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Katara was becoming increasingly certain this was not the first time they had run into the old man with the tea cart. His ostrich horse, which stretched its long neck out towards her, angling for some of Appa’s treats, seemed to remember as much, but if the old man did, he never said anything about it. Perhaps, she thought, his mind was going. All he ever seemed to do, when they did run into him, was offer them all tea and try to teach them pai sho. Even after the time they had landed Appa on top of his tea cart.
“Now this is a very special tea,” he told her. “It comes from the very far east of the Earth Kingdom, at the very tip of Chameleon Bay’s peninsula. Drink it very slowly. It must not be prepared too hot, or the leaves will burn, but it is meant to be savoured.”
It tasted like tea. “What is so special about it?”
“Long ago,” he told her, sounding just like some of the old men back home, “it is said that Chameleon Bay was a great lake, that the peninsula reached down to touch land again, and at that very point, two lovers lived. But their families were feuding terribly, and one of them, a great earth bender, split the world there.”
“Like the Avatar Kyoshi?” Katara tried unsubtly to peer past the curtain of the tea cart, to make sure no Fire Nation soldiers were searching nearby. She was pretty sure she’d lost them cutting through that cabbage patch, but it was hard to tell.
“Something like that. These lovers were torn apart forever. One of them, it is said, was but a simple tea farmer, and she cultivated the first of this tea in the hopes that it would reach around the shores, and lead her love, who feared she was dead, back to her.”
Katara, who could not resist a love story, asked, “and did it?”
The old man looked terribly defeated. “I do not know,” he said, “but I drink the tea anyways.”
It was really rude to ask, but, “did you lose your wife?”
“Many years ago,” he said, “but it is another reunion I hope for when I drink the tea. War is not so good for keeping families together.”
She had not seen her father in so very long. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” he said.
A loud thump came from outside, and all the dishes rattled. Katara downed the last of her tea in one big gulp, ran out the door, and leapt at Appa’s fuzzy side, hurrying to climb up. They really had to get out of here before Zhao showed up.
“Katara! You’re okay!”
“Just fine,” she promised Sokka, even though she had burned her throat.
“Yip-yip!”
--
Katara could have been a firebender, the way the rage and humiliation burned in her throat. She came all this way to the stupid North Pole, and she had learned more from a stolen waterbending scroll than she was going to learn from real, living waterbending masters.
So what if they’d come here for Aang, not her? Aang wasn’t as good a waterbender as her, and he wasn’t trying, and he didn’t want it, not like she did. He was the last airbender, but she was the last too, the last waterbender in the entire South, and she was going to stay the last because they weren’t going to teach her anything.
And yet somehow, the most humiliating part was the fact that the other students in the healing class were babies, no older than five or six. Aang wasn’t being made to train with babies, and he got to learn to fight. It wasn’t fair.
There was one other older girl, at least. She didn’t talk much – or at all, really – and she was so bundled in furs and scarves, with her hood pulled up even inside the igloo, that Katara could barely see her face, but at least she wasn’t totally alone in this humiliation. Katara sat beside her, watching and moving their hands slowly through these beginning katas, for children, together.
And okay, maybe Katara learned something, but none of it could make up for the thing – the ability to protect her friends and her tribe and herself – that she had been denied.
--
The younger children tidied up, as seemed to be their routine, while Katara thanked Yagoda for the training. It was the least she could do. It had been… well, not incredible, exactly, but something. Not useless, like she’d feared.
“The warriors will still be training for another hour,” she said, “you should see more of our city. The boy can show you, if your fiancé does not mind.”
“My what?”
This confusion was resolved soon enough, which left Katara only with… the boy, in his ridiculous furs, waddling along beside her down the canals.
“I thought it was all divided – boy warriors, girl healers.”
“It is,” he said, muffled by his scarf. “But I’m not a warrior of the tribe, so…”
This was not going to work. “Do you ever take all this off?”
“Not all of it,” he said, in a tone of high embarrassment, but he did take them to sit inside, close to a fire as they could get, and lowered his hood and unwrapped his scarf so she could see him, from the messy dark mop of his hair to the burn that scarred half his face, and his features which, true to his words, were not of the Water Tribe.
Katara had seen children like him before, in the Earth Kingdom and at the South Pole too. She hadn’t thought they had them here in the North, where they were supposed to be safe, and the Fire Nation far away.
She really, really wanted to ask, but she didn’t. “So they let you learn to heal?”
He shook his head. “I’m not a waterbender. I can’t heal anything. But… since I’m not allowed to be a warrior, or work in administration, there’s not a lot for me to do. I mend nets too, and stuff, but Yagoda said she could use some help with the younger children.”
It hadn’t seemed to Katara like he was helping with the children much, but… it had sort of helped her to have him sitting there, listening so calmly, like what they were learning really mattered.
“I didn’t actually catch your name earlier, sorry.”
“Zuko.”
“Katara.”
--
“Dude, what happened to your face?”
“Sokka!”
If only she’d learned a good waterbending technique that she could drench him with today.
“My father happened,” Zuko said, like that was a normal thing to say. “Why do you think I live here now?”
“Uhh, because you’re from here?”
Zuko rolled his eyes so hard Katara thought they might leave his head entirely. She tried not to think about the implications of a Fire Nation father – a firebender father – finding his Water Tribe son and doing this to him.
--
After they left their healing lesson the next day, Zuko saw her watching the boys learning to fight with burning jealously, and he pulled her into a corner and showed her how to do the same stance they’d been doing, guided her through the motions of their arms.
“I thought you weren’t a waterbender.”
