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Katara woke to the heavy pressure of the baby pressing down against her bladder, and understood at once that this was what had pulled her from sleep. For a moment she lay still, trying to let her mind catch up with her body, trying to remember where she was and what morning this was.
The window of their bedroom came into focus first, a pale rectangle still grey with the hour. The sun had not yet risen. Somewhere beyond the glass, Republic City was beginning its slow exhale into dawn, the distant sounds of the harbor carrying faintly across Air Temple Island: water lapping against stone, boats shifting in their moorings, the first ferry horns moving across the bay.
She had grown used to those sounds over the last year in a way she had never expected to. The South Pole had its own sounds, its own silences. Sometimes, in the early dark, she still reached for them and found only the city instead.
She turned her head slowly on the pillow.
Aang was beside her, deep in sleep, one arm thrown over the lower half of his face so she could see only the blue arrow climbing the center of his forehead. The blankets had slipped from him in the night and pooled low at his knees, leaving his chest bare. He was breathing slowly and steadily, the way he breathed when he had gone somewhere far down inside himself to rest, that meditative quality she had always found both beautiful and slightly unnerving, as though some part of him was always practicing for stillness.
She had not heard him come in. She remembered the candle she had left burning on the nightstand so he would not stumble in the dark. She remembered telling herself she would stay awake until she heard the door. After that, nothing. The candle had burned down to a stub of wax.
She looked at him more closely in the dim light.
There was a bruise disappearing beneath the waistband of his sleeping trousers, and another greenish shadow along his ribs. She felt the familiar tightening at the base of her throat: the healer's reflex, the wife's reflex, the part of her that catalogued injuries before she had time to be afraid of them.
She would ask when he woke. She would heal what she could.
Her bladder reminded her firmly that she had other priorities.
Katara shifted to the edge of the bed the way the healers had taught her, and the way the older women of the tribe had always taught each other, the knowledge passed in low voices from grandmother to daughter to granddaughter across more years than anyone could count.
Roll to your side first. Never try to sit straight up. Let your legs carry the weight down.
She had thought it seemed overly careful the first time someone explained it to her. She understood now, with the particular humility of a body that had stopped belonging entirely to itself.
She made it to sitting. The pain came anyway, a sharp gathering across her pelvis and lower back that she breathed through with her eyes closed and one hand pressed flat against the underside of her belly, feeling the solid weight of the child, this unknown person she was carrying.
The healers in the South had not been able to tell her whether the child was a boy or a girl. No one yet could. Gran Gran had only smiled and said, the baby will tell you when it's ready and born.
Katara had laughed at the time.
She was not laughing now.
She stood.
The walk to the bathroom was slow and ungainly, and she did not think about it too carefully. Over the last several weeks she had made peace with the fact that her body was operating under its own authority. The remarkable instrument she had spent years training and trusting was engaged in something larger than anything she had ever asked of it before. She could still bend. She could still heal. She had kept that. Everything else had become negotiation.
She relieved herself, washed her hands, and stood at the mirror.
For a long time, she looked at herself.
Her face had rounded the way her grandmother warned her it would, the angles she had always taken for granted softened and filled out. She wore the blue sleeping robe Gran Gran had pressed into her hands four months ago, the last time she had been back to the South Pole. The old woman's fingers had checked the seams with the thoroughness of someone who knew exactly what she was making it for. Katara had only just begun to show then. Gran Gran had looked at her belly and said, after a long silence, you have your mother's way of carrying.
Katara had not known what to do with that.
Now the robe hung differently over her body. Her breasts were heavy and full in a way that no longer surprised her but still occasionally unsettled her, her body preparing itself with a certainty she could not always match. Her eyes were still the same blue they had always been, the color of deep water, but the shadows beneath them were new.
She looked tired. She supposed she was.
And she looked visible.
That was the part no one had warned her about, not really. People had warned her about swelling feet, sleeplessness, the ache in her lower back. No one had told her what it would feel like to carry a child while the world watched her carry it.
At council dinners, strangers' eyes dropped to her stomach before they reached her face. At the market, women she did not know offered blessings and advice, and men lowered their voices when they said the Avatar's child, as though the baby were not a baby at all but a future office, a symbol, a question waiting to be answered.
More than once, Katara had wanted to place both hands over her belly and say: this child belongs to themself first.
The first tightening came before she was ready for it.
Katara gripped the edge of the sink and breathed through the slow gathering pressure. It began near the top of her belly and moved downward with deliberate force, hardening her body beneath the robe, pulling her inward until the small room seemed to narrow around her.
Ten. Fifteen. Twenty.
The tightening eased before fear could fully take shape.
She breathed out carefully. It was probably nothing, she told herself. Practice contractions. Her body preparing.
But when she looked at herself in the mirror again, shaken in a way she had not expected, the thought came plainly and without mercy.
She wanted her mother.
Not in the distant, aching way she had wanted her for years, but urgently, like a child reaching for a hand in the dark.
She thought about Kya more often now than she had in years. The grief was still there, layered and complex after so much time, but this was something quieter, more persistent. She would find herself wondering in the middle of ordinary tasks what her mother had felt standing in a mirror like this one. Whether Kya had been frightened. Whether she had stood in the cold predawn dark of the South Pole and looked at her own face and felt this same vertiginous mixture of certainty and terror.
She wanted to ask her.
That was the part that never got easier. The loss remained, but the specific wanting was what stayed: the questions she would never get to ask. Her mother had known things about being a woman, about carrying a child, delivering it, looking into a newborn face for the first time and understanding what it meant.
And that knowledge had gone with her.
No matter how many healers Katara trained with, no matter how many women of the tribe she listened to, the particular voice she needed most was the one she could not reach.
So she had done the next bravest thing. Four months ago she had gone back to the South Pole on purpose, because she knew she needed to be near the women who had known her mother, the older aunts and the elder healers who still sometimes called her little Kya's girl without meaning anything by it. She had sat in firelit rooms and listened. She had let her grandmother press medicinal scrolls into her hands and explain, in that flat unbothered way of hers, what the next months would ask of her body. She had let Gran Gran teach Aang the massages that would ease her back, and watched him turn red to the tips of his ears while an old woman demonstrated on a rolled blanket exactly where and how to press.
She had laughed until her sides hurt. She had cried later, alone, about things she could not fully explain.
That was what the tribe was, in the end: not a place on a map she had left behind, but a long line of women putting their hands on the next one in line and saying, here, this is how, we have got you.
She had helped bring babies into the world before. She had done it crossing the Serpent's Pass in the middle of a war, on the ground with nothing but her own hands and her bending and a mother laboring through fear and exhaustion. She knew the signs. She knew the stages. She knew what the body did when it was ready, and what it needed when it was not.
Still, something in her chest tightened when she thought about being on the other side of it.
She was going to be someone's mother.
The thought arrived enormous and impossible to resolve into anything simpler. She loved this child. She was certain of that, loved them in a way that felt geological, something laid down over time and pressure until it became part of the structure of her.
But love did not dissolve fear. She had learned that a long time ago. Love was sometimes what made fear so large.
What if she got it wrong? What if she was too urgent, too certain, too inclined toward fixing? What if the child arrived and she did not know how to do the soft thing, the thing she could not remember well enough because she had been eight when it was taken from her?
She knew how to stay. She had always known how to stay.
She did not know if staying was the same as being a mother.
Katara pressed both hands against the edge of the sink and let her head drop forward.
She did not realize she was crying until she tasted it.
It was not the loud, shoulder-shaking grief she had sometimes given herself over to in the years after her mother's death. This was smaller and more continuous, slipping down her face without permission. She was too tired, too uncomfortable, too heavy with everything to stop it.
She wanted Kya to be standing somewhere in this home, in this city she had never seen. She wanted to walk out of the bathroom and find her in the kitchen making something warm. She wanted to say, Mom, I don't know how to do this, and to have her mother say yes you do, or no one does, or simply to hold her for one moment like she was still someone's child.
