Chapter Text
With the sun beating down on her back, Katara followed her father’s chosen representatives of the Southern Water Tribe on their march through the Fire Nation capital, headed towards the palace that sat at the bottom of a large crater, looking up at the nation above. She’d forgotten just how intense the heat could be in this land, dry and clear from the desert, and thanked her father silently for reminding her to pack lighter garments for their journey. The first year that their tribe had traveled to the Fire Nation for trade negotiations - four years ago now - Hakoda chuckled that they all had made the mistake of walking up towards the palace in their heavy coats.
“We were a puddle by the time we met with the Firelord,” he told her with a smile.
She very well might still be a puddle by the time they arrived, she thought, impatient at the slow procession of her tribesmen. She took in a deep breath, wiping her hands against her dress once more, as if it might remove the sweat. Around her, the city glowed with a vibrance she had yet to observe in her previous travels to the Fire Nation. A multitude of changes had occurred here since her last visit - what, two and a half years ago now? Back then it had still been a dark, half-empty place, and the eyes of the civilians had landed upon her with suspicion.
Some things never change , she observed as an impossibly old man sitting in a chair next to a fruit stand scowled at her - but as she glanced around the square, far more people offered her smiles to entice her to their booths of fabrics, food, and other wares. In front of a fountain near the city center, street musicians played traditional Fire Nation instruments alongside more common ones, and a group of children rushed by her, in the throes of a game she couldn’t name.
She fought to release the knot building in her stomach. Here it was before her: a living picture of her post-war dream, in a place she had spent so many years despising. Her heart tugged in two opposing directions, half-joy, half-frustration.
A ball, escaping from its owner, tapped against her foot, and she knelt down to pick it up - only to nearly topple backwards as a young girl, maybe six at most, her hair piled on top of her head in two buns, crashed into her.
“Sorry!” she gasped, swaying back. Katara reached out and caught her around the waist before she could fall.
“Woah!” she said. She held up the ball in her free hand. “Is this yours?”
The child nodded absent-mindedly, her eyes locked on Katara’s face in awed study.
“Your eyes are blue,” she said finally with a giggle.
“They are.”
The girl smiled a wide, toothy grin. “Pretty!” Grabbing the ball, she scampered back to a severe-looking woman who eyed Katara warily.
Katara stood, slow and purposeful, embodying the fine line between firm and graceful that she’d learned to adopt when addressing the Fire Nation dignitaries. The woman’s expression remained unchanged as she grabbed her daughter’s hand to glide away. As they went, the child cried, “I wish I had blue eyes like that lady!”
Katara’s smile spread across her face, hope buoyed.
Turning back toward the palace, she caught sight of the rest of the Southern Water Tribe representatives halfway down the hill already, leaving the marketplace. She hurried her step to catch up with them. Despite being the chief’s daughter, she wasn’t strictly a dignitary on this trip; in fact, her addition to the journey had been perhaps the most impulsive decision of her life thus far. She wondered how the palace guards would react if she showed up after the rest of the envoy had been welcomed into the palace, if they would be convinced enough by the similarity of her skin and eyes to let her in or if she’d have to produce some further proof that she belonged here. Five years after the end of the war, people in the Fire Nation occasionally still recognized her, as the girl who saved the Firelord’s life.
Which was funny, really, because she always thought about it the other way around.
As she reached the group, Yuka, who had settled in the Southern Water Tribe from the North a few years ago and was only a couple years Katara’s senior, turned and smirked as she caught her breath from her sprint. He wore his hair up in the way that was fashionable amongst the men of the Southern Water Tribe these days: half-shaved on one side with small braids pulled back into a top knot.
“Out of shape, huh, Katara?” he teased, pushing his hair back with one hand.
“Oh, shut it, Yuka,” she retorted, giving him a smirk of her own. “I’m in better shape than you.”
Ignoring that, he countered with, “It’s a good thing you ran after us. Wouldn’t want to get left behind.”
Next to him, Kallik, a friendly bear of a man closer to her father’s age, chuckled, “Don’t you worry about her, Yuka. She’s got a man on the inside, after all.”
Katara’s lip curled in disbelief. “I do not have a man on the inside .”
“That’s not what all those letters say,” teased Yuka, smirk growing wider.
Rolling her eyes was the only response Katara had to level at him, and she thanked the spirits when the palace guards began to usher them behind the palace walls, cutting off any further discussion of the subject. Because it was true that for the past year, letters had appeared, with increasing frequency, on her doorstep, signed with Zuko’s messy signature.
It was also true that fifty-four days ago, the letters suddenly stopped.
At a certain point in time, fifty-four days would have felt like nothing to Katara as an interim in speaking to Zuko. There had once been a whole year when they hadn’t spoken to or seen each other, that terrible year that her relationship with Aang had crumbled in her hands. But then the vacation on Ember Island happened, and something shifted between them. Between all of them really.
It was Zuko’s idea, a week-long getaway on Ember Island, a kind of reunion of the old crew, and it was the first time since the war that everyone had managed to be in the same city together, let alone the same room. Only a few months off of her break up with Aang, Katara had been nervous, not sure if the group dynamic would survive the split. But, as Sokka had laughingly pointed out, it was an arrogant thought. There had been a them before there was a Katara-and-Aang. There would be one after too.