“I’m not,” he said, “but I’ve been paying attention, and it’s all moving, really. Waterbending, firebending, using a sword. Once you learn how to control your body, how to use it as a tool, it’s easier to learn other techniques to do the same thing.”
Maybe she should start training with Sokka as well as Aang. There had to be something useful in what the warriors of the North learned. If only she could track Sokka down outside of meals for longer than five minutes at a time. He never hung out with her and Aang anymore.
***
Zuko usually saw more of Yue than he had since the Avatar arrived in the North. He knew it was the last thing he should have been worried about – the Avatar was here, that stupid, meaningless promise could actually have been fulfilled – but for some reason, it struck him as particularly important.
“You’ve been worrying ever since the engagement ceremony,” she told him, when he asked. “I was already betrothed before that, you know. It didn’t really change anything.”
“I know. But something has changed now, right?”
“Anyone else might think you were jealous,” she grumbled, but there was a visible embarrassment in the way her eyes darted away, down off the parapet towards where the warriors of the tribe were training. Down towards-
“Seriously?” Zuko demanded. “Him?”
“Shh,” Yue hissed, horrified. “My father might-”
“Not that! But if you had to… couldn’t you have picked someone more…. better?”
“Like his sister?” Yue asked, a hint of taunting in her voice that never would have been there when they first met, and Zuko could feel the blood rushing to his cheeks.
“Shut up.”
***
It was one thing for Master Pakku not to train her. It was another thing for him to stand there and insist that it was all about her being a girl when-
“You don’t even let all the boys of your own tribe train to be warriors! Healing is good enough for them, when you don’t trust them, because healing isn’t important. Why is it that every girl in the water tribe isn’t good enough for you?”
He narrowed his gaze. “Boys of the North learn to be warriors, unless they’re weak-willed. Perhaps things are different in the South, where no one teaches women what their place should be.”
He turned his back on her, wouldn’t even meet her eyes. That did it. She reached for the water, for the training she’d given herself with her stolen scroll, and whipped the back of his head.
A bark of Zuko’s laughter made it worth her time even before Pakku turned to fight her in earnest.
--
She was wet and freezing, even after she tried to bend the last of the water away from her body. She was too exhausted for that to really work.
“What just happened?” Sokka asked. “Did you win? Did he and Gran Gran…”
“I don’t want to know,” Katara said, “and I don’t know who won. He didn’t say yes, but…”
“Just show up,” Zuko said. “He didn’t say ‘no’ either. And you were good. Really, really good. He’s not stupid enough to have missed that. Show up first thing, perfectly ready. Do all the drills perfectly – you can’t let any of them see you weak. And if he doesn’t want to teach you tomorrow morning, challenge him again. You can learn from fighting him.”
“But what if he doesn’t teach Aang like he threatened to?”
“And they let the Fire Nation win the war?” Everyone stared at him. “It’s a bluff. They can’t not train the Avatar because he’s friends with a girl who wants to fight. If the Fire Nation catches word he’s here, they’re not going to care if he’s being trained or not, they’re just going to kill everyone. They need him trained and gone back to the Earth Kingdom to flatten the Fire Nation there before they even think to look North.”
“Master Pakku said-”
“Pakku’s all smoke. Show up tomorrow morning and I bet you anything I’m right.” He looked at Katara with some concern. “You should get inside and get dry. You can’t show up tomorrow with a cold.”
“Katara always dries fast.”
With a great authority for someone who wasn’t even a bender, Zuko said, “that’s a passive bending effect, like firebenders not getting cold. But if you don’t regulate your bending – or do something stupid like pick a fight with a master – you can exhaust it.”
“You literally just told me to pick a fight with the same master every day.”
“I said it was stupid,” Zuko said primly, “I didn’t say you shouldn’t do it.”
--
Zuko was right that she did feel better warm and dry and bundled under a pile of furs. It was significantly better again when she convinced him, after a few minutes of him standing there shivering like an idiot even though they were inside and warm because he’d given her all the furs, to come sit beside her.
“It still feels weird,” she confessed, looking down at the pendant in her hands. “I mean, my Gran Gran… do you think she really loved him? It seems like he loved her – or thought he loved her anyways, but how can you treat someone like they don’t matter if you love them? Being married means being partners. People who could row a canoe together. My Gran Gran was one of the best racers in the whole Water Tribe! She still has the whalebone trophy from the year she won the Tribe-wides.”
“She must have been good, to make it all the way to the South on her own.”
Katara wrapped her arms around her knees under the blanket and said the thing that had been sitting on her tongue, trying to wrestle free. “She must have been scared. Leaving her whole tribe, everyone she knew. At least I had Aang and Sokka.”
“Yeah.”
“So why do I want to learn from the man who made her that scared?”
“If it was him she was scared of,” Zuko said, “I don’t think she’d have given you that necklace.”
She’d need to fix the band, or maybe beg a new piece of leather scrap from someone making clothes or tanning hides. Assuming she still wanted to wear it. “She gave it to my mother, first. It’s the only thing I have of hers. I mean, I thought it was hers. I never really thought of it as Gran Gran’s, or about where it came from. That’s not how we do things in the South.”
“It’s not how it is in the Fire Nation either.”
It was the first time he’d really… said it. “When did you come here?”
“Two years ago,” he said, and there was something in his voice that made Katara suspect he could have told her the exact day. Maybe even the hour. “Three, soon.”
“No wonder you’re so cold all the time!” Then, realizing that might be mean, she hastily tacked on, “I mean, lots of people have trouble adjusting. It’s not because you’re Fire Nation. Or, I mean-”
He laughed at her, just a little. “No, I mean, you’re right. I was never really cold before I came here. Even the food is hot in the Fire Nation.”
