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It's the full moon and Katara can’t sleep. Just like every full moon since she met Hama. It’s not even that late yet, only a few hours have passed since everyone else went to bed, but she knows it’s pointless to even try, she’d just end up tossing and turning until sunrise.
Sitting on her bed with her back against the wall, she focuses on all the water around her. Her bending flask, the buckets they keep full for washing, and of course (and it bothers her how obvious it’s become to her) the blood of all her friends, sleeping peacefully in their rooms. She tries to ignore it and reaches further out, to the trees around the house that sway in the gentle breeze, water rushing endlessly up through them, and beyond that, the huge expanse of the ocean, calling to her. She missed being so close to it when they were living in the air temple. It was like she’d lost one of her senses. Here, she can never get lost. Even with her eyes closed, she can always feel where she is in relation to the sea.
When she reaches out with her bending again, trying to make out the push and pull of the rising tide, she feels something else between her and the water, or rather someone else. Another heartbeat, this one warmer than all the others. Zuko. Strange, she thinks, he doesn’t usually stay up this late, since he wakes up just hours after dawn. Still, any distraction is better than another night spent mindlessly twirling some water above her bed and ignoring how aware she is of every living thing around her, full of pulsing blood.
She doesn’t run to the beach, but she certainly rushes, hoping to catch Zuko before he decides to go back to sleep. The ocean is pulling her in with every step, its background song in her mind almost deafening because of the full moon.
When she gets there Zuko is firebending, and he must have been at it for a while, because the air is as warm as in the middle of the day. She considers watching him for a while, the way the bursts of fire cast red lights and deep shadows over his skin is captivating, but she doesn’t want to startle him and risk getting hit, so she calls out from a safe distance. He stops in the middle of a form, spins around to face her, and smiles. Deep down she’s still always surprised to see him smile because of her, at least without any malice behind it, but she hopes she’ll get a chance to get used to it.
They sit down next to each other facing the sea, watching the gentle waves. After a few minutes it becomes clear he isn’t going to say anything, but if she wanted to sit in silence she might as well have stayed in her room.
“I couldn’t sleep” She offers up, but he just answers with a grunt, because some habits are hard to break. “What about you?” She tries again.
“I’ve... well, I was training”
“Yeah I saw that, but why now? Aren’t you...” she looks for a nice way to put it, but it doesn’t come, “you know, weaker at night?”
“That’s why,” he answers, without really clarifying anything.
It might take more than a full moon to give her the strength needed to carry this conversation, but she’s not quite ready to give up yet. She looks up, smiling at Yue, glad to have someone who understands dealing with clueless boys, watching over her from the sky.
“I don’t get it. You’ll never be as strong at night as you are during the day,” she tries to say as gently as she can.
“I…” He stumbles over an answer, before falling silent again, looking thoughtful. Just as she thinks he won’t speak again, he begins slowly, like he’s not quite sure if he wants to tell her. “I’ve been thinking and… well, most firebenders don’t care if they can fight at night. They started this war and they get to attack when they want to. But we,” and Katara doesn’t miss how being part of their group is almost an afterthought to him at this point, “need to be ready at all times. I guess I just don’t like having to rely on the weather.”
“You know it’s not that simple. The sun is the source-”
“Of course I know. It’s just that…” he hesitates, starts digging into the sand with one hand before continuing. “Do you remember the North Pole?”
“Yes, of course I do.” She’s surprised he does, with how hard he usually works to avoid any mention of their earliest meetings.
“You beat me immediately. Without even trying.”
“It was the full moon.”
“That’s another thing I’ve been thinking about. With the comet coming, I’ve been wondering how it’s going to feel, and I’m guessing you’re the person to ask.”
She certainly wasn’t expecting this when she came here to distract herself from the full moon, but now she realises she really needs to talk about it, preferably with someone who wasn’t there that night with Hama.
“I’m guessing it’s different. The comet will let you make more fire than ever, but I can’t do that. I can’t make water out of nowhere, I can just take it, and move it.” She makes a short pause, but he’s watching her expectantly. “It’s everywhere around us, all the time. And tonight I can feel all of it. The sea, but also the mist in the air, the grass behind us, the water deep under the sand…” She trails off, but he knows why.