Which she was. She still was. She would always be.
Arms came around her from behind.
She startled, though she recognized him before the small sound left her throat: the particular warmth of him, the specific way he placed himself around her, careful of her belly, instinctive about the angle. His hands found the underside of her bump and lifted gently, sharing the weight. Something in her lower back that had been quietly screaming for the last hour released with a shudder that went through her whole body.
In the mirror, his tattooed hands were splayed wide against her belly, steady and certain. His eyes were still heavy with sleep. He pressed his mouth to the back of her neck, soft and unhurried, and breathed in as if he were finding his way home.
His thumbs moved in the slow circles her grandmother had shown him.
"Are you okay?" he asked. His voice was low and rough from sleep, but she could hear the edge beneath it.
Katara looked at their reflection: the two of them, his arms around her, his hands on the life they had made together in the middle of everything they were still trying to build.
"Please," she said. "Just stay like this a little longer."
He did not ask anything else. He settled his weight gently against her and held her.
She cried a little more. He let her.
When she could speak without her voice coming apart, she said, "I was thinking about Mom."
Aang made a quiet sound against her hair, not quite words. Agreement, acknowledgment, the sound of someone listening who knew what it cost to say the thing you were saying.
"I keep wanting to ask her things," Katara said. "I thought maybe, once I was here, I would know something I didn't know before."
"Do you?" he asked softly.
She considered it. "I know I'm afraid. I know I love them. I know I don't want to do anything wrong."
"That's a lot."
"It doesn't feel like enough."
"Katara." He said her name not as a correction, but as a way of returning her to herself. "Your mother would have been so proud of you."
She closed her eyes. "You didn't know her."
"No," he agreed. "But I know you."
She stood with that for a moment.
Outside the window, a sky bison lowed once and fell quiet.
She was going to say something when the second contraction came.
This one was different. It started low, buried deep beneath the weight of her belly, and spread outward, wrapping around her hips, her lower back, the tops of her thighs, until there was nowhere in her body that did not belong to it.
Katara gripped the sink and tried to breathe. The breath broke halfway out of her.
Aang's hands went still against her. "Katara."
"I know," she breathed.
The contraction loosened slowly, in layers, leaving her shaking against the sink. She took stock of herself clinically, the way she would if it were someone else standing there.
The first one, she could dismiss. The second, she could explain. By the third, twenty-four minutes later, even Katara had to stop pretending her body was only practicing.
She knew because she had been counting while she sat at the edge of the bed, her hands loosely working the night's tangles out of her hair, as Aang stood in the bathroom doorway still in his sleep trousers, watching her with an expression he was trying to keep neutral.
This one came with a deeper pull. When it reached its peak she had to close her eyes and press her hand hard against her side and simply exist inside it until it passed.
When she opened her eyes, Aang was crouched in front of her, his hands on her knees, his face very close.
"What did Gran Gran say?" he asked. "About the difference between the practice ones and the real ones."
"She said I would know."
"And do you?"
Katara looked at him. There was a crease across his cheek from where his arm had pressed against his face in sleep. His eyes were wide and steady, the shadows beneath them deep from the little rest he had gotten. She understood that he was frightened, and that the frightened part of him had decided the best thing to do was ask questions.
"How far apart were they?" he asked.
"Twenty-four minutes. That one and the last one."
He nodded, filing it away.
"Did you eat anything? You should eat. Gran Gran said you should eat something light when it starts." He stood and took her hands, helping her up with a care so practiced it had become invisible between them. "Can you walk? Should I carry you? I can carry you."
"Aang."
"I'm going to get the healer."
"Aang." She put her hand on his arm. "It's still early. This will probably take all day, maybe longer. First labors are slow. I know that."
He looked at her. She could see him weighing what she knew against what he wanted to do, which was almost certainly to send word across the bay to Sokka and then stand beside her for the next several hours without blinking.
"Should I send for Sokka?" he asked.
"Not yet," she said. "Let's get something to eat first."
He helped her to the kitchen with one hand at her back and the other holding hers. She noticed, as she always noticed, that he was favoring his right side.
The kitchen was dim and quiet, early light coming through the window over the stove in long pale lines. Katara lowered herself into a chair while Aang began breakfast, and she was grateful in a way she had spent the last several weeks fighting against. She had always been the one in motion. Receiving care still felt like something she had to consciously allow.
Momo landed on her shoulder. He had chosen her more often in the last months, over the open sky, over Aang, over whatever the day might offer. He pressed his small face against her cheek and chirped, half question, half greeting.
"Good morning," she said, scratching behind his ears.
Aang moved quickly around the kitchen, too quickly for someone trying not to limp. He was still bare to the waist from sleep, and that was almost the problem, because it meant she could see the careful turn of his hip when he reached for the pan, the stiffness in his back as he bent over the stove. If she had not known his body as well as she did, if she had not spent years healing bruises and burns and fractures he insisted were nothing, she might still have missed how he was holding it.
But she did know him.
"Aang," she said softly.
He glanced back. "Yeah?"
"What happened yesterday?"
His hand stilled over the pan.
"Your hip," she said. "And your back. You're limping."
Aang looked down, almost as if he had forgotten his body could betray him. "It's not as bad as it looks."
"That isn't what I asked."
He let out a quiet breath, turned off the heat beneath the eggs, and faced her. "There was trouble after the meeting. A group of people were waiting outside. Angry about the vote. Angry that the council keeps asking the Avatar to settle things, and then resents me when I do."
"A group of people."
"It wasn't planned, not like that. They were upset, and I was trying to keep it from becoming worse before the guards reached us."
"Did they put you on the ground?"
He hesitated.
That was answer enough. Fear moved through her before anger could arrive, cold and immediate. Someone had decided to send a handful of men at the Avatar's back, in his own city, in the place he had given years of his life to building.
And if they could do that to him, what would they do to anything he loved?
Her hand tightened over her belly before she realized it.
Aang saw. His face changed. "Katara."
"Come here," she said.
"You're in labor."
"And you're hurt."
"I'm fine."
She gave him a look. He closed his mouth.
Slowly, carefully, he crossed the kitchen and knelt in front of her chair before she could try to stand. Even that movement made something flicker across his face.
Katara caught it. Her hand went to his cheek first, not the bruise. She needed him to look at her. "Why didn't you tell me?"
His expression softened with guilt. "I didn't want to wake you so you could lie there worrying about me. You've been having trouble sleeping, I know you're uncomfortable. I wanted you to save your strength."
"You think finding out like this worries me less?"
He looked down. "I thought I could handle it."
"I know you did." Her thumb moved once along his cheekbone. "That's what worries me."
The words settled between them. Then Aang let out a slow breath, and some of the tension left his shoulders. "I'm sorry."
"I'm not angry," she said. "I'm worried."
"I know."
"Good. Turn around. Let me see it before I lose my nerve about how much I'm going to want to fix it."
He turned, and she eased the right side of his trousers down a careful inch, and for the first time she saw the whole of it.
In the bedroom she had only seen the front, the dark spread climbing out of his waistband at the hip. The back was worse. A deep purple bloom sat low over his right kidney, its edges already yellowing, and above it, across the muscle of his back, a second mark with the flat, broad shape of a heel, as though someone had stamped down on him while he was already folded over.
She drew a thin ribbon of water from the bowl on the table, let it glow over her palm, then passed her hand slowly above his skin, not healing yet, only listening. The water told her even more than her eyes had, sinking past the color into the muscle beneath, where the swelling sat deep and hot.
Not a fall. Not one bad landing. Someone had put him on the ground and kept going while he was down.
She searched for cracked ribs, for bleeding deep in the tissue, for the wrongness of something torn. The water came back with only bruising, ugly and spread wide, but only bruising. Relief loosened something in her chest.
