Chapter Text
It started with that godforsaken day in the catacombs and a change of heart. She stands now, bewildered, as she looks down at Prince Zuko on his knees, his head lowered, and his hands offered up for shackling. “Then take me as your prisoner.”
The sight of him, humble and kneeling, has Katara seeing red more than anything. More than the empty promises of change, more than the fact that he freed Appa, and somehow infinitely more than the knowledge that he sent an assassin after them. She pulls out a water whip and strikes him, knocking him down. She hopes it hurts.
You turned your back on me! Allowing him to know that would be akin to losing a war.
It would be so much easier to hate him with reckless abandon, just like she used to, had she not met him in the catacombs. Now something tugs at her heart meekly — perhaps a ghost of the sympathy she showed him way back when — as she glares at his soaked form. With his hair wet and clinging to his forehead and temples, he resembles a kicked puppy. But her blood still runs hot. Katara is the first to turn away and storm off. She wants to conjure up an entire ocean to swallow Zuko whole, but when she gets to her room, she can only make frost dew gather along her fingertips.
When he fights Combustion Man, everyone suddenly thinks he deserves a place on their team now, and she cannot help but scoff. It really does feel like she’s the only one with her memory still intact. But Katara is outvoted, so she screws her eyes shut for a brief moment before giving her verdict.
“Fine.”
“I won’t let you down, I promise!”
His forced cheeriness makes Katara want to scream, but she presses her lips into a thin line and wills herself to leave with the others. She conserves her energy for later. She preys on him as he’s settling into his own room in the temple. Zuko hears her footsteps and turns to her standing in the doorframe, a ghost of a smile on his lips fading quickly as he takes in the malice in her eyes.
“One slip up, and you won’t have to worry about your destiny anymore.”
She makes sure he absorbs the venom from her voice and revels in the fear that flickers in Zuko’s eyes for a moment. The expression on his face is one of concealed hurt, but Katara steels herself enough not to let it get to her. He’s done it before, and he’ll do it again. I’m sure of it. She turns around to leave before her voice has a chance to tremble, and she doesn’t quite comprehend the prickling sensation in her nose and eyes. Once she is alone in her room, Katara curls up in a fetal position on the bed and stares at the wall in front of her until Sokka knocks on the door and asks when they are going to have dinner.
For some reason, she has to reconcile with her anger, and it is somehow her problem.
Katara is steadily losing allies in this war. Toph was never a true ally, and she was the quickest to accept Zuko. He sits down next to her at dinner and chuckles at the stupid jokes he makes. Once Aang has come back from their little journey in search of new firebending forms, he doesn’t find Katara’s jabs at Zuko as amusing anymore. She still has her brother, but even he is starting to give her a side-eye.
“What’s going on with you?” Sokka questions her one evening, after everyone’s gone to sleep in their respective sleeping bags. “You’ve been acting really… strange.”
What’s going on with YOU?! is what she wants to say.
Sokka doesn’t know about the catacombs. Nobody knows.
Apart from Zuko and herself.
She has to give him credit — he does not seem oblivious to this fact but the looks he gives her are rather convoluted, and he looks away as soon as their eyes meet.
“Katara,” he finds her in the morning cooking breakfast. “Can we talk?”
She bristles up instantly. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
Zuko is taken aback, but only slightly; he must have been preparing himself to get a response like that.
“Okay. Well. Can I help?”
The suggestion makes her snap her neck at him, mouth agape, until she lets out a heartless laugh. “What would a prince know about making food?”
“Maybe I could—“
“No,” Katara cuts him off, turning her gaze back at the pot with the porridge. “I don’t need your help, Zuko.”
Although he gives in fairly easily, the conversation riles her up so much, she resolves not to say a word to Zuko. But even hearing his voice instructing Aang is jarring, so she resigns herself to the farthest corners of the temple, only emerging to take care of various chores. She hates how prickly and miserable she has become. Katara convinces herself that his presence is temporary. Until he slips up. Then she won’t ever need to see him anymore.