“My blood.” He finishes, and it’s her turn to stay stubbornly silent. “Katara, what you did on that ship... It was incredible, I’ve never even heard of it.”
“I’ve only ever met one person who could do it. She invented it, taught me how to do it, and now I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m afraid I’ll do it by accident, or without thinking, and now I have. I promised myself that I’d never do it again, and then I did it, and it wasn’t even him.” Her voice is starting to shake so she stops, hoping he’ll pick up the conversation and move it away from the topic. He doesn’t, of course.
“Again?”
“She didn’t exactly teach me. She attacked us, made Aang and Sokka fight each other and she was so strong, there was no other way to stop her.” Her voice is still unsteady but she tries to ignore it. Sokka and Aang never want to talk about it, and if she doesn’t get it off her chest soon she might go insane. “With her I had no other choice, but with that man... I knew I could have beaten him without it. We’d already beaten him without it. I just wanted to scare him. And that’s all it can do, isn’t it? Scare people. If no one else can do it then it can’t ever be a fair fight.” She’s almost sobbing by this point, and in response he just laughs.
“I’m sorry, but you have to know by now my family doesn’t care about being fair. Besides, it doesn’t scare me.”
Her head snaps up to look at him. He’s managed to shock her out of her crying with the sheer stupidity of his statement.
“Then you’re not thinking it through. You have no idea how much power it gives me. I could kill you.”
“You wouldn’t though,” he answers simply, his tone infuriating.
“That’s not the point, you should be scared of me.”
“I’m not scared because it’s you.”
She’s not sure if he’s noticed but the mirth in his voice is gone, replaced by pure honesty. They stare at each other until it all becomes a little too intense and they both turn back to the sea.
“Listen,” he continues after a pause, “Aang told me about the first time he firebended. He burned you, right? And then he said he’d never try it again. Do you think he was right?”
“No, of course not. It’s part of his abilities, he can’t just ignore it.”
“Well, don’t you think that’s true for you too?”
How dare he turn her own argument on her in an entirely relevant way. She sits stewing in silence until he decides to push further.
“There must be a way you can use it without being cruel. In fact I know there is. You can feel where people are with just your bending, that’s amazing. I bet you could learn to tell when someone is lying, like Toph.”
“It’s not the same thing as moving their bodies by force.”
“Not their bodies, their blood. Katara, you’re a healer. Think how much more you could do if you used this.”
“Of course I’ve thought about it!” The tears are back in her eyes, and now they sting with anger. “That just makes it worse! I could do so much good with this ability but I can’t learn to do it without hurting people, and no one can teach me because I threw the person who invented it in prison. Because she’d been so traumatised by her first stay she was terrorising an entire village in revenge. And she was one of the most powerful benders I’ve ever met. She knew so much, she taught me how to pull water from thin air, and now she’ll never get a chance to use her abilities again. Can you see now why this doesn’t feel like a gift, or another part of my bending? It’s a curse that forces people to do horrible things and make impossible choices.” She’d been getting louder and louder, almost shouting by the end, but after she’s finished all her anger leaves her, and she deflates and falls back onto the sand, the moon staring at her, unblinking. She allowed her worst fears, that had been stewing at the back of her mind for months now, to come out, and she feels lighter for it. Saying it out loud made them seem less like a truth she’d been denying, and more like the night terrors of a teenager. She feels her age for the first time in a long while.
Zuko stays silent, allowing her to process what she’d said, familiar with such outbursts himself. He doesn’t know the story, and can’t help Katara with her tangled up emotions. He does have, however, an idea. It started as a flicker of curiosity back on the Southern Raiders’ ship, and only solidified into a plan in the last few minutes.
“What if you could practice without hurting anyone? Not in a fight, without all the hurt and anger. Just to try it,” he finally asks, glad she’s still laying on the sand behind him and he doesn’t have to look in her eyes, but she sits back up immediately.
“Are you suggesting I practice on you?”
“Yes,” he says quickly, staring at the ocean, hoping she can’t see his blush. Hoping she can’t feel it, tracking his blood as it tints his cheeks.