"Three of them, at least," she said quietly. "They had you down, Aang."
He did not deny it. "It was over fast. I airbent out of it and the guards came. No one was seriously hurt."
"You were seriously hurt."
"I'm standing."
"Barely." She turned his chin back toward her. "Nothing's broken. I checked. But that is not the same as fine, and I want you to stop saying the word."
She turned her hand, the glow still gathered there, and moved to ease the swelling.
Aang caught her wrist gently. "No."
"It would only take a little."
"That's a little you don't have to give right now." His hand stayed around her wrist, not stopping her so much as asking. "You checked. Nothing's broken. The rest can wait. Let me have this one. Let me be the one who takes care of you today."
Every instinct in her wanted to argue: the healer, the older sister, the girl who had held her family together with her own two hands since she was small.
But she understood what he was asking. Letting herself be cared for was its own kind of strength.
"All right," she said, and let the water fall back into the bowl.
Something in his face eased.
The next contraction started low and deep. This one did not gather politely. It pulled through her belly and down into her pelvis with enough force to steal the breath from her lungs. Her hand flew to the underside of her stomach. She bent forward despite herself, gripping the edge of the table.
Momo gave a startled chirp and scrambled to the back of her chair, but he did not leave her.
Aang was beside her in an instant.
"Counting," she managed.
He went still.
She counted silently. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Thirty.
It did not ease.
That was when fear finally moved through her.
At last the contraction loosened. Katara exhaled shakily and leaned back against the chair, damp hair sticking to her temples.
Aang crouched in front of her, his bruised hip forgotten. "That was longer."
"You were counting?"
"Of course I was counting."
A breathless, frightened laugh almost escaped her.
Aang took her hand. "Katara."
She swallowed. The room felt too bright, too real: the tea steaming on the table, the half-cooked eggs, Momo silent for once.
"It's still early," she said, though she did not know whether she was telling him or herself. "It could still take hours. Maybe the whole day."
"But this is it?"
She looked down at her belly. The baby shifted under her hands, slow and heavy.
Fear rose in her throat. Fear, and wonder, and a certainty so large it nearly broke her.
"Yes," she whispered. "I think this is it."
For one heartbeat, neither of them moved.
Then Aang stood, with purpose. "I'm sending the message."
"Sokka first," she said quickly.
"I know."
"And Nukka. Not because anything is wrong," she added when his eyes widened. "Because I want someone here who isn't so emotionally involved that they forget how to breathe."
That got the smallest smile from him.
"Aang." He paused at the doorway. She looked at the bruise, hidden now beneath shadow, at the way he still held himself too carefully. "When you come back, put on a tunic. The others don't need to see what I saw."
"Katara."
"I'm not angry," she said. "I'm worried."
Something in his face opened. "I know."
"Good. Tell Sokka it's time. Tell him to bring Suki and Toph. Tell him not to run. It's still early."
Aang hesitated. "He's going to run."
"I know," she said. "Tell him anyway."
He sent word across the bay before anything else. Sokka would come. Suki would come. Toph would complain about being pulled from whatever she was doing and arrive sooner than all of them.
Nukka would come too, the young healer from the North who had crossed half the world to study with her and had been staying in Republic City for the last season. Katara had hesitated before sending for her, less from any lack of trust than because asking a student to tend her felt like admitting she could not be only the master today. Still, some quieter part of her had known from the beginning that she wanted another pair of Water Tribe hands in the house before the day was over.
She was not only the master today. She was the woman giving birth.
So there was breakfast. There was tea going slowly cold. There were the eggs Aang had started, plain and a little uneven because he had kept glancing back at her instead of watching the pan.
Katara took one look at them. "You burned one side."
Aang glanced down, dismayed. "I did?"
"A little."
"I was distracted."
"You don't say."
His mouth twitched despite himself. It was a small thing, a foolish thing, exactly the kind of thing she needed.
She ate because he watched her like the fate of the world depended on it. Momo crept closer along the table, nose twitching.
"No," Katara said.
Momo froze.
"No eggs."
He looked deeply betrayed.
Aang laughed under his breath. "He's been very supportive."
"He can support me without stealing my breakfast."
Momo chirped once, offended, then climbed back to her shoulder rather than Aang's, as if making a point about whose morning this was. He had not gone to Aang once since she woke. Wherever Katara was, he stayed within a tail's length of her, and had been since before dawn.
She managed a few more bites before the next tightening began. Aang was beside her before she had to say anything.
"You're hovering," she said, though her voice came out thinner than she wanted.
"I'm being nearby."
"That's what hovering is."
He knelt beside her chair, close enough for her to grip his shoulder when the pressure deepened. He did not flinch, though she knew what it cost his bruised body.
"Slow," he murmured. "In. Out."
"I teach people how to breathe."
"I know."
"You're still doing it."
"Yes."
Despite the pain, something close to laughter moved through her chest. It came out as a broken breath. He caught it and held her hand through the rest until the tightening loosened.
"I'm all right," she said.
"You don't look all right."
"I'm in labor."
"That is not as reassuring as you think it is."
This time she laughed, quiet and tired, and for a moment the fear in the room was only two people who loved each other being afraid together, which was easier than being afraid alone.
The kitchen had done its work and was finished with them. Aang helped her to the sitting room, where the morning light fell long and gold across the floor. He had already arranged pillows along the low couch, set a folded blanket within reach, and placed a basin of water near her side.
"When did you do all this?"
"After I sent word to Sokka, before I started breakfast." He eased her down among the pillows and lifted her swollen feet onto the cushions. "I had a feeling those kitchen chairs weren't going to last you the day."
She settled, and the new position took the pressure off her lower back. "That's better," she admitted.
"I know." He settled onto the couch beside her, close, one hand resting over her ankle where he could feel her without crowding her. "Better is the whole job today."
After a while, when a quiet stretch came, she made him dress. The tunic she had asked for that morning had never materialized. He had come back from sending word, gone straight to the stove, and forgotten his own body entirely. He had been bare to the waist all morning, the bruising on full display, and there was no reason for half of Republic City's old war heroes to walk in on the Avatar in his sleeping trousers. He came back in a loose orange tunic, soft from wear, and the simple fact of him dressed and upright made the morning feel less like an emergency and more like a thing they were only waiting through.
He helped her change too, out of the sleeping robe and into the clothes she could actually move and be seen in: a long layered dress in the deep blue of the Southern Water Tribe, high at the throat, and over it the loose cream overrobe with the wide sleeves that was the only thing that still hung comfortably over the curve of her, its hem pooling pale against the darker blue beneath. Then he worked her hair back from her face, clumsy and careful the way he always was with it, gathering the length of it up and pinning it high, leaving the two loose strands to frame her face the way she always wore them.
It was not as neat as she would have done it herself. She did not say so. The feeling of his hands moving slowly through her hair while the morning waited around them was worth a crooked pin or two.
Momo resettled on her shoulder the moment she was upright again, chirping his disapproval at being briefly displaced.
For a while, it was only the two of them. The light moved. The contractions kept their slow rhythm, fifteen or twenty minutes of quiet between each one. In those stretches they did not talk much. He pressed his thumbs into her lower back when she needed it and held her hand when she did not.
"They're going to be here soon," he said once.
"I know."
"Does it help? Knowing they're coming?"
She thought about it honestly. "Yes. I don't want to do this with only the two of us. I want the people who love us in the room." She turned her head against the pillow to look at him. "That's how it's done, where I come from. You don't have a baby alone. The whole tribe holds you up."
He was quiet for a moment. "Then we'll fill the room," he said.
Sokka arrived first, in under two hours.
She knew it was him before the door opened, recognized the particular quality of his footsteps on the path outside, that long-legged stride she had known since before she had words for it. He came through the door out of breath, crossed the room, and wrapped his arms around her before he finished looking at her face.
