rain from a broken sky.
characters: aang, katara, zuko.
notes: for bean, and her art. all nsfw.

…

Aang's shoulder presses into hers when he sits beside her at the dock and she can feel the worry stretching his skin, as if he's terrified that she'll wither away in front of his eyes. All Katara can give him is an empty smile and a gaze that lies, because maybe she will drift or disintegrate or just completely waste away from the soles of her feet to the top of her head, sift through the dirty boards of the dock and become sea foam.

He's proud of her, but Katara's not sure if she can live with herself.

Zuko told me what you did, and terror grips her heart for only a moment, the water around the tips of her feet freezes so slightly, or...what you didn't do, I guess, and it drips away, melting back into the tiny waves that curl at her toes, and her heart fills with relief. Aang doesn't know what sort of monster she is, not yet; the kind that smiles with sharp, shredding teeth and laughs, a sound as rich as an omen, and lays gentle touches onto others with fingers that pull to manipulate life blood. She is the kind of monster who feels, because once she was wholly human (but if she doesn't embrace the ways of monstrosity, then how can she ever hope to fight these monsters?)

"We should get going," he lays a hand on the center of her back and it fills Katara with lightness, just a sliver of it, and she leans on him as he helps her stand, because it is not exhaustion that has made her bones creak with fragility, but restraint. (There are many dangerous things waiting to break through her skeleton.)

When she is unchained, she will face him again.

…

Behind her eyelids, she grips his blood in her palms, traps all of his arteries under her fingers, and watches the purple tint of suffocation spread through his skin. Katara thinks she can be satisfied with this, watching him slowly wilt in front of her, every lingering second that he gasps for air to parallel all of the times she's cried out for her mother in futility.

There is no mercy left in the corners of her heart; (there was never any mercy, just weakness and cowardice and slits of her conscience trying to remind her she is not of the darkness). Katara thinks she could learn to wade through this dark side of herself, the same way she had once thought she could love the dark side of Jet, because he and she are borne of the same war casualties, both trying to quell the anger and sadness that is cut out in the shape of their loved ones.

When she wakes up, Sokka is staring at her and the morning breeze drags her curls through the grass.

She opens her mouth to ask him what's wrong—his face is frozen in a mixture of confusion and inklings of fear, the way no sibling should ever gaze at another sibling, the precarious knowledge of someone so close to you being so dangerous—but her fingers clench in the grass underneath her and it crumbles in her hands.

All of the grass underneath her crunches dryly, shriveling and dead under her phantom touch.

She can barely feel his fingers latch into her shoulder when she stands until she tries to rip them away, something pulling free as she shifts away, "I don't want to talk, Sokka," and something tugs inside of her. Maybe one day she will watch people crumble into bloodless dust while she sleeps.

Maybe she can climb into an empty well and wring water from dry stones.

…

Katara kicks him over while he's sleeping, curled into himself defensively, and doesn't care that his eyes narrow at her through the darkness (and how bright they are amidst the inky black nothingness). She waits for that laser-like focus, golden eyes turned in her direction.

"It's not enough," she says, and through his sleepy haze, his jaw ticks and hardens, and he stares at her. He's seen her bring men to their knees with the slice of her fingers, he has seen lifetimes of powerful women and she is no new thing to him.

If anyone can help her, it would be him, but no one could understand, and Katara is at least grateful of that.

"So you want to go back." Zuko keeps his voice even and she's grateful for that, because she would destroy this idea with the slightest inflection in his voice, the slightest hindrance of any emotion. He is no moral compass, and he does not understand this, but he is the only one she trusts to come startlingly close.

She knots her fingers in her skirts, energy buzzing through her body. "I need to go back." Heat floods underneath her skin, prickles numbness at her fingertips until the chill of her body is chased away, and suddenly Katara feels too caged in this space full of her darkest admissions. It's not safe here where Zuko can so easily pick apart her shifts in demeanor, and she moves to leave.

His hand on her shoulder had been one thing, cold and heavy like an anchor to keep her still, but this is entirely different because his fingers burn against the inside of her wrist, like he is trying to pour something blistering and molten into her veins. She pulls her arm, twists away from him because she needs to get away, she needs to breathe something that isn't fire and smoke and destruction, but she feels his other hand move against her shoulder blade and tug her back.

They haven't been alone like this since she'd carved herself empty and hollow of resentment towards her mother's killer.

"Please listen to me, Katara," and there's something urgent in the way he looks at her that unsettles her because she tries not to look at him the same way, like maybe there's something she can dig her fingers into and hold onto in this brittle, scarred boy (but she can't, because he's on the verge of a glorious future and she still has to find her way in the world).

She doesn't want to, but she meets his gaze reluctantly, body tense in his grip. "Once you do this," stop his blood while tracing lifelines in her palm, listen to the air wheeze out of his lungs and let his body sink into the ground, "you can't go back," and there's something in his eyes that says he knows, that he has been in that place she cannot come back from, and that eventually she will regret it.

(But she won't, there is a reason this hatred has lasted so long and been unquenchable by every other thing in the world.) Katara kisses him into shock and pries herself free when he lets her go.

…

She thought it might be more satisfying, but she sits with her knees drawn in a huddle as Zuko uses his dagger to—she can't look, and what a shame, that is. (She smells it, him, when he is incinerated, and it breaks its way into her memories like the infamous black snow.)

…

"Zuko," she curls her fingers into his chest, breathing heavy and low underneath him, and they move the way only two broken people can move—seamless, arrhythmic, frustratingly close to perfect but knowing they will never be. Katara's back drags along the ground and Zuko grips her hips, yanking them close to his, and fuck, there is no going back from this.

There are just some things you can outrun, and Katara has stranded part of herself in this dark place (with feeble, despicable old men and charred ashes and abandoned helmets of veteran raiders), waiting patiently to regret it all in the future.