Katara stays silent for a couple of minutes, like she’s thinking it over, then says, after a deep breath, “okay. Okay, let’s try it. You’re right, I can’t be scared of my own bending. Just tell me first, why do you want to do this?”
“I want to help you,” he says, but it doesn't feel like enough, since it was his idea. “And I’m curious,” he admits. He looks at her, wondering how she’ll react, but with the moon’s strange light on her face, he can't exactly read her expression.
Suddenly, he shivers when a droplet of sweat running down his back stops and reverses, crawling slowly up his spine.
“That’s not blood,” he says, forcing his voice to stay calm.
“Sorry, I was just making sure you won’t freak out,” she says with a barely concealed giggle, the earlier tension gone entirely. And all of a sudden he gets what she’s so afraid of. When you take away the anger and fear she associated with this ability before, it becomes just as fun and fascinating to her as any other part of bending. She wants to try to untangle and improve it, and use it until she’s the best she can be. The best anyone could be.
He would be terrified if he wasn’t just as excited.
“Alright. Get up,” she says, standing over him.
But now that he knows she’s not going to start crying again, he can push her a little, and besides, he believes the best way to learn bending is to just start doing it.
”No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“You do it,” he answers, but by then she's already figured it out.
“May I remind you that this was your idea? You have no reason to be difficult,” she says, stifling a smile, but he forgets to respond because suddenly he can’t move.
She forces his head up to look at her, then drags him up to his feet with slow and measured gestures. He can feel his body shaking, but it stops when he concentrates on relaxing, like shivering, though he feels anything but cold. It’s strange, getting up without using a single muscle. He can feel his legs are in an awkward position, toes barely skimming the sand. He'll probably fall when she lets go.
“Tell me how it feels.” She doesn’t sound as sure as she did moments ago.
“Strange,” he answers slowly, “like… Well, it’s a bit like when your leg falls asleep.”
He’s still focusing on keeping his body from fighting her, because it only results in shaking. He knows he couldn’t break her hold, even if he tried. He knows that should terrify him, but it just doesn’t. It’s not even slightly painful, like part of him had expected, but that’s probably because he was prepared. The shivers are annoying, but they’re getting easier to keep at bay.
He knows without a shadow of a doubt that if anything were to go wrong she would let him go whether he said something or not. He also knows how powerful she is, and can’t bring himself to believe, even for a second, that she’d lose her control enough to hurt him.
He doesn’t tell her that it feels similar to her hug, safe.
Suddenly, she moves her curled fingers the slightest bit and his arm whips out to the side. He gasps, more in surprise than pain, but she doesn’t know that and she immediately drops her hold causing him to crumple to the ground like a sack of rocks. He gasps again, this time in pain, though not a lot of it.
“Sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry.” She runs to his side looking honestly terrified. “I was afraid I'd hurt you and I didn't even think to put you down gently. Are you okay?” It’s almost funny how much her attitude towards him has changed in the past month.
“I'm fine, it's just a skinned knee.”
Still, she summons some water and heals the small wound in seconds. The seawater stings when it first touches his blood, but then her bending takes over and he feels his skin close and a soothing feeling spread over his skin.
She sits down next to him and twirls the water around her hands nervously.
“Katara, I’m fine, honestly. I’d say it went pretty well for a first try.”
“You’re right. Thank you. I… I’ll think about it, but I think that’s enough for today,” she sighs, “do you want to get back to your training? I can go if you want.”
“No, stay,” he reassures her. “Actually, I wanted to ask you something. I was wondering if you’d help me?”
“Help you how?”
He decides to explain from the start. “In the fire nation, the goal of firebending is to be as powerful as possible. Make a huge fireball and throw it as far as possible. Anything else is just circus tricks. But that’s not true. I was so lucky to have my uncle as a teacher, he tried to show me a different way…” He trails off, suddenly unsure if he can bring himself to continue.
“I know you miss him,” Katara says, “I think he would be so proud of you.”
He takes a deep breath, trying to ground himself, before speaking again. “He taught me how to redirect lightning, and he learned it from waterbenders. I was wondering if you could teach me more.”
She looks at him with wide eyes. “How would that even work? Our techniques are so different, I’m not sure anything I know could help you.”
