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Prelude, Scene 1
Katara was no stranger to despair. Even dogged optimism had to give way some time.
She woke up just a couple hours after they had collapsed into bed at the Western Air Temple. Her mind was muddled and confused; she couldn’t remember what she had dreamt about, but it left her feeling disturbed and unsettled. She sat up. It was still dark, the moon suspended high in the sky. The others were sound asleep near her. Feeling an urgent need for open air and personal space, she quietly got to her feet and slipped away.
The air temple was big and lonely. As she walked to the courtyard, drafts of cold night air swept around her feet and through her unbound hair, but did little to ease her heart. Something heavy weighed on her, had been bearing down on her spirit since the Day of the Black Sun. They had lost. They had lost.
Katara was fourteen. Katara had truly believed they were gonna win the war; good always triumphed over evil, no matter the cost, after all. And Katara would always stand by Aang, no matter what happened next. But right now, under cover of darkness, with only the unmoving statue of Avatar Yangchen to witness it, she finally admitted to herself that she had lost hope. She didn’t believe she would see the end of the war. She didn’t know what would happen next, and she understood now, more than ever before, that they were small children in a very big war, fighting for something pure in a world split by a century of bloodlust.
What happened next?
The past few weeks had been solely focused on the Day of the Black Sun; everything had led up to it, and no one had dared mention the future that stretched out unsurely after it. No one had planned beyond the confrontation Aang was supposed to have with Ozai; no one talked about what would happen if the Avatar failed to fight him, or even if he won. Katara felt as though the ground had been swept out from under her and she was in free fall, with no understanding of where or when she would hit the ground. What now was her destiny? What was her role here? Look after everyone and pretend everything was fine while Sokka schemed and Aang trained and her father and tribesmen rotted in a Fire Nation prison?
Her heart wrenched in despair.
But once she started considering the worst, she couldn’t stop.
They were alone. For the first time, they were truly and utterly alone. Omashu had fallen. Ba Sing Se had fallen, not that it had been any help to begin with. The Northern Water Tribe had all but retreated after the siege, scarred by the loss of Yue and the near destruction of the Moon. And now, the men of the Southern Water Tribe were gone too.
It was just her and the other kids left. And she wasn’t foolish enough to believe that Azula wasn’t merely biding her time till she attacked them again. Not to mention, Zuko.
Fucking Zuko. If there was one thing in the world she could count on, it was that Zuko would eventually show up to ruin their lives, come hell or high water.
She gave herself a moment to fume before she forced herself to calm down and brushed the tears from her eyes. She wouldn’t allow herself to succumb to fear and uncertainty. She wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was a master waterbender, born of the Southern Water Tribe, and she could bear this too. It was time to stop depending on outside help; it was her and her friends against the world, not just against the Fire Lord. She had to grow up.
Katara stood in the soft moonlight and breathed deeply. Deliberately.
She remembered Zhao, and the mad glint in his eyes as he meddled with things far beyond him. She counted every burnt refugee she had seen, every family torn apart by war, every soldier she had seen fall to fire and steel. She thought of her mother and heard the voice of the man who killed her, pictured his cold gaze clearly in her mind’s eye. She relived the moment of Zuko’s betrayal, watched sadness take over his aged uncle’s face and cruel triumph over Azula’s. She saw their golden eyes blaze in the light of their fire.
A sudden dark urge took over her, and she recalled the unwelcome power Hama had given her.
This was a war filled with rage and darkness and dishonor. Katara had been raised to keep hope alight in her heart, to keep mercy and compassion at the core of her being. But she was now a girl on the cusp of womanhood, treading on a precipice with a gaping horror below waiting to swallow her alive if she misstepped. Mercy and compassion hadn’t helped her in Ba Sing Se.
She wouldn’t be Hama, but she would no longer hesitate at being the force of nature she knew she could be. When the war caught up with them, she would rise up to meet it, and cut down everyone who was in the way.
In the moonlight, she toughened her heart and strengthened her resolve, and stood meditating on the hardness of Yangchen’s stony expression until her exhaustion brought her down, and she slipped back to bed.
Prelude, Scene 2
Sokka cornered her early the next morning.
