Chapter Text
That night, Katara dreams that the ground is rumbling. The icefield cracks under her feet in a long groan like a wounded monster.
She can feel the tide’s strength rushing through her veins. The wind howls on the ocean, filling the air with a taste of salt and metal. In the darkness on the horizon, a giant wave rises, swallowing on its path the Moon and the stars. Its shadow entraps her.
Behind her, screams of panic tears the village apart.
She wants to turn around, but her limbs betray her. Her muscles freeze, her will fails. Her powers deny her. The waters remain deaf to her call, defy her orders. They dominate her and rush towards her in their unnameable fury.
She knows the broken voices whose cries ricochet on the icebergs. But she can’t see them. Their names escape her. Her own voice crystallizes in her throat. No one hears her calling.
A tsunami of ashes descends upon her as the ice yields under her weight. Its roars drown the agonizing screams around. It leaches into her mouth, her lungs, under her skin. The cold lacerates her body with the violence of a thousand knives.
She falls, falls, falls in the dark. She sinks into an unfurling wave against which her powers are helpless.
Molten lava ignites and suffocates the sky under thick black smoke. Katara struggles for an eternity to reach the surface, and an eternity again not to be dragged under. She is alone, the world reduced to a sea of ashes and a dead sky.
On the horizon, a warship appears. Its steel sides slit the macabre waves in a din of furnace. Its illegible banner flaps in the wind like a whip.
Nothing in the world has survived.
A silhouette stands out on the deck, sovereign of the devastated universe. It leans over Katara.
Zuko takes her hand.
He lifts her to him as if her weight was nothing. The reflections of his royal hairpiece blind her. His grip hurts her.
“Come with me.”
He doesn’t ask, he orders. His voice is hoarse and harsh. It resonates in the silence, echoing endlessly.
Katara baulks and squirms. Her screams trickle down her mouth filled with soot. But Zuko persists. He pulls her arm, lifts her body, tears her off the fathomless waters.
She washes up on the deck, naked and soaked, shivering in the King’s shadow. His nails dig into the flesh of her wrist. He makes her stand to stare at her with blazing eyes. His two flawless eyes.
“Come with me,” Ozai orders.
⟃✷⟄
Her scream gets choked in her throat. She shoots up, pushing aside the furs of her bed. In her chest, her heart beats so fast it could break her ribs. She is panting, struggling to find the air her lungs are begging for.
Above her head, the translucent ice dome gently lets the moonbeams in. Little by little, she finds her bearings, quiets the quivers of her hands. She takes a long, deep breath. With a wave of her wrist, the sweat beading her forehead and sticks to her back disappears.
A weight lightens in her chest: her bending is intact.
Reaching for a jug set on a low table, she calls the water to her in a thin and docile ribbon. Partly to be sure. Savoring its coolness, she applies it in the nape of her neck and on her eyelids.
Zuko’s eyes stare at her in the dark.
She starts, swiftly opens her eyes. Water spills on the sheets and spatter on the flagstones. With a sigh, she wrings the linen out and sends it back in its jug before she gets up.
Katara leaves the palace without the light of a torch. As soon as she passes the threshold, the cold embraces her and her senses come back to her. Gusts of wind tangle in her loose hair. She looks up at the stars. They tell her it’s barely two hours after midnight.
She knows sleep won’t come back.
The polar night belongs to her.
Guided by constellations of brave warriors and ruthless she-wolves, she passes the South Gate of the village, walks into the icefield to reach the place where the riverbed falls into the arms of the ocean. Where her element infuses its power and ardor in her.
Where Ozai can’t follow.
The thickness and the fur of her parka keeps her from the cold, yet she can’t suppress her shiver. Fragments of memories, present and past, blend into the horror of her nightmare. Ash rains always foretold woe on those lands. What are they foretelling now?
If Zuko were become like his father, have in him even an ounce of his sister’s madness… He scares her when he speaks of greatness and aspirations. He means to protect peace. Who is protecting him from himself?
The shimmering of a southern light tentatively tinges the snow with violet and purple. This magnificent sight amazes her and makes her blood run cold all at once : on the shore, a figure stands out in the dark. To its shape, she quickly guesses it is not one of her people. She guesses it’s not completely a stranger either.