"I walked," he said into her hair.
"You ran."
"I walked very quickly." He pulled back, taking inventory the way he always did, methodical and trying not to show the worry. "How are you? How bad is it? How far apart?"
"I'm fine. It's early. Still a long way apart." She put her hand on his arm. "Sokka. I'm fine."
He nodded, choosing to believe her.
Suki came in behind him, quieter, and touched Katara's shoulder gently as she passed, a small pressure that said everything it needed to. Toph arrived a few minutes later, announcing loudly from the doorway that nobody needed to fuss over her, and that if Katara was still walking around, things could not be that dire yet.
Nukka came last. She was younger than Katara, slight and dark-haired, with the blue eyes and careful bearing of the North. She entered with the stillness of someone trained to step into rooms where bodies were doing difficult and sacred things.
"Master Katara," she said, bowing in the formal way of the North.
"You don't have to call me that," Katara said, as she always said.
"I know," Nukka answered, as she always answered, and did it anyway.
She knelt beside Katara and set down the small sealed flask she carried at her hip. Katara knew what was in it: a little water from the spirit oasis, carried south less because it was needed than because some gestures mattered more than necessity. A first child was one of them.
"May I?" Nukka asked, holding her palms a respectful distance above Katara's belly.
Katara nodded.
The younger woman washed her hands first, then uncapped the flask and drew a thin ribbon of water into the air. It settled and glowed soft blue across her hands as she passed them slowly over Katara's belly, reading more than healing. Katara watched her work and felt something steadying beneath the cool awareness of another bender's water moving close to her body.
She had taught this woman. This careful competence was partly her own, handed forward.
"The baby is low and well positioned," Nukka said at last. "Head down. Strong. You are early, but this is true labor. Everything is as it should be." She looked up, and something less formal crossed her face. "It is going to be a long day, Master Katara. But a good one, I think."
"You think."
"The water thinks." A small smile. "I only listen to it."
Katara huffed a laugh, and the certainty loosened something in her chest. Not the certainty that nothing would go wrong, because she knew better than anyone that bodies did what they did. But the certainty that knowledge was in the room. That the long chain of women who had done this before her had sent one of their own.
"There's a guest room at the end of the hall," Katara said. "Rest. Eat something. I'll have hours yet, and I'd rather you fresh later than tired now."
Nukka hesitated.
"Go," Katara said gently. "This part belongs to my family. I'll send for you the moment the water changes its mind."
That earned her a real smile. Nukka bowed and withdrew, leaving the room to the people who had known Katara longest.
It was almost ordinary then, the five of them. Toph sat on the floor and pretended to be unbothered, though she kept one palm flat to the boards, grumbling now and then that wood told her half of what stone would. Aang moved between kitchen and sitting room, refilling cups, adjusting pillows, doing useful things with his hands because that was how he managed fear. Suki talked about nothing in particular in a low and steady voice, the kind of talking designed to fill space without demanding attention.
Sokka sat beside Katara and said very little, which was unusual enough that she noticed it.
The hours wore on, slow and then slower. The contractions moved closer, ten or twelve minutes apart now instead of twenty, and they had grown teeth somewhere in the last hour. She could no longer talk through the peak of one the way she had that morning.
"Walk with me," Sokka said, when she rose to shift position again. "It'll do you good."
The path along the island's edge ran close to the water, sheltered from the wind by a low stone wall. Katara walked slowly, one hand in the crook of Sokka's arm, the other pressed against her side. For a while neither of them said anything. It was a Water Tribe kind of silence, comfortable and full.
"Do you remember," Sokka said eventually, "when she used to tell us about when we were born?"
She did not have to ask who he meant.
"She told me yours more than mine," Katara said. "She said you came out screaming and didn't stop for three days."
"That's a completely unfair characterization." He was silent for a moment. "She said yours was quiet. That you just looked around like you were taking stock of the situation."
Katara felt something move in her chest. "She told you that?"
"She told me a lot of things. I think she was trying to make sure I knew."
The wind came off the bay, cold and clean.
"She would have been here," Sokka said. "She would have dropped everything and been here."
"I know."
"She would have driven everyone crazy giving instructions."
"I know that too."
He put his hand over hers where it rested in the crook of his arm. "She would have known what to say to you."
Katara looked down.
"And if she didn't," Sokka added, softer, "she would have pretended until you believed her."
That pulled a laugh out of Katara before the tears could take over.
"She would have liked him," Sokka said after a while. "Aang. For what it's worth."
Katara looked at him.
"She used to say she wanted someone for you who was gentle. Not weak, she had no patience for weak. Gentle. Someone who would be soft with you, because you spend so much of yourself being strong for everyone else." He shrugged, embarrassed. "I think she would have looked at him and known he was the one she meant."
Katara had to press her lips together. "You don't say things like that very often."
"Don't tell anyone. I have a reputation."
She laughed, full and genuine, and felt the baby shift in response, a slow roll she had come to think of as recognition.
The contraction arrived then, slower than the last but deeper. She gripped Sokka's arm and breathed through it. He stood very still beside her, holding her weight the way he had learned to do long ago, in another cold and dark place, when she had needed him only to be there.
When it passed, she wiped her eyes. "Let's go back. I want to be inside when the next one comes."
Inside, the afternoon had arranged itself around her. The couch had been pushed nearer the window. Suki had stacked a table with cups, a kettle, and the flat sweet cakes Katara liked. Toph was exactly where she had been, on the floor, back against the couch, as though she had not moved in hours.
The afternoon moved the way labor moved: slowly, and then all at once.
Katara spent most of it leaning into Aang's side on the couch, his arm around her and her legs stretched across the cushions. His hand stayed threaded through hers beneath the blanket. Every time a contraction came she squeezed and he squeezed back, and neither of them made much of it beyond that. She could feel the low rumble of his voice in his chest when he spoke quietly with the others, feel the way he laughed, careful and contained, some part of him always tuned to her.
When she asked him to fetch more hot water for her back, and he rose to do it, Toph broke the easy quiet.
"Twinkle Toes," she said, without turning her head. "Why are you walking like that?"
Aang went still. "Like what?"
"Like your right leg's made of glass."
A silence followed.
"It's nothing," Aang said.
Katara did not open her eyes. "It is not nothing. A group of people put him on the ground after the meeting yesterday. He didn't tell me until this morning."
"Katara."
"She'd have felt it in three steps. There's no hiding a limp from Toph."
Toph's face had gone hard in a way that had nothing to do with teasing. "After the meeting. The harbor district vote?"
Aang lowered himself carefully back onto the couch beside Katara. "They were waiting outside City Hall. Angry that the council keeps handing the hard questions to the Avatar, angrier when the Avatar's answer isn't the one they wanted." He said it quietly, the way he reported things he had already made peace with and did not want her carrying. "It got physical before the guards reached me. It was over fast."
"It's not the first time," Sokka said from the chair across the room, and the easy humor had gone out of him too. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "The city's growing faster than anyone knows how to hold together, and every time the council can't settle something, they put it on Aang."
"They don't see a person," Suki said. "They see the Avatar. Whatever they're angry at, he's the face of it."
Katara had heard all of this before, in pieces, at council dinners and in the low conversations Aang had with Sokka when they thought she was resting. But it landed differently now, with the weight low in her body and a child a few hours from arriving into exactly this city. Her hand had found her belly without her deciding it should.
"And if they'll put the Avatar on the ground in his own city," she said, "in the open, with guards nearby..." She did not finish it. She did not have to.
The room understood.
"Hey." Aang turned to her, his hand covering hers where it pressed against the baby. "Look at me. Not today. Today none of that comes through that door."
"You can't promise that."
"No," he admitted. "But I can promise I'll keep standing between it and you for as long as I'm able. Bruises and all."
