#dark!katara

A waterbending master within just weeks of beginning formal training? basically inventing bloodbending?? a prodigy healer who discovers that ability entirely on her own???

With the avatar in her thrall?? I mean, look, I 100% believe that zuko and katara should’ve been endgame but if I have to accept that she and aang are in fact canonical as adults, it’s SO OBVIOUS that she rules that relationship, not just wears the pants but is the only one with her feet on the ground, even as they grow up. Especially if they grow up into a world where Katara lets that dark impulse in her win, the one that says “I know best” and sometimes it’s ultimately harmless, pretending appa is sick so she can save a village, but it can be darker. Katara doesn’t always listen to the voice of reason, she’s emotionally driven. Even at 14, she has a hell of a temper, and she turns 15 during a war, 16 during an uneasy peace, she’s a child soldier with a world’s worth of trauma at best. She came of age carrying not only the weight of a war, the survival of civilizations, but also carrying the knowledge that she and her friends were responsible for literally ensuring the stability of the natural order of the spiritual and physical worlds??? The way she turned out as an adult is 100% the outcome of a coin flip and it would have been so, so easy for it to go the other way, but katara’s not one to fall apart, so instead she just leans into her strengths except dark

and by her side, her strategy-minded brother, loyal to a fault, her strong right hand - Sokka, handed the ultimate test in planning: a palace coup. and he’s a child soldier, too, but from far before the avatar ever woke up, and he’s got resentments of the fire nation that not even a friendship with zuko could heal, even if he did fully trust him. He remembers starving on the ice, he remembers his mother’s death, being the only warrior left in the village and carrying that at 10, at 12, forgetting what it was like to be a child before he was even aang’s age. In a world without therapists and reintegration protocols, Sokka never really concedes his premature adulthood. You think he’d listen to his father tell him what to do? You think he’d accept the authority of literally anyone who hadn’t fought by his side in the war? Sokka rode with the avatar. He’s seen things, he’s owed favors. They’d be easy enough to call in, when the time is right.

Easy enough to displace the weak fire lord, only on his throne a few weeks, physically recovering from his Agni Kai with his sister - whispers that mental instability runs in the family, and the crown prince was never a prodigy of a bender to begin with, not like Azula. of course that waterbender, the one he took the lightning for, the one who healed him - she doesn’t want the throne, no, she’s just a simple girl from the south pole, if she wanted the throne wouldn’t she have just let him die? And if everyone eats, and she’s merciful in just the right places, who is going to care enough to overthrow her, after decades of war? She doesn’t torture people, not like Azula, and people don’t go missing, don’t get poisoned. She’s unerringly, unnervingly just - but not merciful.