Chapter Text
Katara’s breath mists in front of her as she struggles to steady herself. Her skin swims green and sickly in her vision, bathed in light refracted from the surrounding crystal. The ground is hard, the crystal is solid, the ceiling is a twisting, weathered mess of impenetrable rock. She is taking increasingly hysterical gasps that spring back toward her, echoing off the chamber’s walls. She clutches the water bag still strapped around her torso. It yields thickly, water and canvas moulding around her fingers. She closes her eyes, tries to be comforted by the sensation, tries to pretend her nose is stinging from a familiar South Pole chill rather than the icy solitude of an underground Earth Kingdom prison. But when she opens her eyes, the crystal is still there, and the panic is still lacing her insides.
And then the cavern erupts with natural light spilling in from somewhere above. The crystal catches and tosses the glow in a thousand different directions and she is blinded, disoriented. There is a voice – a yelling, exclaiming voice, getting louder and closer and tumbling from the opening in the ceiling. In a moment the light is gone, the hole covered, the crystal humming with an otherworldly, internal radiance, and she is no longer alone.
She cannot help the gasp when she sees his scar. It is red and angry and as vibrant as she imagines it must have been on the day he received it. It fills her head with anger, heartbreak, vengeance. She assumes a fighting stance without truly intending to do so. “Zuko?”
He looks up at her from where he has fallen to his knees. His eyes widen, his mouth moves as though he were trying to form words but is unable to utter them. Vaguely she recognises the incongruity of his figure shrouded in Earth Nation robes. “Katara.” His voice is flat, unsurprised. He keeps his gaze on the ground as he moves to stand. He is not much taller than her. Not much older than her, either. But it is his face she sees when she awakens screaming in the middle of the night.
“What are you doing here?” She spits.
“What, you think I had any kind of choice in the matter?” He raises an eyebrow. Folds his arms.
She hesitates. “I know what you’re capable of, Zuko. I just don’t know what you’re up to right now.” She raises her own eyebrow in return. “Oh, wait, let me guess. It’s a trap, a dramatic orchestration to lure Aang into your eagerly awaiting clutches.” Aang. Her heart lurches and she turns away. She wraps her arms around herself, trying to steady her trembling hands, clinging to the hope of rescue that presently feels so distant and impossible. For more than a moment she forgets Zuko, forgets her imprisonment, forgets that the entire world is not constantly bathed in the steady glow of enchanted cave crystal. There is only the cold and her anguish. “You’re a terrible person, you know that?” She whirls around to spit the words at his face, but they land at his back instead. He sits, head bowed, shoulders low, facing away from her.
“I know.” With a nod he acquiesces. She freezes.
“Really? You know? You know how much this war has cost us all, has cost me?” There is an instant when she considers simply marching to the opposite end of the chamber and awaiting her liberation in aloof silence, but her temper is too fiery for a burgeoning waterbender to control now. “How dare you.” Her voice shakes and she closes her eyes. “You have no idea what this war has put me through. The Fire Nation…” A trembling breath, a fortification of her resolve. “You took my mother from me.” But as she says it, she wonders how true it could really be. How much responsibility could fall on the defeated shoulders of the boy before her? How much hatred could truly thrive in so young a soul?
“I’m sorry.” He doesn’t argue or fight or defend himself. He turns to look at her and his gaze is steady, certain. “The Fire Nation took my mother, too.” And then he wavers.
Katara knows nothing of this boy, except that he is the Fire Lord’s son and Azula’s brother, that he is scarred and angry and on a mission of honour. And yet, when he drops his eyes to his hands and sighs like that, she thinks she knows another truth. She thinks she knows that perhaps he is not the enemy after all, just a boy in enemy clothing.
“I didn’t know that.” She is unsure of what else she could possibly say. Zuko, the Fire Lord’s heir, has doused the flame of her vengeance with two simple sentences. Her stance stiffens into awkwardness.
“Not many people do. Sometimes it feels like I’m just imagining everything I remember about her.”
“She died when you were young?”
“She didn’t die.” His voice hardens. He pauses. “She was sent away.”
Katara can’t help but notice he doesn’t cry. His voice doesn’t tremble. But she can see the callouses of a life lived in turmoil etched into his very presence, shuttering him from the world. The rock feels suddenly harder beneath her feet. She imagines it would crumble beneath the weight of Zuko’s defences.
“I’m sorry.” And she is. She carries her mother with her every day, not just in her necklace but in her brother and the hole in her chest and the yearning she feels to be far from this crowded, delusional Earth Kingdom stronghold tasting a snowflake as it melts on her tongue. Zuko does not look so fierce and arrogant now. He just looks like a kid grasping for something certain in the wake of a terrible loss. And she wishes she didn’t, but she feels something tugging her to him, something pushing her to kindness. “I’m sorry. It’s just… whenever I picture the enemy, it’s your face I see.” One of the few faces she has to depict the Fire Nation, puckered and damaged as it is.
“My face.” Zuko’s hand finds its way to his cheek, and Katara wonders if he even noticed the movement. His eyes are clouded, his face distant. There is no hardened edge to this new lack of reaction. There is just defeat. Despair.
“No, I didn’t mean–” She catches herself moving toward him with an outstretched arm. She stops, recoils, folds her arms firmly against her chest. His eyes widen for the briefest of seconds.
“For three years, I’ve let this scar mark me. Define me.” He speaks with distinct hesitation. His hands are still in his lap, white with the effort of holding them so. “I never thought I could erase it, but I thought if I captured the Avatar, I might stand a chance of redeeming myself. Regaining my honour.” His eyes hold the floor unflinchingly. “But lately I’ve considered that maybe that isn’t my destiny. Maybe… maybe I can choose my own destiny.”