“Our food is hot!”
“Not like this,” he said, rather wistfully. “Fire flakes…”
“Do you miss it?” It seemed absurd, after what his father had done to him.
“Sometimes,” Zuko admitted. “I miss being warm. I miss spicy food. I even miss training, sometimes.” And, after a rather shaky breath, he added, “I miss my mother.”
“Your mother isn’t here with you?”
He was looking very pointedly away, when Katara turned to look at him incredulously. How had the North managed to get a boy who’d been taken by the Fire Nation back, and leave his mother?
“She died. I think.”
“You think?”
He whipped his head around, and, just for a second, he really was all Fire Nation, no Water Tribe decency overlying it all, like there usually was. “I think he killed her, alright? Is that what you want to hear?”
He nearly stood up, letting all the warm out, and Katara grabbed his wrist without really thinking about it. She didn’t want to go. She hadn’t meant to say– well, it felt stupid now. Of course that was why. “They killed my Mom too.”
She didn’t think she’d ever said it out loud before. Not even to Aang. As Zuko sank back down to the ground, she felt that suddenly there was power in it. “They came to our village. I was just a kid, I barely even understood that I was a waterbender, and there was no one to teach me to fight. So when I ran home and I saw her standing there with him, there wasn’t anything I could do but leave when she told me to, to try and get help, but when I finally did… she was gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry? I’m sorry, I was being stupid. I should’ve known they did the same thing to your mom. That’s what the Fire Nation does. The Fire Lord and all his stupid generals and soldiers and assassins. They just take, and take, and they hurt everyone.”
“Yeah,” Zuko agreed, quietly, like it was a secret instead of something everyone in the world knew.
“That’s why we need Aang. He’s the Avatar, and he’s so good already, and he really can save us. I mean, if Pakku actually trains him, and we find an earthbender, and we do… something about firebending.”
“He shouldn’t have to.” He was still speaking softly. “Someone should have done something before now.”
“My dad is trying. All the men from our tribe. They went to go help fight the Fire Nation navy. I don’t know why the North doesn’t do anything, when they have all these men, and all these waterbenders. They could really help.”
She was angry again, thinking about it, but Zuko only said, “I didn’t mean them. They’re scared. Of course they’re scared. A well-trained army of firebenders could ruin this place, and if the Fire Lord knew that they had the Avatar here, they’d actually try. I didn’t mean them. I meant that there must be so many people in the Fire Nation who know how many people are hurt, are killed fighting in this war in every nation. The Fire Lord. All his generals. My… my whole family. And no one ever does anything.”
“They’re not your whole family.” He looked at her, his good eye widening in disbelief. “You’re here now, right? Even if your Mom is gone, family’s not just… all that. All them. It’s like… Aang was raised by monks, you know. And they’re gone, now, but Aang still has family because he’s my family. Mine and Sokka’s. And now you’re here, and you have-”
She stopped herself. She hadn’t even known Zuko for a week, and she was suddenly not sure she wanted to call him her brother.
“I have Yue,” he said, rather like he was trying to convince himself. “She’s not my sister, but… we talk, sometimes. She’s good.”
“I’m glad you have someone to talk to,” Katara said, rather more angrily than she’d meant to, but if Zuko noticed, he didn’t react to it.
--
Pakku let her train the next morning, and it was the best feeling in the world, but Zuko’s grin when she showed him what she’d learned was pretty good too.
***
Zuko started running the second he tasted ash in the air, abandoning the mending circle despite the shouts of the people whose work he left undone. Maybe, if he was braver, if he was more loyal, if he was a better son, he would have run for the sea, run for rescue, to throw himself on the mercy of his father’s navy. But he didn’t. In truth, he hadn’t considered that option for a very long time, and not just because he didn’t have any way to survive the cold for more than a couple hours.
He took the stairs up to the palace two at a time, shedding his outer layer of furs as he ran, and slipping across the icy hallways in a way that nobody who grew up here ever seemed to, somehow, and burst into Chief Arnook’s study in a way he never would have dared back in Caldera with a cry of “Sir!”
He’d beaten the war council here, the soldiers and waterbenders who would have defence of the city. That was good. They still didn’t really trust him, after his terrible, terrible introduction to the tribe. But Chief Arnook, for some strange reason, had started to. He trusted Zuko, powerless as he was, with Yue, and with trainee healers, and the old women who did the washing and the mending. He had to trust him here.
“How many?”
“At present, our scouts have only spotted a single ship, making an approach directly at the city walls.”
“That’s not everything. If there was only one ship, it wouldn’t be making a direct approach. A dozen more at least, and at that point they’d be committing to a war and they’ll be trying to win. It’ll be everybody they can spare.”
“I know,” Chief Arnook said, patiently. “I’ve been listening to you for a long time now, Zuko.”
That was good. Great, actually. That made this easier. “You need to take me up on the walls. I don’t know if they’re here for me, or for Aang, but we need to act like it’s about me even if it’s him. You can send a messenger or something, get them to send someone to verify it’s me up close. Tell them you’ll kill me if they don’t back off.”
“And we trust your father values you over his warmongering?”
He could picture Katara’s horrified face. “No. But that’s going to be above their paygrade to decide, and they know he’ll kill them if they decide wrong. They’ll have to send a message back to Caldera to ask. That gets you time. You can evacuate everyone, and come up with a better plan of attack-”
“Better than the ones we’ve already made?”
He’d felt like such a monster the day he’d started telling Chief Arnook the truth about their armies when he asked. But it felt worth it now. “Maybe. We didn’t have the Avatar before.”
“But this plan relies on me threatening to kill you.”
