Chapter Text
The ship came through the ice like a blade.
Katara stood at the prow, one hand gripping the railing and the other pressed flat against her sternum as if she could hold her heartbeat in place. The glaciers rose on either side of the narrow channel — ancient and blue-white, carved smooth by centuries of tidal patience — and between them, she could see it. Just the edge of it. Just the promise.
She had heard stories her whole life. Gran-Gran told them the way she told all her stories — economically, without ornament, as though the words themselves were a resource not to be wasted. The North is not home, she had said once, when Katara was small enough that the seal furs swallowed her whole. But it is magnificent. Don't let anyone use those two words as though they mean the same thing.
Katara had stored that sentence away and taken it out periodically over the years to examine it, the way she did with all of Gran-Gran's more cryptic pronouncements. She thought she understood it now.
The channel opened.
And there it was.
She had expected something impressive. She had not expected something impossible. The city rose from the ice as though it had always been there, as though the ice had simply grown this way — in towers and archways and sweeping bridges, in channels of blue-green water that wound through the settlement like veins, in great curving walls that caught the arctic light and gave it back changed, warmer, stranger. Everything was white and pale blue and the particular silver of the sky at the top of the world. Everything was enormous. She was looking at a civilization that had never been interrupted, and the difference between that and home — between this and the quiet, gutted coastline she had left behind — hit her somewhere below language.
She breathed in.
The air tasted like salt and cold iron and something else. Something that made her hands tingle.
Water, she realized. Not ocean water — not the brackish working smell of the channel — but bending water. The water in this city was being moved, constantly, in ways too deliberate to be tide or wind. She could feel it the way she could feel her own pulse. She was standing at the edge of the largest congregation of waterbending she had ever encountered in her life, and the whole city was humming with it.
She gripped the railing tighter.
Focus, she told herself. You have a name. You have a story. Don't stand here gaping like you've never seen ice before.
Her name was Sokka. She was Sokka, son of Chief Hakoda of the Southern Water Tribe, come to the North Pole to learn what the Southern Tribe needed to rebuild. She was eighteen—no, nineteen, nineteen, for Spirits’ sake! She was a man—the manliest, more than eager to learn the Northern ways. She was a hardworker, a diligent student, and the best son Chief Hakoda could ask for.
She was Sokka, and she was going to be fine.
~𖠳~
The preparation had taken three months.
Her father had sat her and Sokka down at the low table in the warmest room of their home, which wasn't very warm, and spread out a piece of sealskin on which he had drawn what amounted to a map of a deception. She had expected Sokka to argue — he could be protective in ways that expressed themselves as obstruction — but he had looked at the map for a long moment and then said, this is the part where they want me to refuse, isn't it, and Hakoda had smiled at him in a way that contained whole volumes. Even Sokka, it seemed, recognized the necessity of this harebrained scheme.
"The Northern Tribe," her father had said, "will not teach your sister to fight. They will teach her to heal, and they will call it an honor, and they will expect her to be grateful.”
Katara looked at her hands. The ice beneath them crackled slightly.
"We need waterbenders," he continued. "We need them badly, and we need them able to do more than manage field injuries. We need engineers, too. Architects. People who understand how a civilization is built, from the ice up. Warriors, who might be able to teach combat bending to future generations. The North has that knowledge and they will share it—" his jaw tightened, "—on their terms. Their terms being that the student is male."
"So," Gran-Gran had said from the doorway — she had a talent for doorways, for arriving in them at precisely the right moment — "we send them a male student."
She had looked at Katara then with an expression that Katara could not fully decipher. There was something old in it. Something that had its own history, its own long patience.
Katara bit her lip. "Gran-Gran—"
"Katara,” Gran-Gran replied, quite easily. “We have no other choice.”
The preparation was thorough. Sokka had spent weeks teaching her to be him — not the whole of him, which would have been impossible and also redundant, but the necessary parts. How he stood. How he gestured. The particular quality of his certainty, the way he occupied space as though he had paid for it. She was a year younger and half a head shorter and had spent her entire life being dismissed in the specific ways that a girl gets dismissed, and learning to simply not account for the dismissal was harder than she'd expected. She kept bracing for impact. Sokka never braced for impact. That was the core difference.
He'd also given her his knife — the good one, bone-handled — and told her not to lose it, and then hugged her for a long time without saying anything, which was its own kind of sentence.
And now, here she was.
~𖠳~
The dock was bustling in a way Katara had never seen before. Katara came down the gangplank with her pack over one shoulder and her chin at what she hoped was the right angle, and a Northern Tribe official in blue-trimmed robes stepped forward to meet her, his face expressionless.
"You are the Southern delegation?"