“Fire and water are supposed to be opposites, right?” He asks, excited to finally share the theory he’s been developing. “But they’re not, they’re parts of the same whole. The moon shines because it reflects the sun, and heat only brings life when there’s water to keep it balanced. The world is not meant to be like it is now, with the nations separated. We need to learn to work together if we ever want to achieve balance.”
She looks pensive, until suddenly that same excited smile from earlier breaks out on her face.
“Alright. I can try,” she says, summoning more water to pool at her feet. “I guess we should start with the basics. Waterbenders learned from the spirits of the moon and ocean.”
“Tui and La, right?”
“Exactly. It means push and pull, and that’s the fundamental move of waterbending.” She starts moving the water in front of her with a gentle wave of her fingers, in sync with the waves lapping at the beach.
“Firebending comes from the breath,” he starts, trying to find common ground. “I guess that’s similar.” He sparks a small flame in the palm of his hand to show her how it grows with each exhale and wanes with each inhale.
“I wonder if I could…” She trails off, closing her eyes and focusing on the puddle in front of her. Her fingers twitch, but she keeps them on her knees, breathing deeply, until the water starts to follow, moving back and forth.
“You got that really fast,” he says, trying to sound more proud than jealous.
“Well, it is the full moon. Now you try it.”
He brings the fire back out onto his hand and waves the other above it, mimicking Katara’s smooth gesture. He’s trying very hard to ignore how stupid he feels, and succeeding pretty well until he hears her stifling a giggle. He glares at her, letting the flame go out
“I’m sorry,” she laughs, “it’s just… You look like you’re trying to do a magic trick.”
“Maybe I just can’t do it,” he answers, uncomfortably aware of how childish he sounds.
She hums thoughtfully. “I think we might be starting in the wrong place. Come on.”
She gets up, the puddle of water following at her feet like an afterthought, and almost drags him to the fire pit they set up a few days earlier.
“Light it,” she says, once she’s thrown some driftwood onto the ashes.
“Are you cold?”
“No,” that giggle again, “just do it.”
He does, curious to see what she’s trying to achieve.
“You were focusing too much on keeping the fire alive,” she explains, once the wood catches flame. “In waterbending the element is already there, your task is just to guide it. And now you have both hands free. Now look.”
She stands facing him, his fire and her water aligned between them, casting flickering shadows and reflections onto her face. She starts bending again, more focused this time, the movement starting in her wrists and spreading to her entire body. He can’t imagine not looking. He remembers long nights on the sea, when the waves were big enough to seem like they would topple his ship, but they always just rolled under it, like they didn’t even notice, like he was too small and insignificant for them to even bother killing him.
Now, looking at her, he’s never felt smaller.
“Come on, try it with me.”
He snaps out of it and starts to move his hands back and forth following her lead. He pushes when she pulls and vice versa, and it feels like dancing. Not that he’s ever danced before, but he’s seen enough of it in port taverns to have had several daydreams about the two of them, in another life, twirling together in a room that smells like fish stew and cheap ale.
He remembers faintly that he’s supposed to be learning something and turns his attention to the fire, trying to push it to follow her waves and pull it away before it gets extinguished.
“Great, Zuko! You’re doing it,” she beams, proud and bright.
The water and fire dance together and they dance above them and whenever he moves out of sync the elements collide and steam rises, swirling around them, adding to the surreal atmosphere.
After a while he feels like he gets it, but doesn’t really know how to stop. He breaks off and asks awkwardly, “would you like some tea?”
“Sure, why not.”
He brings over the tray he took with him down from the house, and just as he’s about to heat the pot full of cold water he gets an idea.
“Have you ever tried to boil water? With your bending, I mean.”
“Not really. I’m not sure if it’s something that can be done by a waterbender.”
“I’ve seen you melt ice and make steam, so why wouldn’t you be able to do this?”
“Fine, I can try. I guess it’s only fair that you teach me something in return.”
She sits down in front of the tray and looks up at him expectantly.
“Okay…” he starts, suddenly unsure how to explain it. “Fire is all about movement and speed, but water is steady, you have to find a way to unsettle it.” He can hear himself babbling, like he does whenever he’s trying to emulate his uncle, and she looks as confused as he feels, so he asks instead, “how do you make ice?”
