Work Text:
Katara finds a pretty little posy of flowers lying on the low table in her rooms. They aren’t the kind of blooms that she’s seen in the impressive bouquets around the palace, nor are they the works of the botanist’s art that are grown in the lush palace gardens.
She tries to place where she’s seen its like before: crinkled, blue-green-grey leaves, pale yellow petals… a wildflower, she thinks.
She doesn’t know. And she doesn’t know who left it there – there’s no note. They aren’t even in a vase.
Pleased, but puzzled, she leaves them in a glass of water and goes on about her day.
*
Her favourite spot in the palace is in one of the water-gardens. Tucked away in the shade of the cypress trees, in the centre of a wide, broad pool, there is a tall little building made of stone.
Inside, there are seats of fragrant wood, and spaces for candles in the walls. It is cool, and dark, and nobody seems to go there.
Katara loves to meditate, feeling the flat water all around her, watching it reflect the sky. She also hides there when her friends become too noisy and annoying.
The day after she finds the posy in her room, her friends are having a six-way sparring match. Ty Lee challenged Aang’s acrobatics; Suki laughed at Sokka’s hand-fighting; Toph wanted to ask Zuko how hot he can make his fire. They’ve teamed up, and Mai, one on of her rare, awkward visits to Ba Sing Se, has agreed that she will be their referee: Zuko, Aang, and Suki versus Ty Lee, Toph, and Sokka.
Mai’s tentative indications of friendship towards Zuko, after their terrible break-up months before, are important. Ty Lee’s wide-eyed interest in Aang must also be considered significant.
The politics of their group also give Katara a headache, and she doesn’t want to sit with Mai and wonder whether she’s going to say something that the Fire Nation girl will take offense at.
She goes to meditate in the water garden, and finds her bolt-hole covered with fronds of flowers. They smell fresh, and beautiful, and she is utterly bewildered. Who would have left them here for her?
She breathes in the scent as she tries to work it out.
*
She finds flowers in the library, in the section on Water Tribe culture, and wonders if it’s her brother playing tricks.
She finds them on the table in their private dining room, in the seat she favours, the one that faces the water-garden, and worries that it’s Aang trying to win her back.
On the fifth day, curiosity and questions filling up her lungs, after a morning of dissembling with diplomats, she finds them covering the trade agreements she has been negotiating, on the desk in the office she has been assigned.
She thought she was the only one with a key.
She’s been holding the secret to herself because she doesn’t want to find that it’s a joke, one that she’s misunderstood. But it’s been five days, and she has to know, or else she’s going to go mad.
She decides that it’s time to start asking questions.
*
The first person she asks, because she is logical, is the Earth King’s head gardener, Lijuan.
Lijuan unbends from where she is tending a bed bursting with fire-coloured peonies to examine the posy in Katara’s hands.
“That is the common rue, my lady,” Lijuan says, peering at it thoughtfully. “A wildflower, though my aged mother insists it is a herb. It grows in meadowland, but is not present in our little wilderness – His Majesty the Earth King will have no poisonous plant within the palace walls.”
“Poisonous?” Katara’s heartbeat spikes. She’d thought they were a whimsical gift, something to make her smile. What if she had in fact been misreading a threat?
“Oh, only in very great doses,” Lijuan hurries to assure her. “It can cause sickness and bleeding. The Earth King will not risk his bear eating something dangerous.”
“Is it dangerous to people, too?”
“If consumed great quantities, yes,” the gardener shrugs, “but it is safely used in salads and sauces, and sprigs are often used to add flavour to our alcohols. It has a bitter taste; some like the savour.”
Katara is intrigued. A bitter flower, poisonous in great quantities. Who has left the palace five days in a row, to fetch a flower banned from its grounds?
But there is no way for her to know. The palace complex is enormous, with many entrances and exits, and it houses hundreds of people. The likelihood is that it’s someone who knows her well, or at least has watched her for a while, knows where she goes... and even if it is someone she knows, all of her friends have the skills to sneak out unnoticed (though, she concedes, Toph wouldn’t know one flower from another, except by scent). So she won’t find out unless she asks more questions.
Who could it be? Katara spins a flower in her fingers. And who can she ask first?
*
Katara finds Toph rebuilding one of the assault courses for the new group of metalbenders she’s recruited to the New Dai Li.
“Flowers?” Toph sounds puzzled, and then her face perks up. “Hey, have you got a secret admirer?”
Katara feels herself going red. “I’m sure it’s nothing like that,” she says, hastily.
“I can feel your heartbeat speeding up.” Toph is gleeful. “Okay, what’s the flower like?”
