Work Text:
The night was warm and quiet, and the others had slowly drifted off to bed after a dessert of sliced mango and pineapple.
But Zuko, knowing sleep would not find him, instead trudged out to the garden behind the beach house and rummaged around in the dingy shed for something to do. They'd been at Ember Island for a week now, and Zuko found himself wrangling with a pent-up energy inside him, a restlessness which only grew worse the longer they stayed here. That was how he found himself kneeling in the soft grass of the garden, under the stars, unraveling a wide swath of familiar fabric.
He got it properly rolled out only to stare down at it in dismay. A large hole rendered it unusable. Mouse-rats in the shed, probably.
“Is that a hammock?” The voice startled him, and he jolted before glancing over his shoulder.
Katara stood at the bottom of the porch steps, hip cocked out to the side, arms folded, blue eyes bright and curious.
Katara had made herself scarce since returning from their field trip to face Yon Rha. She did not appear for meals, though plates were prepared and left for her, and the others had begun to comment on her lack of presence. In all likelihood she'd come outside now thinking everyone else was asleep. Their tentative friendship was brand new, her forgiveness still fresh, and Zuko, new to friends and bad with people in general, had no idea what to expect with Katara now.
"Yeah," he said. "Can't hang it, though."
She moved closer, then stopped and squatted beside him in the soft grass. "It just needs mending." Katara leaned past him to examine the damaged area. Her arm brushed his, and a palpable thread of self-awareness unraveled its way through Zuko’s entire body. "You don't know how to sew, do you?"
In the past, the question might have been scathing. Now she only sounded a little amused.
"No," Zuko admitted.
"I can help," she offered. "We just need some supplies."
“I guess there might be some stuff in the servant’s rooms...”
“Ohh.” Katara tossed her hair back, throwing her nose in the air. “Look at me, I’m a prince who never had to mend anything, with servant’s rooms…”
Zuko scowled at her, which only made her grin. Then she rose, tugging on his arm, and led the way back to the house. He tried not to observe her too obviously as she trailed along at his side. Like the rest of the group, he'd started to become concerned by Katara's blatant social withdrawal, but other than an air of weariness to her, a heaviness around her eyes, she appeared perfectly normal. Relaxed, even, if the little tilt of her mouth upward was anything to go by.
He was surprised that she was willingly spending time with him like this, much less assisting him.
He was also surprised to find that he didn't mind the company.
They did indeed find a sewing kit and sturdy fabric after some poking around, and back out in the garden, Katara settled in the grass, dress pooling widely around her knees, and gathered the hammock in her lap. "Sit here." She patted the ground beside her. "Sewing isn't hard. Here, watch." She threaded the needle and wove it through, then had him try it. Zuko's fingers were clumsy, and the stitching was uneven. When she corrected him, her hands and fingers brushed his.
Katara's hands flashed, nimble and precise, and she ended up doing most of the work anyway, due to Zuko's slow speed. But it seemed to please her that he'd tried, for she smiled down at his admittedly ugly stitching. "Not bad," she said, and Zuko rose a disbelieving eyebrow at her.
This time she laughed, a quick flash of white teeth in the growing darkness.
They stood and dusted off before tying it up between two palm trees, then surveyed their handiwork.
Zuko remembered, with an odd clarity that he did not often have for this place—or indeed for his childhood in general—that he and Lu Ten had loved this thing, during their vacations here. They’d sat in it to paint, or swing mindlessly while devouring too many sweets. It had hung in this exact spot. One summer, he and Lu Ten and Azula started a bug journal, and the three of them would pile into the hammock, reviewing the bugs they’d found, and the ones still left to catch.
It was strange, seeing the hammock here again. A reminder of rare fun, of a time when the carefree ignorance of children made things easier.
Had his family really been happy here? Each day that he stayed at this house, the more Zuko remembered; and the more those memories didn’t quite line up with his recollection of a content family. He had been happy here, maybe, at least in part. This was the only place he’d been allowed to play. But his father’s presence hung over these brighter memories, casting them with shadow. Ozai had seeped permanently into the walls like rot, and Zuko had started to remember other things, too, things that he would prefer remained in the dark. The way his mother always wore high collars and long sleeves. Pieces of other things he'd forgotten, like the sound of sobs, once, in the kitchen, when he’d gone down for a cup of water one night—his mother’s tone beseeching, his father’s rough and angry.
