Chapter Text
Katara lounged in the back of the boat, hands crossed behind her head, smirking as her brother missed the fish once more.
“I could help, you know,” she grinned.
Sokka waved a dismissive hand and readied the spear again. “C’mere, little fishy,” he muttered, then to Katara, “I can already smell it cooking.”
Katara rolled her eyes. She pulled off her glove and focused with all her might on an area of water where a large tuna circled.
Her hand moved, and the water bubbled for a second, then rose jerkily into the air. She gave a laugh of triumph. “Hey Sokka, I caught one for you!”
Sokka craned his neck around. “Quit your splashing, Katara,” he said without really looking. “I’ve told you, waterbending won’t put dinner on the table.”
Katara raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you see the giant fish in this? Now hurry and spear it before I drop it. I can’t hold it for long.”
Sokka gave an audible sigh and turned around fully. “Every time you play with magic water, I get soaked. I don’t want a fish down my shirt.”
“You won’t get a fish down your shirt if you spear it,” Katara pointed out.
Her hands began to shake from the effort of holding the water up, and inwardly she cursed herself for being such a novice. “Sokka,” she pleaded.
The water dropped as she lost control of it, splashing all over her brother and herself as it filled the bottom of the boat. The fish flapped on the bench for a second, then jumped back over the side.
Sokka pointed the not-sharp end of his spear at her. “See? Your magic water hates me.”
“It’s not magic, it’s-”
“Waterbending, and it’s a sacred art, unique to our culture, blah blah blah. I get it.” Sokka rolled his eyes and turned back to the front of the boat.
Something in Katara snapped. “You want me to help you fish, why don’t you spear the ones I catch for you?”
“You should have stayed at home.”
“You asked me to come!” Katara yelled, standing up in the back of the boat and jabbing an accusatory finger in her brother’s direction.
“And Gran-Gran wanted you to cook, you should have stayed home and cooked.” Sokka turned around to raise an eyebrow at her.
Katara felt her face heat up. “You are the most sexist, immature - argh, I don’t even know why I bother! Catch your own fish!”
She sat down, breathing heavily, facing away from their direction of travel.
His sister was angry, and when she got like this, shit went down.
“Katara,” he pleaded, “please calm down, you’re going to break the iceberg, like you did to the igloo that one time but on a ten times bigger scale–”
Then she was up on her feet and yelling at him again, and she didn’t seem to notice that she was propelling the boat into an ice-filled rapid with her wavy-arm stuff and her weird water powers.
Sokka yelped as their little canoe was pulled forwards into the rapids. Katara shrieked and flailed as she lost her balance and tumbled into the bottom of the boat.
She was yelling something over the roar of the current, but Sokka couldn’t hear her. He paddled desperately as the currents took the boat where they saw fit.
He only stopped paddling when they were flung out of the canoe onto an ice float mercifully away from the rapids, and watched in despair as the boat was crushed.
Katara growled in frustration. “Did that look like left to you?” she fumed.
Oh. She’d been trying to give directions. Well, shit.
Katara stomped around on the ice flat, looking for any way they could get back to the south. “That was not left,” she repeated. More to fill the silence than anything else, but her brother felt the need to reply anyway.
“Well, why didn’t you just waterbend us out of there?” he said dryly, and Katara had just about had it with this boy.
“Enough!” she yelled, gesturing angrily at the air. “I’m sick of your bullshit, Sokka, just shut up for once–”
She was cut off by a large crack and a glow that bathed them as suddenly as a riptide pulls one out to sea.
Sokka stared over her head, a look of awe and fear crossing his face as he observed whatever was happening. “It’s huge,” he whispered.
Katara turned around and her own jaw dropped.
The blueish glow that reflected off the ice on which they stood was coming from an iceberg. About ten times the size of Sokka’s watchtower, it pulsated slightly in the evening twilight. There was something unnaturally beautiful about it, something that gave Katara chills in ways she couldn’t explain.
“You’ve gone from weird to freakish, Katara,” Sokka commented in hushed tones.
“I did that?” was all Katara could think to say in response.
“Yep,” Sokka confirmed. “When you were waving your arms about, you were bending the water.” He huffed a laugh. “When you get mad, shit goes down.”
“Shit goes down,” Katara echoed, staring into the pulsing centre of the glow.
She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she made out some shadows. One was much larger than the other, and looked vaguely like it had wings. The smaller one was suspended in the middle of the iceberg.
She cracked her knuckles and pulled her gloves off. “I’m going to try to break it.”
“Fuck, please no, Katara,” Sokka whimpered. “I don’t know what this is, but it doesn’t look natural and I don’t like it.”
Katara ignored him. She took a waterbending stance, just like Gran-Gran had demonstrated in her stories of the Southern Tribe’s great benders, and reached out to the ice, willing it to part under her hands.