“I find the push and pull and slow it down. It’s always there, even when you can’t see the water moving.”
“Start with that, then. Try to speed it up without moving.”
She raises her hands above the teapot, brows furrowed in concentration. Her hands are almost unnaturally still until he sees them slowly start to shake. At first he thinks it might be from the effort, but then the pot starts to shake too, lid clattering from the rolling boil inside.
She stops abruptly and the pot quiets down soon after, steam escaping from the spout..
“Wow,” she breathes. “Thank you. I can’t believe I never thought of that myself!”
He throws the leaves in, knowing the water is definitely too hot and the tea will come out bitter, but not especially bothered about it tonight. He doesn’t want to see the inevitable disappointment on her face if he asks her to cool it back down.
“Alright, my turn,” she says, dragging him up to his feet. “You know how I mentioned waterbending is all about moving water that’s already there? I think we should focus on that. Let me show you what I mean first.”
She gathers the water at her feet, but most of it has already evaporated or soaked into the sand, so she brings in more from the ocean, so he can see clearly as she spins it around her body a few times, before suddenly swinging it at him. He flinches, but the water just curves behind him and goes back to her, missing him entirely. She continues looping the water around them with wide, sweeping motions, and once again he forgets learning and stares instead. She’s moving a mass of water that’s probably heavier than both of them combined and she’s not even breaking a sweat.
Her voice brings him back to reality. “In a fight I can’t really throw water at someone and forget about it. Unless I’m standing in a river, that’s all I have and anything I lose with each attack makes me weaker.” She sends most of the water back into the sea, keeping some cupped in her hand, and blows on it, forming a perfect snowball. “This is how I used to practice with Aang. Well, not exactly, we used actual water, but that won’t work now, obviously.”
She throws the makeshift ball at him, and he catches and throws it back almost automatically. She catches it with her left hand and throws it again with her right, in a similar motion to her bending. He gets it and tries to mimic her moves. They keep at it for a while, until his motions become fluid and they fall into an effortless rhythm, with just the slap of the ball against their hands and the crackling of the fire breaking the silence. He can feel the snow melting slightly each time it passes through his hands, but when it comes back it’s always just as cold and solid as it was before.
“Good,” she says, “now you see that the way you throw influences how it comes back to you, but so does what I do with it.”
He barely catches the twitch of her wrist on her next throw before the snow breaks over his face.
“Hey! No bending,” he almost yells from the temperature shock.
“Sorry, I just wanted to show you.”
She doesn’t sound very sorry at all, and he can hear that giggle in her voice again. It would be insufferable if it wasn’t so adorable. She drags the melting snow off his face, and droplets pull at his hair before sliding off, leaving it dry.
“As you’re attacking you have to think of the aftermath,” she explains, sounding serious again, and reforms the snowball before throwing it again. “You can guide it up to a certain point, but then I take over and you have to track what I do to know how to catch it.”
They continue like this for a while, Katara throwing trick shots at him just rarely enough that he has to work hard to catch them. After he misses two in a row, the last of which came from a wide angle he didn’t see, she notices and stops abruptly.
“You’re turning your head,” she says, “oh, of course, I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I didn’t realize... You can’t see out of your left eye, can you?”
“Not as well as the other one, no,” he mumbles, and tries to run away from the subject by pouring the tea, which has definitely oversteeped by this point, but that of course gives Katara the idea they’re taking a break to continue this conversation.
You never think these things through, says the little uncle Iroh that lives on his right shoulder.
That’s because you know you deserve to suffer, adds Azula from the other one, and he shakes his head.
Katara takes the cup he gives her, and thankfully doesn’t comment on why there are two. She knows that he knows she’s the only one that ever stays up this late and he can’t really think of a lie, nor does he want to lie to her at all.
“Do you remember what I said in Ba Sing Se?” She asks softly. “The offer still stands. I mean if I ever get some spirit water again.”
“That’s really nice, but I don’t really mind it as much anymore,” he admits. He’s had to accept so many painful things recently that this old hurt just slipped away unnoticed. “I guess you could try to heal my eyesight, but the scar itself... I’ve made my peace with it.”