And here was the hard part. “And you have to do it when they say no. If you don’t, they’ll never take you seriously again, they’ll never think you’re a threat and back off. They’ll treat you like they do the South.”
“No.”
They both turned to the door, where Yue stood, a hand on the icy wall, breathing heavily from having run to find them.
“Yue-”
“Shut up,” she told Zuko, and then told her father, “I’m doing my duty, as a princess of this tribe. I’m making sacrifices for my duty.” She’d ended it with Sokka, then. Zuko tried not to feel too vindicated She really could do better, if she was going to take a lover. “This isn’t a sacrifice that’s worth it. It could buy us time, but at what cost? Zuko could have killed me a hundred times over. And anyone else would have wanted to, after what I did to him. If we’re willing to reward his honour with death, the Fire Nation might as well slaughter us. They’ll have already won by making us as morally derelict as they are.” It was as if all her anger – anger Zuko hadn’t ever even seen before – had burst out at once, looking suddenly embarrassed, she tacked on at the end, “sorry, Zuko.”
He really, really did not want to die. But he wanted to see Yue look that upset even less. “It’s okay. This plan will work, and-”
“Thank you, Yue,” Chief Arnook said. “For your duty, and your counsel. You do your mother and I proud.”
Zuko didn’t understand, at first, but Yue did, because she threw her arms around her father at once. After that, none of his objections were heard.
***
It was never over. Zhao was never going to stop chasing them. The North was going to burn too, like the Earth Kingdom was burning, like the South would have burned if they hadn’t run.
Princess Yue put a gentle hand on her arm, just above the elbow and pulled her out of her reverie.
“Did you need something?” Katara wasn’t really sure what her job was, exactly. She hadn’t figured out yet if being asked to guard the princess was an honour, because she was important, or an insult, because it kept Katara away from the real fighting where everyone else was. Even Zuko and Sokka had vanished off on some mission or another.
“No,” she said. “You just seemed upset.”
That was one word for it. “I led them here, didn’t I? If I was a better Waterbender, if I’d been good enough to train Aang myself, or at least hide him from the Fire Nation long enough to get us North-”
“They still might have come,” Yue told her. “We might not be fighting in the Earth Kingdom like your people are, but just living in the same world as the Fire Nation is a danger. If they hadn’t come for you, they would have come for Zuko, sooner or later. I mean, they’d have to be idiots not to figure it out eventually.”
“His father is… very powerful, isn’t he?”
It was the only thing that made sense of Zuko, really. Of why they were still all so reluctant to trust him, of how he’d become so close with Yue even though he didn’t have any real status here.
With a bloodthirstiness even more surprising than her reassuring quality, Yue said, “I hope when the Avatar masters the elements and ends the war, I can be there to see that bastard beg for mercy.”
“I can’t really see Aang making anyone beg for mercy,” Katara admitted, “but if I was there… I’d make them all beg.”
“Good.”
***
“Hey Zuko… can I ask, why am I supposed to keep you locked in a cell while they’re fighting out there?”
“Yue thought I might do something stupid.”
He could practically hear Sokka’s brain rattling around on the other side of the bars.
“That’s good,” he said, eventually, “I was kind of worried it was because she thought I’d do something stupid.”
***
“I was born here,” Yue said. She was kneeling, as if in prayer, looking nearly as calm as Aang did having begun his trip into the spirit realm. “In a way, I mean.”
“‘In a way’? What way?”
She looked down at her hands, which were soft as if she treated them with seal fat for even the most minor of scrapes.
“I was very sick when I was born. Close to death, I think. There was nothing the healers could do, though they tried all they could.” Of course they had, she was a princess. “But when they told my mother and father there was nothing more to be done, that I would die, my father brought me here instead. He prayed to the Moon Spirit, and placed me into the waters of the Oasis. My hair turned white, and I opened my eyes and began to cry for the first time, and I lived. Because she saved me.”
She wasn’t looking at her hands after all, Katara realized. She was looking down at the fish in the waters of the pond.
“Your father must love you very much.”
“He does.”
--
Aang was taking too long in the Spirit Realm. He was frozen in place, not even moving his eyes behind his eyelids. Katara, for her part, was starting to feel like all his usual energy had infected her. She couldn’t sit still.
Yue wasn’t much better, at least. She was moving too, if in a more sedate, calm fashion that Katara’s nervous pacing, hands and feet shifting deliberately from one position to the next.
“That’s not a waterbending kata,” Katara said, after Yue finished her second repetition of it. Aang really was taking too long. This was a stupid plan. What were they going to do if something happened to him, or he couldn’t come back, or-
“No,” Yue agreed. “Firebending. Zuko says I do it wrong, but I’m not sure he’s right. He does it in a way that’s so… rigid, and forced, like he’s pushing every motion. But I don’t think bending is supposed to work like that.”
“Firebending does. It’s brutal, and endless. It doesn’t have the capacity to do anything but hurt. You haven’t seen it.”
“No,” Yue agreed. “And I can’t imagine losing my mother like that.”
Sokka had told her, Katara realized, and was obscurely angry about the fact. It had been so hard for her to tell Zuko, who understood, and Sokka could just… tell Yue even though she didn’t know a thing.
“You can’t. It’s like the end of the world. Firebending is… I don’t know, maybe it has the capacity not to hurt, but even Aang couldn’t make it gentle. The best thing it can be is controlled.”
“I think Zuko could have made it gentle. Maybe, at least, if I hadn’t-”
She was still moving through the kata, and she shifted to the right, so she was looking directly at Katara, and her eyes widened with horror. Katara didn’t even manage to turn and look behind her before Yue was tackling her to the ground, just in time to avoid the burst of flame that broke through the tranquility of the sanctuary.