“Of course, you can.” The words are out before she can stop to consider her sudden need to comfort him. His head rises and his gaze is on her once more. She tries to find something to read on his face, an indication that he is feeling any emotion at all, but he is blank, flat, a void.
“You sound like my Uncle Iroh.”
“I’m sure that’s a good thing.”
“Sometimes.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
She moves to sit beside him, placing enough distance between them that her skin doesn’t itch with his proximity. She clutches her water bag again, closes her eyes to let the familiarity wash over her. Remind her who she is.
“I could heal you.” She opens her eyes. “If you wanted.”
His eyes widen perceptibly when they land on her face. His hand is at his cheek again. She wonders what the skin feels like against his fingers, angry and inflamed as it appears from here.
“It’s a scar. You can’t fix it.” She wonders if he even considered her proposal. Wonders if she should keep talking or let it rest.
“I’ve got spirit water from the North Pole.” She doesn’t regret the words because she doesn’t let herself calculate their consequences. “And I’ve been saving it, for something important.” She gestures to his scar. Is this really what she will use her life-saving gift for? Is this really where her heart is leading?
“Okay.”
He doesn’t ask questions or smile in eagerness. He doesn’t react in any way. He simply closes his eyes and turns his body to face her. She raises a hand. It is shaking.
“Wait.” His eyes open and she flinches back in surprise. She can feel her pulse in her throat. “Don’t waste it on me.”
“Waste it? I’m not wasting it on you.”
“You said you were saving it for something important.” He cannot meet her gaze. “This isn’t important.”
“Zuko…”
“Keep it, Katara.” He shifts away from her. Awkwardness rapidly bleeds into the silence. She fiddles with her sleeve, thinks of something to say.
“You don’t like your sister.” A burst of lightning. Zuko’s uncle on the ground. A wicked laugh. A taunting smile. Katara sees all these things in the moment it takes Zuko to respond.
“No.” Something like a laugh. “No, I don’t like Azula.”
Katara thinks she knows something else now, too. “I don’t think you’re like her at all.”
He looks at her and she looks at the ground. “I get that a lot. From Father. I’m not strong-willed enough, or commanding enough, or powerful enough. Not like Azula.” The words sound well-accustomed to being uttered in his voice. As though he has rehearsed them often.
“That’s not what I meant.” She forces herself to turn to him and she sees the moment he stiffens in surprise at having met her eye. “You have good inside you, Zuko. I can see that even from here.” Good enough to prompt an apology about the loss of her mother. Good enough to consider a destiny beyond capturing Aang. Good enough to make sitting beside him almost pleasant. Almost comfortable.
“Then you really don’t know me at all.”
“Are you really here to trick Aang into rescuing me?”
“Do you believe that?”
She hesitates. Briefly. “No.” It is the truth. It earns her an emphatic sigh.
“I’m a legitimate Earth Kingdom prisoner. Just like you. Though I suspect they’re going to be a lot harsher to a Fire Nation representative than a waterbender.” A curt nod in her direction.
And then she remembers. She remembers the tea shop. The stab of panic at the sight of the two of them. The instinctive flight to the Kyoshi warriors wearing enemy faces. Her incoherent declaration of Zuko’s presence, the look of startled pleasure it provoked on Azula’s precisely made-up face. And she feels herself crumpling in shame and guilt. She can no longer look at him.
“It’s my fault. I told Azula and the Earth King you were here.”
She catches him dart a look at her, then to the ground. She shrinks further.
“I saw you and your uncle in the tea shop and I…” She breathes in a gasp. “I panicked. I’m so sorry.”
“You’re apologising to me? After you told me the Fire Nation killed your mother?”
“Yes.” In her confusion she meets his gaze. His eyes are alight, his face impassive. “Unless… you really are still hunting us?” She shifts away from him. She cannot help herself. Nor can she help the pang of guilt as Zuko sees and retreats further into himself.
“That’s more like it.” He almost spits the words as he stands and moves away. He holds himself rigid under his Earth Kingdom garments, his shoulders tense, his hands in fists by his sides.
She shrinks back from the threat of a firebending attack. Did she feel pity for him? Shame at her own reactions? Did he deserve any of it?
“Zuko–”
“Don’t. I don’t deserve your pity. I don’t need your apologies.”
“I meant what I said about the good in you, Zuko.” She is begging for his attention now, begging him to stay here with her instead of retreating to that awful place she imagines he must hide in. But he is already gone.
“I’d expect nothing less from a waterbending teenager.” As though they were not the same age. As though she were not an even match for him now. “I don’t need your help, or your excuses. I know what I’m doing.”
She does not believe him, but this time she holds her tongue.
And the room is exploding once more, with shards of rock and crystal this time rather than dazzling light. She is blinded by the swirling dust, but the arms around her neck are solid enough. She freezes until a familiar scent, accompanied by a familiar voice, reaches her through the momentary gloom.
“Katara!”
“Aang!” She reaches down to envelop him in her own hug. “I knew you’d come for me.”
She is barely aware of another figure moving toward Zuko.
“Uncle? What are you doing with the Avatar?” There is more fight in Zuko’s voice toward Aang than has ever been directed at her. Aang responds instantly.
“Saving you!”
She whirls to see Zuko lunging forward, only to be restrained by his uncle. For a moment Zuko glances at her. She holds his stare. He looks away.
“Go.” Iroh is resolute. “Go to your friends.”
Aang is already moving toward the impressive crater he imposed into the cavern wall, but she lingers, almost unwillingly. “Zuko…” She does not know what else to say. He makes no response. So, she holds her water bag tighter against her chest and follows Aang into the darkness. Zuko is watching her when she offers a backward glance. Something in her heart shifts.