The sound of cracking filled the air, and Katara was almost blasted off the ice float by a gust of wind. Sokka caught her and they clung tight to each other until the gale subsided, all thoughts of their argument forgotten.
Sokka held onto his sister for a little while even after the winds died down.
He wasn’t scared, he was just… unnerved. This whole situation was unnerving, and he was mildly concerned that he was going to be killed by an unnatural iceberg.
Katara struggled out of his arms and ran to the cracked mouth of the iceberg, stumbling on the fragments that now lay everywhere. Sokka followed her an arm’s length behind, keeping back because she could handle this, and all right maybe he was a little scared of whatever was in there.
She reached the edge of the iceberg and gasped.
“What is it?” Sokka asked, blinking in the dissipating glow.
“You should see this,” Katara replied, breathless and hushed.
“You’re scaring me,” Sokka muttered, but he picked his way over the ice fragments anyway, because his sister might be in danger and he wasn’t going to let her get killed like their mother.
He reached the lip that Katara stood on and let out his own gasp.
There was a boy in the iceberg.
Katara’s first instinct was to run to him, despite Sokka’s protests and his tugs on her sleeve. There was someone in need down there, and she wasn’t going to just leave him.
He looked about sixteen, at first glance, sprawled at the bottom of the cavity she’d created. His untidy black hair fell over his closed eyes. His face looked almost peaceful, she thought.
He was also wearing red.
Sokka slid down to join her. “Fire Nation,” he growled.
Katara nodded morosely. Then she looked up at something else that made her gasp even louder, because those weren’t supposed to exist.
There was a dragon in the iceberg.
Forget about the Fire Nation kid for a second. That was weird, but this was off the fucking scale.
Sokka stared up at the red wings and closed eyes of something that was supposed to be extinct. But here one was, in an iceberg, at the South Pole. Dragons weren’t even supposed to be this far away from Fire territory.
Then he turned his attention back to his sister, who was bending down next to the Fire Nation kid who was probably a spy.
Katara pressed two fingers to the boy’s neck.
She didn’t expect to feel anything, but a pulse throbbed against her fingertips, and when she put an ear next to his slightly parted lips, she felt the tickle of air against her skin as he exhaled.
“He’s alive,” she reported, sitting back on her heels.
“That’s impossible,” Sokka muttered.
“He has a pulse.”
Sokka was silent for a long time.
“What,” he concluded.
Zuko was awake.
He didn’t want to be awake. He’d been quite happy when he was asleep.
But he was awake, and he didn’t suppose there was anything he could do about that. So he cracked one eye open to take in his surroundings.
Sokka stood a little back, one hand on the boomerang he carried at his hip, watching Katara fuss over the boy-who-was-alive-but-should-be-dead.
Then his sister jerked back with a shriek that reverberated off the walls and he rushed to her side.
“Glowing,” she whimpered, pointing at the boy’s sleeping face that was no longer sleeping.
The ashmaker was sitting up, and his eyes were glowing the same blueish white as the iceberg had been. Sokka yelped and pulled his boomerang out.
He was just about to throw it when the glow faded and the boy’s eyes settled into regular ones.
Well, he said regular. But the irises of these eyes were as golden as the sun itself.
Zuko rubbed his eyes and blinked once to clear the bleariness that came with sleep. He felt like he’d been asleep for a year, but he remembered the day he fell asleep quite clearly, so he couldn’t have been.
He turned his head to the dragon which slept above him and allowed himself a smile.
Then he turned the other way and yelped in alarm, because those two kids were not there when he came here.
He scrambled to his feet and shifted into a defensive stance as the older of the two readied his (boomerang? was it a boomerang?) and the younger shifted into a stance that looked like she was about to waterbend.
When neither attacked him, he lowered his hands.
The boy with the boomerang pointed at him with his free hand. “Hands where we can see them,” he snarled.
Zuko obeyed, confused. “What’d I do?” he asked, and his voice came out rough and gravelly from sleep.
The girl sniffed. “You’re Fire.”
“Uh. Yes?”
Zuko had no idea where this was going.
The girl pulled some water from the ocean that surrounded them and held it out in front of her, hands shaking. “You’re a spy, aren’t you? They sent you on reconnaissance. Well, you won’t be getting any information back to the Firelord.”
“I– what?” Zuko lowered his hands slightly, arms aching. “I’m not a spy, why would you think–”
“Cut the bullshit,” Boomerang Kid growled. “You’re coming with us.”
Katara looked around at the polar ocean and their lack of boat, and snorted. “Coming with us? How’s he gonna do that when you got our canoe crushed, Sokka?”
The boy spread his arms in apparent frustration. “Why do you even want me to come with you? What’s wrong with where I come from?”