Katara didn’t have time to stop and thank her for the save. Already she was shoving Yue off and raising her fists, and the water with it, to meet that bastard Zhao face to face.
Last time they’d fought, she’d barely been able to use a simple water-whip. This was going to be very different.
++
Sokka didn’t actually see the moon change. In the years that followed, he would usually lie about this detail. It made such a story – that horrible moment of the world going red as the Moon Spirit was captured, lifted struggling from the water.
Unfortunately, what Sokka actually saw was Zuko, who was sitting in his cell, staring at a wall, suddenly straighten like he was a puppet whose strings were being drawn taut.
“Sokka,” he said, “stand back from the bars, now.”
It was a good thing he did, even though he didn’t know why, because as soon as he had, Zuko melted them – melted good, solid waterbending – in a single fiery blast.
“Dude. What?”
“Yue’s in danger,” Zuko said, like that explained anything, and took off running.
“Hey!”
Sokka nearly ate snow at least five times trying to keep up.
++
Katara wiped her bleeding nose on the back of her hand, and wished that she could bend Zhao right back to the Fire Nation, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even bend him across the room. It was like being an untrained girl all over again, reaching for her power but finding nothing there.
“Bring it here,” Zhao sneered, at one of his men, who was holding the struggling Moon Spirit up by her tail. He lifted himself from the damp ground that was all that remained of the prison where Katara had trapped him.
“She needs water,” Aang said. “Please, you have to put her back.”
“So your pet waterbender can fight your battles for you?”
Like it wasn’t Katara’s battle.
“It’s not only the Water Tribes who rely on the moon, Zhao. The Fire Nation needs it too. We all do.”
“Do we now?” He took the spirit in his bare hand, raised her up. “The Fire Nation has conquered dragons, and the perfidious air nomads, but no dragonslayer shall be as immortal as I, Zhao, conqueror of the moon!”
“Zhao!”
She knew she shouldn’t take her eyes off him, but she couldn’t help turning to see Zuko and Sokka standing on the other side of the Oasis. Sokka looked confused, and horrified, and was panting raggedly, but Zuko…
His hands blazed with fire, and his eyes too, with a fury she’d never seen.
Could it be? Was Zhao old enough to be his father? They didn’t look anything alike, really, but it wasn’t impossible.
“Prince Zuko,” Zhao said, delighted. “I might have known. Your father always said you were as spineless and weak-willed as a waterbender. What a delightful footnote to add to my list of triumphs. Zhao, who subdued the North and defeated the moon, who captured the Avatar and the traitor Prince Zuko.”
Prince. Did the Fire Nation have multiple princes and kings, like the Earth Kingdom did? Was prince a title you could have without being the son of the Fire Lord?
Not the way Zhao said it, it wasn’t.
Fuck.
“Is that really all you want Zhao? To be remembered as one who ruins things?”
“A pair of traitors, I see. General Iroh-”
“Uncle?”
“Tea cart guy?”
Sokka was right. It was the old man with the tea cart who been traveling North alongside them. Katara nearly wouldn’t have recognized him, if Sokka hadn’t said it. He was dressed as a Fire Nation soldier, and it suited him, despite his age. He carried himself like somebody dangerous.
“You don’t want to do this,” he told Zhao, “you will be remembered as a fool, if you do, not as any sort of hero.”
“You begged me to come north. The great Dragon of the West. Look at you now. Pitiful, your lip quivering over what happens to one little fish. Kneel, or I’ll burn it here and now.” To his men, he added, “bind him. If he makes to bend so much as a spark, we’ll bring back his head instead. I’m sure the Fire Lord will understand.”
“No!”
The blast of fire from Zuko’s hand threw one of the soldiers into a wall with a crash. Sokka’s boomerang caught a second on the head. Aang, reacting a second later, hit one with his staff. Even Yue, who looked green and swayed slightly on her feet, grabbed one of the rakes used to tend the garden and swung it at a soldier’s head.
It was only Katara who couldn’t move. Katara, who was useless without her bending, who could only reach out a hand instinctively and fail to draw any weapon to her in time as she watched Zhao twist his wrist slightly, summoning flame and ending the world.
--
For a second, everyone stood still, frozen like they’d died with the Moon Spirit, and then Yue let out a single, ragged sob, still clutching half of the rake she’d broken on the guard’s head, and the world exploded back into motion.
“I’ll kill you!” Zuko leapt clean across the Oasis trying to throw himself on Zhao, who, having given up his only bargaining chip, decided that if he wanted to enjoy his infamy the best thing to do was to run away as quickly as possible.
Katara still couldn’t feel her waterbending; she’d never feel her waterbending again. But she was sure Zuko hadn’t been a firebender when they’d met, because not a single firebender she’d ever seen dressed for the cold like Zuko did. And it hadn’t stopped him.
Sokka didn’t need to be a bender to clobber that last Fire Nation soldier over the head. Yue didn’t need to be one to swing a rake. Her father didn’t need to be one, to lead their people.
Her mother hadn’t needed to be one to be brave.
She grabbed the broken end of Yue’s rake off the ground, and ran after the pair of them as fast as she could.
--
The city was crumbling around them, trembling before the fury of the Ocean Spirit, by the time Katara caught up to Zuko and Zhao. Zhao was a terrifying firebender, had featured in Katara’s nightmares since the day they’d met, and Zuko hadn’t trained a day in years. He was still good, Katara could tell, but not this good.
“Hey!” She reached down to grab a fistful of snow, which was fortunately wet and malleable, and hit Zhao in the back of the head. He flinched, missing a strike that let Zuko leverage himself off the wall he’d been pressed against and kick Zhao in the stomach, sending him stumbling back onto the bridge, towards Katara. She hefted her end of the rake like a bat.
