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1 Snakes also know fear.
Mai smelled of fire-lilies.
There were a lot of things Mai did that seemed to be second nature to someone brought up by nobility who hadn't done what Toph did, at least if that someone was a girl. Although Mai seemed to have something against sitting with good posture, unless she was in public or trying to be scary. But things like filing her nails instead of cutting them off when they got long enough to annoy, or reading the undercurrents of place-setting at a formal dinner, or putting on at least traces of perfume.
Only traces. Like it was an afterthought, and not important. But it was always fire-lilies.
There were also things that Mai did that were just Mai. Like putting her freezing cold feet on your leg to warm them up.
The first time she'd done that had been the first time the three of them had shared a bed. Katara had yelped, loudly; Zuko sat up, looking perplexed and concerned, until he figured out why she'd done it - at which point he'd started laughing.
"Yeah," he said. "She does that."
"You know, your feet are cold," Katara said, accusingly, glaring at Mai. It was reflex, and she immediately wondered if she shouldn't: if she needed to be more careful. It worried her. Less now than before, maybe. Getting through the awkward to the wonderful (turning the awkward into the wonderful, and learning - that Mai was actually ticklish, that Zuko would arch if you scratched nails down his back, and things about herself, too) did a lot.
It just made her want to keep everything in one piece even more; it taught her there was a lot more to lose. And she didn't want to.
But Mai looked unperturbed. "You're warm," she replied. "I don't see the problem here."
"She's always freezing," Zuko offered, in a voice of suppressed laughter. "It's because she's secretly cold-blooded." He sounded almost like he was giddy. Which -
It was nice to know Katara wasn't the only one scared stupid at this.
"Don't be idiotic," Mai retorted. She pulled at Katara's arm, pulling her back down to the bed. Which brought her cold feet back into contact with Katara's calf, but also let her run her fingers over Katara's hair and scratch gently into her scalp.
After a moment, Katara said, "That's not going to let you get away with everything, you know."
Zuko breathed laughter again, turning over on his side to look at them, head resting on his bent arm. There was actually a hint of a smile in Mai's voice when she replied, "I don't need to get away with everything." And if her feet started out cold, they at least warmed up quickly, and her fingers felt good. Even where the calluses of knives and other weapons caught a little in Katara's hair.
She gave up and drowsed. After a while she murmured, "I bet you hog the covers, too." There wasn't a lot of sting to what she said. This was comfortable; this was, well, really good in general, actually. And if she didn't think too hard or too far ahead, she didn't have to worry too much.
Zuko's breath from beside them told Katara he was asleep. Mai's voice was still very much awake when she replied, "Only a little."
When Katara was on the edge of dropping off, she heard Mai murmur, "Thank you." And the way she said it made Katara pretty much sure that she thought Katara was already asleep; that she hadn't meant for the words to be heard. Or the relief in Mai's voice.
Or the deep breath, like she'd been holding it all day.
Something let go, some knot under Katara's heart untangled: no. They were all three in the same boat, with this.
It was kind of like flying, like the first time she'd trusted air to hold her up (or at least, hold the carefully designed and triple-tested glider Teo had found for her to cling to up), leaping off into the void. You should fall: but that something inside you buoyed you up instead.
Katara wasn't sure how long it took Mai to fall asleep, that first night. Or if she even did. But none of them had hit the ground by morning, so it was alright.
2 The rough elegance of a club.
Putting someone from the Southern Water Tribe in a room with Fire Nation nobility was kind of like putting a sparrowkeet among cats.
Putting someone from the Southern Water Tribe in a room with Fire Nation nobility when she's unassailable and has authority, conversely, was like putting an orca among tortoise-seals.
Katara loved consensus. She was good at compromise. She liked getting everyone to get along and work towards the same goal with friendly encouragement, and she was a nice enough person that she usually even sandwiched any criticism in two bits of praise.
Right up until you actually refused to cooperate, at which point she ground you under like a grain of sand in front of a tank.
Mai sat at her place at the head of the table, and watched that point tick closer and closer to the surface, as Lord Kato grumbled about expenses, Lord Oshi insisted that capitulating would send the wrong message, and Minister Phan dithered about allocation of manpower.
The line of Katara's mouth got flatter, and flatter, and flatter, until Admiral Jinse opened his mouth.
The man made Mai want to break his nose eight times a day, and she was only looking at the long term logistics of running the stupid country. It didn't surprise her at all that he was the last grain on the scale.