When Zuko disappears “on a fishing trip” along with Sokka, a part of her breathes out in relief at the opportunity to be normal again. She spends the morning in high spirits, cheery to the point Aang eyes her suspiciously, but as soon as Katara finds the war balloon missing, she feels it in her gut that it isn’t just a fishing trip they went on. She is racked with dread of what might happen if that cursed day at the catacombs was to repeat itself, and Sokka doesn’t come back; neither of them do. On the first day, she throws herself into routine and practices her waterbending with renewed vigour until she can’t move her arms anymore. On the second day, she snaps at both Toph and Aang and has to resort to locking herself in her room.
When Aang asks her what’s wrong, she chokes up, and he silently wraps his arms around her.
“I know you’re worried about him. But he’s going to be okay.”
As soon as Katara sees her brother and father coming out of a Fire Nation ship, a sense of relief so strong washes over her that it knocks the air out of her lungs, and she throws herself into her father’s arms. It is the first time in a long while that her heart feels so light that noticing a smile on Zuko’s lips as he watches their family reunion doesn’t ruin it for her. She musters a meek smile towards him, and something familiar tugs at her heart again.
A brief sense of gratitude wears off, and Katara finds herself back to square one, although that would be a lie — her rage now is more perplexing than ever before.
When Zuko offers to cook for everyone to give her time off, she hesitates before giving him a stout “no”. When he brings everyone tea in the evening after dinner, she peeks at him furtively as she takes a cup from his hands. She keeps her jabs at him, no longer amusing for the group, to herself.
When the temple is attacked, everything falls into disarray.
“Wake up!”
Someone’s hands pull her out of deep sleep. Katara can’t yet tell between dream and reality, and the latter welcomes her with screaming and rumbling. The ceiling over her cracks and collapses, but she’s too slow to run away. She can only watch the rocks fall, when a fraction of a second later, she is knocked away, Zuko’s body hovering above hers. He cages her between his arms, and the debris scatters over his back, his hair covered in dust. She glances at a pile of crumbled rocks where her body was a second ago — and her head spins. Her wide-open eyes meet Zuko’s, whose face is mere inches away from hers.
“What are you doing?!”
“Keeping rocks from crushing you.”
Before he says anything else, she scrambles to her feet. The chaos unfolding around keeps Katara away from Zuko, and her thoughts focus on simple things: escaping. But she can’t stop herself. She sees Zuko sprinting towards the ledge and catches a glimpse of their assailant. Azula. A memory of their last encounter makes her heart drop, but Katara wills herself to concentrate on survival. The Prince of the Fire Nation can pull his own weight with his family.
Her family, however, is separated again.
As Appa soars over the Fire Nation airships, Katara sees a lonely figure standing on one of them. Before she has time to worry, their little group is chased by streams of fire that she has to counter. She moves on instinct, hoping that her bending carries them through this. When she finally has time to catch her breath, an explosion tears through the air and her heart misses a beat as she sees two figures plunging to their death.
“He’s not gonna make it!”
Everybody is running on adrenaline, including Appa, who lunges forward and upwards. Her body moves faster than her mind as Katara lunges forward, catches Zuko by his forearms and hauls him into the saddle. He falls flat onto her but, remembering the events earlier, rolls to the side. She can hear him breathing hard and heavily, and her own heart is beating so fast it hurts.
“Thanks,” Zuko says breathlessly.
Katara closes her eyes for a moment and stays silent.
They land on a lonely cliff overlooking the ocean. It is well-hidden from prying eyes on land behind a thicket of black trees. As she puts up her tent, Katara peeks at Zuko. Every time he bends or turns, his face is twisted with pain. The falling rocks that he snatched her away from, must have found their victim in him, still. She looks away before he can catch her staring, which is the last thing she needs today.
As they gather around the fire, it’s a celebration. Everybody’s in high spirits. There’s just one thing.
“To Zuko!” Sokka raises his cup. “Who would’ve thought that after all the times you tried to snuff us out, you’d be our hero!”
Katara doesn’t smile. She doesn’t touch her cup. Her eyes are fixated on the flames, which, along with Sokka’s toast and the absence of their father — again — stir up what has been dormant. The group clink their cups, chuckle and pat Zuko on the shoulder, which makes him wince ever so slightly. She has never felt so alone.
