead he offers his condolences, as if she were a widow. She brushes off his pity, jokingly reminding him that she is technically still married - there is no divorce under water tribe law - and insists they talk of more pleasant matters.
He tells her about his daughter - his only child, the Fire Lady having died giving birth to her and Zuko having yet to remarry. He beams with pride as he boasts of her progress with her studies and her bending, and if half the things he says about her are true then she is a very bright and precocious child indeed. She in turn brags of Nanuk’s latest accomplishments and shares amusing stories of Tenzin’s exploits from Aang’s letters. Being single parents seems to be yet another way in which they are now kindred spirits.
Though he is kept busy throughout the length of his stay, Katara manages to introduce him to Nanuk before he leaves. Her son is both awed and intimidated by the man who features prominently in so many of his mother and father’s stories, and barely says a word to “Uncle Zuko,” even though the latter proves to have become quite comfortable with children. But afterwards, when the two of them are alone, he tells his mother that he likes him.
It’s two days after Tenzin’s sixteenth birthday, which arrived sometime when she must have blinked, when her elder son begs her not to leave.
She and Nanuk have returned to the air temple as they do every summer for Tenzin’s birthday. Sixteen is an important year, and Tenzin has just completed his training as an airbender - his tattoos are still fresh and tender. Katara marvels at how tall he has gotten, how much he resembles his father, and how perilously close to adulthood he is. But when the time comes to say goodbye and he pleads with his mother to stay, he is still every bit her little boy, the child she is unable to hold most of the year, the child that, no matter what she says to the contrary, in her heart she feels she abandons every autumn.
Nanuk joins in his brothers pleas, begging to stay just a few days longer. She holds them both while Aang looks on, and she sees from his face that his heart is just as heavy as hers. In the end, they stay one day longer than planned. It only delays the inevitable. The next day, they leave.
It’s a year after Nanuk, at the age of twenty-one, marries and moves out of his mother’s house when the Chieftain of the Northern Water Tribe asks her to fill the recently vacated post of ambassador to the Fire Nation.
Feeling the burden of the empty nest and knowing that she has by now trained enough top-notch waterbenders that the school can get on without her, she answers the call and welcomes the chance to get away. But before she can set sail, she must spend weeks in meetings and briefings getting up-to-date on all the political goings on of both nations. In between finishing reading a report on the fur trade and starting one on the Fire Nation’s guest worker program, she briefly wonders if this is really what she wants or if she isn’t letting everyone else’s expectations dictate her life again. The melancholy that had set in after her son’s wedding only gets worse.
When she finally arrives in the Fire Nation, the welcoming delegation escorts her briskly to her new offices and the mountain of paperwork waiting for her there. When she asks how soon she will be able to meet with the Fire Lord, she is told that he is very busy and will likely not have time for her until the following week or later. She dismisses her assistants and settles in behind her desk. The excitement and sense of purpose she’d expected from the job have yet to manifest. Her sons are half a world away. The one friend she’d expected to find here is apparently too busy for her. All in all, she feels very much alone.
She’s made it through exactly one document and is on the verge of tears when Zuko barges into the room with her very startled secretary in his wake. He sweeps her into a hug, protocol be damned, rambling apologizes for not meeting her at the docks himself, but his useless assistants hadn’t seen fit to tell him that her ship was coming in today until she was already in the palace and then the idiots had tried to shuffle him off to a meeting with the minister of agriculture instead of sending for her until finally he’d simply left his study and run all the way to the ambassadorial wing to see her.
She has trouble making all of this out, however, because she is laughing uncontrollably, really smiling for the first time in too long, and the tears running down her cheeks are now tears of relief.
Whatever their duties, whatever is expected of them, Zuko is still first and foremost her friend.
It’s over two decades since she’s been splitting her time between the North Pole and the Fire Nation capital when Aang dies.
She is not there when it happens, for it comes suddenly. Tenzin and Nanuk are at his side at the end, though, and she receives a letter from them at her North Pole office informing her of their father’s passing. She knows that now she will be expected to mourn him publicly as a proper wife should, to speak at his funeral, and to bear her loss with dignity befitting of her station.