And the canal beneath them erupted in fury, as the Ocean Spirit learned at last who’d killed his love.
***
It was Yue’s face, floating in the air before them, lingering as the Ocean Spirit slunk away, but it wasn’t her. Yue didn’t look on him like that, with a stranger’s pity, as she told him,
“My life was a gift. The time had come to return it.”
“But that’s not how gifts work. That’s not how anything works.”
“I have become what I was always meant to be.”
“And the Ocean Spirit is just fine with having his Consort replaced with a teenage girl? He doesn’t mind?”
You’re fine with this? You didn’t even want to marry someone you knew for duty, and now you’re happy going off with a spirit as old as the world?
The Moon Spirit, who might have had a piece of Yue inside her, but was not wholly Yue, tilted her head, as if he’d said something alien to her.
“I took something from you,” she said, “did you not want me to give it back?”
He hadn’t really felt warm since the Moon Spirit had locked his bending away. That was how he’d known something was wrong.
“Would you let Yue come back, if I said no?”
“There is nothing more within my power,” the spirit told him, and then she – they – were gone.
Zuko’s firebending wasn’t gone with her, but he’d never felt so cold.
“Hey!” Katara was on her feet, shaking and furious, staring at the space where the Moon Spirit had been. “Get back here, you’re not done explaining yet!”
“Katara.” She was a waterbender. She really, really needed not to offend the Moon Spirit.
“What do you mean that it isn’t within your power? You’re the moon!”
It was her objection, her righteousness and fury, just the same as she’d turned on Pakku, that made him see it.
“It’s Atka’s Law.”
That got her attention, at least. “Atka’s law… ‘do no harm’?”
That was the Healer’s Principle, actually, but it didn’t really matter, now. “Atka’s Law is spirit conservation. Why it’s always better to have someone else heal you than to heal yourself. If you spend too much bending to heal yourself, you won’t heal.”
Katara stared at him for a second, and then she said, slowly, “so… the Moon Spirit can’t heal her because they don’t have enough energy between the two of them, but… someone else could?”
“All waterbending comes from the moon. You just saw that.”
“But you’re not a waterbender.”
She said it so matter-of-factly, like he wasn’t a hateful thing. “No. But firebenders can’t heal, Katara. We just kill things. You know that. If it wasn’t for us, for me, Yue would still-”
She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to his feet. “We’re losing time. That’s a healing principle, I think.” Oonark’s Law. Prioritizing the treatment of life-threatening injuries. “We’ll try Aang, first. But if he can’t help…”
The way Katara said it, Zuko knew she wasn’t giving him any choice in the matter.
***
Aang wasn’t at the Oasis. According to the old man he’d gone somewhere with the Ocean Spirit, though both fish were back in the pond now, and Aang was still nowhere to be seen. There was only the old man, looking mournful and tired, and Sokka, sitting on the ground, and Yue in his arms, her hair dark now, like every other girl in the water tribe. It made her look younger, less like a great princess and more like a kid their age, who had no more place in this than Katara and Sokka – and Zuko – did.
Zuko, eyes fixed firmly on some random rock, said, “if the Avatar is lost, we need to-”
Aang wasn’t lost. That wasn’t happening today. They were going to do things one step at a time and they were going to fix it, and if that didn’t work then Katara was going to march into the Spirit Realm herself and start hitting spirits.
“Stop trying to avoid this. Aang’s not here; I’m a waterbender. There’s nobody else.”
“I told you, firebenders can’t heal. I’ll just hurt her.”
“We’re well past the point of hurting her!”
Katara had thought the same as Zuko, once. Aang had thought the same, after his firebending lessons, even though it had been an accident. But she could see no more similarity between Zhao and Zuko than she could see between Zhao and Aang. They seemed less like they were from different nations and more like they were from different worlds.
She forced herself to breathe, to say, “when was the last time ‘firebenders’ tried? I didn’t know waterbenders could heal either. And now the Northern tribe ‘knows’ that only girls can heal, but I bet that’s wrong. You bend like a waterbender already. I saw you, fighting Zhao. You don’t move like he does. Your fire doesn’t even look like his.”
“Waterbenders can heal because there’s water in the body! There’s not any fire in the body.”
The old man said, “no, but there is energy.” And at last, Zuko couldn’t stop himself from looking at him. “You have seen your sister bend lightning, I believe.”
“I can’t make lightning.”
“You do not have to make lightning to bend it. I taught myself to catch lightning and throw it away by studying waterbending, as it happens.”
“Because waterbenders can move energy through the body, which is why we can heal! And you can learn to do it from us!”
Katara found that she had crossed a line from stubbornness to genuine belief they could succeed. Zuko still looked doubtful, but, well, he’d understand once he did it, just like she had.
“Sokka, you need to stand back. Zuko, put your hands on her chest. You have to feel the energy – not water or fire, you have to feel deeper than that. The thing that goes away when you can’t access your bending. You need to move that without moving any fire. Can you do that?”
The old man came and knelt beside them. “Fire is a source of life, Zuko. Firebenders knew this once. The Sun Warriors knew this. The dragons, who taught us bending, as the moon taught the Water Tribes, knew this. Steady your breath, and feel this.”
“This isn’t just healing, this is life and death. No mortal healer could do this. Only a spirit could save Yue, and the ones here can’t.”
Sokka, who had shifted just a few steps away when Katara ordered him to, said, “the sun’s rising. Will that help?”