He'd started having dreams about his mother again, the past few nights, like he used to right after she disappeared.
He chased after her in the dream, calling for her, begging her to come back. She never returned in his dreams, either.
“Zuko.”
“H—huh?” He jerked and looked round.
Katara was watching him with a deep crease on her forehead. “I said your name three times.”
"Sorry," he muttered, without looking at her.
She didn't question him. Katara only nudged his side lightly with her elbow and said, "Want to test it out?"
He nodded shortly and proceeded to clamber into the hammock, shocked when Katara did the same, crawling in on the other side and facing him, stretching her legs out along his side. Zuko had noticed how often the group touched or nudged each other, either when they were rough housing in play or showing easy affection. This entire group clearly had no concept of personal space, but it had not prepared him for Katara to fall into this casualness so easily with him.
Katara shifted her weight back and forth, experimentally swinging, and it lurched sideways.
The hammock was flimsier than Zuko remembered, probably because now it didn't contain small children. "Careful!"
"We have to test it, don't we?" Katara grinned and rather ruthlessly did it again.
Zuko gripped the sides as it tipped vertically and almost spilled them right back onto the grass. "Stop doing that! I don't know if this thing was made to hold two grown peop—” Katara cut him off with another vicious swing, her laugh high and clear when he cursed, scrambling to hold on.
She wrapped her feet around his calves like an invasive plant. “If I go down, you go with me,” she said, eyes shining with mirth.
Something in Zuko's chest gave a funny lurch.
He glowered at her and tried to extract his legs from hers, but Katara only clamped around him harder. Zuko grumbled out a resigned sigh, flopping his head back into the soft cloth. It was comfortable like this, if he didn’t focus too much on every point of contact where her legs touched his, or the fact that her hip rested against his side. Zuko closed his eyes and concentrated, and a moment later, the tiki torches lined strategically around the perimeter of the garden sprang to life.
“Oh,” Katara breathed.
Zuko cracked an eye open. She was peering around the garden, and firelight flickered across her features, softening them. A faint sea breeze rustled at her dress. When she shifted, her dress rode up her leg and exposed a sizeable expanse of smooth, bare thigh.
Zuko tilted his head back to stare upward. Somehow it felt very smart to focus on looking at the sky instead.
The stars were a thick blanket, a backdrop to swaying palm leaves.
“The fly-mosquitos are brutal in the summer," Zuko explained finally. "The torches will melt an oil that helps keep them away.”
“Oh, so just practicality?" she teased. "And here I thought you were doing it because it would be pretty.”
"You could be grateful. I just kept you from being eaten alive by fly-mosquitos." Zuko crossed his hands behind his head and for a while there was comfortable silence, far more comfortable than he was used to with other people. It was punctuated only by the rustle of palm fronds and the faintest hint of waves from the direction of the beach, where the tide journeyed further and further up the shore under the moon's influence.
"I like it here," Katara said suddenly. "I never thought I would. You know, when I imagined as a kid what the Fire Nation would be like, in my mind it was just...this horrible barren rock. Not this.” She sighed. "It's a beautiful place."
“Yeah. I missed the nature here,” Zuko told her. “When I was away.”
“That must have been awful. Not being allowed to see your home.”
Zuko exhaled slowly, hair fanning out from his face. "Yeah."
He felt the hammock shift as Katara tilted up to look more properly at him. "What's a princely upbringing like? Did you have a fancy education?”
“I don’t know what you consider fancy. There was standard stuff. Characters and calligraphy and ancient languages and math. Art and music. History. Etiquette.”
“Oh yes, very standard,” Katara said seriously, but her eyes were dancing.
That little lurch happened again, this time in his stomach. Maybe he'd eaten too much at dinner.
“Music?” she pressed. “So can you play something?”
“The tsungi horn. I’m not bad.”