"That is not as comforting as you think it is," Katara said, echoing the morning, and it surprised a wet laugh out of him.
Toph, who had been unusually quiet, planted a hand flat on the floorboards. "For what it's worth," she said, "I didn't move my whole metalbending operation to this city for the weather. Somebody tries to make a habit of putting hands on this family, they're going to find out the city grew teeth while they weren't looking." She shrugged. "Just saying. The kid's got more than a symbol looking out for him."
The afternoon settled again after that, quieter, the politics set back down where it could not reach them. Aang stayed close on the couch, within reach of Katara's hand, and let himself be still for once.
Later, when the baby pressed so hard against her bladder that dignity became irrelevant, Katara began the long business of rising. Aang was halfway to his feet before she had finished the thought.
"Sit," Toph said.
"She needs to get up."
"And you need to stay off that hip before you give her two patients to worry about instead of one." Toph unfolded from the floor. "I've got her. Suki, make him useful before he wears a hole in the floor."
Suki held out the kettle without looking up. "Aang. The water's low and the fire's almost out. Go."
Aang surrendered with the grace of a man who knew when he was outmatched.
Toph got an arm around Katara, surprisingly gentle beneath the bluster, and the two of them made their slow way down the hall. Momo rode on Katara's shoulder, refusing to be left behind.
The washroom was small and cool. Toph leaned against the wall while Katara saw to herself, giving the only privacy that mattered by simply not caring. When Katara washed her hands, she caught her face in the mirror again and looked away.
"You're doing the thing," Toph said.
"What thing?"
"The quiet thing. Sokka talks when he's scared. Aang fixes things when he's scared. You go quiet. So. Out with it. What's the one you're not saying to any of them?"
Katara dried her hands slowly. With anyone else, she would have deflected. But Toph did not do soft reassurance, and that was exactly why the truth came easier.
"I'm afraid I'll be like having no mother," Katara said. "For the baby. I'm afraid I don't actually know how to do the holding part, the warm part, because I had eight years of it and then I had to be the one holding everyone else. I know how to take care of people. I don't know if that's the same as being someone's mother."
Toph was quiet for a moment. "You want me to tell you you'll be good at it?"
"No. You'd just lie better than usual and I'd know."
Toph laughed once. "Yeah, I would. So I won't. Here's what I've got. You raised your idiot brother, and you raised half of us, whether we asked you to or not. The way you take care of people is annoying as hell, and none of us would be alive without it."
Katara stood very still.
"You think that's not the warm part because it doesn't look soft," Toph said. "But I couldn't see your face the first time you fussed over me, and I still knew somebody finally had my back. That's the warm part. You've just never had to do it slow enough to notice."
"That's the kindest thing you've ever said to me," Katara managed.
"Don't get used to it." Toph reached out, found her arm, and squeezed hard. "The kid's lucky. That part I'm not lying about."
Katara held on to her wrist a moment longer than she needed to. "Can I tell you the other thing? The one I really can't say out there."
"That's the whole point of me being in here and not them."
Katara breathed out. "I'm afraid of what they did to Aang. Not the bruises. What it means." Her hand had found her belly again, the way it kept doing. "If a crowd will put the Avatar on the ground in his own city, then this baby is being born into a place where the people who are supposed to be safest are the easiest to aim at. And I won't be able to put myself between him and all of it. Not always. I can't even get off this floor without help right now."
Toph was slow to answer. When she spoke, the bluntness had gone somewhere lower and more serious than teasing ever reached.
"You won't have to do it alone. That's what you keep forgetting, even now." She crossed her arms. "I didn't move my whole life to this city just to teach metalbending to teenagers. I'm building something that's going to outlast all of us, a way for this place to keep its own people safe so it doesn't have to keep throwing Aang at every angry mob. That's not someday. That's the work I'm doing right now." Her chin lifted toward where Katara's hand rested. "And that kid in there? He's got the greatest earthbender in the world, a Kyoshi Warrior, a councilman who plans three steps ahead of everybody, the Avatar, and the best waterbender and healer alive, all under one roof and all already stupid about him. Anybody who wants to get to him goes through every single one of us first." A short pause. "They will not make it past me. I want you to hear that part plainly, because I don't say it twice."
Katara's eyes stung. "Toph."
"I know. I'm very moving. Don't tell Sokka, he'll want one too."
A contraction rose then. Katara gripped the basin, and Toph stood solid beside her, counting under her breath until it passed.
"Come on," Toph said. "Before Twinkle Toes convinces himself we fell down a well."
The afternoon wore down toward evening, and the contractions wore down with it, closer and harder, until the quiet spaces between them stopped being rest and became only the gathering of breath before the next. Suki took a turn at Katara's back, pressing her thumbs into the base of her spine without being asked. Sokka brought food nobody ate. Aang stayed within reach, his pulse hammering where her hand rested against his chest, neither of them saying aloud that the spaces had narrowed to six or seven minutes, then less.
And then one arrived unlike the others.
It came without warning, a deep and seizing pressure that started low in her back and bore down through her hips with a force that took her breath entirely. Katara turned into Aang before she knew she was moving, her hands fisting in the front of his tunic, her face pressed into the warm hollow of his neck. He gathered her in, both arms around her, one hand spreading wide over her lower back and pressing in slow firm circles where the pain dug deepest.
The sound that left her was low and rough, dragged out of somewhere deeper than her throat.
Around them the room went still. Sokka stood frozen by the table. Suki was already clearing cups and blankets out of the way, making space with quiet urgency. Toph rose, one hand to the floorboards, her face turned toward Katara as if the whole house had become something she was trying to read.
"I've got you," Aang said, his voice shaking despite everything he did to steady it. "Hold on to me."
She did. There was nothing else to hold on to.
The contraction went on past where the others had stopped. Past forty. Past fifty. Then, just as the pressure reached a place she thought she could not survive, something inside her dropped lower, sudden and undeniable. The contraction broke, and warmth spread low and sudden beneath her.
Katara froze against him.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Her water had broken. The long waiting part of the day was over.
Momo gave a sharp, distressed chitter and launched off the back of the couch. Suki crossed to the window and opened it, and the little creature poured himself out into the late afternoon to find Appa in the caves, the way animals always seemed to know when a room was about to become a place for people only.
Toph was already on her feet. "That one changed everything. I felt it." She was moving for the hall. "I'll get Nukka."
Katara glanced down, taking in the spread of it against the cream overrobe and the darker blue dress beneath it, and the healer in her surfaced through the shock before the rest of her could catch up. "Tell her it was clear," she said. "Tell her the baby's still moving." Then, because pain had not taken all of her humor, "And tell her the water changed its mind."
Toph barked a laugh and was gone.
Suki turned back from the window, calm and quick, clearing the last of the cups and blankets from the way. "Go," she told Aang. "Get her into warm water, it helps now. I'll bring Nukka through when she's needed." She did not offer to come herself. She understood, the way she understood most things without being told, that this part belonged to the two of them.
Aang gathered Katara into his arms before she could tell him she could walk, and she let him. She felt the catch in his breath as he took her weight against the bad hip, felt the small lift of air he drew up beneath them both to ease the strain, and loved him for trying to make even pain useful.
He carried her down the hall and set her at the edge of the deep tub as gently as if she might break, then turned to the water, drawing it warm and fast, the frightened part of him pouring itself into the one thing he could do with his hands.
Katara sat at the edge of the tub, one hand low on her belly, and felt the next contraction beginning already, much closer than the last.
She thought about her mother. Not with the old ache this time. More like turning to face her.
She was still her mother's daughter. She was about to be someone's mother herself. Both were true in the same body, in the same moment. The water was warm. Aang was near. Down the hall, the people who had made themselves her family were already coming. When she looked for the fear she had carried all day, she found that it had set itself down somewhere and left her lighter.