Her footsteps squeak on the snow as she joins him. Zuko turns towards her, his face expressionless.
“Your country is beautiful,” he says, looking up above the river.
All the time they have lost.
Her heart sinks at the thought of everything they missed, surrounded by war. All those stolen years, unable to see anything but the run and dangers, travelling only as refugees. Fearing the worst and ignoring the best that maybe was right in from of their eyes.
She follows his gaze. The aurora seems to run like a stream on the heavenly vault to bathe them in an ever-changing light.
“Your presence disturbs the season,” she points out.
His brows furrow. He must feel so weak, so vulnerable, deprived of the sun for days. How could he imagine everything he upsets while his bending is so diminished?
Maybe it is a ruse? To reassure the tribe. So that Katara isn’t on her guards.
“There are no southern lights at this time of year,” she explains.
“You think I’m a threat?”
No acrimony tinges his words. Yet something like pain darkens his features. She remains thoughtful. If only things were that simple.
No. Of course he is not a threat. For her people, for their safety or their advancement. He is not a threat for her either. The all-powerful Moon boils in her veins and seems to radiate from her whole body. Even if he tried, he wouldn’t be any danger.
She knows he doesn’t mean to hurt them, or her. But what of the hurt he causes unknowingly? And what of the hurt he could cause while convinced he is acting for the Greater Good, for his people’s Honor ?
Ozai’s eyes haunt her. The wind is stronger now. But that’s not why she shivers. She nervously tugs on her parka’s collar.
“What are you doing here?”
It seems to her that all of his questions have a double meaning, hide reproach under their seeming banality.
“I needed some air.”
“Nightmare?”
She lowers her gaze to look at him. He observes her calmly, without any judgement. And she tells herself that insomnia may be the first thing they share since he arrived.
She remembers the too short nights, waking with a start, cold sweats and moans, tears sometimes. Hers. His, all of the others’. They would never talk about it the day after. Only Aang’s nightmares mattered. All their worries and all their care belonged to him.
“So close to the solstice…” she begins, unsure. “I can’t help but wondering if the spirits …”
His gaze unsettles her now. She is looking for the monster in the son’s features. It’s stupid. She’s never seen Ozai. Still, she stares at Zuko’s scar without realizing. Its familiarity, its difference reassures her.
“It’s absurd, I know” she continues, sweeping the air with a wave of her hand. “It’s just … It seemed like a warning.”
He folds his arms on his chest, burying his gloved hands under the thick fur of his cape. As he breathes out, a spark escapes his lips. His shaking reduces and she realizes he is waiting for her to go on.
She can’t remember the last time she confided in someone about her nightmares. Something intimate and secret holds her back. She is a bit ashamed. Without her really deciding it, she takes a few steps on the shore.
“It was night-time … No. Not night-time, it was dark. And I don’t know if it was day or night outside.”
They walk aimlessly, mistreated by the winds, under a light so bright they almost see like in board daylight. Letting her words drift with the current, she can almost convince herself all of this is insignificant.
She tells him about the tsunami and the ashes, the screams and the helplessness. She keeps all the rest quiet.
“And Sokka? And me?”
His question disconcerts her. She blinks, marks a pause before she starts walking up the stream by his side again. Gusts of wind lift whirlwinds of powdery snow around them. The sky darkens.
“Sokka or you?”
“I don’t know, you tell me.”
“Sokka… Sokka wasn’t there.”
“But I was?”
For a second, she contemplates the thought of lying to him, of not telling him he is in her nightmares. That it’s not the first time. The wind howls on the ice field like a warning.
“Yes. You were.”
⟃✷⟄
They are far from the village when the storm descends upon them, ruthless. In an instant, furious howling and bursts of wind cover the sound of their voices and take their breath away. Katara fends off ice crystals that the wind tears from the ground to lacerate their faces.
She fights the gusts with the ferocity of a warrior, in the frontline, opposing her body to the fury of the night like an invincible shield.
She can feel adrenaline throbbing under her skin, waking something savage and intoxicating inside her. She could lose herself in the storm, let it take her and embrace her until she melts into it. Until they are one.
But Zuko’s hand, hanging onto her sleeve holds her back, only source of warmth and life as far as the eye can see. Making sure he doesn’t get lost in the blizzard, she leads him further inland.