“I’ve always thought it made you look more interesting.”
“You mean freakish.” He might have gotten used to it, but old habits and thought patterns die hard.
“No!” She says so surely it almost knocks him off his balance. “Like... Daring and handsome.”
He chokes on his tea. She said the last part with a healthy dose of irony and a dramatic wave of her hand, but he can see she’s blushing. He’s feeling so unbalanced now he’s ready to fall over.
“Really?” He asks, trying to sound confident, but it comes out honest and vulnerable instead.
“Yes, really,” she repeats, his tone apparently giving her the confidence back. “Even back when you were chasing us I couldn’t help but notice you looked… ” Her confidence quickly fizzles out as she realizes she might have said too much, and can’t really dig her way out of it.
He doesn’t want to torture her, but he’s curious. “Because of the scar?”
“Well, it certainly wasn’t the haircut,” she huffs, looking anywhere but his eyes, and it’s his turn to blush now.
“I guess I thought if everyone thinks I’m hideous anyway, I’d rather it was by my choice,” he explains, not sure why he’s telling her this, embarrassment tugging at his throat.
Her eyes snap back up to meet his in an intense look.
“You’re not hideous, Zuko, not now, and not then. You were a horrible person, but…” She trails off, her eyes sliding off him to stare at the sea. “Well, you were definitely not hideous, and I noticed.”
“Really?” He asks, this time managing a teasing tone, despite his surprise. He’d always known she was beautiful, and adrenaline from a fight can get confused with other things easily, but he never thought she felt that too.
She must be thinking the same thing, because she looks up with a mean smile, and speaks in a horrible imitation of his voice, “I’ll save you from the pirates.”
“Oh no,” he stammers, face burning, “I hoped you didn’t remember that.”
“How could I forget? I almost swooned.” Her voice is equal parts mocking and melodramatic, but that only makes it better. He never thought they’d be able to talk about that time so lightly, but she’s the only one on the team who doesn’t treat him like two different people. She’s always seen all of him, the mistakes and regrets, and now the desperate need to redeem himself.
She bursts out laughing, and he joins her, until they fall back on the sand slowly getting their breath back.
“I missed you, you know?” He starts after a moment, staring up at the moon. “When I was back in the capital. You were the only people my age I had any regular contact with since I was thirteen. I hated you, and you hated me, but sometimes it almost felt like a game. When I broke Aang out of jail, when you rescued me at the North Pole…”
“We knew the game had to continue,” she finishes for him, like she’s just realising it now. “I guess it was always more fun running into you than the actual army, and ever since your uncle helped us save the moon… Well, I knew your story couldn’t be as simple as it seemed.”
They fall into a silence so uncharacteristically comfortable it makes him feel restless. “Come on, I want to try again.”
She finishes her tea in one gulp, gets up and takes a few steps back.
“Okay. Try it with fire now, that way you’ll be able to feel it, even when you can’t see.”
He nods, then throws his arm out, trying to repeat the motions she showed him, but the blast of fire barely curves before dying down, nowhere near his other hand. He tries again, over and over, with slightly better results each time, but he can’t keep the fire alive through the whole arc unless he keeps making more, creating a continuous loop, and that’s not at all what he’s trying to do.
And apparently she’s noticed, because she shakes her head and starts coming closer.
“Everyone will have huge fire blasts when the comet arrives, and you already know how to make those well enough. I think you should start smaller. You’re still trying too hard to make more fire, and it’s distracting you from controlling it. Try again.”
He tries to step back, but she follows.
“Why are you coming so close? I could hurt you.”
“That’s why. You need to think about what’s around you.”
She’s right in front of him now, so he has to move the fire around her. He tries to keep the flames as small as possible, but they end up dying when he shifts his focus to catching them.
“You’re stopping between each step,” she says, sounding more like a teacher than he’s ever managed with Aang. “In waterbending you don’t get to only attack on the exhale, the throw and the catch are one move.”
He’s getting frustrated, the flames growing with his anger, and he smells singed hair on the next try. She doesn’t seem to notice, or care, but he collapses onto the wet sand mortified, muttering something about a break.
