Chapter Text
If Katara can convince herself she’s chosen this, everything will be a lot easier. Her mother had told her that before she had left, after the wedding ceremony. Fall in love with him, Chief Kya had said bravely. It will not be easy but it is the only way you can win, because he has already fallen in love with you.
All in all, she knows this is not the worst situation to be in. She has been left with an unfamiliar man, but to traverse the world at most, to be bestowed with lavish gowns and visit summer homes and be welcomed across the globe with military might. She doesn’t have the pressure of running a nation upon her, unlike Yue and Sokka and even Lu Ten. She is the second-in-line to the chiefdom of the Southern Water Tribe and Zuko is second-in-line to the throne of the Fire Nation. They are both worst-case scenarios.
But that is why Katara has been forced to come here rather than be allowed to stay in the south—ostensibly, because her lineage has no need to be pure, an ugly thought that clouds her mind with disgust. So therefore, she is the water tribe’s playing card to ensure further peace with the Fire Nation, and for the Fire Nation to prove that they are really trying to grow past the war.
A war that ended when Katara was five-years-old, when an explosive argument between Fire Lord Azulon and Prince Ozai led to both of their deaths in an Agni Kai and the up taking of the throne by former Fire Lord Iroh, who had quickly handed the reigns of the nation to his son, Fire Lord Lu Ten. Katara has hazy memories of when-there-was-war, of her father disappearing for large swathes of time and a dearth of warriors in the village, but she luckily never came close to the Fire Nation.
Even as second-in-line to be chief of the Southern Water Tribe, like her mother, she wasn’t on the world’s radar until she was ten and she was caught bending at a diplomatic summit. Then, she was the star of the show, an exceptional diamond. Her betrothal contract had been sent over the next year, along with a picture of her fiancé.
They said it was a choice, but it wasn’t. Not really. Not with the Southern Water Tribe needing a strong alliance with the Fire Nation to rebuild its economy, especially with the Northern Water Tribe looking to exploit its sister tribe’s natural resources.
Katara remembered searching the portrait of thirteen-year-old Prince Zuko for hours at night, looking for lines of compassion written on his somber face. She had heard stories of his father but managed to not scare herself. By the time she was sixteen the picture was well-worn, and by overhearing rumors from the regular Fire Nation entourage, she had convinced herself Prince Zuko was kind.
She had been correct enough. Unlike Princess Azula, he had given her an awkward but tender smile the first night she had arrived at the Caldera—three weeks before the wedding. He had held open her doors and followed all the rules of Fire Nation courting, sitting next to her at meals and taking silent, monitored walks. It was all artificial and so manufactured that Katara had not been able to stand it.
It was Sokka she had cried on two days before her marriage. “I want to fall in love,” she’d said. “I don’t want this.”
Sokka had been determined to call it off while his sister had sobbed all over him, but Katara had convinced him that the issue was not how terrible Prince Zuko was. “It’s a stupid situation to be in,” she admitted, “because he is kind enough and handsome enough and intelligent enough, he is enough of everything.”
“Oh,” Sokka had said understandably. “But he’s still not what you chose.”
“It’s like in those stories Gran-Gran told us, in what mother and father had—something real. I’m terrified that—”
“—whatever you have with him will never be real,” Sokka had finished. He’d held her tight and then said, “Once you learn that he’s human, once you really get to know him . . . the real him that is more than royalty . . . hopefully, it will become real. If not, I’ll break the marriage myself, trade agreements be damned.”
“When did you start giving good advice?” Katara had laughed into her brother’s side and remembered his words when she vowed to cherish Prince Zuko for life in front of Agni, and then again when they both drank ceremonial arctic wine.
When they sat next to each other at dinner, she’d smiled at his side and tried to put more effort into the polite conversation he tried to make with her. When they went to bed that night, he hadn’t even asked her if they were to sleep together. He had simply given her a soft smile and changed his clothes, and then asked her if she would like to talk, really talk in a way that wasn’t so supervised and artificial, and she had said yes.
That was the first day she truly thought she could imagine she chose this, when they stayed up into the late hours of the night talking about bending and cuisine and plays, a random assortment of topics they had tossed together, a conversation they kept drawing out. They didn’t have a lot in common but they both tried.
Now, sitting at Princess Ursa’s turtleduck pond, a week into her marriage, Katara tries to reason with herself, to convince herself more and more that she can love Zuko. He is the perfect husband, who hasn’t tried to pressure her into anything, who listens to everything she says with a smile on his face, who is handsome and aristocratic and respectful.
But something is missing. She’d found some of that something the first night of their marriage, when Zuko had blushed and admitted he was a fan of romance novels to her into the deep hours of the night, when he’d laughed at the way she had snorted after he said that. But the morning after, it had been gone, and Zuko had been plainly picture-perfect and sweet as they’d taken breakfast with both their families.
He is just so . . . “Something is wrong with me,” Katara tells the smallest duck in the pond, who has fallen behind his mother and is now sitting at the pond’s edge, resting where she is sitting. “He should be so easy to love.”
Her family had left the next day, right before her mother had told her those damning words that are now constantly at the forefront of her mind. Fall in love with him. He has already fallen in love with you. Fall in love with him. Fall in love with him. Fall in love with him.
Katara wants to scream. If only it was that easy.