Current location:	bed
Current mood:	sleepy
Current music:	"Tubthumping"; Chumbawumba
Entry tags:	avatar: the last airbender, fanfic, gen, katara, sokka

Avatar: The Last Airbender- "The Water And The World" (Katara, Sokka)
Characters: Katara, Sokka
Rating: K
Summary: The gAang makes a pit stop, season one. Katara does not get to spend it the way she’d like.

notes: Written for the “Favorite Character” fic challenge on atlaland.

. . . no, Katara is not actually my favorite character. >>;; Avatar is a very hard series to have just one favorite character for, though, and I felt she needed the love. Besides, Katara and Sokka’s sibling rivalry is just too much fun to turn down a chance to write. <3

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“The Water And The World”

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The water is deep. The world is wide. The sky is infinite.

Oh, the sky is definitely infinite.

Katara’s first breath of air came before she ever knew she was drowning, all because of this weird, wonderful kid who shouldn’t have existed and then somehow became everything that did exist. Everything, anyway, except for Sokka in the saddle beside her and Appa underneath them and Momo chittering from wherever and the weight of her mother’s necklace around her throat and the sight of her father’s boomerang on Sokka’s hip (not always even that, because he’d left them, hadn’t he, he was more gone than even Mother). Suddenly the world was the world, and not just their little part of it.

Suddenly she was learning. Suddenly, waterbending wasn’t a distraction, it was her weapon and her life, everything it had ever cried out to be stopped up inside of her for so long, everything that she’d always known it could and should be and everything that--

“Hey, Katara, can we get a hand over here or what?!” Sokka demands, pointedly waving a soaped-up scrubbing brush at her from the other side of the lagoon, and Katara grits her teeth in resentment as her concentration and her form both break and drops her head into her hands.

Suddenly waterbending is the most convenient way to scrub down a stinky, hulking air bison.

Not exactly the kind of glamorous training she’d had in mind when they’d left the South Pole. But then again, Sokka’s practical side can ruin the mystery and glamour in just about anything.

“Katara! C’mon already, do I look like I’ve got all day?! We’re on a schedule here, the North Pole isn’t going to get up and come to us!” Sokka yells. Katara eyes him through her fingers, then twitches her wrist.

The little scream he gives as her miniature tidal wave knocks him over is almost gratifying enough to make up for bison-scrubbing duty.

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. : end : .

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. : you ain’t never gonna keep me down : .