She was ready.
Nukka came in while the tub was still filling, quiet and unhurried, the sealed flask from the North already in her hand.
"Good," she said. "Warm water is the oldest comfort we have for this." She knelt at the tub's edge, tested the water, then let a thin thread of oasis water spiral into the bath, where it vanished without a trace. "A little of home, for both of you."
She made Aang rinse his hands and arms, and he obeyed without argument. Then he helped her out of the cream overrobe and the blue dress beneath it, and the last of what she wore under that, with the unselfconscious care of long practice, and together they eased her bare into the water.
The heat closed around her swollen body like a held breath finally let go. She made a sound that was almost a sob. The weight that had been grinding into her hips and spine all day lifted as the water took it, and for a few breaths she simply floated, eyes closed, held by the element that had never failed her.
Then Aang stripped off his tunic and trousers and climbed in behind her, settling against the back of the tub and drawing her to his chest. His arms came around her beneath the swell of her belly, taking the last of the weight the water had not.
"Is this all right?" he murmured.
"Don't let go."
"I won't."
The next contraction rose before she was ready. She gripped his forearm and tried to breathe, but by the time it reached its peak all she could do was hold on, trembling until the wave loosened.
Nukka knelt at the side with one hand resting lightly on the surface above Katara's belly, reading the contraction through the bath, her other hand near Katara's wrist, counting pulse and breath together.
"Strong," she said. "And even. Your body knows exactly what it is doing, Master Katara, whatever the rest of you believes. Rest in the water. Let him hold you. There is time yet, but not as much as this morning. The next stretch is the hard climb."
For a while it was bearable, even beautiful. The light went gold through the small window. Aang kept the water warm with a slow idle current, and between contractions Katara lay back against him in floating quiet, his hands spread over the taut curve of their child.
"I'm glad it's you," she said, her voice thick and low.
"For what?"
"All of it. This. The one I get to do this with." She turned her head against his shoulder. "I didn't know, when I was small, that you could be this afraid and this safe at the same time."
His arms tightened. "I'm glad it's you too," he said at last. "I'm glad it's always been you."
Then the labor changed.
The next contraction bore down. Not a tightening now, not only pain, but a force moving through her with a purpose of its own, lower and more total than anything in the water had been. Her body pushed before she decided to, and the loss of choice frightened her more than the pain.
Nukka's calm sharpened into focus. "That is the turn. The water has done its work. Now we get you out and onto the bed, where you can bear down and I can catch the baby properly. Can you stand for me between the pains?"
Katara nodded, breathing hard.
Aang rose first, water streaming down his bare body as he stepped out of the tub. He reached for the loose trousers Nukka had left within arm's reach and pulled them on quickly, not bothering with the tunic. The fabric darkened at once where it clung to his wet legs.
Then, with Nukka's help and a small cushion of air beneath Katara's weight, he lifted her from the tub and wrapped her in the warmed cloth Nukka held ready. His hip trembled once under the strain. Katara felt it, and loved him for trying not to let her.
Their bedroom had been made ready at some point in the long afternoon, the bed layered and waiting. Late light came amber through the same window she had woken to before dawn, a whole life ago. Nukka had laid a clean birthing shift across the covers, soft and undyed, open and easy to move in. Between them they slipped it over Katara's head before Aang laid her among the cushions. The small dignity of it steadied her more than she expected.
He knelt beside her at once. "I'm here. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
Nukka settled at the foot of the bed and met Katara's eyes, steady and unafraid. "All right, Master Katara. Now the real work begins."
The first push terrified her. Not because of the pain, though there was pain, great and consuming, unlike anything she had known. Because there was no stepping around it, no bending away, no strategy, no cleverness. Only through.
At first she tried lying back against the pillows, Aang beside her with one arm around her shoulders and his other hand locked in hers. It worked for one contraction. Maybe two. Then the pressure in her back became unbearable.
"Not like this," Katara gasped. "I can't. Not like this."
"Then we change," Nukka said at once.
Aang helped her roll onto her side, one pillow between her knees, another behind her back.
Suki came in quietly, sleeves rolled up, her face calm in the way warriors made themselves calm before battle. She crouched at the edge of the bed and met Katara's eyes first, not Nukka's. "Do you want me here for this? I'll go if you'd rather it was just Aang and Nukka. No feelings either way."
Katara reached for her hand. "Stay. Please."
"Then tell me where you need me."
"Support her leg when the contraction comes," Nukka said. "Don't pull. Just hold."
Suki nodded and moved into place.
Katara barely had time to feel embarrassed before the next contraction rose and took the room with it. She bore down because her body demanded it, because there was no refusing something so ancient and insistent. Aang's hand was in hers. Suki's arm supported her leg. Nukka's voice stayed low and certain.
"Good. Let it build. Don't fight the beginning. Save your strength for the peak."
Katara pushed. The sound that came out of her was raw and unfamiliar.
When the contraction passed, she collapsed back against the pillow, panting. "I don't like this either," she said, furious and breathless.
Suki, still holding her leg with perfect seriousness, said, "Noted."
A strangled sound came from the doorway. Sokka stood just outside the room, both hands pressed over his mouth, eyes wide and wet. Toph stood beside him, arms crossed.
"Sokka," Suki said, without looking away from Katara. "Out."
"I'm out," he said quickly, though he had not moved.
"More out."
"I'm emotionally out."
"Sokka."
"Right. Physically out."
Toph grabbed the back of his tunic and pulled him farther into the hall. "Come on, Snoozles. You're blocking the air."
"I am not blocking the air."
"You're blocking my ability to pretend I'm not worried."
Katara would have laughed if another contraction had not already begun.
Aang bent close to her ear. "Just us," he murmured.
They changed again. This time Aang moved behind her, sitting against the headboard so she could lean back against his chest, his legs braced on either side of her. Suki stayed at one side, ready with a cloth. Nukka knelt at the foot of the bed. Sokka and Toph stayed just beyond the doorway, close enough to hear, far enough to give her privacy.
When the next contraction came, Katara gripped Aang's forearms where they crossed beneath her chest and pushed down into the pain.
"That's it," Nukka said. "Again, when your body tells you."
The baby shifted low inside her, and Katara felt a small, frightened movement against her own fear. Irrational, maybe, to think the baby knew. But in that moment it felt as if they were both working through the same impossible passage.
Her hand moved instinctively to the curve of her belly. "I know," she whispered. "I know, little one. We're both working hard."
Aang's breath caught behind her.
Katara barely noticed. The words had come before she could think about them. Not advice, not strategy, not healing. Comfort. The kind she had been so afraid she would not know how to give.
The next contraction stole the thought from her.
"I can't," she gasped, even as her body bore down anyway.
Aang's forehead pressed against hers. "You can. I've got you."
She shook her head, exhausted and frightened. "I don't know how."
"Yes, you do."
The certainty in his voice made her open her eyes.
"You've been doing this for all of us for years," he said. "Holding people through impossible things."
Her breath caught.
"You held me when I didn't know how to keep going. You held Sokka after your mother. You held Toph when she wouldn't admit she needed anyone. You held Zuko when he didn't think he deserved it. You held all of us, Katara."
Another contraction began to build.
Aang kissed her damp hair. "You already know how to love someone through fear. This is different, I know it is. But you know how to stay. You've always known how to stay."
That undid her. Or maybe it put her back together.
When the contraction took her again, she stopped trying to escape it. She bore down.
The room moved around her in fragments.
Nukka's voice: "Good. Breathe now."
Aang's arms tight around her.
Suki wiping her face: "Rest while you can."
Toph from the hall, quieter than Katara had ever heard her: "Almost there, Sugar Queen."
Minutes passed. Or hours. Katara had no way to know. Her body became the only timekeeper. Push. Breathe. Rest. Again.
