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‘I want us to get married.’
Katara is over eighty years old and nothing fazes her anymore, but still, she’s impressed when Zuko catches her off-guard as they sit at the table, knees on silk cushions, drinking sips of cherry tea that he’s brewed himself. Tilting her head, she looks at him: his face is as wrinkled as her own, the burn mark stretched over the skin of his eye and over his ear, unhidden since he’s pushed his silk grey hair back into a loose ponytail at the nape. His expression is serious, stern, focused – golden eyes clear as water and mouth pressed into a line of conviction. He won’t be laughed at. Even at his age, uncertainty plays at the edges of his mind despite their old friendship, and Katara finds it endearing.
She places her cup down gently, and her hands are so frail, pale, curved with age next to the porcelain. ‘We’re old now, Zuko.’ Even her voice grows hoarser by the day. Time takes away so much at each moment.
‘That’s why. That’s why – I – ’ The teenager in him stutters and stumbles, pausing for a breath before the king rises up in a tide to get what he wants, ‘we’re old and I want us to be together, finally, because this is the right time.’
They sit in her rooms in the South Pole. He’s dressed to the nines for warmth – catfox fur draped over his shoulders and cotton robes wrapped tightly over his form though Katara has a fire going. Outside, the White Lotus guards do their evening patrols, and their familiar steps are a comfortable rhythm punctuating the silence that falls between her and Zuko.
‘I know Aang and Mai are gone from us now,’ she starts, delicately, trying for tact though she feels as young as fourteen again, confusion and frustration sparking at her fingertips. ‘But should we honour their memories this way?’
Zuko’s eyes slide away from hers and rest on the silk cushions at his knees. They’re coloured green because they remind Katara of Toph. Her own gaze flickers to the left where her small bed sits, Sokka’s boomerang hanging on the wall above her pillow. He always promised to look after her.
‘We’ve mourned and we’ve moved on,’ he says finally, tracing his old fingers over the smooth wood of her table, his eyes finding her face again, his gaze an ocean of feeling. ‘We’ve loved and we still love.’
‘Maybe my memory is fading,’ laughs out Katara, and her laugh is raspy with age, ‘but we were together once, remember? I was sixteen and I wanted your military ships out of the North Pole, even if you did say it was for trading, and you – still so immature at eighteen – yelled to me about the swamp benders sabotaging Fire Nation ships every time you tried to approach their land for negotiations.’
‘And Aang was traveling to the air temples with architects to rebuild,’ says Zuko, falling into the rhythm of her voice, ‘you guys had broken up over who was going to be the diplomat to Ba Sing Sei for the newly inaugurated annual Republic Conference.’
‘I won that one,’ says Katara proudly, a smile playing over her lined mouth, ‘but we couldn’t represent both Air and Water together. It wasn’t working. We were both too caught up in our own values and culture, it was hard trying to talk about both simultaneously. I can’t believe Aang sent Teo in his stead to that Conference, but he did well.’
‘Aang always said that Teo was part airbender, despite the wheelchair and all. He did live in an air temple for a few years,’ points out Zuko, not unkindly. ‘And Mai needed a break from the politics when she left me. I thought she was serious. I was so angry – I thought she was off taking a vacation for a year.’
‘Instead, she was traveling the Fire islands, making sweet with the people who had power now. Mayors, old wise women, those still angry teenagers.’ Katara drinks from her cup, lets it tingle over her tongue. ‘She was a political genius.’ He hums in agreement and takes a sip of his own tea.
‘And you were there,’ starts Zuko after a pause, and his voice drops to almost a murmur, and something in Katara’s stomach clenches – something she hasn’t felt since she was sixteen. ‘You were so loud, you were the opposite of Mai – you were all heat and burning, you didn’t let up. You wanted to protect your people from everything. Such a mother, even then.’
Katara is too old to blush, so she shakes her head. ‘I’ll admit to being brash, but you can’t deny you weren’t the kindest host. You laughed at me behind your nice, silk sleeve when I couldn’t handle the spicy food. You even gave me lemon water and I almost thought of throwing it in your face. I can’t believe you couldn’t even offer me milk.’
‘Those three weeks were the most fun I ever had in years,’ he tells her, painfully honest.
‘We’re too old,’ she presses. ‘I could be gone next year. You could be gone next year.’