Katara walks away, then comes back with two cups of tea, now cold. He drinks his, while watching her heat up and cool down hers repeatedly. She makes a grimace when she finally takes a drink, and he chuckles, knowing how bitter that must have made it.
After a while she’s apparently had enough of his sulking. “Come on, break’s over. It’s your turn to teach me something.”
“Well, um, I noticed,” while staring at your legs, supplies the horrible part of his brain, “that you almost never bend with your feet.”
“It’s not really a thing in waterbending, you know. The hands guide the water and the feet just guide... the hands.”
“You should try it. Here, look.” He shows her a basic form, a few steps to build up energy that end in two low, sweeping kicks, supporting himself with one hand on the ground, his bare feet sending flames flying over the sand. “It can help you break an opponent’s root, when you attack low.”
“Show me again?” She asks, then copies his moves without bending a few times. He almost feels some twisted satisfaction that she isn’t succeeding at everything immediately, until she nods to herself with a smile and walks into the water up to her ankles, and he realizes she wasn’t even trying before.
As she goes through the movements in the shallow water the waves seem to cling to her, climbing up her calves as she lifts them, splashing back down with force when she slams her feet down onto the wet sand. She walks steadily into the sea while moving through the steps, so when she bends her knee to deliver the final kicks she’s submerged to mid thigh. But when she spins the water disappears from around her, forming two waves taller than him, sending them barreling towards the horizon. Why break someone’s root if you can just break their legs, I suppose, he thinks, quickly picking his jaw up from where it was hanging somewhere around his knees.
She turns around, still smiling, and moves her hands down her body to drag all the water out of her clothes as she walks back to shore.
“Wow,” he manages, “you know that raw power, huge fire blasts thing you’re trying to get me to move away from? I think that might be exactly what you should do, especially today.
“You said you can’t make water,” he continues, “But that’s not true, you told me that woman taught you to pull it out of thin air, how is that not making it?”
She winces at the reminder, but then nods slowly.
“Show me,” he asks, and watches as she waves her fingers through the air, her hand gathering a thin glove of water. He searches through his mind for a firebending form he could translate it to, and realises he should probably show her the basics as well.
“Look,” he says, slowing down the simplest, most intuitive move, “I pull my hand back while inhaling, to gather momentum and focus my chi, then I punch on the exhale.” He tries to make the blast as big as possible to show her what he meant, but he still knows whatever she’ll do will overshadow it completely. His fire lights up the area like broad daylight, and just barely scorches the cliff side overlooking the beach.
“I’m guessing you can gather water on your way back, then throw it with the punch,” he explains, but she still looks unsure, for whatever reason. “Look at the mist, I bet you could get most of it out.” He’s pretty much begging by now but he doesn’t care, he needs to witness her full power, to see her abandon any precision and grace and just become a force of nature.
She makes him show her the move again then tries it dry a couple of times, first with one hand, then with both at once. Finally that hesitation fades, just as he realises it might have been fear, and a bright, excited smile takes its place.
“I think you should move a bit,” she says, and he does, without questions.
As she draws her hands back she wiggles her fingers again, and he probably would have thought it looks a bit ridiculous if it weren’t for the droplets it drags out of the air, shimmering as they gather around her. What happens next he hears more than sees. First, as her hands reach their furthest position, a loud crack, from all the water behind her suddenly snapping out of the air, then the deafening roar of a wave crashing over shore, and finally a boom he feels reverberated in the ground as a piece of the cliff the size of Appa falls off under the deluge of water thrown at it. A strong scent of ozone hangs in the air, and without thinking he steps closer, gathering up all that leftover power with sweeping moves of two fingers of each hand, feeling that tingle on his skin, and finally, for the first time, sending a bolt of lightning flying into the air.
They stare at each other in silence for a while until Katara says, “raw power, huh?” sounding stunned and breathless, and sits down.
He joins her, and fine drops fall on their skin, the water she moved slowly remembering that gravity is stronger than her control.
“I didn’t know you could make lightning,” she finally says.
“I can’t,” he admits, the darkness, or exhaustion, or maybe just her making it easy to forget any shame he used to feel about it, “at least not alone.”