It was still winter in the North, and the night had lasted so long it was starting to feel like the sun would never rise at all. But Sokka was right. The first fingers of dawn were beginning to stretch across the sky.
“Yes,” the old man said, “it will help. The sun rises again, Zuko, beyond hope, and life rises with it.”
And Katara said, “stop thinking, and do it. I know you can.”
For a second, there was nothing, not even the slightest hint of wind, and then bright light ran down Zuko’s body, from the top of his head to the tips of his fingers, white as the moon spirit, and Yue’s body twisted, heaving off the ground. Through a gap in the ice and stone surrounding the oasis, the sunlight caught on Zuko and Yue. He looked warm caught in its rays in a way he never had before, like he could hold you and you’d never be cold again.
Her eyes on him, Katara nearly forgot for a second why they were there, until Yue twisted in his arms and rolled over to spit up what looked like half a jug of water. Zuko patted her awkwardly on the back, and Sokka gasped audibly. Yue whirled on Zuko to demand,
“What did you do? The Moon Spirit needed me. We need the Moon Spirit. How could you-”
“Moon’s fine,” Sokka said, which stopped Yue from strangling Zuko, at least, when she glanced up at the shape of it in the brightening sky above them.
“How-”
“Uh… remember how I’m a firebender?” When she stared at him, he said defensively, “it was Katara’s idea!”
Yue, apparently grown tired to arguing with him, decided it was time to hug him as tight as humanly possible.
That was a good idea, actually. They hadn’t died tonight – or, well, most of them hadn’t. It seemed like a good time to hug her brother too. Sokka squawked, when Katara hugged him, and then he hugged her back just as hard.
***
If he never let go of Yue, he might not have to face his Uncle. Maybe he could just stay here, and never actually have to turn around and face any of it.
But it was Yue, of course, so she didn’t let him. She did feel very strongly about duty – her own more than other peoples’.
“I must go,” she said. “My father needs to know what happened here tonight, our people need to know that the Moon Spirit is well, that she lives.”
She couldn’t really stand on her own, but Sokka pulled away from his own hug with Katara to help her, and Yue blushed terribly when he wrapped her arm over his shoulders to help her walk.
“Straight to the real healers!” Zuko called after them. “You can talk to your father lying down, like a normal person who just died!”
And then it was just him, and Uncle, and Katara – and the bodies of half a dozen unconscious soldiers.
That was a perfectly good distraction. “What do we do with them?”
“That’s probably Chief Arnook’s call,” Katara said, but she waved her hands a few times. and ice formed to bind their hands to the ground, so that even if any of them were benders, they’d have some trouble immediately bending their way out of it.
Her bending was so extraordinary to watch. Zuko considered himself something of an expert on waterbending, at this point, but he’d never seen anyone like Katara. To go from no training at all to a mastery in just the span of a few short weeks – the first spent without much training at all – was an extraordinary thing. She was as good as Azula, and that was where the similarities ended.
Or maybe she was better than Azula, because Azula couldn’t have saved Yue, and Katara had. Her belief, her courage and hope, had done more than Zuko’s bending, that strange feeling of fire-without-fire, ever could have alone.
“I, uh, probably shouldn’t leave you two here alone?” Katara said, though she seemed embarrassed about it. “But I could… go stand in a corner or something?”
“I’m not going to run away. I know I’m a traitor, but I wouldn’t betray the North, not even…”
“I know that! But they could wake up, or more soldiers could come, or your Uncle could try and kidnap you! He’s been going all over the Earth Kingdom looking for you, I think.
“He is who you were looking for, right?”
“Yes,” Uncle said, heavily. “He is.”
He looked so sad. Zuko barely even noticed Katara slipping away into the shadows at the base of the cliffs.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you. I just got so lost, in the storm, and I got washed up in the North, and when Chief Arnook and Headwoman Pinga found out who I was, they thought they they’d try to ransom me to my father for a peace treaty, and then they realized I was banished and they thought they should probably kill me, but Yue said she had a better plan, and she brought me here, to the spirits, and asked them to bind my bending, so I couldn’t hurt them.”
“Zuko…”
“I’m sorry, I should have tried to escape anyways – I think I maybe could have, their defences were awful when I got here – but the cold was too much, and I didn’t know what else to do, and they were kind to me, and they made their healers treat my face even though I was yelling at them all the time. I kept thinking they’d want something from me, but they never did. I was the one who decided to be a traitor. I told them military secrets, and I helped them update their defences, and I- Father would have been so embarrassed, I mended nets and looked after annoying little brats, and they just… let me? I think I could have got on a boat and nobody would have batted an eye but I still didn’t leave. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to betray you, but I couldn’t go. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to waste your time, making you look. I-”
He hadn’t known Uncle was so strong, squeezing him so tight he thought he might die.
“No time spent on you would ever be wasted.”
Maybe they hugged until Chief Arnnok brought some warriors up to take the soldiers hostage. Somehow it didn’t seem as embarrassing now as it would have three years ago.
***
They found Aang eventually, exhausted but fine where the Ocean Spirit had apologetically deposited him. Katara took him back to their room, and made sure he rested, and took a nap herself, even though she was losing precious hours of sunlight by doing so. Approaching things one step at a time was the only way she was keeping herself from screaming.
Now that the horror had passed, she could no longer avoid thinking about how embarrassingly foolish she’d been. It was one of those things that was going to haunt her until the day she died. Maybe confessing would help settle it, stop it from being literally the only thing she could think about.
“I didn’t realize who you were, before.”
At some level, Zuko was unrecognizable from the boy he’d been yesterday. He was dressed lightly now, his hair tied back so his scar was more keenly visible than ever, and he sat up straighter when she spoke to him. She could see a Fire Nation prince in that, except that he’d been burned by it as badly as she had.