Katara doesn’t try to describe it. Instead, she crushes a petal and a leaf, holding it out for Toph to smell.
“Sharp,” the blind girl notes, tilting her head. “No, I don’t remember anything in my parents’ garden being quite this pungent. Sorry.”
Katara shrugs. “Yeah, I didn’t really think it was you. You have other ways of making life fun.”
Toph punches her in the shoulder. “I could have hidden depths.” She stops for a second. “Were the flowers hung from a beam in the middle of a room?”
“Nope. Tied up with blue ribbon, scattered across my desk...” Katara looks at the paler bunch she retrieved from a shelf in the library. “Why?”
The blind girl purses her mouth. “Dunno. I just remember my parents telling me about peasant superstitions, that hanging herbs in the house would keep the spirits out.”
The sun is high in the sky, and Katara has had a long morning. They go in together for lunch.
There is another sprig of rue at Katara’s place at the table.
*
Sokka tilts his head, sadly, in that way he does when he’s remembering. “Yue said that when she was a child, she travelled to Omashu with her father. She loved the flowers, she’d never seen them before, like the tundra in springtime… but the yellow one she liked the most gave her burns all over her skin. They told her it was the flower of rue.”
Rue, Katara thinks, and wonders if the name means what she thinks it means. Who has a reason to regret?
She shakes her head. They have ended a war. A better question is, who does not? That would be a shorter list of suspects. She offers her brother beef with seal blubber for breakfast, and that ends the shadow of his sadness.
After ensuring Sokka is fed, Katara returns to the garden, where today Lijuan is working with the vegetables.
“Yes, my lady, rue juice has many interesting properties,” she says, lecturing as she weeds around the cabbages. “It will keep insects out of a room when rubbed around the doors, and should not be ingested too heavily by people. And any trace of the juice is smeared on the skin and then exposed to sunlight, it blisters and burns most painfully.” Lijuan’s brown eyes look up at her, earnestly. “That is another reason the Earth King will not allow it in the palace. There is too much risk of someone getting hurt.”
Sunlight, sadness, bitterness, burns: Katara has no idea what to make of it. She sighs, thanks Lijuan again, and leaves her to her work.
*
Zuko tilts his head when she holds the posy out to him. “Where did you say you found them?”
“In my drawing room, and my office,” she says. “In the library, and in the gardens. They weren’t growing there,” she clarifies. “Someone left them on one of the islets.”
There’s a faraway look in Zuko’s golden eyes as he teases the tip of his thumb over the pale frills. “I’ve seen these before, when I was a child… my mother had lots of wildflowers in her private garden. My father hated it in there, he said there was no order.”
Katara feels a stab of sorrow. “I didn’t mean to bring back bad memories,” she says, taking them back from him. “I’m sorry.”
Zuko smiles, but she sees the effort that goes into it. He tries a lighter tone: “My mother caught me eating them once, and she was furious,” he says. “She was so fierce, and so protective.” Something intense crosses his face as he looks up at her.
Katara hugs him. This was the first thing that made her think they could be friends, the fact that the Fire Nation had stolen both their mothers. “I’m sorry, Zuko,” she says, and her voice is thick. “I really, really hope we find her.”
After a second, he hugs her back. “Yeah,” he says, “yeah.” And Katara feels like something’s slipped out of the corner of her eye, she’s missed it, it’s flown away.
*
Suki smiles when she sees the flowers that Katara is gathering in a vase. “Herb of grace! Who’s apologising?”
Katara blinks. “Sorry?” she looks at the rue, and laughs. “You mean these? I’ve been seeing them all over the place.”
“Sokka said you kept running into them,” Suki says, and Katara should have known it would get around – her brother likes nothing more than to gossip.
“Yes. Rue flowers,” Katara mused, stepping back to examine her handiwork. “I don’t really know what to make of it.”
“Rue,” Suki says, thoughtfully, as if she’s tasting the word. “On Kyoshi Island we call it the herb of grace. We use it in the sauce we put in Kyoshi’s favourite dish when we honour her in the springtime… it has this bitterness that works really well with the elephant-koi steaks.” She leans forward to sniff at the flowers, appreciatively. “We use it in love-posies, to apologise for an argument. Oh, and it’s the flower we leave on the graves of people we’ve lost, when life is bitter without them.”
“Well, I’m not dead,” Katara frowns, “and I haven’t argued with anyone. But that’s really interesting, Suki.”
“I wonder if the palace cook and find some elephant koi,” Suki says with a gleam in her eyes.