“We have to make a plan.”
His eyes were bright, almost feverish in their intensity. He looked nearly as tired as she felt, even though she hadn’t noticed him stir at night. She nodded firmly and let him talk.
“I know Jeong Jeong didn’t work out,” said Sokka, beginning to pace, “but Ozai escaped us during the eclipse, with no bending whatsoever. Aang’s gotta master every element to even stand a chance during the comet.”
Katara said nothing. It felt like there was a lead weight in her stomach. They had, what, four months? Aang had been learning earthbending for nearly as long, and according to Toph, he had only just started to manage the basics. Manage.
Sure, firebending wasn’t the opposite of air, as earth was, but it was… it was fire. Powerful, destructive, violent. It was the language of war. Aang wasn’t made for war.
“Katara,” said Sokka, sounding like he’d been saying it for a while now. “Are you listening? Have you seen Aang?”
“Yeah,” she replied. Her voice sounded like it was coming from very far away. “Yeah, he’s with Haru and the others. I’ll go find them.”
She found him.
But the moment the subject of firebending was broached, Aang took off after Haru, Teo and the Duke, leaving Katara, Sokka and Toph standing in the sunlit space.
The Western Air Temple was vast. It was silent like the Southern Air Temple had been, but the powerful drafts of wind that swept through the rooms and between the pillars carried the lilting notes of birdsong and the sound of rustling leaves. The open space in which they were standing caught the sunlight and illuminated the caverns and pillars around them. If she closed her eyes, Katara could almost imagine young children, bald and dressed in orange and yellow clothes like Aang, running across the stone floors and taking off into the air with their staffs. The air would be light and carefree, and nothing like the mood that had just descended on their group.
“Aang has got to get his shit together!” Toph burst out.
“Toph!” exclaimed Katara, more out of surprise at the swear than in reprimand. Toph glared in her direction.
“What? You know I’m right,” she said, crossing her arms petulantly. “We’ve got four months until the comet, Katara! And Twinkletoes has barely even grasped earthbending! And from the way he just ran away from us, I’m guessing he’s not really in a hurry to even try out firebending yet.”
“He’s only twelve,” said Katara, quietly.
Toph sent a hard look in her direction. “I’m twelve,” she said. “And I know what my job here is!”
“It isn’t the same,” Katara insisted. “He’s got the weight of the world on him, Toph!”
Toph drew herself up. “Well, he sure isn’t acting like it!”
“She has a point,” Sokka pointed out, rubbing his eyes tiredly. “Besides, we’re all in this war. And we’re alone. We all know the stakes, Katara.”
The weight of the world is on us, too.
He didn’t say it, but they all were thinking it.
“I mean,” said Sokka, after a brief silence, “There must be someone who can teach him firebending.”
Sokka jinxed it.
Hadn’t she known that the Firelord’s son would show up? She watched as he knelt in front of them, the darkness that haunted her at night quickly flooding her heart. What right had he to ask for forgiveness? Katara felt as though she would have been less angry if he had appeared as he always had in the previous year- as a villain. How dare he play at being something he wasn’t- something other than Fire Nation?
Katara saw him look up, saw his golden eyes blaze in the sunlight like they had in Azula’s fire in Ba Sing Se and, without a second thought, hurled all the water she could summon from her flask.
She stood there long after Zuko crawled back from whatever pit of hell he had emerged from, long after the others went back to pretending they could spend forever in this vast, empty temple, unable to stop trembling.
Whether or not Zuko came back, his eyes would always be what she’d remember of the war.
That night, the darkness took over completely.
*“Everyone else might be buying your transformation, but you and I both know that you’ve struggled with doing the right thing in the past. So let me tell you something right now.” She stepped in closer, till their faces were mere inches apart. She noted his sudden intake of breath and the nervous twitch of his hands at his sides with distant satisfaction. “You make one step backward, one slip up, give me one reason to think you might hurt Aang, and you won’t have to worry about your destiny anymore. Because I’ll make sure your destiny ends, right then and there, permanently.”
She turned and walked out of the room without sparing a single glance back.