They advance slowly, bent and almost blind, left out of breath by the air freezing in their lungs for what seems an eternity.
At last, Katara points a crevasse in the ground. She walks ahead along a narrow path on a soft slope cracked in ice. Darkness slowly wraps around them until they can’t see anything. At the end, they enter a cavity, large enough that they can stand side by side.
Katara fumbles her way towards something she puts in his hands. Zuko recognizes the shape of an oil lamp.
“Can you …?”
He blows on the wick that immediately catches fire. Instead of giving the lamp back, he raises it to his face and slowly turns round to examine their shelter.
Dozens of sharp icicles hang from the vertiginously high vault. They gleam in the wavering light of the flame and seem to swing like the vines of a giant weeping willow. Around them, smooth walls delimit a circular space similar to that of an igloo. The ice they are made of seems to flow like a soft and silent waterfall at the will of its movements and of the glimpses of light. Here and there, others oil lamps are set on frozen ice blocks like irregular stumps. In the farthest end of the shelter, skins and furs lay on the ground.
“Where are we?” he breathes.
He feels as though the faintest sound could break the moment, that it would take nothing to make this haven of peace disappear.
“Home.”
She takes his lamp to hand him another. He instinctively lights it up. Still admiring the vault where snowflakes fall and melt before they reach the ground, he walks around the impossible room.
“I sometimes like to be alone. Somewhere quiet,” she clarifies, using the flame of her lamp to light the others.
Her parka drips on the floor, her hair form a large untamed halo around her face, blushed by the cold’s bite. Under this icicles rain shining like diamonds, in this cavern worthy of the darkest mythologies, she looks like a wild and forgotten deity.
She takes her coat off, then gathers her heavy brown curls to the side. Her fingers fidget, with a series of delicate movements, she manipulates water to dry it. A faint smile on her lips, she begins to braid it.
Zuko looks away. There is in her gestures something deeply intimate, their gentleness unsettles him. As if he was spying on her, as if he was prying on a private instant that only belongs to her.
He moves further away to take off his cape and drop it on the ground. Now they are out of danger, excitement begins to fade, his breathing steadies itself. The frozen bite of his soaked clothes is all the more cruel. He breathes in, then slowly out. The heat grows in his chest, runs on his skin. His shivers subside. With a thin hiss, a shy steam escapes his clothes until the last drop of water has evaporated.
“The storm will last for hours. You can … Get yourself comfortable. If you want.”
On the other side of the room, Katara turned around to watch him. With a leather strap, she ties the end of her long braid before she pushes it aside.
Apprehension tenses his muscles and his jaw. Hours. It’s been so long since they’ve been alone more than a few minutes. For a moment, Zuko feels like he is trapped in the company of a stranger. Frozen in place, in the middle of a pool that is already starting to freeze, he questions his every moves.
It’s her, though. He knows it’s her. Why can’t he convince himself of that? He recognizes her eyes where an untamed winter stream runs and the tone of her voice, the grace and the splendor of her waterbending. He recognizes the beads on her forehead, the strict braid she wore when they first met … But something is missing. The bond between them, that he thought indestructible is damaged. She is, even when she opens up, on her guards. And he instinctively is on his.
His shoulderpads fall on the ice flagstones with a metallic sound. He gets rid of his armor. A strange mixture of lightness and vulnerability takes hold of him.
Katara soundlessly joins him, as if she was floating above the ground. She is holding a small, almost translucent bowl made of horn, filled with a clear and steaming liquid where some sorts of seaweeds are floating.
“It’s not tea but… It will get you warm,” she offers holding it out to him.
Zuko’s eyes go from Katara to her infusion, from the infusion to Katara.
“I don’t need anything to get me warm.”
She tenses, lowers her eyes on the cup, not knowing what to do with it. The implicit of his words strikes him belatedly. That’s not what he meant. He feels shame burning his cheeks.
She turns away, biting her lip. But he moves faster than her and holds her back, taking the bowl before she can put it away. Their hands brush. Katara swiftly steps away.
“Thanks,” he mumbles.
For a second, she seems to look for something in his eyes. Then contact breaks, a shadow of disappointment veils her gaze.