Even if it had been a little awkward, to say the least.
It was just that, at the time, her anger at Aang welled up in her heart so suddenly out of absolutely nowhere, especially after she drank - and Iroh had been especially generous with the wine on the first evening of their group reunion. As everyone else drifted off towards bed, Katara had stumbled down toward the shoreline, determined to seek some peace from the moon to get herself through the week without strangling her ex-boyfriend.
(For what, she still couldn’t answer - but maybe a certain amount of fury after being dumped was warranted.)
She didn’t remain alone for long. Shortly after settling there herself, Zuko collapsed next to her in the sand, muttering, “Hey.”
Katara snorted. The collapse had clearly been more plum-wine-induced than intentional. “Hey, yourself.”
A familiar silence settled around them, the kind of silence Katara had long come to expect in her friendship with Zuko. It always left her a little rattled; not because she disliked the silence but because he was the only person she’d ever met that silence felt comfortable with, even after months of distance.
“Is it just me, or did you also get too drunk?” he asked finally, glancing at her out of the corner of his eyes.
Katara grinned. “Well to be fair, you drank way more than anybody else.”
Zuko huffed, leaning back so his weight was on his elbows. “Yeah, well, I deserve it. Being Firelord is not as fun as it seems.”
“Oh, yes, great one, tell me how difficult it is to be the adored ruler of your nation.”
“It is!” insisted Zuko, scowling at her. “There’s so many decisions to make and so many people who want to talk to me - god, all the people.”
“You’re telling me that you, Zuko, hate talking to people?” teased Katara, her grinning spreading wider over her face. “I’m flabbergasted, truly. I mean, you talk to me so easily.”
Zuko rolled his eyes at her. “Yeah, well, you’re easy to talk to.” He let himself collapse onto his back so that he gazed up at the stars above. Katara suppressed the urge to join him. “If you were in the palace, you could do all the talking for me.”
“Mai’s not up to the task, huh?”
Zuko’s frown deepened, his eyes darkening over at the mention of Mai’s name. As Katara floundered for the right words to smooth over whatever misstep she’d just made, he said, coldly, “I think Mai and I are about to go the way of you and Aang.”
Katara winced slightly at the casual dig, and Zuko’s eyes flashed in contrition. “Uh, sorry, I didn’t - “
“It’s fine,” insisted Katara. “Really. Don’t worry about it.” Zuko nodded, clearly still unsure, and when he didn’t venture anything else, she softly offered, “Sorry about you and Mai.”
Zuko held her gaze. “Sorry about you and Aang.”
Don’t be, she’d wanted to say, but instead she’d just smiled and thanked him. From that moment, the rest of the week unfolded in a much more pleasant manner than Katara could have anticipated. Without Aang at her side, she was free to fill the void of him with whatever, or whoever, she wanted, and surprisingly, the person she found herself continually drawn to most was Zuko, who happily paired with her when they played games, cooked dinner with her, sat with her on the beach as the moon rose above the sea. It was a return to a feeling that, in the aftermath of the war, Katara believed to be lost for good.
Because see, once, in the final days leading up to Ozai’s defeat, it had occurred to Katara that she and Zuko had, suddenly, gotten rather close. Despite his upbringing as a literal prince, he had been the only person in their little crew who didn’t need to be asked to help her with the dishes; he chopped vegetables for her with such careful precision she refused to let anyone else do it; and despite their rocky start, she found, by the time their journey came to a close, that she trusted him as much as she trusted any of the others - more than that, that they shared something she would never be able to share with the others, some understanding she couldn’t quite put into words.
After going their separate ways, she’d seen Zuko in only sporadic bursts, mostly when Aang felt the urge to visit him, and much to her disappointment, he seemed to have put any bond they’d formed during the war behind him. Their friendship, for several years, amounted mostly to the middleman that was Aang.
But the vacation on Ember Island had changed things: as the week came to a close, she’d sat on the beach under that moon one last time with Zuko and tamped down her laugh as he asked, in the most stilted, awkward manner possible, if it would be all right if he wrote to her in the Southern Water Tribe.
“Of course you can, Zuko,” she’d assured him. “I mean, we’re…friends, right?”
Genuine relief flooded the former prince’s face, as though he hadn’t been sure himself. “Yeah,” he’d said. “Friends.”
True to his word, the first letter had arrived for her in the Southern Water Tribe a few days after she arrived home, asking for her advice on some minor political issue he was having - and relaying that he had, in fact, broken things off with Mai. The letters were irregular at first, often with weeks between her response and his. But as the year trudged on, Zuko wrote to her more and more frequently, asking for her advice on political matters or relaying some funny thing Iroh had said or, sometimes, responding to whatever nonsense she’d unloaded on him in her most recent letter. In the endless cold of the Southern Water Tribe - a cold that had begun to feel oppressive - sometimes it felt like the letters physically warmed her.
She’d almost asked him about that once, whether it was a Fire Nation trick, but for some reason her face burned so hot at the idea of him reading it that instead she wrote to him about the art of penguin sledding.