On another level, though, he was just the same. There wouldn’t have been a pile of bandages to be rolled in his lap if he wasn’t.
He looked concerned. “I didn’t mean to lie to you about it. I thought Chief Arnook would have said. It seemed like an important thing for the Avatar to know.”
“I don’t think he saw you as any of our business.”
It hadn’t escaped Katara’s notice that the Earth Kingdom and her father’s army were both blissfully unaware of the Fire Nation intelligence that had allowed the North to weather this latest, greatest attack even better than they had many earlier ones. They’d brought down five ships even before the Ocean Spirit got involved, and seriously damaged many more.
“I’m sorry though. Did you think I was…”
“I thought your mother was probably Water Tribe.”
Zuko understood what she was implying, at least, and looked down. “No. She was a lady of the Fire Nation. I don’t… I don’t know a lot about her family. But my father wouldn’t have married anyone who wasn’t as Fire Nation as it gets.”
She hated to ask, but she did have to. “And the Fire Lord killed her?”
“I don’t know. I woke up that morning and she was just gone. And the Fire Lord – my grandfather, I mean – was dead. For a bit, I kind of thought she might have killed him, she came and said goodbye to me that night, but I know what kind of man my father is now. I know the kind of things he’d do. And I think, maybe, him killing her and his own father to take the throne makes more sense than her deciding that she had to kill my grandfather and then just leaving us behind.”
He really did believe it, and Katara could understand why. The Fire Lord, who turned his bending against his own child, did seem like the kind of guy who could kill his wife and his father too.
“I’m sorry your dad is awful.”
He looked relieved to be believed. “Yeah. Yours sounds pretty cool, though.”
“Yeah.”
She sat beside him, and picked up a pile of bandages of her own. “Do you know what your uncle and Chief Arnook are talking about in there?”
“Pakku’s in there too. It was the weirdest thing – he showed up and just started talking with my uncle about Pai Sho. And then they kicked me out.”
Huh. “Weird.”
“Uncle wants to leave, I think. To try and control the story of what happened here so Father doesn’t try again. And I think Chief Arnook is going to send us away. If word gets out that I’m here… it would be embarrassing for my father, to have me here. I don’t think I can stay and put Yue and everyone in danger like that. I was being selfish, staying as long as I did.”
“You were literally a prisoner.”
He shrugged.
“I might have an idea,” Katara said, tentatively, “if you don’t know what you’re going to do after this.” He gestured for her to continue. “I don’t think we can stay too long. Aang hasn’t even started learning earthbending yet, and that’s going to be hardest for him, because he’s an airbender. So we’ll probably leave soon. I’ll make sure Aang keeps practicing his waterbending while we look for an earthbender to help us. But… Aang still needs a firebending master.”
“You can’t ask me!” Zuko sounded horrified. “I haven’t done any firebending in years. And I was never very good.”
“Aang doesn’t need the person who’s the best. He needs someone he can learn from, and he couldn’t learn from the teacher we tried before. Aang’s even more scared of firebending than I was. He needs someone who can show him that fire’s not just for destroying and I think literally the only person in the entire world who can do that is you.”
And Katara wanted him to come, too. She wanted someone there who she could talk to the way she could talk to Zuko. She couldn’t with Aang, he was just a kid, and she was too used to looking after Sokka, but she could talk to Zuko. She didn’t have anyone else in the world who made her feel easy like that.
She hadn’t performed miracles with anyone else.
“I don’t think I could teach Aang to heal. I don’t even know if I could do it again, or if it was only because the spirits were helping that I did it this time.”
“Don’t try resurrection again. That’s a terrible plan. But hey – after that, fixing anything else has got to be easy.”
That made him smile, warm and handsome.
“You should ask my Uncle to teach the Avatar. He’s better than I am, and Aang couldn’t find him scary.”
“Isn’t your Uncle the same General Iroh who almost took Ba Sing Se?”
“Yeah. But you’ve met him.”
That was a good point. “But he’s not you. I mean, you could both come with us, I guess. He’s pretty good at being inconspicuous, and I understand if you don’t want to be away from him right now. I miss my uncle too.”
She couldn’t imagine, really, how awful splitting up from Uncle Bato would have been if he’d been the only person she had because her father was a power-hungry, world-dominating lunatic.
“I might travel with you for a little while,” Zuko’s uncle agreed. He and Chief Arnook – and a somewhat disapproving Master Pakku, although Katara was pretty convinced that was just what his face looked like – were all standing at the door of the council chamber, looking down on them. “I have a lesson that I think would be very important for the Avatar, and for my nephew, to learn. But I cannot stay for long. I have been neglecting things in the Fire Nation too long, I think. I am needed back in Caldera.”
“You can’t go back there! The Avatar needs you. And it isn’t safe. Father-”
“I have been staying safe from your father for longer than you have been alive. I will be fine. And as for the Avatar… well, he is already going to have one very good firebending teacher. Why does he need two?”
“That’s exactly what I said,” Katara told him, feeling rather vindicated. “Zuko’s a great firebender already. A great inventor.”
“I just had good instructions,” he said, looking anywhere but at either Katara or his Uncle.
She was a good teacher already. She’d be a good teacher for Aang. But what she had with Zuko – what she could have with Zuko, in the future – was more than that.
She took his hand. “We’ll all be learning together. You and me and Aang, and Sokka too, probably. We can figure out more about fire healing together.”
“Fine,” he conceded, still looking at the ground. “I’d like that. With you."
If Katara leaned over to hug him after that, it was just to celebrate his agreeing to join them, and not for any other reason.