“I’m touched. I don’t deserve it,” she can sense his smile without looking at him.
“Yeah. No kidding.”
Katara avoids meeting everybody’s eyes as she stands up and strides away to the edge of the cliff. The dew on the grass lifts as she passes by, and although the moon is full, she’s too upset to control her bending. Gusts of wind run through her hair, the cold air grazes her cheeks, but she doesn’t feel it. Absent-mindedly, her fingers find the carved stone on her necklace, and Katara fights the urge to fold in half at the pain that this simple, practised gesture brings her today.
“Everybody seems to trust me now. What is it with you?”
Zuko’s footsteps are too light to hear over the wind. His voice pierces her, and she turns around to face him, hoping that anger will mask her grief.
“Oh, me? I was the first to trust you! Back in Ba Sing Se. I opened up to you! And then you turned around and betrayed me!”
It makes him flinch as if she’d slapped him. She would’ve welcomed the expression on his face a few weeks ago, but now the feeling is void. She’s alone with her own pain.
“What can I do to make it up to you?”
“Oh I don’t know. You could travel back in time and be a better person. Or,” she has to pause to keep voice from betraying her, “here’s another idea: you could bring my mother back.”
When Katara finds him outside her tent in the early hours of the morning with dark circles under his eyes, she isn’t surprised. It’s what he says that changes everything.
“I know who killed your mother. I can help you find him”.
Zuko keeps his word.
The rain that started during the day has turned into a storm, forcing them to seek shelter in a cave. Wind shrieks through the mountains and forces its way through the cracks in the stone, carrying needles of cold rain with it.
As soon as they step inside, Katara stumbles into the farthest corner and slumps to her knees. She is supposed to bend their clothes dry, but her hands that conjured a water dome a little while ago now can barely move. Katara vaguely hears Zuko shuffling around unpacking supplies, the clunking of a pot and cups. He drapes a blanket over her shoulders and sets up a fire. She knows she needs to pull herself out of it, but she is frozen in place.
Memories of what happened over the past week appear in flashes, one of them especially piercing. A man collapsing under her bending. Reaching into him, pulling his limbs down. His face contorted in primal fear.
Her stomach twists. Katara closes her eyes tight and hugs her knees, burying her head in her arms. He wasn’t the one, but he must have deserved it somehow. He wore a Fire Nation uniform. Could not have had a mother who’d greet him back with open arms. Even if he did, he might have traded her for his life as willingly as Yon Rha did.
She feels like she’s going to throw up.
“Hey”, a voice cuts through her thoughts. “You should eat”.
Katara opens her eyes to Zuko’s outstretched hand with a rice ball in his palm and a cup of tea he is holding out to her. Listlessly, she takes the rice ball and the cup and takes a bite. The rice tastes like damp paper, but she forces herself to finish it anyway.
She can feel Zuko’s gaze lingering on her, but Katara feels too tired to tell him to stop. His eyes have been on her the entire trip, silent and by the end of, familiar. She barely registered it at first, too consumed by her rage. A few days ago, she would have lashed out. It doesn’t matter so much now.
“I thought it’d feel better,” Katara says quietly. She takes a sip of her tea. The scalding liquid runs down her throat, but she doesn’t flinch.
Zuko bends a little flame in his palm, and she wishes she could wrap her hands around it to feel anything. Her clothes have dried a bit, but her entire body is a block of ice, unyielding even in the face of the open fire crackling in front of her.
“How’d you think you’d feel?” He asks with his eyes fixed on the dancing flame.
“Relieved. Victorious,” Katara inhales sharply. “But instead I am just…”
“Dissatisfied?”
“No. I was so angry before, but now… It’s like every emotion has been sucked out of me”
Zuko doesn’t answer. When Katara steals a glance at him, he isn’t looking at the flame anymore; his eyes are boring through the fire in front of them, his face entirely unreadable. It must be hard to empathise with emptiness when you’ve been running on anger your whole life, she thinks.