Now it had been fifty-four days since she’d received a letter, and as much as Katara tried to insist to herself that Zuko was busy - he was the Firelord , after all, not a stupid, directionless girl standing at the shore of her home nation every day waiting for something she couldn’t name - she couldn’t help but worry that she’d said something to cause the change. Had she offended him in some manner? She’d written a dozen letters asking this very question, and a dozen more furiously admonishing him for abandoning their little ritual. None of them ever got sent.
No, instead, she’d jumped on her father’s ship to travel with him on his trade negotiations with the Earth Kingdom and the Fire Nation.
Which was not because of Zuko, Katara insisted to herself as the guards led them through the majestic front doors of the palace and down a near endless hallway.
It was a half-truth, she conceded. The lack of letters from Zuko had merely been the catalyst for her to do something she should have done ages ago, the first moment she looked around at her very dear homeland and thought in horror, I’m going to die here.
Nothing left to lose, she’d hopped on a ship with her father and set sail for - something. She couldn’t be sure.
The towering doors of the throne room creaked open as they assembled just outside, and the Southern Water Tribe filed in one at a time, led by Hakoda and his broad shoulders. Katara tried her best to hover at the back of the group, but Yuka grabbed her arm, shoving her forward towards her father.
“You’re the chief’s daughter,” he chided her when she resisted.
“Yeah, so don’t manhandle me,” she hissed back at him. It really was a shame that Sokka spent so much of his time in the Earth Kingdom these days, she thought; he and Yuka would have gotten on like a house on fire.
Reluctantly, she settled into her position just behind Hakoda as they lined up before the empty throne room, awaiting the arrival of the Fire Nation council. For all the time she had spent in the Fire Nation, Katara had remarkably little experience in dealing with the country’s political customs, but she knew enough to understand that they stood unyieldingly on tradition. The Fire Lord would inevitably come to greet visitors in a very specific way.
Katara’s stomach flipped as the doors to the throne room opened once more, and the Fire Nation council processed into the room, their backs uniformly rigid, heads bowed low. The last to enter was Zuko, and Katara couldn’t have demurred in respect if she wanted to. She focused on him, undeterred, as he entered the room, cataloging the changes in him since she’d last seen him a year ago. He walked with more confidence now, a full-fledged adult instead of a teenager playing at Firelord. With the baby fat gone from his face, his jaw had become sharp enough to cut glass, and he pulled his hair up into the traditional half top-knot of his forefathers, the rest hanging an inch or two below his shoulders. Moreover, he stood taller than she remembered, like he’d finally regained some of that honor he was always so desperately seeking.
He looked good, though Katara stamped down that thought as quickly as it came, refocusing her attention on Zuko’s greeting as he stopped ten feet or so from the Southern Water Tribe representatives.
“Welcome, Chief Hakoda,” he said grandly, his face relaxed in a way that Katara could tell he had practiced many times to get just right. He didn’t smile, exactly, but the old go-to scowl wasn’t there either. Instead he simply looked at ease with being in charge.
“We’re pleased, as always, to have you all here for our annual negotiations,” he continued, taking time to look them all in the eye. “I know we have a lot to discuss this year, so we’re - uh…”
His eyes widened and words failed him as he clocked her, standing at a small distance from her father. Katara’s stomach twisted into knots as he looked quickly away, trying to regain his footing.
“Uh, that’s…sorry, I -” He cleared his throat, a frustrated frown creasing on his brow. “I’m sure you’re all very exhausted from your journey, so please allow us to get you situated in your rooms for some rest before we begin negotiations tomorrow morning.”
This signaled the end of Zuko’s speech, more abrupt than anyone anticipated, if the slow reaction of the councilors was any indication. He signaled with his hand, and a number of servants appeared to guide the Southern Water Tribes to their rooms. Reluctantly, Katara turned to follow, resigning herself to a fitful night of sleep as she wondered, for the two hundredth time on this little excursion, if coming here was a huge mistake.
A warm hand on her forearm halted her. She turned to find Zuko, the corners of his eyes filled with a mixture of confusion and something softer as he looked down at her.
“Katara,” he said. “What - I didn’t know you were…coming.”
Katara turned to face him fully, and he let his hand drop back to his side. “Yeah, sorry, I didn’t -”
But before she could even finish her sentence, one of Zuko’s councilors, a gruff-looking older man in his 50s, approached to remind Zuko he was needed elsewhere. Zuko’s frown deepened at the reminder, and as he glanced back at Katara, his expression melted into one of mild remorse.
“Sorry, I have to, uh…” he said, gesturing to the councilor.
“Right,” responded Katara quickly, clasping her hands behind her. “Of course. You’re busy, I’m sure.”
Zuko rolled his eyes and for the briefest half-second searched her face - for what, she wasn’t quite sure. “We’ll, uh, catch up later, though.”
Katara nodded, offering him a bright smile. “Looking forward to it.”
With one final glance, Zuko was gone, but as Katara followed a maid down the hallway toward the chambers she’d been assigned for her stay, the warmth of his hand on her forearm remained.