Katara smiles, and picks up the vase. “Here, take them,” she laughs, “I have enough.” She has three more bunches, and she’s no closer to finding out who’s giving them to her.
*
Katara runs into Ty Lee in the corridor, and thinks she might as well ask.
“Someone’s leaving you rue?” Ty Lee’s grey eyes are shining like clouds on a summer’s day. “Oh, that’s so romantic!”
Katara is thrown. “I don’t think anyone’s interested in me, Ty Lee. At least – nobody’s said so.”
“Oh.” Ty Lee looks heartbroken – and then, impossibly perky. “Well, in all the great Fire Nation romances, a sprig of rue symbolises a love that’s been lost, or a devotion that may never be returned. But in the ones with happy endings, it always turns out to be a misunderstanding and they get together anyway.”
Katara almost feels like she has to build defences against the force of the Fire Nation girl’s enthusiasm. “What about the ones that aren’t happy endings?”
“Someone usually dies,” Ty Lee whispers, and Katara swears there are tears in her eyes. “Because they will never be with the one they love. Oh, it’s so sad.”
“Why would someone want me to think of stories in which people die?” This mystery is becoming less and less clear to Katara.
“Oh, well, it’s a symbol of love,” Ty Lee shrugs. “You know.”
Katara doesn’t, but Ty Lee has already cartwheeled the length of the hall.
*
When she asks him if he’s seen the flower before, Aang frowns. “We used to hang it in the temple halls, to keep the spirits out, but only when it had been dried. Fresh... I think we ate it.” He tears off a leaf, dubiously, and starts to chew. His mouth curls up as if he’s bitten a lemon. “Yeah, that’s the stuff,” he sighs. “We ate it on days when we were supposed to meditate on the spirits, and understand the balance of the world. That not everything is sweet, and some things are very complex, but all things have their place.”
It is a very monk-ish thing to say, Katara thinks, but she thanks him anyway.
He brightens up, and says, “I used to hide it in my sleeves and smuggle in spinach instead. Gyatso thought it was hilarious.”
The good thing about Aang is that he’s as transparent as a window. He can’t lie to save his life. He couldn’t compromise his principles to save the world. She can strike off her worried theory that he’s trying to win her back; she could tell from the moment that his eyes went misted with memory that it wasn’t him.
Katara breathes a sigh of relief when she leaves him to his earthbending practise. She cares about his happiness, and she knows they won’t work together, so she’s glad it isn’t Aang.
*
Iroh’s eyes are amused, but also a little sad, as he looks at the flowers – the original posy, dried now, but still bound with the slip of blue ribbon. There’s something else in Iroh’s face, as well, and Katara wishes she could read that wise old man better. “If a woman does not wish to have a baby,” he says, “a strong tea of rue leaves will ensure that she does not.”
Katara’s a healer. She knows that these things happen, that people will not always want to have a child. “I don’t think that’s the message someone is trying to send me,” she shrugs. “They’d have no need to drop those kinds of hints.”
She’s told him everything she knows: the flower’s name, its properties, what it means to the cultures of the world, and how she does not understand where they are coming from, or why they are where only she will find them.
Iroh creases a petal of the pale yellow flower before his thumb and forefinger. “Miss Katara…” he stops, and sighs. “Perhaps I should not say.”
“Please, Uncle,” she begs, leaning forward to take hold of his hand. “I’ve been going around in circles asking everyone I know, and nobody seems to know a thing. I’m starting to worry that I’m going mad. Do you know anything that can help me?”
Iroh looks up at her. “I don’t know that it will help you,” he says, seriously. “It is to do with Zuko. Whenever a new member of the Fire Nation royal family is expected,” he leans back, gazing out of the window, “there is great excitement, as you can imagine. And when Ozai finally married, well…” Iroh trails off, and Katara knows that he is thinking of his lost son. “There was an heir to the throne already,” he finishes, “but it was still an event to ignite the minds of many, to make them think of our glorious future.”
Katara thinks of that sun-baked city with all its beautiful houses, where only the royal family, their retainers, and the highest-ranking government officials were permitted to live. A life of entitled idleness, supported by the rest of the empire. With nothing to oversee, they watch each other – obsessively. The Fire Nation court was a nest of vipers even more complex than the shifting hierarchies of Earth Kingdom power. “I can imagine,” she says, softly, and she tries very hard not to think of what that city did to Zuko, to Mai, and to Azula. Why Ty Lee ran away to live humbly, in a circus that never stopped travelling.
She tries not to think of what the people of that city did to the rest of the world.