“Cut the bullshit, ashmaker,” Sokka repeated, with a jab of his boomerang in the boy’s direction. “You know very well what’s wrong with where you come from.”
“No, I don’t,” the boy insisted.
“Whatever, ashmaker.” Sokka turned and sized up the dragon. “The real question is how we’re getting this thing to the South Pole.”
The dragon chose that moment to open its eyes, lift its head, and sneeze fire onto the boy.
Zuko deflected Ran’s fire-sneeze without even thinking about it. “Careful there,” he reprimanded the dragon.
Ran snorted and nudged him with his nose.
“Yeah, I know,” Zuko sighed.
The Water Tribe kids were staring at him.
“...What?” he asked.
Boomerang Kid pointed at him. “Firebender. Hands behind your back.”
“What’s wrong with firebending?” Zuko half-yelled.
“You know what’s wrong,” Water Girl sniffed.
“No, I don’t!” The confusion and frustration that had been building up in him finally snapped and suddenly he was yelling. “You keep talking about how I’m an ashmaker and that I’m a Fire Nation spy, well I’ve got news for you, I don’t know what you’re talking about and you act like I should, why won’t you answer my questions–”
He cut himself off abruptly when he noticed that his hands were on fire.
Sokka yelped and threw his boomerang at the ashmaker’s head. The boy dodged it neatly, took one deep breath and clenched his fist, extinguishing the flames.
Katara reacted a split second after Sokka did, and suddenly the firebender’s hands were encased in ice and stuck together. He looked down at them with an expression that almost looked like surprise.
When he spoke again, his voice was calmer. “I just want answers. I just woke up and two minutes later my hands are frozen and you’re accusing me of spying. You haven’t even asked my name, and you assume I’m evil?”
“Your name doesn’t matter,” Sokka growled, “when you’re clearly trying to play us.” He turned to his sister. “How do you think we should get home?”
“My name is Zuko,” came the irritating firebender’s voice from behind him, “and I have a dragon we could ride.”
“No,” Sokka yelped, then cleared his throat. “We can’t trust you.”
“He has a point,” Katara offered.
“Why thank you, kind sister, I–”
“Zuko has a point,” Katara clarified.
“No,” Sokka repeated. “I am not getting on the sneezing fire monster with an ashmaker who claims not to have a clue about the war but is clearly a spy.”
“The sneezing fire monster’s name is Ran.”
“I did not ask.”
Zuko breathed in and tried to let his inner fire spread to his hands. The ice began to steam, and Water Girl sternly re-froze it.
“Aw, come on,” he complained. “My hands are cold.”
“It’s ice, you idiot ashmaker,” Boomerang Kid retorted.
“I wasn’t talking to you.” Zuko rolled his eyes. “Besides, if you want me to fly you to the South Pole, I need my hands free for the reins.”
“He has a point,” Water Girl conceded.
“He does not–” Boomerang Guy started.
“Are we going, or what?” Zuko cut him off. “Agni, if I have to tie myself to Ran’s horn, I will, but I still need my fucking hands.”
The ice melted and dripped to the ground, and Zuko tried to massage some feeling back into his fingertips with a reproachful glare at the waterbender.
Ran nudged him again and he patted the dragon’s nose. “C’mon, boy, we gotta go.” He turned to the staring Water Tribers. “Are you guys coming, or what?”
Boomerang Guy sighed. “Teach me how to fly this thing. I’m tying you to its horn.”
Ran knelt on his front legs to allow the kids to climb onto his saddle. Zuko went up last, trying to figure out why he had the sinking feeling that something was very, very wrong here.
Once they had Zuko safely tied to the dragon’s horn (sweet Tui she was on a dragon this could not be happening), Ran took to the air with the grace of any bird.
Sokka held the reins in silence. Katara had been put in charge of making sure their firebender didn’t escape.
As they flew, she began hesitantly asking questions.
Zuko had a younger brother. His brother was fourteen when Zuko left the Fire Nation, and he was a prodigy firebender.
His family were nobles. That figured, with his attitude to everything.
She didn’t trust him, but he was surprisingly nice, for an ashmaker.
Ran touched down with a soft thump in the snow.
A wall rose in front of them. About waist-height on Zuko. It wouldn’t keep out any attackers, but why would anyone attack the South anyway? Unless it was supposed to keep out rival tribes. Maybe that was it.
Boomerang Guy - Sokka, he’d heard the waterbender call him - carefully untied Zuko from the dragon’s horn and pushed him down into the snow. Zuko broke his fall with a roll and came up with a scowl aimed at Sokka.
Water Girl jumped down next to him. “Was that really necessary, Sokka?”
“Ashmaker,” Sokka replied. Like that explained anything. He jumped down next to Zuko and gestured to the wall in front of them. “Welcome to the Southern Water Tribe’s capital city.”