"What is wrong with you people?" Katara demanded, standing up, leaning on the sand-table and glaring at them all. "Are you secretly trying to sabotage the country and drop it into chaos and suicidal, or are you just stupid?"
Out of the corner of her eye, Mai saw Lord Tsei and Lady Bao exchange a look, and Lady Bao hide a smile - one of approval, Mai thought. She made a note to have her agents look into them; a few more people with the sense of stunned monkeys would be good to have a handle on.
"Let me explain something to you," Katara went on, getting up and reaching over to take one of the sticks, so she could draw in the wet sand. "And I'll make sure I use small words. Water, even in rivers and lakes," she said, drawing a loose outline of the area under discussion and circling the increasingly-tainted lake, "doesn't just stay there. Nobody went and made a waterproof seal out of glass or metal under the lake bed. There's just rock, and dirt. Dirt, like the same dirt the rain sinks into all the time - I'm sure you've seen it - and rocks that are full of holes, and don't necessarily stop water anyway. Not to mention that this entire island shares one connected system of water.
"With normal people who had any common decency," she went on, acidly, "I'd point out that there were real people dying out there. But since I'm talking to you, I'd like to focus on the fact that if you don't clean up the water there, it's going to be in your wells on your estates in less than three months."
Lord Kato scowled. "There's no proof of that."
Katara bridled, but Mai took the opportunity and deflected it back at the idiot. "At your request, I'm sure we could give you some," she said, and watched him look apprehensive. "A demonstration. Of course, we'd want to make it a very clear one, so we would have to encamp the engineers on your grounds . . . " She let that trail off.
Kato sat down.
It wasn't subtle, elegant manoeuvering, but sometimes pounding really hard, repeatedly, worked just as well. Or better.
Sometimes Mai couldn't believe they'd managed without her for so long.
3 Value space for what it does.
It was an unspoken, unexamined understanding between them. They didn't need to talk about it. It just worked itself out. There was a simple, undeniable fact that different people needed different things, and so did different schedules, and so it was better in the end that everyone have space of their very own. How much it got used changed, depending on the day.
The palace was honeycombed with rooms and suites, most of them there just to impress, and to shuffle guests through in appropriate order of precedence. When they'd first known Katara was coming, Zuko had spent hours agonizing over which suite to put her in, before settling on the one closest not the ornamental pond, but the rather wilder stream that ran out of it to the sea, a little way around the gardens.
Then he'd had it painted in a clear blue and the wood stained in dark brown.
And the longer she'd stayed, the more she'd settled in, the more furniture mysteriously got moved out into the hall, to be taken away by servants. Tables; chests of drawers; certain chairs. In their place had come light furs and leather cushions stuffed with down, rugs woven from the coats of wild koala-sheep at the very southern tip of the North Pole and northern tip of the South Pole, and wide chests carved out of northern and southern wood and stone.
Where the Fire Nation wove in was in the masks on the walls, and the glass and porcelain bowls and vases. The Fire Nation masks shared space with the Water Tribe masks meant for good fortune, or pure decoration, or gifts and acknowledgement, not with the Water Tribe masks meant for ceremony or honouring spirits - but they were there just the same. The vessels, of course, were filled with water, and some had water-plants floating on top as well.
Katara almost always had her windows open, and the doors that led out to the balcony over the river.
Zuko had inherited the same suite of rooms that Fire Lords had slept in and lived in for generations, and had them stripped of almost everything and redone almost as soon as he could get out of bed, when the war was over. They had been everything from grand and ornate to spartan and severe, but now they were . . . home-like. Perhaps for the first time in four generations, at least.
One room had become a library, and it was very full. Another one was what looked to be a private study, although if one looked in the right places, one might find that in addition to desks, brushes, paper, weights and seals, there were also two cupboards that seemed to have no purpose.
If one opened them, one might find everything needed to make a soldier's bed on the floor - and a comfortable one at that. And one might notice that blankets, pad and sheets all showed a lot of wear.
A third had become a semi-public thing, for when audiences were excessive but formality was still called for. This was the room laid out with the most care, and decorated with the most attention and precision.
A fourth, opening onto the gardens with the slide of a door, almost always stood empty unless and until any one or more of a handful of people were visiting: then it was a retreat. None of them ever mentioned that if you squinted, you could see the layout of a particular Air Temple in the way the seats, cushions and indoor fountain were arranged.