“We celebrate in public,” Uncle continues, “but in private, we consult scholars, sages, and seers, asking for details, analysing every little indication that the baby will be strong enough to be a leader of our proud nation.” Iroh’s voice is bitter, now, as if he can taste the flower in his hand. “Zuko’s mother had a difficult first pregnancy, Katara. She was sick, and pale, and the foretellings of the sages were not good. They were not right,” he adds, fiercely. “They said that the baby would be born weak, that he would most likely die before he had been weaned.”
Katara is astonished. “Zuko?” The question slips from her mouth before she can stop it. “But he’s so… so…” she blushes for a second. “He’s so strong, so full of life,” she finishes, somewhat lamely, and then wonders why she’s tripping over her own tongue.
Iroh smiles. “Yes,” he says – and then his face falls again. “But Ozai – who was a prince then, and not even heir to the throne – could brook no shame such as this. He secretly ordered for rue to be added to his wife’s blend of tea, and forbade his servants from telling anybody what he had done.”
Katara feels like she’s going to vomit. “He did what?”
Iroh’s face is grim. “Ozai tried, many times, to get rid of his son, before and after he was born. Zuko’s mother never forgave him. Ursa moved out of the palace and permitted only her old nurse to prepare her food. She never forgot.” Iroh’s voice is barely above a murmur, now. “And Zuko’s sister,” Iroh finishes, his voice so quiet that Katara has to lean forward to catch his words, “the firebending prodigy, who always wondered why her mother loved Zuko the most, was told this story by her bending tutors. When my nephew was banished,” Iroh meets Katara’s eyes again, “Azula left a bundle of rue on his bed, so that he would find it before he left. She was eleven years old.”
She is, for a few seconds, deliciously breathless as the pieces fall into place, and she thinks of blue ribbons and spirits.
The bitterness. The burned skin. The sorrow, and the savour. The stubbornness to survive. The apologies.
And, oh. The love that may never be returned. “Poor Zuko,” she says, softly, and lifts her tea to her lips.
Iroh is a master of politics and pai sho. He sees the very second that she inhales, and that her eyes start to sparkle like sunlight upon the sea.
He lays the rue gently on the table, and somehow, he manages not to smile.
*
She finds Zuko in the water garden, on one of the broad, flat islands in the middle of the artificial lake. It is an immensely beautiful place, crafted by waterbenders and earthbenders to paint hues of blue and green across the land and sky.
He’s sitting, cross-legged, gazing at the little wind-ripples that are wrinkling the surface of the pond. She can tell by the movement of his eyes that he isn’t actually meditating, so she decides to take the plunge.
“Fire Lord Zuko,” she intones, and laughs when she sees him jump.
“Spirits!” he springs to his feet, shaking. his mop of black hair out of his eyes. He eyes her, his voice dropping from alarmed to impressed. “You snuck up on me!”
Katara smiles, but she flushes, too, because she’s pleased that this time, she bested him. “Well, we’re in a water garden, and I’m a waterbender,” she says, stepping off the thin sheet of ice that she used to skim silently across the little lake.
His smile is a little wistful, now, as he looks up and over the gardens. “I love it out here. We only have small pools in the Palace City, though my mother had a stream running through her wild garden.”
“Where she grew rue?” Katara’s voice trembles on the last word, and she kicks herself inside.
Zuko blinks, but his face stays calm. “Yes,” he says, eyeing her. “And lots of other meadow flowers. I told you that.”
She stares at him, and sees the colour rising in his face. “I think you left a few things out,” she says. “Like where you picked this particular bunch.”
He rubs the back of his neck with one hand. “Katara, I…”
She steps forward, and tilts her face up towards his. “I could use the juice to keep away mosquitoes, but I’d need to be careful to avoid being burned,” she murmurs, running the tips of her fingers, with infinite sadness, across the scar on his face. “But I won’t be hanging it in my rooms.” She takes Zuko’s hand, and smiles. “There’s a Blue Spirit that I don’t want to keep away.”
Wonder blossoms in his face. “Really?”
When she nods, he dips his head and presses his forehead against hers, and for a few moments, they just breathe together.
“You could have just talked to me,” she says, wryly. “It would have saved me several days of questions.”
Zuko blushes. “I tried. I wanted to, when you came to me, and – I really couldn’t,” he confesses, and she throws her arms around his neck and kisses him. “Maybe I should have, though,” he adds after a minute. “We could have got to this sooner.”
Katara grins at him. “I don’t have any plans this afternoon.”
His smile is shy, but triumphant. “I have some flowers for you,” he says.
Katara kisses him again. “I’m busy right now. Can’t it wait?”
“Oh,” he says, “it definitely can.”