At some point she ended up on her knees, folded over a stack of pillows, Aang in front of her so she could cling to his shoulders while Suki pressed both hands into the small of her back. The pressure helped. It did not take the pain away. Nothing took the pain away. But it gave the pain somewhere to go.
At some point she cursed so sharply that Aang's eyes went wide and Toph barked a laugh from the hallway.
"That's the spirit," Toph called.
Suki shot a look toward the door. "Not helping."
"Disagree."
"Sokka," Suki said.
A muffled scuffle followed. Then Sokka's voice, strained and too loud: "Toph is choosing silence now."
"I chose nothing."
Katara almost laughed. Almost. Then the next contraction came and everything else disappeared.
At some point she cried for her mother again, not in words this time, but in a sound pulled from somewhere so deep it felt inherited.
Aang held her through it. Suki stayed steady. From the hall, Sokka went very quiet.
When the pressure changed and Nukka said it was close, they moved her one last time, back against the pillows and into Aang, her spine to his chest, his legs braced along either side of hers so she could push against him and rest against him in the same breath. It was the way she wanted to meet the baby, not folded over on her knees but held, upright in his arms, where she could gather the child straight up onto her own body the moment it came.
Then Nukka's voice changed. "Katara," she said, wonder beneath the calm now. "Reach down."
Katara shook her head at first, not understanding.
Aang helped her, his hand covering hers as she reached between her thighs.
There. The top of the baby's head. Wet hair. Real.
Katara broke. "Oh," she sobbed.
Aang made a sound against her shoulder, half laugh, half cry. "That's our baby," he whispered.
The next contraction came before she could answer. This time, she did not say she could not. She pushed. Once. Again. The pressure became unbearable, impossible, everything.
Then release.
A cry split the room. Small. Furious. Alive.
For one suspended second, nobody moved.
Then Katara heard herself sob.
Nukka lifted the baby carefully, swift and sure, cleared the wet hair from his face, checked his color, his breath, the flex of his tiny limbs, and then there was a warm, slippery weight placed against Katara's chest.
A son. Their son.
He was wrinkled and impossibly small, his skin flushed red over the warm brown it would settle into, her own brown, the deep color of the South. Dark hair lay plastered to his head. His mouth was open in outraged protest against the world, and when his eyes cracked open against the lamplight, just for a moment, they were the blue of meltwater, of deep ice, of every Water Tribe child born before him, with something softer and greyer beneath it that was unmistakably Aang. His tiny fists curled against her skin as if he had arrived ready to fight everyone in the room.
Katara laughed and cried at the same time. "Oh," she whispered. "Oh, hello."
Aang was crying openly now, his face pressed to her temple, one trembling hand hovering over the baby's back as though he was afraid to believe he was allowed to touch him.
"He's here," he whispered.
"He's here."
Their son squirmed against her chest, still furious, and Katara tucked him closer with shaking hands. "Hi," she said, because it was the only word she seemed to have. "Hi, my love."
From the doorway came a broken sound. Sokka.
Suki glanced over her shoulder. "You can come closer."
Sokka stepped into the room as if approaching something sacred and dangerous at once. Toph followed more slowly, her head angled toward the small new sound in the room.
"Is he..." Sokka's voice cracked. "Is he okay?"
"He's perfect," Nukka said.
Sokka nodded very seriously, then immediately cried harder.
Toph wiped at her face with the heel of her hand. "Don't look at me," she snapped, though no one had said anything.
Nukka smiled as she worked. "He's strong."
Of course he was.
Katara barely heard the next minutes as anything but fragments: Nukka checking the baby, Aang's breath breaking against her hair, Suki's hand warm on her shoulder, Sokka crying openly, Toph near the wall with one palm flat to the floorboards, feeling not the fine things the wood would never give her, only the new weight in the room, the small fierce fact of him.
The baby shifted against Katara's chest, his mouth opening in a small searching movement against her skin, his cheek dragging clumsily as if he knew there was something he wanted and had only instinct to guide him.
"Oh," Katara whispered.
Nukka smiled. "He knows you."
The words struck deeper than Katara expected. He knows you. Not Master Katara. Not the girl who had held her family together too young. Not the healer, or the waterbender, or the wife of the Avatar, or the woman who had spent all day afraid she would not become enough.
Just her. His mother.
Her whole body trembled. Aang noticed immediately. "Katara?"
"I'm all right," she said, though the words shook.
Nukka looked up calmly. "That happens. Your body has done a great deal of work."
She waited until the cord had stopped pulsing before she tied it with practiced hands, then looked at Katara first. "Would you like him to?"
Katara understood. She looked at Aang. "Do you want to?"
For a moment he looked frightened by the question. Then he nodded.
Nukka guided him, placing the small blade in his hand and showing him where. His fingers trembled so badly that Katara covered them with her own. Together, they did it. The cord parted beneath their joined hands.
The baby made another indignant sound against Katara's chest, as if deeply offended by every decision being made around him.
Katara laughed weakly. "All right. Yes. We're all listening."
Then, just as she began to think it was over, another cramp moved through her.
Aang felt her body change. "Katara?"
"It's all right," Nukka said gently. "The placenta still needs to come."
Katara closed her eyes. Of course. Of course there was still more. "I thought I was done," she whispered.
Suki brushed the damp hair back from her forehead. "Almost."
"Almost," Nukka agreed. "When the next tightening comes, give me a small push. Nothing like before."
The next cramp came. Katara breathed in, held their son close, and pushed once, small and weary. A moment later the pressure eased. The last of it slipped away from her body, and with it came a release so complete she almost sobbed from relief.
"There," Nukka said softly. "That's done."
Done. The word moved through Katara like warm water.
Nukka checked her carefully, looking for what needed looking for, checking the bleeding, pressing low on her belly until the womb tightened beneath her palm, watching Katara's face all the while. Every part of Katara ached: hips, back, legs, the deep center of her. Even her arms trembled with the effort of holding the baby, though she could not have let him go if the world had asked.
Nukka's expression stayed calm. That was what finally let Katara breathe.
Then Nukka reached for the bowl of clean water beside the bed.
"Water?" Katara asked, her voice thin.
Nukka gave her a small smile. "Water." No more explanation than that.
Somehow, Katara understood. Not oasis water. Not spirit water. Nothing rare or impossible. Just water. The first thing she had ever learned to trust. The thing that had followed her from the South Pole to war, from war to Republic City, from girlhood to this bed, this room, this child.
Water had always known how to change. Ice. Snow. Mist. River. Sea. Tears. Blood. Milk. Life.
Nukka drew a thin ribbon from the bowl and let it hover blue and luminous between her palms. "May I?"
Katara nodded.
The water moved into the ache with a gentleness that made her eyes close. It did not erase the pain. Nothing could have. But it softened the sharpest edges. The trembling in her legs eased. The rawness dulled into something heavy and survivable.
When Nukka finished, she let the water fall back into the bowl. "There. That should help."
"Thank you," Katara whispered.
"You did the work. The water only followed."
After that, the room softened around her.
The baby rooted against her again, more impatient now, his cheek dragging clumsily over the damp fabric of the birthing shift still bunched between them.
Nukka noticed and moved closer, gentle but practical. "He may try to feed. Or he may only search for now. Either is fine." She glanced at the shift, then at Katara. "May I help you loosen this?"
Katara nodded, suddenly nervous in a way that felt almost absurd after everything her body had just done.
Nukka helped her ease the soft fabric down from one shoulder and bare one breast, then guided the baby closer without taking over. "Support his head here. Bring him to you. Do not bend yourself down to chase him."
Katara obeyed with clumsy, trembling hands. It was not graceful. It was not effortless. His head wobbled. Her fingers shook. For a moment he seemed more frustrated than comforted, his little mouth opening and closing against her skin.
He tried once, catching only briefly before slipping away again. His face scrunched in immediate outrage, and he cried as if the world had personally betrayed him.