“Thanks for the tea”, she stands up, gathers whatever is left of her strength to bend the remaining water out of their clothes and walks to the farthest corner of the cave to lie down on Appa’s tail. Zuko is silent, but Katara can feel his eyes on her once again as she turns to face the wall of the cave.
Katara can’t see the moon, but she can feel its energy — the same energy that fueled her bloodbending the night before. The same energy that fueled her anger when she formed icicles out of rainwater, the ones she aimed at Yon Rha, the ones she stopped a mere inch away from his throat and his face.
She curls up into a ball, squeezing her eyes shut. Trying to erase Yon Rha’s face from her memory, trying not to picture what it must have looked like when he realized he’d get to keep his life. She should’ve erased him right then and there. It should’ve been easy.
The diabolical reality of her mother’s killer getting mercy makes her eyes sting, and squeezing them tighter can’t stop tears from running across her face and the bridge of her nose to pool under her cheek. She holds her breath as she used to when she was a child. She mastered the art of crying silently after the death of their mother as she didn’t want to bother Sokka and make Gran Gran worried for nothing. Although she had still been a child, her childhood had disappeared, taken along with their mother. She inhales as quietly as she can, but her throat constricts as though a ball of fire has lodged itself in her solar plexus.
“Katara?”
Startled, she opens her eyes and stills herself. Zuko has already learned too much, and Katara doesn’t quite understand why she’d let him. She thought he’d simply be instrumental to her revenge; a compass that would lead her to her prey, and he did just that. Zuko followed her lead. He asked no questions and wanted no reward.
Katara exhales as quietly as possible, trying to bring her breathing back to normal. She braces to hear his steps coming closer, waits for his hand on her shoulder. She stills herself, ready for impact, but nothing happens.
He must have thought it was the storm.
Katara lets herself take a few more shaky breaths, trying to be as quiet as possible. She blinks the remaining tears away. Her eyes are burning. She just needs to sleep. Once she gets some rest, everything will make a lot more sense.
Still, the sleep won’t come.
She tries to relax. She tries to empty her mind of any and all thoughts. As a last resort, she counts otter penguins, even though it never worked for her.
This is torture. Exasperated, Katara groans and turns back toward the fire.
Zuko is lying on the ground with his left arm tucked under his head for comfort, but she can’t imagine it to be comfortable in any way, shape or form. His dark hair falls on his face, softened by sleep, the unscarred part of it looking almost peaceful. Katara realizes she has never really seen him truly relaxed. His face routinely wears a frown. Angry, disappointed, sceptical, bashful — different flavours of the same expression. He is unguarded and vulnerable, and she can’t take her eyes off him.
There is no way he will get a good night’s rest sleeping on the cold floor of the cave like this.
Katara gets up and kneels in front of Zuko. For a moment, she wants to brush loose strands of hair off his face, but that would do nothing but startle him. She touches his shoulder lightly — and that is enough for him to open his eyes and jerk upwards. His jumpiness brings her a sense of amusement so fleeting, it is gone before she can fully realize it.
“Hey,” she says with more softness than she intended. “You’ll catch a cold here. Go lie down on Appa’s tail. It’s warmer. Softer, too.”
Zuko blinks — still a bit out of it.
“Is there even enough space? For two of us”, he murmurs, his voice coarser than usual.
“Yes”, she walks back to Appa’s tail and lies down, shifting closer to the wall of the cave. When Katara glances towards Zuko, he looks hesitant to move. A stray thought that he might be afraid of her now, if he wasn’t already, passes through her mind. Katara closes her eyes, a small grace that she can allow him.
She hears his quiet steps coming closer and the weight of his body lowering onto Appa’s furry tail. This “field trip” really was life-changing; she couldn’t imagine herself being able to lie comfortably side by side with Zuko several days ago without spontaneously combusting.
Katara opens her eyes to find Zuko lying on his right side. His face is much closer than she thought. It’s as close as back on that fateful day in the catacombs. The day when she touched his scar, offering to heal him.
Had he joined them then… No use wondering this now.
As if in a trance, she raises her hand to touch his left cheek.
“What are you doing?” His eyes fly open, and a familiar frown appears on Zuko’s face, although softened by a tinge of bashfulness.