She goes back to the far end of the cavern, fills another bowl with the greenish liquid, extracting it by the force of her will from a sort of pot laid on a portable stove. Her movements are slow. As if she was buying time. When she can’t find anything more to do, once all of her escape strategies are exhausted, she sits on the furs in the middle of all the lamps she placed there.
Zuko joins her. His heart beats a little too fast in his chest. It’s only when he kneels down on the thick fur of a sabertooth-bear that he notices the twinge in his legs. The pole exhausts him, the uncontested reign of the Moon hinders his muscles and his chi. A part of him seems to burn out, he can feel it in the tension of his nerves, the slowness of his blood. He can see himself diminished. And his weakness makes him irritable.
He sits on his heels, his back straight, and brings the bowl to his lips. Katara watches his very moves like a wild creature.
A long silence sets in, only troubled by the howling of the wind, far above their heads. The infusion has a spicy taste of ginger and the freshness of lemon balm. Katara takes a sip, holding the bowl tight between her bare hands to absorbe its heat.
“You don’t have to drink it,” she ends up saying.
He remains perplexed for a second, watching the greenish residue floating on the surface.
“What is it?”
“Arctic seaweeds and sea pepper. Warriors take it when they come back from the hunt.”
Zuko absentmindedly looks at the bowl he rolls between his hands. The beverage spreads a pleasant warmth within him, soothing his muscles.
“We tried to import tea from Gaoling but the climate doesn’t allow us preserve it…”
She used to like this place for its quiet. Now she dreads it and tries to fill it however she can. Zuko probably doesn’t care about her traditions or the failed trade agreements between the Water Tribe and the Earth Kingdom. But her words, however futile and inconsistent, are a bond. Tenuous and fragile. It seems to her she’s been fighting and struggling all night. She is surprised to feel the need to keep fighting in order to maintain this bond.
Zuko brings the infusion to his lips again. His tension seems to melt like the cold on his skin. With a sigh, in a halo of steam, he gives up his formal posture et gets a little closer to her to find a more comfortable position.
“My uncle would like it.”
“I could give you some to bring back to him.”
“Katara…”
She knows what he is about to do. The way he says her name like a prayer ties knots in her stomach. It’s not seaweeds he want to bring back to Caldera. She meant to fight. She didn’t mean to fight against him.
His robe slightly slipped on his shoulder, the collar of his tunic is partly undone. His large belt loosened at his waist. A few stray strands of hair, shorter than the rest, escaped his bun and frame the sharp angles of his face. She isn’t facing the Lord of the biggest nation in the world anymore. This man is nothing to her. It is much harder, however, to fight against Zuko.
“Please, Zuko, don’t …”
Her eyes seem shinier, wrinkles dig her forehead, above her eyebrows, frowned by pain. So Zuko gives up.
In a deafening silence, they empty their bowls. Then fill them again.
The stove goes out, the infusion gets cold.
Zuko doesn’t know how much time has passed since they came into the cavern. A few endless minutes or a few hours… Up there, it’s still dark. Maybe the sun rose somewhere else. He can feel darkness weighting in on him, numbing his limbs more than the cold ever could. He knows how to remedy to the cold. The endless night surrounding Katara’s life, however, leaves him helpless.
She wanders aimlessly between the slumps of ice. He knows she is avoiding him. They don’t know how to talk to each other anymore. He doesn’t know if they can go back to what they once were. Find what they lost. And, for the first time, he wonders if he really wants to.
Hakoda’s words come back to him like a distant echo. The person you are looking for is not here anymore. The Chieftain was right. He understands now. What good is it to hold onto memories? It seems there is nothing left of the girl he knew.
This elusive woman, consumed by melancholy is someone else. A creature of solitude, somewhere between this world and the spirit world. Almost unreal. Yet, sometimes, she seems to inadvertently resurface. If he could reach her…
His helplessness drives him mad.
Katara kneels down next to an alcove dug in the wall he didn’t notice. She is almost turning her back on him and he has to move aside to see. At the back of the cavity, a sort of phosphorescent seaweed, trapped in a translucent bubble, sheds an enchanting glow that reminds him of southern lights. It illuminates little figurines carved in bones, ivory or horn, bearing the effigy of creatures with polar animals’ traits.