Delegation was a generous word for one person and a bag. "Sokka," she said. "Son of Chief Hakoda."
"Of course." He looked her over in the way people looked at things they had expected to be more impressive. "We had understood Chief Hakoda's son to be something of a warrior."
There it is, she thought. Eleven seconds.
"Chief Hakoda's son," she said pleasantly, "traveled three weeks on a boat that smelled like fish oil and seal blubber. Chief Hakoda's son would like to see his quarters before anyone evaluates his warrior credentials."
The official blinked. Then, apparently deciding this was satisfactory — a certain kind of bluntness apparently reading as masculine enough — he gave a short bow and gestured for her to follow.
She followed.
She kept her face neutral.
Inside, she was cataloguing everything. The channels — shallow, fast-moving, clearly engineered rather than natural. The walls — stacked and shaped, not carved, which meant a different technique than she'd assumed. The archways — the archways. Back home they used posts. They used posts because they didn't have enough builders or benders to do anything more complicated, because a generation of knowledge had been lost when the Fire Nation took everyone who had it. She stared at the nearest arch as she walked beneath it and tried to understand the geometry through her eyes the way she understood water through her hands.
I could bring this home, she thought. I could bring all of this home.
Her chest ached with the size of it.
~𖠳~
Her quarters were simple and clean, which was all she needed. She set down her pack, unwrapped the outer layer of her parka, and sat on the edge of the bed and allowed herself exactly two minutes to stop performing.
She was a long way from home.
She was in a city that would deny her everything she'd come for, if they knew who she was.
She was going to have to be her brother every day, all day, without slipping, in front of people who were professionally trained observers of custom and propriety.
And she was — if she was being completely honest, in these two minutes allotted for honesty — more excited than she was afraid. Which probably said something about her that Sokka would have a field day with, if he knew.
She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and breathed.
You're here, she told herself. You made it to the North. You're going to learn everything they know. You're going to take it home. You're going to give them back what was taken.
She breathed.
You're Sokka. You've never doubted anything in your life.
She stood up. She unwrapped her braid and rewrapped it — tighter, simpler — and put her parka back on and went to find the dining hall, because she hadn't eaten since morning and she thought better when she'd eaten, and there were introductions to survive, and after that she could begin the actual work of figuring out how to get herself into a combat training class without anyone looking too closely at her.
~𖠳~
The dining hall had high ceilings and long tables and the particular echoing quality of a room built for more noise than it currently contained. It was late enough in the day that most people had already eaten; there were scattered clusters of students and young officials, a few older masters along the far wall. Nobody paid her particular attention as she filled a bowl from the communal pot and found a seat at the near end of the closest table.
The stew was thick and unfamiliar and good.
She was three bites in when the doors opened.
She didn't look up immediately. There was a current of sound moving through the room — not alarm, not quite excitement, but something that made the air change, the way the air changed just before a storm — and she registered it with the part of her brain that was always monitoring her environment, but she was hungry and the stew was good and she was tired.
Then someone at the end of the table said, it's the Avatar, and Katara looked up.
He came through the doors with two people flanking him — older, official-looking, wearing Air Nomad orange— and then stopped, because one of the masters along the far wall had risen to greet him, and the two of them clasped forearms in the way of old friends, and the whole room was watching with the low, charged attention of people in the presence of someone significant.
He was young.
That was the first thing. She'd had some vague sense of the Avatar — the Bridge Between Worlds, the one born again and again into the cycle of elements — as someone weighty and distant, a political figure, a title more than a person. She had not imagined someone who was clearly in his teens, with a monk's arrow tattooed across his forehead, currently grinning at the Water Tribe master in a way that suggested they had a joke between them and the joke was ongoing. He was lean and bright-eyed and he moved with the easy physicality of someone who had been trained since childhood, but also with something else — something she didn't have an immediate word for.
He looked, she thought, like someone to whom the world was genuinely interesting.
He was looking around the room now, the quick frank look of someone curious about their surroundings, and his gaze moved across the tables, across the students, across her—
She looked down at her stew.
She had no idea the Avatar was going to be here.
She had planned for the Northern Tribe's sexism. She had planned for the questions about Southern customs, for the gaps in her knowledge of Northern protocol, for a dozen complications her father and Gran-Gran had mapped carefully over months. They had not planned for the Avatar, who would presumably have access to every master in the building and would therefore be everywhere she was trying to go.
Sokka, she reminded herself, doesn't panic.
She took another deliberate bite of stew.
Sokka, she thought, finds solutions.
From across the room, she heard him laugh at something the master said — a real laugh, surprised out of him — and the room exhaled slightly around it.
Sokka, Katara thought, staring into her bowl, would find this very funny.
She was going to have to think very carefully about the Avatar.