But first, she locks herself in her bedroom and cries, grieving for her friend and the father of her children, who at one time had been her whole world.
It’s four years since she was officially widowed when a little girl from the Southern Water Tribe is identified as the next Avatar.
Sokka sends her a letter, not as her brother but in his official capacity as Chieftain, asking her to be the girl - Korra’s - waterbending master. Katara is in the Fire Nation when she receives it. She knows it is an honor to instruct one Avatar, let alone two. She knows that she is the most qualified for the job. She knows that she is supposed to accept.
She talks it over with Zuko first.
Eventually, she decides that this really is something she wants to do. She says goodbye to the Fire Nation for what could be the last time and boards a ship headed south.
It is strange to be back in her childhood home. She had returned once or twice after her initial adventure with Aang, but the last time had been just after the birth of Sokka and Suki’s youngest child, over forty years ago. The circle of tents and huts she remembered had even then been replaced by larger, sturdier ice houses. Now, the little village has grown to a bustling city that rivals its sister in the north.
Korra is a stubborn, willful child and a definite tomboy. Without even knowing she is the Avatar, she demands perfection of herself. Usually, she can achieve it. When she can’t, Katara has a very sullen student on her hands.
But most of the time, Korra is cheerful and exuberant. Katara wonders if this is a trait all Avatars share, at least at the beginning of their lives. As the girl grows, she learns quickly - not just waterbending, but also sword fighting and hand to hand combat and history and engineering. She seems to soak up knowledge from everyone around her. By the time Katara has taught her all she can of bending, the young Avatar is a veritable know-it-all. She hopes that all that knowledge will soon be tempered by wisdom.
It’s a month after she declares Korra’s training complete when she shocks everyone by neither remaining at the South Pole with her brother, nor returning to the Northern Water Tribe to be with her younger son, nor even moving to Republic City where her elder son lives, but instead journeying back to the Fire Nation.
The air temple around which the city had sprung up had never really been home for her, and the South Pole hadn’t been for a long time. Nanuk and Tenzin were grown men now with families of their own, and though she loved them and her grandchildren dearly, they didn’t need her hovering over them. The Northern Water Tribe’s bending school was in the capable hands of her former students. Though there were many places she could have gone, there wasn’t anywhere where she was particularly needed.
So she returns to the city where she remembers the festivals to celebrate the coronation of the new Fire Lord, taking afternoon tea with General Iroh, and enjoying the challenge of sparing against benders of her opposite element. She goes back to where she fed the turtle ducks in the royal gardens, spent hours in the palace library, and lost even more time in conversation with Zuko, where she attended state banquets and private dinner parties with the royal family and negotiated peace treaties and trade agreements.
The Fire Nation capital was also where a friend had been willing to sacrifice his life for her, where she had ignored some of the best advice she had ever gotten, and where she had laughed for the first time after her bout of depression.
She doesn’t think of it as returning to Zuko. She simply thinks of it as returning to where she had been happy.
It is four days after Korra arrives in the capital having mastered earthbending when Katara sees her bend fire for the first time.
She is eighty-two years old. She has traveled the world, mastered previously unknown bending techniques, helped to overthrow a tyrant and worked towards establishing peace. She’s trained two Avatars, has two sons and five grandchildren. She’s been a wife and a mother, a single parent and a teacher, a leader and a diplomat. In spite of her regrets, she’s always felt that she’d done so much there was hardly anything she could have missed out on.
But watching the blue-eyed girl manipulate swirling jets of flame as she spars with the Fire Lord’s grandson, standing next to the Fire Lord himself, her closest friend and most trusted confidante throughout all the ups and downs of her life, for the first time Katara finds herself wondering What if…
It’s two months after Ozai’s defeat when Katara lets Aang down gently. It’s ten minutes after they’ve announced their engagement when the Fire Lord’s advisors finally stop protesting and begin to see the advantages of the match. It’s a little less than five years after her daughter was born when she firebends for the first time.
But there is no sense in wondering. For better or worse, this is not Katara’s life.