Katara’s fingers brush over them as she murmurs words in a tribal language Zuko doesn’t understand. At her touch, the seaweed seems to pulse like a little frozen heart. Her hand stays suspended above the altar for a while, her fingers fidgeting in midair as if she was hesitating.
She eventually chooses one of them and turns around to show it to him. Zuko turns the thing at every angle. The figurine seems to be carved in horn. It could be an elephant-koi fish or a whale. Assuming it is actually a fish…
“Sokka made that one.” She smiles.
“It’s…”
“It’s a boreal killer whale.”
Zuko looks at the thing with bewilderment. What does she want? Sometimes elusive and cold, sometimes calm and affable, she is as impossible to grasp as her element. Everything she shares, when she talks to him, seems insignificant. All her silences, however, scream her solitude and a deep torment. She refuses his company but refuses to reject him.
The treatment she inflicts upon herself fans within him a cold fury that he struggles to contain as time passes. What does she think she has to punish herself for?
“It represents Sedna. Goddess of the sea,”she adds.
He is completely ignorant of the deities of the water peoples. His meager knowledge mainly concerns the Northern Water Tribe. And his knowledge is mostly military. The South Pole was always neglected, too small, too weak to be the object of decent research. An insignificant dot on a map in a time where culture had no importance. Sages tried to provide him with information before he left. But even they proved to be almost completely ignorant.
“Who is she?”
Katara’s brows furrow. He doesn’t look at her, taken by the rough features of Sokka’s work. The fact that her gods could interest him eludes her. But after all, so many things about him elude her…
“She reigns over salted expanses and those who live in the deep,” she recites. “She watches over fishermen, condemns them sometimes too. To the ones she protects, Sedna is source of life. To the ones who approach her as enemies, she is ruthless. She is a lone woman of great beauty who shrouds herself with an ice coat and lives in a fortress of icebergs at the heart of the ocean.”
Zuko stays silent, with a serious expression. She carefully reaches towards him to take back the figurine. The puffy sleeves of her dark blue clothe narrows under the elbow to reveal the curve of her forearm. Her hands and wrists are bare, unveiling the delicate blue lines circling each of her fingers, on the last knuckle.
“And her tattoos?”
She blinks in confusion. It seems to her that all of his questions have a double meaning.
The figurine regains its place next to the others. Katara stares at her hands, hesitating. She understands it was never about mythology for Zuko.
“They tell who we are. Some are meant to strengthen our bond with the spirits.”
“Who are you, Katara?”
She thinks she is hearing this question for the second time.
She slowly breathes in, considers not answering for a second. The truth is she doesn’t know what to answer, that she isn’t sure she found the answer. Something, in the way he looks at her, whispers that it’s precisely where he is going.
“I am a daughter of Water,” she breathes, showing im the dots above each of her fingernails. “Daughter of the Chieftain, child of the South Pole.”
She traces the two lines circling the last knuckle of her index finger, then the ones on her ring finger. She lingers on the three lines on her little finger.
“I am an orphan, motherless.”
She remains silent for a while before she clears her throat and resumes.
“I am a warrior.”
She points each line, each dot in turn, what they say of her. She is a healer and a sea huntress. She is a sailor, bears the mark of the wise.
Zuko follows her every move, tries to remember all the symbols she shows him. When she stops, he raises his eyes, meets hers. And he thinks he can see the spark of his memories.
There aren’t enough lines to contain everything she is. Does she even know? If he could make her understand, if he could reach the one she walled up in silence and gaged with blue ink…
Silence becomes softer. In this endless night, under a rain of icicles and in the surreal light of the seaweed, he could almost forget that everywhere else, time still flows. And that this time is running out.
What she confides in him awakens a bold flame. The pain that radiates from her and that he can feel turns into something else. Something between rage and impatience.
“Let me stay.”
She tenses.
“It’s— It’s not up to me to decide if you can stay.”
“I don’t need their permission.”
He comes closer. And she lets him. There is a breach in her armor. Maybe it’s not honorable of him to exploit it. But she is here, so close. He can almost reach her. Hakoda is wrong. The person he is looking for is still here. Waiting to be found.
“Let me stay,” he insists. “For a few days.”
“No.”
“Do you want me to leave?”
She rolls her eyes, sighs. Ice is so thin under his feet. The slightest slip-up could make everything crumble.
