Chapter Text
Sokka is born in the sunless nights of winter, in the bitter cold and the dawn of his family’s greatest shame. They only know it is night by the shifting of the great stars, in the turning wheel of the lovers signs on the horizon and the grey-steel light of the only sun that graces the snow.
The tents are lit by fire, burning on seal-fat and powdered bone— winter is only ever lit by fire, and it is an irony that is not lost on his people.
Gran-Gran tells him, when she spits at his feet— it is luck, a blessing, the only one Sokka will ever get. She tells him that in the fat-brown smoke and flicker of his mother’s birthing tent, that Sokka’s left eye had shone golden— Gran-Gran tells him how his mother wept at the sight.
It is a story that Sokka needs to know, but she does not tell it out of kindness.
There is a hatred, a shame, a bitterness to his people when they see the shades of the sun in his eye and the cold-tide blue of their people in the other: he is a duality they do not want. Sokka stares at them with the eyes of the enemy, and Sokka is not one of them.
Nobody in their village is born with eyes like his, they see their matches in the eyes of their neighbours. Nobody is bound to the earth, no seal-gold brown— there is a sea of blue everywhere that Sokka looks.
They hate him for it, call him sunlover and dragonfire . The children ask him, innocent and cheeky, set up by those older than them, which village he will burn today.
And Katara is born with one black iris, grey-dark, squalling in the summer’s endless sun and white-blankness.
They let him hold her only because it is their way, because it is against the words of the past to not let a family hold each child that comes into it. His mother is white as a sheet, pale in the smoke-light as she cradles a daughter with eyes like the empty breeze. His father stands in hollowness, in the steady stance of a man who grapples with the knowledge that nothing in his life is blessed.
Gran-Gran holds a babe with one dark eye and an empty future, and no one knows how to say that there is no one here to match her eyes. Katara is a child of the cinders, of blackened soot and ashen grey rain—
Katara is not one of them.
Gran-Gran passes her to Sokka like she would rather leave the child in the snow, like it is a kinder fate to die of exposure then for Sokka to touch her. But it is the words of Tui, the songs of La, the endless stories of fated pairs that stays Gran-Gran’s tongue from vitriol. Katara is so small, so quiet, so much that it takes Sokka’s breath away. It is a cruelty of the fates, that she stares out with eyes that have no match here.
Staring down into her mismatched eyes, Sokka knows that even still— Katara is blessed.
Even a future where her soot dark eyes might be earth brown in the sun is better than knowing that Sokka is bound to the sun, to a child born in fire and raised on the blood of his people.
Kya stares into the mismatched eyes of her children and weeps.
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“Why do they hate me, Gran-Gran?”
“It is in our nature, to hate that which is not ours.”
“But I was born here.”
“You are not ours.”
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Zuko is born in the monsoon season, in the flash of lightning and summer-heavy humidity, in the wet . He is born when the sun goes down, hidden behind the rain and the world outside is blue with water.
Zuko’s eye blends into the sky, into the pale blue of the ocean, the drifting currents that stir his reflection in the ponds. It is meant to be covered, to be hidden— to be water is to boil, to evaporate beneath the hands of the Spirits.
Blue is the shade of people who refuse to be conquered, who refuse to bow before his father and Zuko is the greatest of all shames. Water is the antithesis of all they are, all they do, all that matters in the burning lands and sun-hot metal of the palace.
They blame his water-eye for his weakened flame, for the sputtering heat in his veins. There is too much damp in his soul , they tell his father, tell anyone who will listen. He is not one of us, you must never forget he isn’t a child of the sun — he is of the water and he will drown us.
“Sunchild,” says the boy staring back from the water, and his words send ripples across the surface of the pond. They grow smaller and smaller as they fan out, little bumps on the water— the turtle ducks are coming closer. “I am a sunchild, just as much as they are.”
“It’s okay to be water as well, little one.”
Zuko yelps in shock, whirling around with one hand across his face by instinct. His mother stands in the shadow of the willow, hands folded in her sleeves and she smiles. Zuko knows there is bread, tucked away in the billowing fabric of her sleeves, and knows it by the way they hang heavy.
Father doesn’t approve of this, wants him to train and be stronger— Zuko must work harder, move faster, burn hotter than any natural born sunchild. He is only half of them, half of the sun: even when he hides it away, the people know he is water-hearted.
They do not spit at his feet— but if he were anyone other than who he is, they would.
“Mother, you scared me!”
She laughs at that and like clockwork, tugs the bread chunks out from the hollow of her sleeves with a broad smile. “I’ve been here for some time, Zuko.”
Zuko flushes at that. “It’s not okay to be water, Mother. If it was, I wouldn’t have to hide it.”
His mother sighs, and hands him a chunk of bread as she crouches next to him, long red sleeves dragging in the wet earth of the pond bank. It’s only in the shade of the willow, the cool breeze off the water: only in the red-glow of the late night fire are the mother and son in this way. Nobody watches them by the pond except for guards who do not care, who ignore Zuko with his water-heart and his mother who is weak .
The turtle ducks paddle through the murky blue-brown, coming ever closer— the bread brings them faster. They crowd them, voices rising in a clamour— Zuko laughs, despite the heaviness of his thoughts.
“The turtle ducks do not care about your eyes, Zuko.” She finally says, as she breaks the bread into small pieces and scatters them. “They do not care if you are a fire-born spirit child, or if your heart calls to the waves— they do not care, because it is your hands that bring them kindness and food.”
Zuko chucks a bread chunk into the flock, smiles at the way they dive for it— an uproar of squawking and quacking that is joyous even in its chaos. “But people see my eyes, mother… and it’s the people I want to know, not turtle ducks.”
He says it like a joke, but his mother does not laugh at it. “Some people you meet are going to be like your father, and they will hate what they do not know, and they will not care if you are kind. But some people…” She abandons the pretence of feeding the turtle ducks, and takes his hands in hers. “Some people will be like turtle ducks, and they will not care about the colour of your eyes or the temperature of your spirit. They will know you are kind, and it will be enough.”
Zuko blinks up at his mother. “How will I know which people are like father, and which are like the turtle ducks?”
His mother smiles, soft and sad. “You will know it when you see it, Zuko.”
Azula might’ve been born in the heat of summer, in the dry lightning-spark of a surprise storm— but anyone who knows her would tell you she is anything but warm.
She burns, burns , rages in flame but Azula is cold in every way. She is younger but she is more , far more than Zuko can ever be. Father knows it, Grandfather knows, even mother knows it— even if Azula has an eye that looks like ice-melt and the tides, she is twice the sunchild that Zuko could ever be.
Azula has an eye the colour of lightning meeting the surface of the sea and Zuko has eyes the shade of soft-water currents, of rain — the difference is enough to divide them into enough and not enough .
Azula is enough and Zuko—
Zuko is not enough.
Zuko begins to think that turtle duck people do not exist.
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Sokka is only young when he is told about how the weakest of them die, of how the oldest of them choose to walk out into the snowblind horizon to protect their people from their failing bodies and shaky hands that can no longer shear blubber from skin, fat from bone.
He learns that the air is cold and the water biting, sheer cutting wind that throws the waves up into the air and over the lip of their kayak as his father bundles him into the bow, where it is safer. Where he can see him. He learns that they go for the slowest seal first, the last to respond, healthy but slow, fat or thin, ripe for food.
“The old must go first,” his father says, as he teaches him how the ulu cuts, how to drag it below the edge of the skin, between blood and flesh and the fat they will eat as mattak, back and forth like the rocking of the kayak.
“And so too must those who slow their herds down.”