“You never told us about it,” Katara says and, suddenly aware of the intimacy of her gesture, lets her hand fall back on the fur. “How you got it.”
“It’s not exactly a happy story.”
“Neither was mine”, she parries.
Zuko is silent for so long, she thinks he must have decided to ignore her.
“I spoke against a plan in a war meeting once. The general there challenged me to an Agni Kai. It’s a duel between two firebenders. How matters of honour are settled. I thought I would be fighting him, it would have been easy, but when I got to the arena, it was my father who I was supposed to duel.” His voice is almost devoid of emotion, but Katara notices the muscles in his jaw clench.
“He really fought you?” she whispers.
Zuko shakes his head. “It wasn’t a fight. I refused to. I… begged him to forgive me. But,” his fingers clench into a fist. “He despised that. He saw my refusal as a sign of weakness”
Katara doesn’t need to hear the rest — with a chill that has nothing to do with the storm outside, she realizes that the outline of his scar resembles a palm. She tastes bile at the back of her throat.
Silence settles between them, while the storm rages on outside. Katara studies him in the dim firelight. She has been convinced for so long that was all that Zuko was — angry, ruthless, reckless, treacherous. Even his scar used to be evidence of his diabolical nature somehow, a mark of evil; she just couldn’t imagine it wasn’t a mark of his evil.
“What about your mother?” she asks. “Did she… how come she didn’t stop him?”
“She wasn’t around anymore.” His voice is dry. “She’d disappeared when I was ten. I thought she’d been dead but… turned out she was banished by him too.”
Her mother’s face emerges in Katara’s mind, and she has to bite the inside of her lip to override the hot sensation in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she says quietly.
Zuko’s frown loosens slightly, but his jaw remains tense. He closes his eyes as if in silent acknowledgement.
“I hated you,” she says in a small voice. “A lot.”
“I know.”
“But not after the catacombs.”
Zuko’s eyes open. He studies her face, as if trying to see if she is lying.
“Okay, maybe a little after the catacombs. But not like that. I know I didn’t give you much of a reason to think otherwise…” she winces involuntarily. “I was… hurt. More than anything else.”
“I get that.”
“But when I looked at that man today… It was as if these years of pain after she died, became just one ball of hate when I saw his face,” her breath hitches, and Katara feels a treacherous prickling in her eyes and nose. She swipes a hand across her closed eyelids with intensity bordering on fury. “And the worst thing is, I knew it was no use. It wouldn’t change anything if I killed him or kept him alive. Nothing would change.”
“Do you regret going?” Zuko asks in a serious, careful tone, his eyes never leaving hers. Katara shakes her head.
“No. It had to be. But,” she lets out a humourless laugh, “I don’t know yet if I don’t regret letting him live,”
“For what it’s worth,” he says after a pause, “I don’t think you did him a favour. He looked like living was punishment enough.”
Katara gives him a weak half-smile.
She watches him fall asleep fast as she lies awake listening to the pitter-patter of the rain, which the storm has reduced to. Zuko’s breath is quiet and steady. Calm. The heat emanating from him — must be a firebender thing — loosens something in her, makes her body grow slack and heavy. She shifts just a bit closer, close enough so that the warmth lulls her to sleep at last.
He doesn’t talk to her on the way back, and she doesn’t initiate, but the silence between them is different. Katara lets him take the reins and allows herself to sulk in the saddle. Sleep, however brief and interrupted, did help: at the very least, it expelled Yon Rha’s face from the back of her mind. Her heart, however, still aches for what never lived.
“I didn’t forgive him. I will never forgive him.” Katara finally identifies what has been a vague inclination that kept her up the night before, and her voice is cold as she looks Aang in the eyes. The hurt on his face is palpable. She wishes she could have his capacity for forgiveness. “But I am ready to forgive you.”
Her eyes meet Zuko’s and Katara sees the corners of his lips turn up in a smile that almost seems shy. She feels her face soften, closes the distance between them, and wraps her arms around him. His warmth surrounds her. It’s familiar now.
She was wrong; something would change.