‘When I kissed you on the last day, you tasted of cherries and victory and I thought I was going to burn up.’ There’s a shuffle where his fingers play with his sleeves. At eighty four, it looks ridiculous, but Katara can’t find it in herself to laugh.
She can’t tell him that he tasted of his terrible spiced tarts that had soon become her favourite desert, that his skin under the silk of his vest felt more valuable than gold, that his long hair had tickled her neck when it slipped over his shoulder, that she felt she would drown into his scent and feel and presence.
‘We had our days, Zuko, it was wonderful. But when Aang came back, when Mai appeared at your doorstep.’ The memory comes to her fresh and touched with part sorrow, part joy. ‘I’m glad it was a mutual break up. I’m glad we had those months.’
‘They’re not coming back this time,’ says Zuko softly, and there it is. The truth laid out on her table between their half-empty cups, the steam curling and rising into the air, wrapping around their respective thoughts that float just above them.
Katara thinks of kissing him at sixteen, on her tip toes, pulling at his bottom lip, making him groan and tangle his long, lordly fingers in her hair. She remembers teasing indignant blushes out of him – ‘an emperor and a peasant’ – and how he had rolled her over and worshipped her neck, stomach, legs, the apex of her thighs – ‘a goddess and a devotee’.
She knows he was just as affected by everything they did – the way he watched her waterbend in front of him, the way he asked for advice, her words, the way he would arch and shiver when her fingers would trail lines of searing heat down his pale skin, how they’d be moon and sun in all that they did.
Her resolve is crumbling. ‘And where would we do it – get married?’ she asks, humouring him. Zuko’s face lights up in that same childish way it always did – cheeks growing rounder and eyes crinkling at the sides.
‘On a boat in the middle of the ocean. At the mouth of the South Pole.’ He pauses, backtracks. ‘Or perhaps on one of those small islands near the coast of Fire. ‘
‘Republic City where it started?’ she adds in, laughing.
‘Or the middle of a forest where there were pirates,’ he mentions, eyeing her. A memory pricks at the back of her eyelids, making them burn.
And it comes to her – fresh and unforgotten, forever pressed into her psyche. The time where he left her in the waves of her own pleasure, where his mouth laved confessions on her neck, when he told her ‘that was your betrothal necklace I gave you – it was me’ and how she had laughed, shoving his shoulder, pinning him underneath her, tickling his sides, kissing him until he was breathless, saying, ‘maybe in the next life.’
‘We’ve lived so many lives,’ and his voice is soft. Katara bends the tea from the kettle and lets it fill their cups again, but the tea has grown lukewarm. He continues: ‘in that life, I loved you. In this one, I still do.’
His hand is playing with the rim of his cup, and his other hand is outstretched now, holding Katara’s porcelain, warming the tea it until it’s steaming again. It’s as good of a proposal as any.
‘Let’s have it here,’ she replies, ‘let’s have it now.’
She takes off her necklace and hands it to him, and he stands in a rustle of fabric, curling his aged hands over the delicate thing.
Without pomp, nor ceremony, in the quiet of the South Pole, between the hallowed walls where Katara keeps them all in memory – Sokka and Aang and Toph and Sukki and Mai and Iroh – Zuko kneels behind her, pushing away her white hair and slides it around her neck in a breath, tying it at the nape carefully.
She turns her head and he leans his forehead against hers. Her chest is tight with something, feeling Zuko’s hand slide over the cotton of her tunic before interlacing their fingers. This has been long overdue.
With effort, she stands, tugging at his hand. ‘Come, it’s our honeymoon now,’ and wonders if her lips are smiling as playfully as they did when she was younger. Zuko’s face finds hers and he’s laughing too, quiet, more reserved, and Katara thinks – of course it’s not the same, they’ve both changed.
They lie down side by side in Katara’s bed. The outside bells toll, signaling some late hours and the night has embraced the South Pole already. She holds Zuko’s hand in her own – crinkled with age and experience. Zuko takes a breath next to her, mouth upturned in a soft smile, and closes his eyes. Katara follows suit.
If she doesn’t wake up tomorrow, that’s just as well. She’ll go happily.
-
She does wake up in the morning.
She wakes up day after day after day next to Zuko, and it always feels like coming home from a long, arduous journey. He smiles and tells her the same.
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