Katara’s gaze was fixed on him, big and blue, watching him with faint fascination, and a flush crept up the length of Zuko’s neck, discomfort growing like an itch all along his skin. The more she asked and found out about him, the more disappointment she was likely to encounter. He'd been the weakest royal firebender in a century, as his father told it: he'd needed extra firebending lessons, and he'd been embarrassingly mediocre in most of his other lessons, too, except perhaps for the tsungi horn and music in general, but music was widely considered the least important, most useless, and frilly of subjects for the crown prince.
A spoiled prince, sheltered in his palace. Eating up the propaganda of his nation until his banishment and subsequent obsession with the Avatar. Someone like Katara, with her rich relationships and connections, her fierce devotions and her independence, witnessing the dwindling of her tribe at the hands of his country, would surely find his life story depressing, disgusting, or deeply uninteresting. All three, most likely. The itch grew to an uncomfortable squirming sensation.
Shame, one of his more persistent companions. It was like a hot fire that ate up at him, for he no longer had the retreat of his anger to cover the feeling of his own inadequacy. All he had now was the shame. His instinct was to physically retreat instead, where Katara couldn’t witness it or hear about his failings.
But before he could make an excuse and flee, Katara said, "Zuko."
Something about the change in her tone had Zuko's eyes snapping over to her. “Yeah?”
“How..." She hesitated a moment. "How did you know it would help me? To face him?"
Zuko took a moment to respond. He could speak unthinkingly at times, behave impulsively.
He didn't want to do that so much anymore, and especially not with this, with her.
"I didn't," he said honestly. "I guess I hoped it would. From...personal experience."
"Personal experience," she repeated softly.
"Someone..." A lump in his throat made his voice huskier. "Someone took my mother away, too. I faced him when I was in the Fire Nation, and I think it helped me. I guess that's why I offered to help you do the same."
Katara's expression twisted, and then she suddenly scooted up in the hammock to sit beside him. It swung with the momentum as the weight shifted all to one side, and when it rocked sideways, they instinctively reached out to steady each other. Katara's fingers found and clutched at his bicep, and Zuko’s hand landed on her waist, fingers tightening involuntarily. He could feel the way it flared out under his hand, how her hipbone curved under his thumb. Her body was warm, and she felt small under his hand, too, his fingers wrapping all the way around her side and reaching to the middle of her back. Katara's personality and presence in any given room were so large; he'd never really given thought to how much smaller she was than him. It was a strange thing to notice now. They met eyes; hers were unreadable. Zuko quickly released her and turned his head to watch the erratic flicker of a tiki torch, the patterns of light and dark that danced across the grass.
"Thank you, Zuko," Katara said, squeezing his arm and releasing him, too. "It did help."
"That's good. I wasn't sure," he said carefully. "You haven't, uh...been around much. Since we got back."
"I know," she said, quieter. She sighed and looked up at the stars. "I just...still don't know if I can talk about it yet. And the others will ask."
Zuko fidgeted. She was still sitting very close to him. "Well. I mean, if you ever do want to talk about it..." He trailed off, suddenly feeling like an idiot.
Of course Katara wouldn't want to come to him with a house full of other, better candidates.
"Thanks, Zuko," she said, warm and genuine.
He momentarily lost his train of thought. He cleared his throat, gesturing to the hammock. "Thanks to you, too. For helping me with this."
"Does it mean something to you?" Katara ran her hands over the fabric.
“It was just a fun place, I guess,” Zuko said. “It had nice memories, as a kid. I used to hang out here with Lu Ten. My cousin. Iroh’s son. Azula too, sometimes.” It sounded silly and juvenile when he said it out loud, that he should care about putting this thing up at all. Soft, he'd always been too soft. His face grew warm.
But Katara seemed to understand, for she only said, softly, "That sounds nice." It was quiet again for a time, companionable and comfortable. Katara took his hand in both of hers and squeezed before letting go. "I should try and get some sleep. Goodnight, Zuko."
It took him several seconds to respond, or even think coherently. He really must be tired. "Goodnight, Katara," he rasped.
She glanced back once from the porch with a small, kind smile. And then she was gone, slipping into the house.
Zuko stretched back out on the hammock, patched anew after so many years; and he looked up at the moon, feeling inexplicably peaceful.