If anyone who cared had ever been allowed to see them, they might have noticed that - with the exception of the semi-formal-audience room - the Fire Lord's suite looked more like one might expect from a mildly prosperous merchant in Ba Sing Sei than the ruler of a vast nation. They would not have noted that the bed was very large; it is the rule of all kings and emperors that their bed must be bigger than anyone else's. That the Fire Lord's (that is, that the bed in the Fire Lord's bedchamber) was exactly the right size to hold three sometimes-restless sleepers was simply . . . coincidental.
There was no designated suite for the ruler's spouse. Indeed, it varied reign to reign whether one was needed, and (sadly) for how long. In times of peace, or of trust, it seemed unnecessary.
In times of war or fear, though, it was often best that a firebender sleep alone. At least, some of the time.
So the rooms of the royal spouse had been created, torn down, passed on, remade, over and over again. This time was no exception, though Lady Mai would have laughed - well, exhaled once in a manner that passed for laughter - in pitying derision at the person who suggested it was because she was afraid that Fire Lord Zuko would accidentally kill her on waking up from a nightmare.
In this suite, three rooms: one with bed, mirror, stool, wardrobe; one with long, low couch, desk, locked drawers and locked cupboards; and one with bamboo mats across the floor, a target on one wall, a sturdy wooden pole in the center of the room, and racks of weapons on the walls - most of them small, edged, and easily concealed in formal robes.
The colours, black, white and the occasional touch of red. The style, most minimalist, contemplative line. Cool, clear and sharp.
Except on one wall, where hung a dried red flower. And on the low table beside the bed, where sat a box carved from white horn and decorated with tiny, brilliantly blue-green shells. And on the desk, in the second room, where a seashell weighed down the pile of blank paper waiting to be used.
4 Discretion is the better part.
When Sokka heard Katara's suddenly-loud exclamation of "Excuse me?" from the other side of the door, he knew someone was in trouble. He was actually a little bit surprised when the sound of the lower voice - so low he could only hear mumbling, not actual words - was Mai's.
He glanced at the door, slid half-open the way they'd left it. So, fortunately, did Zuko, or Sokka would admit he might have wound up losing the bout. That was okay; his pride was content with the fact that they traded off about 50-50 these days. But it still stung. In the literal sense. Or bruised. Or whatever.
Without the sound of breathing, he could hear a little bit better: he heard Katara's, "That is the most ridiculous - " and Mai's "Oh here we go - " and then the sound of a door sliding shut, and then sliding open, and then voices too far away to hear except that he could hear that they were now shouting.
Sokka glanced at Zuko, who'd given a low whistle, as if to himself. He caught Sokka's look, and said, "What?"
"What are they fighting about?" Sokka asked.
" . . . I haven't developed the ability to mind-read since you were here last," Zuko replied.
"I mean, you don't want to find out?" Seeing as they were clearly taking at least a moment, Sokka sheathed his sword and put it down, and went for the cups of water.
"If it lasts, I'll hear about it later. It usually doesn't." He caught Sokka's second look, and shrugged. "I really don't get involved."
"Huh." Sokka thought about that for a minute. And, knowing that Katara would probably drench him for how much he was poking, but figuring it didn't really matter, he asked, "Why not?"
" . . . because then they're mad at each other and me," Zuko replied, as if this were self-evident. "You can't tell me you've ever interfered in your sister having a fight and had it end well."
Sokka considered fourteen years of completely shared life and ten more years of just being siblings, with maybe four off the beginning for Katara Being A Baby and a Toddler, and said, "You have a point."
5 Continuity and grace.
The boat was almost at the island by the time the story was finished, and Katara had that look that said she was pretty sure she was supposed to be appalled, but was mostly amused.
"I can't decide which is worse," she said, leaning on the railing. "That Chen didn't know who you were, or that you trashed his house."
"His father's house," Zuko corrected, completely unnecessarily. "Besides, breaking houses is an Ember Island tradition."
"Hopefully not this time," she replied, smiling.
"When else did you wreck houses here?" Mai asked, from her seat on the cushioned benches in the stern. Katara's eyebrows went up.
"You didn't tell her that story?" she asked, and Zuko felt his face warm, slightly.
"There's not really anything to tell," he protested. "I was just making a point."
He wasn't getting out of this one, he knew. Katara snorted, shaking her hair out of her face as the wind blew at it and the hands on the dock waved and called out to the hands on ship, getting ready to catch the lines thrown to them.
"Yeah, by making us all think you'd gone off the deep end."
"I just wanted to make it really clear," he said. "Based on the information that I had."
"I'm sure at some point one of you's going to stop having an argument you've clearly had twenty times before," Mai interjected, dry, "and tell me what you're talking about."
Katara grinned. The ship docked.