The rain she unwittingly made has doused the fire, and in the dark he suddenly notices the horizon is becoming a paler blue. He’s tired, but too keyed up to go to sleep, and not ready for the polite distance that still usually lingers between them to inevitably return in the morning.
“Are you up to one more lesson?” Katara asks, and he smiles and nods, grateful she feels the same way. Still, she sounds unsure when she speaks again. “It’s about looping and catching your fire. I’m sure you’ll get it eventually, it should be easier when the sun is out but…” She trails off, until he looks at her expectantly. “Well, I have an idea, but it probably won’t work, and it’s fine if you don’t want to.”
“What is it?”
“I could… I could try to guide you through it. With bloodbending, I mean. Only if you’re okay with that.” She rambles, visibly anxious again.
“Katara, I’m fine with it, I already told you. I don’t know if it will even work, but I’m willing to try.”
It shouldn’t work. There’s no way it’ll work, it goes against every rule of bending. And yet, this ability of hers is uncharted. Besides, even if it doesn’t, at least she’ll get some more practice. Katara answers with a solemn nod.
They get up, and he sparks a small flame in his hand, getting into position.
“You’ll have to keep the fire alive,” she says, “I can move your body, but I can’t control your chi, or your breath.”
He closes his eyes, focused on his breath, feeling the boundaries of the fire in his hands, so he doesn’t notice her moving to stand behind him until she speaks.
“Don’t fight me, just focus on the movement.”
Now that he’s expecting it he can feel it start before she fully takes control, seeping into his body like a cold drink on a hot day. He concentrates on keeping the flame alive, surprised when it doesn’t go out when she grabs hold of him entirely. From her delighted gasp he guesses she didn’t expect that either.
Suddenly he gets why he was so curious earlier, so excited to let her do this. She’s warmed up to him recently, but somehow he still wasn’t sure where they stand, at least before today. He’s helped Aang and Sokka since he joined them, but some part of him feels like taking Katara to find the Southern Raiders might have done more harm than good. Could easily have done her more harm than good if she wasn’t such a good person, if she was the slightest bit more like him. He’s got nothing else to offer in exchange for her trust but his own, and this is the undeniable proof of it. He knows she won’t harm him, and this forces her to face that knowledge too.
Slowly he feels his right arm start to move and he concentrates on making the fire follow it. He moves through smooth, gliding motions, nothing like firebending, his entire body participating in the deceivingly simple arc of his hand. And then he can’t reach any further, but the flame continues on, naturally slipping from his grasp. He can feel it getting away from his normal reach, but since he doesn’t have to move, it’s easy to concentrate on his breath and give it the extra power it needs to stay alive, like the push and pull she showed him earlier. His body rolls back into position, left hand already reaching out to catch the fire looping around.
And he does! Or at least Katara does, but still, he should be able to recreate the move now that he’s felt how it’s meant to work.
She drops her hold on him all at once and he just barely manages to put the fire out before she throws herself at him, hugging him tightly and laughing.
“Oh my gosh, Zuko, that was amazing! Do you realise what we just did?” She steps back still holding him and a yawn breaks though her smile. Her eyes sparkle with glee, despite the dark circles underneath them, and he can see them clearly now that the sky is bright blue, a red halo signaling where the sun is about to rise. He yawns too, the sleepless night finally catching up to him and they both chuckle.
They gather up the tea set and make their way back up to the house in a comfortable silence that only turns awkward once they stand in the corridor. It feels wrong leaving without a single word, as if the whole night might disappear like a dream without proof, but the walls are thin and neither of them wants to risk waking the others.
Like countless times tonight Katara looks uncertain, her face betraying her doubts like an open book, but it doesn’t last long before she smiles a question at him and grabs his hand to lead him to her room. His old room, in fact, where he used to sleep when he came here as a child. He took the guest room for himself when they first arrived, hoping to avoid any unpleasant memories locked in these walls, but now when they lay down tangled in each other, when her freezing toes press into his shins and she giggles at his hiss, when they fall asleep intertwined, his mind doesn’t stray towards his painful past, or their uncertain future. He stays firmly in the present that is better than hopeful, because it’s already true.