An Interlude
In the back of his mind, Zuko kept many things alive. He was not someone who could compartmentalize successfully; his failure to bend lightning was proof of that. Among the things that Zuko kept alive in his mind were his people.
Zuko had spent several years away from his home. He wasn’t raised to be crown prince; he wasn’t given the lessons Lu Ten was until his grandfather died and Ozai ascended the throne. He didn’t know much about the nobles who filled his father’s court, or the ceremonies performed by those in line for the throne. Before going back, he could barely recall the sight of the Fire Temple.
But Zuko was aware of his people. He knew the legal age of conscription was 15. He knew the flag of every military regiment and the generals leading them. He knew the average lifespan of an average Fire Nation soldier drafted from an ordinary family.
He saw many of them fall to the power of the Avatar at the North Pole. He saw them fall on the Day of the Black Sun. And although he was on the Avatar’s side now, although he wanted his father dead and the army called back, although he knew it was necessary, Zuko kept his people at the center of his prayers. May Agni guide their spirits safely into the next life. May their families know peace.
He had mourned the loss of the 44th regiment when they had inevitably fallen. He had mourned the loss of his crew at the North Pole. Tonight, under the light of the stars at the Western Air Temple, he lit a stick of intense and prayed for the souls of those nameless, faceless Fire Nation soldiers who had fallen on the day of the eclipse.
Prelude, Scene 3
The night that Zuko arrived was the first night Katara didn’t dream of losing control.
Perhaps, she mused the next morning as she warmed up the previous night’s leftovers, it was because she had set it free for once. That dark thing inside her. Perhaps those few minutes in which she had cornered Zuko had been enough to still the beast. She didn’t want to think about what that said about her, so she called for the others to hurry up and help her set the plates. Aang and Zuko arrived on the heels of Toph and Sokka, shirtless and sweaty. Firebending practice. Somehow, she’d already forgotten that that was why Zuko was here.
Sokka, ever careful, leaned towards her as he took the soup ladle to serve himself and Toph. “I’m keeping an eye on him till Toph’s feet get better,” he said, his voice low. “Not that I think Aang can’t handle himself, but-”
“I get it,” Katara cut him off. She looked over Sokka’s shoulder at Zuko. He looked pale and tense. Despite the muscle on his arms and chest, he looked thin; his ribs were faintly visible. She looked away. “I talked to him last night.”
Somehow, Sokka didn’t look surprised. He just nodded. “Good,” he said, and went to give Toph her bowl. Katara made eye contact with Aang and gestured for him to come serve himself. He sprang up with less than his usual cheer and accepted the ladle.
“I think Zuko’s having trouble with his bending,” he whispered, looking worried. Katara snorted, and Aang gave her a reprimanding look. “It seems serious!” he insisted. “We’re gonna figure out what’s wrong this afternoon and try to fix it.” We. Katara tamped down on a sudden surge of nausea.
“Just tell him to come get his food,” she replied curtly, and quickly began serving herself. The soup was decent if a bit boring. They’d have to find a way to buy more vegetables from the market that week, now that they had one more mouth to feed.
She finished serving herself. Without meaning to, she glanced up and locked eyes with Zuko, who was approaching the pot. He froze.
Last night had been strange. She had walked to Zuko’s room at night in a daze, as though in a dream, and had watched him silently through the doorway for a minute before making her presence known. She had been drowning in anger and, loathe as she was to admit it, fear. She was afraid of Zuko’s inevitable betrayal, of what it would do to Aang. But mostly, she was angry that it had happened to her first.
She barely remembered what she had said, but now, Zuko was watching her like a caged animal watches its keeper.
Katara flicked her eyes away from his and glanced meaningfully at his underfed torso. “The food’s getting cold,” she said, icily, and stepped away from the pot. Zuko flushed but set his jaw. He waited until she was seated to serve himself, and before he ate, he pulled his undershirt back on.
He didn’t meet anyone’s eyes again during that meal.
Far from feeling guilt, Katara felt a thin curl of satisfaction. Good.
She didn’t want to be feared, but she would make sure she was if it meant keeping her family safe. She wouldn’t let them be betrayed again. She would keep them safe, even if it meant that the darkness inside her never died.