Katara startled. "What did I do?"
"Nothing," Nukka said. "He is learning too."
The words settled gently. Katara looked down at his furrowed brow and angry little mouth. "We're both new at this," she whispered.
He complained again, quieter this time.
"I know," she said. "I don't like not knowing either."
Aang's breath shook with a soft laugh behind her.
With Nukka's quiet guidance, Katara adjusted him a second time, bringing him closer against her bare skin, one hand supporting the back of his tiny head, the other steady beneath his body.
This time he found her.
The sensation was strange, sharp for half a second and then pulling, intimate and grounding all at once.
Katara went very still. "Oh," she whispered, and this time the word was different.
Aang's hand covered her shoulder. Their son settled against her, alive and determined, his tiny body pressed to hers as if this was the only place in the world that made sense.
Katara looked down at him. She still did not know if she would get everything right. She did not know if she would always be soft enough, patient enough, wise enough. She did not know how many mistakes waited in the years ahead.
But when her son quieted at the sound of her voice, she understood, with a strange and trembling certainty, that motherhood was not something she had to become all at once. It was something she would learn with him.
Maybe Aang had been right. Maybe she had already known part of it. Not because she had all the answers. Not because she was fearless. But because, when someone she loved was frightened and hurting, lost inside something too large to carry alone, she knew how to stay.
She had stayed for all of them. Now she would stay for him.
Aang saw her tears immediately. "Katara?"
She shook her head. "I'm okay." For once she smiled before he could worry himself into asking again. "I am. I'm just..."
She looked down at their son. There were no words large enough.
Aang followed her gaze, and his face changed all over again. Wonder first. Then grief, soft and old, not sharp enough to wound the moment but present enough to belong to it. This child carried more than the two of them. He was future. He was proof that something could come after.
Aang's hand finally settled, feather-light, against their son's back. The baby paused for half a breath, as if considering him, then made another small sound against her chest, softer this time.
Aang laughed through his tears. "That seems fair."
Sokka had sunk to the floor beside the bed, one hand still pressed over his mouth. Toph stood near the wall, one palm flat to the floorboards.
"He's loud," she said at last.
"He's just born," Suki said.
"I'm making an observation."
Sokka sniffed loudly. "It's a very healthy volume."
Toph turned toward him. "You are the last person allowed to judge anyone's volume."
"I am being supportive."
"You are being wet."
"I'm emotional."
"You're leaking from your face."
Katara laughed before she could stop herself. It hurt. Everything hurt. But the laugh came anyway, small and real, and the room seemed to breathe with it.
"Can I see him?" Sokka asked, creeping closer on his knees, eyes wide and reverent.
"Come here."
He stopped at the edge of the bed, hands hovering uselessly. "He's so small."
"He is a baby," Toph said.
"I know that."
"Then stop sounding surprised."
Sokka ignored her completely and reached out with one careful finger to touch the back of the baby's tiny fist. The baby's fingers flexed.
Sokka froze. "He moved."
"He does that," Nukka said gently.
"He's perfect," Sokka said, his voice breaking.
"Yes," Katara said. "He is."
Toph shifted near the wall. "Are we allowed closer, or is this still one of those sacred moments where everyone pretends not to be a mess?"
Katara nodded, and Toph came, one finger reaching out to brush the baby's foot. He kicked. She jerked back.
Sokka let out a watery laugh. "He got you."
"He did not get me."
"He absolutely got you."
Toph's face turned toward the baby again. Then, very quietly, "Strong kick." Katara understood that this was her blessing.
"He has a whole army already," Suki said, resting a hand on Sokka's shoulder.
Katara looked around the room: Sokka, trying and failing to stop crying; Toph, pretending she had not been moved by one impossibly small foot; Suki, calm and close enough to help; Nukka, quiet and watchful, carrying the knowledge of women Katara had never met; Aang, warm and trembling behind her, his arm around her shoulders; her son at her chest. The ache of her mother, no longer empty.
"Yes," Katara whispered. "He does."
For a while, no one rushed her. No one asked for him. No one tried to pull the moment into something else.
Their son stayed there, warm against her bare skin, nursing in that second stubborn attempt with more determination than skill. It was awkward and tender and miraculous. Not the effortless knowing she had imagined mothers were supposed to possess, but something slower. A conversation between two people who had only just met and somehow already belonged to each other.
Aang's arm tightened carefully around her shoulders.
"You're doing it," he murmured.
She closed her eyes. The words would have frightened her that morning. Now they did not. "I think we are," she said.
Nukka looked at Aang directly. "She is tired. She will be sore. She will need food, water, warmth, and rest. But she is well."
Aang swallowed. "And him?"
Nukka looked down at the baby. "He is loud, hungry, angry, and strong."
Toph nodded. "I said that."
Nukka smiled. "You were correct."
Aang let out a breath that seemed to leave his whole body. Katara reached up and touched his cheek. "Come here."
"I'm right here."
"Closer."
He bent until his forehead touched hers. For a moment it was only the two of them and the baby between them. After everything grief had asked of them, after every morning they had learned to survive side by side, this felt like the same vow in another shape: not healing instead of loss, but life beside it.
She brushed her thumb under his eye. "You did well too."
Aang closed his eyes. "I was terrified."
"I know."
"I still am."
"So am I."
His mouth trembled. Katara looked down at their son, then back up at him. "But he's here."
Aang opened his eyes. "He's here."
The words settled between them like a prayer. His thumb moved gently over the small curve of their son's shoulder.
"Bumi," he said softly.
Katara looked at him. He looked almost afraid he had spoken too soon.
"I know we talked about it," he said. "But seeing him..."
Katara looked at their son. Tiny. Furious. Alive. She thought of King Bumi's wild grin, his impossible strength, his strange wisdom, his refusal to become anything other than himself.
Then she looked at Aang. "Bumi," she agreed.
Aang's face crumpled and reassembled itself into something full. "He's going to laugh so loudly when he hears," he whispered.
Katara knew he meant King Bumi, ancient and delighted in Omashu, already certain to declare this the best news in a hundred years.
She smiled. But she saw the other thing move through Aang's face too, beneath the laughter. The name reached further than the living king. It reached toward the boy that king had once been, the friend whose growing up Aang had slept through, a hundred years of it, and toward Gyatso, and all the others the Fire Nation had taken before this child could ever know they had existed. Aang carried them in the giving of the name, not as a weight but as a thread, something remembered and carried forward into a person who would get to live.
"They would have loved him," Katara whispered.
Aang's tears fell silently. "So would she."
Katara's breath caught. Her mother. Kya. The room blurred.
"Yes," she said.
Bumi shifted against her chest, small and impossibly real.
Aang bent and pressed a kiss to her forehead, then another to Bumi's damp hair.
For a while, no one asked anything of them. No one spoke of councils or nations or wounds or duty. The room simply held them.
Outside, Republic City went on beyond the island. Boats moved through the harbor. Somewhere past the walls, the world was already reaching for the Avatar, for Master Katara, for the child people would surely try to name before he had words for himself.
But inside the room, there was only this. Katara. Aang. Their son. The family that had come when called. The people they had lost, carried quietly in the names and stories and hands that had brought them here.
Katara looked down at Bumi, his cheek warm against her skin, his tiny body rising and falling with each breath.
She was still afraid. She suspected she would be afraid for the rest of her life now, in one way or another. But beneath the fear was something older. Something steadier.
She came from women who had continued. She came from love that had survived grief. She came from a mother whose voice she could no longer hear, and still, somehow, had carried into this room.
And now, with Bumi breathing against her chest and Aang's arm careful around her shoulders, she knew how to stay.
Katara leaned into him. Bumi sighed against her chest, finally quiet.
And for the first time that day, the world felt very small.
Not empty.
Not fragile.
Small enough to hold.