“It’s not that…”
“What then?”
Air becomes heavy with tension. Katara struggles to make a neutral tone come out of her chocked throat.
“You don’t belong here…”
“Neither do you, Katara,” he retorts, a little too briskly. “You said it yourself, nowhere is home anymore.”
“Then stay,” she says sharply.
She turns aways. The Firelord doesn’t take no for an answer. Why keep talking if he only hears what agrees with his will?
But he is not finished. With a pacified voice, he asks again : “When I leave, will you come with me?”
He asks. Her doesn’t order. Yet his persistence makes her shudder. She looks for his scar, holds onto his difference. Zuko is not his father.
“No.”
She ostensibly turns her back on him. For a second, the lingering silence has her hoping he will leave her in peace. But silence doesn’t last.
“Tomorrow,” he begins softly, ”I intend to ask the Tribe Council to appoint an ambassador. Someone who will be the voice of the Souther Water Tribe in Caldera and defend its interests. I though about you.”
She doesn’t answer. He wishes he could see the look on her face. But neither of them moves. The ice is so thin now.
”You’ve travelled the entire world, you know the leaders of every nation, their culture, their people. You know the Fire Nation. You’ve already proven yourself as a diplomat.”
The wind is still howling above them, covering the sound of his breathing. If he couldn’t feel the warmth of her body, in his back, he would almost think that she is gone.
“We are going through hard times … I am going through hard times.”
Not facing her makes things easier. He knows she is listening. And that no one else can hear them. Nothing he can say will ever come out of this cavern. Words come with a disconcerting ease.
“Not so long ago, we were friends.”
At last she turns to face him. His words sound like blackmail. Yet she can’t read any calculation in his expression. Only an unspeakable fatigue.
“We are friends, Zuko.”
Her words escape her before she realizes. They echo like a lie inside her chest. He knows too. She can see it in the joyless smile twisting the straight line of his mouth.
“Talk to me then.”
“Why go back? We’ll never get back what we lost.”
The pain she inflicts upon herself and the endless grief she seems to wallow in infuriate him. His fire, weakened by the night, builds in his veins.
“They need us.”
“Who are we talking about, Zuko?”
He pauses, hesitating. His people. The whole world. Her. Why does she refuse to understand?
“They needed him,” she continues. “We are no one.”
“We were no one,” he vehemently retorts. “Things have changed. Aang changed them! How can you destroy all this? If he isn’t here anymore, then we have to continue what he started! So that he didn’t do all this in vain. It cannot be in vain….”
Anger rumbles in his chest. The ice cracks.
He blames her. He blames Aang. The whole world. He blames himself for making her suffer for it. And yet… Yet he is pleased to get a real reaction from her. He recognizes the dark look she gives him, the flame that drove her before.
“I-”
“We can bring peace back,” he cuts her off.
She should be his ally. She should understand. She shouldn’t be one of those whom people pity.
“Bringing peace back won’t bring back the dead.”
Her eyes shine with tears. And her words hit him like a slap.
She doesn’t believe in anything anymore.
Is that what this cavern is for? Wait for life to pass her by, willing prisoner of her ice fortress? Without doing anything? Without hope and without any goal? This place is no refuge. It’s a tomb.
He wants to burn it all to the ground. Wipe out in a whirlwind of fire all this splendor that keeps her from the world. She thinks she is safe. The Pole is destroying her.
He blames himself for letting her leave, two years ago, on the steps of the air temple. He thought it was what she needed. That time would heal her wounds. That her family and her people would make life worth living again.
He hates them for letting her sink into darkness and loneliness. And he hates himself for not doing anything. He hates himself even more for having the pretension to believe he has the power to save her from herself.
His chest heaves too fast. The fur under his hands bear the singed marks of his fingers. He tries hard to clear his heavy heart and anchor his eyes in hers.
“No, it’s true,” he whispers.
He sees her jaw clench, her lips slightly quiver. He feels so empty. He doesn’t have the strength to fight against her. Not if victory comes at the price of her tears.
“All we can do is honor their memory,” he continues in a low voice. “I … It cannot be in vain,” he repeats.
She lowers her eyes on the furs. With the tip of her fingers, she smoothes the burnt hairs of the sabertooth-bear skin.
“What will happen if we destroy everything?”
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